itch.io

Scaled to page size for printing, I have mixed feelings. The text is mostly kept in a readable size range. A little squinty, but not looking like a jumble of scribble. That's certainly a step above a lot of entries I have done. That said, the red is a bit rougher than I expected for me. Additionally, I would end up only ever using this digitally. I just never liked printing out documents that are going to bleed my color cartridge dry on a single color. I currently use an ecotank, so I can fill a color individually, but for two decades I was using those multicolor printers so if one color went low, the entire thing was considered empty and you were shelling out another 40 to 60 dollars on another. If possible, maybe offer a printer-friendly version for people who are still using those.

I have to take a minute any time I encounter a trifold to make sure I am reading things in the order a person would read the physical book version. If I am mis-ordering them, do forgive me. The cover does it's job, telling us the what and why. I question the choice not to capitalize the A here since that doesn't seem to be an aesthetic choice anywhere else on this side of the trifold. I suppose arguably the list of the auction, but I mean more in terms of starting a paragraph or sentence. Not a problem, just sort of something I noticed and wanted to point out in case it wasn't an active choice, but an oversight.

Holy hell that list! (See what I did there?) I know a lot of players are going to try to weasel away from the rough ones, but even valuable items can be interpreted. Everything here is pretty ephemeral. Trying to give a valuable gem isn't really 'treasured'. The ring of mystic whatever on the other hand. The one they treasure because it has gotten them out of trouble before... that is 'treasured'. This makes every choice hurt. A deep and rough choice that means anyone here is either insane or deeply desperate.

Onward to the archdevil's puppet vessel. I think this is the first point where I as a GM have to put in some legwork. Most games will have stats for an archdevil, but this isn't the archdevil. It's a sort of twisted toy being used as a remote drone. I have no real idea what stats to give it. Possibly weak ones considering it just keeps reappearing once per minute if destroyed. A lot is left up to me to decide here. That's not always bad, but I think maybe if it was slightly less implied here and more noted that the danger of this form isn't pure physical brutality, but the impossibility of eliminating it unless you went after the one controlling it.

The list of bidders is interesting enough. Having the bride be the second most bidding power is a choice since it implies she really only has one thing she's going to want to bid on. Having the last one though is almost cruel. That's a lot of coins the group is going to have to pool to outbid him. Cruel isn't bad though. I think if I ever run this, I might do some tweeking on the list of bidders. Maybe add a few who can bid high, but aren't technically interested in the PCs themselves. Just sometimes going to bid well on something for the sake of tension.

The items... you really don't pull punches do you? Right away, a potential issue of the only way out being to win this first bid. It's entirely possible the PCs have to burn through a huge number of coins before ever getting anything they want. Date with the Devil becomes an oddity since I noted before Crinkle Fox might be weak. This isn't saying time with the Archdevil, just the puppet. For me, I think I would probably give the players two options. Several hours with the fox, or 1 hour with the archdevil himself.

Second chance could be either wildly entertaining or horrifying depending on what mortal happens to be closest. Lot of interesting options there. Ends on a classic wish spell. Nothing wrong there. Probably not worth the cost at the end of the day, but yeah. I know a few who would do it anyway.

Information about the auction, thralls, and collector are all fine. Nice little extra note on the collector outside of the stat block to indicate an extra reason it might mark you. Feels like death by a thousand cuts given how weak it is. Short of somehow dealing with the Archdemon, this thing is going to be a permanent and inevitable problem for someone.

All of the 'a thing happens' table items seem fun. Lots of ways for things to go sideways. I think number 8, either say 'a player' or 'the players'. Saying 'the player' implies only a single person is actually playing. Nitpick, but still.

As a whole, this is a lot of fun. It stays true to the title given, feels like the sort of madness one might find in certain corners of the Appendix N, and allows for different styles of play. The silly groups will find a lot of fun in the stranger elements. The brooding folks will find the angst they crave. The murder hobos will have lots of fun stabbing their way through situations. Overall, it feels like it is meant for low level characters who might not have access to amazing things yet and offers a sweet set of rewards at a very steep cost.

I can see a lot of ways for this to result in upset players too though. If they are here for a singular goal, then they might have sold away half of their stats and the soul of their grandmother and still not be able to 'save the world' or whatever it was that drove them here. I also feel like this would be a good candidate for expansion. Not some huge book, but offering perhaps a set of auctions. Each time, different potential bidders and each time with unique items to bid on. In a way, it could become a dangerous gamble of knowing where to go when the players hit a wall, but also are desperate enough to try the unthinkable.

I quite enjoyed this. I will probably try to figure out a way to make my printer a little less sad printing it and do so. I wouldn't have a lot of times I can use it, but there will come a moment where this is the absolute perfect little module for what I need. Thanks for putting this out into the world.

I went back in to get a screenshot and realized what the weird distortion is. As I looked again, it is only appearing over a single word. Hastur. I have to assume it was fully intentional. That said, I must assume it was an idea to show the corruption and you do want to keep it. I think I would simply tone it down a little so it's not making the reading quite so difficult. It's not a bad idea and it isn't as though I couldn't read around it with effort. I think the small font is what made it so much worse for me than it probably was for others. If anything, I would maybe just lower the opacity of the corruption effect

At scaled size, the font is smaller than I like, but the contrast is fairly good. Will it print readably on a low quality printer? Yes. Will I need to buy some reading glasses? Also yes. Considering only one entry I have read so far managed to be a larger font than this though, I can't really say a lot at this point.

I wasn't sold on the cover at first. It's beautifully done and absolutely works. There was just something about it that held my hand on clicking the first time it came up as one of the options on what to review next. I can't explain why. It feels both simple, but also professional. It is well laid out and feels like it done with paint markers. The more I've looked at it, the more I like it honestly. That appreciation goes for all the art in this. All of it feels cohesive, professional, and well chosen.

As I move into the actual content, the layouts are beautiful. I'm actually rather upset that things get marred by a strange sideways ascii as part of the background overlaying text. Scrolling around for a moment, it's showing up once on page 2, and twice on page 3. I tried redownloading, refreshing the page, etc. It stays there. I didn't see anyone comment about it at the time I pulled things up, so I don't know if this is a 'me' thing or if everyone has it in their download and just overlooked it. I did however notice that some people aren't able to see room numbering due to a PDF reader issue. Maybe mine is picking up on something normally hidden? Not sure. I can screenshot if this is something you aren't aware of.

The backstory is interesting and clean. I think the writing could be a bit more evocative and fluid, but is fairly tight in terms of conveying information. The inclusion of the Lovecraftian elements is nice. I say that because if you know, you know, but if you don't know, it isn't harming the flow in the least. I can't say the same for the cryopod. I get that it's there for the weird science fantasy element, but I don't think it's helping the overall story. It is a jarring shift in genre tone. When I was looking for references to that weird mark before, I did notice others apparently mentioned the cryopod as well, so I won't harp on it.

The mention of the mansion not being real feels redundant. Being in a mindscape means nothing is real, so I just assume that by default. I similarly don't feel like I need told to alter things to suit my needs. I do that with any module honestly. Still, I don't fault you for deciding to include that.

Encounters are interesting and offer some positives and negatives. That said, at a 1 in 6 chance per room change and the low number of combat options, it feels like they are unlikely to have more than one random dangerous encounter in a single play through. I'll have to wait to see how encounters are for the actual map to decide how I feel about that. Unrelated, the quote is cute.

First room offers some setting, bolds key elements, and only offers a risk if players decide to do something they probably won't choose to do. Fair enough. Strait away entry two has me looking between it and the map. It's talking about a pit leading to the library, but when I look at the map, they are on the same level as far as I can understand. I believe what this means is there's a tunnel leading between the two locations. Fair enough. Better wording would have prevented the momentary confusion however.

Otherwise this area is fine. Offers an alternate secret route, a treasure item that's also a key, and a potential boon and backstory element. Granted that last set is less likely depending on the nature of the group involved, but good to have it there. The other entry to the building leads to an immediate and relatively obvious fight. Good to let them see it coming so they feel smart for not just walking between them. It also likely helps them gauge how tough the coming fights will be.

Area 3's art is doing the heavy lifting for descriptions. Nothing wrong with that when space is limited. We get the important elements actually written so no harm no foul. I do wonder about the crystal. It seems like there should be a sort of danger clock associated with it. As in a set number of times you can get close and have things grow weirder before something really unpleasant starts happening.

The library is going to be a casual interest to some players and an absolute treasure trove to others, largely dependent on their PC and system being used. Those odd images I mentioned earlier make me want to scream here. They overlap perfectly in such a way that Hastur is entirely obscured. Deeply annoying. Beyond that however, this is the first time the system neutral element is forming an issue for me.

With previous encounters, I could easily swap in whatever from the existing system. Two knight statues? Stone or iron golems, animate armor, etc. Half-wolf knight? Lycathrope with armor. 'Abomination'? Literally anything weird I want to pull that is fitting for their character level. The transformed book however feels like I would want to put more legwork in. Even just a faint guideline such as 'PCs who attempted to read far enough to cause a transformation will require a very difficult mental check to avoid a temporary reduction in mental abilities' or something similar. It tells me how the mind was affected and how readily they could resist it so I can scale it to my own system of choice. Having some sort of generic reference stat for rough strength scale would be nice too. Presumably it isn't incorporeal, but facing off with a tentacled book imp is very different from a writhing mass the size of a bear.

Gained knowledge is always good. However, spell scrolls are tricky. It's established this place isn't real. It's all in a mindscape. So I assume any scroll not used here is going to disappear when they leave. It's not really said though and I know at least one player who would want to argue about 'taking his loot' if it just disappears and I can't clarify it was explicitly in the document. Is he a dick? Absolutely. We all have that one guy we knew since we first started gaming and who isn't quite enough of a jerk to kick from the group... but who you sometimes consider it anyway on.

Dining room is okay. I am a little confused about the lavatory. First, the image shows a very modern looking toilet. It was noted earlier that the setting is best for medieval fantasy, so just like the cryopod, this feels out of place. More importantly, you note it as an alternate entrance, but to what? The building? There's nothing on that outer wall implying a fallen area of the building and the modern toilet/tub setup doesn't leave any large opening for someone to crawl in from a cess pit. This feels like it's there solely for the sake of offering extra directions in (which you were fine with two of on the small map) without really adding one people are likely to find and use. I don't think I have ever had a player ask to circle a building before entering it unless there was a very good reason first.

Kitchen is fine. Unlike the lavatory, I won't question this alternate entry. It's logical to have a back door here for servants and is something players could be logically expected to accept without question. Are they going to use it as a way in? Probably not. But that's not a bad thing to have here since it's thematic.

Bedroom entry makes sense why you combined them given the space limits. I'd probably want each room separated though in an expanded. I'm also realizing it's a bit hard to see room division walls. I didn't even realize until I got to here that there was a hallway there. It blended in visually. If you can find a way to draw that out a bit more, perhaps using light color variations, it would help. Lastly, the 'items as keys' thing has become a bit stale at this point. It's feeling less like a unique element and more like a series of video-game puzzles. Varying things up might be useful. It does lead to potential backtracking, but few players I have met leave anything that seems remotely useful or valuable behind.

Numbering breaks down at IX. So far, I can logically follow the flow with my eye. The first five made sense where you have the initial location, the side area in that location, the entry, the main hall, then a side venture into the library since it relates back to the second area. Perfect. We then move to the next page with VI and follow a slow arc across the top of the map. However it now breaks down. The next room in the loop is XI, but obviously IX is the next one written about. I could see hopping over XI to the room currently as X.

That would make sense for breaking the movement of my eye on the map because there's no way to access any of them from VII and that's clearly a central room to reach two of the remaining three exclusively. Basically, what I am saying is this arrangement fails for me. Either the current X or XI should be the IX and go from there.

The room itself has more items whose presence may or may not evaporate when they leave. I don't care which you go with, but pick one. GMs are aware they can decide to change it a different way. Heck, you already made it clear they can before this, so just pick an answer and make it so. More puzzle items. At this point I know I have 2 puzzles with 5 items in a dozen-room map. If you're going to weed one of the two out, keep the hex puzzle as a physical puzzle and switch the other puzzle to one of remembering the two important names to input in some way. This way it's still holding the idea of the puzzle mechanic, but offering a wider variety of concept beyond pick up all the little things and put them into holes.

Palid mask... dear god. Anyone with the faintest familiarity is going to recoil from that like a viper. Even so, be explicit. How likely are they to suffer mental damage? Is it ongoing rolls, or just one? What are the signs of changing? Is it instant or slow? How hard is it to resist that as well? I don't need numbers, but I do want rough ideas so when I pull this out of a folder in 2 years, I am not stuck randomly throwing together whatever comes to mind on the fly 2 drinks and 3 hours in. Being system agnostic is wonderful, but temper it with solid elements to anchor onto.

Greenhouse has another entry. A lot of those that weren't mentioned back in area 1, but would have had to be accessed from there. I shouldn't be reading about them on the bottom portion of the last page. Granted, if I look closely at the map, they are implied in the art, but since doors are hard to make out at times, the growth isn't even mentioned in the room description so much as just visually crawling out of a window in the art, and I have zero chance of guessing there's a way to climb into a modern toilet from anything on the map page, these things do matter.

Specificity is turning out to be the biggest issue I am having in this. I again run into a vague statement. 'Too much time'. Okay. 3 rounds? An hour? A week and four days? Where do I put the line for what counts as too much? It's there to motivate them not to linger in the room, so why not just give a real world time range that makes sense? Searching a room in a lot of games is 10 minutes, so maybe say 'more than 10 minutes in the room' as your marker?

Hexes and poem are fine. Not too hard to figure out. Uses a near-rhyme which few people do. No real complains. I actually like the little visual there as well and offsetting the poem in a 'paper' callout box is smart.

The final room is interesting. It tells us she doesn't need those keys to move about. It's her mindscape after all. Her lack of real hostility is nice. Someone's going to get her angry. It happens. Still, there's no real clear ending here. Or more to say, there's not a satisfying one. If we talk and leave, we didn't really accomplish anything. If we fight her and the hybrid, it's a rough battle, but presumably we expel back into reality.

Those are fine situations as 'options', but if they are the only options, there's no real sense of ever having mattered here. If you expand, I would love to see there be other ways to resolve this. Maybe there's a way to help her let go of the pain. Maybe it's possible to get her to let go of the corrupt power that caused it all. Perhaps there's something of those two lost souls left to try to turn bring her peace or even turn against her for the sake of the world? There's a lots of ways this could resolve and feel satisfying depending on what the goals of the party were.

I also find myself wondering about the upstairs. I get it... space. I also remember a mention of opening that up in the expansion in the comments, so I won't linger on this. Still, I know my past players and there's no way they're not going to obsess over that upstairs until they either get themselves killed or get up there.

Anyway, so that's my rambling incoherent stream of consciousness review. I hope you can pluck some gems out of that. Either way, I need you to understand just how clean and beautiful this was overall. It wasn't without faults, but neither are expensive paid products. For a small space, you packed a lot in and you did a ton of heavy lifting with very few visuals. You made every decision count and I don't think it would take much to elevate this quite high. Thanks for taking the time to participate and I imagine I will be pleased to see where you go with the expansion.

I say this with almost every entry to the point I am considering just typing up a boiler plate start to save myself time. When scaled to page size, this is basically unreadable for me. The sharp contrast on most of the pages means it is probably going to print clearly, but I'm going to be holding this up to my face or putting on reading glasses. Packing a lot in comes at a cost. I hope the gains are worth that cost.

The artwork is evocative and wild. While it's not to my tastes as a style, I recognize it evokes a lot of questions and a sense of the uncanny. I find myself with a lot of questions looking at it. At the end of the day, an image that leaves the viewer wondering more about the situation drives eyes forward, so a success.

While I have read a few Cairn modules, I have never played Cairn and am by no means an expert. As such, take anything I say relating to statistical elements and game play with a grain of salt. I'll do my best to make sure everything is useful despite this fact.

Right out of the gate, you start with a set of paragraphs well suited to the cover copy of a book one might find in the Appendix N. Solid choice and offers up a clean bit of information about the situation that will serve as our plot hook. Right after is an offer of two clear methods of reaching the target. One obviously easier than the other at the cost of having to spend a good bit of time and effort climbing. The other is quick, but would require irritating the town officials and possibly risking arrest. Solid again.

Under 'what's really going on' there's some serious setting specific name dropping. That said, I didn't find it hard to follow. Only found one word I think lower vocabulary folk might trip on, but it was pretty clear from context what it was. I doubt it's going to be any real issue. Overall, it sums up the situation in a small space. Good. Tight prose is one of the most difficult elements of writing, but it felt like I had pretty much everything needed.

Gnoll priesthood is not something I see every day. They're the ones we are helping. I keep rolling it around in my head like a set of rusty gears grinding together. I wonder if this is kind of like how kobolds still exist as a different sort of creature in my head than they do in many of the current TTRPGs of the world. Do I have anything useful to say about it? No. Just pointing out how jarring this was for me personally. It creates a sort of wild and unexpected situation right away.

NPCs are pretty clear on the Naka clan. Having the ability to possibly read and even alter fate is interesting. It's especially good that there's a high price for doing so. Saving freely on a single save can make or break you sometimes, but then having to evade spectral gnolls for a week could be rough. That's a good balance of an easier time in the present for a harder time in the future. The question is does the person taking that action now realize there is a cost for it later? Not entirely clear. Possibly some sort of religion or knowledge check. Not sure if Cairn has those.

The enemy and his groupie are interesting enough. Clear outline of how to handle things if the party fails and not going to lie, I empathize with the 'bad knees' element of the enemy. Critical damage is especially nasty here since it can make allies into enemies. Extra brutal if it's a party member. The blink dogs are interesting due to the rivalry element. That said, you note 'this Area' as being a location to drop and take damage in. Because of the wording and bold, I was thinking at first it was going to be a hyperlink to a specific location. I would reword it as 'the currently occupied Area' or something similar. Just for extra clarity. Also, what happens on a 10? There are 9 areas and we are rolling a D10, so is that GM's choice?

Respawning enemies feels a little 'gamey', but nothing egregious. Explains where they keep coming from on a limited map, so there is a solid reasoning here. As to the elementals, this creates some interest as well. If I have one complaint, it is that you don't follow your own convention here. Elsewhere, you reference the number when mentioning a specific location. This time you just say spire. While some will immediately recognize A9 as the spire, others will not immediately associate the name of the mountain with the reference here.

