By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 4-6
The Astral Bazaar has been experiencing “godquakes;” rumblings from deep within the very petrified corpse that the bazaar is constructed upon. The characters are thrust into an extraplanar mystery, tasked with determining the very nature of the dead god and what can be done to save the city that floats in the Astral Sea!
This is 121 pages of junk. The hook is sixty pages long and then there’s thirty pages to describe about thirty locations. It marks, I think, a new record in the amount and degree and uselessness of padding in an adventure.
You chase a wanted man across rooftops. You find a rock on him and a ticket to the circus. At the circus the ringmaster uses his astral ship(!) to take you to the Astral Bazaar. There Queen Frostine tells you the rock is part of a dead gods heart, the city is built on top of the dead god, and they’ve been having godquakes, so, pretty please, go in to the dungeon and fix shit. You visit Reality, The Nightmare, and the Dreaming, about thirty locations in total, collecting the blue key for the blue door, etc. At the end you can wake up the god in question or kill the god in question. Neither choice has any impact on the game.
I’m going to ignore parts of this adventure. Like the rooftop chase that begins it. There’s no real set up here other than “the party is after a dude.” The chase takes four pages to describe, with about one sixth of one page being actually devoted to “how to run the chase.” One of the roofs you can run across is an inn. Fully a third of the page it appears on describes the inn. In terms of all the food they serve and how much each costs and all of the various room types they have and how much they cost. There is literally nothing in the long ass description that is relevant to the chase. At the end of the chase you’re given a long ass description of three items you find on the dude: a dagger, a rock, and a circus ticket. Then the adventure tells us that if the dude gets away the party find two items, the rock and the circus ticket, and then proceeds to repeat the long ass descriptions of those two objects. Mind you, this is on same page. ON THE SAME COLUMN OF TEXT.
The amount of padding here is just beyond belief. I truly cannot relate to you the overwhelming degree of text here unrelated to the adventure. The hook, with this chase, the trip to the circus, and trip to the astral plane to talk to Queen Forstine takes 61 pages. And, it’s not even trivia. It’s trivial. Long ass descriptions for things that can, in no way, ever be related to the game that will be run. It’s fucking exhausting. Oh, hmmm, I guess I’m not ignoring parts of the adventure.
Mountains of read-aloud. There is no way in hell I, as a player, would sit and listen to this and I’m the king of suffering in order to be polite to your host. It/then statements abound. “Appears to be” all over the place.
This cannot be real. But it is.
Circus trope. For no reason. Dinner party at the circus, for no reason. Astral ship in the circus. It’s like a list of all of the worst tropes.
The actual “dungeons” here, the core of the adventure, are quite simplistic. You solve riddles … that are meaningless. You stab demons. You collect “shard” keys. You meet the Lawful Stupid good guy army. Your DM suffers through bloated text and the players suffer through long read-alouds. You wander about, mostly aimless and not knowing whats expected of you. You make checks you don’t know are important or face arbitrary conditions until someone monologues at you for a column of text. At the end you free or kill the suffering god via fiat. There are no consequences for either decision, just “it will take many mortal lifetimes.”
I am aghast at this. Looking back at the designers other adventures, I can see it was all leading up to this. No more for me, thanks, I’m full.
This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages and shows you nothing of what to expect, although if you squint hard can you can get hints of the problems to come, if you know what they are in advance.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/584562/crucible-of-a-dead-god-ose-edition?1892600
That’s not the inn in question, with the chase. That’s a completely separate inn that has no bearing on the adventure.