City of the Scorpion God

By Tuukka Tenhunen
Nuclear Saints
Fail Forward

Deep in a forsaken desert, weeks away from this life-giving river, lies a ruined city of yore. It was destroyed by our people in the ancient times, for the city was dedicated to a foul god of scorpions. Yet even after all these centuries, the scorpion cult persists. They hide in the deserts and plot doom to all civilization. Now they have struck our beautiful city and stolen my daughter. The cult will take her to their ruined city and sacrifice her to their false god under the next full moon!” “Go forth, bring back my daughter and I will pay you her weight in silver, this I vow in name of the Great Serpent
This 52 page story game adventure takes place in a ruined city with a small dungeon in it. It’s attempting to tell a story, with many encounters that would fit in well. What it does though is fail to recognize what it is, a story game, and model itself to that environment. Not understanding what the text is supposed to do is just a secondary sin in this one. Our story game friends deserve good adventures also. This isn’t one of them.

The kings daughter has been kidnapped and he send you in to the ruined city to save her, along with one of his servants (a pregen.) It seems the evil cult there wants to sacrifice her. But what we’ve really got is a ‘the dragon was the good guy’ thing going on. In reality, the chick is just a peasant and they ARE sacrificing her, but to keep the scorpion god locked away. The king, and his servant, want them NOT to, so the god will be summoned, being the REAL evil cultists. The trope here is not particularly well done, just a few throw away lines. I’m not morally opposed to it, or the intra-party conflict, in a story game, particularly a one shot for, say, a con. Games like the Mountain Witch and so on can thrive on this, contributing to the noir vibe, especially when pulled out in the last moments of the final encounter. Absolutely forbidden in a more traditional RPG, but we’re doing as the romans do and creating a story to talk about in a game like this one.

I really want to talk about three things here that I think are common to (every?) game type. The first is the arbitrary nature of dice rolls. Traditionally, rolling the dice was bad. It meant something bad could happen to your character. We try to convince the DM of the outcome and only then, if there’s risk, do we make a choice. Something like the wandering monster tables, arbitrary as all fuck, are a known risk that forces the party to confront a resource, time. The longer we fuck around the greater the likelyhood of finding out with that group of 1d4+1 owl bears. The worst/best example of this is the Wandering Damage table form an April Fools edition of Dragon. Just roll on the table and take an arbitrary amount of damage. There’s no player choice here. You simply accept the damage. You didn’t do anything, or take any risk, to potentially earn the damage. It removes the benefit of playing carefully and taking Push Your Luck decisions to earn rewards. And we see this show up in this adventure. In various encounters the party must roll on a table and something happens to them. THings like “take one wound” or some such. You are punished simply for playing the game. While I concede that there is some narrative benefit to, say, having a character with a gimpy ankle, the adventure removes the narrative element of that in the encounters. It just happens to you. Take a wound. Arbitrary should not happen in any game. It removes the agency of the players. There can be risk. Calculated risk. Burning spells to find out and improve odds. Careful planning. Zany plans. But simply saying “you take damage in an arbitrary way as a result of simply playing” does not really belong in a game. 

Secondly there’s a voice mismatch in the descriptive test used in the encounters. The adventure doesn’t really know who it is addressing. Is it directed at the players, ala read-aloud, or DM factual text, or DM inspirational text? The voice of the text provided is all over the place. This leads to hard cognitive switches. Our first encounter is with a nomad camp “Nearest point of interest to the entry point is a small desert nomad camp. Their typical tents, colorful and decorated by embroidery, flap in the wind. The camp seems abandoned, but the horrible stench surrounding the tents soon betrays the truth. It is the smell of carrion, there are many corpses around” Read aloud that over-reveals? Text for the DM in order to ad-lib the encounter? It’s a seeming mixture of the two. Another encounter ends with the text “How could such place exist middle of a terrible desert?” In appropriate for the DM and cumbersome if its meant to be read to the players. “Merciless sun scores the characters from the cloudless sky.” We’re getting purple here. II understand we’re going for that Howard vibe, but the text is leaning hard toward prose rather than understanding it’s a technical document meant to run a narrative game.

Finally, and most critically, is the nature of the encounters themselves. I talk sometimes about the encounters and format needing to match the goals of that part of the adventure. I usually talk about this in the context of a village or other social aspect of an adventure where both the type of information presented is different and the formatting/layout/etc are different in order to facilitate that sort of game play. Another example might be Mighty Deeds in DCC. If the room is four bare walls then there will be no swinging on chandeliers or dumping over cauldrons. If we’re working with a narrative adventure then I would expect the adventure to facilitate those narrative elements that the players must bring to the game themselves. And this don’t do that well. The core concepts are here. You can imagine the party sneaking through a dry riverbed, or trying to social their way past guards on a bridge. You can imagine a Howard story in which these things might be elements. But the execution of these elements is not very strong. They are very open ended, with little for the DM to riff off of. The tables driving things, where  there are some, don’t really give you enough to work with and certainly don’t give the players anything good to work with. It also confuses things by providing a general city map, as a traditional exploration game might, and then leaning very heavily on a narrative play style. The marriage here is not a good one.

You have to understand what you are designing for if you want a decent result.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7. The preview is two pages and shows you nothing of interest to make a purchasing decision from.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/485861/city-of-the-scorpion-god?1892600