{"id":7469,"date":"2021-08-07T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-07T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7469"},"modified":"2021-07-28T16:03:42","modified_gmt":"2021-07-28T20:03:42","slug":"memento-mori-memento-vivere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7469","title":{"rendered":"Memento Mori – Memento Vivere"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Wayne Canepa\nWyrd Valley Press\n5e\/OSR?\nLevel 5<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
What do you get when you mix Kakfa, Lovecraft, Camus, pirates, ghosts, graffiti, magpies, swamp monsters, philosophy, the spirit world, and an unimaginably large wall? Well, this book. \u2026 you are newly arrived and find yourself stranded on the mysterious, mist-shrouded island of Anon, in the strange city of Vestige\u2014where ghosts mingle with mortals as if it were commonplace. However, you won\u2019t have much time to gawk before you become swept up in a Kafkaesque adventure\u2014and even more danger! You must overcome challenges and puzzles, uncover hidden secrets, come face to face with madness, the fragility of life, and the absurdity of existence to escape this place. Can you maintain hope in the face of impossible odds? Will you survive nefarious pirates, dangerous creatures, or the land of the dead itself? And, if your character dies while exploring Anon, your adventure won\u2019t be quite over…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 128 page source book uses about 41 pages for a plot based adventure. A COMPLEX adventure. In a baroque setting described in the sourcebook section. The setting is mostly a city, and interesting enough to steal bits from your own bizarre big city. The adventure is a fucking mess, as all plot based adventures are when they get too big and try to handle too many deviations from the norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, the designers have the fucking marketing down pat. \u201cWhat if you took Albert Camus\u2019 hope in the face of Franz Kafka\u2019s futility and H.P. Lovecraft\u2019s fear and paranoia, mixed in some existentialism, and certified continued existence after death?\u201d Yeah bitch! Take my fucking money! In practice, this turns out to be a kind of standin city for 19th century Lond, maybe a bit like that Sean Bean Frankenstein series, with the bureaucracy from that Discworld city thrown in. Oh, and there are ghosts and skeletons everywhere, living in the city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, some kind of pseudo-19th century London with a decent helping of Brazil mixed in. I can get behind that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s no intro, though, shit just starts coming at you, and it\u2019s a little confusing to make out the setting because of that. On top of that you\u2019ve got to wade through some, uh \u2026 high brow bullshit statements, we\u2019ll call them. \u201cMemento Mori \/ Memento Vivere is designed to be many things, but need not be all those things to everyone.\u201d and \u201cWhat would such a world look like? We wanted to explore it, and we wanted to share that exploration with others\u201d and \u201cIt is a philosophical foray into the meaning of life and death\u201d Ok, sure, what the fuck ever. It\u2019s a setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And a decently flavorful one. One of the random things is a mime with a consumptive cough. That\u2019s cool. Or, a description of the red light district that goes \u201cA red light district full of smoky cabarets, unruly bars, ample brothels, gambling halls, fight clubs, opium dens, pawn shops and fences, grifters and snakeoil salesmen, lurking cutpurses, and countless hangovers. Named for its many copper doors.\u201d Uh. yes. Fuck. Yes. That should be what every D&D red light district is. And the setting hits on this stuff time and time again in the various encounters in the city, the city districts, the factions, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s also got stupid shit, like level 9 guards and some level 5 fighter guy whos the hero of the mercenary fighter corp. So, a mess, but a delightful one and just dripping with flavour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, this blog ain\u2019t about no setting reviews! It\u2019s about adventure reviews! What about that adventure that\u2019s included, Escape from Ghost Island?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD. IT\u2019S. A. MESS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, it\u2019s a plot based thing. And a COMPLICATED plot based thing. There\u2019s a flowchart. I can get behind a flowchart, to help sort things out for the DM. But, not when the flowchart needs a flowchart. And, of source, its railroady, because its a complicated plot thing. As the adventure justifies by saying \u201cAs this book is as much a foray into philosophy as it is an adventure, consider this a Kafkaesque element added to the adventure.\u201d Uh huh. Or, maybe, work on the rewrites until you don\u2019t need to do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It starts with someone getting killed. No problem, people come back as ghosts in this setting! And, of course, there\u2019s Speak with Dead! But \u2026 the killers used a poison that prevents ghosts from manifesting after death. Uh huh. And thus it goes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, of course, there\u2019s, I don\u2019t know, it feels like multiple pages, in which the designers have inserted themselves in to the adventure. That\u2019s NEVER a good sign. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The various scenes in the adventure are complex, but nearly impossible to piece together. The format selected is so \u2026 disconnected? From itself that making head or tails or it, much less quickly scanning a scene to run it, would be nigh impossible without actually make this adventure a major part of your ongoing lifestyle. This thing SCREAMS the type of incoherence that a CoC adventure can only dream of being. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are ideas here, but the degree of abstraction and irrelevant detail is overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $25 at DriveThru. If it weren\u2019t $25 I\u2019d pick it up to steal parts for my city game. The city shit is gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/353280\/Memento-Mori—Memento-Vivere?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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By Wayne Canepa Wyrd Valley Press 5e\/OSR? Level 5 What do you get when you mix Kakfa, Lovecraft, Camus, pirates, ghosts, graffiti, magpies, swamp monsters, philosophy, the spirit world, and an unimaginably large wall? Well, this book. \u2026 you are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeons-dragons-adventure-review","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/memento.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469","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=7469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7470,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7469\/revisions\/7470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}