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THE LUMINESCENT LICH

THURSDAY 14 DECEMBER 2023

MASTERS OF CARCOSA PART 2

This post originally appeared on my substack. You can view it and subscribe
here:

https://twilightdreams.substack.com/p/masters-of-carcosa-part-2

-------------------------------

Where I last left off, I had a general pitch for my Masters of Carcosa campaign
as well as a pieced together setting and hexcrawl using Geoffrey McKinney’s
Carcosa hardcover book and module.

However, I also had one issue. I found the original hex map in the module not
really to my liking:

It had that classic hexcrawl look and feel but I had a number of issues with it:

I found the colours to be too high contrast.

I found the white hexes and numbers hard to read.

I found it lacked info that I wanted to include. I needed two versions of the
map. One which would be GM facing and include an overlay that would show all the
hexes that had an encounter in them (not all hexes had an encounter) and another
map which would be player facing and not have this information. I also wanted to
include some things like roads and water trade routes as villages would be more
important in my version of Carcosa. They’d kind of be the basic building block
of civilized interaction and each one would have it’s own weird style of
government and theme.

It used the traditional hex numbering of one axis being one pair of numbers and
the other axis being another pair. So like 38XX in a column and XX11 being the
row so you get 3811, 3812, etc. While this may be sacrosanct to some, I find
such methods of labeling axis make it very hard to read what hex follows what
hex and whether to flip forward or back when looking them up in text.

I wanted to add a number of my own hexes and things to the hexcrawl. To put my
own twist on the setting.

So all together I came up with the following. I don’t claim to be an artist but
I think my lessons learned may help others:

Carcosa Maps

The colours have less contrast and I find overall more pleasing and easier to
read.

The hexcrawl uses letters along one axis and numbers along the other. I find
this is much easier to parse and much easier to immediately know at a glance
that column H is after column G and row 3 after row 2. Additionally, the label
for each hex is in the middle of it.

The GM map has the hexes with fixed encounters labelled with a white overlay.
Overall I don’t think you need a fixed encounter in every hex. I find you need
to give players room to breathe, to feel like they’re traveling across a
landscape where there may be just random road encounters or wandering encounters
or nothing at all, rather than another fixed location.

If you look on my maps you’ll see villages (with names) and white column things
that are supposed to be towers. The villages are villages and the white towers
fortresses. I decided to do things this way because I found a number of the
hexcrawl entries featured fortress like locations, basically lairs or bases of
operations by factions with a single leader who could project force out from his
base.

The players starting village, Refuge, is the village with the red outline around
it’s hex.

Overall I was fairly proud of the results and it worked pretty well in play.
Still, after playing for several months if I were to juice up another hexmap or
create one of my own I’d do the following:

Center the Hexmap: if you’re going to start the players off in one location, and
that location is probably, or supposed to be, a base of operations. Then center
the hexmap on that hex. I made the mistake of putting Refuge, the players
starting village they were responsible for, in the south. It took several days
of travel to get to the northern city. The further the players travel from a
place the less likely they are to return to it as exploring new hexes is more
fun. If you put their base of operations in the center where all the ‘new’ hexes
are equidistant, they’re more likely to venture out then venture back in loops.
This has them interacting with the NPCs in the their base of operations more
regularly.

Common map Symbols: as explained above I had a symbol on my map for villages and
a symbol for fortresses. If I were to create another hexmap I’d go even further
and create symbols for like 5-6 common adventuring sites, things like lairs,
ruined buildings, magical standing stones, inns, etc. I would do this because
while, as the GM, you’ve read the text of the hexmap and know what kind of
things are to be found and roughly where they are, the players haven’t. The
entire point of a hexcrawl is it’s supposed to be self-directed by the players.
But if the players don’t know what kind of things lie out there in the hexworld,
they’ll have a hard time setting their own goals. You can do this by dropping a
lot of adventure hooks but you can also do it by simply making that information
discernable on the map. In my opinion the hexmap should be something the players
want to study. Not just a empty chessboard they move their pawn around.
Additionally, if they do learn things in a hook, like the knights you met come
from the Fortress of the North Wind to the North, they can look on the map and
be able to figure out and see which Fortress is the actual fortress.

