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So, as I understand it, the criteria for qualifying is as follows:

Is it a TTRPG Module (Heist, Point Crawl, Puzzle , Dungeon, etc.)?

Is the module limited to four(4) A5 pages or less?

Did the participant avoid generative AI usage (not likely provable unless they state it outright for some reason)?

Obviously judges would disqualify these outright of if those aren't met. However, as the voting public, should we avoid reviewing any entry that would not qualify to avoid tainting the ratings on the public favorite prizes?

With most projects, I like to offer supplemental materials for the users to make their lives easier. What form this takes can vary, but is often relating to clean maps or scaled up maps for printing off and easy use around a table. Obviously no supplemental material is going to get accounted for in voting, but is there any issue with adding such things on the landing page for the people who would want them? At least so long as they are adding nothing to the entry itself? Most jams I have participated in take no issue with it, but I wanted to check before doing anything that could be considered disqualifying.

Time isn't on my side, so this is going to be a smaller comment than I normally try to give. Still, I hope you can find something helpful in it.

Non-voting thoughts:

I absolutely understand why it was included, but I've never liked countdowns where the result is death. This includes puzzles, map traversals, or end-of-the-world scenarios. I've met far too many players who find a way to get obliterated. Not always by making bad choices, but sometimes by sheer poor luck. I'm not against TPK, but I also know it can be pretty unsatisfying to step into a situation where the options are win or everyone is dead. At least without other possible outcomes being a chance.

Also, with 60 minutes (presumably real time given how Shadowdark is generally played) means I can't imagine most of anyone I know pulling the adventure of successfully. I've played non-SD games (thankfully SD is a lot quicker usually) where a single round of combat ended up eating too much time for this to be viable. I'd want to play test the time limit heavily before committing to it.

Inspiration:

Okay. I can't lie here, you nailed this. There's absolutely no ambiguity as to where the games inspired things and how they absolutely are required to have built this adventure out. You actually broke my rubric on this. A 5 is when someone has one game absolutely represented and the other two heavily woven in to bolster the total. You literally brought all three equally deep into the concept.

Usability:

I'd be cautious bringing this to my table. It would depend on the players present. The win or everyone is dead mechanic of it means it just isn't going to be fun for some of my players. I don't play with people who can't accept dying, but I also don't give them situations where only two outcomes are possible. I know far too many players who , when asked if they have what it takes, would say nope and have their characters go elsewhere well away from the impact site.

Page 3 is very wall-of-text for me. Doubly is the fact that I basically never read pre-scripted comments. I'm not against having them, but if you can find space to add a bullet-point alternate or maybe use bold text to draw attention to a few key words. That means just skimming the page mid-game I can see what I most need and improve around the players talking and interrupting the NPC. There are other parts throughout where similar scripted moments happen.

Room 1 either doesn't say how many of each color are there or I am going blind. I keep reading it over and over, but just not seeing an indication. It might be visible on the map, but at the size it shows on my screen, I just can't tell. Maybe when saying the flag effect, add the total number of them in parentheses? Like Red Standard (2)=...

Room 2 I love a roleplay challenge. I don't want everything to just be dice rolls. Some thoughts though: What is stopping a less than cooperative player from just attacking (we all have that one player)? History is often unique to each table's setting, so are the history sections viable? I doubt most of my players could answer deep questions about the lore. Some of these questions are so painfully easy to answer it is almost a freebie room. Lastly, I'm not sure I love the action boon set. With the room already being relatively easy, it is almost impossible to fail for a lot of the players I've had over the years.

Room 3 is interesting. I'd point out that movement in SD is pretty abstract. You indicate an exact distance (which is fine), but then say 3 to 4 rounds. I would probably firm this up as saying 100' Long (triple near). This makes it clear immediately in SD terms exactly what you can expect and how the rounds will play out.

General – The monsters/NPCs lack some of the stats I expect to see with SD. Probably not meaningful to some, but if I needed to check their wisdom or something, I would have to try to reverse engineer it on the fly. Worth considering. Also, you have several places where various things could happen, but no random table to decide it. I don't personally need a roll table, but having it means instantly knowing exactly what to do to determine which thing happens in a round.

This is going to sound weird, but for once I don't think the maps really add anything here. They're basically just square rooms with evenly spaced items. The description was actually clearer on the first room /before/ I looked at the map since looking at the map mentioned 5 flags on poles, but then I saw what looked like 6 stone pillars. I know a number of people who play on the round turn table style game boards for games like Shadowdark where everything is broken into Far, Near, and Close. Trying to represent these rooms in that layout would be a lost cause. I think you could have dropped the maps and used the extra space for more valuable things. It feels wrong saying that. Heh.

