Per's comments on the 2024 Lindenbaum entries
May 12, 2024 19:29:38 GMT
slloyd14 and aggsol like this
Post by Per on May 12, 2024 19:29:38 GMT
Here are the mini reviews/commentary I wrote for the other competition entries, jotted down while and after playing them. The order in which they appear is simply the order in which I played them. If I recall correctly this was fairly well received when I did it for 2008/2009 Windhammer, so I hope people will like it now as well.
It's entirely possible I could have read or played something wrong. I did already catch one thing I played wrongly, though it should have had a negligible effect on my experience and chances of success. In another case I strongly suspect I didn't play as intended though in that case I blame unclear rules.
The reviews are not a clear and complete listing of each entry's faults and merits, and I'm not sure it would be easy to guess which entries I voted for or considered voting for just based on this.
What Lies Beyond the Standing Stone by Jeremy Johnson
Premise and set-up
* Science fantasy in a post-apocalyptic setting, or something along those lines.
* You belong to a line of champions responsible for protecting your people from generational extra-dimensional incursions originating from the titular stone in your low-tech, non-relocatable settlement. Look, here comes one now!
* Interestingly, this adventure would not have qualified for the Windhammer Prize, though it meets my own basic definition of a gamebook.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* No rules. In fact we're not even told to begin at section 1.
Style and presentation
* Each section is given a title. In combat sequences, these are the stances and maneouvres employed, recurring in each new fight with different contexts and results.
* Combined with the measured, unadorned prose, the effect is often a little somber and ponderous, as if we are moving through a series of woodcuts showing captured moments in time. Together they form a distinctive scenario.
* Scenes are typically made up of clusters of neighbouring sections, and in general, the closer to section 100, the closer to the end.
* Needed a little more proofreading.
Twists and trials
* Nearly all of the adventure is structured so that you will find yourself either looping around in a battle sequence until you find an exit, or following a few branching segments to reach the next battle. Since most of the adventure's endings occur at the end of the last scene and the adventure has no memory, it's only the choices made there that determine which ending you get. I would characterize only one of them as a failure, so it's not at all unlikely you'll reach what might be called a win, or under the circumstances positive end of story, in your first game.
* There is however one dissimilar ending which, in defiance of the usual way of these things, is both quicker and happier.
* There's also a secret ending you can't reach without cheating. Or can you? The end.
* I'm reminded a bit of an acclaimed Twine game that I played years ago and ultimately found disappointing: it was billed as having meaningful choices, but contrived to always present the same consequences. In this case my personal preference would have been to have some mechanical distinction between the paths beyond the stone, not necessarily numerical ones, that held some significance in the endgame, not necessarily to strictly determine failure or success. The alien world part is commendably atmospheric, but given that the rest of the adventure would necessarily play out almost the same way, I'm not sure it's enough to motivate repeated plays instead of just systematically reading through the branches.
Bugs and problems
* No technical ones, but sections 41 and 45 are identical.
Knighthood by Elie Merle
Premise and set-up
* Fantasy with folk-tale flavour, somewhat modernly filtered but not exactly a spoof.
* You are a young man from what appears to be a noble family, setting out towards the king's castle hoping to be knighted.
* 67 sections (but numbered between 1 and 100).
System and mechanics
* Three stats (rolled) and six skills (bought).
* Skills use a roll-under mechanism, combat works by similarly rolling against attack-defence differentials. There are also special moves usable in combat, at least one of which could have been more clearly worded. More things that could be have been clearer: multiple opponents attack simultaneously by default, and you strike first by default. Endurance could also have been simplified, since nobody ever does anything other than 3 or 6 damage on a hit.
* Skill values can be understood to be calculated by first using a points pool to increase them at progressively higher costs, discouraging specialization, then making a series of choices that together so far as I can tell are functionally equivalent to picking any four skills to receive fixed bonuses, then picking another type of skill bonus which apparently only applies for specific distributions. The rules themselves can't entirely keep track of all these steps, which could probably have been entirely exchanged for a simple array assignment system and lost nothing of value. My approach was to go for a distribution of 4/4/4/4/4/1 and hope my chosen weakness wouldn't doom me.