Common Resources: while the hexmap should contain a good number of truly unique
and strange locations. I do think there should be 5-6 common adventuring sites.
While this may make it seem like a bunch of hexes are kind of copy-pasted, I
also think these adventuring sites should be thought of as resources. They
aren’t just weird locations the players poke around in and leave. They are
things which the players, or other factions can control and fully exploring and
controlling them gives them increased power in the setting. Like a fortress can
house troops and project physical force into the surrounding land. A ruined
building hosts lost magical artifacts. A lair hosts a monster which disrupts the
land around it and probably a hoard. Magical standing stones increase certain
types of magic in their hex, etc. Once the players figure out what map symbol
represents what, and what the resource is they’ll very often come up with all
kinds of plans and schemes of how they want to use it and which other ones they
want to explore next. They’ll begin to gain power in the world that comes from
more than just GP or XP and which they begin to feel an attachment too.

Gameboard not just mapboard: I find hexcrawls are unique in the sense that they
are not just a bunch of static adventure locations on a larger map. What I
attempted to do, and I think succeeded to some degree, is made my hexmap feel
like a living breathing world. I did so through the aforementioned things, but I
think most of all is thinking of and treating my hexmap like a gameboard of a
fancy boardgame, rather than just a RPG map. Where I would physically move the
players token about. I thought of the common types of static sites as resources
and the other villages as separate factions. The leaders of some of them would
even leave their village and move about to the main city of pillars for a fall
time festival, etc.

Posted by JG at 19:42 No comments:

TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2023

DARK ENTRIES BY ROBERT AICKMAN

This post originally appeared on my substack. You can view it and subscribe
here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/twilightdreams/p/masters-of-carcosa?r=48ejp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

-------------------------------------------

Because it’s the season for spooky stories I decided to finally get around to
reading the copy of Dark Entries by Robert Aickman that I bought a while back.

Robert Aickman was a British short horror story writer who wrote almost
exclusively strange tales. They’re not quite horror stories, more weird and
spooky then horrific. He’s not super well known but they republished his stuff
recently in a couple of volumes, one of which is pictured above.

His style is hard to describe but overall he’s pretty good. He really has a
unique way of telling a story. He’s a bit different from most writers of weird
tales. Most writers of the weird tend to really create an atmosphere through
description of setting. Lovecrafts overwrought prose and Poe’s purple prose are
kind of good examples of this.

Aickman is a bit different where the sense of strangeness and tension tends to
almost come more from the characters, their relations, and the built
environment. Something kind of feels ‘off’ in his stories in a twilight zone
kind of way where it’s like the main character has woken up and everything is
the same but something is different and only the main character notices it. It
also makes his stories feel very British, especially mid-century 1950’s British,
where you can tell the characters have a strong sense of what’s ‘proper’ and
different class divisions and societal relations. So when something does seem
‘off’ it becomes very magnified because of British culture.

When I say ‘off’ I don’t mean anything obvious like the character looks like a
scoundrel and is probably the guy you’d pick out in a police lineup as the
murderer.

Additionally, his stories aren’t completely moralistic where you have a bunch of
normal characters and then one quirky character not following the rules who’s
existence is supposed to give a lesson on society. I also don’t mean ‘off’ in
this manner either.

I mean ‘off’ in the the sense that the occurrence of the strangeness makes us
realize how much we rely on social norms to grant context to what’s happening
before us. Where it brings to light the artificiality or arbitrariness of a lot
of ingrained social things.

For example, imagine you had to visit the doctor, a doctor you’ve never seen
before, and you go to his office and find that it’s in the basement of a
building where you have to go down a set of stairs into the unit. And then once
in the unit instead of white walls, they were carpeted with shag green carpets.

Now these two things, location in a basement, green shag carpet walls, there’s
nothing really wrong with them, nor is there really any reason why a doctors
waiting room couldn’t be these two things. But all the same, if you were sitting
in that doctors office you’d probably thing, hey, this doctors office is kind of
weird.

