King for a Day (Revised)

By Jim Pinto
Port World Games
Generic/Universal
Level- Ha!

The Valley of Brycshire has been infested with a foreign and strange problem for a quarter of a century. This alone is not unique to fantasy gaming. Most adventures start with, “There’s something rotten in Denmark.” But it is for this very reason King for a Day works so well. It starts simple enough with an errand or a missing woman, concepts PCs can easily understand and want to solve. The hook is baited and slowly they come to realize there are a lot of problems in Brycshire. Too many, in fact. And no one seems interested in fixing them. There are nonhuman tribes fighting a war no one can see. There are two groups of cultists, shockingly similar, yet with nothing in common. There’s a local Baron, unable to think straight and unconcerned with the impending extinction of his people. Underneath it all, keeping their intentions hidden, is the Dagon Cult. The cult is fixated on serving three masters who in turn serve a disguised god, who is lying to everyone, including the cultists and puppet masters. Every layer of the mystery is buried under another lie. The enemy at the end of the story is never named. Not in this edition and not in the previous one. I thought it was obvious who it was. But some people didn’t agree and fabricated endings I didn’t intend. And that lie makes me happier than any truth I could reveal.

This 373 page book attempts to paint a picture of a small region with a cult problem and many other intrigues. It is, instead, an unusable mess that spends a lot of time either touting itself or being purposefully ambiguous. 

This frequently comes up on lists of Best Adventures. I’m gonna assume this appealed to the Pathfinder Adventure Path crowd and that they were amazed to see a sandbox? Otherwise I just don’t understand why people think this is a good adventure. A quick google to learn its history instead turned up people say it was SUCH a good adventure or people saying something like “I’ve read through this book several times, made pages and pages of notes & scribblings, and have been working for over a year on bringing this into a playable adventure that I can DM for my group. All during this time, I have been wishing repeatedly that there was an index at the back of the book rather than all my Post-It page markers with notes on them sticking out everywhere around the edges of the book.” A lot of people seem to be saying how great this is … but there are not a lot of Played comments. This causes me to raise an eyebrow. Either this (Revised) edition fucked up the origional (as, say, kickstarted Rappen Athuk did), or peple are just reading this instead of playing it, or It Was A Radical Departure from the ham-fisted adventure paths at the time. This version, that I’m looking at right here, is not playable. There are some good sandbox adventures and many more acceptable or not terrible ones. I can’t see anything radically different in this one that would make it more appealing than those.

The region has a lot going on in it but the core of this is a cult playing the long game, poisoning the water supply, slowly turning the people apathetic. They just don’t care about anything anymore. And it’s not in a radical way, something obvious, but, if your kids go missing you should give a shit, yeah? They don’t. Parallels to the modern pharmaceutical industry and its pills, removing both the highs and the lows from list so everything is just kind of bleh? Well, no probably not. There are, listed, 39 storylines in this. 39 separate things/plots/etc going on that range from minor to full on campaign themes. There’s a lot going on here, probably too much even if the product was perfect. That does give the DM the ability to pick and choose and perhaps use this as the basis for SEVERAL campaigns, and it also means that a good deal of space was wasted in other circumstances. Although, I do think it would be fun to run this, like, three times, name changes and the like, dropping in different plot elements, all eventually ending in the same way/cult. “Jesus fucking christ! It’s the same campaign!” Always down for a good “appeal to the player not the character. I’ll speak to those later.

