Ship of Fools

By Thomas Scoot Ingle
Thomas Scott Ingle Presents
LotFP
Level ?

From the Captain’s log: “Whatever profane scourge, horrid disease, foul magic, or pure evil has taken my crew, my ship, my life, it cannot be allowed to find its way ashore…!              “I pray the gods sink this vessel, and the evil infecting her to the dark deep, and Mother Ocean take us all! For now, I’ve locked myself in my cabin with my last gallon of stout liquor, contemplating further on our dark situation, for I know not what else to do. May haps lady luck will visit, and this hard liquor will cause my death…” What happens when an adventure party stumbles upon Naval war vessel, lost for years, presumed sunken? Can they figure out what happened, or will they too fall to the horrid curse that destroyed the crew…?

This 32 page adventure describes the zombie apocalypse that is taking place on a boat. Designer Fiat combines with a mixed up DM text/read-aloud and Looooooooonnnnngggggg text runs to create one of the more confusing messes i’ve stumbled across in my ten years. Ok idea. Some decent imagery here and there. But a fucking mess.

You find a ship aground on the beach. You go on to it. Eventually the zombies wake up and attack you … after the ship has drifted back out to sea. Fight hordes of zombies. 

I enjoy a good monster description. I think they help bring an adventure to life. “It’s a zombie” is boring. That could mean anything. I like a monster description that draws no conclusions, like “Zombie” and instead describes what you see, or sense. This is part of what helps keep the game from becoming stale. A good monster description keeps the wonder of D&D alive. “It’s an orc” *YAWN* “It’s a svelt oiled human, nude but for a loincloth, sporting the head of a pig.” NOICE! This does a thing or two with monster descriptions that I particularly enjoy. “[The bodies on the deck] are rotted to the point it looks like one would need a spatula to get them up. Or a flat shovel. Some of them have thin layers of mineral growths on their bones from repeated exposure to sea spray.” That’s pretty sweet, eh? That’s a description from before they get up to attack. Hours before they do that. And, it turns something that the party is used to getting gacked by, a dead body, in to something that seems inoffensive to them. They are not as much on guard. I’m always impressed when someone manages to describe a skeleton in a room in a way that I, as a player, would not immediately destroy it for fear of it coming alive. And don’t get me started on statues …  Anyway, good zombie/body description in this one.

But the rest of this is terrible to a degree I don’t usually see in the adventures I review. 

Read-aloud! Second person read-aloud! Oh, my favorite! “The salty spray of the sea kisses your faces, the icy wind freezing it, as you trek along, near the coastline.” And the fucking adventure is FULL of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many second-person descriptions in any adventure before this. It is, of course, purple, because otherwise why the fuck does someone use second person. And, even better, it’s mixed in with the DM text. Like, it will have a second-person read-aloudish thing and then immediately launch in to the DM text. There’s absolutely no indication, at all, where one stops and the next begins. You’ll be in a second-person description and then encounter “It only appears someone’s waving from the crow’s nest, but one can’t tell, until they climb up for a firsthand look, which requires boarding the vessel.” It’s absolutely insane. Switching, back and forth, with little rhyme or reason. 

Did I mention the descriptions are LOOOONGGGG? Like, at least a column, and those are few and far between. We’re looking at page long descriptions here. Page a half in some cases. How the fuck are you supposed to run a page a half description of room, with no formatting other than a paragraph break. Yup, it’s paragraph style. Not quite wall of text, more novelization. 

If you try to get off the ship you get eaten. Yup. Designer fiat. If you notice the ship drifting out to sea and try to jump off then your character is immediately eaten. That’s wonderful. Play the fucking adventure the way the dude wants you to or fuck you. 

The artifact on board, causing the dead to rise (classic bite zombie infection style) is located “[at] Referee/Gm’s choice”. Great. And the zombies, proper? How about a headshot?! “their headless body will still attack, though at a Referee/Gm determined penalty.” It’s the fucking designers job to handle this shit. It’s their job to come up with that penalty and describe it and playtest it and make sure it fucking works. That’s part of what the fuck I’m paying for (in time, if not money) when I get an adventure. But, no. 

And, let’s talk about the dead rising. A lot of the rooms, especially the initial ones, have a percentage chance that a certain action, most something causing noise, will cause the dead to rise. But, the party doesn’t know this. They will continue from room to room, causing noise, not knowing that this will trigger the undead attack.; There is no tension here. If the party doesn’t KNOW they are taking a chance then there is no tension around that chance. Sure, you can just attach a percentage for the undead waking up in each room. But let us not kid ourselves that is anything more than pure randomness. Why not just roll ahead of time, when writing the adventure, and making the zombies rise in that room, as you are writing it? It has the same effect.

Badly designed. Badly formatted. Impossible to wade through the text. It’s got nothing. But, also, the rare Two out of Ten!

This is $5.50 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. The last two show a couple of the shorter rooms descriptions, up front. So, only a column or so. But, illustrates the other points well. SO, A good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/439894/Ship-of-Fools?1892600