Vibes:

Vibes... is so subjective. For me, this feels like it was definitely set up like a gauntlet of games, but doesn't give me any real NES feel. I'd say I'm getting a lot of the top-down early 90's PC game feel more than anything. The artwork largely feels like it would have been in a standard TTRPG, so isn't doing anything to enhance the vibe either. Not saying it's bad art, just that the writing itself is being left to pull the entire NES vibe and I wasn't there. I don't think the feel is bad as a whole, but can't rate it higher since I'm really looking for NES in my Vibes for this jam.

Boss Room is pretty standard video game concept and the whole damage some object to weaken and defeat him is the most solid NES vibe I think here. Sure it shows up in modern games too, but we all know it was the only way to win any boss fight back in the day. Spam the attack on whatever was floating or sitting in the area until he started flashing red or something. Hah!

Overall:

I can't believe you broke my rubric for Inspiration. How do you get a six on a 5 scale? Be proud of that! If you can pull off similar in the future and up your numbers in the other areas just a little, you'll be hitting top 10 regularly I think.

As with last year, thank you so much for taking the time to do a review. It's too bad you weren't able to participate this year. Still, your insights have always proven helpful and I grow as a designer each time.

Yeah, since I was aiming to emulate the old NES instructional pamphlet, I was inspired to include a controller. After all, every manual has one somewhere! With ABBA being the revive code, it only made sense to make it the altar. The Dragon-eater was something I almost didn't go with, but it was just too much fun not to make the center of the adventure.

Thanks. Glad you liked it.

Everything I say here is just things that strike me as I read over the piece. Thanks for taking the time to make this game and good job on getting it completed in time.

Non-voting thoughts:

I'd change 'Live through your crimes' to 'Revisit your crimes'. Just a personal choice though.

Stress bonus' sometimes color just the word stress, but other times the bonus number as well. Probably should get that consistent.

I probably missed it somewhere, so you might want to include a note in the item section on if they disappear after leaving the nightmare. I assume they do.

Inspiration:

Without even needing to open the games, I can see the clear influences of two immediately.

Usability:

The hook page offers a lot of value on setting the expectations right away.

Muscular men succeeding in an attack could be an issue if some of the PCs are buff. The more they succeed, the worse it is for him!

I assume you picked the font for it's somewhat pixelated feel, but I find it a little hard on my eyes personally.

Given the 'mental' nature of this, I would love to see the stress become health. Instead of going up, it goes down so that it's a super easy leap for players to grasp exactly what's happening. Every 'stress factor' is doing damage to his mental health. This would eliminate tracking extra information but still treat things very differently from the standard. As a bonus, it means strong intelligence/wisdom sorts of characters would have the higher health in this setting if you wanted to play with that mechanic some.

This could make healing a tricky thing since you aren't healing physical health though too! If not, there needs to be an easy way to track what is happening. Maybe a little printable card for Quintus with a little stress bar or something.

I don't know how much I would ever use things from this outside of the adventure itself. That's an unfortunate thing because there's some interesting stuff here. I somewhat wish I had a player version of the spell used by the Ikari listed. Obviously a high level spell, but could be fun to take away from this!

Vibes:

Holy crap that cover. Maybe I don't get NES vibes, but I sure get a feel for the wild insanity I am in for from the moment I open the document. I was a little surprised to see the map before even seeing the inspiration, but it also gave an idea of the madness ahead.

Both in the visual way this reads like old NES stuff and the overall wild feel of the game, vibes are strong in this.

Good job on this one!

Allow me to preface this with a statement. I'm going to break down things as I go over them. It isn't intended to be harsh, but instead to help point out where there is room to improve or where I think things worked well. I hope you will take the feedback for what it is; an attempt at constructive criticism. I hope you'll join next year's jam as well and I get a chance to see how you've developed as a designer.

Non-voting thoughts:

Zero chance anyone ever prints this out due to white on black. I'd have to burn up half my black ink to do a print out. Also, the white on black is a major turnoff to a lot of people. It strains the eyes to read.

I will say that the map looks very nice on the black background though! Everything's clean and clear there, though I would put the overview map at the start rather than the end so I have a clear understanding of how it all fits together going in.

