itch.io

Cool entry! A little dense for my tastes, but very vibey, with arresting visuals. The rival cults bit is the best, in my opinion. Tough luck pulling Metal Slader Glory and the pre-Mario-fied Super Mario Bros. 2, but I think you did a good job making it work.

Great, now the Tetris theme song is stuck in my head! Seriously excellent design and implementation of the prompts. The mechanics make for slick and interesting puzzles/combat. It looks like the phenomenon could feasibly be explained naturally in-world, but I think my players would get a kick out of figuring out how the Raiders wound up in this twisted arena!

Really bangin' maps. I also think your RP notes are a lot of fun. Big fan of the adventure being based in a roughly antagonistic imperial city (good use of Ghostbusters prompt)! With minor tweaks it could be adapted to most of the campaigns that I've run with minimal fuss. I'm stoked to drop the rumors next time my players are near a hub city.

I really dig the art here, it feels like the characters (and indeed the whole booklet) are tensed, shouting, and ready for action. I especially enjoy the rats, dire. Very punchy and enjoyable to read. Fun twist on "Contra" to being "against the world" in the title!

Really delightful art, especially Maggie in the Oni mask, and "Sho's." Looks like fun to run at the table too!

Top-notch layout and design choices. It feels like once you get some art in the blank spaces it'll really sing! I'd love to pull a finished version of this out to run at my table. My players always go wild for tarot. This project makes me really curious to find and play Taboo. One note, I wish the title of the pdf noted the title of the game

Sewerific in a good way! I also loved TMNT growing up, and this took me back. Loved the art!

As crisp and refreshing as a Granny Smith apple. I loved Rhonda and Havlan as twists on the McDonaldland characters, and the smorks are super fun! Quite a polished piece, and ready for table application!

Thanks so much, it means a lot! I strove for a usably lively world of relevant characters and engaging layout.

Happy to hear you found it creepy and enjoyed the bomb item. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks, the trap with the least-obstructive entry getting blood on the PCs' feet making the pool encounter more difficult/dangerous was a lot of fun to try to implement! I am grateful you liked it.

I appreciate it. Thanks for sticking with it past my amateur-hour cover and your impressions of it!

What I love of Borg games was not far from my heart as I made it. I'm glad you found it fresh, thanks!

I am glad it did. Thank you!

High praise. I thank you warmly!

Love it, love it, love it. The art is enchanting, and the adaptation of the games is a lot of fun to see. And I personally never say no to a pyramid!

Holy smokes, this is stellar! Your isometric map is mesmerizing, but immediately legible, and your art is so evocative and cohesive. What an inspiration. Thanks so much for this master-class adventure and all your work in the discord trenches.

I was very charmed by your gnome illustrations and the word-art title. Really dig how you incorporated the influence from slalom.

Neat stuff! Interesting interplay between law and chaos factions in the dungeon design. I know my players would enjoy their characters sweating over the time pressure.

I really enjoy the idea of the wishcoins saying their wish, ratcheting up the weirdness of everything. I think my players would get a kick out of that. Good use of the golf game prompt as a thematic backbone.  "go 'over par' and perish" in your intro page is such a sick line, I feel like it really sells the adventure.

Very spooky, and such cool art. I'm obsessed with the idea of dragons as fantasy jets, and I'd love to see you execute on that shadowdark soccer system someday!

Thanks for the feedback! I imagined the structure as a stepped pyramid of three levels of square rooms that get smaller as you go up, with a single giant support pillar in the center of each level carved to look like a dragon standing on the ground with its head poking into the top level. There's an unlabeled (oops) sketch of the exterior of the ziggurat building on the last page, but I definitely think there could stand to be a single page or a spread or something that shows how the three levels connect via traversals and the pillar. 

Thanks again for your helpful critique and your charitable assessment of what does work!

Those are very kind words, thank you.

I appreciate it. It was fun to get out the craft supplies. I will definitely try to jam again!

Thanks, it was a blast to make!

This seems like a very fun adventure! The crab knights are pretty cool.

I have one critique, but before I offer it, I want to acknowledge that maybe I'm a little over-sensitive because I'm a PhD candidate and my dissertation research analyzes both monks and Indian religion. Kali is a goddess for millions of real world human beings today. The movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom handled that aspect of its story less than ideally. When I saw your otherwise neat adventure mention Kali, it was jarring. I think the text here largely does a good job avoiding the ways that Temple of Doom dehumanizes people by painting their religion as monstrous and inscrutable, but there were still little things that made me wince. For example, I know it's pedantic, but there's nothing in Hinduism that's exactly analogous to the dead "monks" that litter the dungeon. That was just one of several points in the adventure where I wondered why you wouldn't just make up a different god or goddess of "destruction, time, and transformation", or use one of the ones from Shadowdark. Some of my closest and most avid TTRPG playing friends have South Asian heritage, and I wouldn't want to run this adventure at the table for them without changing it. I easily could change the name from Kali to something else, it's just frustrating that the default either requires that work or at best draws eye-rolls and at worst potentially excludes people I respect and value. 

I hope that's not too harsh, and to be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of anything (except maybe Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas of lazy sensationalizing). Maybe it's not my place to say here, because I'm white, but it bugs me when people use figures from my cultural-religious background in off-piste ways. I'd want knowledgeable sources to say something if they saw that happening, and I'm trying to follow the golden rule. 

I know nuance can get lost in online comments so I've tried to be careful and precise with what I want to point out, which is simply that IN MY OPINION, this adventure's temple should not be dedicated to Kali.

Let me know if you want me to clarify or explain anything about this comment, and let me reiterate, it's a fun dungeon that I think would be a hoot to run if it weren't for that one issue.

This is a cool adventure and I like your burger-time-inspired characters, but I think given that theming, it could stand to be a little more gonzo. 

One note: the pdf file-name was the not the title of your entry, it was "Game Jame Rough Final.docx (2).pdf".

I really dig the toad and rat sprites.

The aesthetic and design choices are very much to my taste. Burger time was my favorite game on the NES, and I really liked how you transformed that theme/inspiration with the alienating reframings of meat, cheese, bread, and veg.

Big fan of the art! I also like how you incorporated other inspirations to blend the flavors of your NES prompts.

Fabulous use of the Greg Norman's Golf Power prompt. I really liked the desperate npcs in Tea town, and I love the map illustration of the puma bones in the temple.

Funny writing, good use of the inspirations. And the cover is so cute, it looks like exactly the kind of goofy little guys that my players love to squish through a funnel like this.

What a clutch interpretation of the prompts. This looks so pro.

Cool adventure. I love the hand-drawn-looking character art, and the shape of the map!

What a fun trippy adventure. I think the magic items and the ninja brothers especially capture the gonzo spirit within tight design constraints that I love so much in 8-bit games.

This is such a neat module, and it feels really ready to deploy at the table. Light and punchy. I love the texture on your cover illustration, and I gotta say, I think it's a real power move to use one of your few pages within the limit for GM notes.

Very fun read! I feel like it authentically captures an attitude toward game design communication that informed a lot of titles that were on the NES.

Fantastic work! Great use of space, and such a good job working within the prompt. I like the way you operationalize the aesthetics of nes booklets to do very Shadowdark-y worldbuilding. What an inspiration.

Hope it reads and plays okay! It's my first game jam. As I say in the inspirations paragraph, I pulled Final Fantasy 2, Snake, Rattle n Roll, and Jūōki.