Thank you for the read and for the comment. I really appreciate it!
KNUCKLEPUNK GAMES
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Thank you for the read and the comment; I appreciate it! I have not ever used Pirate Borg or really any of the Borgs - but I find it interesting that we independently came to the same understanding of how a Blunderbuss should work!
To clarify about the storm, the sandstorm does not necessarily just go on forever. If a DM wanted to make it a hazard to keep players in the Mons, they could. It is left open ended in the module so the DM can decide things like length, duration, ect. if players decided to leave the Mons. But there is a house at the bottom of the mountain for players to use as a base if they wanted to go explore Mars. Since getting back to earth is what the adventure is about, the palace within the Mons is the focus, and the rest is left open. The storm's purpose in the module is meant to be an indicator that being outside on Mars is dangerous, hence why the majority live in the Mons, not to force players into the Mons.
Thank you for the comment; I am glad you liked the adventure! For the purposes of running the adventure, the text of the adventure connects the maps within the relevant room descriptions. Map 1 and 2 are connected by the item text in the middle of page 2 regarding room 5. Within Map 2, they are connected by the teleportation circle at the top of the stairs in the hall marked 1.
Really well-done social adventure; I think a lot of times people use the term "immersive," a little too freely about writing, but this adventure was truly immersive to read. I care about every single person in this village now. You also did so much with the tight space; this would be a great campaign to run.
Thank you for taking a read and thank you for the stellar question! Two reasons for the “Elflike” nature of Martians; on the one hand, a lot of early, early copies of Mars literature has these illustrations of Martians where they look almost batlike - and I wanted to do an homage to that at some level. Second was that in a lot of the old Appendix N literature, there is this evolutionary adaptive theme applied to its fantasy races (you see this theme leak into D&D in Dark Sun). So I tried to apply this in Pits of Olympus Mons - the Green Martians who live in the outlands have longer ears to catch more sounds and sharper features to give them better vision and agile movement capabilities, making them better hunters and better at avoiding predators who could harm them. Similarly, the White Martians have elongated features because they live in the highlands and need their arms and legs to reach across chasms. Their ears are longest and eyes are widest because they need to be aware of predators in a full horizon. Their torsos are also small because they live in high altitude environments and need less air to survive, therefore having smaller lungs. The Red Martians used to also have the features of Green Martians, but when they moved into the cramped caves where sound carries and a pin drop can be heard throughout, their ears became smaller and their eyes also became adaptive to the environment, to make them better at seeing in the dark, and they grow shorter to accommodate or avoid constant crouching in cave systems. Due to space, I was only able to allude to this with the brief descriptions and then the Yellow Martians, who tried to speed up their evolution and instead turned themselves into (batlike) monsters.
This adventure is exactly what I have come to expect from LostHereticPress - an adventure that keeps all of its promises, immerses you in a whole world in just a few pages, and lays everything out perfectly. A genuine treasure I will recommend to everyone that moves into my line of sight. Well done.
This module rips. I usually hate time travel, time loops, anything time in a module; but this module taught me that my hatred is dumb. I genuinely did not believe "playing with time," modules could be done well. And this one is done so, so well. Well done; excited to run it; thank you for making it.
Thank you for your comment. It is appreciated. For the purpose of running the module - answers to these questions are found within the text of the module (using blue diadem, significance of runic writing, Martian race, ect), but the layout could have made this info more apparent. For creature levels, as per Shadowdark, HP divided by 5 (4.5 technically, but here rounded up) will give the creature level. Once again, thank you for the feedback! I hope you get the chance to run the module in the future.
Thank you for reading through and considering the adventure! I really appreciate the compliment on design, and I also very much respect the critique on level disclosure.
In terms of the pronoun issue on 4, both sets of pronouns were intended to refer to party, not the werewolf. So: "and brought them [the party] to test them [the party]." I can see how this would be confusing given the structure of the sentence for sure.
The abbreviations "ST, DX, CN, IN, WI, CH" might be specific to me. An older Shadowdark RPG DM Quickstart manual had used "S, D, Cn, I, W, Ch" as the abbreviation and so when taking on writing for Shadowdark RPG, I tried to meet in the middle between "STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA," and what had been in my Quickstart copy. I have found it very effective for space within an adventure module and (at the time) I thought it was helpful moving people from 5e breakdowns to Shadowdark RPG ones.
I think your critique on leveling is understandable. My goal with this adventure was for a multilevel, intentionally unbalanced adventure to emphasize discernment for players, leveling prior to walking into an encounter they know could be hard, and also accessibility to allow for DM's to take on players who may each be at different levels. I placed this general disclosure on the webpage description of the adventure; and perhaps it should have gone into the book itself.
I do agree though that if there were to be a pocket it would be around 3 to 5, or even 4 to 6.

















































