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mtb-za

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A member registered Jun 15, 2020 · View creator page →

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Glad that you liked it.

Yeah, some of the other adventures are a little more clear that some NPCs will be difficult to persuade to do certain things compared to others. This one does not really have that for some reason. More physical challenges are mostly left for the referee to decide: it is difficult to know if a given PC should be able to spoof a biometric lock or not. Will have to think about how to flag that sort of thing more clearly.

As for the other adventures, it was always the intent to have a nice big stable of NPCs with some cross-connections that could start to snowball into future adventures as the PCs start wandering around. A big party makes a lot of sense for seeding those links to me.

This is a pretty cool wargame scenario. I can easily see this being adapted for all sorts of settings, with or without mechs.

Nice set-up and balance of priorities in general and a fun intro to something. I would definitely be interested in seeing a full narrative campaign of this: I think that it would be a good thing to have in one’s back pocket, even if I am very unlikely to ever actually run this with Lancer.

Great artwork and clean keys with some fun enemy stat blocks.

One thing that might benefit from expansion, and that is what water it is that Cerdita wants to cross. It is quite different if she just wants to get over the river, or if she wants to get off the island entirely (because of the effect she can grant), and having the author’s intent be clearer here might be good. (Also, minor typo here: “possess”, not “posess”.)

This one is a little lighter on the science side of things than most of the other submissions, but it can still be pushed fairly easily in that direction with some more labs and weird chemicals and such.

I think that the biggest thing missing is how to achieve the overall goal for hook #2, given the lack of things to use to escape the island properly in the keys. The other two would have the PCs arriving at the island with a ship to use to get away afterwards and are much stronger motivations in general, I think. (I might still do something slightly different with Camilla, but overall that hook works for me.)

Definitely easily runnable though, nice work.

This is a nice one. Clear, interesting premise, well-written.

I am not sure if I would actually run this solo, but it would definitely work for that. This looks like a super solid convention game, actually.

Not much to critique, in general, this is good work for a one-shot.

Those minor changes definitely help make the usability better. Nice work!

Yep! The page layout is explicitly modelled on The Traveller Book, without being a direct copy. Glad that it resonated.

I also like having little nods to the wider world, especially since this is the fifth adventure: I am trying to build up a fun setting through them all, and having mentions to other places and events is a solid way of managing that without needing to have actual timelines and such.

Huh. I wonder how that got missed. Might have been a slightly earlier version. Will update with the missing stuff though, thanks. Will make it clearer that Turleigh is part of the R&D team, but the only one working on that specific thing (although the issue would still crop up in production which would be more people). Will add something of the security. I think that it got a little glossed over because in the preliminary playtest the PCs got invited in directly! (Also, breaking and entering from the nobility? For shame!)

And yeah, tangents are quite plausible, but with the style of the adventure it is tricky to avoid. I ran it as a duet game in about an hour and a half, so there is enough time to handle a diversion or two, I think. One potential entry to get the PCs more directly involved would be to have one or both of the people involved approach directly, but the difficulty there is in assuming what motivates them in the initial text. Some of the other adventures have had the same sort of issue in development in terms of how and why the PCs are getting involved.

Glad that you seemed to like it though!

At least some of that is boilerplate from the other adventures in the series. It is more pointed at other NPCs that might be met, more than the ones actually detailed.

The intent for the Roslove adventures generally is to build up a social sandbox, so opportunities of meeting NPCs that provide lead-ins to other adventures is entirely planned. Most of those have specific kick-off things, rather than just being done from the party. Should that not be wanted, then breezing past those interactions is very feasible as well, which would also let it run more quickly.

Will have a look at how (or if) to clear things up somewhat earlier though, thanks.

Yeah, the potential meetings are all NPCs that lead in to other adventures set on Roslov that have already been written up. The Social List has all the details for those NPCs, which I did not want to duplicate entirely here, mostly because having their details is even more likely to derail things. I guess that one only needs the Appearance and Open Information for them, but that will still add at least a couple of pages to what seems long enough to read through. Might still be worth it, it just ends up adding a fair amount of detail that is somewhat distracting. Having it in a separate document makes it clear that it is not directly part of this one.

Will have a think about the amount of background knowledge needed, but I generally think that the page with player information should be enough. The details that the encountered NPCs would be adding to that are largely optional, but my head has also been in Roslov for a year, so I am not exactly the best judge of that…. Do you think that it needs expansion?

Flipping is very quick in PDF form (via bookmarks) but I will take a look at how it might be more easily sign posted in print: image.png

If you like the style of this, the other Roslov investigations will likely appeal, btw.

Overall, this is definitely good and runnable.

I would number/letter the room descriptions instead of (only) relying on the key. As it is, I need to look at both the key and the description to figure out what a given room on the the map is. You probably have enough space to just label the rooms as well, to be honest, given the overall font-size used, and it would be what I would do if I was printing this out.

The font seems overly thin in places and difficult to read, but that might just be on screen. I think that it would be fine if it was printed out, but well, there is a ton of black, so that is not going to happen.

The cargo cut-out has a corpse, but the other corpses are only in the keys: consistency (or having the symbol in both) would be helpful, I think.

It is not quite clear what the HEAD is actually doing in terms of why it is killing everyone, especially if it can assimilate heads and similar. The note on the console is explanatory, but there is no indication of where this should be found or who wrote it - I assume that this is meant to be whomever is found in the Power Room.

Some nice environmental world-building in general though: it is pretty easy to follow the flow and how one might run this.

Straightforward set-up nicely presented and a pretty decent over-all pitch. Always nice to see a non-evil “AI gone wrong” scenario.

I think that the map is a little underwhelming, being very linear in practice. Making it more complicated and presenting some choices as to direction of travel is probably worth the effort.

The styling could look slightly more like a prescription label of some kind, but otherwise this just gets out of the way nicely.

Easy to follow, although it does leave a fair amount up to the player in terms of what stuff actually looks like. Worth taking for a spin.

Usually not a fan of Brindlewood-style non-mysteries, but for a solo game I think that it works well.

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Is anyone with a good knowledge of fragrances and perfumes willing to help me out with making up some fake ones based on relatively well-known real-world ones? I would like to add a list of fragrances to my submission but I am not sure which real ones are worth riffing on to make fun Easter eggs. This is definitely a blind spot that I have, so some expert help would be appreciated and credited. A list of about 10 in total, like this would be great:

image.png

Not planning on charging for this, but will add your name/pseudonym to the thank yous, if you would like me to.

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Small suggestion: can we start with the neighbourhood’s main feature: that church at 92 and then work outwards? (Given the district, that might be a bank, with a couple more on the square around it, but whatever.)

It would be a shame to have to trim that out because we do not get enough people making a hovel. Maybe that church could get filled in by one of the Melsonian authors who are doing more first-party Swyvers stuff with double the page count?