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monodestoyer

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A member registered Jan 30, 2024 · View creator page →

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This is a great little module. You've woven a really interesting narrative through this. 

It was a little hard for me to follow at times. Might be useful to specify what the overall goal is, e.g., what does success/failure mean for the village?

Same with the individual villagers. What might happen if the players don't assist Ojin with hanging the bozu? This is a good chance to reward the players with helping (maybe he's more accommodating to visitors), or maybe a penalty for failure. I'm assuming that the players will have to do a lot of negotiating with different parties to get them to accept more and more refugees. Listing some basic wants or needs might help here. It would be a lot to come up with on the fly.

Layout-wise, very clean. You write well and have chosen a nice, readable font in a decent size. I like the drop-cap key numbers. Very economic with the space. If I were to nitpick anything, the subheads (NOON, 1st DAY) are probably a little too lightweight for my liking. The ordinal suffixes (the 'st' part of '1st') do not print well. You also switch between em-dashes and brackets, I'd say just pick one or the other to keep things consistent.

I really like the back page. You've used a lot of Japanese terminology here, and the Glossary will help a lot. Worth the space that it takes up. 

I see in the credits that this is your first adventure. I hope you're proud of how it turned out. It's really great.

Thanks! Yeah, I've really been enjoying thinking about card mechanics lately. They've got a familiarity to them with how ubiquitous card games are, so it's almost like this shared language that is easy for people to just 'get'.

Thank you! I was really leaning hard into that folktale vibe, so I'm glad it landed.

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Great job with your first page. The ripped cover and the handwritten notes really sell the vibe.

I would love a description of the surface or Europa at the start, though. It sounds icy? 

A nitpick about key 6, when you have a paragraph continuing to the next page, its helpful to put a (cont.) at the end to inform the reader there's more on the following page:

The spacecraft appears cut in two by the dome. (cont.)

In 7. Talos' Home, a Con test that becomes a potential one-hit kill is pretty brutal. I'd probably change this if I were to run it. Also, would be good if there were clues on how to convince Europa hidden throughout the other locations.

I love the Revenant triggers being emotions. That's a really cool mechanic. 

Overall, the layout and design is clean and easy to parse, and the adventure nails the Appendix N theme, well done.

Incredible writing, conceptually dense, very original. Well worth a read if just to soak in all that atmosphere.

Wow, I've had to read this a few times to get my thoughts in order. It's so DENSE.

Love the hooks on the front cover, especially the seventh (decorative) hook about a lost memory but the text has been torn off. Nicely poetic. There are lots of these little poetic moments that make it a joy to read.

Now the inside. Yes, too small text, it's been mentioned. I'm not sure how you could edit it down much further though. The prose is really strong and evocative and I think it would suffer from too much trimming. I like the door icon, very clever.

One thing that confuses me is what's the actual setup here? The intro is written in the second voice and makes it seem like the players are Ur themselves. 

I love the factions. They are distinct and characterful.

Where I'm getting stuck is with the layered procedures of the Kudurru stones, the triplets, the game of Ur, the Rules of Rhetoric. I just can't figure out how all these procedures fit together by myself. And unfortunately you just don't have the extra pages needed to explain this properly. 

But it's so flavourful I want to see how it works.

Anyway, probably one of the most memorable entries I've read so far and fits the themes so well. Really well done. 

A great little science fantasy point-crawl that mixes a classic fantasy forest with irradiated horrors from some unspoken nuclear event.

Great work. I really enjoyed this one. Some thoughts:

The location keys are short but sweet. I can see them working in a more zoomed out roleplay style, but I do wish there was more to interact with at each location. Maybe a random table at the back could do this, so the descriptions don’t get too long.

Would like to see more interaction with the NPCs, like the injured night cat, what might it offer in return for healing it? Or the unicorn, what might it warn us of in the forest? Maybe a lost pilgrim or a druid ghost to speak with. 

The escalating weather is nice atmosphere. This is a great vehicle to ramp up the tension.

I’m confused at what the difference between the line paths mean, e.g., what’s a dashed line vs solid mean? I do like the path descriptions.

This is set on a mountain but there is a  opportunity for any locations that require climbing or negotiating great heights, especially with the fog. Especially with the escalating weather. Climbing across a rocky outcrop is now too treacherous now that the wind has picked up.

Also, would be great to add in some kind of effect for carrying or holding the enriched uranium.

Overall through, I much prefer your decision to keep content light in exchange for great readability, as opposed to cramming in more content and then shrinking the font down to size 6 or something. 

Thank you for the feedback. When I originally wrote the premise, I decided to keep the setting vague so as to not get bogged down in historical weight. I wanted the player to feel like they can be free when creating their own stories and not worry about if it is 'lore-correct'. But then Vukica emerged from my own playtesting, and by including her, I've gone against this rule. So calling this out has been useful, thank you. I do like the idea of building out the  valley, will add that to my list of features to add. An you're now the second person to mention the trick-taking lingo, so will definitely add some more accessible descriptions.

Fun pulpy romp around an Aztec temple, with time-travellinh nazi cultists, gremlins and ray guns that go zwp zwp!

This is a really fun, pulpy romp. I kept laughing out loud at the different room descriptions. Cocaine in the desk, embalming room turned mess hall, the diary entries. Very funny read.

