By Handy Haversack
Exalted Funeral
OSE
Levels 2-4
Inside the caldera of an old volcano in the Narthex Range, a Chimera has made their lair. From here they command the surrounding territory Like some creatures eventually do, the Chimera has found a drive to reproduce. An urge in the fiery chaos of their tripartite mind drives them to force into the future their legacy of hybrid power. But not for chimera-kind is the boring sexual striving of pedestrian and mundane species. The creation of new chimeric life is a process fraught with magic, charged with eldritch fire, and enacted in ritual mystery in places of ancient power […]
This 45 page adventure uses fifteen pages to describe nine rooms. Light on descriptive text, it manages to put a decent amount of interactivity in those nine rooms. I loathe the layout? here.
Let’s suppose I write the worlds greatest adventure. Everyone agrees. It is the best adventure ever. If you play it then you’re going to say so. If you run it you’re going to say so also, the booklet is perfect, engaging, encouraging interactivity, evocative. Full of great art. FULL of it. Every single page is a full art piece. And the adventure text has two words on each page. You can make them out easily enough. But each art piece has two words in it and taken together that’s the adventure. If you can get past the incident then the play was pretty good. Nature or nurture. Do these adventures gravitate toward Exalted Funeral or does Exalted Funeral turn them in to what they are?
As noted, this is a rather simple adventure, at least in terms of room count. It’s nine rooms in fifteen pages housed within 45 pages. That means lots of extra shit. And I’m not just talking about appendices here. At roughly two pages per room then you’ve got the rooms, individually, taking up some space. The adventure accomplishes this with the fuck ass layout that I mentioned earlier. It’s not the full on two words per page thing, but there is a hubris in its layout. A large art piece with the words around it, or a giant 72 point font to announce the room name and then some bullets underneath that. The energy here is an empty white page with a box outline in the middle of it with a few bullets in it. And, as a result, we get rooms not uncommonly spread out over two pages. I’m not thrilled with this. I understand there is a spectrum here. I understand that there can be some happy medium between an art book and plain black text on a white page. But, I think I see, time and time again, this tendency to pay attention to the bullshit art and layout and pick funky font choices. I might, st some point, point out a nicely evocative art piece or two in an adventure. Something hat I think communicates the vibe or shows off the scene particularly well such that the DM gains something from it that can be passed on to the players. That is the full and complete extent that I am ever going to comment on art. And your funky font and presentation choices are only ever going to be criticized. Because the only time I am ever going to comment on them is when I am bitching about them and how dumb they are and how he effort in the adventure should have been spent on the adventure. It’s great that you spent three thousand hours to rework the fucking barcode on the back and get a real ISBN. I don’t fucking care. I care about the fucking adventure.
And, fortunately, the adventure has great elements. We’ve got this mountain top, an ancient caldera on the top. The tree line 250 feet below the rim. (This, I think, is some of the bets imagery in the adventure. While there are a decent number of words present, imagery is not its strong point.) But, anyway, caldera. And inside, while only nine rooms, we’ve got several perchs/overlooks looking out. And some condor people. And some flying apes, both under the thumb of the chimera. Three flying enemies/groups. And, thus, the map is multilevel in a way seldom seem. Maybe that Expeditious Retreat cave crawl from years ago? There is, overall, 400 feet of difference, I think, between various levels in the caldera. And you, the party, get to negotiate those internal cliffs and drop offs. Some gradual, some not so gradual. In addition to those folks, who could, of course, be swayed to the parties cause with varying degrees of success, we’ve got a secret research lab underneath. The old lair of the e SPACE HORSESHOE CRAB SCIENTIST-HERO. (Who is referred to the same way, every time mentioned. I admire the dedication to the schtick.) Who has some elevators in his lair to help bop around a bit. There are also a variety of traps of various sorts.My Crabs has a magnetic trap that can also act on your red blood cells (Nice though there Mr Horseshoe crab! I see what you did!) Others are accidents, like fucking up a landslid or some such through carelessness. There’s good variety in that area, and they are integrated well, never seeming like a trap afterthought.
I’ve touched on the evocative writing. The cavern of the winged aped is described as “CAVERN: 75′ long, 60′ wide, ledges, nests.” There are other words, but they are mostly focused on the dimensions of the exits, ledges and such. Of the five bullets that describe the cavern, four deal with mundane dimensions of exits with one being that cavern description I copied above. WHich is mostly cavern dimensions. WHich is shown on the map. “Ledges, Nests” is not really a lot to go on. Yeah, the winged apes have bullets of wants and thinks and needs. And that’s great. Really love theory love of human flesh and the difficulties that could bring in negotiations. One sentence of cavern impressions would have REALLY gone a long way here. The bird people get a little more. “PILED WITH BRANCHES, debris often slick with guano”
It all just feels so padded out. Both with the words, and the exist/dimension fetish that is going on, and with the layout stuff. I would have appreciated about 50% less words for the room keys and quite a bit more focus on the something OTHER than the rooms dimensions. LIke a description.
This is all so suck ass. My feelings, I mean. I really like what it’s trying to do. The concept here. The chimera lair thing. The caldera/cave thing with levels and flying groups. I like the interactivity. Even if I am a bit skeptical about the level range taking on a 9HG chimera, a tribe of condor people and some 5HD apes? I sure as fuck hope you can make some friends in there. But, man, the emphasis on style over substance is hard for me. Dude fucks you up coming back from the dungeon and you track him back to here to get your magicitems back? Fuck yeah! This is a GREAT implementation of that, at least in concept. Also, I feel like I’m being super negative here, maybe because this thing is so close to being something really good?
The PDF is $9 at Exalted. There’s no real preview, although the sample page kind of gives you an idea of the presentation style I’m referring to.
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I feel like i would buy this for half the price. But 9 bucks for 9 rooms... i dont know. And this comes from someone who thinks art does have its place in an adventure.
I think a big issue with many of these fancy ones is that they don't use art as filler. They start with art and use the adventure as filler. And to this one you got lucky. The adventure was good. But it usually goes the other way, right?