I think it would feel this way because based on everything you’ve learned about
doctors offices in the past; your experiences, seeing them on tv, you have a
certain unconscious idea of what one is and isn’t, of how the receptionist
should and should not treat you. Additionally, our entire middle class corporate
modern society has been built up, more and more, around an idea of sameness
where we expect all doctors waiting rooms to look the same, all restaurants to
feel the same, all receptionists to follow the same script.

When it’s not like that, it feels weird and you begin to wonder why and flounder
about a bit. You sense an artificiality of things, begin to become aware of your
own biases.

Aickman’s stories are kind of like this. A lot of them tend to have fairly
conventional plots. One story is basically a zombies attack a town story,
another a ghost story, etc. However, what makes them weird very often isn’t the
actual most blatant supernatural thing that’s occurring. Very often the
supernatural thing that happens kind of happens offscreen. What makes them weird
is feeling of a break in reality, the creation of a liminal space, due to the
small details in things seemingly being ‘off’.

Additionally, a lot of his stories tend to end ambiguously. Where we know
something happened in the end, probably have a good idea of what happened, but
still aren’t quite sure why or what exactly happened. A lot of them kind of left
me scratching my head being like huh? WTF just went down? Now with most writers
I find the ambiguous ending more often than not feels unsatisfying. The stories
feel unfinished or things in them symbolic in an unmotivated fashion.

However, with Aickman’s stories this didn’t really happen. The ambiguous endings
weren’t that frustrating. Partially because of the simple plots, where at the
end of the zombie story they escape, etc. at the end of the ghost story he
continues out of his train station on his way, etc. Where overall you know what
happened. But all the same, there’s an ambiguity to cause and effect in his
stories, to the strange characters, to the odd little details.

It’s an ambiguity that made me want to re-read some of his stories and I’m
normally not a person who likes to reread stories. I find what makes them so
compelling in this manner is the strangeness of the little details makes you
wonder if there is some kind of hidden motivation or reason to things. Is
something sinister afoot? Is the shag green carpet walls of the doctors office
the way they are because it hasn’t been changed since the 70s? Is it the way it
is because the doctors office recently took over the building and hasn’t had
time to renovate? Is it because of the personal taste of the doctor? Are such
walls hygienic? Should I be concerned?

I find it no wonder that Robert Aickman (based on a description of his life in
the forward) was probably what is best termed a lifelong small ‘c’ conservative.
You know the type of person. The guy who enjoys being part of a historical
society in his country, who likes routine, who probably has a boring office job
but is kind of the cornerstone of the office, who likes to order the same meal
every time he goes out at the same restaurant. In fact, in many ways I don’t
think the stories he wrote could have been written by another type of person
because he is keenly, keenly aware of the unconscious societal expectations we
have around relationships and our built environment and how disconcerting they
feel if they’re off.

As the truth of the matter is, I think we all have a different tolerance for
unexpected weirdness in this way, no matter how accepting we may claim to be.
Like at what point would you leave that doctors waiting room? Would it be the
green shag carpet walls? Would it be a lack of any other patients waiting? Would
it be a fish tank bubbling away with nothing inside? Would it be a much too
friendly receptionist? I think that as you begin to add on more and more
compounding things that are ‘off’ (without any context or explanation) there
reaches a point where all of us would just be like, this doesn’t really feel
like a doctors office, I’m leaving.

In our own way we are all just simple animals living in a built environment of
brick and concrete, of glass and upholstery. And like any animal removed from
it’s natural habitat, we react with confusion and startlement, feel the depths
of the weird.

Posted by JG at 16:56 No comments:

THURSDAY 19 OCTOBER 2023

MASTERS OF CARCOSA - PART 1: THE PITCH

This post originally appeared on my substack. You can view it and subscribe
here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/twilightdreams/p/masters-of-carcosa?r=48ejp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

-----

For my last campaign I decided to run a Masters of Carcosa game. It ran for
several months and overall I think was a success. I’m going to cover various
aspects of it in a few posts.

