Uncaged: Faces of Sigil Review and Rework Part 1

You can buy it here

[UPDATE 1/6/21: I no longer support spending money on products that benefit Zak S, or giving him positive attention and connection. The short version is that I find credible claims that he has engaged in unacceptable behavior and not made up for it. For more detail, see here for the core of the accusations. To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

While I've been working on the Fellhold reboot recently, I've had an unofficial policy to avoid reading too much "reference material" in the form of other RPG supplements. This is for a couple of reasons. First off, as Zak has pointed out multiple times, a lot of what's been put out for as "Official D&D stuff" over the years has not been great, so why do I want to read mediocre stuff if I'm trying to make great stuff? Secondly, I don't want to get "locked" into imitating stuff that I've seen elsewhere, or read something I like and copy it and miss the amazing idea I might have had on my own.

Instead, I've been trying to hold off when I hear about a book that might do something I'm interested in. So, if a cyberpunk city supplement sounds appealing, instead of reading it and mining it for ideas, I try to think about what could be in there or what I would put in there - and then I can just make that stuff up for Fellhold. Later on I can go back and compare the thing I made with the source that gave me the idea, and see if I missed anything or if their way was totally better.

For some reason, though, the idea of Uncaged: Faces of Sigil just kept creeping into my brain, causing an itch I finally had to scratch. So, over the weekend I gave it a read, and it was basically what I expected (in both the good and bad sense). I probably would have been better off with reading the thumbnail synopsis and then making my own version of it, like I described above, but like I said, I had an itch and I decided to scratch it. Since I gave in and scratched that itch, though, I figured I should do something useful with it, and instead of just telling you what I would change, I'm actually reworking it into something useful (coming up in Part II). Enjoy and let me know what you think!

The Good

First off, the basic idea of what the book is/is for is really good. It's a collection of NPCs that are "ready to go" when a GM needs them. Each is meant to be useful on their own, but they also have various relationships with each other. For an urban campaign, NPCs are where the game is, so having interesting, ready to go NPCs is just as (if not more) important as having a monster manual. I think the reason we haven't seen more of this is because making up interesting/useful people is usually easier than thinking up interesting/useful monsters. Our entire brain is wired to care about other people and their interactions, so we have a lot to fall back on when it comes both to making up people and interacting with them. Making monsters that are fun and interesting when you interact with them in fictional, abstract combat, though, that's tough. 

All that being said, getting good, interesting NPCs handed to you does essentially the same work that good, interesting published monsters do: it saves the GM work and breaks up the "samey-ness" that might happen when they make everything up themselves. Especially in a kooky place like Sigil, getting help with the NPCs is a fantastic idea. And the book does a good job of not just giving you a bunch of humans, elves, dwarves, and other standard types that you could find just anywhere. It takes full advantage of the plane part of Planescape, giving you ogre mages and Genasi and fiends and modrons and sentient plants and more. Another place where the characters shine is that it takes full advantage of all of the levers available with alignment, faction, and personal motivations. There are good characters working with evil characters because they share common ends, there are folks who share a faction but have totally different reasons for working for them, and there are evil characters that can quite likely be useful to the PCs. 

Oh, and how have I gotten this far without mentioning the art? Every single character gets a gorgeous large-size illustration by Tony Diterlizzi (well, the "main" ones - there's a handful at the back with less detail, more on that soon). My favorite one is Zadara the titan. Besides being nice for all the reasons that illustrations in RPG books are always nice, for a book of characters, the illustrations are damn near essential. They make each character more concrete and gives the GM a way to differentiate them. Instead of lengthy description, they can just turn the book to the players and go "they look like this". Now, they could have done more to make the illustrations useful rather than just pretty, but more on that later.

My favorite piece in the book

The various characters are all linked to other people in the book in different ways, and as you read through, you become aware of a few distinct but sometimes related plots. This is actually kind of a neat idea, and I think with a deft enough hand could be done "artistically" - kind of how the key in Deep Carbon Observatory is ordered so that the GM reading through the adventure has a building sense of discovery of what's going on with a "punch line" at the end, or how the interconnections between the different things going on in Maze of the Blue Medusa become clear as you read through the key in order. I'm imagining something that has a metafictional justification for being a collection of short biographical sketches - like a book of royal genealogy or a guide to members of a society or something, and as you read through it, you get pieces of a story that becomes clear by the end (but each entry is still a useful and gameable reference). Anyhow, in Uncaged, you don't get as carefully crafted a build up, but the characters are linked into intrigues and their are hooks to involve the players, which is nice.

In the appendix at the end of the book, there’s a handful of less detailed NPCs that get about a paragraph or two of description, and no detailed workup of powers/combat abilities and so forth. Then you get a half dozen “quick ideas”, which give a name, a bare minimum stat line (race, gender, hit dice, class, level, faction, alignment), and then two sentences or so of characterization. Honestly, these are some of my favorite characters and some of my favorite writing in the book. A booklet of 50-100 interesting, evocative NPCs in this format with a little thumbnail mugshot? That would be awesome.

In terms of layout and information architecture, there's a few high points, but unfortunately, most of what I have to say will be in the next section. As for the good stuff, though, I almost overlooked the table of contents, which gives a little one sentence description of who/what this character is and why you might want to reference them. They're terse and evocative and useful, which is great. The introduction explains the point of the book and how to use the characters presented, and it’s a pretty useful orientation. Within the write-ups themselves, each character has a summary that takes up about a quarter of a page, and in typical late 2E fashion focuses mainly on describing special powers and combat info, but there are some tips on how to roleplay and where to find them. The best part of the summary, though, is the “See Also” section. This little blurb tells you the other NPCs from the book that are especially connected to this NPC and mentioned in their write up.

For the whole book, my favorite piece of information architecture is at the back in the “Ties That Bind” appendix. This brief section provides a list of which NPCs run establishments and what sort it is, which NPCs provide services (and what they are) and little diagrams that show the various intrigues, with a summary of what the intrigue is about. Besides the specific plots, there is also a diagram of “Bigwigs with Jink” which shows the three especially rich/influential people presented in the book, who are their allies and who they oppose. This whole section neatly summarizes the interesting and gameable stuff throughout the book, and it is very much appreciated. There’s also a little section on locations mentioned in the book organized by Ward, with a brief mention of it’s relevance (so and so lives here, this guy runs it, et cetera). 

This is a pretty close runner up for my favorite piece

The Bad

Okay, so a lot of what we’re going to talk about here will not come as a surprise, and a lot of it is more along the lines of how they fell short with the good stuff. Like, there’s nothing terrible about the book, and most of the stuff I’m most upset about is seeing the potential implied not get fulfilled. I’m gonna rag on it a bit here, but it’s all the set up for how we could do something better with the same concept and same characters in part II.

First off, remember back in the “Let’s Talk About Campaign Settings” post on the second edition settings where we talked about padding? Yeah. That. This book is an exercise in padding. A disertation on padding. The platonic ideal of padding. Okay, I exaggerate, obviously, but the padding is strong with this one.

Above, where I said that you don’t need to waste time on a lengthy description if you have a good picture? They do that anyway. You get long backstories and detailed descriptions of stuff that could be usefully (and more interestingly) summarized. There was even a “bait and switch” moment I experienced when reading the introduction. First we get this sentence:

Each entry in this volume includes the same basic information about a Character: personal history, physical appearance, goals, personality, occupation or activities, favorite hangouts in Sigil, and potential connections or utility to the player characters.

And I’m thinking “wow, those are some good headers for NPC entires, if each entry is organized with those, you’ll get plenty of info and it’ll be easy to reference!” Then I read the next sentence:

But you won't find these topics set apart and labeled within the body of the text. Each entry is meant to be read as a narrative -  one that tells you everything you need to know about a character without reducing him, her, or it to a list of facts.