I say as part of the 2 year folder concept. If I pull this out of a folder 2 years from now, I am probably skimming it and remembering the basic idea, but might skim and miss the name of the mountain earlier in the document. Adding that little (A9) just makes sure there's no flipping around trying to figure out what I missed elsewhere. Well, that and some people just miss things.

Encounter list seems short, but not knowing how commonly it is going to come up in the system, that might just be me. Having repeats create new body parts is a good way to avoid constantly seeing the same event on the encounter list when it is this small. Nice. Map is pretty and easy to read, so may as well comment about that as well.

Area 1 is fine. I feel like the elevators returning to the city is an easy escape for someone stealing a book. I'd rather see them instead be locked to the location. Doing this could actually create an interesting option to gain the elevators that were locked below. If they climbed the path, but end up here, the book opens options. Take it out of the building to cause the elevator to lift and break the chains to return. Then put it back and boom, new escape route!

A2 is good. Not an easy situation to resolve, but a reasonable reward if they do. A3 is hard to get to, but offers some interesting things to interact with. Having a plant being caused by the garden who isn't allied to it is fun. I can see this getting played different ways to suit a group. For players who are a bit silly, it could be a moment of levity. For those who are into brooding things, it could be learning of a child without parents and no understanding of the world it exists in. It could go a dozen different ways to suit the needs. Good. Very good.

A4 is clear enough. Setting and vibes. A5 offers a choice between food for the allies or a very valuable pet for the group. My only question there is if the Egret is smart enough to have conversations. It seems to be implied it can happen, but it also seems unlikely to be speaking a common tongue. I am going to assume Cairn has some means to communicate with animals for this effect.

A6: Somehow the second time in this jam I am seeing giant silkworms. Quite unexpected. Surprisingly large number of things to explore and a bit of storytelling here with the wrapped body. The item being a jack-in-the-box that's actually a folding glider feels a little out of place. Glider offers another means of traversing which is good. Just not sure about the jack-in-the-box aspect.

By the time I get to A7, I have gotten a ton of locational storytelling. Every location says something about what has been going on, what's currently happening, and where the story is going. It means no matter where a player goes, they gain something about what needs known. There's no reason they have to hit any single location so far, but doing so benefits them. There's no pattern they need to follow either. This is good for any map.

Nothing to say about A8 really. Clear enough. The peak stuff is pretty clear as well. Everything has been laid out on how to do things. My only question about the entry is the fruit. Eating them (god why) prevents a regrowth, but what if someone just chucks the fruit over the side? Does a new one form? Also, now at the end, I am wondering where the side path leads. Obviously it's the long route from below, but it goes around the back and none of the locations indicate if lets out into them.

Based on the intro, it leads to A9, but that seems ... bad. I think having it come around the other side and let out into A7 somehow seems to make it a bit less 'strait-to-the-baddie' in nature. Given A1 was pretty clear no visitors are allowed, it seems similarly odd this spot lets people walk right up without anything to stop them.

Anyway, if my worst complaint is just being concerned the players might face a villain a little early, I am doing well. I've never had inclination to stop players from face-planting (see what I did there) right into the enemy fist. I don't love the art, but that's just my own aesthetic style preferences. In terms of what art is there to do, it does it. You convey elements of the story. You pay off the questions the art raises. Every bit of art is doing a job here, not just fluff taking up space. This whole thing is good. Better than I was expecting in fact. I think based on what is here, I can actually make it work in other games I do know. Since I don't know Cairn, I was worried about liking it and not being able to do anything about that fact. With the way it's laid out, I actually can convert with only a small effort. Kudos. Peak decision making on your design choices.

Thank you for the kind words.

Font at scale is a little small for my liking, but you provide a printer friendly version which makes it a bit easier to read. As long as I don't have a pure garbage printer and hold it close to my face, I am probably going to be able to make out what is said. Old man eyes suck. The setup is clear enough. Gives a little backstory and direction. Feels like one I would use as a one-shot rather than try to integrate into most of my long-term games. That's fine.

As to the 'What's really going on' section, there's not a lot there not already implied by the first section. Mention of shadow creatures, but I would assume previous year's successes mean it's pretty easy to learn those are there. My bigger issue is it's another 'all or nothing' situation. Do the task or the terrible thing enters our world never to leave again. At least that's how it feels. As a one shot, that's fine. It does, however, reinforce the decision that this wouldn't be one I ran in a long-running game.

Environment stuff, sure. Not much for me to say there. Random encounters are varied and interesting. As long as there's enough room-specific encounters the lack of fights things is fine. Especially with the encounters being every round. To be honest, I would almost want a longer list of encounters with them happening so frequently.

Items are fine. Good enough information, clearly within the standards of the system. The crown isn't so powerful it's going to tempt a player to keep it at the expense of the world. Monsters include page references when needed. Shadow Curse is pretty brutal given the cure conditions and time frame of the setting. Finding the ISBN on a document like this is a bit of a surprise. My understanding has always been that those are mostly useful for placement in stores. Are you planning to try getting printed versions of this trifold into physical stores where scanning would be required?

Entrance memorial is a nice touch. Foreshadowing of the risk of death even in success. Room 2 is a dear god my players are F*ed moment. Not stealing, just moving them without reciting the prayer is enough to curse them. Granted, someone is stealing them regardless, but how many might move a few aside to check out the water? Moon reflection is nice though! I think I would make the number of figurines match the number of names on the previous memorial as a hint about needing to recite the prayer. I doubt most would realize, but in hindsight it would be a head-slap moment for them. The fissure offers options, though likely a split in the party.

Mineral vein is a solid treasure trap. Using up a full hour of the player's limited time for the sake of a payout. Value is enough to tempt a number of players I know, though the smarter ones would just note it on the map and try to get it on the way out. Room 4 is interesting. Kind of a bomb-shadow on the wall that can either be passed safely or turned into a foe depending on player actions. I like this. I always enjoy seeing situations where a player's own choices decide how events will play out. The only uncertainty is what I would consider to be 'inspects it too aggressively”. Probably meaning spending more than a single turn looking it over.

Room 5 is nice foreshadowing, but offers me no indication of what happens to the shadow zombies if someone gets rid of these bodies first. Most players loot and leave, but at least a couple over the years have been the sort to burn, bury, vaporize, or otherwise remove bodies from an area. Given the frequency of reanimation, I don't blame them. I wonder if burning the bodies or otherwise removing them would leave behind those shadows like found in room 4 to ensure an encounter later even if a different sort.

Room 6 offers a new exit option, a way to choose between suppression of a major problem or gain of value. It also creates a small haven and fall-back point for when players get into more than they can reasonably handle. I like this. Good design. Moving to the next room, the note about cave paintings overlaps the map. In the visual version, the white text disappears. Doesn't prevent me from understanding. It's a formatting issue though so something you may want to fix. This room also offers a second treasure trap. I might have said something here, but you offer a bypass of the time issue with a strength check. Doing so changes the nature of this treasure trap in a way to make it a unique situation. Ultimately, it is similar, but not the same.

There's an odd gap in palm sized silver medallion within the offering room. I half expected something here to have a shadow curse too given previous treasure tied to the location gave the curse if moved. Onward to the Ritual Room!

So I think it feels balanced. I suspect having a note somewhere at the start to ensure at least 1 player has to be a Priest, though honestly it is sort of implied. I also find it fascinating you note focus as a tier 2 spell instead of just saying focus DC 12. Neither is right or wrong, but by mentioning tier 2 spells, my brain did a hiccough. When I see the words 'tier 2 spell' my immediate reaction was to scroll back and check the character levels. Yep, 1^st and 2^nd level... I get that they aren't actually casting a spell, but by referencing the word spell, it feels off. It also eats more space, which given the space constraints... well, it's a choice. Like I said, not wrong. Hell, I don't even dislike it. I just think there's a mental disconnect it can cause for the reader. If you don't mind that moment existing for some people, no worries. If you want to avoid it, maybe just stick with a number.

So my real question at the end is this: What about the 'Shadowdark'? Is the Shadow Maw supposed to be the fail condition? The way the intro read, a great evil was going to spread into our world. Reading the 'if they don't finish in time' consequences, it's a Sarlac pit made of shadows fused into the floor of a cave. Those are two very different situations. Is the pit just the beginning and a final chance to undo the escape? Does the pit keep growing over time? I have a lot of unknowns here.

So as an overall, there's a solid little one-night event here. Depending on the group, it could be tied together well enough with an existing game. They can rush to the goal, they can explore, they can ruin their own knight with greed, and they can find multiple ways to handle the setting before them. At the end of the day, there aren't a lot of encounters until the goal, but for level 1/2 characters, that's probably just fine. I think it's good overall. Steeped in setting, power levels of items aren't insane, solid little map, etc. Having a 'save the world' game for low level characters feels a little odd, but given how it ends, I feel like whoever is asking them to do the job is an unreliable narrator. I picture whatever priest that was being overly dramatic. Like anticipating a category 10 hurricane and getting a foul wet fart instead. You don't want either of them directed at you, but the scale and scope is certainly not the same. Anyway, thanks for your efforts and glad you got this finished. It was a solid little adventure.

Beautiful cover that has everything it needs to have. You got a really good title, so I am going to be expecting a good entry here. Double edged sword, I know. Such an evocative title gives you a lot to work with, but sets the bar immediately high for what you give us. I empathize.

Scaling it to print size has me squinting a bit, but with the mostly-clean text color to background color, I am sure it will print fine. Might need to hold it a little close to my face, but it's not precisely a tiny blurred mess. Pretty much everyone has shrunk down the font to dangerously small, so there's nothing unique here. Keeping the contrast between text and background strong is vital when it's like this. So, success there.

First paragraph sets up how this all starts well enough. I am guessing there's an editing error in the statement “...freeing one of his marked.” I suspect the wording was probably something like 'marked status' or such. When you removed the latter word, the former needs to be shifted into present tense. “Freeing one of (I would say from here rather than of) his mark”. As I read this, I find myself thinking this is going to be a perfect adventure to keep in my emergency fold. One day when there's a TPK, boom, I pull this out and have death offer them a deal.

The reward is pretty self-explanatory here and you probably could have bought yourself a little more space leaving it out. Location is solid. Short and sweet. The complications though is twice as long as it needs to be. It's 2 sentences long and one of them is basically repeating something we learned in the previous paragraph. Another thing you could have shaved down to add more breathing room to the piece.

Factions is interesting. Based on the setup, it seems to be rather unique. Most of the ones I have seen in the past place the cult leader and cult members into a faction. I notice you separate out the leader by name under 'The Horror' faction. I kind of like this. It mirrors real cults. Often cultists are enthusiastic folks who've been manipulated and don't even really see how off kilter things have gotten. It works to keep them from all just being evil monsters trying to warp everyone. They legitimately believe what they're selling and are going to come across very differently because of it. I will say you note peasants for the guest stats. I would at least reference the other two as well since they appear on the back cover. Also, I am almost certain that some of the cultists are in the know given the stat block for them, so I would probably distinguish between the oblivious ones and the ones who are higher rank.

Under the compound, you note to start rolling for encounters starting room 2-8, but don't indicate a danger level. A quick glance at the encounter table tells me it's not there either. I'd be sure to include this somewhere at least. One less thing for the DM to make up on the fly and won't really cost you extra space. At least not if it is added to the encounter table itself along the top bar.

I don't see a percentile roll very often in ShadowDark. It's a little jarring to have one right out of the gate. Not calling it bad, just saying it's a little jarring. I would probably have formatted it to match other elements in the document. So, 1:10 instead of 10%. The bigger question I have is why need an invitation at all? If they are trying to gain members and steal souls, the best bet is to let as many people in as possible. My guess here is that it's meant to be a classic heist option. Find a way to procure invitations and failing that, try to bribe. Combat the moment they walk in probably kills a lot of the interest of trying to uncover things. Just my initial thoughts. I'll see how the rest of it is laid out.

Courtyard's fine. I'm sure there's a lot of conversation and such to be had here. For the groups inclined to sleuth, it's a gold mine. Murder hobos who stabbed their way in the front door will probably just have a bunch of screaming guests and attacking guards/cultists. Two very different options. Pillow room that follows is odd to me. 9 guests, but not a single cultist? Also, where in the world did the sword come from. It feels like it was just randomly put here for players to perhaps find and have a weapon with.

Servant's Room is a stronger narrative connection for providing weapons. It's interesting as a means to provide clothing to disguise themselves with, though it's a little weird imagining them making the pitchers up in this room that seems to be just a sort of laundry area. Zone of Truth could be useful, but again feels weird in a room with a hamper and a cabinet as the only features.

The dining room is fine. I think I'd indicate something where instead of just a 1 in 3 chance of seeing things, each turn lingering in the room increases it by 1. So first turn 1:6, second one, 2:6, Third, 3:6. It means they are increasingly more likely to notice something useful and if they spend enough time there chatting with guests, eating, etc, they are going to absolutely notice it eventually.

Sorceress' Room is where I finally break and stop thinking 'odd choice' and instead go 'intentional gaminess'. A sorceress leaving a journal laying out everything along with a scroll she would never need but that absolutely helps the players is probably a bridge too far for me. I'd probably decide to swap this out so the journal entry talks about someone snooping around claiming to be an agent of death and having taken the scroll from them. Maybe some hints at the truth without openly stating the evil plan.

So before I move on to the map page, I am rescanning this page. You have the horror's amulet stats, but no actual mention of it on this page. Skimming the next page, not there either. I finally find it on the back cover under the boss fight. Not a shock really, but having it here made me think I should expect to see it in the rooms on this page. I know why you put it here. Space. There was a blank spot and putting it here avoided orphans. I can't even really complain. I had my own item sitting on the cover. Still, I think at least a small reference to where it's going to be found would be nice. Maybe next the the name (page 4) or something similar.

Map is nice. Attractive and clear. Multiple directions one could move around the map with. More than one entrance, doors clearly marked for which are locked, visual reminders of what's in the room. Everything's solid. It reminds me I meant to note there was no indication of difficulty on opening the locks through other means besides knocking or having a key. There's going to be someone trying to lockpick one of these almost certainly. Might help to note a difficulty on the related roll.

Glowing drinks notation are fine. Honestly happy to find out these aren't some soul sucking drink. It's a wonderful little red herring. Turns out it's basically just strong alcohol with a Chr benefit. Int drop is to be expected when drinking strong alcohols. It's the incapacitation that matters here. I absolutely foresee players trying to detect magic on the drinks, avoiding them like the plague, etc. Kind of love that.

The pit is deep. Really deep. I assume given the soul sucking thing, the pool at the bottom is pretty deep to avoid instantly killing the people tossed in. Might want to include something about the players who are bold (stupid) enough to just dive in or those who get knocked in while fighting. Some group is absolutely going to find 3 robes in that hamper roll and be doing the secret knock while lugging their (not really) sleeping companion into the room. Fun times.

Garden has a named guest with a specific story. If they come in this direction, they get an immediate hint about something important. If they don't find it until later, the effect may vary. I'm good with this. Also adding a little side-fight treasure is nice. Optional encounter for optional rewards.

Down in the ritual room, the chained guests feel strange to me. Why bother to chain anyone? The leeches are supposed to be sucking souls right away as far as I can tell. Giving someone enough time to wake up and get chained is risky. Especially since they're begging for help. I would think the party would be hearing them scream bloody murder all the way up in the pit room. I don't know. It's a variable, which can be fun, but it's also an oddity in behavior for the cultists.

That reminds me, everything seems to be leading up to the cultists all being in the know. My earlier comment apparently was an inaccurate reading. There are actually only 2 factions here. The cultists with their leader and 'god' being, then the guests. It seems none of the cultists are actually clueless. That's too bad. I really had been impressed by the idea of 'innocent cultists' being a part of the setting. It would have created an odd faction dynamic and fun little moral quandary for those who like that sort of thing.

Soul Pit room is going to be a real horror show if the party has a classic Big Dumb Fighter type. Especially if he decided to have a few drinks upstairs. Having him out of the fight for D3 rounds every failed intelligence roll is going to hurt. Especially since they have to roll it any time they aren't paralyzed. Not saying it shouldn't, just going to make someone regret their lack of strong intelligence rolls. Timer on when more reinforcements arrive is clear. My only real question left is what happens to the drinks when the pool evaporates? I assume they stop glowing and just return to regular alcohol. Also, Leeches is spelled differently here than elsewhere.

Back cover callout is more or less a repeat of the intro. Can't complain about it since it's offering something a player would see on the outside cover. For the jam, it hurts space a little to repeat what we already know. It's a choice. Neither right nor wrong. Simply pointing it out since it came to mind. The encounter table works right up until you get into those rear rooms. Suddenly elements like guests approaching isn't viable. Room 6 and 7 won't work for the table given. Earlier it was noted 2 through 8. I would reorder your numbers or else set a 'specific encounter' for those two rooms. Reordering would be easier. 2 through 6. Change garden to 6 and make 6-7 into 7-8. My suggestion there. Do as you wish however. There's other options.

I do love the reappearance of Halfred as well as the use of the term 'unkindness'. Not enough people use those sorts of terms. Everyone remembers the Murders, no one remembers the Unkindness'. Stat-wise, most of this is within reason. Could be a pretty tough fight there at the end, but not unwinnable. I do notice Beguile notes 'for the duration' but doesn't indicate more. I assume that means for the duration of the fight? Ends with legal stuff. Nothing to say about that.

So where do I fall on this? It could use more space, but who couldn't in this jam? I noted a few spots you could have gained a little more room to perhaps add a little here or there instead. Above all, I think it's certainly workable. If I was to print this out, I would want to jot a few notes in advance before putting it into my folder. I think I laid those out above clearly enough. Just bits to help myself have an answer to questions so I am not working it out on the fly.

I only really had one disappointment. The title certainly alludes to the setup, but very little of the adventure is actually wagering your life. It's doing a task under an ultimatum. You can do a wager at the start, but for me it felt more like a tacked-on 'if they don't want to actually do the adventure' sort of option. I had really hoped to see something where a player's actual life force was involved as a mechanic. I was imagining going to the cult's location and having it really play like a fantasy heist. Cultists are doing some sort of games where the guests can earn riches, but are gambling bits of their souls! The only way to get in is to put up collateral in the form of part of your soul and then you can wager it away or gain it back. Risk, reward, clear tie-ins to the title. Everyone gets drunk and thrown into a pit feels less awesome. Not a bad little module by any stretch of the imagination. Good in fact. Just saying that I had been hoping from the setup and 'party' aspect that it was going in that direction.

