Tangled

By Josh Domanski & Reilly Qyote
Afterthought Committee
OSE
Level 0

Like viscera from a corpse, a carnivorous tangle of vines and bramble has spilled forth from an ancient fortress, swallowing up the countryside. Today, it reaches the outskirts of Peatstead. Your home. With promises of gold and glory swirling through your head, you’ll accompany a small army of commoners to put an end to its deadly expansion and emerge as heroes. Discover ancient treasures, avoid devastating traps, and encounter the wrath of nature itself in… Tangled

This 24 page adventure uses ten pages to describe ten rooms in a plant themed dungeon. The read-aloud leans purple and the encounters rather simplistic in this “Enjoy The Dm Backstory” adventure. A couple of nice ideas to steal, though.

It’s a funnel! The local plant life is out of control and the villagers go out to deal with in, in the local dungeon/cave place. Where the old druid lived. So this is going to be a standard “plant at the middle of everything will tendrils everywhere” adventure. This one is done in the art style, with certain exceptions, of an 8-bit dungeon crawler. An appeal to nostalgia using a familiar trade dress that is not T$R? I generally stopped reviewing DCC adventures because of their linear nature. They do it well, but I don’t need to go out of my way to find that. And this, also, has a map that is mostly linear. There are a frustrating number of “cracks in the roof letting in a beam of light” that the party CANT exploit. Such is the nature of a linear adventure.

Our read-aloud, which can in places push the limits of what I’m willing to put with, is all in some cutsy font. No doubt authentic to the 8-bit genre being emulated. I continue to find it puzzling why people think illegibility is a good idea. I’ve got enough problems in my life and struggling to read your text should not be one of them. Unless … this isn’t an art book is it? Not an adventure at all but a piece of art masquerading as an adventure? Cause you know, if that’s the case then I’m going to go all full Bryce on you. Which is not to say you can’t make your adventure look pretty. But not at the fucking expense of being a fucking adventure. Oh, also, the read-aloud over-reveals what is in the room. It gives too much detail in places, which means it destroys the back and forth between player and DM that is at the heart of all RPGs. For example, in one of the rooms, there are some woodland creatures. “Some of them sleep while others have long since died in a peaceful huddle around a gnarled effigy” That is something for the party to discover, not for the text to prematurely reveal. The tension of discovery has been ruined, as is the horror of it all.

As that text betrays, the wording here runs to the purple side of the spectrum. It feels disconnected. In the past I’ve made an analogy to the bible used to write scripts. Its not the end goal but something used to send a signal to someone else who is doing the writing. And that’s not the right place to be in adventure text. “The smell of rotting wood and mildew sweeps up from the floor.” Sweeps up from the floor? Really? I’m all for a thesaurus, but we can play “stick in a word randomly.” Or how about “Inside is a pitch-black chamber of incomprehensible shape or size” Ok, we’ll ignore te pitchblack and vision aspect of this. Incomprehensible size and shape? Really? One of favorites from the adventure is “The river crashes against the rock with an uproar, as though fleeing from danger.” You gotta be fucking kidding me man. See, maybe if I was trying to tell the set designer what to show me, maybe thats chill. But that’s not the same as telling the DM something for them to riff on and inspire them, or to the players in read-aloud. That is all groan worthy.  Which is too bad because there is at least one major disconnect between the language and the art. There’s a terrific back cover piece which communicates a scene in the adventure VERY well. And yet the text used to describe it comes nowhere close. The text needed a lot more work here.

And, we won’t even mention all of the DM backstory that pads the DM text out. With all of that removed then theres remarkably little text to the adventure. It’s all pretty much your standard fare in terms of interactivity. 

But not all of it. 

There are some really great things on here also. The magic items are TOP. SHELF. We’ve got a ring that keeps you from getting surprised. And makes you very paranoid. Excellent! That is EXACTLY what being hyper-aware means! A wonderful example of not imagination first. If we assumed there was no surprise mechanic in the game, and you wanted to give someone the power to not be surprised, to make them hyper-aware, then what else would happen? The’d be hyper fucking aware. Which is paranoid. NOW you can turn to the mechanics. And then there’s this lamp that dispels illusions inside its glow. POWERED BY YOUR OWN BLOOOOODDDDDD! Fucking rocking man! “I was a thousand times more evil than thou!” Power has consequences.

And, then, in the rooms also. There’s a dude, asleep, with an apple tree growing out of his back. Uh. Ok. Hey, trees got some apples on it. Wanna eat? An apple tree comes out your mouth and stomach. Oopsies! It’s fanciful and imaginative. Which is what an adventure should be. I know some of you are going to grouse at the more folkloreish aspect of it (and, I do love me some folklore in an adventure …) but you also have to recognize that its a thousand times better than the deriguour that can pass for room encounters in many adventures. To it’s credit, we’ve got pitcher plant mimics as pits, rope bridges, an underground river to swept up in and a nice little room that you have to feel around and groped in, along with tiny mushrooms. That are bleeding. Pretty nice things. 

The trappings here, though, are just not enough to really recommend the adventure. Yeah, it’s a funnel. But the text really needs to be better and the encounters, the ones that are not straightforward, are just not enough in concept, by themselves, to support the adventure. I will note, though, a great little “follow ups” section that recommends other plant based adventures. And, they are pretty decent ones. Hole in the Oak. Hideous Daylight and so on. AT least the ones I’m familiar with are pretty damn good. That’s a nice little tough for someone that wants to continue the plant theme.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview, so I guess the potential buyer can go fuck themselves.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/493879/tangled?1892600