But, but, but an NPC is a list of facts - that’s what’s useful to the GM. They don’t become a character until those facts are acted out or described by a person. I actually laughed out loud when I read this because it so clearly embodies the late 90’s RPG writing ethos that is now so thoroughly rejected by the DIY D&D crowd. Later on there’s a nod to the fact that that’s not a useful format for GMs in the heat of play, so that’s why they have the “Quick Chant” summary sections mentioned above.

The trouble with the “Quick Chant” sections is that they display mid to late 2E’s typical obsession with combat stats, special powers, and statting everything by PC rules - an obsession that would later find its full flowering in third edition. Now, don’t get me wrong - if you are using all those powers and they are relevant to your game, I’m sure they’re useful to have called out and summarized, but they’re kind of weirdly intermixed with the roleplaying info in the summary. In order, you get a detailed statline, a description of all special abilities (and every character has several), then you get three or four words to summarize their personality, then special equipment, then spells, then spell-like abilities, then the location you can find them, then notes on roleplaying them, then notes on running them in combat, and finally the “see also” we mentioned earlier. Does that order make much sense to you? Cos it doesn’t to me. 

Speaking of combat and special powers - almost all of the characters listed in here are powerful, classed figures. And the descriptions of them often specifically indicate that they use their high level powers to stop people from screwing up the status quo. Want to steal something from that shop? Too bad, she’s got crazy golems made out of the wares. Try to fight the nice gnomish bookstore owner? He’ll wreck your whole day with crazy illusions and his demon paladin friend. 

Such shenanigans could be handled well if they gave a feeling of “wow, Sigil’s a crazy place where you would need ingenious ways to stay on top of things!" Instead, almost all of these kinds of examples feel painfully specifically like “if the players try to fuck with this person or place, here’s how you shut them down.” It’s gross.

This Guy Really Wants to Rub Your Shoulders

Now, there are one or two people who are special or influential despite being 0-level normal folks, but the correlation is usually important = good at fightings. Another typical 2E-ism is that there’s a lot of powerful “good guy” NPCs that are probably intended to be DM-stand-in allies for the PCs, which is kind of boring. One of these powerful good guys runs a day spa. The entry goes on at great length about the services available there (manicures, pedicures, acupuncture, full body massage, facials, you get the drift) and how amazing they are. Somebody contributing to this was way into spas. Don’t get me wrong - spas can be good stuff for RPGs, check out Arnold’s adventure here. But there’s zero indication of why the PCs might care. There’s no intrigue happening there, the spa doesn’t grant you any bonuses or remove any conditions, it reads as if it’s simply a place to encourage “good roleplaying” of the late 90’s sort - describe stuff about your character because it isn’t rules-relevant, or you’re not really roleplaying.

Guess I got a bit worked up about spas too. 

Let’s go back to some of the issues here. I mentioned before that the book includes several intrigues or plots that various NPCs are involved in, which is good. What is less good is that the intrigues are a bit boring and are lacking any serious “so what?” for the players. The main intrigue involves an angel (excuse me, “deva”) running upper planar weapons to the Blood War between demons and devils (ahem, between the Baatezu and Tanar’ri). The angel figures all the fiends will wipe each other out and stick to their own turf if they don’t have to go get weapons elsewhere. Some evil people involved think that the weapons will keep the war going, which they want for their own evil reasons. And some people just want to make a bunch of cash running the weapons across the planes. That’s it - that’s the plot. 

It assumes that the players will care about the blood war because they’re heroes and fiends are bad, right? Another typical 2E-ism. Or, even worse, it perhaps assumes that the GM will present clues to a thing, and the players will investigate because that’s the adventure that was prepared. 

It took me awhile to realize something reading this book, but it was thinking about this plot where I realized something was ringing false. The book sounds like a very sandboxy kind of tool - a grab bag of NPCs to be used as needed as the PCs run around a big, complex city. Having grown used to the modern DIY D&D mindset, I assumed it really was just such a sandboxy tool, since it was not a specific "adventure", where I would have been on guard for railroady bullshit. 

Near the end of the book, though, it clicked that this was written by people caught in the grip of an age of pre-planned storyline adventures. Even if the intent was for the characters to be used in a sandboxy way, the plots they pursue all feel just a bit too “complete” - like "this is the story this person is a character in, no others!" Each PC has very specific goals, actions, and interactions spelled out, and the connections between the NPCs are very tight. This makes the NPCs less modular, which is a shame. Any one character kind of needs all the other ones they're involved with to do anything more interesting than provide a good or service. In other words, when you bring one of these NPCs in as written, you're committing to a particular storyline adventure.

I will say, to the writers'/editors' credit, none of these plots have a specific outcome defined, so maybe I should say a pseudo-storyline type adventure.

Okay, enough ranting about what is lacking in the intrigues, I think you get the idea. Let’s talk about the writing a bit. As mentioned before, it’s quite wordy, and every entry would benefit tremendously from being maybe one quarter the length (which, coming from me is a bit rich, I know). The entries are also presented in a variety of “voices” - sometimes a personal narrative, sometimes an interview, sometimes the typical disembodied all knowing sage of monstrous manual tradition. If this had been done well, it might have been interesting, but instead it just felt kind of grating to me. Your tastes may vary on this obviously, but it felt a little to me like “ooh, look how creative we’re being!” 

The quality of NPCs and their write ups was also variable, which I presume is a remnant of the fact that they came from multiple sources (several appeared first in Dragon, some in adventures, - the original sources are included at the back of the book. No authors are listed in the credits, just an editor. Presumably the “special thanks” section includes the authors). On the plus side, the Planescape cant isn’t too strong - I’m a fan of it when used sparingly, and this one gets it about right. There’s a bit of fun at their own expense - a rogue modron presented in the book uses too much cant and uses it wrong. Unfortunately, some of the humor is fairly “hurr, hurr, see what I did there, guys?” - such as a character in conversation “forgetting” that the realms are on Toril, not Krynn (Get it, you guys? Forgotten Realms, you guys. You guys.). 

And speaking of published campaign settings, I felt like they were referenced too often when talking about the prime material plane. I assume this was TSR trying to push the “interoperability” of Planescape with the other campaign settings, but it just made the prime feel smaller - you keep referencing the same three planets when there’s supposed to be an infinite number out there? Weak sauce. Another way that some of TSR’s questionable business drivers crept into the book is that you get a few wiffs of loathsome metaplot. Some of the entries reference the build up to the forthcoming faction war. I know this sort of stuff was all the rage back then, but I hated it even as a kid, and I hate it even more now. Bleh, keep your stories out of my campaign setting, we’ll make our own, thanks.

Pretty picture, not so easy to quickly find character details

Ahem. Let’s talk about the problems with the layout and organization. Despite the positive things I mentioned above, overall I was not super happy with this aspect of the book. Each NPC entry is an average of 3-5 pages, and that is nothing but straight up prose. Nothing is done to set off important or rules-relevant material in this wall of text, the only formatted section is the “Quick Chant” described above. This sidebar is printed over a faux-parchment texture that made the text over it damn near unreadable at times (at least in my pdf scan - it might read better in print). 

The entries are basically in alphabetical order, but because some characters have last names and others don't, the fact that characters are ordered by their last names if they have one made it somewhat non-obvious, and I imagine it would make flipping through difficult. As I said when talking about the introduction, I would have loved for each NPC to have the sections they detailed as actual headers, or at a minimum, have a little thumbnail that describes that stuff along with the six pages of so-so prose.

And the art! The art was beautiful and large, which is appreciated, but more could have been done, oh yes, much more! Little thumbnails of the character’s faces in the table of contents, some kind of icon for the different plots, more diagrams of how characters are related to each other right there in their entires. Reprints of the art in another section without text so you can show players without giving stuff away. More of it bigger, because you didn't waste space on thousands of words. Basically it was presented as nothing more than decoration, when it could have also been treated as a game aid.

