{"id":9617,"date":"2025-02-24T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9617"},"modified":"2025-02-10T09:29:23","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T14:29:23","slug":"everybody-rots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9617","title":{"rendered":"Everybody Rots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Scott Southard
Self Published
5e
Levels 2-9<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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? \u201cDear Bryce, I love you and want to have millions and millions of your babies\u201d Ok, it\u2019s starting off right. \u201cI wrote a 5e adventure on itch\u201d Oh. Ok. joy. \u201cEverybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure\u201d oh my god. No! NOOO!!!!  \u201cpopulated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out.\u201d Well, ok, I admit. That sucked me in. That\u2019s the line that got me and got you your \u201c5e western fantasy noir on itch\u201d adventure review. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s a 10% chance that they do actually do that. This rings true in such a depressing way and I\u2019m 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\u2019s nothing more to these, they are just rando things to find\/happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that is one of the major problems. It\u2019s just weird for the sake of being weird. The parrot, the murder weapon (how non-specific!) \u2026 they just dont do anything. It\u2019s just window dressing. There\u2019s not springboard there. \u201cStuck in the lord mayors wife\u201d or something. Thats a situation. And the town should have situations not possessions.  \u201cA 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\u201d This comes off as trying to be clever and witty instead of being clever and witty. And why do I care?Ohhh! It\u2019s a booby! How risque! There\u2019s nothing to any of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the adventures included, and even the overall plotline, just isn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s time to go find a little kids cat. In a basement with giant rats. There\u2019s 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\u2019s a disconnect here between the vibe the designer wants to portray and the content that the designer is providing. And I\u2019m not even gonna touch the \u201cgiant rats in a basement\u201d trope. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This disconnect runs through it. Arasaka corporation, the drug pushers, don\u2019t come off as Arasaka. The cult of decay faction doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t present. In spite of their being reams of information about them \u2026 that isn\u2019t 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\u2019s a pretty idiosyncratic lace, being on the literal edge of the world (whats that place in Discworld?) You\u2019ll need to fit that in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u2026 while still having, I guess, words that you can actually read if you try just a little. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This is $10 at DriveThru. The same pages on itch are NOT indicative of the actual pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s not enough actual situations. There\u2019s not enough people with real motivations. The main town plot has not enough specificity in building tension. It\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/scottsouthard.itch.io\/everybody-rots<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Scott SouthardSelf Published5eLevels 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5e","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/rots.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9617","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=9617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9618,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9617\/revisions\/9618"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}