There are going to be many issues with this adventure, but the most immediately obvious is the conversational tone in the writing combined with the smugness of the designer. What A Clever Boy Am I gets real old real fast. And the designer speaks to the reader directly and frequently, if not continually. “The gamemaster must see everything at once. The PCs want to see everything at once, but the act of discovery is everything. The more the gamemaster knows and understands about the environment, the more she can ‘wing it’ when the PCs go off course. After all, a great percentage of roleplaying is improvisation, but sandbox play can be more demanding on a gamemaster’s freewheeling spirit. Gamemasters that aren’t comfortable with this style of play should map out each scene or segment of play ahead of time, drawing players through the story by the nose. And if this is your intention, I recommend not playing this adventure at all.” That the designer condescends to allow us his secrets is a great honor indeed! I suppose I could get over the smugness if it were not married to the conversational writing style. As a reminder, I’m looking for four things in an adventure: usability at the table, evocative writing, interactivity, and overall design. If you’ve really created a masterpiece of design then I can be forgiving in some of the other areas, and it’s an easy c- if you can use what you’ve created at the table. All stabbing is going to be frowned upon, generally, as is Victorian laundry lists rooms, extreme minimalism, and purple prose. Conversational text gets in the way of locating information in the adventure. I’m not dying on any hill; it’s theoretically possible that you could write an adventure using conversational text and that it will still turn ok. But possible and probably do not have the same definitions. Adventure writing is, at its core, technical writing. It MUST assist the DM in running it. That’s why it exists, its entire reason for existing. And the conversational writing leads to both padding of the text, making it harder to locate information, burying the important parts of text in surrounding walls of conversational tone, and a cognitive difficulty in parsing the text to pull out the portions you need for the game RIGHT NOW. I mean, you don’t seriously expect me to keep 370 pages of text in my head, right? I’m going to hit this again and again and again in this review. A book filled with underlines, highlights, post it notes, and separate notebooks of data and excel spreadsheets is not a success. It means that the designer has fundamentally failed in the core purpose of the adventure. I don’t care. It’s its written in iambic pentameter in inuit then, maybe, it shouldn’t fucking be written in iambic pentameter in inuit? 

Let’s talk storylines. Plots. Whatever. These start on page 290. Of 373. “Border Disputes” is a minor plot. It takes, oh, a page and a quarter to describe. Humanoid tribes have turf and they put up rocks to mark the edges of their turf. A border marker gets vandalized and no one knows the graffiti of the new tribe. A couple of villages are suggested as places remote enough for warring tribes to fight over. That’s it. There’s nothing else here. Oh, there’s preaching: “While this is not an important storyline, certain players come to expect combat with humanoid species as a staple of fantasy gaming. Border Disputes provides an organic method to introduce physical threats to the campaign. Without this storyline (and a few others), the gamemaster can ignore most of the humanoids in the valley, especially if it seems unlikely Brycshire could support so many creatures.” But anything else? That’s on the DM. This is, at best, a series of events in a better written adventure. But, hey, want to run it. Let’s turn to page 556, where the locations start. Hmmm, a footnote for “Abandoned Farms” on page 59 tells us that “Goblins from the Carrembarrow Hills have been spotted on the edge of Thursley Bog. Someone from Osathorpe travels to Halford in order to report it.” That seems useful. Ashley Forest is described starting on page 60. It has a small note about two tribes using the southern tip to trade, as well as a couple of other events related to the forest, a wild boy a dead orc, humanoid on humanoid ambush. Seems like something to remember. Ah! “Avendeep, a couple of sentences on page 64 about a locale in the forest. It has “another passage into the orc tunnels.” Basing Hall has a note about the Roughskin tribe nesting there occasionally. Ah, Carrembarrow Hills. “Border Disputes and Warring Tribes. The Carrembarrow Hills are