What I'm Gonna Do About It

Okay, enough grousing: since I went to the trouble of reading all of and thinking about what it could have been, hell, should have been - let's just totally go there.

Here’s what I'm thinking:

     - Create headings for the essential stuff and organize the content below them

     - Summarize the good stuff, cut out the bad, lightly edit 

     - Make little face thumbnails for everybody and include them anywhere that character is referenced

     - Tweak the plots to be more open ended, with more hooks for self-interested PCs

     - Create icons for each plot and include them whenever that plot is referenced

     - Make "no words" pictures to show the players - "They look like this"

     - Re-organize the order based on the first word of the name

     - Make better diagrams of relationships and include them with each entry (with the thumbnails from above)

I'll post the results in part II, but there's a lot of culling involved, so I'm not sure how long it'll take. Stay tuned.

"Review of The Pale Lady" and "The Squid, the Cabal, and the Old Man"

So, a couple of adventures that were add-ons to the Better than Any Man kickstarter have been published in the last few months, and I picked them both up today: The Pale Lady by +Zzarchov Kowolski and The Squid, the Cabal, and the Old Man by Andre Novoa. Since both are rather brief, and since I got both at the same time, I figured I'd do a double feature review, especially since there's some nice compare and contrast items. As with previous reviews, I will follow +Gus L 's lead in format and approach.

Spoilers follow! So turn back if you plan on playing either of these.

The Pale Lady

The Good

This adventure is written in Zzarchov’s usually enjoyable writing style - brief, readable, just a hint of silliness, but with his usual “actually darker than you might think” treatment of subjects. It is admirably concise and the set up is interesting.

The layout is clean and easy to read, and the art is somewhat sparse but attractive and evocative. It reminds me of WFRP art in a good way. More importantly, all of the content is admirably concise, focusing on what's interesting and necessary for adventure.

The Pale Lady is an interesting and well done version of the “aloof, amoral faerie” that I rather like. Spending the night with the Pale Lady is at once mechanically significant, creepy, gross, and “magical”, so well done there.

Speaking of the Pale Lady's creepiness, the Rabbit Men are wonderfully creepy and disturbing, and the whole concept of children abducted, neutered, and enslaved if they aren’t sacrificed in a ritual? Yikes (in a good way).

The mirror claiming it is Lucifer is an interesting choice. I find this a much more compelling and useful “unreliable narrator” situation than the poor crazy guy at the beginning of the adventure, where gamer sense will figure out you should believe him pretty quick, unless you constantly screw with your players.

Along the lines of the Lucifer bit, I like the possibly-divine take on the Word of Creation. The benefits are mechanically interesting and do a good job of conveying the flavor of “divine knowledge beyond normal mortal comprehension” - but then, I’m a sucker for the concept of magic = divine language.

It is also nice that there are multiple ways to “win” this adventure, depending on what the players define as a “win” (save the slaves, figure out the cube, loot the place, kill the scary elf witch, et cetera). 

All told, this is one of the more directly usable LotFP modules, even if you aren’t hardcore into the "LotFP adventure ethos", while still retaining the feeling of creepy weirdness. It also is perhaps more “modular” than many LotFP (or other) adventures, being neatly set apart from normal reality, easily engaged with to a varying degree, and then never dealt with again if desired. So, it's an easy way to drop some weirdness into your campaign without committing to possible apocalypse-level events.

The Bad

In an RPG, I’m not sure how much mileage you’ll get out of the “unreliable narrator as quest-giver” idea - your players will be inclined to believe that crazy crap is real, especially in the context of someone telling them about a possible adventure. It's an interesting concept, but I don't know how interesting or useful it would be at the table.

Likewise, not sure how I feel about the fake “reward” offered in the form of the not-really-magical sword the nuns have. It totally makes sense, and the adventure offers plenty of other payoffs, but it feels a bit “gotcha” to me, with very little information given to the players to inform their decision as to whether it's something they might want to undertake an adventure to get until it's too late. 

Inside the Pale Lady's estate, my main issue is with the structure of the main puzzle. The library and laboratory offer a few clues on the cube, but it still feels a bit like a one-solution puzzle - ask the Pale Lady or you're screwed. But maybe I’m not crediting player ingenuity given the available clues enough. Plus, getting inside the cube is hardly "required" so maybe it ought to be difficult.

Speaking of the cube, I’m a little torn on what seems to be the central “Gimmick” of the adventure - on the one hand, it’s an interesting philosophical issue, but on the other, I don’t know how much bringing it up will add to a game or group dynamic, but on the other other hand, I did rather enjoy the conundrum in The Prestige, so maybe I ought to just appreciate this. I guess my main concern is that the philosophical debate that I totally agree is likely to happen at the table might not actually make the game of sitting around the table with your friends pretending to be elves and magic users and what not any better. But maybe I don't have a broad enough idea of what the game is about.

What I Would Change to Run It

Honestly, I don't think much needs changing here for most settings. In the re-reboot of my own Fellhold setting that I am currently working on, I don't think there are elves/fairies, nor is there a proper "right" church. So, the Pale Lady becomes either a demon or a massively powerful witch, I probably keep her Rabbit Men rabbits for the sake of creepiness (goats could work too, but would have less incongruity to trade on), and the Divine Word cube would become some kind of runic object, probably a relic of giants or greater demons. I'd play the crazy quest giver more for pity than for "he's nuts, yo", and I'd either stress the poorness of the quest-encouraging nuns, or else give their offered treasure some benefit (or maybe offset it by combining it with some tangible benefit with being high in the Nuns' books as do-gooders). 

Really, though, one of the best things I can say about this module is that I don't think most campaigns would have to change much to use it, but it manages to do that without feeling generic.  

The Squid, the Cabal, and the Old Man

The Good

First off, I rather like the choice of material - ever since I read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, I’ve had a soft spot for these characters and this time period. Further, I also rather like Foucalt’s Pendulum and of course Mr. Lovecraft, so the stated influences for this adventure hit a significant portion of my buttons. It helps matters that the writing is friendly and conversational with just a hint of “not quite native speaker” that adds to the perceived enthusiasm and charm of the text. It's obvious that the author, Andre Novoa, genuinely cares about this adventure and wants you to have a good time with it, and that's nice.

The look and feel is pretty good, with well chosen fonts and decorative elements, even if nothing in the font choices or layout jumps out and makes me go "yes! this is the best ever!" Also, +Kelvin Green 's illustrations work well with the feel of the adventure and look good where they're placed.

I love that the set up for the adventure is “here’s three guys and three places, here’s their relationship, and here’s a reason for the players to get involved. Go!” Andre takes some time to tell you not to sweat any particular way for this charged situation to play out, and to roll with whatever develops in play. That's nice. It’s an excellent example of a situation presented, rather than a plot, to reference the Alexandrian.

I like the facts about the setting (late 18th century England) presented as sidebars - they're useful if you want them, but not stuff you have to memorize to run the adventure successfully. And none of the detail given is stuff that doesn't matter to play. As a quick aside, English currency is made of madness. Clearly, the inclusion thereof is meant to further the Lovecraftian vibe. Seriously, though, even though I am someone who values the more naturalistic English/Imperial/Standard units of measurement over the soulless and foul Metric system, my American brain just flat out can’t understand His/Her Majesty's Currency - which is perhaps ironic, given Mr. Newton’s later role as master of the Royal Mint.

Anyhow, returning to the adventure, the imaginary cabal is a pretty nice touch, especially since there is a real secret organization with similar (but by no means identical) goals to the imaginary one. I’m not positive how much the players will get out of this distinction, though, unless they end up chumming up with Newton as well as conducting a lot of investigation. Still it provides a nice roleplaying cue for Newton - paranoid, jumping at ghosts everywhere.