I’ve been wanting to run a Carcosa game for years. I own the Geoffrey McKinney’s
Carcosa hardcover book. While I do think it’s an awesome book, I couldn’t really
figure out how to best make use of the material.

That was until I saw a series of posts by the blogger Ramanan Sivaranjan who
detailed his Masers of Carcosa campaign. It was an idea so good I decided to
steal it! Additionally, I also had Geoffre McKinney’s carcosa hexcrawl modules
that very few people seem to be aware of, probably because they’re only
available in print off of lulu.

So I decided to mash all of these things together, plus Masters of the Universe,
the gonzo science fantasy TV show, into a single campaign.

I decided on this mashup mainly because I like the idea of Carcosa. A horrible
far future world at the end of time with different races of different coloured
people (red, green, black, white orange, etc.) living in stone age villages
among the remnants of ancient super science and magical civilizations.

However, I find the actual Carcosa book leaves a lot to be desired. It does have
a hexcrawl. But I find a lot of the hexes are fairly abstracted and overall not
all that fun. The whole culture and peoples of the world really aren’t detailed
that much or in interesting enough ways to lead to meaningful adventure.

In contrast, the carcosa hexcrawl modules are much, much better. Overall, I’d
say while the Carcosa book has the spell rituals and science fantasy weapons and
gives a clear vision of the world in some ways, the hexcrawl modules have more
concrete gameable content. I’d highly recommend them in this regard, especially
if you have the Carcosa hardcover book and want to make use of it.

Anyways, I also decided to mash it up with masters of the universe to, well,
make the whole setting feel less bleak and be more fun. I wanted the players to
feel somewhat empowered, to not just have them slogging through a world full of
misery where everyone is cruel and/or suffering all the time. I didn’t draw any
elements directly from Masters of the Universe, used a lot of the art from that
show as inspiration and explanation for things and to convey the general tone
and vibe of the world.

I created the following pitch:

Masters of Carcosa

Beyond the farthest galaxies viewed by the greatest telescopes. Beyond the
limits of our universe lies another place — a place of magic, myth, sorcery and
science. At the end of time after all the other stars have gone out blinks one
star, one last red dwarf slowly dying, casting a red glow upon one last spinning
planet.

Dread Carcosa.

The terrible world of Carcosa is peopled by the 13 races of men and the Great
Old Ones they fight, fear, or worship. Primitive tribes fight amongst one
another and amongst themselves. Strange technology, magnificent architecture,
and horrific sorcery tell the tale of ancient civilizations now long extinct.
The men and women of Carcosa try and eke out a quiet existence against this
backdrop.

To the North of the Thaggasoth peaks lies the village of Refuge. Those who have
escaped the Jale slavers to the East have found sanctuary here, forming a small
refugee community. This unlikely situation—men and women of all the races living
and working together—is made possible due to the town’s wise and powerful
leaders. Refuge has been spared from the common xenophobia of Carcosa.

Those who feel adventurous hunt the vile spawn, The Star Children, avoid the
Jale Slavers, and venture out in search of strange space alien technology, avoid
mutant dinosaurs, and explore the wilds of this world.

Format

You are all random adventures summoned, in a great ritual, from the past by
Leela, the leader of Refuge, a small society of escaped slaves. They view you
all as mythic heroes from the past (despite being random unskilled adventurers
who might have been summoned by mistake) who can help protect and champion their
small starving village in the wastes of Carcosa.

The universe is dying, the last planet, Carcosa, is filled with all the broken
remnants of the past. The dangers are many, slavers, races of strange reptilian
men, strange ancient technology, cthuloid cults, horrific monsters. You’d be
exploring a hex map, encountering all these things, dealing with whatever
strange forces may threaten the survival of the small village that is your
newfound home and trying to improve it and perhaps lead it to glory.

I stole the idea of them being in a village of escaped slaves from Ramanan
Sivaranjan. Additionally with the premise being that they’ve all been summoned
from the past in a great ritual I opened things wide where they could pretty
much be any race/class they wanted and come up with whatever gonzo character
they desired. They’d be totally fish-out-of-water characters.

