By Dave Robinson
KEH Publishing
OSE
Levels 4-6
Travel from the city of Cismontane into one of the worlds beyond the Breaking on a mission to stop a monstrous cult. While shopping in the main market in Cismontane, one of the nearby merchants calls out to one of the party members, selected at random. “Hey, that ruffian stole your amulet!”
This 26 page single-column adventure describes a short linear adventure with a few scenes to Save The World. Yes yes, I know, but, also, it has some nice touches to it with great puzzles and hints of great imagery. But just hints.
Dude had an idea. It feels like it’s a home campaign idea. Dude put his ideas down on paper and published it. Dude knows nothing about adventure design. Inevitable result happens. Also, dude does actually know something about how some parts of D&D work and craft a decent Special encounter.
There are bits of this that make me think this comes straight out of a home game. This is centered around what the designer admits is a Stargate ripoff. Ages ago the gods threw down one of their own blah blah blah, temple at the site around the ensuing spatial rift eventually becomes a city. “The Skid” is the main street, representing the bodies skid down the mountain, blah blah blah. We’ve got some norse and egyptian and greek gods based game, and the temple now allows adventurers through the rift to various places using special amulets as passes. The mixed pantheon, the riffing on a stargate, the skid, and, of course, placing the dungeon under the local bar (or, in the temple in this case) is a time honored home game feature from the early days.
There are some parts to this that are quite good. In particular there’s a kind of perspective puzzle to get in to a building. Looking at the facade from one angle does one thing, looking at it from another does another thing. Shrinking features, growing features. It’s great puzzle, the likes of which is seldom seen in adventures. Not only is there this perspective thing going on but also a kind of environmental thing as you have to figure out how to, essentially, build a ramp to it in the skewed perspective that allows entrance. The designer is trying for, explicitly, an otherworldly vibe here and it does that quite well. It’s explained in a cumbersome way, and the evocative language is not really present, but the strength here is the core of the puzzle proper and it carries a lot of the heavy lifting for that vibe. Really good job and an excellent example of thinking about design in terms of imagination rather than starting from the standard book challenges of trap, environment, skill check.
There’s another portion, inside the temple, with a great piles of bodies, mostly skeletonized, and black cable-like things extending from the ceiling in to them. The skeletons get ‘animated’ by the cables, in a kind of puppet way instead of being undead. As you hit the skeletons pulses of energy ripple up the cables, with the entire encounter being treated much the same way as one would a hydra. You can kind of get a good image of what the designer meant, even if it, again, isn’t exactly the most evocative or clear way of describing it is present. The mechanical animation and treating it like a hydra are great riffs as well, again, a kind of imagination forward version of design with some rules thrown in to make it work instead of the other direction.
The adventure, though, is amateurish. And I don’t mean that in an overly negative way. Perhaps, uneducated, or unaware? I write sometimes about the difference between how a home game is run and an adventure for publication. I might scribble some notes on a paper and run the game from that. I’ve thought some about the game and those notes are really just a reminder of the aspects of the adventure I want to hit on as I riff my way to the game, responding to what the party is doing. I know what I mean when I see the words on the paper. I was inspired by something and thought about it and the notes are really just a way to get back into that vibe. The challenge, when writing for publication, is to transfer all of those ideas and imagery and whatnot into words on the paper, such that the DM using it picks them up and gets generally the same vibe I was going for. It’s all about efficient and effective communication from the designer to the DM, not losing the flavour initially imagined even before those homemade notes were made.
Some of this is formatting. We see here a single-column approach which makes that information transfer clumsy. And being concise in the writing while still being evocative. And here the writing is somewhat cumbersome and the general vibes meant are not really conveyed very well in the use of the descriptive language. Lost in the translation of The Telephone Game, so to speak. And then there’s the linear gameplay, where scene A leads to B leads to C leads to D. This is something that I think a home game does often, with the DM providing the glue to tie the various beats together, riffing in between them and perhaps dropping clues, etc to get the party to the next beat. Chase a thief, wander into cultists, go through the Breaking/Stargate, hit the temple exterior, then the two scenes in the interior, to get their stolen item back. And in a published adventure there needs to be just a bit more glue. Not a railroad, but support for the DM to get from A to B to C without it looking linear, just as one might do in a home game.
There’s an off phrase here an theorem padding things out. And a frustrating “Between the altar and the carving is a large chest containing the enemy’s hoard. From the way it’s piled, it looks like it was just dumped there. The hoard is Treasure Type B, with one each of types L, N, and O.” which really should have been expanded upon. There’s a rough fight in there also with an EHP and minions, but I’m gonna trust that the credited playtesters made it through without too much DM fudging.
Dudes heart is in the right place though, and the perspective puzzle is a great idea. He knew what he wanted to do, he’s just having a trouble getting there and communicating it to the buyers.
This is $3 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Boo! You gotta do a preview so I can make an informed purchasing decision.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/544746/into-the-breaking?1892600