Speaking of the real secret organization, I like the brain-stealing cult quite a bit, and I enjoy their being tied into historical acts of lost knowledge, but I feel like worshipping space squids was the low-hanging fruit in the Lovecraftian orchard. For my tastes, a Mi-Go rip off would have been more fitting, that is if you’re bent on using the trappings of a familiar Lovecraftian beastie. You could always take the approach of some other LotFP modules and use the concepts of cosmic horror with some wholly new monsters/creatures/situations.

Anyway, moving into the adventure locations, Kelvin’s maps are fantastic. I’ve grown to appreciate them even more since I’ve (partially) run Forgive Us for my home group. Also, it is definitely appreciated that they don’t waste space describing normal rooms or regular house stuff - the detailed maps do all of that detail for you, and it works. Only the rooms/stuff that matters gets called out in the key.

Hah! While we're talking about keys, in Newton's secret Alchemical laboratory, there's Easter Eggs! On the Nature of Quicksilver by Stefan Nilsson indeed. (Quicksilver was the first book of The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson I mentioned above).

Further, in Newton's reproduction of Solomon's Temple, the fact that how the secret doors are hidden and how to activate them is described is a nice touch. I've got some more thoughts on the temple below, and if you look at the whole thing as  just some bonus material, I guess it’s alright, but I gotta admit, I had a few more negative things to say than positive.

Skipping ahead to the evil cult's temple, I rather like the sphere room, both the image and the weird effects. . . except for the “you’re an evil cultist now, have fun with that!” result. Maybe it’s fitting for LotFP, but somehow this seems worse than either “you’re dead” or “you’re crazy” as the result of a die roll for "doing what the game is about" and "interacting with the space you're exploring." Again, maybe I don't get the LotFP ethos, but it just seems kinda screwjobby to me.

Oh yeah, and the mummy squids are a pretty cool monster, as is the watchful squid in the walls of the corridor.

Overall, this adventure has a fantastic set up and a lot of really inventive concepts/ideas, but unfortunately, there were some downsides that  I dive into in the next section. 

The Bad

Despite the fact that I love the "voice" of the writing, I feel like the text could have used a slightly harsher content edit - often, there were times that the text was lengthier and more detailed than necessary - such as providing referee advice. Now, maybe I'm just too steeped day-to-day in OSR referee philosophy, because I didn't think any of the advice was bad, I just felt like I didn't need it in an adventure. Maybe if it were packaged as part of an intro box, but as a stand alone adventure, I found a lot of the basically sound, obviously well meaning advice to be unnecessary filler.

Speaking of which, the “running the adventure” section strikes me as overly wordy/detailed at best, and unnecessary at worst. As I said, all of the advice is well meaning and pretty much totally correct, just maybe extraneous. I will say though, why on earth are the dice generators in this section presented in paragraphs!? Gah! They are clearly tables in all but form. That’s just bad information presentation. By all means present them in a paragraph, as long as you show them as a table again later. It’s a shame, because these are immediately useful (if pretty basic) tables for helping the situation to be dynamic as the players come into it. More of this sort of thing would have made for an even tastier adventure.

On the other hand, there were one or two areas where I felt like some advice to the referee specific to the adventure would have come in handy. For example, near the beginning of the adventure, the idea is presented that the “real treasure” is knowledge, rather than gold/silver, but then it gives no guidance on how to tweak LotFP’s Silver-for-XP system. Sure, any referee with some experience under their belt can figure something out, and later on, guidelines are given on how to monetize some of the esoteric knowledge uncovered, but if you are going to specifically write an adventure to go against the standard written into the game rules and proven valuable over decades of play, some guidance would be appreciated. 

I've struggled with this very concept in my Heresies Without Number game, because providing indirect, fungible/holographic incentives to advancement is a really robust reward mechanic. Anyway, I think overall it works out okay, but some more thoughts on how this sets up an intrigue based game, or how the players can gain fictional (but non-experience/treasure based) advantages in the game world would have been nice in an adventure that seems to go to some lengths to discourage standard "steal everything not nailed down" play.

Anyhow, getting back to the details of the adventure - it strikes me as a bit wacky that all of the dramatis personae are such hard SOBs. Even Hooke is a 2HD mofo. I get that Halley is a secret sorcerous cultist, so his improved stats make sense, but Hooke and Newton having 2HD seems not to jive with the usual LotFP “everyone is normal except the PCs” approach. I almost wish Andre took it to 11 and made all 3 or them secretly hard ass former adventurers, even if that wouldn't be very historically congruent.

Now, I mentioned Kelvin's delightful maps, but I wish Mr. Novoa and Mr. Jagosz had consulted him on the text and layout of the map keys as well. While it's appreciated that mundane rooms are left undetailed except in the broadest of strokes, the "interesting room" key entries are still somewhat wordy and they fail to fall into Mr. Green's wonderful "one building, one spread" layout from Forgive Us. Just a hair more discipline there would have been greatly appreciated, even if the "crawling" the locations is not the focus of play. 

Speaking of locations, neither Hooke’s house nor Newton's as locations offer a ton of interest. I feel like more clues as to their enmity, madness and paranoia, and/or contact with Halley would be useful. As it is, neither of these locations give much reason to "crawl" them, and I'd probably condense most of the action in them into a pretty abstract terms. Probably even for Halley's House and the Observatory, as well. 

Speaking of breaking and entering in early Natural Philosophers' homes, I’m torn on Newton’s (possible) employment of Ryan O’Flannagan. On the one hand, having a hard bastard come after you because you stole from a rich and paranoid guy makes a lot of sense. On the other, it feels a bit like a “gotcha” for PCs doing what PCs do - robbing a place blind because somebody asked them to. I think I would rather see the threat of this happening telegraphed a little more clearly - give the players a chance to find out that Newton will go to any length, even questionably legal ones, to recover things he considers important, or rumors that he’s been beefing up his security, or whatever. My main issue is not the severity of the consequence, but rather its inability to be anticipated.

Okay, while we're on the topic of "crawling" these locations, the replica Temple of Solomon under Newton’s mansion strikes me as something of a missed opportunity. See, I love that the temple replica is there, given (real, historical) Newton's interest in alchemy and Solomon's temple, but the problem is, there’s not actually, you know, much to do down there, or much of value to find. Certainly almost no leads into further adventure. Just a couple of double-secret treasures/easter eggs.

When it comes to the actual physical format of it, I’m not thrilled with the well entrance to the temple. The key being literally the only way in there is kind of weak, especially when you consider that key is also in a secret room the players will have no particular reason to find, unless they are lucky or careful mappers. Add on to this that if you do figure out the key situation, you get gassed and Newton will get you executed if he finds you, it seems like an overly bottlenecky kind of thing, especially for a not very valuable, not important at all to the "main plot" kind of location. 

Come on! Replica Temple of Solomon.  In he basement of the greatest natural philosopher of his age. This is a solid gold idea that gets maybe a bronze treatment. It's not bad, it just should be so much better.

Anyway, moving on to Greenwich Observatory, which gives the impression of being the "main" adventure site (which I think is sadly back-tracking from the awesomeness of the "three guys, three places, one conflict" set up the adventure began with). I’m not a big fan of Flamsteed being 100% reticent to talk unless the players convince him they’re “experienced enough” - I think a better approach here would be to just qualitatively describe him as terrified and afraid to talk to anybody, then let the referee decide how easily (or not) he’ll open up. Really commit to "here's the pieces, you figure out what happens" rather than trying to push any particular reactions or storylines.

Further, the telescope-entrance to the temple seems waaaay too fiddly. I’m fine with needing to know what star to point it towards, considering there’s still another way in to find or that the players could just crowbar/sledgehammer the stone blocking the entrance, but the fact that they need to find the information about Lyra and then still have a lengthy, boring fiddling around with it to get it right? That doesn’t strike me as a fun kind of puzzle - it strikes me as more of a pixel-bitchy kind of puzzle.

