Hunt for the Last Owlbear

By Jacob Densford
Illuminated Snail Press
Knave 2e

Only one of the foul creatures remains—abominations forged by the meddling hands of wizards. After generations of slaughtering us, we’ve finally driven them back to the brink. Let the final hunt commence: the hunt for the last Owl Bear.

This sixteen page adventure has seven hexes to explore as you slaughter the last living owl bear. You’ll need all of your wits to survive the monotonous boredom of hexes with nothing/close to nothing to do in them. 

Sixteen fucking pages my ass. I’ve been noticing a lot of Knave adventures pop on DriveThru all at once. Looks like there was a contest and this thing was the third place winner. Which seems to mean the public voted on it being the third place winner, so you know, the unwashed masses and all that jazz. 

Ok, so, there’s one owlbear left. You’ve just arrived incountry at some white colonizer camp in the jungle. There are two hunting parties going out tomorrow. You want to join the big game hunter and her quisling local businessman sponsor or you want to join the white savior environmentalist and his smiling caricature of a local? Or maybe go your own way?

But first, the news. You wander around those seven hexes, notably NOT going south. IE: you start on a hex border at the six o clock position with nothing else shown on the map but the rest of the surrounding dial from the centerpoint of the hands. And from there you wander from hex to hex with little initial direction in finding the owlbear. Eventually you’ll find something. A village of locals who have all been grisly slaughtered by the owlbear with some ghosts playing a flute.. Or a bunch of monkeys in a tree banging on a drum. Or a wizards hut with nothing to do in it. 

I really really can’t emphasize enough how shitty the encounters are. There is this thing that designers sometimes do where they are SO resistant to actually putting anything concrete down on paper. Maybe, if you squint really hard, you can get what they are going for. But, the wizard hut. It takes a fucking page, like all of the encounters do. And it’s nothing. It’s a dude living in a hut. He’s not fucking histile. He doesn’t really even have anything. You CAN get a spell component from him, for some project later, but it’s just so empty. He’s got no real personality other than “likes flowers.” The entire thing is pointless. I get it, you want a place to get the spell component. So, put some interactivity there. Likewise the monkeys in the trees. They’ve got a drum they bang on. That’s it. I guess you are motivated to get the drum because you se ethe monkeys have it? And I truly am guessing; I don’t see any reason to do anything here other than yawn. You’ve got to lead the party on, give them something to follow up on, give them SOME kind of bone to get them going an interested. We’re not talking spoon feeding them, but, something. ANYTHING to get the going. “Monkeys in the trees” ain’t it. 

You know what else isn’t it? If you pick up the drum then you hear in your head “Rebuild my shrine and I will reward you!” Likewise if you pick up the ghosts flute or the other thing. LIterally a voice in your fucking head. This is not roleplaying. There is no subtly here. Telling someone directly what to do is not embracing the joy of player discovery. But, in the rumours, there is no specificity. “The local gods are feuding with each  other, with dangerous repercussions  for mortals—take shelter in bad  weather” Well that’s exciting. DO the local gods have names? Is there a story to go with this? No? There’s just senseless abstraction of a rumour? Got it. I am not amused.

And now to the part of the review that the fuckwits will feel the need to comment on. You know what’s a decent novel? Things Fall Apart. Not my favorite, but pretty decent. You know what’s not Things Fall Apart? A sixteen page adventure. I have no fucking idea why someone decided that a sixteen page adventure, with a contest deadline attached, was the correct medium to comment about white colonization. We  get white colonizers. We get the enviro dude with a white saviour complex. We get lots of references to white colonizers. We get a note about portraying the locals with empathy … even though we don’t get any information about them except they are all friendly. It’s fucking nuts. But, sure, dump in the smiling native caricature and the evil quisling businessman caricature. Or, the infantilized natives who can’t solve their own problems. And don’t forget to slaughter the smiling natives family so we can know for sure he’s just there as a trope. Got it. Ham fucking handed. And let’s be clear, I’m not bitching about your white colonizer shit. I’m bitching that its done is a hack fucking way.

But, also, I’m a hypocrite and can get over that. Well, I could get over that that. I mean IF THE FUCKING ADVENTURE WAS ANY GOOD. The smiling native guide has a village. If you go there everyone is slaughtered bloodily by the owlbear. There are some ghosts playing a flut. If you bury the villagers bodies then the spirits go to rest. IT TAKES A FUCKING PAGE FOR THIS. An entire page. Is there detail? None to speak of. Evocative descriptions? Not really, not to justify a page. Big fonts, a lot of white space and A LOT of extraneous padding. “IF the party picks up the flute THEN [fuckwit local god] speaks directly in to their mind: Build me a shrine and I will reward you.” Fuck off with that shit man. There’;s nothing to this village, or any of the encounters. There’s no content. There’s an ABSTRACTION of content. “You could, maybe” put in some ghosts of the villagers or something, I guess.” This is the equivalent of what is going on here. The specificity that brings an adventure life is just nt present at all. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, a mix of intro and hexes. That’s enough to know what you’re getting. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498863/hunt-for-the-last-owl-bear?1892600