The Flame Pact

By Nicole Mattos, Davide Tramma, Icaco Agostino
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 2-4

In a place far distant from civilization there’s the remote island of Enjin no Chi, or The Land of the Fire God. Even though it has a magnificent landscape, no living soul dares to enter the region and get exposed to its dangers. It is a place shrouded in terrifying legends, spoken of only in whispers by the few sailors who have seen its shores from afar. Tales warn of a land where nature itself has gone mad and unknown monstrosities hunt in the volcanic gloom.

This sixteen page adventure gives a rough overview of four sites. “How to ruin a bad ass erupting volcano” hates keys, loves generalizations, and is, essentially, a wall of text for the four sites it does present. 

There is always room for new things. New. Ideas. New ways of implementing old things. Refinements. Experimentation. And there is also room for looking at your own latest perpetual motion machine and deciding it doesn’t work and scrapping it before you release it on the world. This is #1 in the fortnightly adventure series. It looks pretty good. Let us hope that looking good and putting out a product every fortnight does not trump a good product? But, you know the answer to that already, don’t you? They had an idea. That’s great. They implemented the idea. That’s even better. They should have spent a lot more time implementing the idea before releasing it. 

And it’s pretty obvious there was a lack of focus here. The designers didn’t know what they were designing, or why. And therefore they couldn’t match the design to the porpoice.I’m not saying that every product made needs to originate in a home game that is then edited to make it to publication. But I think it’s clear that this was an idea that came about without much thought about what was actually needed. Either that or it’s guilty of original sin: just another in an endless line of mass consumerism in the RPG industry meant to be read instead of played. A good example is the content density. It’s four hexes, one hex per page. That’s four pages out of sixteen. There’s a place in an adventure for support information. But when you’re doing four pages of content and twelve pages of support and boilerplate then it raises the question of what the priority here was. It’s not the actual content, thats for sure. Yeah, the digital page count is free, in that there’s no cost difference between four pages and sixteen pages. But its clear that there IS a cost, in focusing on the gameable material. The time spent on the boilerplate and support information heavily outweighs the time spent on the heart of the adventure for the DM. You gotta work the keys. You gotta work the adventuring sites. You gotta work the heart of the gameable material. 

And the core of the adventure, those four hexes, are very loose. In a hex crawl I might image some very loose language, resulting in a paragraph or so. An adventure seed. But once we reach a page I would expect something more concrete. It’s just loose language though, saying nothing more than a paragraph would, just spread out over the entire page. It’s combined with “dungeon-like” environments for some of them, complete with maps. Unkeyed maps. “Inside the tunnel, they’ll find a Skeleton from a cultist’s body. He will be depressed in a corner, crying and mumbling to himself. He will attack if the characters come too close or try to touch him. He might engage in a conversation with the PCs. He’ll tell them he was left behind by his lover during one of the missions to exterminate the beetles” The skeleton is weird. An erudite skeleton? Ok, sure, it’s D&D. But it just feels out of place, and isn’t keyed on the map except with a very general “Skeleton here” note with an arrow pointing to a hallway.  Toss in some 6HD and 12HD opponents. 

The central conceit, I think, is that there’s this giant erupting volcano and you’re in the hexes around it. Which is kind of a cool image. Lava, smoke, ash (rules provided!) and so on. But i don’t think it really gets much into the erupting volcano vibe. Sure, rules for ash falling from the sky. But beyond that there’s nothing that really sells that vibe, either in the four hexes or in the support material. And this is with a literal lava monster living in a cave in the volcano. It’s just not there, the vibe. 

I’m not sold on the hybrid map/general description layout. I’m not sold on the almost wall of text like hex descriptions. There’s not much solid to sell the whole vibe of any of the hexes. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which is mostly boilerplate. It needed to show us maybe a hex description and the accompanying map for it, or something like that, to get an idea of what he actual contents were.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/545174/fortnightly-adventures-1-the-flame-pact-ose?1892600

Motherfuck! I had to correct that four times before it would take porpoise! Lethal poison for the system.