itch.io

It's an insane amount of entries to get through, especially in a thoughtful way. My hat's off to you all.

Is the plan to sell the physical version of this at the TNG store?

Gorgeous!

Wow, that's really flattering, especially considering how many great entries there were in the Appendix N Jam.

Whoa, what?

Great cover, for starters.

Wonderfully clean layout with a great typeface.

I love the character names. I know a lot of them are drawn from history, but they work well together to give a picture of the cultures involved.

In a world of fantasy RPGs full of weird and gross stuff, congratulations on coming up with skin magic, which somehow is ickier than a lot of the more overt eeeevil magics seen elsewhere.

I'm not sure I understand the centurion just laying in bed, talking to himself. Likewise, why is only being able to move single-file through the rubble-filled room important?

I like the subtle warnings to not look in Josephina's eyes. It will take a clever player to realize why the painters don't know what her eye color is, but it'll save the characters' lives if they figure it out in time. (Yikes to her gaze power.)

Very creepy adventure and a compelling and horrifying villain. Well done!

That's a very effective cover. Great idea!

Pretty small type for an A5 booklet. Great typeface, though. What one did you use?

Beautiful presentation all around.

This feels very mythic, which I know is a big part of His Majesty the Worm. This would take a little bit of work to convert to other systems, as some of the ones you reference here don't have obvious counterparts, but I suspect this adventure can be used in a lot of other OSR games to great effect. 

Well done.

The art has a vaguely Edward Gorey feel to it, which is great, and a flavor I haven't seen in RPGs before, strangely.

I love the maps, although they're wildly different stylistically than the artwork.

I like the classic structure of the ship getting cruddier with each descending deck.

There's a lot going on in this adventure. Even with the introduction to the main NPCs at the beginning, I feel like I might need a bit more hand-holding to make this run smoothly in play.

Overall, an incredibly creative setting and it makes me want to play a gonzo game like Troika so that I can experience it.

The cover art is a delight, as is the art and design throughout.

In a challenge full of wildly creative entries, this is one of the most creative. This feels like a more family friendly take on Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, which isn't something I would have predicted, but it's great.

The mirror puzzle is pretty hard, especially with a ticking clock involved, but that's literally my only quibble.

Basically a perfect adventure for many urban campaigns. I will 100% be using this in future.

Excellent maps. Bregan Manor has a great, Conan-stealing-into-the-garden kind of vibe.

I think the site description and layout are excellent.

But the adventure feels a bit too much like the players are being dropped into a lore-dense short story for my tastes -- I would prefer a bit more freedom for the PCs, especially with the possibility of instant death just a few bad dice rolls away.

Is the pact itself a scroll? It appears to both be the legal contract and a physical object, but I think I'm missing what the physical object itself is. (I assume it's a scroll.)

First off, that cover is just fantastic.

I like decaying orbit as a ticking clock. Nice and scary for the players and it's a doom that can't be bargained with.

The actual adventure having a page width two pages wide makes for some very wide paragraphs and it makes it harder to parse, especially at the table. I like the experiment, but I would probably reformat into two columns.

The map reminds me of the graphics on the old Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy show on BBC, which is fantastic.

This is a good adventure and  I think reformatting it a bit would really elevate it.

I have rated a ton of entries and am not even halfway through. My hat's off to you all tackling all the entries -- that's a heck of a feat, even beyond the question of having to pick the best among such a giant pile of great works.

The cover is great. I love the extra little touches to make it look like an old paperback.

Honestly, all of the aesthetics are great. The cream-colored paper, the font choices, the art. All great.

Incredible job of laying out an interesting dungeon (although that brain is not where I'd expect it to be) in one page and change, along with an evocative map and a single page of background and interesting monsters.

I don't see a system stated anywhere in the PDF. Is this for Cairn? A delightful adventure, no matter what.

I love the spooky cover. 

The cursive header font is a little hard to read, in my opinion. I'd consider something with a similar personality that's a little easier to read.

Elegant way to handle sea elves.

I like the rival parties, who are a colorful mix of characters.

This whole adventure is packed. 

Smart move throughout to just reference existing monsters instead of making new ones, which saved you a good amount of space and is fine -- 99% of players won't notice and most of those that do will understand.

I would love to see this revised and expanded. You've got so much going on here, I'd like to see more of everything, including what the mask actually does.

This whole thing just bursts with energy.

