Vestiges?
Self Publised
OSR? 5e.
Level 2
Every night, someone climbs down into a burial mound sealed for sixty years and declared “inactive.” He’s counting something on a wall, in chalk. No one knows who, or why — and the answer reaches far beyond one lone surveyor.
This 21 page adventure uses four pages to describe six scenes, one having five rooms. Is it AI slop? It is pretentious? You now longer have to choose, now it can be both! It’s also barely comprehensible.
This was a request, but the designer, as it turns out. I’m always a little bemused when someone wants ME to review something they wrote. Any publicity is good publicity? I mean, there are more than a handful of reviewers that will just give you five stars, why not go there?
And then there’s the statement in the request that the line drawings are AI. Sure, ok. I don’t actually care about AI. I feel about it the way I feel about Mork Borg: there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it just turns out it’s enabling a lot of garbage. Because, you see, while the designer disclosed the use of AI art to me, the adventure has this disclaimer at he bottom of the title page: “The illustrations in this work were created using generative AI tools, under art direction. Part of the content was developed with the help of AI, which was also used for proofreading and for translation. The whole — setting, rules, text — was conceived, directed, reviewed and approved by its author.” So, you used AI to write it and then write a deceptive missive to me in order to get me to review it because, I suspect, you knew that the use of AI in writing would be a no go. Except I don/t care about the use of AI. I care about the end result, and the fact that you engaged in a deceptive practice. I know, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right? I note that the last sentence in that disclaimer basically just says “I used AI” using different words and notably does NOT say that someone write this. Just that they directed the writing of it. Having saif all that, I don’t understand WHY someone would use AI in a creative work. Isn’t that the point, the process of creation? Isn’t that a major joy in life? If it’s not then why the fuck are you engaging in it? Like most modern shams, this is hollow. Nice art. Nice page layouts and backgrounds. The APPEARANCE of quality. And it’s all to the end of hiding the word-guesser slop underneath.
The text here just positively drips with AI mannerisms. Which is a euphemism for overwritten purple prose. It anyone wants to be a failed fantasy author, it’s the AI agents. “A Cabinet station: plain, functional, without a single ornament. It is not a tomb, it is an instrument, and it still works. At this depth nothing explains itself at first glance” Uh huh. Purple slop. “But he can read a depth, feel a draught and tell when a corridor is lying, which is worth more than a map.” Uh huh.Purple slop. “The threshold says it to anyone who looks: a sword bent double, a crushed helm, scattered iron filings — everything that carried iron and came too close” Purple slop.
It doesn’t help that this is some walking simulator. “It is also a way into Vestiges, a game of archaeological fantasy in which you do not loot dungeons: you survey what dead worlds left behind, and you decide what to do with what you have understood.” I decide to sell it for money and power. “A Guild of scholars, the League of Nyméria, funds the expeditions, buys up the finds, and decides what the world is allowed to know.” Wrong! My sword decides that. “The scenario is not won by killing Orin. It is played by deciding what to do with a man who counts in spite of himself, and to whom the count is handed.” But, it’s a lot easier, I’d say, if I just stab him? So, pretentious setting. Oh, oh, also, you get the famous “ask the party a deep question” bullshit. In this case “Why do you go underground, when sensible people stay up top?” I do it as escapism for a shitty middle class wage slave life in order to have fun and as a pretext to spend time with friends. Why the fuck did you shortcut one of the few meaningful things in life, the act of creation, and instead resort to AI slop?
With pretentious interactivity. I’m not sure you actually DO anything in this. There is certainly no conflict. There are a few die rolls, which you can’t really roll to continue with. I guess, once you walk to the end you get to decide who to seel the COUNTER out to, if anyone? It’s not meaningful though. There’s not real consequence for anything.
Bolding is used seemingly at random. The entire text is nigh incomprehensible because of the AI. I THINK I could give a somewhat accurate overview, although none of the motivations make sense. At some point in one of the railroad scenes it says something like “The real thread is pulled at a College cartographer’s, who sells copies of old surveys.” So, this is out of nowhere, I think, after you pursue the clue given to you at the start, which is a dead end/fake. How you end up at the Cartographers COllege, which has not been mentioned previously, is beyond me. At the end, during your one choice, you get this text “The return is the real fight, and it is fought without weapons. Three parties learn, within a few days, that the group went down — and each of them wants the count. Bring them in in that order” Bring them in WHAT order? The people mentioned, the table the table that follows, there is little in the way of consistency that would let you figure out what is going on here.
This is just a mess. An AI mess. A pretentious AI mess. Even if you are in to walking simulator D&D this is a shitty version of it.
This is Name Your Own Price at Itch.
https://sylkaen.itch.io/rpg-sylkaen-en-the-hand-that-counts-en