I tend to strongly prefer to have the players be fish-out-of-water characters,
even if it’s something as simple as being from the next village over. This way
they don’t know much about the setting and the players and their characters are
effectively experiencing and learning about the world in the same manner.

The champions of the village angle also helped frame the campaign and gave the
players strong agency over something in the world. While it may be full of
horrible cthulhu like things and dread sorcery and cruel and evil people,
they’re village was at least nice and they would have at least their small patch
of the world that they could shape and grow how they wished.

I think that the more strange and hostile your world is, the more you need to
give the players stronger agency over some part of it, otherwise the world is
too strange and hostile for them to exercise much agency. If they can’t exercise
much agency and are continually reacting to things much more powerful then them,
they’ll have trouble setting goals of their own and will probably grow bored or
disengaged with the campaign.

Anyways, enough for now. For my next post I will blog further about the hexcrawl
map I compiled for the campaign.

Posted by JG at 17:50 1 comment:

SATURDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2023

REVIEW OF DEMON BONE SARCOPHAGUS

This review came from my substack which is located here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/twilightdreams/p/critique-of-demon-bone-sarcophagus?r=48ejp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

----------------------------------

Demon Bone Sarcophagus (DBS) is a 129 page system neutral (although decidedly
OSR) adventure by Patrick Stuart with art by Scrap Princess. Patrick Stuart is
one of the more well known authors in the OSR scene, having completed several
books in the past that I own and enjoy and which are highly regarded critically.

It’s with some reluctance I can’t say the same for DBS. I will get the easy
things out of the way first. The highs in it are very high but the lows are very
low and overall it’s a bit frustrating where the book feels about 80% complete.

There seems to be at least one editing mistake on every page. If polished a bit
more it could have been very good, perhaps even a masterpiece, but as it stands
it feels kind of incomplete. Beyond the simple editing mistakes, if I were to
run this it would require a lot of prep to help smooth over the frustrating
parts.

After reading it I have done a lot of thinking about it. To this end I’d thought
I’d write a more in-depth critique rather than a simple review. Mainly, to see
how I would have done things differently in my own adventure writing. So lets
begin.

Backstory

To begin, DBS is the first adventure in a 3 part series (of which I do hope the
other 2 do get published despite my frustrations with this first volume). DBS
starts off with a 3 page history about the Nobility of Fire and the Empress of
Fire. The Empress of Fire is the character within the Demon Bone Sarcophagus and
is entombed in a trap and trick filled dungeon that is the main meat of this
adventure.

While 3 pages may not seem like a lot for a backstory, it’s broken up into
multiple sections, spans a fair amount of time with various characters,
factions, and summarized historical plot points.

It’s a lot to digest and remember. So much so, that beyond the basics I really
don’t remember much even after reading it twice.

Most of it seems not super pertinent to the adventure at hand. It may be
referenced in the later adventures in the trilogy, but it is a fairly large
information dump up front. Overall I think it would have been better to really
try and modularize this information. To maybe give us the most recent events in
this adventure and then as we get to the second or third adventures give us more
of the backstory once we have encountered and understood the events and
characters referenced in this one.

I also think the adventure could have done a little better at showing and not
simply telling. That information presented at the beginning could have been
broken up and presented better during the adventure. The adventure does attempt
to do this to some degree. There are cultural artifacts within the dungeon that
come from the Fire Nobility, but they don’t exactly exposit the presented
backstory. There are NPCs you can meet within the dungeon which were involved in
the history in the backstory but the text kind of just says they can answer
questions regarding the history etc. The actual book doesn’t really do a lot to
break up this text for you (like in bullet points or something) and I imagine
involve a lot of flipping to at the table, scanning, and trying to figure out
how much or how little to tell the players.

Additionally, the backstory at the beginning feels a bit self-indulgent where it
feels a bit overcomplex and overwritten. Overall, I am of the opinion, that
narrative in RPGs should be short, and fairly dramatic. Think Shakespearian
plays. They very often only have a handful of main characters and maybe 3
intertwined plots at most. In Shakespearian plays It’s also fairly easy to
determine who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy, who’s the clown, the character
relations, what everyone’s goal is, etc.