I love the color scheme throughout. 

Wonderfully simple, yet effective, map.

The text is pretty densely packed.

I like the oracle deck to handle encounters and stocking the rooms. I might tighten up the explanation of how to set it up. Likewise the locking mechanism could get tightened up a bit -- we can see from the combinations that no action is performed twice in a row.

Overall, an excellent little site exploration and a great bit of worldbuilding for a game.

I love the old school blue map and AD&D formatting of the adventure.

Some of the murderhobos I've known would hear that a blind man has 1,000 gold and focus on robbing him instead of going to the dungeon. That hook may be a bit distracting as written.

I'm confused by your use of "crepuscular" in this context, as it doesn't match the definition of the word as I know it.  Its use feels very Gygaxian, though.

I love the Midas ooze. The XP to gold conversion is interesting, although it does seem like an enterprising player might figure out a way to scoop it up (a resilient sphere or cube of force or something) and just unleash it on their foes to both clear them out and finance their wildest dreams. Extremely fun, though, and an exciting idea.

I also like the structure of the dungeon, requiring characters to visit each of the rooms in the funhouse before reaching the end. Given the way the wishes are handled in this dungeon, the genie certainly does seem like a jerk worth imprisoning.

The way you handle falling into the void is very elegant. While that kind of scenery is very evocative, it's often a pain in the butt to run, and you found a good way to do so here, with kind of a Looney Tunes end to the effect.

There's a whole lot of sci-fi games this would work great with, especially given your light touch with the game stats here. This could easily be used in Mothership, Traveller, Alien or a number of other games.

I suspect it's a very good moment when someone carbon dates a skeleton for the first time and finds out how long ago the person died.

Excellent work!

The Forbidden Hat of All Colors!

This sounds like a MacGuffin from Adventure Time, which is the highest possible praise.

Beautiful layout, a simple dungeon and an extremely wholesome quest. I love it.

"Four A5 pages? Ha, who needs all that space?" I love it!

I really like the aesthetics, including the color scheme. But some of the icons will be hard to parse if this is printed out. 

This is a great short little adventure. I don't see any way the party will know that they need to commit more sins to maximize the treasure and thus setting off the loop of creating more furies to deal with.

The interior text font is IM Fell English, which I discovered -- just as deadline was approaching -- doesn't have a bold face character set. Oops!

The updated version after the judging period ends will have some text italicized to indicate hyperlinks as a result.

I agree that I should try to flesh out some of the rooms. Ideally, every room would have something that would make players want to explore it (and tick down the clock as they do).

I really like your use of color in this.

Excellent new monsters.

A fairly straightforward adventure with fun flavoring throughout and the chance to get a mobile command center, which is a great get for an adventuring party.

And since the whole adventure takes place in a bottle, this adventure can be placed more or less anywhere. I love it!

I'm pretty sure that I heard of someone using XP debt as an alternative to level drain and my brain just spit that out when I needed time-related mechanics. So the real credit probably goes to someone in the OSR blogosphere.

That cover is, of course, immaculate.

A great cursed weapon as well, good enough that even rational players will be tempted to keep it around if they're "sure" they can handle it.

Gotta love a talking partial skeleton.

Fantastic magic items.

My only critique is that I'd like the map to be less of a tunnel and offer players more than one choice how how to move through the caves.

Otherwise, this is a great adventure. I could definitely see using this with Pirate Borg, where it'd fit in great.

The presentation on this is amazing.

The adventure is very lightweight, but there's sufficient to figure out what to do, and the branchlings are a fun halfling variant, and the conflict isn't one that we see all the time.

Excellent cover.

The typeface has a lot of personality, but the lack of white space around words makes the adventure a little harder to parse than you probably want, given how clean and usable the text is otherwise. 

Great plot, including the intrigue among the mole people.

I really like the map. Some of the letters showing where the body parts are located get lost in the pencil drawings, though, so I'd either move them all outside of the rooms, or change and maybe bold face the fonts.

This is another good adventure site to drop into a hex map with an open-ended adventure.

I love the color scheme. What a gorgeous package.

A great intriguing initial situation and a very interesting small dungeon, but I'm not sure I see how players can resolve the problem. If they need to bury all the soldiers, as per the legends, that feels like it involves freeing the undead dragon to do so. (Or maybe that's the intention here.) At least there's not really 10,000 of them, as per the legend!

