This is a really potent one! Leans into the Sword and Sorcery elements of Appendix N, with a cruel evil spellcaster, who has subjugated the populace. I love the central mechanic of this, it is really clever and a great way to create a challenge for the players. Layout is clean and well presented, I like how the mechanics of the procedural stuff flow together nicely.
The thirteen protections are really cool, though It is a shame that some might never be seen or experienced by the players. The System agnostic aspects are pretty solid, with some vagueness that might make things tricky, but others have explained that better than I.
My only real questions come from the scope, it feels simultaneously too large in scale and too small: Voss Kerrigal is supremely powerful, it seems strange that he only rules in this one valley, so either his power is limited by location, or he is kept in check somehow, if not he is powerful enough to likely be a large-scale threat, which means that a GM might have to do a bit of work to foreshadow or hint at his presence, before this module is ran. a bit of legwork would be required to gel this in smoothly into a game, but it presents some cool opportunities!
Those questions are more things that stood out to me, and are separate to the quality of the module itself, Great stuff all-in-all!
Viewing post in The thirteen counts of charm jam comments
Ah, those are some good questions... perfect for the Extended Edition (TM).
To touch on the procedural elimination of certain powers: that's a deliberate design choice born from my 'Forever GM' experience. It happens to run the same adventure for different groups or with some players who've seen it before, but since I love being surprised as much as they do, swapping out the powers lets me keep everyone (including myself) on their toes with a fresh twist every time.
As for the scope... ooof, there’s so much things I wanted to write, but the page constraints hit hard (fitting 13 different things into a jam entry felt like a legendary feat itself). There are reasons why he’s confined in a valley, his half-lich, half-undead, half-something else nature is a small clue. Once I get the space to drop in a full area layout for the Extended Edition, I’ll definitely expand on it!
And, of course, thanks for the feedback.