Style and presentation
* The writing is pretty simple and straightforward, with the odd amusing aside like the unsentimental revelation that your brother was eaten by a tiger on his attempt at knighthood, but more often giving very little information about where you are or how you got there, so most of the adventure takes place in a series of white rooms, whether indoors or outdoors. This isn't super atypical of folk-tales, I guess.
* Style, grammar, spelling and typography are all a little shaky.
Twists and trials
* It's not too difficult to steadily advance towards your destination. Combat may end your adventure, but is mostly weighted in your favour unless you got unlucky with initial die rolls. There's also the odd avoidable instant death. There's very little in the way of item collection - in fact, a single one - but the adventure may ask if you've accomplished certain things and provide help or hints if you have.
* The kicker to the convoluted skill selection procedure is that they are far from equal. Three of them have good uses, one of these being the only skill with more than one good use (another having a second use which you however would hope to fail). The fourth and fifth have one potentially helpful use each, but one of these is only used to mitigate the consequences of a bad choice, and the other is rendered pointless by one of the good skills. The sixth is not used at all.
* There's a two-minute mystery which you solve by catching the culprit being wrong about something which has no obvious relation to the crime. (The adventure handwaves the actual case being made against them.)
Bugs and problems
* The first section contains no choices, this tends not to be a good sign.
* In spite of the unused section numberings, several paragraphs point to consecutive sections, or to the following section.
* 82 seems like it would warrant a roll against Persuasion, but doesn't involve one.
* The fights in 23, 39 and 57 couldn't end in fewer than two rounds.
The Lost Treasures o' Cap'n Blouchard by Sean Loftiss
Premise and set-up
* You are some kind of player entity chosen to assist with navigation and decision-making on an expedition to a treasure island. Your partner Mack, who swears he isn't a pirate, supplies the map, wanders the terrain, fights the battles, and speaks every line of text.
* A case could be made that it's at least as much of a gamebook-style puzzle as a puzzle-style gamebook.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* You roll to determine Mack's max health, health restoration capacity, and ammunition.
* Combat includes rolling for surprise, rolling for a ranged attack (hit, effect and/or damage), and rolling for repeated melee rounds (hit and/or damage). There are also rules for evasion, flight and pursuit.
* You navigate the adventure by moving on a hex grid, turning to the section indicated in each hex to read its description, rolling to check for random encounters, then moving on the map again, and repeating this until you think you have found the location of the treasure and the relevant waypoints used to get there. There are three islands of varying sizes to attempt, with different particulars for working out where the treasure is buried, and an escalation of the range of enemies encountered.
* There are also a few codewords used on the third island, but they all spell trouble.
Style and presentation
* The whole adventure, including the rules but excluding italicized technical instructions, is written in piratespeak. Because it's Mack speaking. To you.
* Most of the adventure is made up of two components: environmental descriptions and creature-specific combat result tables. Both are varied and well done.
Twists and trials
* What you must do to win on each of the three islands is work out how the given clues accompanying the treasure map correspond to a specific progression of hexes, then use the numbers of those hexes to calculate a section to turn to. On the first island, the solution is unambiguous once you find the two relevant landmarks. The second can be solved by fully deciphering the clues or worked out with some trial and error. The third island is where either there are some deeper calculations that elude me, or the adventure eventually drops the idea that each waypoint is in some way located in relation to the previous one. But if the latter is the case, the proceedings become thematically strained; if I can determine where I should be after the ninth step simply because there's only one hex matching the clue, and I can then guess the correct treasure hex by making some inconclusive but not unreasonable assumptions about steps ten through twelve, then why does it matter what I may or may not have been doing before step nine?
