Livin on Stolen Time

By Jason Leslie Rogers
CozyRPG
Generic/Universal
Level? Ha! Not in a storygame boyo

A funeral. A memory. A fire.

Living on Stolen Time is a system-neutral, emotionally driven one-shot adventure designed for Game Masters who want more than combat and treasure. This is not a dungeon crawl. This is a story—one that asks your players to feel something. It begins with the funeral of Jasper Nighthollow, a thief and a dreamer who tried to undo pain with gold, who wanted to be better than the man who raised him, and who died before he ever figured out how. But Jasper’s death was not the end. Now he walks again, carrying within him the spirit of the very dragon that slew him, and the truth of his life—its pain, its joy, its regret—will be revealed in fleeting, cinematic visions. Your players will be drawn into the unraveling of Jasper’s legacy, confronting moral choices that have no easy answers. As the story builds toward its climactic confrontation in the smoldering streets of Grimscale Row, they will determine Jasper’s fate—and their own—amid fire, memory, and the pull of two entwined souls.

“For I, Bloodymage, stand supreme! None shall ever reach my depths and produce something worse than me! I, for all time, shall revel in my …” HOLD  MY BEER, says Living on Stolen Time.

This sixty page adventure is at least half read-aloud. It contains no choices. Isn’t there some mem about a Vampire adventure in which you stand around why elder vampires talk to each other? Yeah, well, this is 2025. History is depressing. Or, perhaps, the inability to learn from it.

And I am a hypocrite. Perhaps a self-aware one though. A fool, in the best sense of the word. I believe that a six page adventure can be good. I look with excitement upon every purchase. There is a shining hill called generic/universal. And … a D&D adventure that makes you feel something. I had the best calamari of my life at an Iberian place, Mallorca in Cleveland. Light, melt in your mouth, barely breaded. Life changing. So I ordered calamari everywhere I went. Olive garden. Applebees. It wasn’t the same. My various wives have independently insisted that I order two meals, one that I want and one that will actually be good. How is it possible that the sea cucumber, in Indiana, could not be good?!?!  Perhaps, gentle reader, you can find something useful in my unethical experimentations.

I’m sure this adventure meant something to the designer. It seems to, from their forward. I’m also sure Bloodymages stuff meant something to him. Regardless, this is one of the worst adventure I’ve ever seen. I’m not even sure it can be called an adventure. It’s got a number of chapters/vignettes. Each one has a fuck ton of read-aloud. Like, pages worth. Then there’s a section called “What Happen if … “ which has some “if the characters do X then you can do y” shit in it. That’s about a page. Then there’s some creator commentary with advice, about another page. “Allow the group to savor the moment0linger on the sights and sounds of the Laughing Banshee, where the crowd is paying their respects to Jasper’s memory in all the ways he might have enOoyed1 through guzzling and gambling, through song Ssinging and sword Sswinging0 maybe even through rabble Srousing and rough-housing” I don’t know, I’d guess that two thirds of this sixty pages is read-aloud? Maybe that’s hyperbolic. Maybe it’s only half.

I got it. You want to tell a story. You want some emotional connection. I’m down. Inn of Lost Heroes managed some of it. But, you don’t do that by boring the players to death. The very words, PLAY, seem to invoke an activity, yes? Is LISTENING an activity? Sure. In as much as eating shit is a hobby. I guess, technically, its true. Players don’t want to hear you speak. They want to do things. They want to make decisions. When you talk too long the players lose attention. They pull out phones. They get up in the middle of a con game and walk away and never come back. This should have happened in the playtests, right? Let me guess, no playtests. Because a playtest would have revealed this flaw immediately. It’s not the players faults. It is not they who are the problem. You are repeatedly punching them in the face and then screaming at them what the problem they are when they flinch. 

I think the story here was important to the designer. But, they didn’t know how to make it come out. They were, perhaps, too invested in it. This is an RPg, it can go a million different ways. That’s the fun of it. Choice. That;s why there’s a judge. This adventure doesn’t have any of that. The storyteller reads pages of text to the players. The players make the decision that the railroad has them on and then the storyteller reads pages more of text. That’s not an RPG. It’s not even a Choose Your Own Adventure.  

It’s not that we need dungeons or dragons or stabbing or something to make an adventure an  adventure. We need to be able to make choices. Ideally meaningful choices. We need to be able to interact with the environment in a meaningful way. And that’s not possible here. Everything is a straight line. I’m not even sure that there’s te illusion of choice in this thing, it’s literally just a straight line. 

Complete with flashbacks. It’s full of tropes. The little thief, rapscallion, flamboyant, heart of gold in the end, giving his life to defeat the dragon in the beginning mondrone for the party. Orphan, drunk father, wants to help kids. Blah blah blah. Oh no! Now the flashback says he’s in the doctors office and he’s dying! How then does this recontextualize his sacrifice, killing himself to save the party from the dragon? That’s my question, not the designers. I see it as the ultimate act of cowardice and refuse to engage further in anything Jasper related. Oh No! I’m not engaging with the adventure on the ONE path the designer selected. Oh no. Yes. Correct. That’s what an adventure is. People bringing themselves to it and unknown outcomes. You’ve selected an RPG adventure in order to make people feel something, instead of the traditional method of writing about a NYC tenement in the Paris Review. That means you need some connection to that form, the RPG adventure. 

But there are no choices in this adventure. Literally none. You get to be bored to death listening to read-aloud and then you get to do what the designer wanted you to do. Through railroads. Flashbacks. Whatever. I WILL NOT be told how to fucking feel in a fucking RPG adventure. You can influence me. You can encourage an environment in which I feel SOMETHING. But I will not be forced in to pity, given no other choices, and led down the path. THATS NOT A FUCKIGN GAME. At best it’s an activity. And, I think I could make a decent enough argument that it doesn’t even fit the description of activity, given my shit eating theory. “The empty vault is more than a plot twist it’s a gut-punch. Let the silence Breathe” Oh fuck off.

Tons of read-aloud. Second person read-aloud. Everything in single column formatting. No specificity. Not even much in the way of coherence. It’s not even clear what the party is supposed to do in some places. Or the DM. It’s just read-aloud and then the What IF section launches in with scenarios that don’t make sense at all. Ok. I guess we fight a dragon now? Or jasper? Or both? 

You know, as a good midwesterner, I find the sex adventures offensive. But, I find the inauthentic insulting. It is not that I am incapable of feeling during a game, it’s that the hamfisted attempts to do that here are plodding. 

Don’t fucking do this. Don’t try to be edgy when writing your first adventure. Maybe, first, figure how to write one and THEN figure out how to write an emotionally charged one?

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire sixty pages, so, you know what you’re getting to here …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/532313/living-on-stolen-time?1892600