Parliament of Owls

By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
DOlmenwood
Levels ... 2-3?

No Funkadelics appear in this adventure.

[…] Lately, the witch owls are squabbling about whether to move on to new hunting grounds, or remain to continue preying on travellers. The owls comprise two factions, led by witch owls named Horned Hextus and Nightshade.

This eleven page adventure uses 3.5 pages to present seven locations in and around a small forest temple. It is too small for the gameplay it wants to encourage (intrigue) so instead we;re just gonna have one titanic battle. The formatting is BADLY confusing. 

I like the art style in this. All of it, I think. Nicely evocative. So, remember, I said something nice.

I hate this. Do I hate it? Maybe not hate. It’s disappointing to see something fail so hard at what it’s trying to do. Like, so hard that I hate the failure. And the environment that surrounds it to generate it.

There’s this temple in the woods. The chick priestess there makes swords for people. And has no guards so a group of six Witch Owls move in and take over and start eating her memory. And they ambush people coming to the temple and eat their memories and use their shadows as guards. And they have two factions who disagree on what to do, one group wanting to stay and one group wanting to leave. 

No level range to be found anywhere, on the cover, in the adventure, in the description. 2-3, I’d guess, based on everyone inside having 2HD. The hooks are the same lame-o getting hired/go find quest-gover nonsense that every adventure has. 

I don’t really know where to begin with this. It’s small. Seven rooms and only four of them are interior as in inside the temple. Of those four, which are right on top of each other (there’s no fucking scale on the fucking map! Which means its a fucking art piece and not a fucking map.) The two factions are right next to each other. Three owls and some shadows in one room and three owls and some shadows in the next room. Literally right on top of each other. How do you do faction play like that? “Frank is next door, go stab him. And by ext next door I mean you can see him, 20’ away, right there. Go stab him,” “HEY! I CAN HEAR YOU ASSHOLE! I” STANDING RIGHT HERE!” All six owls, both factions, in two rooms. Why have factions? Why give the owls motivations and wants and pretend that you can appeal to them? Why not just stuff all six in one room? The map/environment is so close in that it doesn’t make sense. At all. If you want some owl intrigue then you need a larger map. You need to put different owls in different places. Divide up all six, give them some shaky allegiances. Put in some dangerous areas not related to the owls. THEN you can play factions and seek things out for one owl and appeal to a different ones sensibilities and so on. It’s clear, with the whole faction thing and the different owls wanting different things, that this is the concept that the designer wanted. And, yet, we got all six owls in two rooms like, I don’t know, twenty feet apart from each other? With no order of battle? The concept, as implemented, is a failure.

And then there’s the writing and formatting. “A strange river of weird aspect” is how room one, a river starts. What does strange mean? It has a waxed moustache, all Poirot style? What does weird aspect mean? Those are conclusions. A well written description will cause the players to think “hmmm, that strange”, but you don’t use those words to describe things because they don’t actually describe anything. I’m down with twisting the english language, stealing words, making up words, using words out of their normal usage, anything, really, to get across a meaning, a vibe of the location in question. But you can’t use weird or strange; those don’t actually describe anything.

As for formatting … something weird is going on. I’m going to copy in a section of the main room description of one of the rooms. I’m not cherry picking they are all have the same issue. But, also, I’m not sure if what I want to talk about it going to come through in this copy/paste: “A stone portico (cracked slabs, spotted with purple guano) holds a promenade of statuary columns (heavily eroded almost smooth, stag and deer headed shapes) leading to carved steps and columns supporting a wide doorway.” The bolding here, I don’t know, it seems, noun-like? Are we just bolding nouns? Features? They are not followed up on elsewhere. And then the mini-description in the parens. I think we can all see what the INTENT was with this. To provide a little more description of those features. But I don’t think this works AT ALL. I think it’s a confusing mess. Either I’m having a stroke (I AM out of velo 9’s. And gin. And coke. And coffee.) or this is a just a muddled mess of a description with the parens, bolding and so on. It’s too much, I think, competing for our attention, including the word usage. It reminds me for al the world of those adventures that try to use color-shaded boxes to color code every section and paragraph of an adventure and in the end their attempts to bring clarity just result in a big ugly confusing mess that you want to burn instead of reading. And its STILL hard to find out which rooms have monsters in them!

There were supposed to be factions. But the place is too small for that. There’s no real interactivity here, once you rid yourself of any possibility of factions. Just long room descriptions with things overly described for no reason. 

Someone had an idea. This parliament of owls thing, with factions and birds nests and how that works with deer people and witch owls and so on. I would assert, though, that in spite of all of the additional words, it never got beyond, as a concept or in implementation, what I just typed up there to describe it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. Good eight page preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558919/parliament-of-owls?src=newest_recent?1892600