Once the party gets down to the evil temple, the dungeon itself is totally linear. Sure, going in the temple at all is not technically “required” for the adventure, but it’s obviously where almost all of the fun weirdness is, so it’d be nice if it were slightly more compelling as a map. And again, the locations are presented in standard prose form, with parenthetical references to map locations. It's not very helpful for reference or ease of access, and the good stuff isn't really highlighted.

Another specific callout, the cube puzzle strikes me as way too many blind, uninformed decisions unless you found one elusive clue in the house, and even then, you might mess it up. It’d maybe be okay for experimentation, except there’s a huge number of possible combinations, so it’s not really realistic to expect the players to figure out any “rules” in any kind of reasonable amount of time. So this leads to non-meaningful guessing, boring choices, and a puzzle that pisses off more than it tantalizes. I can certainly get behind the inspiration for this section of the dungeon, but I think it deserves its own entire adventure where figuring out "The Cube" is the whole point with lots o ftime and tries and more clues on how to make it work. As it stands, it's more likely for the party to get stuck and super frustrated.

What I Would Change to Run It

So, what would I change to run this? First off, I'd give each of the three main figures some even stronger personality cues, and then leave it up to what the players do to figure out how they interact. I'd probably also leave it ambiguous whether Newton really had stolen Hooke's formulas (just to make it more interesting). I'd insert some more interest into each location - I'd give Hooke some kind of tenuous social connections, play up Newton spiraling into a connection with shady elements, and then put a few more cult clues into Halley's house. 

I'd make Newton's Solomon's Temple more interesting - probably a caged demon down there, definitely some rituals you can accidentally trigger just by moving through it. I'd also make it a little easier to get into without Newton having you murdered.

I'd probably also add in the Royal Society as a form of forced interaction between all of these personalities, a way for the players to meet more weirdos, and a source for further adventures.

Finally, I'd redesign the creepy cult and their temple. Mi-Go (bugs, fungus) instead of tentacle everything, a more Jaquayed dungeon, and I'd probably greatly simplify "The Cube". 

Conclusion

So, overall, I think I found Pale Lady a more immediately useful module, but The Squid, the Cabal, and the Old Man has a lot of promise in its fundamental concept, it just would have benefited from being maybe half as long. Despite the fact that Pale Lady would be easier to use as is, I see it as more likely that I'll modify the basic structure of SCOM to my game than that I'll use Pale Lady at all.

For the price, both are pretty well worth checking out. Pale Lady is a better bet if you're looking for a true "module" that you can drop into any existing game with minimal fuss, while SCOM is a richer vein of mineable ideas. Do what you will with that, and enjoy.

Red & Pleasant Land Layout Review

[UPDATE 1/6/21: I no longer support spending money on products that benefit Zak S, or giving him positive attention and connection. The short version is that I find credible claims that he has engaged in unacceptable behavior and not made up for it. For more detail, see here for the core of the accusations. To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

Introduction

Okay, I figure other, more insightful people than me have already told you what you need to know about the contents of Red & Pleasant Land. The short answer is, it's really good and really pretty. Even if you have no interest in running the whole setting put forth in the book, it's chock full of mineable goodness. If nothing else, if you are of a staid and vanilla turn of mind like myself, this will help you to push your own boundaries and question your own assumptions about what you can and can't do with a game, which is good exercise for your brain.

So, what I propose to do here instead is to review the layout, graphic design and usability of the book specifically. Yes, I know that implies a lot of moxie given that Zak S. has won a technology award for his previous graphic design work, and Jez Gordon is the DIY layout hotness with good reason. That being said, I've noticed that most reviews tend to give the physical appearance/usability one paragraph tops, and then focus on the content. Maybe that's the right way to go for almost everybody, but I really like this layout stuff, and paying attention to it will hopefully help me get better at my craft. And hopefully it'll be useful to some other folks along the way. So let me know if you'd like to see more of this sort of thing, and any requests, and I can get on it.

Oh, and a bit of a disclaimer - I have not used this book in the heat of play, so some of my suppositions about usability could very well be totally wrong. If you have used something and found the experience different from what I imagine, do please let me know.

The Physical Characteristics

To begin with the very beginning, let's look at the cover and binding. First, it's gorgeous and sturdy, with a cloth-covered hardcover, which appears to be bound with through the fold sewing (but I could be wrong there - at any rate, it's sewn, not just glued), which doesn't quite allow the book to lie flat, but does let you put one facing flat and hold the other side up at about 90 degrees without doing any damage to the spine - it's good and sturdy. I figure if you need a more extreme version for table top use, print out the relevant pages from the PDF. There's also a lovely book ribbon for keeping your place, which has come in quite handy for a read-through. The embossing is attractive, and the cover artwork is Zak's usual quality work, and part of the original "gag" that led to the production of the book, but I personally think the classy cloth bound cover could have stood alone without it - minor nitpick there, though. Like pretty much every LotFP product, the size is a slightly large digest (A5) which is large enough to read without squinting, and small enough to fit comfortably in the hand or on the crowded gaming table, or to throw in a backpack with other things. Oh, and the paper inside is matte and textured and ivory colored and thick. It looks good and it compliments Zak's art without reducing readability (if anything, it's probably easier on your eyes than stark black on white). Overall, the book is nice, it's sturdy, and it's well proportioned for its intended uses.

Forematter, General Layout Nerdery, and Organization

So, opening up the book, the front end paper is a map of Voivodja, and the back endpaper is an illustration of a number of denizens thereof, many of whom you'll recognize if you've watched "I Hit It With My Axe" or read Zak's play reports. They are wearing a plethora of interesting clothes and give a good feel for the sumptuous, slightly over the top nature of adventure here. The map is very high level, but like most of Zak's maps, it features a lot of useful, immediately gameable information - distance, names, terrain, and a clever encounter table tied to terrain. It's placement is useful for reference and it has lots of whitespace for adding notes and new locations.

Credits

So, turning past the title page, we get to the credits, which I've alluded to earlier. The book is written by Zak S., most of the art is by him as well, Jez Gordon did the layout and some of the maps, and James Raggi edited and published, with the printer being Otava Printers in Finland. I'm going to guess that they're the same printers James has been using for a while now, and I gotta say, the physical quality of all of the books I've gotten has not disappointed, so I'm glad James has them to work with. I was also pleasantly surprised to see my own name in the acknowledgements - I must have commented on one of the contributory Google+ posts, so thanks, Zak.

Table of Contents

Next up is the Table of Contents, which shows us that the overall organization of the book is logical and useful for both reference and initial reading. It has three tiers of organization - I'll name them "Chapters", "Sections", and "Topics", but they aren't called anything in the book. Chapters have a roman numeral and are larger and bolder. Sections are bold, and Topics are smaller and plain text. The whole thing is fit on a two page spread with 4 columns each. What this means is that just about every specific thing short of room contents is in the table of contents, making an index unnecessary. The bolding scheme makes it easy to find high level stuff easily, while more time allows you to find specifics, rather than trying to strike an ideal balance between abstraction and detail in choosing what to include in the contents.

Typefaces

Now then, on to some type nerdery. Zak is fond of denigrating the importance of typefaces, but I like them, so I pay attention to them. The titles and section headers appear to be primarily in Parmapetit with assists from FoglihtenNo07 (it might be the other way around), which results in a somewhat loopy and whimsical look that sets the "Alice in Wonderland" tone for the piece while remaining clear and readable for quick reference. The body text is in Neuton, which is apparently a "slightly Dutch inspired serif" that fits generally into the "Roman" category. Read more here if you're the kind of person who likes to read about typeface characteristics. From the point of view of this review, it's clear, readable, and doesn't get in your face about being a "theme" typeface. It provides a range of fonts for weights and emphasis (italic, bold, extrabold, light, extralight, etc) that are put to good use in the text for highlighting important things and distinguishing sections.