Good job on this. It's clean and clear. Only a few things where I had to stop and wonder about something. Map was also good. Cover is beautiful and evocative. I hope you take some time to expand this and maybe add some more interesting personalities like my boy Halfred for the players to interact with. I really do think leaning into the mystery is the way to go here. If even Death itself can't figure it out... this could be quite a fun quest to overcome.

Tiny print at scale. I feel like I say this with almost every entry, so you're not in bad company there. It's especially a shame here because the layouts are so clean that it feels like it should be readable. My sad old eyes just can't pull it off though. Onward.

The cover is clever. It does everything a cover should be doing, but does it in an atypical way. The name byline is used in a way to seem like the name of a series. Since it indicates book 2, this is reinforced. Being level 3-4 implies it even more since someone looking at this would assume a first book would be level 1-2. Kind of fun how it all goes to reinforce the idea this was a legitimate book in a series pulled strait from a shelf. I have no idea how intentional that is, but it's what I get from it as a vibe.

The story setup is clean enough. Gives an idea of wrongness, duality, and theoretical goal. It's not really forcing anything on players, so that's also a positive for me. They can chose to back away if they want. Below that, the large number of creatures is surprising for the page count. Most people manage 3 or less due to space issues. It's a little odd getting them before anything else, but makes sense when considering the layout of the final two pages. Speaking of layout, this looks very professional. I wouldn't be surprised to find out there was a team of several people working on this entry.

That professional feel follows in the interior pages. The mirroring not just of the images, but the layout is peak design choice. I don't find much to say until I get to the Rule Engine. Since it says it is continuous, I imagine there are a ton of rules already. How are they enforced? Is it just expectations and punishment or do they literally alter the laws of the world within this tower? I can see the latter being difficult for players to follow, but the former meaning an almost immediate failure by someone in any given group.

Encounter 3 for the order side implies it is a punishment, but all of the upgrades have positive results for the most part. A longer list of encounters and upgrades would serve well if you expand this. Maybe a rule where too many upgrades mean a loss of what makes someone human. A slow degradation of their soul so to speak.

On the Chaos side, you use 'upgrades', but then later in the very first entry you use the word mutation. Given the concept of order vs chaos, I think calling the changes on this page mutations for the table would have been better as well. The flesh pool notes adding random body parts, but that implies extra random limbs, eyes, etc rather than the elements noted under upgrades. Uniformity of word choice would go a long way on this page. No major complaints otherwise about what's on the page.

Taken as a whole, it's very polished and offers a strong baseline to build a game around. If the complaint I have is 'I wish there was more' you are doing something right I suppose. With the number of creatures at the start, the towers feel painfully small. I think this is one of those entries I would highly encourage the creator to expand on. A larger document size to work with is going to do wonders for making this into something absolutely amazing to run. Even as it is, it makes good use of the limited space and well worth a read.

When I scale this to print size, that is some awfully small print. I am starting to notice a pattern in the jam that depth crawls are all quite detailed. Detailed to the point they really can't be fit into a double sided sheet of paper well. Tiny font required. Of course, it's pretty clear this is never meant to be printed out given the color choices being used. For me, if I couldn't print it, I very rarely keep it. My style of running a game involves having the physical pages of whatever I need in front of me to reference. Even when doing a game online. It keeps me from jumping between different screens and better able to stay focused. Something to consider.

Right away, the cover offers information that tells me this isn't something I can plug into an existing game (with rare exceptions). 'Last city on earth' is a limiter. It's also flavor though, creating depth. This isn't a problem so much as just something I as a GM need to keep in mind. One-shot only. I also notice pixelation on the cover image that doesn't seem to appear elsewhere. This feels less like an intentional decision for aesthetics and more like trying to upscale an image beyond it's limits. I think I would smooth the lines out if you decide to do revisions or expansion.

Next page starts with more art and a quote. This feels like a mixed blessing. All of this feels very on theme. Absolutely building on a vibe here that I don't know you could otherwise pull off the same. The down side is that it's all eating into space that caused the decision to have such small print. It's a catch 22. You can't have one without giving up the other.

Depthcrawl rules are clear enough. Getting lost is clear enough too, but made me pause to look around the rest of the document. I didn't notice a system mentioned. As I am writing this, my internet is down. I can't go digging on the landing page trying to figure it out and only have the document to work from. There's information on an Intelligence AND a Wisdom roll. It kind of implies it isn't system agnostic since not every system uses the old D&D stats, but for the life of me I can't find where it says a single system. It also lacks anything to tell me what sort of difficulty I am facing on the roll. If you're avoiding a number, you can still use words that imply a range. Easy, Difficult, Extremely Hard, etc. Does it get harder?

Since the player is making 2 rolls here on 2 different stats, the idea that it feels off that the results remain the same regardless of which fails. I would change this slightly. One of the rolls is to avoid an encounter. That could be recognizing the signs of something around or picking paths unlikely to draw attention. The other would be to navigate and find their way. This creates a different dynamic and a very different experience depending on who is navigating the path.

Lastly, I find myself wondering something. I do a navigation roll every time I move anywhere but back. So what about a cascading failure? I can only do explore or delve style actions while having a bad roll. 1D4+1 turns. As written, Each of those turns I am also rolling again. Rolling again has only the benefit of avoiding attention. With meh numbers and bad luck, I could get stuck in an endless loop here. So on average, once a bad roll happens, it's going to be 3 more rolls before they have a chance to escape the loop.

Gloom's fine. Mentions more stats so I am going to assume this is /not/ system agnostic. It's made with a system in mind. Probably mentioned on the landing page. Just add something to the cover to clarify this so two years down the road when I can't remember where I downloaded it from I can still know what I am looking at. I skim through for more stat-focused elements and it looks like it could fit into a number of OSR style games. Not really a shock.

Setting, flavor, and initial location description finish off the back cover section. No complaints here on the content. I would, however, flip which side it is on. English speakers generally track left to right. Personally, I want to see my flavor text first. It gives me a sense of the setting and location that will influence how I read what comes after them. As currently laid out, I read about descending and gloom before I even know more. It's a minor issue. I could have just jumped over, but I feel like a lot of people will just read in the order presented. It's just a little change to curate the experience.

Gloom notes on the side imply an increase depending on which location you roll. The likelihood of deeper gloom increases with depth which makes sense. That said, why in the world is an Orchard in the deepest gloom area? I would expect that to be way up on top where the odds are incredibly low. Also those apples are absolutely brutal. No roll, just done. Given the common idea of what a golden apple is, I could see at least one player just taking a bite without hesitation. Dumb? yes. Going to happen? Also yes.

I see a few words here and there that are probably not familiar to the average person. I'm always mindful of overusing my vocabulary. The double edged sword of words is sharp. The more you know, the more you can say in a single word... but the fewer people will understand what you said. Personally, I don't hate it here. It adds some feel without being too hard to work around. Even if someone doesn't know what chryselephantine statues are, they can pretty much infer it from the rest of the text. If they get it wrong, it doesn't really change much about the entry. Works. A little surprised you reach to goal potentially within 6 turns with good rolls. Probably not going to happen, but given the 'vast' nature of the theoretical location, that feels short.

Details, the first thing I latch onto is the sand entry. The idea of going deeper being prevented is solid. Forces a backtrack action some groups would otherwise not choose. Not much for me to add here. Same with the encounters table. I'm a little surprised that the encounter chance doesn't go up with depth or gloom. Then again several locations have automatic encounters and a bad roll is an automatic encounter as well. Probably fine.

I'm in a weird spot with my overall assessment here. On one hand, the tight print makes me want things spread out more. On the other hand, the art is applied well and the flavor text added a lot to the theme/vibe elements. Then I have to borrow someone else's hand to say on the third hand, it's not big enough. For some ancient city sprawling and decaying, I wanted more locations and details. I wanted a much broader spread of potential things to find and explore before reaching the 'riches untold'. With a larger spread of options, it could become a multi-game setting. Instead of a one shot, it could be ongoing. They delve to find things, return with treasures. Go back to delve deeper looking for even better things... back and forth. I could see it being a really interesting way to step away from the main game for a month or two to avoid burnout.

So yeah. It's a pretty interesting little entry. I already pointed out things I thought could be improved, but overall it is solid. There's a lot of heart to this, giving a sense of setting and scope. Despite the majority being game-elements, it still offers a lot of world building. Good job.

When I scaled this down, it was readable. While I haven't done a lot of the 8 pages at A6, that's a first. So many times people treat the pages as if they were still at A5 scale. Kudos there. It immediately also negates the normal complaint I would have about spending pages dedicated to legal elements in a tiny page count (I'd typically have those on the landing page or in fine print for a jam given the space limitations). Here though, it's basically in the same space as a single A5. So honestly it's more fit into a space most people are doing less with.

I'm not expert on the layout of A6, so just did a test check of 4 pages per sheet. I'll base my thoughts around that on how it is laid out. If I was just reading it in page setup strait down, I was thinking the map needed to come a little later, but then looking at it in the print layout, the next page pairs against it so I suppose it's a non-issue. It was just slightly jarring to have a map before I even had information about the setting.

Annex dungeon as a concept is solid. My own entry makes use of annex dungeons in one of it's elements. Making your entry into an annex dungeon means you avoid needing a huge amount of space spent on backstory and complex mapping. That said, it also means you have to make things a little more generic to allow it to annex in. As I read, I guess I will find out how that played out for you.

I like the teleportation coffin effect. That's interesting. Not sure yet how clear it will be to players but certainly fun. Having it alter time is interesting too, though presumably only one person fits at a time, maybe two? A bigger question I end up having is why the coffin slowly emerges from anywhere. If the players are retreading a dungeon back and forth I suppose that is an interesting little tidbit, but most of the time once they visit a spot, I find they rarely go back without good reason. I'd probably just end up having the coffin exist in a room somewhere and figure out a way to properly hint at how to go inside beyond an urge.

As I get to 'Exit' and 'Garden', I scroll back up to the map and sit looking at it for a minute. Okay. Things not indicated on the map itself. That's fine, setting elements. Did make me notice the map has a weird cut-off at the bottom that had me thinking something was there for just a second. There's probably a way to avoid that 'wait what' moment. Doubt there was time or testing to work it out though and it doesn't really hurt anything per se. Garden fruits are pretty clear about the risks there, so anyone eating that gets zero sympathy in my game.

At this point, I am realizing the bold is calling out elements well enough, but I think I would like some call-out boxes for things like the stat blocks on NPCs/Monsters. Separate them a bit from the other text of the document.

Funerary Panoply is not exactly a common word many people will likely know. At least based on my experience. When I have something where I think a word may confuse people, I tend to describe it along with the name/word. This is especially true since you bolded it, meaning it must be important as part of the description. Skipping ahead to the end, yes it is important. I would go ahead and put the information about the sentinel and panoply after the first entry. If I am referencing it, this is the most likely 'initial conflict' area. Since it is important to understand what a player is dealing with, having it here in entry 1 means the GM sees it immediately and can easily reference back to it just as easily as referencing to the end.

Area 2 is interesting in so much as the panoply associated with the sentinel here is in an entirely different area. Changes up the fight dynamics a little if they entered this direction. Area 3 offers a lot in a little space. A potential ally, a potential conflict with future encounters, a risk of misinformation, and a hope of useful information. This is good. It offers options for a lot of different player actions. Good choice.

The pit is where I have an exact opposite reaction to 3. It has all the same elements, but that's the problem. Aside from a slightly different personality, he is a carbon copy of Davke. Right down to no memory aside from his name, a single hint, and hatred of the other person. I think I would have varied this some.

Maybe he remembers the secret door along with a few tidbits of something, but is entirely unhostile towards Davke. Instead he acts defensively and confused, no longer even remembering why they are supposed to hate one another. Davke probably doesn't remember either, but is just feeling unbridled rage without remembering why. Something to consider. Right now they both remember their name, their hint, and how to coax the PCs into killing themselves. Carbon copy characters.

Disappearing gold is cruel. Not saying I wouldn't do it... but yeah. Depending on the player, some would be pretty upset over that. Not a trick I would pull too often lest they stop bothering.

I won't break down the rest since there's nothing else to really say. Lots of little places to move, but honestly I think the biggest problem is same-ness. I already mentioned the two NPCs being very similar, but almost everything is a mirroring. The enemies are all a single type with the only variation being if their connected panoply being in a different area or near them. There's a history between the NPCs, but even they apparently don't have memories of what it is outside of the lingering hostility.

It's not bad. I can't even pretend it's bad. It's a solid little dungeon. It's basic enough to fit in almost any game... but it's so basic in nature it lacks personality. NPCs aside, the only thing offering a history is the term 'Coffin of Enmezer', but I don't even see anything giving the players a way to know it has a name. If you plan to expand on this, that's where I would focus. Adding some variety to encounters and offering means of learning more about this interesting little sub-dungeon. Also including a clear reason to enter the coffin would help too. I don't think I have ever seen a PC try to get into a coffin. Loot one, yes. Climb in, no.

The 'urge to climb in' would scream trap to most sane players I think. I would probably choose to add a document the GM can drop elsewhere in their larger dungeon. Something that documents someone's attempt to enter, but not being able to get beyond the first sentinel. Perhaps he was with Davke and Gamul who climbed the tower and were supposed to open things up, but never came out! Bonus points if there's a fruit pit in his corpse's hand.

I like the idea of an annex dungeon and I don't dislike this usage. I think it needs some work to add a bit of history and personality more clearly. Not a bad little entry. Hopefully I've offered some useful things to consider and I look forward to seeing where this one places in the end.

You're welcome. It's pretty impressive realizing this is your first time entry/publication. I wouldn't have guessed given the quality of design overall. Sounds like you have a bright future if you pursue publishing further. It's not super shocking to hear someone not considering the print. A lot of it is generational. Older folks like myself grew up before cell phones even existed. My first computer had no internal memory (used floppy disks) and my first console was the ColecoVision! Before the 2000s, a lot of us were using physical media almost exclusively. For people growing up after 2000 (or at least in them) it became increasingly easy to just download entire books and images. I've found a lot of 20-somethings don't even own physical media or printers anymore. They do everything online, including proofreading papers on their phones and tablets.

A lot of these short-form documents end up getting printed out by people for their table. It lets them slip it into a folder to carry to games or cons and have something to run on the fly. Given the nature of this one, I would expect a lot of people to want to print out a copy to have on hand. Not only that, in jams, there are always a few people who print them out to judge on their lunch breaks or when otherwise away from the computer. Having a printer-friendly version is often a major boon to them. Something to consider in future jams. I expect this one to do well in the votes, so hopefully you do stay enthusiastic and do either an expended or updated version after the votes are in.

Either way, I hope you continue to enter jams in the future and look forward to seeing your other entries.

When I scale this, I know flat out my printer is never going to see this thing run. The use of black background with light writing is always a striking visual, but murder on a printer and if the printer is low quality, the text ends up fuzzy. Worse, the size of this print is unreadable to me when scaled to size.

Cover gives the information required. It's pretty on a color use level, but not bringing a lot else to the table for me. Clear about the system, which is pretty important. I don't know Cairn, so I have to guess at usability in some cases. Something to keep in mind if I mention system-related confusion.

Reading things over, I see bold call-outs. Always like those since they draw my eye to important stuff when skimming. Given how dense this is, that's extra important here. Info is on theme and still within a range of fitting into most games typical of what I would expect to see played. Good clean read on how the crawl works, so again good.

The loss of memories is the one sticking point I have. If I am doing this as a one-shot, there's no real impact to losing memories of a character. If I'm playing a long-run game with lots of history, this can be deeply impactful, but also potentially destroy beloved elements of a character. I think that would be the thing that decided if I ran it or not. If I had a game with rich history and NPC ties, but also with a set of players who consider /all/ character change good, it would be perfect. Long sentence, deep concept. Either way, I don't dislike it. I just need to be careful with how I use it.

Enemy is clear and offers a non-combat solution in a relatively small block. Solid. Not sure if you know the Wizard of Oz backstory for the Tinman (the tin woodsman), but it is all about a man who had deep love in his heart but had his parts slowly replaced due to a situation caused by a witch. Eventually he lost everything that made him human. His physical heart, but also the metaphorical one. In the absence of his love, he became like a machine, just going through the motions until he froze up. Why bring it up? Your NPC doesn't sound like that guy, but the connections between lost emotions and a woodsman reminded me strongly of that history. I would have been hard pressed not to have the subconscious connection make some some odd appearance in how I ran him. As to the last monster, 1d12 WIL... ouch.

Locations are varied and interesting. Lots here. Tight packed, but all clear enough from what I am reading. Again, without knowing the system, I have to guess at balance. It seems balanced though. With a minimum of 9 rooms to get deep enough to find the center (barring kindling rule). It's enough to create doubt of success without being unreasonable.

Details are solid also, adding changes to the location that go a long way to making repeated rolls on the same 'location' into their own unique variations. Events also have some nice details including causing location merges, detail double ups, etc. I think it's your tables in this that make the whole thing sing.

The biggest issue for me is just how tightly packed this is. Everything works and I'll honestly be adding this to the ones I keep in a file. My current printer can probably handle it as readable, but if I was using my printer from 2 years ago it would be a lost cause. Even with the good printer, I am looking at a massive loss of ink due to the black background. A printer-friendly version would go a long way on that though. If the jam was still ongoing, the change I would have suggested is actually cutting out the cover.

Maybe a quarter of the page dedicated to the same information, a bit of art, then use that space to give the rest of the document more breathing room. My old man eyes are always a bit intimidated by ultrafine writing. Everyone with small font always responds with something to the effect of 'I printed it and it's fine' as if everyone has the same quality printer or the same eyesight. There are people who've been in the hobby for around 70 years now and still going. It's really easy to say 'it's fine' when you're half the age of the person reading (or maybe just have better eyes if similarly aged).