where problems start, but the valley floor of Brycshire is where most fights seem to end.” Seems like a major site to me. Ok, an hour later I’ve scanned the location, up to page 146 and noted the places where humanoid tribe shit happens. I have now reached the orc Caves” section. That’s nine locations over two pages for the Blood Eye Orcs. Regale yourself with “3. cave stairs Massive stairs are cut straight from the earthen cave, breaking through into the natural cave entrance above.” This is all generic content. Ok, lets see, page 160 is people, let’s scan that also. Ah! Blood Eye Orcs appear on page 174. Wait, no, they belong to a major plotline, not the minor warring tribes plotline. Ah ha! Page 176 are the Bog’gog, a small tibe of peaceful goblins. Led by Bez. Is there an entry for Bez? Lets flip back and check. Ah, yes, there is! /4 page to tell us he’s a pacifist. “He now understands the value of life and death.” Seeems lie that could be said in less than ¾ of a page, but what do I know? Ok, back to the Bog’ogog. Nothing relly good here. Ah, Broken Fangs on page 178, aggressive warline Gnolls. Led by Remmock, we’ll need to go look that up later. Another ¾ page to tell us about some gnoll names and other trivia, and that they will blame the tribe of eight in border wars. Ok. Ah, yes, page 249, their leader does have a separate entry. Hates Snygg. Better go look that up. “Alpha, Intelligent, Hunter” hat’s fucking boring. Hmmm, ok, lets grab a map, print off a copy and note the tribes on it and locations on it, maybe with territories? Seems like a good idea. Oh! Looks like page 51 has a list of factions and MAYBE the tribes are on it? Eight of them maybe? Ok, lets pop out the handouts PDF. It’s got all of the locations in it and who appears. Ashley Forest says “Duncan Fangrin Gnolls Gremock Spearfang Order Of The Serpent Snygg Tribe Of Eigt Viviene” Ok, some of those looks humanoid. Serpent? Oh, hmmm, those are hippies who dress up like snakes, not humanoids I guess. We can dig through the rest of these to try and find humanoid sounding names also. So, I’ve read everything, made by notes, stuck in post-its, and created maps and a kind of event timeline. I’m now ready, after a couple of hours, to include one of the more minor and throwaway plotlines! Yeah me! Remember this feeling. 

Obviously this is absurd. There is some kabuki regarding organization, cross references and the like, but it’s just that, kabuki. I don’t think it actually does anything to help you run this, or, mostly even, prep to run this. This is, likely, not an adventure. It’s a regional setting with a lot of suggestions and the possibility of a lot going on. It has, through its obtuseness, crossed the line from adventure and/or sandbox in to regional setting. And I don’t willingly pick out regional settings to review. I don’t know how to review fluff. 

As a regional setting the organization is still shit. But, clearly, you can see how this might be used as a starting regions for the players. They go about their business exploring dungeons and the like and the regicide, apathy, coups and other intrigues happen around them. That SHOULD have been how this was organized. It’s not though, there’s not nearly enough to the locales to support adventuring “down time.” 

Plus, there’s a very strong, explicit, Harn vibe going on. We are solidly anglo-saxon with this. Laets and Cnihts running around. You know what those are, right? How about compurgation? No? Shit is just thrown in to complicate things. This should have been a more generic setting instead of going hard core down the angle-saxon path. Yeah, it adds flavor. You’ve also got 30+ “storylines” to dump in. How much complexity do you want in a supplement? The hundred court. The shire court. All tools for you to use, but, also, not directly referenced anywhere in the adventure. COULD either of those show up as play elements? Yeah, there’s noble intrigue. Do they deserve all of the space they take up? No.

You can see why people got excited about this when it came out. And, even, why it might be interesting today. The scope here is quite large, with lots of people, places, and plotlines. And there’s always something quite impressive about these larger scope products. Rappan, Night Below, GDQ … the larger scope products have room to breathe. They are rare beasts and its hard to not be impressed when you see them. Even cynically, someone got it out the fucking door, no small feat in and of itself. You can FEEL the possibilities in these things, including this one, and that is a magnificent thing. If the purpose of fluff is to inspire then it got it right. I’m not sure it’s possible to pick this up and NOT feel that way. Time slips, but I suspect that in 2013 something like this would have been a revelation. Not just a single plot. Not just room bashing. A campaign in which to house your OTHER campaign. It’s in that weird category of a regional setting that has things to do. Not just geography and history, people and place names, useless trivia, but things that can happen. This is a dynamic home base. And that’s a great thing.