I know groups who would immediately make everything here useless. I understand why, given the NES games, but it makes it only usable on groups who like to play along with the DM's prompting.

I could see a couple bad rolls blocking off important pathways since there's a rather linear path happening. Something to consider as well.

The most interesting version is if you end up finding the slide and having to reverse-solve the situation. Having the big bad just standing up in a tower smacking a gem means you could finish him off pretty early into the crawl too.

I think you can drop the word Core from SD Core page references. Standard nomenclature is just the title abbreviation and page number. I know there's an argument to reduce it further in various ways, but Core especially can easily be dropped and lose nothing.

Inspiration:

I took a little time to look up the games you got. Fire and Ice is pretty obvious. I think you missed the chance to do something really creative with the Golf pull. Just adding a metal club to a monster felt like a cop out to me. If you'd not drawn attention to it, I wouldn't have even thought of the concept of golf at all.

Metal Slader Glory felt a little more present, but more like window dressing. If you had it to do over again, I'd say try to bring the other two games more solidly into the designs. Golf especially is a hard one, I understand, but it's those rough pulls that can inspire the most creative designs. A lot of this felt like it could have been any random adventure design regardless of the games being used.

Usability:

I like that you list clearly which rumors are true or false. It meant without reading any further, I knew which ones were just red herrings.

It makes note of flame spirits being unable to handle water or ice well and or travel at all on ice slides. I'd have rather seen this put somewhere near the monster section because when I go to reference a monster, I want all relevant info where the stats of the monster are. I get why it is where it is, but a reminder note at least would help.

Since the fairies aren't really relevant once you reach the island, this is more of a themed map with a goal than an outright adventure. I would have liked to see more back and forth being possible.

As soon as I started reading the map, I realized a critical flaw. The entire location is created of ice, but it was already clarified that fire beings are restricted in their movements when the ice is there. I realized they need to have restricted movements, which then had me looking to their stats and realizing I have no idea what you want the restriction to be represented as. Are they slower than listed?

Which now moves me down another tangent of wondering how the place made entirely of ice is still here. It should have melted down from flame creatures heating up everything so much the fairies can't be here. I feel like either there's missing information (the compact ice is magic and the building itself doesn't apply to the monsters for purposes of restrictions. The monsters were supposed to have a 'reduced' version or maybe the movement listed /is/ the reduction, etc). One of your encounter rolls indicates things /are/ melting and the description of the bridge from the guards is saying things are melting, so it all just feels like this needed more thought.

After bouncing up and down repeatedly through the document, I as a person picking this up outside of the jam would have been at a loss and decided it probably is just broken. I'd possibly use elements somewhere else and do a lot of revamping of what is going on.

Am I missing something in section 2 of the map? Almost as soon as the players enter, they can easily bring the whole adventure to a fail state without even knowing. The only person who will be down in 11 is the queen. There's no stats provided for her, but if she was better than a player or Druin, she wouldn't have needed the help. I would rethink this. Perhaps a fall and damage situation. They skip some of the map, but take potentially lethal damage.

When I got further into the reading, I think it was meant to be 10 instead of 11. 10 speaks about the guards being unaware the bride above /THEM/ is melting.

I could do insane things with the treasure by the way. Lacking the object language of Shadowdark feels like a miss here, but far more importantly I think you need to give real dimensions here. Saying Near in this case offers me the ability to just insta-screw enemies pretty readily. Just my opinion on this one.

Why isn't magma brute included down with the monsters?

Vibes:

This is the weakest part of your adventure/map. You kind of capture the side-scroller tunnel effect, but I doubt that's your goal. The pixel titles might have more impact if the majority of writing wasn't a more standard font. It feels like an easy nod without any real oomph. Without any art, you need your writing to carry a lot of the workload on vibes and I think it fell short.

Final Thoughts:

It's not a bad entry, just not really playing up to the potential. With it leaning so hard into one specific game and barely touching the difficult draw, I don't get excited. If not for the flame and ice mechanics, it could be a reskinned adventure from just about anywhere. If you decide to go back and make changes, I would try to work out the fire and ice a little more cleanly. I'd also try to increase the ways to engage beyond simply doing as the fairies ask. I hope you had a blast working on it regardless and you got your entry in which is more than 75% or so of the people who started did, so solid success on that count! 

Allow me to preface this with a statement. I'm going to break down things as I go over them. It isn't intended to be harsh, but instead to help point out where there is room to improve or where I think things worked well. I hope you will take the feedback for what it is; an attempt at constructive criticism. I hope you'll join next year's jam as well and I get a chance to see how you've developed as a designer.