* While you're doing an increasing amount of walking about, you have to constantly roll for random encounters, the likelihood of which varies between around 8% per step on beaches to around 40% in the jungles. You quickly learn to feel relief when a roll indicates no encounter. In effect, these encounters and their drain on Mack's health are the timer ticking down to prospective failure. But dying and starting over doesn't mean lost resources or information, you can just head back to where you were with restored health and possibly a lower threat level. I find the combat system is a bit overwrought for the unwelcome and distracting role it ultimately plays.
* The only traditional gamebook decisions offered - i.e. outside of grid movement, combat options and where to dig - turn out to comprise a situational complement to the health restoration system, which could just as well have been given as a brief rule. I have a hard time seeing that this feature could become relevant, even on the third island, since once you might possibly need it, you're unlikely to be in a position to use it.
* This then leaves the puzzle aspect of matching clues to terrain, which as noted gets a comparatively simple introduction in the first game and becomes more challenging in the second, but wears out its welcome in the nebulous third. I fairly quickly gave up on playing by the rules there, the clues being vague enough that just trying to line up a solution with all information available, attempting to work out what features might fit each clue and how the potential matches are or aren't lined up with each other, is sufficiently taxing without breaking it up with moving, rolling and fighting random encounters in order to record your working data piecemeal. In the end it took me long enough to arrive at a winning solution by just systematically reading the descriptions and trying to match a likely configuration to the riddle, but without understanding the exact logic of every step, so who knows, maybe it's only coincidentally correct. In a sense this is necessarily true, since there are multiple instances of several hexes used in the solution, and the adventure can't know which of these I believe to be on the proper path.
Bugs and problems
* A few procedural details were not crystal clear to me. A possibly unintended consequence of the pursuit rules is that you can end up on a hex you want to explore but the instructions tell you to move away from it; I assume in this case you should be able to just stay put and look around you. The rules don't really say anything about digging as a game action, but I guessed you must occupy the suspected treasure spot, that digging happens after you roll for encounters in that hex, and that there's no penalty for getting the solution wrong (which could happen even if you're digging in the right place). I also assumed that if you kill one pygmy of several with a shot, you turn to the new battle immediately and do not roll again for surprise.
* 27 doesn't seem to be used.
* I still haven't received the shipment of inconspicuous gold bars I was promised.
Heart of Keros by David M. Donachie
Premise and set-up
* Maritime fantasy adventure using the GNAT system.
* You are not a sailor.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* GNAT ("GNAT, No Acronym This!") means two non-random stats, roll-under mechanism for actions, pick two skills from a list of ten for situational bonuses and occasionally action gatekeeping.
* Also inventory management, food and drink (separately in this adventure), a pool of rerolls (ugh), magic, situational reroll-based modifiers (seriously, screw rerolls), codewords, character advancement, and two checkboxes (which could have been dealt with using a codeword and an "if you haven't already", respectively). Combat is made up of finite sequences of action checks: make a prescribed number of rolls to avoid damage and then if you're still alive you're victorious.
* An equipment list is possibly missing from the rules, but it seems to make no difference what you call your starting weapon so long as you know its type and are ready to honestly respond to the adventure's question whether your pickled neutronium whale spine is "similar" to a spear.
Style and presentation
* Certain parts of sections with rules instructions regarding keyword management, inventory management, skill checks or combat have been emphasized with borders and a coloured background, but this is inconsistent across the board (or possibly follows an inscrutable higher logic, but it seems to defeat the purpose in either case).
* In some places the adventure could have used a better way of presenting conditional statements, e.g. 88 has a detached "otherwise" clause following a paragraph with four "if" clauses in succession. Similarly 11 could have said that a non-fatal climbing failure is always followed by a second, successful attempt, assuming that's what's intended.
* I found that the tone and flavour of the encounters made the world feel consistent and coherent. Scenarios like the fire boar island and the pale men wouldn't have been out of place in one of Dave Morris's fantasy entries in the Virtual Reality series. (If I were to change one thing I would maybe not have the ghost priest pop out of the ground, though it probably wouldn't seem as silly if you fixed the misplaced modifier.)
