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The Smell of Death's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| How legible and easy-to-understand is this mission? | #6 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
| How stylish does this one-shot visually look? | #6 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall | #6 | 3.708 | 3.708 |
| How well are design principles used to create a fun one-shot? | #7 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| How well are the themes utilized? | #7 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Which RPG system(s) is this for?
system-agnostic
How did you use the mandatory theme "Side Effects May Include"?
Spoilers: One character has been harmed due to missing that by-products in a chemical process they developed are more dangerous than they realised.
Which hard mode challenges did you do?
ASCII-only
What do you want comments/critiques to focus on?
What could be cut from this? I think that I tend to over-detail, so some edits to trim this down a little are probably valuable. That said, I do not think that it is too long.
How harsh do you want people to critque your submission?
Be brutally honest
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Comments
Reading it through, it produces a nice idea of an outline for an adventure – this is great, having this read this once I'm confident I could run this without other prep. (Ofc hav
While it is statless, I would appreciate ideas for what is likely to be a challenge, regardless of the system. To have an idea of the shape of challenges. But this is also a weird thing to ask in some way.
Seeding the other Roslov adventures in is such a nice touch, I like that a lot!
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.
Well-detailed social adventure, a refreshing and interesting change for being solely in polite society. The mystery isn't too complex, but the layers of society between a stranger and the crime scenes read like it would be a good roleplay challenge.
Elegantly formatted, though a few more boxes and lines would help separate sections cleanly.
A handful of sentence fragments scattered throughout.
It would be helpful to state that the NPC Sources are your other adventures available on Itch, if you are referring to them as sourcebooks.
As far as things to cut - it's been mentioned below, but throughout the whole doument there is a lot of text, single sentences and clauses, that doesn't need to be included - suggestions to ignore X or Y, verbose-yet-vague descriptions, etc.
First of all, congratulations on the style and presentation. The layout and typography are quite similar to classic traveller books and look good.
I did not have any trouble reading or understanding the adventure. Regarding what to cut, there are little bits of information, like the retail outlets of Parfum Dumont, but they are never paragraphs-long and I personally like these small bits and tangents that end up adding to the atmosphere of the setting.
There is one bit of information that was cut short: on the second bullet point of "Investigating the Claims" on page 5, the phrase "Obtaining a location or contact details for Jeanne Marsh is not too complicated: they are" is not concluded. Also, I was not sure if Turleigh was part of the R&D department and, if so, did anyone else there know or were affected by the same problem? Lastly, I expected to have some information on the security of Atelier Parfum Dumont and its surroundings, as players might decide to infiltrate it in their investigation.
I liked the presentation of the relevant NPCs and places, rather than a collection of scenes that might end up railroading the players. This might lead players to go off on tangents away from this one-shot, though. Maybe there could be another incentive to get the players involved.
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!
First of all, congratulations on the style and presentation. The layout and typography are quite similar to classic traveller books and look good.
I did not have any trouble reading or understanding the adventure. Regarding what to cut, there are little bits of information, like the retail outlets of Parfum Dumont, but they are never paragraphs-long and I personally like these small bits and tangents that end up adding to the atmosphere of the setting.
There is one bit of information that was cut short: on the second bullet point of "Investigating the Claims" on page 5, the phrase "Obtaining a location or contact details for Jeanne Marsh is not too complicated: they are" is not concluded. Also, I was not sure if Turleigh was part of the R&D department and, if so, did anyone else there know or were affected by the same problem? Lastly, I expected to have some information on the security of Atelier Parfum Dumont and its surroundings, as players might decide to infiltrate it in their investigation.
I liked the presentation of the relevant NPCs and places, rather than a collection of scenes that might end up railroading the players. This might lead players to go off on tangents away from this one-shot, though. Maybe there could be another incentive to get the players involved.
Some thoughts regarding what to cut.
There are a few instances where you spend time giving the Referee permission to change things. Phrases like “Changing these secrets for most NPCs will not affect the overall adventure much, and adding additional secrets to those NPCs without them can also work” make it feel like the ideas presented don’t matter. If they aren’t relevant they wouldn’t be in the adventure. As someone who is reading the module to understand your vision of the scenario I would prefer you just gave me the ideas as they stand. If I have another idea I can change it, but it’s helpful to have one clear vision to work from.
During the launch there’s a section on adding NPCs from other works to give plot hooks to completely separate adventures. That muddies the water quite a lot. If I ran this adventure and followed those guidelines there’s a very high chance that my players wouldn’t pursue this mystery at all, which is fine, I suppose, but then what would be the point of having it?
It seems like the key function of the launch is to introduce one of two hooks: “Jeanne Marsh’s brother has been harmed by the company and they’re covering it up! You need to help expose them!”
Or
“Anthony Newland was forced out of the company he was instrumental in starting. He’s the one who should be in charge!”
I would try to focus the text more towards those two things.
Once we get past the party I think the vision gets clearer.
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.
Pretty straight forward and understandable corporate intrigue mission with opportunity for stealth segments and social investigation. Its not too often you see these slower, non-combat focused adventures that let players flex their roleplay muscles and I think the world of RPGs could use more of those. The layout is easy enough to follow and lets a referee flip between NPCs, area descriptions and the chain of events without too much effort. These sections could be made more distinguished with images or more pronounced headers and the potential encounters at the end of page five could use a box or something to separate it from the main text body, but its manageable after just one read through. I also feel the sources for the NPC's in potential encounters isn't very helpful in a one-shot. It seems to expect outside knowledge or encourage having a history in this world of Roslov's adventures that I don't think feels very good if this is meant to stand on its own and be contained to one mission.
With a drama oriented group I could see this being good fun though. Lots of opportunity for player characters that wouldn't work in most rpg's, moments to play as a snooty aristocrat type, smooth detective or even a disillusioned brand fan. A referee only has to manage a handful of NPCs with some decent range of archetypes and for the most part wont need to worry about stats and number tracking.
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:
If you like the style of this, the other Roslov investigations will likely appeal, btw.