Despite my finding the tight, small font intimidating if not scaled up, I think you did something really high quality here. You packed a lot in (even accounting for the tightness, there's more than expected here) and should be proud of this entry. Not going to lie, I was jealous when I was starting my own and saw the title you got. Such a fun title and you did it a lot of justice. I hope you decide to do an update after the jam to maybe make it a little less jam-packed and let it breathe a little. I don't even know that it needs a lot added honestly. Just maybe a bit more space for things to ease the eye a touch.

I actually don't hate the spell as it currently is, I just think it would be best to reign it in a bit. Having a spell to bypass the warband situation once in a while isn't bad, just different. I think the key to making it sing though is going to be making it something a player really has to think hard before using. If it's something where they have a difficult or risky recharge, they won't want to use it for every little situation. Instead, they hold on to it and when things look dire, they pull it out and save the day. I like your thought of burying it among goats for a few months. It means a long delay between usages, but also a risk of it getting dug up and stolen! Pretty risky so a player's going to really hesitate to use it up quickly. I might even go so far as to only letting it have a single use between charging. Either way, some things to think about. 

Scaling to page size tells me this is entirely readable when printed. This fact despite the color on color print! Kind of a nice change. You even include a print-friendly option, so no complaints about my printer eating a cartridge of ink. Cover is pretty basic stuff. Vague mouse tells us right away it's Mausritter even if the system note wasn't there too.

The back cover blurb could use a few passes to tighten up the writing a bit. Maybe vary the sentence lengths a bit more and add readability to the prose. I got the point without an issue, but it never hurts to add a bit of punch to the words or tightness to the wording. This persists into the hooks as well. Especially jarring is using mouse for mice in one spot, but then mice for mouse in a different spot. Hook 6 is interesting since it starts you in medias res.

The Tree Stump room was a rough start. The way room 1 reads, the longer I sit around searching, the more treasures just materialize in there. I assume that is just a misunderstanding of the wording choice. What I assume is supposed to be happening here is that they get a 1:3 chance of finding a treasure each turn spent looking, but once they do find something, there is nothing else. Also, I believe my book has treasure on page 38 rather than 36. Treasure is mentioned on page 36, but the table is on 38.

Interesting use of entangled through two very different encounters here. I like that. It's a smart use of limited space to create a unique set of situations. Not sure how I feel about it being the encounter element for both directions I can take from a single path though. At least one is a lot of smaller 'creatures' and the other is a single large threat.

Oof on the 4 inventory slots for the statue, but having it close to the entrance means there's a chance they can get it and go if that's the quest they are on. Fair balance I say. The maze could be a bit rough with a couple bad rolls. Creature list starts on page 22 though. The real issue though is the last sentence.

“If you find...” My initial reaction was to want some mechanic for finding them since it's in the middle of a maze, then I realized you meant 'If you found...”, referencing the hooves in one area and the saliva in another. The word 'find' had me thinking it was something to discover in the maze itself. It needs a counterpoint though. If you didn't find them, do you just wander and come out in some random spot on the map?

Swords area visually had me wonder about scale, but getting to this entry clarifies it. That's good. Random sword, but again the page number doesn't match my book. The sword tables are on page 39 for me. I'm starting to question if these page number issues are a mistake or if I somehow have a different version of the book.

Hermefaun doesn't note warband scale on itself, but kind of implies it. It's something as big as a goat vs a bunch of mice after all. This is reinforced by the fact the spell grants identical statistics and notes warband scale. I'd just make a note on the Faun himself as well since you read that first. Probably more importantly though, the spell is pretty OP. Being able to shift into a warband scale creature and the only recharge needed is to act like a goat for a week and eat grass.. sold. It would become just about anyone's go-to spell over any other option the minute a cat or hawk showed up. I think I would either make the recharge much harder or make the spell into something simpler like giving the user horns they can gain a ram attack with.

Overall, this isn't bad. You're not stuck going a single direction, you have multiple goals you can focus on, and there's a good chance they go in, find the goat, run, then have to come all the way back with a warband. Adds depth. A few spots could use a little more mechanical attention and the writing needs to be cleaned up. Also, double check your page numbers to make sure we don't just have different versions of the book or something. Multiple page references were askew for me. Usually by 2 to 3 pages off. Congratulations on being one of the ones to make it to the finish line and hopefully if you plan to expand on this or update it, you can find some useful things from my review.

Scaled to size, this is eye-bleedingly small print with massive wall-of-text style paragraph blocks. Not in love with that at all. At least you kept it black print on a white background. At double page size, it still feels small. Not at all ideal. I mean, I know you're trying to fit an entire planetoid into 4 pages. Shoot for the moon I suppose (or planetoid) but I think the ambition ended up causing some issues here.

Okay, so into the meat of the text. First section is backstory and setup. You lead with the inciting incident and then jump back in time to how she was changed. This is jarring since I only know one sentence about her and already I am now having a flashback. Most of these are fairly long sentences too. I'd restructure this as well as try to find ways to break up the sentences. One long, one short, one medium, another short, etc. To help illustrate how jarring this is, here's the number of words per sentence in this section: 22-31-27 / 19-17 / 50.

Not a single sentence under 15 words. Most of the sentences in the first paragraph are similar in length so they feel monotone in addition to being run-ons. And the entire last paragraph of the first section is a single long running sentence. I feel qualified to admonish you on this since I have to admonish myself as well. I suffer it as well. If left to my own devices I will write a paragraph-sentence. I seem to subconsciously expect a few commas to do all the heavy lifting. Break it up. You'll thank me for it later.

This trend continues through the whole document from what I am seeing, so I won't keep harping on it. Just know that it is harming your readability a lot. I also wish you'd made use of bold or underline at least as well. Italics do call out some things, but when it's this much solid text, everything kind of feels 'samey'. The dragon names are an example. Being bold would help break up the blocky feel and draw the eye to them. I do like the explanation about why the planet hasn't fully crashed. It was something I wondered. It was immediately answered. Always a good thing.

Notes to the GM work by and large. You make it clear this isn't about providing stats, but offering a framework setting to do what you want with. I approve. With only 4 pages, I was wondering how you intended to fit a whole planet in here along with adventure and stats. Instead of trying to cram things even smaller, you opted to focus on one element. The world. Some people may knock you for this, but I am alright with it. The down side is that if you're only going to do one thing, do it well. It's going to have to really pull a lot of weight. Especially since gameability is going to be limited. That said, I could probably have figured out usage myself. A sentence or two to clarify the things I just mentioned and I can work out what to do with it depending on my group dynamics.

Setting notes are clear enough. Since there's no statistical information, you try to convey what happens here and how things would behave. It should let a GM plug this into their system with only a little side effort. A few house rules. Ranged is limited to X, voices don't carry past one facet, etc. So far, nothing to raise an eyebrow over. Side note: Smart hyperlinking the webpage.

And then I get to... um.. wait... the story. Okay, so you put the backstory and GM information front-loaded and the Player facing elements at the end. Wouldn't have been my choice, but hey. The reason I say that is because if I go to yank this out after sitting in a folder for a few years I start with a skim. Refresh myself. “Oh yeah, the thing with the witch and the dragons.” And I might start to tell players something I shouldn't because I didn't skip ahead before suggesting it might be a fun thing to plug into the game. Granted, I don't tend to ask my players. I just do things. Other GMs I know do though. So I would put the 'what is going on as the players know it' section first.

Page 2 breaks up the map key in a weird way. You start with specific facets, then mention flora/fauna, then go back to map elements then to water. For me, it would have been more logical to start us with the note on flora and fauna, then mention water, then lay out the general map overview, then down to the specific areas. This flows in a path of things I personally like better. Flora and fauna are a planet-wide thing. Same with water, so they come first. Then when we get an overview, we see how it is all laid out, then specific elements of interest are pointed out.

210ft interior isn't small, but I don't know if my concept of 'extensive tunnels' and yours align. At least not if there's any chambers larger than a bedroom. It's magic and fantasy, I get it. I won't go whining about earth-like gravity making a swiss-cheese cave planet unstable. None of that matters. Hand-wavey works. God help me trying to work out tunnels in a sphere of gravity for something only 210ft thick from top to bottom. I don't know. I don't hate it, but it does feel like homework. I'm already going to be doing a huge amount of legwork on this one, so that feels like something I'd probably just shrug off and not even bother mapping. Just a system of rolls to not get lost and random chance to find some chamber somewhere down there with something in it.

So now I sit here trying to decide how I feel overall. I nitpick. I always do because that helps you find what you want to change and what you disagree with and want to maintain. I think if I were trying something this ambitious, I would have reduced the backstory some. I probably would have just noted what used to keep the planet up and that something had interrupted that. I'd have probably dropped the dragons entirely. I like them, but I think I'd have rather focused on the 'essence' part. In this case, that seems to be the water. Having something happening to the water that is the essence means that is the real focus of any story built here. Putting up multiple hooks and making the planetoid into a sort of mystery would have been absolutely amazing.

I don't know. Just random thoughts. I also say that if you plan to revisit this, work on the blocky nature of the text. Use call-out boxes for things, bold some words, underline or color something here or there. And above all, break up the sentences into smaller blocks. I often say shoot for the moon on these jams and you certainly did. You pulled the whole damned moon down for us to explore! It's doing things no one else had the brass to try. Did it work? Depends on who you ask I imagine. For me, it was a solid framework, but a rough read. A good starting point, but one I would likely make major changes to before bringing it to my table. Without much in the way of game-stats, tables, or even location maps (like the tunnels or hut), I am doing 80% of the work to make this into something players can explore and play with. I could absolutely see this being expanded into something much grander. If you do, I say pick a system and go with it. Maybe add a page to note conversions into other systems if you wanted. Good job.

Bravo on being one of the only people whose entry is readable when scaled to printer size without the need to squint or pull out a magnifying glass. Already that helps you in one of the voting categories. While I am at scale, I see several of your call out boxes are misaligned. If you do an update, you absolutely want to fix that. It goes a long way towards looking professional and there are people who will absolutely go into a rage over things like that. Doesn't bother me so badly, but I have learned to look for those sorts of things.

Right away I read the introduction and had thoughts. First was that sentence about the sun was a bit purple. I assume you were trying to capture the sometimes purple prose of the pulp science fantasy era. I feel like it went a bit beyond evocative into the odd. Especially when you start calling the sun amoral. Might want to tone that one down just a hair. Heh. Second though is that I was clearly missing something. Sure enough, when I go to the main landing page I find a cover you didn't have space for. Ah-ha! The missing information is on the cover. At least it's somewhere. Can't judge on it, but when the jam is over that's going to be helpful. Especially since there's nothing about which system is being used inside of the document itself without it!

Right away, we get a small 'dungeon' to enter. Super simple 2 room setup, but evocative. The idea of a half-buried tower where you are entering on the second story instead of the first through a window is nice. Extra valuable that the enemy I face inside makes absolute sense for the setting and situation. It's not some stocked monster. Instead it's just a large animal living it's life who happened to find a useful location to stay. I am pretty sure you meant to say red 'circle' though.

Not sure how I feel about the statement on relics. Obviously useful, but it's more that this is a 1:1 ratio situation where each item is practically made for the sole intent of giving them a bonus against that one creature. As to the rest of these first two pages, I don't play Cairn, but I figure I get it. The warping isn't constant, hence the map, etc. I Like that you can cut through the hedge if you want, but given the warping, it may not work as well as you think. Kind of a fun thing since I know at least one player is going to start hacking at bushes eventually.

Key page has some odd grammatical errors you'll want to fix. For 1, I know a few players who are going to obsess over why the rope is there and what they need to use it on. The weird doors are a nice foreshadowing about this place not always working as expected. Water filling it is a solid enough way to say 'don't come back here' without forcing players. Right away I feel bad for the minotaur. Wondering if there's some way to avoid the fight and ease it's situation. Potential ally?

As I read on, there's a lot of permanent body changes here. Certainly in keeping with the weird stuff out of the era of writing, though I suspect a few players are going to be miffed. Imagine if the entertainer PC ends up losing his ability to express happiness! Bonus points if they're the sort who is a hyper-optimistic always-smiling sort. At least with the shackle situation you can just rip the arm off of the skeleton and bring it with you.

And then the ultimate dick move of realizing they didn't have to sacrifice anything to get out. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just saying it's rough if they realize. My only complaint is realizing the test was just getting to the exit. Prove your worth, stay the beasts, claim the prize. The prize is just having a way out it seems. All the other stuff is offering up something in exchange for something else. If it is worth it or not will depend on the player in question. Since they don't know what they will get for doing so, it's a real crap shoot.

Last page is relevant statistical stuff for the monsters and objects. It's not a bad little one-off. I think how well it goes over depends a lot on the group. I know at least one player who would absolutely flip finding out they made a big sacrifice only to get one of the items in question. Then again, I know another who'd absolutely love the RP that came from the permanent changes. If I was going to change something (other than fixing grammatical stuff or formatting errors) it would be to maybe find a way to make the monsters feel more thematic to the rest of the setting. Minotaurs suit labyrinths, but aren't particularly 'desert' or 'witch' themed. Ooze doesn't feel on brand either, though the tool applying to it makes sense. Then there's a four armed skeleton at the end. Bowing is nice, but again not particularly thematic. One of the biggest strengths is going to be to keep that thematic momentum up from the first tower.

I would suggest creating unique variations on what is here. Maybe the Minotaur is actually a Minodax (Half human, half Addax) With a picture (if you are expanding) to show how it is similar, but more desert themed. The ooze could be a strange sand-ooze so instead of seeing skeletons, it just looks like a pile of sand until it moves and then you see swirling sand inside it! The skeleton can be more or less the same, but add a description of it wearing a light tan thobe and tagelmust to imply it was once a denizen of the desert you arrived from.

Overall, this feels small but complete. The art is limited, but not offensive. It does it's job, which is important. I didn't feel like I needed to go hunting for information elsewhere outside of that initial moment about the setup. I can't speak to how well the stats work since I don't play Cairn, but if I convert them into the familiar games, nothing seemed game-breaking. If anything, I might feel a bit jaded about the tube. Don't get me wrong, as a player I can think of a few dozen ways to abuse the hell out of that ability. I'm just not sure I want to give up my character's facial expressions for it. So yeah. I could see doing this as a one-shot for an evening with friends as a side activity through a main campaign. The sacrifices lose meaning as a true one-shot though, so it's probably best plugged into an existing game where the players are okay with permanent character changes happening unexpectedly.

No worries. Not everything is for everyone. It's why I mentioned this one really wasn't for me. I figure it let you know to take things with a grain of salt if you were aiming a different direction. In a jam, there's often not a lot of time to go digging more than a glance into side things like landing page, etc. I still think it goes a long way to indicate on the entry itself exactly what the expected system you are using will be.  I could see where you were going with the map, it just ended up being an art-only thing for me. When you only get 4 pages, dedicating a whole page to something that is (in essence) just a visual felt a bit rough. Feel free to ignore any of my advice or use it as you wish. I try to give deep dives on every game I review so the creators can really see how someone is reading through it in real time and where their mind may go. I wish more people would do long reviews like that to show exactly how they are reading through the documents so people can see how the flow is going. Hope you find success with the expansion down the road!

Scaling the doc to printer size tells me the font is a little small, but mostly going to be readable on a low quality printer. Might need to squint a little, but I've seen worse. Scrolling back to a legible size for review and I am confronted by a map on page 1.

Conceptually it is interesting, but in terms of practicality I don't feel like it's particularly useful. Scrolling down to see if the next page helps at all and nope. Next page isn't even a key. It means the key is going to be printed on the other side if I go to print this. I do a quick pull out to be sure maybe it isn't something where the front and back are book-ending the pages version, but no, the key is on page 3. So even if I treat page 1 as the front and page 4 as the back, I still have to flip between map and key.

Okay, so I'll flip back and forth for a moment to see if the map is offering much beyond aesthetics. After doing that a few moments, the answer is no. I don't seem to have any reason to even need a map honestly. There's no scale here, but presumably each square is a city block. It shows me where they are in relationship to one another, but I didn't notice anything in the rest of the document where that would have a meaningful impact. Making it worse, the numbers are all over the place so it's not immediately clear about why. Without reading the document yet, I can only assume that's the order in which places become meaningful.

I do like the concept here, but for an entire page to be dedicated to it seems odd. It certainly hits the 'art' side of things, but the old time photo feel is clashing with the whimsical hand-drawn art style elsewhere. I know there are going to be people who love this. I kind of want to love it too honestly. For me though, it's just a wasted page I won't ever bother printing out. I'd rather the space have went to the adventure instead with maybe some photos in the corners.

On I go to page two and am kind of just sitting looking at it. Clearly I am missing something, so I go digging. The jam doesn't automatically show the landing page, so when I go a few pages in and pull that up, boom. That's what I wasn't getting. The adventure didn't tell me what system I was using in the document itself, but apparently something called Odd Noir. Explains why I was seeing what I first mistook as a half dragon, but I am guessing is a second form of the woman standing there. The clothing is a different in terms of color, but the same design. I don't know anything about Odd Noir, so I won't be able to speak to system elements. I would adjust that first sentence as follows: “A gothic, weird one-shot for the Odd Noir TTRPG. It's set in a dusty Southern border town, where a prominent high society vampire has vanished on the eve of an apocalyptic cosmic event called:” To avoid any confusion about what I am looking at. While the landing page means anyone who downloads it knows what they are loading, there's nothing to say that when they go to pull it out of a folder in 2 years, they have any recollection of what it was meant to be used with.

That aside, there's nothing particularly wrong with this page. Unlike the following two, the font is easily readable at scale and it does a fair job giving an overview of the adventure and what to expect. It's basically an elevator pitch for what's to come. Where I do have a problem is that we are now 2 pages out of your 4 and all I know is a basic overview of the premise and a map I can't really make use of. That means everything of substance needs to be mashed into 2 remaining pages. That's pretty tight and explains why the font size on the next two pages is so cramped.

Locations. I already talked about how I would have rather had them on the same printed page as the map when doing a front and back A4. No need to rehash that. The very first location though offers me nothing meaningful. Fastest way in or out doesn't mean a whole lot honestly. I guess it lets us know this is where we came into town from, but I could have gotten a notation in the description for that. A single sentence of where the characters arrive at. The next two entries both offer something to work with since they reference important events.