Non-voting thoughts:

Zero chance anyone ever prints this out due to white on black. I'd have to burn up half my black ink to do a print out. Also, the white on black is a major turnoff to a lot of people. It strains the eyes to read.

I will say that the map looks very nice on the black background though! Everything's clean and clear there, though I would put the overview map at the start rather than the end so I have a clear understanding of how it all fits together going in.

I know groups who would immediately make everything here useless. I understand why, given the NES games, but it makes it only usable on groups who like to play along with the DM's prompting.

I could see a couple bad rolls blocking off important pathways since there's a rather linear path happening. Something to consider as well.

The most interesting version is if you end up finding the slide and having to reverse-solve the situation. Having the big bad just standing up in a tower smacking a gem means you could finish him off pretty early into the crawl too.

I think you can drop the word Core from SD Core page references. Standard nomenclature is just the title abbreviation and page number. I know there's an argument to reduce it further in various ways, but Core especially can easily be dropped and lose nothing.

Inspiration:

I took a little time to look up the games you got. Fire and Ice is pretty obvious. I think you missed the chance to do something really creative with the Golf pull. Just adding a metal club to a monster felt like a cop out to me. If you'd not drawn attention to it, I wouldn't have even thought of the concept of golf at all.

Metal Slader Glory felt a little more present, but more like window dressing. If you had it to do over again, I'd say try to bring the other two games more solidly into the designs. Golf especially is a hard one, I understand, but it's those rough pulls that can inspire the most creative designs. A lot of this felt like it could have been any random adventure design regardless of the games being used.

Usability:

I like that you list clearly which rumors are true or false. It meant without reading any further, I knew which ones were just red herrings.

It makes note of flame spirits being unable to handle water or ice well and or travel at all on ice slides. I'd have rather seen this put somewhere near the monster section because when I go to reference a monster, I want all relevant info where the stats of the monster are. I get why it is where it is, but a reminder note at least would help.

Since the fairies aren't really relevant once you reach the island, this is more of a themed map with a goal than an outright adventure. I would have liked to see more back and forth being possible.

As soon as I started reading the map, I realized a critical flaw. The entire location is created of ice, but it was already clarified that fire beings are restricted in their movements when the ice is there. I realized they need to have restricted movements, which then had me looking to their stats and realizing I have no idea what you want the restriction to be represented as. Are they slower than listed?

Which now moves me down another tangent of wondering how the place made entirely of ice is still here. It should have melted down from flame creatures heating up everything so much the fairies can't be here. I feel like either there's missing information (the compact ice is magic and the building itself doesn't apply to the monsters for purposes of restrictions. The monsters were supposed to have a 'reduced' version or maybe the movement listed /is/ the reduction, etc). One of your encounter rolls indicates things /are/ melting and the description of the bridge from the guards is saying things are melting, so it all just feels like this needed more thought.

After bouncing up and down repeatedly through the document, I as a person picking this up outside of the jam would have been at a loss and decided it probably is just broken. I'd possibly use elements somewhere else and do a lot of revamping of what is going on.

Am I missing something in section 2 of the map? Almost as soon as the players enter, they can easily bring the whole adventure to a fail state without even knowing. The only person who will be down in 11 is the queen. There's no stats provided for her, but if she was better than a player or Druin, she wouldn't have needed the help. I would rethink this. Perhaps a fall and damage situation. They skip some of the map, but take potentially lethal damage.

When I got further into the reading, I think it was meant to be 10 instead of 11. 10 speaks about the guards being unaware the bride above /THEM/ is melting.

I could do insane things with the treasure by the way. Lacking the object language of Shadowdark feels like a miss here, but far more importantly I think you need to give real dimensions here. Saying Near in this case offers me the ability to just insta-screw enemies pretty readily. Just my opinion on this one.

Why isn't magma brute included down with the monsters?

Vibes:

This is the weakest part of your adventure/map. You kind of capture the side-scroller tunnel effect, but I doubt that's your goal. The pixel titles might have more impact if the majority of writing wasn't a more standard font. It feels like an easy nod without any real oomph. Without any art, you need your writing to carry a lot of the workload on vibes and I think it fell short.