* Needed a little more proofreading.
Twists and trials
* The adventure spans about half a dozen islands and some boating antics. The middle part is spent on three islands that you can take on in any order (although rowing back and forth may take its toll), or potentially not at all.
* Water is handled in a slightly arbitrary manner. You may take the adventure's advice and conserve water early on, to find yourself saddled for the rest the adventure with a penalty because you're not given the option to drink the water you're still carrying around. In 63, refilling your flask from a pool big enough to fit a toad bigger than you are is apparently not enough to top it up. 57 explicitly presents you with a stream but only lets you take two portions, though you could revisit it as many times as you want. 71 says you can fill the flask but doesn't say how many portions this amounts to; 92 seems to be the only section that actually states a limit.
* Nonetheless the adventure is not overly punishing, and I won on my second attempt, if you count getting the treasure of Keros as winning. Obviously if one of your design goals is having people play multiple adventures with the same character, it makes sense to leave out random deaths and fatal bottlenecks, even to include ways to come back from taking lethal damage.
* Because of potential integration with the larger GNAT-verse, there are some options and considerations in the adventure - all spells and some items - that won't be available or relevant to someone who plays it as a standalone. It's possible to gain enough experience to purchase another skill or even raise Vitality, although this may be unlikely to have much of an effect if you're picking blindly. Winning also becomes a little less defined if you mean to reuse your character.
Bugs and problems
* The first section contains no choices, but at least there's a scene transition.
* 18 points to 19. 30 points to 31. 17 points to 16.
* In 4, you are looking west towards the three islands, which matches the initial identification of right as north, but the following description and options given in 4 and 94 only make sense if you are looking east. You also proceed east in 72, only for the directions to be reversed again in 16 and 30, before finally flipping back in 28.
* 75 should perhaps not have allowed repeated skill checks, and one might think at first that an "if you haven't already" should have been added to the link to 26, but allowing the player to revisit 26 at will turns out to be necessary since it may be the only way to gain Shore and proceed to the next stage of the adventure (so arguably it shouldn't have been a skill check in the first place, although this would have left Linguistics without even a convenience application).
* 5 doesn't say what happens if you succeed at the check. Presumably it should have continued using parts of 43 and then led to 97. Since you can't have Seasnake in 27, currently 97 is unreachable.
* 2 doesn't fully make clear whether eating there counts as using up the ration you just gained, and if so, why the fish don't retain their too-salty quality if you save them.
* The spell options in 76 assume that you successfully cast the spells. As a parenthetical note, the inclusion of options like these raise the question why you couldn't do something similar in other parts of the adventure.
* You should logically gain Shore in 11; what you additionally learn in 55 relates only to Sea.
* Gaining Sea in 16 is pointless since you must already have it.
* It's possible to have the materials needed to repair the mast yet not be allowed to do so; this can happen if you visit 17 (which could just have linked to 46), but also if you resurrect after being killed by the pale men.
* In 80 the merrow's pearl immediately disintegrates to no effect when exposed, but 27 implies it can be used for illumination with no risk of losing it.
* There should probably have been some checkbox or codeword in place to keep you from acquiring multiple greenstone tablets and attendant experience.
Operation Dead Dawn by Tom Perrett
Premise and set-up
* Zombie apocalypse? The slow, shambling kind.
* You are a cool military type doing military things with military attitudes alongside your military buddies.
* 67 sections.
System and mechanics
* Fixed starting health and equipment.
* Combat is done by rolling on tables and successively eliminating oncoming zombies until they're all extra dead or they reach and kill you through accumulated damage. The latter isn't really going to happen though.
* Instead of one ranged combat table and separate range modifiers for sidearms and automatic weapons, the adventure could have presented two tables with all the modifiers baked in, which would take up as much space and save the reader the arithmetic.
