A Green and Dead Sea

By John Battle
Self Published
OSR
Level ? Fuck you for wanting a level, plebiscite!

The curse left behind by the shells of gods has turned the canopy of this forest into a fungal carpet. It’s tangled so thick that it can be skiffed across like a green and dead sea, on wood and steel barges, frigates, and scooters. Bismark’s Guild of Hooligans has spare cash to throw to adventurers who climb down below the canopy and pilfer the pre-war tech that’s probably still down there.

This thirteen page hexcrawl in a post-apoc/fantasy/bio/retro setting is the usual for this style: more ideas than adventure and a lack of understanding of what “Situations” means.

How disappointing. I reviewed a decent adventure by this designer a few weeks ago. It was artpunky, but, was substantially longer and with more substance. A rarity among the artpunk crowd. So I sought out another one. That was a mistake. 

So, hex crawl. Three hexes “on top of the trees” and five underneath it that have encounters. A small rando table for each that has Other Things that happen while traveling. Bismarck has an airship, there are biotech giant mech wreckage (“the gods”, I think?) and so on. Kind of an interesting setting; maybe a little anime for my tastes with the appeal to Bismark and airships, but, sure, I could do this. 

The descriptions suck. “A sac of lifeforce wrapped in now-sentient fungus which fights to protect itself.” Great. I am inspired. Can we pulsate? Can it be ghostly lifeforce? A translucent purple sac? A fungus full of fave with only mouths? I don’t know. SOMETHING?  Everything is like this. This is the core conceit of these types of adventures. Just toss out an idea of something and put all of the work on the DM. This fucking shit does this enough that I hesitate to even call them adventures. “99 adventure ideas within a fungus forest” might be a better idea. Except there are far fewer than 99 ideas.

Stats are few and far between. That lifeforce fungus shit gets some. 5HD. But thats the heart of the adventure. The Big Bad. Most things don’t get stats. And most treasure is not detailed. You do get a treasure table at the end, ala the Gamma World junk tables. “A broken AI chip.” Wonderful.

As with most of these, it’s just ideas. It doesn’t understand the difference between an idea and a situation. “A still living war machine is impaled on a fungal thorn tree, made of red, bleeding fungus and 6ft spikes. Its battery can charge two disintegration rays.” Great. “Spiced Pear Pirates are arming a car-sized bomb to blow a hole in the canopy.” Wonderful. These are, I admit, wanderers, but, the hex locations have much the same energy. 

You need to do a mission for someone, in one of the hexes. You need a pre-war cape, the blood of a god, a vial of time and the “final’ mushroom. I get that a large part of D&D is improv. A large part is people making shit up. But, too much reliance on this and you fall in to story game territory. That’s not OSR D&D. Let’s look at this comment, in the description for the sinkhole that leads you from the upper canopy to the ground beneath things “I don’t know how they could get down this, so just ask them how they’d like to avoid being crushed by the sands and what they plan to do about the fall. They’ll think of something.” Or this commentary for a treasure item “The sand is crystalized Time and can be used for many interesting purposes (I’m sure).” 

I get shit sometimes for wanting things a little more loosy goosy and less mechanistic, but this is just insanity. This is just the typical artpunk collection of ideas. This is a story game. Perhaps, I guess, this is what happens when the OSR won. The story gamers, the people who hate the D&D mechanics, are still around. They just call themselves D&D players and continue to play, and produce, story games. 

Quite the disappointment.

And, to out ArtPunk friends … be happy that you have an identity. From high fantasy railroads in 2e to 1e stick-in-the-ass, to the sublime perfection of B/X and the New SHovelWare of The Hotness, at least you got a brand also. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Of course. No doubt there are Communty Copies on itch or something like that. I don’t know. I don’t really give a fuck.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/321686/A-Green-and-Dead-Sea?1892600