Final Thoughts:

It's not a bad entry, just not really playing up to the potential. With it leaning so hard into one specific game and barely touching the difficult draw, I don't get excited. If not for the flame and ice mechanics, it could be a reskinned adventure from just about anywhere. If you decide to go back and make changes, I would try to work out the fire and ice a little more cleanly. I'd also try to increase the ways to engage beyond simply doing as the fairies ask. I hope you had a blast working on it regardless and you got your entry in which is more than 75% or so of the people who started did, so solid success on that count! 

I think I'm going to go ahead and call it done. It is functional as-is. It would need populated by the DM/GM, but the images are suggestive enough to be usable for most systems I think. The required door mechanic is on the page, so I'd say it's within the limits and spirit of the Jam.

Due to a medical issue today, the work I had planned to do to transfer the map into a finished form, colorize it, etc didn't happen. I only have about an hour left to work on it, but there's precisely zero chance I can do a cleaned up version in time. That said, while it lacks details needed to run it, the basic map itself is done and ready. Do people think I should go ahead and post what I have and just clean it up down the road? Does technically done count? Heh

I'm glad you found things to enjoy in it. I appreciate your taking the time to comment!

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I like that you were able to include such an extensive loot table. For a setting that is regional like this, it goes a long way to adding a sense of specificity to the location. I also found the idea your encounter table interesting. Things like clams being run across (I assume these are actually oysters due to the pearls) rather than just monsters/npcs was nice.  If I had one critique, it was for the merfolk. The key element to the story is people getting turned into them, but in the meat of the adventure, it seems to indicate they are unaware of ever having been human. Are they a separate group of merfolk serving the Naga or people whose memories have been lost to the transformation? Perhaps I missed it as I have been reading quickly to get all of the reviews in on time.

Not going to lie, whenever I read flying monkeys anywhere, I immediately think of the Wizard of OZ. Just something that happens. Overall a clean product with a solid compilation of information to work with. If you ever go to revise or expand this work, I would suggest adding more to develop the local dealings with the place and the researchable background. Then again, that's the kind of stuff I find myself drawn to. There's nothing at all really missing.

This one certainly leaned into the cover illustration. The perpetual light/perpetual darkness elements felt a little out of place to me, but I do see why they were added. The inclusion of lots of maps was a nice choice, but the three wilderness ones felt arbitrary, as a simple encounter table would have been enough without having to draw them.  Regardless, I applaud your including multiple locations to explore as a way of making this small adventure a bit more expansive. I also appreciate that not everything has been answered for you, letting a GM fill in the blanks for their own world

I like the idea of making the darkness suddenly come to the players, as they may not be prepared. I also like that there's a hook for an unrelated adventure in the nature of how the eclipse occurred. It seems like there's a lot to do with this adventure, not forcing anything too hard to handle as it ramps up. I will say that the choice of layouts made it feel a bit 'wall-o'-text to me however.

Overall, this has the feel of the supposed panic from the 'War of the Worlds' broadcast with everyone acting crazy and the otherworldly beings playing silly (and sometimes deadly) games. A nice little stack of ideas for adding to a game, though probably not suited for 'extremely serious' game tables where the playful nature might not fit well.

I'll be honest, I felt a little torn on the demon kitties. I immediately thought of an old cartoon when baby kittens being all sweet, but turning evil whenever someone wasn't watching them. Once I found the inspiration, it made more sense, but I think for the tone of the rest of the work it might have been better to just call them Demon Cats or maybe just Familiars. That said, it was very clear how the covers inspired the work and there was nowhere that I felt like I had to wonder too hard about what was going on. I think the random element to entry guardians felt a bit unnecessary, but didn't really detract from anything.

I was really happy with the color coded/adaptive element myself. Thanks for taking the time to read it. I had to make a call on the map between a simpler map with more hand-holding or a map with everything mostly on it, but relying on the reader to have the core book for rolling the random things needed and/or referencing the creatures listed. It was a hard call, but in the end I wanted that longer map.

You're not the only one who questioned the Merchant. I am feeling more and more like I should have found a way to explain its inclusion in the document itself rather than just adding it and commenting on the author note page linked at the end. 

Thank you. I hope you have fun with it.

Thanks. I was fighting time and didn't have the time to rescan/color the map when I realized how it compressed into the PDF. As to the merchant, I wasn't able to include much commentary due to space limitations, but I had a solid reasoning to add it as a way to expand options and enhance elements of the adventure. I wanted to offer more options on how to resolve things for those who didn't decide to seek out the ruins. If you're interested in more information, I included a link at the end of the document to a page where I discuss at length some of my decisions such as the inclusion of the Merchant Class.