By Scott Southard
Self Published
5e
Levels 2-9
Boozy, smokey, fatalistic, cheap, lonely, bloody, melodramatic, effervescent, nodding off, oneiric, seedy, urban, muddy, Ink-stained, shrouded, fetid, a sour gut, a shadow, a lie behind a lie, and one wrong move from ending up another corpse in another alley on another list at the bottom of a stack of scrolls on the lawman’s desk, fighting for his life against another hangover. Everybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure, populated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out. It can be used as a standalone adventure or plugged into an existing campaign.
This fifty page city adventures/setting has a couple of good turns of phrase, but it is so overwhelming up its own ass that its hard to make out what is ging on here. Figuratively and literally, as it turns out since the layout is an abomination and the text a confusing mess of postmodernism.
The email the email, what what the email, the email the email, what what the email. Hard to type with those boxing gloves on, eh? “Dear Bryce, I love you and want to have millions and millions of your babies” Ok, it’s starting off right. “I wrote a 5e adventure on itch” Oh. Ok. joy. “Everybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure” oh my god. No! NOOO!!!! “populated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out.” Well, ok, I admit. That sucked me in. That’s the line that got me and got you your “5e western fantasy noir on itch” adventure review.
This is supposed to be a kind of city/town setting, for the party to do things in between adventures. And then also it has a few adventures in it, a kind of overarching plot to keep things together and give some semblance of continuity. But it fails in very nearly every way. It does, however, sometimes deliver on its promise of delivering things that seem real. These are some of the best parts of the book, setting and adventures. Some dealers are moving a drug shipment to a nearby town to expand operations and some druggies find out. They dig a trench across the road, cover it, and then hide out to hit the shipment. And ill get fucking slaughtered, but if the party intercedes for some reason and they survive they swear they are taking the money leaving this shithole of a city. And there’s a 10% chance that they do actually do that. This rings true in such a depressing way and I’m sure many of you can relate. When the adventure is doing things like this its doing a good job. But they are far too infrequent. Not that everyone has to be dripping with this shit, but the motivations for the various people, and they way they interact with others, is far too staid. There is, at times, some throwaway shit that is a chuckle. You find a murder weapon covered in blood in an alley, as a rando event. Or a big thunderclap that makes kids and dogs run around scared. A parrot in a cage squawking DONT MAKE ME DO IT over and over again. There’s nothing more to these, they are just rando things to find/happen.
And that is one of the major problems. It’s just weird for the sake of being weird. The parrot, the murder weapon (how non-specific!) … they just dont do anything. It’s just window dressing. There’s not springboard there. “Stuck in the lord mayors wife” or something. Thats a situation. And the town should have situations not possessions. “A group of 4 or 5 goblins and elves are furiously making out. Pants are at ankles and dresses are pulled above waists. Hands are everywhere and the slurps and moans are burned into your brain” This comes off as trying to be clever and witty instead of being clever and witty. And why do I care?Ohhh! It’s a booby! How risque! There’s nothing to any of this.
And the adventures included, and even the overall plotline, just isn’t there. A little girls cat is missing and you need to go in to a basement to find it. And there are giant rats there! Seriously. Rats in a basement. Yeah, sure, mutant rats. Whatever. It’s rats in the basement. For an 11YO. I just knifed an orphan girl and cut out her kidney to sell for drugs, but, sure, I guess it’s time to go find a little kids cat. In a basement with giant rats. There’s a fucking disconnect here. Help a hooker? Sure. Help the old woman that gives us stale bread? Sure. Even maybe the kid lures marks to an alley for us to roll and then we help her. But THIS?! There’s a disconnect here between the vibe the designer wants to portray and the content that the designer is providing. And I’m not even gonna touch the “giant rats in a basement” trope.
This disconnect runs through it. Arasaka corporation, the drug pushers, don’t come off as Arasaka. The cult of decay faction doesn’t come off like a cult of decay. Even the newly arrived cops are not really copping well. All of the situations and vignettes that would turn this in to good shit isn’t present. In spite of their being reams of information about them … that isn’t really gameable. Theres a focus here on How Clever Am I instead of gameable stuff. Too much randomness for its own sake instead of communicating the vibe through the thighs on the table as appropriate. The city, for all its descriptions and little weirdness, seems lifeless. A sin beyond compare for a town supplement. ABD, it’s a pretty idiosyncratic lace, being on the literal edge of the world (whats that place in Discworld?) You’ll need to fit that in.
And then theres the text. The physical text and layout and font and colors chosen. Ths thing is a fucking nightmare. White text on black background. Weird drippy overlays. Weird font and angles. I don’t see how you can get any mor illegible than this without it actually being illegible. I mean, can you technically read it? Yes, in the same way you can read something that is written backwards. Information retrieval. Headaches from it. It’s just Willlldddd that this was the decision made to aid gameplay. By making it hard to use. Your book can look cool and edgy and still be easy to use and legible. It is one of the worst put together books, for usability, I have ever seen … while still having, I guess, words that you can actually read if you try just a little.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The same pages on itch are NOT indicative of the actual pages.
There’s not enough actual situations. There’s not enough people with real motivations. The main town plot has not enough specificity in building tension. It’s illegible. Which is all too bad cause I like a good town supplement and the promise of a seedy one that more mimicked how real life is was quite intriguing.