There is a fairly tight five act structure and they usually take place in one
overall locale. While events may have happened in the past, there is an emphasis
on the present and how things are coming to a head. While the plot and
characters may seem simple when you summarize them, there’s a surprising amount
of depth to them.

I think RPG narrative is best this way simply because it’s very hard to
communicate complex plot to the players. Tabletop RPGs are primarily an oral
tradition. So is theater in this manner where you’re watching, but mostly
listening to characters dialogue and understanding a story in real time through
the spoken word.

The Opening

DBS probably starts with one of the best openings I’ve read in any RPG. The
adventuring party comes across the remains of a couple of factions which have
mascaraed each other in the desert. It’s very obvious that there was some kind
of misunderstanding, that something has gone wrong, that all hell broke loose
and you’re left trying to figure out what happened.

In reality, it involves “four groups of conspirators, plus two different groups
of security operatives, plus a giant sloth“. This feels like waaaay to much to
me. The Alexandrian has a three clue rule. I’d like to propose some kind of
inverse law. Like, the only three factions at a time rule. I find if there are
any more, especially if they’re kind of entwined in some previous plot like the
above listed groups, it quickly becomes very hard for the players to piece
together who’s on who’s side and what the fuck is actually going on. There is
such thing as too many clues, too many things going on.

Three factions is all you need. Three. If you have two they quickly become a
duality of good guys vs bad guys. But three, that helps kind of keep some
ambiguity. Six? Six, is way to much and just feels overcomplicated. Why have two
different conspircies’. Just have one. If you have to much the players will have
a hard time figuring out and understanding things and if they have a hard time
figuring out and understanding things they’ll stop caring about things. I think
less is more in this regard.

The Implied Setting

The implied setting of DBS was kind of confusing to me at first. Every
adventure, whether it likes it or not has an implied setting. While I came to
kind of understand it better after reading through it all, there were a couple
of things that felt kind of strange and random to me about the various groups in
the opening. One of them wore only wooden armor and seemed tribal themed.
Another of them were agents of a powerful corporation. Another was a guy with a
bunch of trained baboons.

This kind of felt incongruent to me at first. Like what’s the general level of
technology? Stone age? Medieval? High renaissance? Where are we and how
connected is the setting? We seem to be in the desert but the women warriors are
tribal themed? Is there a jungle nearby? For the corporation, are we talking
East India themed? Or like more modern as the agents kind of seem like the
Pinkertons or something? What’s the general culture of the area? European?
American West? Colonial?

While it may seem like I’m being nitpicky, and this is probably a critique
that’s more my personal preference than anything. I always like my adventures to
have a fairly understandable implied setting. Like, medieval Europe, or 17th
century, or East Asia, Lord of the Rings, Dreamlands, etc. I don’t care what it
is in particular, or even if it fits with my current campaign world. But
something known. This is even more important for adventures that are weird,
which DBS is and which I enjoy.

The reason I like this is because it provides a common language of tropes,
ideas, images, and terms for me and my players to grasp onto. Everyone knows
what an elf is. Everyone knows what a spaceship is. Or what a wild west town is.

Roleplaying is about creating an emerging narrative together. It’s very hard to
do so if your implied setting feels very random. If it’s too random, like oh,
you’re all popcorn people in a land with twin suns that was ruled over by
ancient squid people, then the players don’t really have much of an opportunity
to come up and set their own goals and has to kind of just go along with
whatever the GM has planned. And the GM doesn’t really have much of a choice but
to go on what the adventure says as there’s little for them to expand and
extrapolate on with their own imagination based on what they already know.

Now to be clear, DBS isn’t that bad in this regard. Some of what I read, like
the wooden armour made sense as I read further on (or well I think it does. I
think some characters are wearing wooden armour because it seems like metal
doesn’t work or is bad in the Zone? Which appears in a future adventure?). But
overall the implied setting that I got from DBS was that of something like Dr.
Who. Where it is interesting, but kind of a mishmash of a lot of different
genres and things, all treated like normal.