Saloon is similarly meaningless to me. Obviously it's where people get drunk and gossip. Rowdy is about the only word I care about there, but not sure yet how much that's going to bring to the table. The apothecary sounds like it's meant to be important later, so I am going to assume this isn't just fluff. The last two both mention things that seem important as well, so we'll move on.

NPCS gives us Josephine. Woot, I got it right about the whole bat person on page 2. Well, got it right after an initial thought it was two different people and the whole half-dragon thing. Don't take that personally. The ears reminded me of horns from another art piece I had seen, along with the wings on the back as opposed to her arms changing into wings. The sheriff is a dick. Sure. Not much to talk about there. Wish I knew why he's acting this way, but I guess I am making that up myself. Sterling's info is a little odd. Says he's going to take her from the cult, but also that he's going to frame the cult. There's no need to frame the cult, they did it apparently. I assume it's because he's going to hide that the ransom is his doing. Still feels odd to call it 'frame' here.

I think I am again missing something tied to setting again when it comes to Clara. I have to assume the all-blue is just the style thing since other characters on this page are similarly monochromatic. However, she has extra eyes. There's no note about her being a weird species unlike when you mention Josephine, so I am left to just assume as much. Not going to lie, between the single color and the extra eyes, she feels very much like a Steven Universe character to me. That's a touch jarring when I was in the middle of a western fantasy noir already. As to the remaining NPCs, I don't have much to say there. Information is present that I might want about them, so it's fair enough.

Earlier it was mentioned we are a recovery team. I have to assume that's a standard part of the game play in Odd Noir, so it's with that in mind I am trying to evaluate what comes next. Last page and immediately Clara is asking if we know what happened at the manor. I assume she's here waiting on them specifically, but it's only implied. Her question feels odd for people who just arrived. I think saying she asks if they're the recovery team and if they say yes, she lets them know they'll want to check out the commotion there. Just feels like it makes a better flow of logic to me than asking a random group who just arrived if they know about something local.

Also, this is broken into Acts, but act 1 could literally be just a five minute scene. A GM could probably break it down a bit. Scene 1: coming into town and passing through to describe things along the way they see from the train, letting them know what's around and where. Maybe even some foreshadowing. Scene 2: meeting with their contact Clara to figure out where to go, etc. I'm not going to break down everything for the 4 acts here. Instead I'm going to say there just isn't a lot of meat or mystery. It feels like a framework to build the adventure on, but almost everything (including all of the clues to the mystery itself) are on the GM to come up with.

The doom clock mechanic isn't a clock so much as a series of increasing events as each 'act' progresses. If I am reading it right, nothing the players do or don't do really changes the clock progress until they move to the next act. Of course, this means we basically start at stage 2 since 'act' 1 ends almost immediately. I would much rather this be a matter of either time or milestones. Stage 1 already sounds like it would shut down the train on the way in honestly. I could see stage 1 being just visual signs of the comet as a slow line of light in the sky. Then 2-5 stages as progressively worse situations. This means the hostile folks wouldn't start right away until they were partway into the investigation.

Ends on credits. Perfectly normal. I agree with thanking the partner who helps ensure you make progress when you otherwise might not. My own wife is someone I call out often as the one always supporting my efforts and keeping me from losing hope when the moments aren't the best. I'm glad you have someone like that in your own life.

I'm going to judge this fairly by a rubric, but this wasn't really for me and I can admit that. I didn't feel a connection with the fantasy noir western setting, the art style didn't suit me and felt a little jarring when combined with the realistic photos, and I don't even know the system in use to be able to judge on those merits. I can only go by what is here and how it feels in relation to the Appendix N. I don't feel like this is much game so much as setup. The only game element is the clock, which is a bit abstract and didn't feel strong to me. The acts even pulled a 'quantum ogre' moment where if players fail to investigate well enough an NPC swoops in to give them the answer at the cost of the reward. I think more space should have gone to the mystery elements and digging into clues. There was another mystery game I reviewed so far in this jam that was pretty short and simple, but handled it well. I believe it was The Lycan's Pelt if you wanted to get some ideas there. Not at all the same setting or system, but did focus on the mystery elements in addition to setting elements. With a lot of people expanding their entries, the mystery aspect is where I think this would most benefit from an expansion.

It's honestly a shame about the map. It was a neat idea, but mostly just ate space that could have gone to adding more to the adventure itself. A lot of page 2 probably wasn't valuable enough to be taking up an entire page either. With an extra page and a half of space, this could have been a pretty intriguing mystery and not require the GM to do quite so much of the legwork. It's not a bad effort by any means, but at least for myself it didn't sing. Either way, you got it done which is more than 2/3 of the people who entered can say. It's largely coherent and is at least a viable framework. Trust me when I say that's at least something to be very proud of.

I'm starting to feel like a broken record about bad printers and poor eyesight when viewing documents at scale. This one isn't the hardest though thanks to the clean contrast from print to background. Just a little small for my liking when I scale it to print size. Overall, it feels clean and well laid out.

The overview of what is going on (known, unknown, and GM only) seems solid and easy to follow. It's not doing anything unheard of, but it doesn't need to either. If I was going to have one thing change here it would be adding bold words to call out key elements as I skim it over again in the future. Draw my eye to what really matters.

The legends all sound like log lines for a book. I mean, they are legends so I guess. Feels less like something I hear from a person and more like something I read from an author trying to offer a single sentence synopsis. Depending on who you ask this is either great or underwhelming. Also, I have to assume the typo was D6 rather than accidentally cutting away the 5 and 6 entry. Random 'encounters' is really not. It's random events honestly. There's only one encounter in the list and it's just an interaction. Nice picture under these. Simple, but evocative.

Immediate impression of the map is that I love the absolute number of directions someone can take back and forth, zig zag, etc. Visually, three rooms are laid out identically which I am sure is entirely logical, though a bit dull to imagine. Option of rooms doesn't mean a lot mentally if every room is just the same room after all. I'm sure you give them a bit more life in the descriptions in the key though. I'd love if the art of this map matched better with the rest of the document.

Sister Arista has a mirror mentioned here, but everywhere else you note a crown. Old version missed in the edits? Otherwise the vestibule serves as a reasonable foreshadowing location. Gideon is pretty strait forward. Interesting that he doesn't attack the dazed players, but mostly strait forward. If you defeat him here, does he resurrect to appear in the encounters or do I just skip the only encounter on the encounter table if he already got defeated? Also, that orphan line cutting over to the next page is something you will want to address. If there's anything you can cut or move just slightly to make sure it stays on the same page as his other stats, the better. This orphan is worse than normal because instead of just being on the opposite page or another column, you let it jump to the back of the page if this were printed. Just to keep track of his stats, I am in theory flipping the page over mid-fight. It's a nitpick, but it speaks to intent.

I don't see any stats or mention of the good sister's body. Since the other two guardians are still here (well, one person and one sword, but yeah), this feels like an oversight rather than intentional. With the nature of this puzzle, I can see certain players absolutely failing to figure it out. Having her here (even dead) might offer a clue. I'm also realizing there will be players who find the objects of each room and assume these are the relics. Nice.

Sword room is probably the roughest one for combat so far. A few good rolls could make Sever a really nasty situation. Odds are low, but I could see this absolutely wrecking a few people with some really bad luck I have played with. Not a bad thing, just something I as a GM would want to keep in mind.

The reliquary changing is interesting. Foreshadowing again, as well as making it clear what is going on when they win over one of the rooms. With two rooms being pretty easy to figure out, they might default back to Arista's room towards the end and just spam ideas until they figure something out. Assuming of course they don't just leave with the false items. That keeper being immune to non-magical items is a rough situation depending on the player load outs. Could make for a tight fight as well. Once again, not a bad thing. Something I would have to assess when seeing the setup of the player characters prior to running this.

The bell and crown are pretty balanced. The sword feels a bit too strong for the negative it imparts. I think most players would be smart enough not to go using it constantly, but having a way for a level 6 character to insta-kill a level 20+ monster at the cost of a single permanent HP is pretty extreme. I think if I was using this, I'd also add it doing some number of damage to everyone in a 'far' range. Nothing insane, but enough that most level 2 and below NPCs would instantly be killed. It reinforces the thematic elements and the visual from the scene in the sword room. No saving the townfolk by just stabbing the monster rampaging through town. You'd need to be smart enough to get it away from others first. Adds a little more thought to the insta-death situation. Especially without a roll to prevent that instant death.

The little note about treasure is fine by me. I know some people throw up their hands in situations where they can't get treasure/xp. Not I. I enjoy moments where a concept is made clear and a lesson may be taken away. Honestly if they're that hard up for loot, I am sure there's a bunch of things they could walk out with to sell off. Either way, overall a solid short adventure. My biggest issue is the lack of meaningful encounters. At least one of those 'encounters' is just a free pass on solving a room. Overall a solid entry. Easy to see where the title was applied, easy to find things when I am looking for them. Some bold call outs would go a long way and a bit more to engage with wouldn't hurt. Thanks for the clear effort.

This is one I don't see a lot of people make modules for. Gauntlets tend to be bashed together as short quick runs without a set module in my personal experience. GM just grabs a map, picks some low level monsters and has players run through quickly to see which of the 0-levels get to become PCs. Having a nice solid start is a good option. The only down-side I see is it's nature is going to set the tone of every element of gameplay thereafter. If the GM was already planning a monster-game though, it certainly is a solid start.

Cover is.. just the name. Well, name and a picture. Not even the byline of who wrote it. Bold choice. Given the page limit, it is a little shocking actually. Still, I will reserve judgment for now. Right away I have a sense of what is happening as I turn to the inside. I'm not sure how I feel about the amalgam chart. Personally, I would have probably just written the table once and noted getting 2 of the same number means it's stitch from two of the same heritage. I might also offer a more mechanical element here in that players can pick 1 of either heritage or both heritages for a disadvantage to charisma rolls. Or at least something like it. Create an immediate balance and choice here where the 'horrific to behold' has mechanical weight to it in exchange for the benefits.

NPC stat blocks work well. Gives us what to use for numbers, a short quote for personality, and a unique element each. Map has at least one way to move around a trap situation at the expense of going without initial equipment. First fight doesn't seem too rough as a start. Ways to increase the danger if they start making noise in the wrong spot or if not then they have two fights to deal with separately instead of together. Bag of Badgers is a little random, but got a chuckle out of me on the reasoning.

Then the back cover. I've taken to preferring these together with the front cover so when doing printing it's all in one. It requires adjusting settings in the design program so pages start on the left instead of the right. When done right though, reader sees the covers together and see the important information at the same time that would be on the outside of the document. As done here, it has me seeing the description of what to expect after I already read the contents.

Of everything, the encounter table is least viable to me. 3 of the 4 encounters are the named NPCs. This means they can encounter and kill them in advance of the locations. Alternatively, they can roll an encounter for someone already eliminated. Granted reanimation is a thing here, but without ways for those individuals to have snuck past back to the other areas, it just creates a lot of issues. I'd rather the encounters be unique abominations created here that lack the same free will as the PCs have. Also as a nitpick, I would just say 'Risky' on encounter frequency. It's standard SD language anyone who plays the game knows. If you are trying to make it more translatable to other systems, then 'Risky (every 2 rounds)'.

All images for the document suit it and have a theme of style to them. I don't feel like I needed more to make this work, so the choice to make the entire cover just the name and image worked fine. Again, my biggest problem is that I will very rarely have a chance to use this. Even if I run a monster-game, I would only be able to do so once per group of players really. The universality of that is pretty low. One or two out of 20 GMs would even want to run such a game in my experience. Not because they don't like the idea, but because it means they are pretty limited on other modules they can pull from that would be able to account for walking monstrosity PCs. I'm not saying it's bad. Just saying it is a limiting factor and it seeing less usage is a bit of a shame. Nice work.

I almost didn't click on this one for review. It seems visually and conceptually like a somewhat silly concept. Not as in a bad idea, but more like it intended to be very tongue-in-cheek. I don't run a lot of games like that outside of Paranoia once or twice, so I'm not always the best judge for such things. That being said, I am seeing things I like as soon as I opened it and started the review.

First thing is always scaling it to the intended print size and congratulations on text someone can read. You'd be amazed how rare that is. Next, I am almost immediately confronted with something very rare indeed and I wish there were more of. An adventure tied to the main story, but not involving the main characters. One of the big problems as I have gotten older is that all of my gaming crew has had more and more adult responsibilities. Playing nightly went away almost 3 decades ago. Playing weekly disappeared around ten years ago. At this point, it is biweekly for the regular game with a side game for off weeks on the ones with more free time.

That means when someone has something come up in the main crew, we get a canceled game and no one doing the primary game gets to do anything for a full month until the biweekly time hits again. Having little side-adventures with secondary characters and locations tied to the main party is nice. It allows for a one-shot weekend with no one losing out on core play or being stuck with some meaningless side-play. This lets everyone play some otherwise nameless NPC(s) in their base for a night. It could create a much richer history for the players to fall back onto and ensures that just because one player can't be present, the group isn't stuck deciding between excluding them for a week of progress or not playing. More of this please!

I've not dealt with Aetherdark, so an overview of the unique elements to that aspect are much appreciated here. A simple enough timeline with enough details to figure out how to handle elements. Those names for the interdimensional rats are … interesting. Kind of getting Redwall vibes. On the list of crew you might have though, I notice no quartermaster role despite it being mentioned earlier. Sad. No one armed quartermaster for me.

Page two and yep. Absolutely goofy. The idea of a giant rat insta-painting itself to go invisible while another one is stabbing people in the legs is ridiculous. Fun, but absolutely bonkers. Their 'traps' make sense, though trap is kind of relative here. Like a pair of goofy thieves creating distractions (which they are honestly) more than true traps.

The stats are reasonable. The behavior is reasonable. The fact Ham! is the only one who can't squeeze through is cute. Every rat has a personality and concept, even if they all share basically the same stats. Color coding is very smart, since it prevents any confusion on which abilities go to which rat. In fact, the use of font and color both in this are very well thought out. Looking at dander, I wish there was a notation on crew members section. Something like 1:4 Dander Allergy. Just to randomly give that a specific issue when it comes up on who is and isn't affected.

It's small in scope, but easy to follow. Stats I would want are all easily found. Everything is distinguished by both color and font. All of the visuals are wild, but make sense and seem to lend a lot of personality. The names suit the owners as well. Was I right about it being silly? Yeah, but it's also kind of brilliant. I think I might load the simplified version of this to print out and add to my 2-year folder. That's where I stuff a bunch of one shots for handling random things I need on down weeks or for times when I want something quick to do with a game rather than researching a bunch of extra ideas for that week. 2 years from now when it comes up that I need something for a down week, I think ten minutes of reading and I will have everything ready to go. Congratulations. Top notch.

I always scale to a page to decide how it is likely to print out. This appears to be A6, so once I scale it properly I am seeing my old eyes are doomed. Assuming the printer doesn't fuzz the tiny letters while printing, I am going to have to have a magnifying glass and hold everything a few inches from my face. Way too small. It feels small even at double size. I scaled to A5 and still am having issues. In the end, I had to scale it to A4 to read well. This is not for print. Digital only.

Front cover has everything it needs to have. Shocked to see a back cover with absolutely nothing on it. It's so strange to see. I think you probably could have taken the first half of the setup and put it into a callout block there. An overview you see on the outside of the zine, then the rest of the setup jumps strait into what players are encountering. It's not technically better to break up the information into two spots, but doing so lets you use a larger font and might mitigate one of my biggest complaints so far.

As I continue, I find myself conflicted. There's a lot to love here. Nothing feels crowded (ignoring the font size), there's a ton of lovely visuals, there's a very interesting title font that manages to remain readable. But I keep wondering about choices made. There is an entire page dedicated to pictures of the key 'cast' for example. They're interesting, but at the end of they day it's a page I look at once and am never going to use again. I don't need vague pictures of weavers or wranglers. I don't need to know what a caterpillar or moth look like. Ten seconds of google and I have thousands of silk moth and silk caterpillar pictures. It's not painful to include it, but when it came at the cost of space for the actual adventure information being readable, it feels like a poor choice.

Caterpillar timeline is a cute idea. I'd probably reverse it though. Typical westerners read from left to right, so expect a timeline to start on the left. Doubly so since you map reads from left to right. The map itself is pretty. Two ways to enter is nice, but honestly I could get just as much out of a description. There's nothing much to do in most of the rooms. Loot a few things, read over some documents to know what is going on. The lack of exploration or options on directions other than a linear path with a couple side rooms is a big down side for me as to why I don't feel like I even need a map here.

Lots of faction play stuff to work with, but I could see things going south for groups used to having more to do in a dungeon. The 'impervious' silk sounds like a nightmare to have in a game too since some player is going to insist they steal a bolt and use it as armor somehow. (Still working out in my head how you cut and sew something that can't be pierced or cut. Magical scissors and sewing needles?)

Profiles are strait forward. Easy enough to understand and work with. Solid for faction play with clearly difficult elements to resolve without someone losing out. Some of the things under stats are probably better suited to 'profile' instead. When I look at stats I am looking for information I can convert into numbers when needed more than dispositions and emotional states. That doesn't mean not putting elements about tactics in there of course. Knowing the weavers aren't enthusiastic and will avoid combat /is/ useful when dealing with stats. It speaks to morale.

And that's everything. It's cute. Small (Literally on that font. Sorry, had to say it) but not trying to be some huge adventure. It's just a one-shot situation where players can do some faction play and maybe a small combat if they decide they aren't in the mood to play negotiator for a sycophant and a moth backed by a god. I don't hate it. I just don't know if I'd use it. Without even looking at it again, I remember most of the key points. Less due to the clarity (which it was clear so congrats on that) but because there just wasn't enough there to forget anything. I think your strongest point is the art here, for obvious reasons. Hopefully you find some value in my ramblings. Thanks for participating in the jam.

On a whim, I checked the landing page and saw you'd researched the title before starting. Kudos on that. It's nice when someone takes a little extra time to understand what they're working with rather than just rushing out the first thing that came into their head. It also ensures the title makes solid sense with your adventure design.

Font might be a touch small at printer size for a low quality printer, but honestly that seems to be the standard for this jam. Most of it is black on white, which does help a little. Anyway, cover is visually nice. Vintage, but nice colors and there's a bit of whimsy to it.