Typography/Layout

Let's talk about the basic layout followed through most of the book. Margins are small, as you'd expect from Zak - he likes to get as much content on a page as possible, and the "classical" margins are less relevant to a game book that spends more time on a table than perched between thumb and fingers. The only gaming nitpick here is that there's not much room for notes if you're into that sort of thing (I've recently been breaking a lifetime aversion to writing in books, so I noticed this). Sections are titled with the same titling font, and begin with a big, fancy drop cap capital initial. This makes them easy to pick out, which is helpful. Topics are titled by a simple large all caps bold that is easy to find without being obtrusive.

Text is divided into two ragged right columns per page, and lots of allowance is made for art to break up the blocks of text. More on the art later. The leading looks pretty generous, while the tracking looks just a teeny hair tighter than "standard" - but I'm eyeballing this and could be totally wrong. The net result is that the text is easy to read "like a book", but individual lines are distinct enough to easily pick out when referencing things. This is especially useful for things like stat blocks and lists. More on tables later. The last thing I'll say is that I'm not positive why Jez went with ragged right instead of justified for two column text. My guess is that it was some combination of looking better wrapping around art and not wanting it to look too rigid or polished. I may just be enamored of justification since I recently learned how to do it "properly". Finally, lots of use is made of bullet points and numbered lists, which works well. We'll dive more into that in some of the specific sections.

Introductory Material & The Alice

As for sections, he first is a half-page flavor intro to Voivodja, the Place of Unreason, the "Red & Pleasant Land", followed by a half page "how to use this book". This section is appreciated for explicitly acknowledging and setting the stage for its multi-functional usefulness, which basically breaks down into "use as is", "mine for ideas", "get inspired to do something totally different", and "kill pesky animals". I'm sure there are more not covered here, but those seem the most relevant.

This is followed by a fairly brief introduction to the Place of Unreason, (~15 pages) that gives an overview of salient features with a relentless focus on what's useful and necessary for making the game interesting. You'll be seeing a lot of that. It accomplishes a lot by implication and aesthetics - by referencing well known literature, art, and folk lore, western culture fills in a lot of the gaps, with the book going for what's gameable. So, even subject matter is a choice that affects what you can and need to convey in your text or visually to get a "complete" result.

After this is the Alice character class, which will pretty familiar if you read Zak's blog. For the purposes of this review, I'll just say that it is written to work well with just about any version of D&D or its clones and progeny you may want to use, and the D100 level up table fits admirably onto a 2 page spread, despite some fairly wordy entries. In fact, everything you need is in 2 spreads, which is pretty great.

Beasts & People

Now, the Beasts & People section has some stuff that got me really excited while reading through it. First off, this section does about 40-60% of the lifting in defining the setting (I used very scientific measurements to determine this). Most of the descriptions are admirably brief: the "major NPCs" of the setting get 1-2 pages max, and the longest monster description for "guests", or demons, comes in at 5.5 pages, because of extensive random tables to build your own. Despite this brevity, the monsters and people all have motivations, rivalries, and hooks.

One way this is accomplished is through the 4 major factions of the setting - Heart Queen, Red King, Pale King, Colorless Queen. Each creature that belongs to a faction has this really nice icon at the beginning of their entry. The icons are both pretty as well as just the right size to immediately give you the relevant information without crowding the text.

Only three creatures don't have illustrations - horses, a Gryphon, and Pale Pawns - and all three of them have been adequately illustrated elsewhere (Pale Pawns are basically described as vampire dandies).

Entries are organized alphabetically for reference, but there's a nice note at the beginning about a few general entries to read first if this is your first time (like the rules for Voivodjan vampires in general). Also, most of the rules shared by multiple monsters are repeated in each entry. Repetition in game material meant to be referenced is super useful but is often cut for seeming unnecessary when the book is viewed as a book you read cover to cover. Generally, I like what terms are bolded in the monster entries - things like spells, specific abilities, and each stat in the stat block (with regular weight numbers). The stat blocks could maybe stand to be a touch more set off, but the fact that practically every monster fits on one page, or at worst, one spread, combined with the relatively straightforward stats makes that a minor issue. Oh, and while the general description for each monster is a paragraph or two of standard prose, almost everything else is bullet points, which is again good for reference.

Altogether, really top marks for the monster section - most of what makes the setting interesting and unique is conveyed by, you know, the people and things characters will actually interact with. There's an added bonus that the monsters can be easily ported if you're looking for a creative and slightly weird monster to put somewhere else, but a lot of them fit into their factions and ranks in cool ways that makes them all more rich together than alone.

Adventure Locations

If monsters do around half of the heavy lifting for getting the setting into your brain, the adventure locations do maybe 30-40% . You get to see the Heart Queen's Palace and the Red King's Fortress, and both are wacky and wonderful, and will give you very creative ideas for running "dungeons". Implicitly, both show you what "Unreason" really means, and give you a model for the kind of challenges you can throw at players here, so they do a lot more than just give you cool places to explore. And most of the weirdness and puzzles are made to be modular and portable (and are even called out as such in the introductory material, so that's cool). For the actual layout, each location begins with some general notes, a random encounter table (d100, natch), and a full location map that fits on one spread.

Maps & Illustrations

Like all of Zak's maps, they pack a lot of information, but I find these much more immediately comprehensible than those in Vornheim, which I found confusing initially, and awkward for my brain even after I got them. The R&PL maps still take some study to get familiar, but once you know the place, almost everything you need to run the whole location except some puzzles and set piece rooms is right there, which is super cool. All of the rooms are labeled right there on the map, but also have numbers for reference to the keyed description. Side views are incorporated where useful and necessary, and are clearly marked. The door, locked door, and secret door icons are nicely useful, but I really like the notation used for doors in the floor and ceiling. There's a yellow square and then an orange arrow leading to the connected piece of the map. If it's in the ceiling, the arrow overlaps one side of the yellow square frame (it goes "over" and "up), but if it goes down, the frame overlaps it (thus showing it going "down"). This is a really neat visual way to convey complex information clearly and easily. Nice.

The best part, though, is again repetition. Pieces of the maps are repeated throughout the keying, such that you are never more than one page flip away from the map relevant to what you're currently reading (okay there's one page that's two flips away from the relevant map). This is a fantastic solution to the difficulty of getting detailed enough room descriptions into one spread. Everyone, everyone writing/laying out dungeons, please do this. I'm going to try to start incorporating it into my own work. Really useful. Oh, and the illustrations throughout are both evocative and often useful (especially for the weirder rooms with crazy effects).

Room Descriptions

Now, speaking of room descriptions, these are brief, bulleted, and generally focus on only what is different/interesting/tactically relevant for the room, with the rest being covered by the scene-setting in the general description and your own understanding of what would be in, say, an opulent ridiculous palace or an impenetrable vampire fortress. Occupants and references to other rooms are bolded, and most of the spatial relationships not covered by secret doors or weird passageways are left to the map to show. It's not quite as systematic as Courtney Campbell's Set Design method, but I don't think to take a highlighter to the text to make it playable.

If I wanted to run one of these, I think all I would need would be an initial read through to get the whole thing, some note taking for any changes I wanted to make, and a quick refresher immediately before play. For a location with more variation in aesthetic or a huge number of rooms (like a megadungeon), I could see maybe wanting or needing a more systematic approach to room descriptions, with a clearly defined way of ordering information, bolding, italicizing, et cetera, but this system looks pretty right for these particular dungeons.

Extra Rules, Random Tables, and Other Resources

The remaining 10 - 20% of getting the setting across (if that's what's left, I don't even remember) is done by that general intro at the top and the sample locations and random tables. There are three random locations, showing the three generic sort of territories in Voivodja - forest, garden, and interior. They very well may have been generated by the random tables following, because you see some shared features between them. All three are presented as a one-spread illustration/map with notes right there, effectively giving you three one page adventures. You could make a pretty great setting book with nothing but these and a thoughtful monster section. I would like to especially give a shout out to the "marble madness" style map of the interior (I think Jez did that one) - it rather easily shows a super complicated place, including a section with sideways gravity.

