itch.io

Thanks. I kept the western stuff vague so that this could technically be a standard Shadowdark game or, for sure, be used with Frontier Scum or something.

Good idea about a table of other encounters!

It is extremely light on kaiju!

First off, I love the hand-made art.

I would also have not thought to make this title a Pirate Borg adventure and I love the out of the box thinking here. I've been running a ton of published Pirate Borg one-shots at my local gaming store this summer, and this feels more Pirate Borg than even one or two big name publications I've run.

Fantastic cast of characters and great new monsters, all of whom fit into Pirate Borg like a glove.

I know space is a premium in this jam -- I had to cut a page's worth of content in the last 30 minutes before submitting -- but the typeface here is so small it's hard to read on screen and would probably be murder to read on a print-out. I'd find a sentence or two in each paragraph to cut (why do we care if the clay is edible?) and pop the typeface up a font. 

A gorgeous adventure, although the mention of the curse on the timeline threw me -- was it mentioned previously, or is it from the Violence rules? This feels like a climactic scene from a Tarantino movie, which seems appropriate.

First-rate layout, including the use of color to convey specific types of information. I also like the Arthurian feel to the language you use throughout.

This is impressively dense with information, while still remaining readable -- a combination not everyone can manage.

I love that you've included NPCs names, so that the GM doesn't have to come up with them on the fly. I would extend that beyond just the ghosts, maybe by making a single master list, since everyone seems to be from the same culture here.

You appear to have misspelled "amoral" in the faction listing. Also a typo in "reset he tracker" under the Approaching Doom section.

Gorgeous adventure. Love the cover, the map and the general graphic design.
I would like more of the rooms to be more interactive. Quite a few of them have nothing that the group is going to naturally want to interact with.

There's also at least one instance of referring to the "leeches" as "leaches," FYI.

I've been running Pirate Borg one shots at my local game store and the folks who show up every week are loaded down with stuff, but in true PB fashion, many of the items are either super-situational or are dangerous to the users and those around them. It's been fun, but it definitely makes things crazy.

Gorgeous layout and design.

Great use of multi-column random tables.

Obviously you're space-limited by the nature of this jam, I would have liked to see you engage with the amoral nature of the Demiurge's behavior -- his "failed" experiments being left to fight for survival in exile sounds pretty horrific.  

Man, the surviving pirates will make out like bandits with the eldritch relics. I like the chaos of the adventure -- very Pirate Borg and very Appendix N.

Yeah, there are no updates to the adventure until after judging is over. I'm making all the changes to my entry in a 1.1 file I'll post afterwards.

This adventure is gorgeous, top to bottom, and the art is spot-on for the Appendix N era. (Honestly, it's better than 99% of Judges Guild stuff.)

I really like the use of the hourglass to add time travel shenanigans.

I would like a little more specificity on Time's Needle (the sword), which is really potent and, as written, I could see arguments over interpretations of its powers.

Thanks. I had a crazy month and was rushing to finish this on deadline, including getting the scissors out and cutting away basically a full page worth of content. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that could be clearer, along with typos or styling inconsistencies. I'm going to be gathering all of the feedback and putting out a 1.1 version once judging is over.

The curse of getting a late start this year. (July was a month.)

Here's mine: https://lby3.itch.io/fable-of-the-silver-lanterns-a-shadowdark-adventure

Honestly, I feel like the biggest challenge for folks new to publishing is royalty free art that's not AI. 

Folks who crack that seem to be unleashed, but sorting through the maze of "this says it's royalty free, but obviously is pirated or AI" and "stuff I know must be royalty free because it's 100+ years old seems weirdly hard to find on the internet" never stops being a pain in the butt.

This is also my plan.

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.