Cover is doing a lot of lifting compared to a number of other entries. It's still a full image cover with title, creator, jam, system and level expectations. It then uses the open space to give us an overview and the plot hook table. It's a little cramped, but not painfully so. The plot hooks don't call out well visually, but the trade off is that they don't feel out of place on the cover. It mentions rumors, which made me initially consider it must be a rumor table, but reading it, it's more of a plot hook table. No rumors there, just setup for why to explore. It's a little odd also seeing the mention of an NPC secret in the hooks table, but a quick scan tells me you didn't have stats or extra information for this guy elsewhere. Space constraints.

The map is interesting. The faint hex grid had me pondering for a few moments, but I decided I like it well enough. Even though you can't see it everywhere, the places you can see it are more than enough to know the scale you will be working with elsewhere. The only thing that had me confused was seeing a standard grid inside of the cave spots. It felt out of place like one map was being overlaid on another and removal of the little bits got forgotten.

Sirens aren't special, but depth is added with the sea hag gathering items left in the wake of their actions. That it's not a pure combat situation is nice as well. Negotiation is an option. As to her owlbear, I guess. A lone owlbear on an island is an anomaly, but not impossible. Having it laying an egg that holds value seems odd though since it wouldn't be fertile. Is there a viable owlbear population on this island? How? Are they suffering dwarfism? This is where my mind goes with things like this. I overthink, I admit it. Sometimes a monster is there because you need a monster. Still, of all things an owlbear. It feels really strange to me.

4 had my mind immediately quote “Why does GOD need a starship?” What in the world are they repairing a ship for? Crudely or not, they are a semi-aquatic species. Ships wouldn't really hold value right? Maybe it comes up later. I'll have to watch for that. Maybe this is some clue to a larger story hidden in the text.

Octopus god is a nice callback to the cover. Mimic is pretty average. Not super concerned with it as a trap. Nice it's not just random, but being maintained and fed by the Deep Ones. Onward to them repairing weapons and sailing gear. Weapons make sense, but again, why does an aquatic species need sailing gear? With it now being twice, it feels less like a mistake and more like you're working towards something.

Aboleth 'god' to the Deep Ones is in keeping with theme, but that octopus god feels like it's in contrast now. It might be worth it to add a 'mutation' so the aboleth has grasping facial tentacles to tie it back into that theme. I do love the inclusion of the fish sauce. Incredibly unique and appropriate. Rotting fish in the one version humans find pleasant, plus a potion style bonus.

2d6 Stingbats is starting to feel like a running gag in various modules. A call out perhaps. I'm not someone who feels strongly about Stingbats, but I know some people are incredibly enthusiastic about them. And then back to yet another boat being repaired. At this point I am skipping down to see if there's some sort of payoff for all the sailing supply repairs. And... no. Not really. Looks like it's there just to make sure the players have ship options to escape with. Honestly, you could just have them picking over landing boats left abandoned on the shore from previous folks getting to the island like yourselves.

Ghost. Sure, it works. Dryad? Okay, maybe. How in the world has she held out on this island given how many hostiles are around and she can't exactly leave her location. Fun mechanic with the Treant element though. And then treasures. Nothing much to say. Some decently thematic items in there. Good enough.

Encounter table is smart. Variable depending on location. Having it go off an extra time when changing biomes works well enough. Since the layout was page format, I am slowly learning of the fey folk all over the place instead of reading that back cover to know right away. No shade there, just meant my exploration of this created moments of confusion seeing things like Dryads and Leprechauns seemingly randomly. If I hadn't gone scrolling down looking for the ship issue, I wouldn't have realized the explanation of the inhabitants of the island was noted on the 'back cover' area. Reactions of the Deep Ones don't seem like something that would ever be neutral in this adventure's lore. Perhaps replace it with something akin to 'Flees for backup'. The little explanation why some might react oddly though is nice. Given the dynamics of the island, it explains why some might be hostile or not according to perceived heritage.

On the back, we get the rumor table. It has some nice callbacks to other parts of the document. 'Reaching the Island' section is nice. Good vibes, clarity for why it's dark, etc. Same with 'On the Island'. Wish I'd seen these before reading the interior pages honestly. It would have definitely altered the reactions I was having as I read through. It's not really a fault of your own. Just the nature of reading page style as opposed to spread. It's one of the reasons I offer both to people and will personally read spread versions when they are there. It feels more like picking up a book and reading over the covers before opening the document. At least on a small document like these ones are.

I've never been a fan of random numbers for time to accomplish something. 1 day to get it done and leave is a pretty tight situation. 4 days is almost casual. Having no set number known to the players means you lose that element of control on pacing. And if you hide it from the players, the number is actually somewhat meaningless. They will move assuming minimal time. If they couldn't manage before the timer runs out, they were never going to anyway. If they reach their expected time and end up with more, they'll be wondering if you fudged a number for them. Better to just say a number of days and base the adventure around what a reasonable progress for that time would be.

Ends with credits. Worth having here. Could also have gone on the landing page, but when you can fit it in an actual document, do so. So yeah. Good. Honestly, I think there's a lot to work with in this. There's a set of three main factions (humans, deep ones, fae) with sub-groups involved as well (such as the no-love-lost situation between the Merfolk and the Hag). I happen to know ShadowDark, but this isn't set up in a way you have to. I could easily plug this into a number of games with almost no real effort. Standard trade dress style for a SD game means it immediately reads as one, but isn't forcing you to use that system. Good job on this.

Scaled, it is a little smaller than I like to read, but not unreadable. Keeping it black on a semi-white background keeps this from being an eye strain. My very first impression was one of confusion. Based on the sequel to … and because I'm not sure if this was an existing game or a reference to an in-universe book, I go digging on the internet. Looks like in-universe. Okay. After the jam is over, I suspect entries like this are going to cause confusion. They reference books that don't exist (which is technically the assignment) as if they were real. I find myself wondering how many people will 'get it'. It's not like it hurts your points in any way, but something to consider after the jam is over.

As a whole, the work is simple and clean. The front cover is a little odd visually. It reminds me of a back cover for a book, which is technically in keeping with the theme, but since there's no 'front' cover, it feels odd. It makes it feel less like a book and more like a cover for a dossier. As I read the portion under The Verse, I am seeing some odd grammatical choices. You might give it another pass for readability and flow. It's not that I can't follow, but it could be a cleaner read.

With all the capitalization happening, the only thing bold is 'Tonic'. I don't see anything here or at a glance through, so I'll be looking around to see if I can find a Tonic item somewhere. Either as a McGuffin or an functional item. Dice mechanic on the same page is pretty clear. I'm sure there's someone out there who'll get confused, but not because of what you've written. There's always someone who can't wrap their head around the idea of a higher dice being worse than a low die. It happens. If you find someone complaining about that, it's probably them rather than what you've written.

Oxford comma is your friend. I highly suggest its usage under Drones when establishing their natures. Everything about how this works feels clear enough to me. I think there might be some people who reread Fever info, but not sure I can put my finger on exactly what is making me think that. Intuition mostly I guess. As I sit and ponder it, I think it's the fact we're getting information about things like dice for Nestborn and such before actually knowing what the word means. Sure, it's not hard to go to the next page, but since I am reading in single-page format, that isn't quite the same as if I had printed it out. Anyway, moving on.

I get 'what's going on with that radio' vibes strait out of Silent Hill 1. You combine it with a help-the-player mechanic through a very befittingly vintage concept perfectly suited to the era of books associated with Appendix N. Of everything in this so far, this is the stand-out element. Pure gold on that one.2 very useful aspects to a single element. I especially like the idea of using things like old-time advertisements or a song to somehow offer a hint. There's a lot of fun to be had there without just handing players an instant answer. Good for play and for feeling immersed rather than just roll and know sorts of things.

I don't have a lot to say on character building. It might need some tweeking, but I'd need to playtest to be sure and honestly it's going to depend on the group anyway. The only item I had to sit and think about more than a moment was the 'condemned' trait on Nestborn and (a little oddly enough) the mention of wasps under the same. When 'condemned' as a trait would come up in RP feels a little hazy to me. As for wasps, everything noted so far implies the infected individuals just seem like invasion of the body snatchers style humans. Acting different, but looking like us. I'm guessing this is a bee reference since wasps are solitary. It still felt out of place for me personally.

Setting has 2 drop points and 4 locations. Pretty strait forward, if a bit linear. It's pretty clear you're supposed to move through them in order. For a one-shot, it's probably not a big issue. I am going to note for argument sake however, that it isn't my preference. I as a player and many of the people I run games for tend to be put off by obvious forced paths. It is always preferable to those like myself to feel like we're making a choice. Prep for the drop probably said the Hospital was the best starting point to aim for. Gas second to bring back and refuel for the escape. Hive center and Elementary are probably not considered priorities in the debriefing.

With this little space, it's probably hard to do so, but adding something as an incentive for why they would want to detour to the school would go a long way. Maybe having the last known location of the Hospital Director being there due to picking a child up from school or something. Knowing the Tonic (yay, I knew you had it in here somewhere) is at the hospital, but locked behind a security wall creates a strong incentive to start at the school first instead of just going strait to the hospital and trying to break down a wall.

Okay, onto the general thoughts having finished it all. Almost every time 'It' showed up in the information, it threw me out of things. There were many times when the sentence would have been clear enough without the usage. Adding it didn't increase the clarity and instead kept making me stop mid sentence. I'm not against the ambiguous term in capital letters. I just think you need to be limited in it's usage. Selective use of the term is going to lend it impact. Having it too frequently makes it feel more like the pronoun game and feels like starting a new sentence mid-previous.

This is clean overall, clear enough to use, and has a real sense of identity. There's a few moments where it felt a little cramped. Not because of the writing, but the idea didn't have enough pages to truly breath. Even so, you did a lot with the space you had to work with, fitting a system, chargen, and adventure into 4 pages. Nice job there.

My biggest complaint is more about the name. I absolutely see how it inspired your idea, but after it all fleshed out and came together it feels off. Like the name describes one thing, but we get another. Eye of the storm concept for the hive is clear enough. Battle though, maybe less so. Mind part: yep, I get it. When I read it though, 'Battle in the Mind's Eye' doesn't feel right. It's a covert mission after all. Battle is the thing you're trying to avoid. Anything big enough to become a 'battle' probably results in a lot of lost players. I don't know how to apply this feeling to the voting though. Theme in my rubric is about feeling like it could be found in the Appendix N as something Gygax and others would have referenced. I mean... how heavily do I measure the disconnect I feel between module and name into that? I'm going to put a number here, but I may change my mind the more I think on it prior to the end of the Jam.

Anyway, hopefully you can pull a few gems form the rambling mess of thoughts above. Good job on this overall!

Scaled, it is a little smaller than I like to read, but not unreadable. Keeping it black on a semi-white background keeps this from being an eye strain. My very first impression was one of confusion. Based on the sequel to … and because I'm not sure if this was an existing game or a reference to an in-universe book, I go digging on the internet. Looks like in-universe. Okay. After the jam is over, I suspect entries like this are going to cause confusion. They reference books that don't exist (which is technically the assignment) as if they were real. I find myself wondering how many people will 'get it'. It's not like it hurts your points in any way, but something to consider after the jam is over.

As a whole, the work is simple and clean. The front cover is a little odd visually. It reminds me of a back cover for a book, which is technically in keeping with the theme, but since there's no 'front' cover, it feels odd. It makes it feel less like a book and more like a cover for a dossier. As I read the portion under The Verse, I am seeing some odd grammatical choices. You might give it another pass for readability and flow. It's not that I can't follow, but it could be a cleaner read.

With all the capitalization happening, the only thing bold is 'Tonic'. I don't see anything here or at a glance through, so I'll be looking around to see if I can find a Tonic item somewhere. Either as a McGuffin or an functional item. Dice mechanic on the same page is pretty clear. I'm sure there's someone out there who'll get confused, but not because of what you've written. There's always someone who can't wrap their head around the idea of a higher dice being worse than a low die. It happens. If you find someone complaining about that, it's probably them rather than what you've written.

Oxford comma is your friend. I highly suggest its usage under Drones when establishing their natures. Everything about how this works feels clear enough to me. I think there might be some people who reread Fever info, but not sure I can put my finger on exactly what is making me think that. Intuition mostly I guess. As I sit and ponder it, I think it's the fact we're getting information about things like dice for Nestborn and such before actually knowing what the word means. Sure, it's not hard to go to the next page, but since I am reading in single-page format, that isn't quite the same as if I had printed it out. Anyway, moving on.

I get 'what's going on with that radio' vibes strait out of Silent Hill 1. You combine it with a help-the-player mechanic through a very befittingly vintage concept perfectly suited to the era of books associated with Appendix N. Of everything in this so far, this is the stand-out element. Pure gold on that one.2 very useful aspects to a single element. I especially like the idea of using things like old-time advertisements or a song to somehow offer a hint. There's a lot of fun to be had there without just handing players an instant answer. Good for play and for feeling immersed rather than just roll and know sorts of things.

I don't have a lot to say on character building. It might need some tweeking, but I'd need to playtest to be sure and honestly it's going to depend on the group anyway. The only item I had to sit and think about more than a moment was the 'condemned' trait on Nestborn and (a little oddly enough) the mention of wasps under the same. When 'condemned' as a trait would come up in RP feels a little hazy to me. As for wasps, everything noted so far implies the infected individuals just seem like invasion of the body snatchers style humans. Acting different, but looking like us. I'm guessing this is a bee reference since wasps are solitary. It still felt out of place for me personally.

Setting has 2 drop points and 4 locations. Pretty strait forward, if a bit linear. It's pretty clear you're supposed to move through them in order. For a one-shot, it's probably not a big issue. I am going to note for argument sake however, that it isn't my preference. I as a player and many of the people I run games for tend to be put off by obvious forced paths. It is always preferable to those like myself to feel like we're making a choice. Prep for the drop probably said the Hospital was the best starting point to aim for. Gas second to bring back and refuel for the escape. Hive center and Elementary are probably not considered priorities in the debriefing.

With this little space, it's probably hard to do so, but adding something as an incentive for why they would want to detour to the school would go a long way. Maybe having the last known location of the Hospital Director being there due to picking a child up from school or something. Knowing the Tonic (yay, I knew you had it in here somewhere) is at the hospital, but locked behind a security wall creates a strong incentive to start at the school first instead of just going strait to the hospital and trying to break down a wall.

Okay, onto the general thoughts having finished it all. Almost every time 'It' showed up in the information, it threw me out of things. There were many times when the sentence would have been clear enough without the usage. Adding it didn't increase the clarity and instead kept making me stop mid sentence. I'm not against the ambiguous term in capital letters. I just think you need to be limited in it's usage. Selective use of the term is going to lend it impact. Having it too frequently makes it feel more like the pronoun game and feels like starting a new sentence mid-previous.

This is clean overall, clear enough to use, and has a real sense of identity. There's a few moments where it felt a little cramped. Not because of the writing, but the idea didn't have enough pages to truly breath. Even so, you did a lot with the space you had to work with, fitting a system, chargen, and adventure into 4 pages. Nice job there.

My biggest complaint is more about the name. I absolutely see how it inspired your idea, but after it all fleshed out and came together it feels off. Like the name describes one thing, but we get another. Eye of the storm concept for the hive is clear enough. Battle though, maybe less so. Mind part: yep, I get it. When I read it though, 'Battle in the Mind's Eye' doesn't feel right. It's a covert mission after all. Battle is the thing you're trying to avoid. Anything big enough to become a 'battle' probably results in a lot of lost players. I don't know how to apply this feeling to the voting though. Theme in my rubric is about feeling like it could be found in the Appendix N as something Gygax and others would have referenced. I mean... how heavily do I measure the disconnect I feel between module and name into that? I'm going to put a number here, but I may change my mind the more I think on it prior to the end of the Jam.

Anyway, hopefully you can pull a few gems form the rambling mess of thoughts above. Good job on this overall!

Readable at scale. Kind of small, but readable. Good enough. I worry about the amount of open space, but absolutely baller that you have the pages showing through their opposite. I have no idea how many other people noticed that mirroring, but you are a rockstar for doing that! I almost always get a little nervous when there's so much open space in an entry. Cover dedicates almost exclusively to the bare minimum. Title, Interesting visual, who made it, what system, jam info. Back cover is a quick blurb to set the tone, followed by a basic bit of information on what someone can expect from playing this. Nice choice to add a link there as well as the note of 'review copy' since this is being offered at a price outside of the jam.

Clean and professional so far. No complaints. You've managed to hit theme, writing, and some of visuals already quite well. Into the game itself. Card explanation is pretty strait forward. No idea how many people automatically know what a desire path is, but it isn't a wrong choice per se.

Kings to you Fernand. You did something that no one else has yet. You shut me up. I normally pick out bits and comment as I go. I'd already read all the way to the villager stats before realizing I hadn't said anything. Whatever else happens, know you gained that victory. There's a lot of ways this might not work well. This is a setup I would only use if I don't have a contrarian player in the group. Still, assuming everyone is willing to stick around in the village, it's solid.

The horror itself is a thing that never quite reveals itself. It isn't incredibly powerful and instead uses the fog to succeed. The little bit about feeding itself to the young is interesting. Odd little point, but implies it exists beyond the scope of this game. That's always nice. The fact it never changes forms also means that even killing it, they aren't really sure if they killed the right person until the dying stops. After a few deaths, I could easily see villager families starting to proactively attack one another as well, making it even harder to know who the real horror is.

My biggest issue is that this is almost entirely setting and very little substance. If that makes sense. We know what's going on and have mechanics for it, but we know basically nothing about anyone here or their lives and the GM is going to be making a LOT of things up on the fly to manage a viable murder mystery. There's a note about the horror being able to lie and shift blame, but all of that is on me if I want to run this. The single biggest element of a mystery is the mystery itself. The red herrings and the hidden clues. We have a what, a why, and even a how technically. What we lack here is the part of a mystery that makes it really fun for people. That trail of hints that lets them feel like a genius if they figure it out or like it was so obvious they don't understand how they missed it when they get it wrong.

Looking over the names, it's cute that you tied the suits into their surnames. Nice touch. I did find it odd that for a place all about refusing to believe in the supernatural, one of them believes in werewolves and another is interested in witchcraft. Found that a little jarring. I presume the point of them disbelieving in the supernatural is so they can't be convinced of the horror's existence instead of their own selves as the cause. It more or less says so in the text. Having two of them believing/interested in the supernatural is a very odd choice.