There's a brief section on some widely useful rules - rank, duels, mass combat, skirmishes, and a spell. Not much to say here except that they're clearly presented with the same useful headings and section divisions from the rest of the book.

Tables & Generators

Now, the tables (what, you thought you'd get a book by Zak that didn't feature random tables prominently?). There have been tables throughout the book, but I thought I'd leave the description of them to this section dedicated to them. First, many of the tables from earlier in the book, presented either in the introductory material, monsters, or some of the locations, are repeated here, which is great, with only one or two left with a "see page whatever" place holder.

The contents of the tables are all useful for Voivodja, many are useful as-is outside of there, and some are useful anywhere with a bit of modification. Some of the plot hook and intrigue generating tables, for example, would make good fodder for copying the text out of your pdf and doing a search & replace (which Zak points out in the text). Most of the tables have a red header with white text, bold black numbers, standard weight entries, and alternating fill rows - page color and a light pinkish/orange sort of color, with strokes on the lines between rows. Edward Tufte might have some issues with this "chart junk", but I think he has not applied his energies to the different demands of RPG products. Plus they look better than plainly presented tabular with no fills or strokes, and aesthetics are more important to an RPG than to a scientific report. Altogether legible and useful, and none spill outside of a spread, which is definitely useful and appreciated.

Three of the tables deserve special mention for doing cool things: Encounters, Intercepted Communique, and the Location drop tables.

Encounters

The Encounters table especially excites me as giving a lot of useful information in a compact form. It's takes up both sides of one spread, but is actually two slightly different tables. Each page has a full list of all of the characters and creatures listed in the book, and to the left of each name is a simplified version of the faction symbol used in the Beasts section - a little colored square, some with a smaller colored square in the middle. So that's the first cool thing. The next is that on one page, you have columns presenting the chance of encountering each creature based on where you are (forest, interior, etc), and on the other, you have columns for each faction - so only those creatures in a faction are given a chance of appearing in that column. So whether you need to know "what would they find here?" or "what sort of Heart faction thing do they find?" you're covered. Either one of these alone with the addition of the faction icons would have been neat, but both together are extremely useful.

Intercepted Communique Generator

Next is the Intercepted Communique generator, which is both hilarious and full of potential for starting adventures. It is (I think) an example of a multi-step Complete Creative Result Generator. This would work for just about any intrigue focused game you could want with only a modicum of changes (mostly to the "to" and "from" entries).

Not much to say on it layout-wise, though I felt like a little more visual separation between the tables for those rolls taken in sequence without a a header might be helpful for a GM in a hurry. For example, under "To. . ." (bolded) is a 1d6 table for a salutation, and then a 1d20 table for the recipient. There is a slightly darker line between these, and obviously the numbers change, but in a hurry, you might just roll a d20 and miss out on the salutation. With a little more time (like pre-session prep) this wouldn't be a problem, but perhaps a little more space or a mad-lib style sentence with blanks for each roll would have been a helpful visual cue.

Location Drop Tables

The drop tables are not anything new if you've seen Vornheim or the many works influenced by it. I like the concept of drop tables - they have a ton of information built into them and they make use of the spatial characteristics of dice in addition to their sides and numbers. On the other hand, I think you'd need fairly small dice to make use of these tables, and you'd have to be holding up the half of the book not being used to keep the other side flat for the roll. Altogether, possibly more useful blown up to letter-ish size, printed out, and put into a box top to contain the dice (like some of the stuff Dyson Logos has been experimenting with). Given these reservations, I really appreciate that the drop tables are reproduced as more traditional tables, so you can use whatever method works for you.

The Art

Oh, and I promised I'd talk about the art. All illustrations are by Zak, and they are very definitely his style. While I find his work technically impressive, much of it is not my personal favorite style, which probably says more about me than anything else.

Now, in terms of gameability, the frequent illustrations not only make the book more fun to look at, they go a long way towards jamming the setting into your brain. I probably lied about the division of setting-conveyance above, since I short-changed art. It goes a long way to giving you the aesthetic of the place, which is a huge part of this setting (and maybe any game setting? I'm gonna say yes).

More prosaically, the art provides an aid to mental bookmarking - you can go "oh yeah, the section on that one wing of the Heart Queen's palace has the creepy lionfish thing in it".  And having almost every monster illustrated is fantastic - I tend to like Zak's monster art a lot more than his other stuff, so maybe I'm biased there, but it makes the weird new creatures a lot more concrete and evocative and saves effort in the written description, which gives you more elbow room for talking about behavior and motivations.

Quibbles & Nitpicks

I only had a few quibbles and nitpicks, but they were there, and for the sake of completeness, here they are. There were a few typos throughout the text (not a lot, certainly fewer than most DIY/Indie/whatever type products, but some). The Rabbit has the Pale King's icon, but his text says he works for the Heart Queen (on the plus side, this could serve as an inspiration for some intrigue). And one of the handouts is missing from the back of my printed copy (though it's present in my PDF, which is probably where I would get it from if used, anyway). Unlike Vornheim, the chapter headings at the top of the page, and the page numbers at the bottom are somewhat small, and the page numbers are centered on the page, which certainly looks attractive, but makes flipping through the book to a specific page a teensy bit less convenient than outside edge number.

But really, that's all I've got in terms of layout/typography/editing issues.

Conclusion

So, as should be no surprise to anyone, this book presents a lot to learn in terms of design, layout, and usability. It's maybe not as in-your-face radical as Vornheim, but I think that this and Qelong are now going to serve as my gold standards of "how to do a setting book", and I'm going to try to synthesize them if I ever put together any kind of setting. So even if you never want to run a game in Voivodja, even if a gorgeous RPG book isn't something you want for its own sake, and even if you don't think you'll find anything you can pull out and use in your own game, consider getting this if you want a good model of how to write and set up a setting book. But buy it soon, cos it has sold fast and it might be years before there's a reprint (I foolishly thought a pdf would be "good enough" for Vornheim when I discovered it at the tail end of its print availability).

Lost Mine of Phandelver: Review and Changes

So, for this review, I want to take a page out of Gus's book and provide a general overview, the stuff I liked, the stuff I didn't, and most importantly, what changes I would make to the adventure. I don't expect it will be anywhere near as interesting or creative as Gus's efforts, but hopefully somebody will find something useful here. Oh, and this will be totally spoilery, so please don't continue if you're hoping to play this. Also, I've only read, not played or run this, so take everything below with a grain of salt.

Overview

The purpose of this module, coming as it does in the Starter Set, is to introduce new DMs to running games and new players to D&D. For this review, I'm not going to focus on that stuff, and am instead going to focus on it as "just another adventure" since (presumably) I already know how to run a game, and most of you probably do too. So, when I get to "the bad" section, please keep in mind the disclaimer "this may or may not be useful in a beginner's module, but I don't like it for something I would run." Overall, I don't go into critiquing how well this adventure does (or doesn't) teach new DMs what to do, but I think that'd be an interesting exercise too.

The Good

So, I really did find a lot to like here, and a lot more to like than in most recent forays into introductory modules. For starters, despite the overarching plot of events going on, players have a lot of freedom of action, and not once does the adventure say "if they aren't doing what they're supposed to, steer them back on track" or some other railroady bullshit. There's a presumed course of events, and some locations and encounters assume certain other things to have happened, but mostly it just relies on dangling pretty obvious clues in front of players and then having multiple avenues to the "right" place. The central town of Phandalin and its NPCs/rumors/plot hooks serves as a nicely done home base that reminds me of a stripped down Hommlet in all the best ways.