* There are also rules for healing (unneeded), evasion (unlikely and unneeded), and team members (could to a large degree have been baked into the tables).
* Codewords are employed under the designation "Narrative Events".
Style and presentation
* I was willing to give the grim, dramatic prose the benefit of a doubt at first, and a certain measure of cool military tropes can be expected in the genre, but when eventually the adventure was producing sentences such as "The helicopter claws at the sky, ascending with a mixture of urgency and remorse," I just wasn't feeling it. I'm pretty sure the word "belie" is misused throughout.
* Ghost was OK though, that is except when his "exclamation slices through the air like a warning siren" or some such.
* If the operation is actually designated Operation Dead Dawn in-universe, we aren't told.
Twists and trials
* You proceed into and through the super secret military lab base and occasionally fight small groups of zombies. You can make one narrative detour early on and there's one place where you can choose between two short paths with differently flavoured zombie encounters, but for the most part, games will follow the same route. As long as the dice gods haven't marked you for special treatment, you will proceed to one of four endings, one where you die (less likely) and three being about the same level of gloomy for different reasons.
* I strongly doubt you could ever lose in combat without actively trying to; one avoidable fight where you have a fixed 1 in 6 chance of failure is as bad as it gets. After my first game I had more ammo of both types than I started with, and a bunch of accumulated healing items that I never used for the simple reason that I never took any damage. If combat had actually been dangerous - if you risked zombification, or even just damage - and if your choices had had more of an effect on how much you had to fight, then no doubt this could have resulted in some degree of tension and urgency as you sneaked about the base (and for instance getting into the armoury or saving Rodriguez might have actually mattered).
* The adventure commendably inserts a couple of moral choices towards the end, but at least partially fails to explain their significance. The hard drive is "lost forever" - why? Did somebody eat it? The "epidemic" is "unchecked" - why? What's changed? The zombies have proven eminently shootable, send in a few more people with better gear and a proper briefing like maybe you should have queued up to begin with and what's the problem?
Bugs and problems
* The rules could have been patched and clarified in places. There is something called "the current fight or flight modifier", which seems to reference the number of other people in your group. The stealth rules should presumably have said you must roll equal to or over the target number, and even when rolls are allowed they are frequently impossible to make (because you can't roll higher than 6 with one die and there are no positive modifiers to stealth, but always a negative one), so there's rarely a reason not to ambush. Squad members can be made to take damage, but you are not told their initial health (not that it matters, because double zero is still zero). Does Dr Falkov count as a squad member for all purposes?
* 1 points only to 2. 2 points only to 3. There are plenty of transitional sections later on, though it kind of makes sense to break them up when there's combat. Several sections point to consecutive paragraphs.
Malevolence in Makivel by Tiago Filipe Costa
Premise and set-up
* Fantasy with cosmic horror flavour.
* You are a Xaeno, a being not native to the world in which the adventure takes place, and you are recruited by the local SCP Foundation branch to deal with some demonic incursion inside a region ravaged by chaotic influence.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* You roll two stats and have a fixed starting health.
* Six skill values are calculated using a somewhat convoluted procedure that could have been simplified to a fixed array (with or without the final two modifiers baked in). Skill checks use a roll-under mechanism and you would expect to fail most rolls were it not for the fact that the adventure also drops a ton of items on you from the start, which give you additional and permanent stat and skill bonuses... I think. Nevertheless it's quite possible to reduce your chance of victory to next to nothing at character creation.
* Combat uses an FF-style roll, add and compare mechanism, but also adds an additional defence roll each round. There seems to be something missing when it comes to damage, though. Damage values for items and enemies are presented as modifiers, and section 10 implies you can kill an enemy with Life 10 in four rounds, so there must be some other damage value. I'm assuming it's the difference between the attack value and the avoidance value, but the rules just don't say.