Under the seers section, I would honestly be happier to just have it's face look empty when it is preparing to attack. That way I am not making an artificial effect on play just to keep the mystery. Instead, I have a setting-specific element that creates uncertainty. This could be really interesting if it took a bit of damage and escaped. Then it might sneak off and harm someone else in the same way so that in the morning the players checking others would find the wrong person! Some fun to be had there. Honestly, with 4 HP, it's probably not making it out alive either way though. I'd personally also be inclined to have its HP go up after every kill so that the longer it goes on, the harder they need to work to end it's reign of terror.

One thing I was thinking was that you had us pull 2 cards from the pile at the start to represent murders, then pick another of our choice to count as the murderer. To me, it feels smarter to have the GM pull 2 cards. The first is who was murdered, the second is the Horror's disguise. Then everything gets played strait and I am entirely random each time I run this with no way for players to sus out how I think in a way to get a hint ahead of time on who the horror is. Good GMs aren't going to be easily caught out, but newer GMs might find it trickier.

As a whole, this is good. I think it can gain a lot from expanding to create a way to readily set up clues. Making such a system is probably tricky since you don't know in advance who did what, but if you focus on things relating to the non-horror villagers as they grow ever more panicked, you can mask the horror itself through the increasingly desperate actions of the villagers themselves. Anyway, I like it. A lot in fact. Good job.

Don't feel too badly about the lack of playtesters. Until one gets a larger following, it is very hard to get them. I still find difficulty getting reliable playtesters for anything I do. Also, there's no shame in starting somewhere and growing. My first game design was twenty years ago now and while it was a work of love, I probably wouldn't share it. Other projects I have worked on for years and still not had ready due to time constraints and the desire to have them meet a certain minimum standard. We each put out our best work and hope it does well. We see our mistakes and use them to grow so the next project is better. No shade at all to you. It's why I do these deep dive critiques. They help others to see how things are happening and where they might decide to make changes. Good luck on your continued growth!

Cover name, creator, system, jam, and an idea of what we can expect. At a glance of everything as a whole, seems pretty obvious that everything ties together well. As a whole, when I take the work to the scale of what it would print at, it's a bit small on font for my liking. On the up side, the stark black on white element means I won't have to be worried about contrast issues from a less than amazing printer rendering it into a bunch of unreadable fuzz.

Tracker along the bottom is a nice setup. Keeps with the visuals and creates an easy way to follow what's happening. The only down side I can think of is when needing to access information from the other side. Then again, switching from laying a token on it to a paperclip instead probably works just as well. Trigger section kind of frustrates me. It's interesting, but there's only a 1:6 chance of infection. Since I can assume immediately the infection is vital to the story, this is an issue for me. A few lucky rolls and no one is infected. I think the easiest solution for this is to make 1 item automatically infectious, while all others have the chance. This way you are sure to have one infection, but potentially several.

Progression is simple enough. I'll have to see how the game is meant to play to know if some groups might screw this up somehow or not, but it's probably fine. Treatment catches me though. It says explicitly that after stage 1 it is incurable, but then goes on to talk about advanced reversals for stage 4. I think what you're aiming at here is the disease becomes a chronic and permanent thing the player has to deal with after stage 3, but that stage 4 and above can only be dealt with through advanced methods to prevent full change. So a lifetime of dealing with it through expensive and difficult methods if they allow it to progress too far.

Then I look back at the rumor table and realize the 'halt' element comes up as something more than it initially seemed. Having thought it through some more, it seems what you are trying to say here is that you can reverse the 'progress' section, but any 'mutations' will remain even afterwards. I think if you are going to focus anywhere, this is where to put your attention. Adding clarity to the way this is written would go a long way.

Rumor table seems fine. Good choice on the True/False element. I started doing that with my own and it makes it a lot clearer to the GM how to handle their rumors when they happen. I've taken to enjoying adding a half-truth in there as well when space allows for explaining it. On progress, I like how the early stages are beneficial, making some players think they can hang on to it a bit. It's a strong method to coax them in to allowing it to get past stage 1. However, I think I would make the 3^rd a trade-off stage. Not just a negative, but a positive and negative together. This is the hint to players they may be getting the worse end of the deal if they let it go on. It's storytelling through the mechanics and lets the ones who decided to 'let it go a little longer' before curing it look back and realize exactly when they made the fatal error. One final element is that 11 is basically death anyway. I suppose there's a chance one of the other players undoes the effect by dropping you down a few notches somehow, but since the player in question won't be helping them at that point, that player is out of the game for a while. I'd probably have them lose memories and consider the priests favorably, but let them still interact with the group rather than having them /only/ respond to priests.

Roster of enemies is pretty clear. The only thing that threw me was the infested priests. I assumed the good father and his lot have plant-associated powers due to their faith. Apparently being of the faith and infected means you don't turn full shrub, but get nettle fingers. Makes me wonder if the players can joint the faith to avoid permadeath.

Mutations are interesting. I could see 3 having a mechanic attached. 4 having a risk of infecting the other players, etc. Mutation 10 overlaps with Progress 9, which could make a weird overlap of effects. That last one with the mushrooms I would love to have fruiting 1/day with edible fungi that count as a ration if one of the other players is willing to do so.

Last page of the single page format puts everything together. Why they are here, what they are doing, etc. It's the first entry I have read that wasn't an adventure, or map, or similar attempt at a larger scope. Instead, you've focused more tightly in on an element and allowed it to sit freely to be placed into an adventure of the GM's choice. And honestly, it works. I feel like I have everything I would need to plug these guys into my own campaigns. I don't play Cairn or Into the Odd, but I could still make these work with minimal effort on the games I do play. Several of them in fact. It would be so simple to add hints of their existence months before they show up, building the stakes in advance and allowing players to know full well they shouldn't allow this to progress.

I think you've made something very solid here. If you decide to expand, I am going to make an odd suggestion. Instead of expanding this, just clean it up and keep it either free or low cost. Do an expansion that is a full adventure set around using these guys in part of a larger setup. It lets people see the quality of what you have made and I think as long as the price was reasonable, it is a solid incentive to purchase whatever future expansion is associated with it. Just my thoughts though. Good work.

Because my son is a huge fan of TADC, I went to skim the page for the core system you're using. Kudos putting full pages up for people to look over. Kind of unfortunate that the first thing my eyes fell on was a grammar error and a spelling error in the same sentence. Don't feel bad. I somehow missed a spelling error in my title on the cover once since I was so focused on the text inside the book. None of that is relevant to this review, but thought I would mention it so you can give the whole thing another pass and update.

To the actual module at hand, I don't print them out for these reviews (I actually couldn't for yours right now anyway. My yellow is low and this would absolutely wipe it out!) but I do scale them on my screen using a piece of actual paper to verify before doing an overview of legibility. My old eyes sometimes struggle with readability for one reason or another. I big culprit is white text on a colored background, so thankfully that's avoided here. That said, the print is so small that when at scale it looks less like real words and more like implied markings meant to seem like them.

I increase to double size to do the review read normally, but even then this font feels painfully small. At 2.5 times print size, it was readable and it wasn't until 3 times the print sizing that I didn't feel a need to lean towards my screen. I have no idea what font this is and what size you used within it, but for me this is so tiny I would never even consider it. It feels cramped and I'm not sure my printer is high enough quality to manage making the letters readable if I printed it out. No amount of magnifying glass is going to fix a printer not bothering with details.

I started out with the dirty version listed as final, but that made the matter worse, so I switched to the clean version. Reasonable idea, just that the font issues made the dingy version an absolute no for me getting through it. Cover doesn't bring a lot to the table, but it's clear about what this is, so there's that.

And page one I am hit with a wall of text. Looking like it's supposed to be a hand-written journal entry of whoever put this together. Nice enough idea, but the cube of text is jarring. It immediately breaks the attempted immersion. People don't write in large squares normally. They put returns, they have awkward layouts that no machine is there to reposition the words into for them. It's typing, I get that. The lines will all be neat because it /isn't/ hand written. That's not what I mean. There's no breaks in there at all. Just pressing return once in a while would enhance the sense it was a person scrawling a note. If you wanted to be a little extra, changing letter spacing here and there, word spacing, font size up or down one. Those things create a more uneven feel like a person writing neatly, but failing to have machine perfection.

I hate read-aloud text. I never use it in a game. This notes it is found in the location, leaving me two choices. A: I absolutely must read it aloud word for word, or B: I must hand type this into a separate document and print it to hand to players. Having a set of printable documents that can be handed to players would go a long way here as a side item. Players love getting physical props as part of an adventure and it lets them reference back to things later by rechecking what was written there.

Word choices in the summary can be a bit questionable here. Feels more like an attempt to use obscure word combinations than a desire to convey information. I'll give you Gloam. It's kind of the assignment, but then you put sempiternal right beside it. Those who know me know I have a vocabulary to break an English teacher's soul, but I learned long ago that language is a double edged sword. The more words you know and use, the more focused the information you convey is. However, the more words you know how to use, the lower the number of people will understand what you are trying to say. You could convey basically the same thing by saying 'infinite', 'endless', or 'eternal', but have just about everyone reading understand what you were saying without needing to pull out the dictionary. The choice I suspect is meant to convey the Lovecraftian vibe given his penchant for odd words. Not ideal at the very start of things though since it's going to turn off a lot of people as being pretentious.

Next up, solve a riddle. You learn it in the adventure and apparently it's not something to guess or a set answer. No set answer is good. I've never had a lot of luck running riddles for players though. Far too often things go poorly. I'll reserve judgment for now. 764 words in now reviewing the module and I haven't made it past the first page. I am starting to worry.

Oh god... more walls of text I am expected to read out in a uniform block. Not going to lie here. I would have already deleted this by now if I wasn't reviewing. This isn't for me. I have no issue with narrative roleplay, but the daunting idea of reading out endless journal entries in this monotone visual is more than I am willing to put in. I want information about things they find, what they can do, etc. I don't even need stats in some cases, but so far, this document isn't giving me anything but a sense of having to read my homework out loud in front of the class. At least we do get the information on the face. One small mechanic and a note to just use it as I see fit when I want. It would be nice if it was clearer about things that might trigger it other than 'when engaging'. Being unkillable and seemingly able to just do whatever, this is feeling less and less like an TTRPG and more like a 'DM wants to do things so just go with it and don't expect to have success unless I allow it' situation. Narrative play can sometimes fall into that unfortunately. Rules are guard rails and rolls are simulations of chance over choice. When the rules just say I get to do anything as the DM, they're basically saying the players are going to be NPCs in the story I want to tell. It's one of the big reasons I am so much in favor of emergent storytelling over pre-planned stories.

Okay, onward to doors. I see a lot of grammar and spelling errors in here. Make sure to do another pass if you plan to expand this. As an idea, this is interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it's certainly different. I don't think I have ever seen a map where the GM is expected to make up all of the rooms themselves and the system elements offered are just procedurally generated door functionality. Functionally, I don't care for it. The tables are a bit odd so that the dark gray pops out and my brain tried to short circuit. The white blends so well with the gray background when next to the dark gray that it doesn't always register when I look at it.

I sit for a time feeling like I am missing something before deciding to instead rant about the Deus ex Machina element of item functionality. GM decides they jump in and out of existence as needed to ensure players can't resolve issues too easily. Instead of rewarding smart play in a narrative game, I am being told to punish them for thinking outside of the box. Better to just say nothing can travel beyond the room it came from and have it all be self-contained.

Then I am realizing I have 2 rows of information about door functionality that could probably been condensed down to a single chart, but only 1 row about the actual rooms. I know I see more below about that, but for now, it's telling me I have to make all of my own material up. I could go on. The fact this implies every player's character is in a separate location as I run things unless a door leads them to meet up isn't helping me feel like this is something that can be run without a few weeks of extra prep either. I end up just shrugging and moving on lest I get too deep into this area rather than trying to offer anything useful to you as a designer. The TLDR here is that I don't think this works as well for a person reading it as it does for you who is already intimately familiar with what you want it to do and how you want it to work.

Until now, I've largely not commented about the contents of the in-setting text read-aloud/print elements, but I have to point this single thing out. You have a picture on a page with a single statement under it. You use the word 'closet', but I suspect from the image and implication you meant 'wardrobe' here. With only one exception, every home I have lived in or visited had a door on the closet that led to a small space. Sometimes a walk-in space. A wardrobe though is never really a room. It's just a box with door-like openings on the front. Bonus, by using the word wardrobe, you're evoking C. S. Lewis. Never a bad choice.

The only 2 set rooms are fair enough. Not much happening in the first one and a combat at the end. Exiting is apparently just about saying something with confidence. No idea if half the players I have had over the years could ever make it out in that case. One in particular always spoke to questions in a tone that sounded like he was questioning his own answer. Players are expected to be all over the place, leading me as the GM to need to bounce back and forth between situations. Either someone is sitting for extended periods watching someone else play or everyone is getting a few actions in and being made to wait while I rotate around the group. I can handle this type of play well enough, but two things are noteworthy. First is that I know a lot of people over the years who could not have handled it well as GMs and would lead to bored players. Second is that even if it is handled well, it's a lot more work to maintain a whole night than a one-shot event is probably going to be worth for me.

You've got an uphill battle convincing people to play an unfamiliar system. You get some credit for the fact it did cause my son to go looking up your game out of love for the source material. That only gets you so far though. There's zero chance he could make it through reading this, let alone trying to run it. Even myself with decades of experience as a GM would have to sit down and do a lot of legwork ahead of time to make sure I was ready. You swung for the fences here with trying to create mood, add elements of old style writing, building out systems to add complexity and interest. It was a good attempt, but I am afraid it fell short of where I believe you wanted it. It's the scaffolding, but the building hasn't fully come together. At least for myself. If you get anything useful from this long-winded analysis done in real-time as I read it, then great. Not everyone will have the same experience I had, but maybe it will offer insights into where my thoughts were going as a GM while reading the document.

That's an absolutely fair assessment. My biggest reason for going with large numbers of lower fights was the high likelihood players would end up lost in there for a very long time. A war of attrition where there's only one safe location, only one place to get more rations, and only one location to get more torches. With bad luck or bad decisions, they could be trapped in there for multi-week sessions. I really wanted to playtest it better, but with hundreds of ways it could play out depending on group makeup, player styles, rotation choices, etc... it wasn't possible. I resigned myself to making the baseline creatures a bit lower and then allowing the danger clock/encounters to ratchet up the risk of major threats. One of the things I considered if I do an expanded was altering the danger clock so it not only increased the risk of major monsters, but also drops off the lower ones over time entirely so you get to a point where only the bigger threats are showing up. I'd still need to work out rooms, but with more space, I could have what appears in them change over time too!

Thanks for the input. Space ends up being the excuse for everything sometimes I fear. Logical, but still frustrating. I tried to make sure to convey point 1 through small elements, so glad it at least did come through. If I expand this module, I will likely add more similar things throughout. Regarding point 2, some breakage was intentional, requiring more consideration on how to handle things when rooms are split up from rotation. I did some testing to find if they could be accessed if someone was rotating things, but the combination of possibilities was beyond the scope of time to playtest. I was considering altering elements if I did an expansion. 10 especially given how important that area is. I considered making it so the core 6 coffins hold the phylactery and the two end ones hold a set encounter and reward between them. On 3, solving the cube will depend a lot on which order they rotated everything in. A single video may not be enough. However, I was deeply considering adding a link to a site for 'solve the rubiks' automation to help a GM resolve setting it back to standard start. In the end, space didn't allow for it and it seemed like someone could look it up easily on the internet. Still, one element I considered was to have grabbing the Phylactery yank them all out of the puzzle immediately to at least resolve the need to find their way back out.

Of course. It's kind of funny how I actually had experience that applied directly to such a wild ride style setup. Hope it is useful.

Dedicated cover. Seems like a lot of people are doing that this year. Not a huge issue, especially here where the page size is A6 instead of A5. Not a lot of real estate lost in exchange for some concept gains. My only critique would be that the choice of cover art feels far more like an old video game cover than an old paperback. Not speaking ill of it, simply letting you know the first impression I get from the visual.

Back cover is loaded with vital information. Good place to put things you want to reference regularly. 2 NPCs of note, an encounter table, a note on how to stat the encounters instead of needing to explain them completely. Pages don't include numbers visually, but I would still reference the page number the chimeric mutations are found in the Hybrid note. Especially for the print version where the page number explains itself by flipping pages. Last is a list of Science Fantasy relics. The trope is certainly suited to the era of pulp fantasy novels one might find in the Appendix N. A good number of these aren't just benefit alone, which is good. Having some 'curse' there as well means things get more interesting and requires more thoughtful usage.

The situation is straight forward and well marked with bold call-outs. Overview of the setting is clear enough as well, though calling out 'clawing kudzu' had me immediately glance over to the mutated flora chart. If only the word 'kudzu' was bold, I wouldn't have looked over. Adding clawing made it feel like a monster call out rather than a visual highlight. It's nice to add more flavor again in the form of magic as psionics. It's reskining rather than trying to create an all new system.

Lots of hook options. I like this. Many products focus entirely on rumor tables (I'm guilty of this as well sometimes) as a means of getting people involved. I like that you have multiple directions to approach it based on the type of players you have. Motivations of wealth, prophetic visions, hope of useful information, etc. Not just “A thing is happening over there”. Good choice.

Under the Chimera entry, is it meant to be 'rarely'? As to the Chimeric Lord, I like that he's not some endlessly obvious evil to defeat. Kind, wanting people treated fairly, etc. On entering the next page, your entries immediately are referencing valuable information. Number of guards, page number to find the hook, which Roman numeral to move to for location data. Good. Excellent in fact. Highly valuable as a GM trying to pull this out of a folder after a long time not looking it over.

Okay, technically I get the map first, but it's serviceable. I can talk about that though I suppose. You've kept things from getting dull by the use of the kudzu images snaking around the borders of pages, so art isn't really lacking here. There's always something to keep a page from looking like a wall of black and white. Heck, you even use the kudzu leaf as a bullet, which is really smart. The map style is in keeping with the cover, so makes sense. What I don't like about the map is just a personal thing.