One of my favorite things from this adventure was the use of factions/organizations. Especially in the town of Phandalin, but even in some of the other encounter areas, you meet people that represent various external bodies of power (The Harpers, the Zhentarim, the Dragon Cult, et cetera) and when they are described, most of them have something they'd like the players to do for them, and most of them are willing to recruit like minded PCs. That is absolutely fantastic future adventure fodder, and a great way to tie in the wider world. But even more than the useful nuts and bolts of secret societies asking you to go on missions, I really like that there's real choice there and it's based on philosophical differences - reminds me in a great way of the Planescape factions. There's some room for improvement here (see below) but hands down this is the best feature of the module in my book.

When it comes to encounter, even though there are a lot of combat encounters, especially in the final eponymous dungeon, there's a lot of advice given on avoiding, bribing, outsmarting, and otherwise dealing with encounters in ways beyond smacking the bajangus out of it. And advice is given on when enemies flee and how to handle prisoners and so forth. So that's all good. The dungeons are pretty well designed, most are non-linear and have multiple entrances, attention is paid to how adjacent areas interact with each other, and the "villains" have their own agendas that can be interacted with in ways other than killing him to stop it. The bad guy groups have internal tensions and animosities, which is also a nice touch, though I wish they had been made stronger. There's a decent mix of fights, traps, and things to figure out, but it skews heavily towards fights. There's also a lot of nice environmental stuff in the dungeons, like goblins blowing a dam to flood out intruders, or areas to fall into, and barricades to set up.

The treasure in these locations is mostly pretty good. More items than coins and a healthy dose of large, inconvenient mundane stuff with a dollar value (crates of provisions and such). There are also a number of old-school approved very hidden treasures that are unlikely to be found but reward careful exploration handsomely. My only real complaint there is that there's a lot of treasure. A lot.

So like I said, there's a lot to like here, and I really dig that. Nothing really earthshaking or extremely innovative, but some good stuff that is readily usable. Especially the maps: they are both very pretty and very usable.

The Bad

Despite a lot of good steps towards player agency, there is still a presumed sequence of events, and there are a few sections where it's like "if players skipped X, Y, and Z, they may be in trouble at this point". While there's a lot of different stuff to go do and see, almost all of it points back towards the central adventure, which is the Mine. Speaking of which, let's go ahead and get this out there: the only thing I dislike more than the name "Phandelver" is its use as a title throughout the adventure ("The Phandelver's Pact"). Much has been said on Forgotten Realms naming conventions, but I'm not much of a fan. I do enjoy the NounAdjective or AdjectiveNoun type place names, though (like "Neverwinter" and "Waterdeep").

The action depends a lot on villains doing bad stuff that needs to be thwarted. That's fine and all, but it does make the players more passive. And while some real stakes are given with these villains (killing hostages, selling innocent families into slavery) there does seem to be a presumption that the players can easily stop it, and that anything bad will hold off until the players have had a chance to at least try to stop it. If not from villains, then PCs can get "quests" from NPCs. This strikes me as pretty World of Warcrafty, but I guess I get that considering the target audience. I'd like to see a few more false rumors snuck in there for ignorant townsfolk. A few of the encounters are a bit quantum ogre-y: they will happen regardless, or their resolution will have a different flavor but will provide the exact same information no matter how they go. [edit: So, after reading Courtney Campbell's review, it looks like I was misusing the term "Quantum Ogre" here, because there are ways to avoid the encounters. I still think some of the advice to "steer" players towards certain encounters is shitty and agency-robbing, but there's not much of it and there's no hard and fast "this will happen no matter how the players try to avoid it" type encounters or events]

Some of the encounters that have the potential to be awesome and/or terrifying are strangely nerfed to make them newbie friendly. Like a banshee that will threaten players then simply disappear if they're not respectful instead of fighting. Having an encounter where you need something from an obviously evil and obviously powerful monster is really cool. Having it be all upside with no downside for playing it wrong is weak sauce. Likewise with the green dragon encounter: while it was a pretty clever way to make sure the "Dungeons & Dragons" starter set had a, you know, dragon in it, the encounter itself is a bit cheesey: the dragon runs away at half hit points no matter what.

A lot of the more interesting stuff in the adventure (like tension within the ranks of the bad guys, the potentially conflicting goals of "good" organizations, conflicts between the PCs' own avarice and sense of right and wrong) gets lip service but isn't developed very much. Even though PCs can go wherever they want, it's assumed that all roads eventually lead to the mine and even though NPC/Monster factions have internal tensions, its assumed those won't come up until after a good fight, if at all.

As mentioned above, there's a whole hell of a lot of combat encounters, and they pass out treasure pretty open handedly. I'd probably be a bit more parsimonious, but I'm well on working my way into being a crotchety old man.

What I’d Change

Okay, so as discussed, there's a lot of good stuff in here. Not groundbreaking, but good and usable, especially if you aren't tired of "standard" D&D fantasy tropes. Most of what I'd change is a matter of tweaking what's here rather than major sweeping changes. Almost all of those changes are geared towards maximizing the player-choice and freedom elements that are already present in nascent form. Oh, and I'd change all the names to stuff that didn't use "exotic" spelling to make things look phantastickal (<-- this is funny because "phantasy" actually has legitimate etymological roots, but you get my point, I hope).

First off, rather than presuming a mysterious villain is driving things and presenting some half-hearted mystery-solving (Gasp! Glasstaff the bad wizard is actually Iarno, the knight guy's friend?!), I would frame the entire adventure as a gold rush scenario. Tons of people and powers are seeking this lost mine. Phandalin is a smallish boomtown where these various forces are coming together for different reasons. This would nicely enhance the already pretty strong faction stuff going on in this module. Rather than Phandalin being a central base from which to launch investigations into villainy, it is instead the hub of exploration and prospecting going on in the region.

Speaking of Phandalin, I'd make the NPCs there a little more interesting. Most of them presented are just blandly nice, upstanding good people. I really like the "major NPC summary" section at the beginning of the Phandalin write-up, but it's shame it doesn't have anything more interesting going on here. Now, I know many people don't want the town to be the adventure, but if nothing else, I'd have each townsperson sympathize with one of the factions meddling in the region. I'd also mix in some false rumors with all of the "quests" going around, but would pair them with people you could discern were not to be trusted/treated as credible.

The villains of the adventure become actors that are probably (but not necessarily) antagonistic to the players. Iarno Glasstaff goes from being a secretive figure to being an actual agent of the Alliance of Lords, and his redcloaks are semi-official deputies. He's just abusing the hell out of his power, and the Lords' Alliance doesn't technically have a claim on the town.

Nezznarr the Black Spider goes from being the mysterious puppet master behind all of the shenanigans to being a ruthless treasure seeker. Sure, he's still employing bugbears and goblins and stuff to chase off and/or kill rivals, but he's not pulling all the strings, he's not the goal of the adventure, he's just a competitor or potential (if treacherous) ally.

At least one of the factions, preferably one of the do-gooder ones, wants no one to find the mine and will stop at nothing to make that happen. Bonus points if they have a really good reason to. Speaking of which, the Mine itself needs something there worth racing for beyond "future mining profits". That would provide the time crunch needed now that we're not relying on the pressure of a villain holding people hostage.

Likewise, I'd make the dwarves just one more interested party, and I'd turn their dwarvishness up to 11 (so more greed and secretiveness than you see here). I'd put their discovery of the mine and murder/capture by Nezznar along a fixed timeline during the adventure, rather than an event leading up to it.

For actual encounters, I'd add more keyed encounters in the surrounding area, I'd make the abandoned town with the dragon in it bigger with randomized enemies rather than a teeny pseudo-dungeon, and I'd give the humanoids more of an agenda than "do what Nezznar tells them". I'd make them uneasy allies at best with internal squabbles, and maybe the goblinoids and the orcs are both eyeballing the same territory for conquest.

Finally, I'd trim down the wording in the whole module, eliminate boxed text, and generally compress a 50 page adventure to probably 10-15, tops. Hopefully most of that would be brief write ups of the different powers interested in the area and interested in recruiting players to their cause.