The room traps are good. My favourite would be the moon, with the phases as the sequence. Though I can see some difficulty for the DM trying to remember the names of the phases for the players.

Poking the pencil through the paper is a fun mechanic. Very tactile and memorable.

One thing that I think would have been nice to include is maybe some ideas on how to quickly adjudicated the large horde of resurrected zombies. I’m sure it would be easy for the DM to handwave this, but some sort of mechanic could shine here.

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Thankyou, I really appreciate the kind words! Once you get time to play a few rounds, I'd love to get your thoughts on what worked for you and what didn't.

A fun haunted house to explore with killer undead brides, shushing chimpanzees and wandering peacocks! Wonderful layout work too.

Some very skeuomorphic design choices here and I think they mostly work. The letter on the back fits the back page really well, and your attention to detail with texture, shadows etc. sells the realism. I disagree about the comments where it’s cut-off. I think it works well.

One suggestion for handwritten fonts though, some bigger line-height would make it easier to read. Look at some photos of handwritten letters and you’ll see they often leave a pretty big gap between lines.

Inside is very creative. It comes across as mad, frantic, chaotic note-taking, but the page is still easy to navigate for the referee. The typewriter font has character but is still readable even at that size.

Slightly unfair critique here, but I printed it off in grey-scale on my printer and it was quite hard to read with the contrast between background and text. The map is also quite subtle and small but I like the ‘blueprint’ styling. 

 Love the situations in the room keys here. The shushing chimp wandering in to the foyer would be so fun to roleplay. I’m definitely using that.

Nice countdown happening with the bride. I also liked the way you’ve written the keys. Very economical but still easy to parse.

Overall, I see this being a very fun one to play. Great job!

Thank you mate. Appreciate the support.

Thanks for checking it out. That's fair criticism. I have assumed the reader is familiar with trick-taking games. Which terms did you struggle with? I would love to refine any of this to make it more accessible.

Some imaginative traps and atmospheric rooms in this very vertical dungeon. Well worth a read.

Imaginitve descriptions with some greate imagery, my personal favourite was the stone coral pipes. Very purple prose, but in all the right ways. It fits the theme to a tee. Really evocative desciptions in here - 'doors yawning open', love it!

Not enough treasure for my own taste, especially for OSE.

Some more clues would also help with some of the puzzles. The solutions are a bit obscure, and I’m not sure how the players would get there on their own. I'm not sure where the party would get blood or flesh for the altar in room 3 without it coming from themselves. Though maybe that was the point?

Some bolding throughout the room keys would help with scannability, but overall the text was readable even at the small size, thanks to decent leading. 

To run this, I think I’d need to do a solid pass with the highighter, and then maybe add in more signposting for the traps etc.

Great romp through a gritty, atmospheric point crawl. Lots of gameability here. Easy to run after a quick read-through without too much extra work from the referee.

Typography: lovely font, and you’ve done a good job of layout with font size, line length, leading etc. You obviously know what you’re doing here. A couple of suggestions: Copyright line is way too small when printed. Disappears completely. 

Also, with light text on dark background, the strokes of the letters can get a bit too thin. I noticed there was a ‘News Roman’ weight in the font family. It looks a little bit thicker and better suited for small type.

Some keyword-bolding might help with scannability. Because this is white on dark, my usual go-to of highlighting important bits does not work as well.

Prose: very well written. Was easy to follow on the first read-through. You could tighten it further by making it more direct and active-voice:

Before: "Can unleash a wave of lightning to hit..."
After: "Unleashes a wave of lightning to hit..." 

Also there’s a bit of duplication between headings and contents: 

Heading: "Crown forged of lightning"
First line: “The crown can only be removed…” 
Edited: “Can only be removed…” 

Love the encounter table with the nested activies. Really aides the Referee in the moment. If I were to add anything here, a rumours table might be useful. There’s potential for more in-depth interactions or faction-play with the saved villagers, the crows, the occulists:

  • Maybe the villages provide clues or rumours for rescuing them. For example, telling the players to smother themselves in gore etc.
  • Maybe there’s a boon or curse for worshipping the meteorite. 
  • For the crows, some signposting to leave a trinket: base of the tree decorated with trinkets and knick-knacks. If the players try and steal, it turns the crows against them. 
  •  As this is Mork Borg, those impaled sentinels could be undead and pleading for mercy or something. 

Overall, you’ve nailed the prompt 100%. Love the overall package. Will figure out a way to run this in OSE sometime. Doesn’t look too hard to convert.

I love the art in this so much. Very whimsical. Great imagery, too. And the PDF links were a pleasant surprise! 

Thank you! Your feedback was really helpful too!

Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I'm running it with OSE. I used your Hinterland tools to generate the rough map, and then the party navigates with Trail Mix rules. For encounters, when I roll a creature on the Encounters step, I then switch over to the OSE encounter tables to decide exactly what was encountered. Its running pretty smoothly at the moment.

Been really enjoying this little ruleset. Quick to run once you get the hang of it. The navigation procedures feels a lot more realistic than other hexcrawl rules I've run. Will have to check out your other pamphlets.

One question though, is step 6 missing?