Extremely atmospheric and metal.

This practically cries out to be used in conjunction with Shadowdark's Midnight Sun issue of Cursed Scroll.

Ridiculously attractive entry. Some of the map icons, like the lock and secret door, are a little small when printed at A5.

This is an interesting and very creepy town with a problem, but I'm not sure how much complexity there would be in actual play.

The player characters will realize something odd is happening, tour the increasingly unpleasant town, decide to go to the gate, get into a conflict with the guards, the Mouth will show up at some point and either the PCs will identify them and take them out or won't and will likely get overwhelmed.

I would add in some way to find out that the Mouth exists and is in disguise (maybe a journal or a letter sent to the adventurers that draws them to the area?). As it is, it's not like the player characters are going to be staying in town and slowly picking up that something's wrong -- that's clear immediately and they're either going to try and resolve it or run for the hills. (Run for the hills being the obviously smarter choice and let someone else save the world.)

Alternately, maybe the enthralled shouldn't be quite so overt with their status, so that players will only start to figure out how bad everything is after staying in town for a bit -- ideally viewing this as their "home base" between other adventures.

That said, this has atmosphere for days. It feels like a horror movie that unsuspecting PCs will wander into.

First rate cover.

I appreciate you going with a higher level adventure. Level 12 is a range that even WotC seems nervous about engaging with.

I would like to see some guidance on how to adjudicate the tentacles as well as some encounters where violence isn't the obvious right answer.

Also, the tease talks about beetle men, but I think I'm missing where (or what) they are. Are they just the fire beetles?

This is a wonderfully strange adventure with very specific details with a real dreamlike vibe to them.

Well, that is just an astonishing cover/map.

Although I know there are certain groups that will see an altar and say "yep, time to make a sacrifice," for others, I think that'll be a pretty opaque way of advancing through the dungeon. I would add an explicit clue or an alternate route.

"Oh, this seems like a fun twist on a standard fantasy adv ... A FLYING SAUCER?"

Great zigging when the players will expect zagging.  A great way to take an already clever adventure and really elevate it to something unique.

The art and cover are obviously fantastic, as one would expect of Jason Sholtis.

This definitely has the kind of low-key creepy vibe that a lot of Appendix N stuff has. I would have said CL Moore until I got to your explanatory note.

This would make a great random hex to drop into a map. The player characters could easily ignore the weirdness or go on. This is all strange enough that I suspect most players will want to poke at things.

I would provide at least one more clue that there's something inside the installation, just so players don't assume the answer is somewhere else and wander off.

Good stuff.

Those are some great magic items, right off the bat, worth stealing for any system.

Similarly, the background and set-up are fantastic. I normally don't get excited about druids, especially urban druids, but this had me 100% in.

This whole thing is wall to wall great ideas, combined with excellent execution, and making both of those look far easier to pull off than they actually are.

Excited to insert this setting into any fantasy city I run in future.

"Hellclerk" is a great idea. Of course legalistic officious evil would have clerks and bureaucrats.

I really like the clean layout.  I think this would be enhanced with a touch of spot art, if you wanted to drop a well chosen piece or two in.

I like the central mystery and that it's not strictly necessary to visit every location to figure out what happened with the contract. (I'm not sure parties will necessarily be exploring the tavern basement, for instance.)

Nicely creepy while still likely not being too much for more sensitive players.

Well done!

I'm not sure this depth crawl will be clear to those who haven't run Gardens of Ynn or the Stygian Library. (To be fair, depthcrawls are pretty complicated to explain.) If you could figure out a way to squeeze in a flow chart, that would likely help.

The baby seals with Glocks are funny, but tonally are a lot sillier than the rest of the adventure. I get the appeal, but I would have just kept on with the rest of the weird science fantasy tone.

I would also consider swapping your typeface out for one with a bit more personality. This adventure has a ton of personality and would really shine if the presentation matched.

Gorgeous art and layout.

The random events don't really work for me -- they feel like they might need another pass.

The overall idea, though, including the creepy alien hermit interested in memories of conflict, escaping off to wherever it came from, feels very Jeff VanderMeer to me. He was born too late for Appendix N, but is definitely in that spirit.

And I love the idea that this is meant to enhance an existing adventure with faction play. I haven't encountered that idea before, but it's a great one.

I think a lot of us have a lot of fixes we want to publish after the ratings close. ;)