By Jon P
Gwion's Mistake
OSR
Levels 3-5
Cross a mysterious bridge that appeared on the coast and enter a terrifying city of wealth and splendour.
This 54 page adventure describes nine areas, each with a handful of rooms, in a city that mysteriously appears one day and begins raiding the local towns. I don’t really understand how the adventure is meant to be run, given the content, or what the challenge is? Maybe, it’s not interactive in any way, to be hyperbolic?
I don’t fucking know man. I’m trying here. So, one day a bridge appears, running on to a local village, coming from offshore. At the end of the bridge is a magnificent city. Raiders come across the bridge carrying off people, valuables, non-valuables, dirt, whatever. Happens every twenty years and the bridge and city always disappear in three days.
The city has a number of sections to it. So, the bridge is a section, and the city gates are a section and the kings palace is a section and so on. Each section might have four or five little areas, separate keyed areas with, ostensibly, something going on. With a very loose definition of “going on.
Maybe the best example of the vibe of the entire adventure are the city gates. These are four locations provided by the map. There’s outside the gates, the gates (which means the guards), inside the gates, and a dock that is also behind the gates. There’s a page for a map. A page and a half to describe the keys, And two and a half pages to describe the NPCs/opponents there. Six pages for what is, essentially, a “challenged at the gates” encounter. Outside the gates we get a senior guard berating a junior guard and a collapsed wall section you can climb. In the gates proper we have a chest with a necklace in it. On the other side of the gates we have a couple of cages with prisoners in it. Finally the dock is the ONLY place you can land a boat.
The adventure is levels three through five. The adventure states, definitely, that the dock is the only place to land by boat in the entire bridge or city. I have no fucking clue why. Because we MUST encounter the bridge adventuring locales before the city proper is reached? This makes no sense. I didn’t see any prohibitions against flying over. Why the disparity? There’s a fundamental disconnect here in what an adventure means. Is it meant to be a series of linear events or can the party use their wits to bypass things and find unique solutions. Essentially, the Combat as Sport/Combat as War discussion. The more non-Fireball spells the wizard memorizes then the more they can bypass obstacles, but, obviously, the fewer fireballs. If you are not allowed to be the strong proud independent wizard you’ve become then why not just kill everything and everyone?
Looking further, this is a relatively simple set of encounters and yet it is taking up six pages, even while the keys proper take a page and a half. Time and again I see this happen in the adventure, the focus of the designer is somehow distracted, sifted away from the actual interactive portions of the adventure and on to trivia. “Page count is free in a PDF!” Sure as fuck is. And if the core of the adventure is great then I won’t bitch about the support materials. But when the support materials seem to get much more focus than the actual adventure then I start to question what went wrong? Why did the designer feel the need to have multiple named NPCs, each with a half page or more of information about them? FOr the fucking gate guard? That’s most likely going to get stabbed?! Sure, absolutely, there COULD be an adventure in which that kind of information, that focus on the NPCs over the keys, makes sense to have. And we also all know thats not the case generally. What if your page long NPC was instead one line of stats, like the ready ref sheets, with three keywords after it? That’s an extreme example, but it counterpoints the verbose NPC description style and begs the question: what does the longer entry offer, for actual play, that the shorter entry does not? And, therefore, why pay attention to the longer NPC entry when you could instead be agonizing over the text of the actual keyed encounter location? That IS the point of the adventure, usually. Thusly we have some very overwritten encounters in which very little goes on that are then supplemented with an absurd amount of support.
Except when we get to the core of the city. This is MASSIVELY abstracted. Up until this point I had pondered the use of a map in a game, because of the seemingly secondary nature of them in this adventure, even beyond a pointcrawl. Then the core city map showed up. That’s fucking useless. Here’s the map:
And the start of the description: “The City Plaza at the summit of the entrance staircases. Packed with stalls and stands, through which several major routes and seemingly hundreds of alleys can be navigated. Arcing around the entirety of the city, with the exception of the entrance, are monumental housing blocks that cast over the city through most of the day. The base of the housing blocks has an attached mass of accumulated shacks and houses accommodating the poorer classes of the city’s booming population.” There’s a disconnect here, not just between the scale of the map and the text, but the implied nature of the map and the text. The map is not just useless, it says things to us that are patently not true, actively working against the DM at the table. It’s bizarre.
But, moving on, the core issue here would be the lack of interactivity. The backstory has raiders from the city, and a previous attempt to repel the city being stopped on the bridge and so on. This implies things. Things that are not true. Those two guards are the only bridge obstacles. There’s no reaction force to incursions to the city, advice or anything. If you kill the king then 2d6 palace guards respond to hunt you down. 2d6 3hd guards. All the other guards are 2hd. When they are present. Which they usually are not. Everyone else, the king, the important NPC’s, these are essentially zero-level humans. And I’m supportive of that decision, but, the party of three to fives just outright murdering people didn’t occur to the designer? I’m pretty sure you can just stroll in to see the king and gack him, or do the same with th giant obvious city teleporting device. There’s no real obstacles here. No contention. If you, today, were to be attacked by 50 ants, would it matter to you? Would that be the definition of interactivity? Or, if you, say, met 1d6 ants every ten minutes while you walked over to a tree to pick an apple. Is that interactivity?
There’s nothing here. There’s nothing really to care about. There’s no subplots that matter. There’s no challenge. It is, at best, a series of colorful interludes on the way to pick an apple. The fishermen who swear they didn’t see anything. The administrator who hates the regime. Colorful bumpkins who say hello while you refill the car with gas. It looks like something is going on here but there is nothing.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $6.62. PWYW and a preview that shows you everything. The bridge starts on book page fifteen/preview page twenty. Check out those six pages for an overview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/570303/the-mechanism?1892600