Which to be completely honest, isn’t my favourite kind of implied setting but
some people seem to like it so your mileage may vary.

The Disjointed Nature of the Adventure and Lack of Motivation

As mentioned previously the adventure starts off in the aftermath of 6 different
factions facing off because of two different conspiracies. The ground breaks
open during the fighting and a bunch of characters from these factions fall into
the Tomb of the Empress of Fire.

These characters are all chasing each other in the Tomb of the Empress of Fire.
The conspiracies they are all involved in seem to involve the Frictionless Blue
Glass Merchant company and it’s very valuable frictionless blue glass.
Frictionless blue glass seems to come from the plane of fire or was invented by
the Fire nobility or some such thing. I

So these two discrete elements, the characters and conspiracies (active element)
and the tomb (passive element) seem to be connected in a very roundabout way but
as far as I can tell (I may be wholly wrong, I’ve only read through it once) I
don’t think there is a direct connection.

That is to say, the conspirators just happened by random chance to fall into the
tomb. They don’t know what the tomb is about or really care to be in it. What
they desire is to get each other.

And while the tomb is very interesting, and probably contains a lot of
information about further things in the 2nd or 3rd adventure, it’s kind of, in
the present of the 1st adventure, unrelated to the conspiracies and
conspirators.

This I kind of find disjointed and a bit of a problem as it provides very little
motivation for the players to really explore either of these two elements. I
think either they’re going to learn about and decide to get involved in the
conspiracies and fuck off from the tomb which seems to be a deathtrap anyways,
or they’re going to think the tomb is cool and not really care much about the
characters within it who are involved in some kind of conspiracy and trying to
get each other.

In putting these elements in competition with each other I think it does a
disservice to both, especially because two other adventures are supposed to
follow this one. If the players become interested in the tomb, and either
disregard or kill all the conspiracy characters stumbling around the tomb, where
is the motivation for them to become involved in the conspiracies involving blue
glass and the Zone that seem to be present in the 2nd adventure? And likewise,
if they abandon the tomb and simply head out to the Zone after siding with a
character within the tomb, they probably won’t learn much about the Empress of
Fire, her history, and the Fire nobility, things that seem heavily involved in
the third adventure.

To some degree I think in play this might not be a huge issue. Most players
probably explore the tomb a bit and explore the different characters and
conspiracies enough running around in it. But I can’t help but feel that it’s
going to lead to both elements half explored and the importance of stuff lost on
the players, which may lead to the importance of further things lost on the
players. Not so much through their own actions, but because two different
elements were vying for their attention and interest and while they had no way
of knowing at the time, both turned out to be of importance.

The Random Dynamicism within the Tomb

Now we’re kind of getting to the nitty-gritty. The tomb is comprised of a bunch
of rooms. Every room has some kind of fixed element that (most of the time) is
something the players can interact with. There is also an encounter in every
room with a monster or a character involved in a conspiracy or an NPC monster.
However, all these encounters are random. Where you roll on a little table and
it’s like character X is doing Yin this room. Like just entering it, or fighting
this other character, or investigating thing Z.

I think I kind of get what Patrick Stuart was trying to do. A bunch of
characters have fallen into the tomb haphazardly. They stumbling about it and
are trying to find and/or kill each other. Instead of having them in fixed
locations where they ‘come alive’ when the players enter their specific room,
they can be found throughout the tomb and seem to move about.

This is all fine, but when I think about what would happen in play it feels a
bit frustrating. The first reason is every time the players enter a room I have
to stop play, roll a dice, check on the table, see what monster/character is in
the room and what they are doing. And these aren’t simple monster/characters
like an angry Orc boss who is eating some mutton. They’re interesting and
complex characters who all have a full page spread in a different section of the
book about what they’re about and who they are allied with etc.

So most likely after rolling on the table I’m going to have to flip to their
character page and be like who the fuck is this guy again? Is he allied/enemies
with someone the players have met already?