Style and presentation
* The writing and editing are generally fine, but there are a number of odd words and phrasings that could make you think English is not the writer's first language. The tone in some parts of the comparatively long dialogues also feels off or inconsistent. The main character is sometimes presented as smooth and cocky, at other times easily flustered or nonplussed.
* The setting and characters possibly fit into a larger context, though a drive-by reader is largely left guessing at how to feel about the specifics of the ending.
Twists and trials
* There are a number of ways to fail the adventure, most resulting directly or indirectly from failing a skill check. You are sometimes given a choice of two skills so you can pick your best option, and the adventure also features compound skill checks where you add up multiple skills and roll against the total with more dice, which is a pretty neat mechanism - where it makes thematic sense, at any rate.
* There are number shenanigans for using some codes and items, though you are always prompted for these, and there are other important items that do not use them.
* You don't have to do a lot of fighting as long as you pick non-belligerent options and don't screw up in other ways. At the end however there's a long battle designed to not be winnable, though it's not really losable either, and just makes you do a lot of rolling (so I skipped all but the first couple of rounds).
* If you guess a certain password as explicitly allowed, it's possible to skip more than half of the adventure, although you'd need to be quite lucky with rolls to win.
Bugs and problems
* The management and use of items is more than a bit unclear and counter-intuitive. Why does armour make you more likely to be hit and damaged in combat? Should it be assumed that accessories, not mentioned in the equipment rules, provide their modifiers without being equipped, or is there supposed to be some property separating them from items with no given type? Does carrying around random recipes make you better at Chemistry until you use them up, or is the bonus applied only at that time? Since the adventure seems to say you can take every item when presented with sets to choose from, and the rules imply you can freely equip and unequip them, does that mean you can just switch in the heavy armour stuff whenever you are told to make an Endurance check, then switch it out again? The rules could have stated more clearly that although damage doesn't stack for weapons, their stat bonuses do, or at least I think they do. 40 reminds you to not "forget about your Inventory limit", but none has been given, unless it's just referring to the slots, or perhaps the character sheet is meant to imply a limit of ten or maybe fifteen items, it doesn't say. 89 says you "waste no time" after taking some books, but clearly at some point you must spend enough time reading them to get their bonuses. Why are the best picks in the Organization's armoury worse than whatever junk is lying about in the Asylum's staff room? Why do the Gloves of Pickpocket and Science of Deceit book only ever help with accurately throwing an object?
* 2 says you have three attempts to open the door and then that you die if you haven't succeeded after the second.
* In 73, the cyclops apparently has two (or more) eyes.
* 15 should point to 64 instead of 70.
* 64 says the corridor is too narrow for two people to fight you at the same time, then still has you fighting them in parallel, which makes little sense while being mechanically pointless.
* 28 is missing the option to ask about the door (which may lose you the game).
* 34 and 46 should perhaps each have had an "if you haven't already" to prevent you from rolling until you succeed (even though being there and doing that is not good).
* 18 seems to say you attempt to run back to the previous intersection and take the left path, but if you succeed, you are sent forward on the path you were on. My guess would be it's the text that is misleading, not the link that is wrong.
The Curse of the Snake Queen by Christopher Bünte
Premise and set-up
* Fantasy adventure, a kind of miniature dungeon crawl with six rooms.
* You are a novice adventurer hired to investigate why people keep getting killed up in the hills and maybe put a stop to it. What could possibly go wrong etc.
* Actual amount of snake queens you can date in this adventure: zero.
* 100 sections (numbered from 101 to 200).
System and mechanics
* There are five stats determined by nonrandom allocation, and a fixed starting health. Action checks are roll, add and compare with a target number.
* Combat involves alternately rolling against attack (one stat and weapon bonus) and defence (another stat and armour bonus). These rolls are made in different sections that you may need to flip between repeatedly, although probably not too many times.
* There are universal checkboxes (which are essentially codewords), section-specific checkboxes, and one case of monster count checkboxes.
