Killing Grounds

By Eduardo Raffo Carozzi
Breeding Calamities
Generic/Universal

Year after year, the monks meditate and pray with the desire to get closer to enlightenment. They boast of having abandoned the desires of this material world, of being one with the Universe, however, no one is beyond temptation and many times the most devout are the first to be corrupted.

This thirty page outline is trying to convey the hunt for a demonic beast in a small village and with their growing anxiety and panic. It’s way too wordy for what it is with not nearly enough gameable assistance. Great NPC’s though.

On the first page the adventure tells us “This is just the sketch of the adventure …” Well, fuck me man. I guess if I knew that going in to this I MIGHT have still purchased it. I do have an academic interest in adventure sketches; enough information to get the thing going but far fewer pages than a traditional adventure. But, also, I thought I was buying an adventure. I’m not buying an adventure though, as I learned. That makes me sad. It makes me feel like I’ve been cheated. I did NOT want the clearcoat. I feel like going on a diatribe about this. I will save everyone the explicit insight and just say that the buyer should know what they are getting.

Ok, so, a monk is sick. The party comes up to the monastery to help and the dude implodes. Or escapes to the village and implodes. Either way, a monster now stalks the village at night killing people a night.The party gotta stop it. Errr…. Should stop it? Could stop it? 

There are two good parts to the adventure. The designer knows they are the good parts. They ARE what the adventure is. The core of it. The first is the list of village NPC’s. It’s a good list. An entry or so takes a full page. Others take columns. Others are a paragraph or two. So, yes, the writing is WAYYYYYYY too long. (In a small fucking font that looks like wall of fucking text. Jesus man, give a dude a break!) And the adventure is in DESPERATE need to a summary sheet for the NPC’s. The name, occupation, age, relationships, secrets. Somehting like that, so I can look at one page (NOT IN A SMALL FUCKING FONT!) and work them in the on-fly social interactions in the village as the game progresses. But man oh man oh man, the NPC’s are good. The dollmaker digs up a body every couple of years and has a basement full of zombies that he makes. He’s going to be a strong ally of the party in their hunt for The Beast. No, seriously. He is. He’s devoted to the village. The Reeve is cooking the books and has been sleeping with the local milkmaid. If she dies then he goes fucking nuts, in a small way, rounding up all of the young men and going on a vengeance hunt for the Beath, making a lot of mistakes in his hubris/anger. That’s fucking good. That’s real life. And the hits just keep coming and coming. Including a farmer with good yields, five kids, a young and beautiful wife who cooks well. “He is living his best life” the text tells us. Oh man, the ways I could use that! The NPCs work with the adventure their shit makes sense IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ADVENTURE. It’s not just random trivia, it’s things that can help enrich the adventure. 

The other nice part is a small, three event, section. There’s a mechanic called VIllage Hive Mind, or some such, which basically tracks the mood in the village. As people die their IMP score is subtracted from a starting total. More important, liked NPCs subtract more. When it reaches a certain level then people start a mass exodus from town. When it gets still lower then some people start to think they should worship the Beast,leading to a confrontation and death in the town square. The third and last event is The Rapture, where they kind of go buts. They start self sacrificing themselves to The Best, or “the people begin to voluntary surrender themselves to the Beast, worshiping it like some kind of god and letting the monster absorb them as it evolves into its Abyssal Phase.” Sweet! I fucking love it! Again, mirroring a kind of dark human nature in extreme pressure trope. Alas, these event section are quite short, just a couple of sentences each. 

That is, essentially, the adventure. There are no real maps of the monastery. Or the village. Or any events to speak of. No kills. And while there’s quite the focus on the ecology of the monster there is not a whole lot on how to use it during play. 

The designer recognizes, correctly, that the adventure they are building is a kind of paranoid monster hunt where the creature also stalks the villagers. That is a social adventure and the designer knows that. The NPCs would be the heart of that, the designer recognizes that and a substantial focus, via page count, is there. The second support, though, would be the events. And while there is that very basic outline, that could use a great deal of supplementing. More kills. More vignettes and so on. Somehting for the DM to riff more on. SHort, just a couple of sentences each, but there for the DM to sprinkle in. Do you need maps? Well, no, not really. Not very good ones anyway, like an exploratory map. But, also, having a map of the monastery and village, just a rough one, not really keyed much, would have helped a lot also. 

It’s very hard for me to get over the small font and extreme number of words that is taken to describe almost everything. Those three events, of just a couple of sentences each, that’s about the right size for what it is. You could get away with a few more sentences there, maybe. But, other than that, almost every entry in this just drones on and on and on, with the smaller font making it even harder to scan the text for the important details. The large page count here is almost entirely wasted. Yeah, there’s a hunt wandering monsters in the wilderness so you can craft minigame. And that’s ok also. But the main monster text focuses on the wrong things about the monster. Ponderous, I guess. The text is ponderous. The phrasings and vocabulary choices are off just a bit, which may be an EASL issue,  but that’s not really a problem. The ponderousness of the verbosity. That’s the issue.

Reference sheet for NPC’s. More events/kills/etc. A couple of throw-away maps. Bonus points if they have some features that enable some interesting play. Cut the word count drastically and pump up the font. 

I leave it as am exercise for the reader if generic/universal is appropriate or if you just stat shit for D&D and be donet with it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. No preview, but, with PWYW you can look at the entire thing. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/445024/killing-grounds?1892600