Every mountain has the exact same markings. Cut and pasted peaks regularly spaced around the valley. I get it. They're not really important to the situation and players probably aren't going to go exploring them. Still, for me, many entries only have that map as the core visual in the interior. If you do an expansion, it would be worth it to consider remaking the map with a little more time and care put into the seemingly-unimportant elements. Feeling like time was taken on those small details lends a sense of care to the design of the map. At the end of the day, all that matters is knowing what is where and I understand that. A hand sketch with circles and lines can do the job. Still, you clearly cared enough to make it more than that and I feel it's worth the little extra time to go all the way. Not a point issue, just a sentiment.

Back to the adventure. Lots here for hints of what is going on. Some set interactions where player actions matter. Waterfall though bothers me. The minute some players realize there's no down side, I have known them to go gung-ho on the option offered. I'd add some sort of risk of negative effects rather than always positive mutations.

VIII notes several vehicle objects not noted in the document. Given the system neutral element, just noting something suitable as a similar concept for scale would be nice. For example, the skimcycle could easily be noted as “Speed equal to a horse at full speed up to 6 hours. If allowed to cool 4 hours, can be used again. If run more than 6 hours or not allowed to fully cool, may overheat and explode as a fireball 2:6.”

Under IX, I would bold the whole stench of death element. So now on to the keep. Not going to lie, it feels very weird doing a random dice roll to decide how many rooms are in the keep that capstones the entire adventure. Only the 4 seem to matter though and I'd have to figure out where in the world they all fit together. If I am running this on the fly, I am throwing all of that out and just using those 4 rooms. Small keep. It is what it is. I read it over and then go to scroll to the next page to see what we have next... and there's nothing there. We reached the end.

Kudos on the game setup. I was all in. I was lost in what was happening enough that I wasn't keeping track of what page I had reached. But the ending feels abrupt and painful. I know I can make all of what happens from there up. I do it all the time. But when I am pulling out a premade adventure, I am doing it so I don't have to do all of that extra legwork. This is an amazing first half of a larger event. I say do expand this. Add a second half to the adventure where players are forced to make a hard choice between a kind man with cruel methods verses a status quo being restored even if it isn't pleasant. No obvious good or evil, just two people with their own goals using what tools they have access to. Hard choices. These were my final thoughts as I got to the end.

For better or for worse, this was on the list of games I wanted to review. The why of that is the part that may annoy you or make you happy, depending on your goals. That cover image hit me and I was expecting this to be a somewhat whimsical silly game. I half expected it to be written in rhymes. Why? Because the combination of simple imagery, strong color distinction, and that font with the little person symbolically above it made me absolutely reliving my childhood. It feels like a full commitment to the Dr. Seuss evocation. I'll be judging the document on its own merits, but realizing it was designed to be horror enough to need a content warning was a slight disappointment. There goes my hopes of a monster stat block for a Lorax. Oh well.

I'm not familiar with the system in use here, so that's a point against me on offering useful insights on mechanics. Still, I am sure things will make sense enough once I dig in further. As I've said in other reviews, I am never a fan of more than a short paragraph of 'read-aloud' blocks. My style of running games doesn't fit with monologues well. I much prefer when these sorts of blocks include either a key point list at the end or bold words for key elements within the block of information to call my eye to what's going to matter on the fly. It allows those who like the read-aloud elements to have them while still allowing those like myself to have our own method addressed.

GM only section immediately references seventh son of the seventh son, evoking elements of Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son, and The Spook's Apprentice by Joseph Delaney. No idea if that was coincidence or intentional though. Especially given the similarity between Alvin and Alair. Weird little tale of what is going on. Missing a comma in the sentence about Yena though. Not a point issue, just pointing that out.

Not sure if moments are part of the system, but seem fine. Little tone aspects. At this point in reading, I don't see them more as bits of set dressing, but perhaps they come into play later. Treasures are alright. Two of the three are quite fun if the players decide to do something with them. Once I get down to the summer residence, I find a person who is hiding and knows what happened. When I look back at the GM info again to be sure I wasn't misremembering, it indeed says all of the people on the estate are there mesmerized. Perhaps change 'all' to 'most' in that case. Or 'nearly all' perhaps?

The mime enemies are,.. okay. Less than obvious weakness is fine considering it is caused by unholy beings. The list of 6 things they do feels a bit weak though. You are going to get a little unexpected backstory out of me here. In high school, despite being involved in athletics, I was also involved heavily in theater. One of the special clubs I was in was mime. Shocking they even had it as a club honestly. I spent 2 years studying mime and perfecting elements. There's a lot you can do with mime.

The most obvious option for combat is allowing some of the mimed objects and effects to become real. That's pretty bog standard though. What you can really make good use of is a little known element of mime. The line of silence (or circle of silence, etc). I'm not sure how much it gets talked about even in books and documentaries about mime. Basically, you may notice on almost every form of mime makeup, there's a very strong division point between the makeup and the skin. Sometimes it is just a crisp edge, other times it is marked with a black outline around the white. This is the silence line. For as long as it remains unbroken, the mime is supposed to stay silent. It's treated by some mime groups as a sort of sacred and unwavering barrier. To the point where the mime troop may banish you for breaking it and you need to smudge the line at the end of a performance before you can start talking again.

While it's a silly tradition I doubt most groups even follow, it is useful. It's a distinctive cut off between the real world and the performance. I could easily see you using this in your own setup here as a way to free the brothers. Smudge the line. Breaking the line frees them from the demon possession. Perhaps even allowing the demonic beings into our own world instead of inside the brother! Harder enemy in exchange for maybe saving a brother. Food for thought.

So then onto the last page I see an audience member wanting to escape. This strikes me oddly. Since the audience is captivated, this person has to be Yena right? But if it's Yena, I have a hard time imagining she's counted as a trap. Is the automaton going to be clawing her way out or something to cause trouble for players. It feels a little unclear here, at least for me how this person is still able to try escaping. The very next entry says Yena's there, so it obviously isn't her then. All quite confusing for understanding why there's now a second person not captivated in an adventure where 'everyone' is captivated and never leaves.

The slime's weakness is beautifully strange and entirely fitting. Without really knowing the system, no idea how well designed the enemies are for this, but they seem consistent in design. The ending itself implies there's no saving the brothers and they might recur as an enemy in the future. You gave a few options for player actions at the end, so it's not a railroad event exactly. I just really like the idea of a possibility of undoing the deal that transformed the brothers. Doubt most players would figure it out, but still noteworthy.

So overall, seems like it could be fun. There's a lot of silly turned horror possible. Lord knows there's a lot of sources for ideas from things. Killer Klowns comes to mind. The layout is clean and everything felt easy enough to find. It was consistent, but felt a little short. That's not an insult though. Wanting to see more and have a better feel for the setting, world, and adventure are a good thing. Nicely done on this overall.

Thanks for the thoughts. You are correct about blue. It was a solution on how to make a problem into a feature. Early on, I realized I could save both space on the map for vital information to go as well as create an unsettling mechanic if I didn't turn those into map sections, but doorways into the extradimensional space where the box is actually hidden. With more space, I would have created some custom elements to that space. As to Rubik, I don't have a good excuse for that one. As many passes to look for typos as I did, I should have caught it.

For some reason, my computer is trying to treat the pages as 3 A4. When I tried to convert over to spread and see how the system handled it for print, it left a lot of extra space. At first, I thought maybe they were A4 pages instead of A5, but when I did the pixel rate to dpi conversions, it was within the A5 size range with only a few pixels short on the long sides. I have no idea what is going on there, but since the system says it is indeed A5, I have to assume there's just some small issue I don't understand.

I do a quick scan of the document and see it's largely a dungeon with the first page dedicated to system-elements. There's a map referenced with a functional link. I can only assume it was due to issues with the reprinting of someone else's maps. I'll be honest here, I would have been happier with a map included. Especially considering you only used 3 of your 4 pages. Even if the map 'quality' was a little lower, having it with the document to directly reference back to instead of linking to a second page is more in keeping with my preferences. If I was printing this out, that map wouldn't automatically get included on the 2 sides after all.

System neutral conversions and notes are comprehensive. I doubt most GMs would have any issues finding their way around the information. The down side is it does make the pages with information feel cluttered. I found myself referencing back to page 1 a lot just to be sure I was understanding correctly. Was this one bold underline italic or bold underline? The little arrow was paths right? Seems like a path but let me double check. You get the idea. Based on the fact this is referenced as part of a larger setup, I can only assume this visual language is shared across the entire product line. Probably good to stay consistent, but it's a bit rough for me personally on a visual level. I could see applying other techniques to help here some.

At the very least, you can probably eliminate some of the redundancies. I don't need to know tables are bold italic. I can see a table is a table without the need for any real call-out there. Similarly, you note items with a symbol, but also with italics. Chapters/Rooms/Important Areas can collapse into a single entry since they share markings. Things like that could shave away some of the cluttered feel to the page. It's actually strange. So many entries I have pointed out how helpful calling out details would be for some key points. Here, I find myself seeing so many things called out that my eye doesn't naturally land on anything.

Clear background, clear goal. Always good to start with. Key faction noted right away, also good. Mystery as a module nature is nice. So many are find items, kill things, fight BBG. Something where the goal is clear, but the details are fuzzy and there's not some obvious target to attack makes for a nice change of pace.

Crime scene is nice. Lots of things to look at, lots of ways for different players to shine by searching. Even missing a clue or two won't be an issue. You might not get the whole picture, but you can see enough of the puzzle to have leads. If it was a larger work, I would add some red herrings (not dead ends, but things that lead down a less direct path to answers) and maybe a few more locations to explore. Given the space constraints, not a huge issue here.

By the second location, I realize the path element can be removed entirely. Every location can lead to every other location. No real reason to include it here. I make it to entry 3 when I realize the linked map doesn't seem to have anything to do with this set of independent locations. Am I missing something or no? And then I see the Cemetery mentions a crypt. Ah.. okay, that's probably what the map is for. From the way it's described, I don't really need a map though. On the fence about the whole map situation at this point.

Anyway, final encounter isn't ridiculous. Balance will probably vary a bit from system to system, but overall I could see the level set noted working for this fight in a lot of the systems I am familiar with. Minimal tweeks needed. All told, there's a lot of chances to use abilities, a lot of times to explore RP, a reasonable set of leads to explore the mystery and a capstone fight to pull it all together. Fair work. Single piece of art at the end isn't doing anything for me, but it's not hurting things either.

I still am surprised at the use of only 3 pages and still feel confused regarding the mention of maps in the explanation page, but no apparent need for a map, nor direct inclusion. Maybe it's me. As I said, the amount of call-out information kind of makes me want to go cross eyed. Items, mysteries, fights, traps. Lot of things in a surprisingly tight package. While I don't know if I'd run this at my own tables, there's certainly a number of things I can take away from this and use in different ways at my table. Sometimes that's more valuable at the end of the day. Thanks for taking the time to participate and for doing something atypical with your adventure!

I kind of just stared at this entry for a while. I normally take time to look at it as a whole, consider art elements, get an impression of the piece before even reading. I'm at a bit of a loss right from the start here. There's... um... text. No clear game elements at an overview level (I am sure I will find them as I read), no stat blocks, no call out areas, no...um... game. It looks like a solid length of prose. Like a short story more than a game. Kind of curious as to how this comes together. The only real visual comes in the form of columns. They're symmetrical I suppose. I can see italics vs regular font, so there's that. I feel like even at a glance, it's going to be all about the theme and writing here. So, I guess I am digging in with no real insights.

We start with a title and an overview of the backstory and expectations of what is going to happen. Clear enough. Might be an interesting means to set up players who have never played a system to learn that system. Works alright as a baseline. Nothing making me stand up and clap, but nothing crazy either.

And then I get to garrison and realize I don't know what system this is for. It mentions Ego (my capitalization here) in character creation. With it not being bold or capitalized, I initially was about to dismiss it as just being an odd phrasing, but got wondering if it maybe was tied to the system. With that, I moved from the jam page to the landing page (jam judges don't see those automatically fyi) and find out it is a homebrew system made DURRING the jam period.

I mean, kudos for the dedication, but this then got me thinking about how much you put into the system time-wise. So now I download that. It doesn't get measured in any way for your vote elements, but personal curiosity required it. I expected maybe a 5 to 10 page ultralight TTRPG. What I found was over 40 pages of game. I apologize, I'm not reading over the rules. I skimmed at best because there are over 300 entries and this wasn't part of the judging criteria.

Sir, allow me to commend you on your dedication to shooting yourself in the foot in the most spectacular way humanly possible. I don't know how much time you spent building this system, but the time you spent on that could have gone into your actual judged entry. Based on what I am reading in the document, it could just as easily have been system neutral with almost no changes. You could have spent all that time refining this, having people look over it and make suggestions, etc. I won't lie here, it's hard not to want to judge it based on that knowledge rather than just the content (such as it is). Okay, onward.

Okay, I read the italic 'read this to players' text... but I can assure you good sir I am never reading something this long at my table. It doesn't have bold for key elements either so I can't skim and do my own descriptions. These are the blocks of orchestrated text that kept me from using many modules from decades ago. Some people like them, but without bold elements or a bullet list nearby, I have to go in and create a short list myself to use. If you are someone who really enjoys these, more power to you. You'll get a lot more happy GMs if you can find a way to keynote them with bold elements though so ones like myself can instantly know the important elements at a glance.

I get to the end of the Garrison section and there's some RP, so that's good. I never liked games where everything was combat and nothing else. I know I'm the outlier there though. The thing is, there's very little game to this. A couple of stat influences on social interactions, but there's not been anything to do for players but talk so far. Even some of that was semi-scripted as well though.

Next section (apparently there are only two) starts back up with another long read-aloud section. In that section, you explicitly state what a player imagines (can imagine). Personal thing, but I never tell a player what they think or may think of something unless they are under some form of mind control. I describe it, sometimes in floral or moody terms, and let them decide what they imagine. Nothing to vote on about that, just something to consider.

I'm going to be honest with you here. If I wasn't doing a voting review, I would have checked out several times in all of this. I'm on page 2 and so far the only game here has been a couple reactions from NPCs based on character stat blocks to see who they like more and a navigation check. A lot of this feels more like it was meant to be the first chapter in a novel rather than an actual game.

Halfway through the second column of the second page, I find something any player can sink their teeth into. The guide goes away and is clearly attacked badly. Considering she is a veteran and they are newbies, seems like a rough setup though. Any threat bad enough to do that is probably not one they all survive. I will say here I wouldn't have the slab fall only as they near the entry. That feels very 'DM refuses to let you do something smarter than the planned adventure' to me. Instead, have the sound of the slab falling happen in the same time frame as the unseen combat. This way, if they reasonably backtrack, the sound becomes an 'aha' feeling of recognizing what had happened. Same situation, very different vibe.

Every failed strike hitting Sarah in the fight is pretty harsh. Low level characters are likely going to end up hitting her a lot. I don't see any stats for her character here though. The monster I assume is in the TTRPG book, but is this NPC in there also? If so, strange choice to include in the book. If not, I need something to work with here. At least her existing HP if nothing else.

And then we are again doing the 'door shuts so you have to do what I want' trick. Same feeling as above for the same reasons. Then it's wandering with rolls to decide how they do. I don't know your system, so not sure how likely getting a 10 or 5 are. Presumably low enough not to TPK or have them wander out with no idea of what is going on. Instead of a list of things they can find out with exploration or successful rolls, you have another large text block to read. Seems it's an 'all or nothing' answer if they decide to dig deeper than 'horned things worshiped stars'. Sure.

Lastly we end the (well not so much adventure, but...) path with a, um, monster eating lesser monsters while also pooping them out. Was...this intentional? I know some entries have small language barriers, but nothing in this made me think it was a second language. She's just swallowing them hole and immediately sending them back out? Is this supposed to be birthing them or was it just meant to feel horrific? Not the worst part of this encounter, but the one that gave me the most pause.

Again, I am assuming stats are in the book somewhere. Again, I don't like telling players how they feel. Just have insight say it doesn't seem like a fight they could win short of a miracle and let them decide if they want to dive into a pile of death or not. It's written as if they automatically escape somehow if spotted. It also says they unlock a new passageway when they do. Unlock how? Does a wall fall away? Do they literally have to find a key and unlock it? Does the hand of God descend and hold it open for them? Don't know, they just do.

We then conclude with one of two situations and telling the players exactly what they remember/think. The end. I get it. It's meant to be a poignant reminder of the foreshadowing from before. I also get how I am sure I have come across as a patronizing jerk through most of this review. I endeavor to be painfully honest and to point out all of what works and all of the ways things can improve.

Digging in to see what was going on with the companion TTRPG you designed here tells me you seem to have a narrative focus in your interests. Nothing wrong with that. I think you've let it remove some of what makes a game a game though. There's no map, no npc stats, a third of the document is read-aloud bits, and ever player choice is basically as follows: (Do a thing? If yes, go forward. If no, go forward anyway but some issue occurs.) I get that player's don't always have a choice, but they need to feel like they do. Quantum ogres work for some games, but you have to paint the illusion they were always there rather than you shuffling the board. Those doors are probably my single biggest complaint about this adventure.

It reads more like a story with a few choose your own adventure moments. It's clear you have passion here. You crafted a story with the space you had and put a lot of thought into what you wanted to say or have happen. You were so passionate, you spent 11 times more effort/page space into a core system design than the actual jam itself. I can't judge on your TTRPG. I can't judge on that massive effort you must have put into it. I can only judge on what is on a single sheet of letter-paper. 4 A5 pages of text. No art. Almost no stats, no bold usage, only one meaningful choice they can make.

This entry upsets me, not because it was terrible. It upsets me because I can see both the core of an idea worthy of exploring and the tremendous amount of inspiration you felt to make a whole system. I truly wish you had worked to refine the core element of the jam more. Even if it meant using another person's system. Even if it meant just making it system agnostic. I think you have potential to make some amazing things and this entry isn't reflective of your potential. Please... Please don't let my words prevent you from doing more. I hope they instead are something you can allow to sit for a time and then with time light a path to greater things in the future. Keep that passion. Keep growing as a designer.

Thank you. I understand the sentiment about the cover. I wanted to fit certain non-play elements in and that real estate was the best choice. Putting the item up there was a last minute decision that may or may not have paid off depending on who you ask.

Thank you. It was pretty tough to fit in there given how much space the map elements ate. I'm pleased to know it came through properly

Thank you. Glad you liked it