{"id":2702,"date":"2015-08-19T07:15:24","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T11:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2702"},"modified":"2019-01-21T15:14:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T15:14:16","slug":"deep-carbon-observatory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2702","title":{"rendered":"Deep Carbon Observatory"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dco\"<\/a>
\nby Patrick Stuart
\nFalse Machine Publishing
\nLamentations of the Flame Princess
\nMid-level<\/p>\n

The adventure takes players from a town devastated by an unexpected flood, through a drowned land where nature is turned upside down and desperate families cling to the roofs of their ruined homes, hiding from the monstrous products of a disordered world, through the strange tomb of an ancient race, to a profundal zone, hidden for millennia and now exposed, and finally to the Observatory itself, an eerie abandoned treasure palace, where they will encounter a pale and unexpected terror which will seek to claim their lives.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a year, time for a signal boost. Go buy this. What.The.Fuck did I just read! Go Buy this. You see, this is what commitment to a vision results in. Go buy this. Shit, now I have to think about how to revise my reviewing model to account for the disruption of my core ideas. Go Buy this. You are a fool if you are at all interested in any version of D&D, Pathfinder, etc and do not own this. You could probably fit it into Conspiracy X, CoC, or any of a dozen other genres as well. You bought it, right? No. I\u2019ll wait. Go buy it. Some people deserve to make a good living from their work. Stewart is one of those. He marries creativity with purpose to a degree that makes it seem platonic.<\/p>\n

The adventure has a couple of overland journeys, a couple of complexes\/dungeons, and a nice hook\/Transition To The Mythic World section. It\u2019s light on mechanics and packed full of imagery, ideas, and gameable content. It channels the vibe that Raggi\u2019s Lamentations adventures try to reach. There\u2019s this sadness and \u2026 inevitability present in the adventure that just kind of grows and grows. There\u2019s a river journey, so comparisons to Heart of Darkness\/Apocalypse Now are inevitable. There\u2019s this same sort of Passing By Weird Shit Should We Stop thing going on, combined with a melancholy.<\/p>\n

The adventure abruptly starts. Just a few sentences and no real background. Everything you learn about what\u2019s going on is revealed through the use of the encounters. This works SO well. A picture is slowly built up in your head of what\u2019s going on and how it fits together. But the picture is incomplete. Blackness hangs around the edges. This emptiness demands to be filled and your brain works feverishly to fill in the gaps. By the designer providing less information, and working it in, you get a better picture in your mind of what’s going on. There are limits to this, of course. It works well for background and history and not so much in other areas. But it\u2019s used here for great effect. The adventure alludes to things. It implies. It leaves gaps present that you subconsciously fill in yourself. I don\u2019t want to imply in ANY way that the adventure is incomplete. It\u2019s not. The information missing\/alluded\/implied is not critical information in any way. It\u2019s the fluff that builds a world.<\/p>\n

This adventure does what SlaughterGrid did so well: provide evocative encounters. There\u2019s thing DM\u2019s do when creating an adventure that involves minimal keying. Just jotting down a dozen or so separate lines on a paper. \u201cRoom 4. Dry well. 4 Ghouls\u201d The home DM can do this. They created the adventure. That text prompts their minds to remember what \u201cDry well. 4 Ghouls.\u201d means. It\u2019s a shorthand reference to something deeper and more complex in the DM\u2019s head. This minimal keying is terrible in published adventures. The people reading it have no idea what what \u201cDry Well. 4 Ghouls\u201d meant to the designer. Many designers write up boring descriptions, or resort to a lot of text to try and describe the vision. What\u2019s really needed though is a short burst of flavor. What\u2019s the key to this encounter? By just providing that much, and doing in an evocative way, the DM\u2019s head can, once again, fill in the rest. That\u2019s what this adventure does, over and over again.<\/p>\n

\u201cA petty cleric, clutching a log, shouts \u201cAll is Lost!\u201d Seltor Tem is the only survivor of his village. He has a key to his church. He will drown soon.<\/p>\n

Perfect. P.E.R.F.E.C.T. This is exactly the sort of thing D&D encounters need more of. It\u2019s memorable. It\u2019s tersely described. It\u2019s full of potential energy. As soon as you read this your brain starts to fill in the picture and the gaps. Stewart does this over and over again in this adventure. It\u2019s wonderful and a joy to encounter. This is exactly the sort of descriptions that I\u2019m looking for to riff off of.<\/p>\n

I could gush, over and over again, about many aspects of the adventure. The beginning section has some hooks. I guess they are hooks. There is\/was this mem in the OSR about the Mythic Underworld. The players needed to cross over some threshold during their journey to the adventure proper. They needed to understand that Things Are Different Now when they entered the dungeon. I think that\u2019s what\u2019s going on in the entire \u201chook\u201d section of the adventure. You learn you\u2019re not in Kansas anymore. Things are put in motion. Events happen that have repercussions elsewhere in the adventure. There\u2019s a simple time and event mechanism going on that sets the mood and provides that crossing over. From there it\u2019s up the river to find Kurtz, with ever more weird things being encountered. It\u2019s Wonderful how it builds.<\/p>\n

I wish I had the words to relate how good the encounters are. As you journey further into the adventure things get more and removed from the traditional Tolkein tropes. It takes the bizarre that was only hinted at, in things like Vault of Drow, and provides full glimpses in to it. Nowhere have the drow seemed more Drow-like than in this adventure. Magic and mundane items are unique and wonderful.<\/p>\n

After gushing for two pages I\u2019ll also feel compelled to hand out some lumps. Most importantly: the maps. Most of them are generally ok. I might recommend making the numbers a little clearer on them, by typing them or something. I promise it won\u2019t impact the aesthetics much and the old bifocal crowd (like me) will appreciate it. The map has to be functional. It MUST be. You can also communicate with it creatively but it must fulfill the core purpose. The DCO map, proper, fails most at this. The upper left, the entire right, the upper middle section \u2026 Stewart or Scrap need to redraw that fucking thing and publish it. I would also mention two improvements with the NPC group. It\u2019s quite nice they were included. Just a TAD more motivation might have been nice, but I can deal with that. What they really need is a 1-page summary. 1 page with the stats and a brief personality reminder for each. Everyone who runs this is going to have to create that in order to use it. You should have provided it. The full descriptions are good and should remain, the reference sheet is just a prompter to remember the bits burned in to your brain.<\/p>\n

GREAT adventure. More than enough content, and the content is VERY easy to build off of.<\/p>\n

You bought it, right?<\/p>\n

This is available on DriveThru.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/131801\/Deep-Carbon-Observatory?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Patrick Stuart False Machine Publishing Lamentations of the Flame Princess Mid-level The adventure takes players from a town devastated by an unexpected flood, through a drowned land where nature is turned upside down and desperate families cling to the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-level-4","category-reviews","category-the-best"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/dco.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2702"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5054,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions\/5054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}