Additionally, I feel like I’d kind of be on thin ice after a few rooms and
repeated characters. Like oh, the players met this character two rooms ago. What
if they killed them? Do I roll again? How did they just enter from the far door
when the room they met that character in is behind the characters? Oh, they’re
going to attack the characters again? But they had to run away last time? Or
they’re supposed to attack but previously became allied with the characters.

I know the easy answer to this is just simply make stuff up based on what seems
sensible. But I really kind of feel like it might get hard after a few rooms. As
I’m essentially not making stuff up about what they’re doing. That would be
easy. The table provides that. Instead I’m left to make stuff up about why
they’re doing what the table says they’re doing. Especially when it contradicts
what happened in previous interactions with the characters. Now that is much
harder. Especially when these aren’t simple one or two line characters. They’re
complex characters with their own backstories and motivations.

So while the dungeon may seem more dynamic because the conspiracy characters
that have fallen into it are dynamically stumbling about it, the mechanism which
they do so has added a lot of cognitive load to me as the GM. And I’m not sure
if the effort is worth the payoff.

Fact Based Rooms

About 90% of rooms within the tomb are highly imaginative, interesting, and well
designed. About 10% are not. They seem highly imaginative and interesting at
first glance, but lack interaction and are basically just ‘fact’ or ‘history’
rooms.

An example that really stuck out to me is R36-Histories and Historians. The
first paragraph and general read out-loud is:

“The room is lined with thick clay jars, the floor coated with a fine layer of
ash.“

The text goes on further to explain that some jars are small, some large. They
are all sealed. The large ones contain the ash of historians who studied the
primordial Demon wars, powerful but corrupting knowledge that draws the
attention of powerful beings. The small ones contain the ash of the histories of
these wars. The souls of the historians are bound within these jars so they
cannot be summoned etc.

Now overall this is a fantastic and interesting idea. But it feels more like the
kernel of an idea than a fully fleshed out room. As so far we’ve simply provided
some background facts or history for what in reality, and more importantly, what
the players will immediately experience, is just a room full of clay jars.

There’s really not much to telegraph the history of these jars or suggest
possible avenues of interaction. Yes, I can probably improvise if the players
decide to do stuff like cast speak with dead on the ash. But as far as I can
tell there’s really nothing about the lay jars that even suggest there’s the ash
of important people in them.

Very little of the interesting things about this room is telegraphed to the
players. And very little support is given for further implications. It’s all
very abstract. Like if a player does cast speak with dead on the ash of the
historian, what does the historian look like? What languages do they speak? Will
they willingly divulge what they know? Does speaking what they know cause a
demon to appear?

Yeah I can make all this up, and yeah the initial idea is very interesting, but
in general the details of the room are written more in a fact based way than a
perspective of someone who is seeing the room for the firs time and interacting
with shit.

Should I buy this?

Overall I don’t regret buying DBS. I love Patrick Stuart’s work and as
frustrating as DBS is, it’s still very imaginative. I also know DBS had a very
troubled production history. Multiple things went wrong outside of Patrick
Stuart and Scrap Princess’ control and I get the feeling it left them burnt out
and probably not making a ton of money off this project. However, I also kind of
feel like it unfortunately kind of comes across in the end result.

The book isn’t necessarily bad, poorly written, or poorly designed, as much as
it just simply feels unfinished. If more attention had been paid to the various
editing errors, more rooms been polished a bit more, more feedback given to some
of the design, I think it could have been a masterpiece. But as it stands now,
it’s simply not.

I do truly hope that Patrick Stuart does the other two books in this trilogy. I
don’t know if I’d ever run the first as it stands now. It would require a fair
amount of prep and I’m not sure if it would be worth the payoff. However, if
this adventure did lead into other more polished adventures I could see it being
worth it. I also feel like if I had the full arc of the three adventures it
would be easier to see what I could tweak and re-arrange and scrap without the
whole house coming down.

Still it’s worth the read. It’s one of the more imaginative things I’ve read all
year and does kind of stick in your head.

Posted by JG at 11:53 No comments:

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