It’s also the case that this is pretty multifaceted. Once you wade through the self-aggrandizement and conversational tone, you get several levels to the plots going on. We’ve got the standard warring tribes thing, that I went through in detail. There are a few other things of this ilk going on, standardish humanoid trouble and the standard “normal” cult activity. Then we’ve got some politics; the dude in charge of the region is the Regent … and would to continue to rule. So we’ve got the spies, troops, noble shit going on, economic stuff. Then we’ve got the main troublemakers: the Dagon cult. Lots  and lots of things leading to this and lots of the humanoid and politics lead to this also. They have a subtle APATHY poison in the water supply, there are kidnappings, all sorts of machinations. A standard home base would have little of any of this, maybe some hand waving about orc tribes raiding and burned farmstead before you go off to stab them. Here it’s more integrated, and the consequences more integral. A great home base might have some politics in it. But, again, seldom to the degree this thing has, so we’re adding yet another level. And then there’s the real trouble in the region, the Dagon cult, underneath it all, doing their thing. Anywhere you dig in this you’re going to find something going on, from the straightforward to the subtle. The amount of actual fluff, beyond the anglo-saxon culture stuff, is at a minimum here, perhaps raising its head most prominently in the NPC descriptions. Again, the scope and layering here is impressive. 

There are few specifics here. What you get are outlines of things.Think of them mostly as events that could happen rather than locales, with a lot of unnecessary commentary and “questions for the DM”; how does the party react, what does Bjorn do, how they react is up to the DM. And the organization of the booklet, for that, is just no where near where it needs to be to run this effectively. Fuck me, it’s also nowhere near where it needs to be for a DM to just understand what is going on. The comments about a year of study with notes, highlights and post-its are spot on. 

I have led you down a path to a certain opinion, and no doubt several people have opinions. Let us consider that in view of (what I anticipate) to be the reactions of the last review of a similar product, Brink of Calamity. These are, essential, the same product. This booklets scope is substantially larger and Calamity is less of an series of plots and focused more on specifics. This is an outline format, almost a book of lists (a list of anglo-saxon terms. A list of NPC’s. A list of Places. A list of Plots) and Calamity beds more towards room/key. But they both require SUBSTANTIAL prep to get you to a home base type area that you can use with the party in the way in which they intend, rather than just stealing one or two plots. What for the difference? Other than circling the wagons for one and burning the other at the stake. 

I don’t see this adventure as being fixable at home; to do so would require a complete rewrite. You can steal parts, of course, but there’s nothing special here to steal, the magic comes from the depth, scope, and layering. An editor needs to eliminate the conversational style. The NPC’s need shortened immensely. The anglo-saxon/normal fantasy village shit needs to be cut; its flavour can be integrated in to the NPCs, places, and events. Cross references need to be prevalent. It’s needs a brief summary of the MAJOR plots, then a list of places with their plots in them/directly after them. This could be followed or preceded by the major area spanning plots. It needs a few other things also, like home base shit and some normal home base plots, Mike is having an affair with Mary the innkeepers dog, and so on. I know what a fantasy village looks like, I need the deets on the Mike/Mary thing and that Bill is a serial killer who worships the local orphanage. There should be an event timeline, or at least a suggestion if inserting things in a particular order in the background when the party if off on the other side of the region, so that when they come back they can see the school marm is missing, has been for a week, and none of the searchers can find her. Ignoring the socio-economic implications of what I’m about to say, if every megadungeon were scattered throughout this region, how do I drop some shit on the party in an effective way when they return to town, or pass through the village of Pigsty on their way to Stonehell? Oh, sorry, I mean when the party feahfang’s the local frith-borh to avoid the nithings being healsfanged by the gemot. It’s been a few years, maybe it’s time for a “You can actually use this one” edition on kickstarter?

And, quoting from the adventure, “And don’t be afraid to say, “There’s something really wrong here.” 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages and shows a portion of the second booklet, the handouts and people/places reference. That’s a really shitty preview of the adventure. The preview should give a potential buyer a view of the product in a way that they can make an informed purchasing decision once looking at it. And this don’t do that at all.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/112514/king-for-a-day-revised-edition?1892600