Ancestral Peninsula #1

By Guilherme Providello
Savvy Thief Studios
OSE
Level 1

For years, you were victims of an imperial Senator who lived in the Capital. He stole you as children from your home village in the Ancestral Peninsula, and assured your subservience through drugs and witchcraft. After many years receiving this treatment, you no longer remember who you truly are or where you came from. Enslavement was never accepted in the Empire, and one day his illegal actions were discovered. In a desperate flight towards your forgotten homeland, the senator let his guard down. And now, at last, he lies dead at your feet. This momentous death is only the beginning of the PCs’ struggle to recover their past

This thirty page supplement uses about ten pages to describe ten hexes in a Roman/Iberian like setting. It’s just boring crap. Nothing going on. Hardly a hex crawl. At a page per hex you’d think SOMETHING was happening here. No. Good luck. 

This thing is so frustrating. It took me a minute to figure out why. It’s Isle of the Unknown all over again. Maybe not QUITE as bad, but close. And when I say bad I mean aimless. There’s an aimlessness here. But, let’s back up. 

We start with the framing. Ok, you’re from fantasy-Iberia and you were fantasy-enslaved to a fantasy-roman senator who removed your fantasy-memories. You’ve fantasy-killed him right at the fantasy-threshold to fantasy-Iberia with the game starting with “How did you manage to kill the senator? What did you find on his body“. (I guess the whole “physical violence may be kept off-screen” is out the window as a trigger, yeah?) So, I guess you’re fleeing into non-Roman Iberia and away from Roman lands? Got it? You’re escaped slaves who just murdered someone. 

So what’s the frequency Kenneth? What are you doing in this hex crawl? I guess it’s always the players job to find a motivation for doing things, yeah? But it just seems like there’s more to this. You are hexcrawling in a settled land. Whose treasure you stealing to level up? Or, who you stabbing to level up? That leaves the usual culprits: demons and animals. And, there are a couple of demons here in two of the hexes. More on that later, right now we’re philosophizing. How do you level in a world in which you can’t loot to level? I don’t know man. What do you exploit when you can’t exploit? I guess you just damn the torpedos and full hypocrite ahead? I’m down for a more nuanced view of monsters. After all, I love a good situation. But we’re still playing a game. The designer has to give us something to do. There’s got to be an out, someone to kill and something to loot if we’re playing a game in which we get XP by killing and looting. If you want to write for the “get xp by interacting with the environment” game then I’m down with that also. But that’s not what is going on here. I mean, IM happy to stab and loot, but, also, it seems more than a little disrespectful to play the Things Fall Apart adventure by looting houses and killing people. So, the designer forgot something. A critical something. 

We’ve got a hex with d3x100 mermaids in it in a cave surrounded by shipwrecks. Hot damn! That’s a real hex crawl hex! We’ve got a hex with the millers family under the sway of a demon disguised as a pig with the families children rooting around in the pigpen. NOICE! A demon goat trapped under a hill temple. A witch in the woods. This is all very classical. 45 giant eagles in a lair. WTF?! Rock on man! This is the shit! Wilderlands eat your heart out! Lots of shit in the lair man! The lair where the goodies are …

But, then, the entry goes on for a page. Wilderlands did this in a couple of sentences, not a page. If Wilderlands jumped off a bridge then would you? Yes. Yes I would. A column for a stat block and a column for an encounter and treasure. I’m not even sure what the fuck to do with this encounter. I mean, stumbling upon it. Live and let live, I guess? There’s no reason to go here. There’s no reason to interact. Oh, look, we need a place to sleep for tonight? And the kids live in the sty? Ok. When in Iberia do as the Iberians do. Either I want to exploit a situation for my own ends or I’m an interfering do gooder? For my definition of good? I guess that’s why its a demon? Platonically bad? Does that cash belong to the miller though?

This is another full page hex and this is the pertinent part of the description. Do you care? Why are you interacting here? Domed rock? An entrance to it? Do you see one? In THAT text? Ok. Uh. I guess we move on? There’s just nothing here. I mean, functionally, what’s the difference between this goat encounter and “a 10 foot tall parrot on stork legs is in this hex.” (That being the platonic Isle of the Unknown encounter.) There isn’t on? Just more words spreads across the page?

Ok. So. What secrets? There are none. That’s it. That’s all you get. Can you riff on it? Sure. In the same way I can riff on a dictionary entry. In the lava temple the text tells us that “A lot of care and courage are necessary to leap from rock to rock over the lava to reach the temple (see map.)” There is no map. There’s a line drawing, a little art piece, of some rocks in a stream/lava. Is that it? Cause there ain’t no map of a temple.

This is pointless. The designer has explicitly outlined a play style and then provided hexes in which the journey is the destination … but no rules for XP for the journey. What the fuck do you do here? It is a simplistic worldview presented where a more nuanced one would have resulted in the situations in which a party of characters can enter.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. That shows you the slant but not any of the hexes, and it really should have shown some hexes to be a good preview. We need to see what we’re getting ourselves in to.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534682/ancestral-peninsula-1?1892600