Style and presentation
* Some rules and procedures (mapping, poison) are only presented after you begin playing, in separate sections. One might argue that the player deserved to know how combat works at least, in order to make an informed attribute allocation.
* The adventure appears to be constructed to fit a reusable design pattern, with for instance weapon and armour modifiers that could change but do not, gold collection, and a checkbox array that goes beyond what is used here. As a standalone it could have been simplified in various ways, such as baking the static modifiers into the combat rolls. By simplifying navigation and combat presentation and moving some things to the rules, you could probably shrink the adventure by a fourth in terms of sections.
* The adventure makes liberal use of the permission to include illustrations and diagrams if they serve a puzzle function. Also, skulls.
* Overall the presentation is nicely done, with the map fragments, fonts, skulls and everything.
* I found the introduction a little jumbled and awkward in places, but the writing in the adventure proper is fine and well edited.
* 172 is neat.
Twists and trials
* To win you must, in addition to beating a few combat encounters, solve a few escape game-style puzzles, none of which should stump anyone with any experience with such things. Despite the map movement system, progress through the adventure is largely linear. Getting to section 200 should obviously be considered a win, even though 137 will potentially leave you 10 gold pieces richer. The endings overall leave some questions unanswered.
* The skills are not equal in this adventure: in a sense, any point not spent on Dexterity or Strength is wasted. Education and Intelligence have one use each, both of which can be repeated until you are successful, neither of which helps you win. Perception has three uses, one of which is inconsequential, the other two of which are potentially helpful but probably not needed. Meanwhile Dexterity is very useful in combat and has two other uses, one of which is marginal and one of which is pointless, while Strength is useful in combat and is used to shrug off poison.
* It's not clear whether the bolding of gold coin amounts means you are supposed to be able to play the same character in multiple adventures, but notably there are instant deaths for anyone who misses a clue or makes an unfortunate assumption about some puzzle.
Bugs and problems
* The first section contains no choices.
* 138 should read "If you were poisoned and need to know...", since if you weren't poisoned the instruction at the beginning of 140 is inappropriate, and if you were, applying the poison rules should not be optional.
Are You the Hero? by Andrew Wright
Premise and set-up
* Can it be... the latest in the evolving line of Wrightean Fabled Lands-style exploration and resource management games?
* Sort of, but with a little less emphasis on the resource management than the previous ones I've played, and perhaps more accurately a quintet of mini-adventures that allow some hopping back and forth.
* Fantasy adventure like the rest of its kind. Death Hog! Weed Nymph! Bone Clone!
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* Basically FF with the serial numbers filed off.
* There are some differences, though. Damage is treated as a variable; there's an armour rule which is a little awkwardly worded and annoyingly means a lot more rolling; stats are not rolled but allocated; Stamina is effectively halved to use the same numeric range as the other stats, affecting meals, use of Luck in combat and Escaping, but not regular combat damage - on the contrary, in most fights you and/or the enemy will likely have the potential to do more than the usual amount.
* There are also missile weapons, a carrying limit and checkboxes.
Style and presentation
* Well written with some humour and colour. There's weather, terrain, vegetation, wildlife, people.
* BONE CLONE
Twists and trials
* In this iteration of the free-roaming concept, there's no overland movement grid or travel cost: you can freely zip between the five mini-adventures, each of which spans about 20 sections. They are all structured in somewhat different ways, providing some variety (and one does consist of a movement grid). In one sense the adventure is the least linear in the contest aside from the idiosyncratic pirate game, but a successful (or very nearly successful) attempt will still have you turning over most stones.
* Victory means winning all of the five sub-adventures in any order. You can stop earlier and accept a lesser ending, although this seems somewhat pointless. It's possible to shut yourself out of beating two of the locations.
* You start out humbly, armed with a simple club. However, after finishing the quests in one or two locations, you will be able to buy the best equipment.
* After that, combat becomes a formality, since nobody will really be able to hurt you, assuming I understood correctly how armour works, and if I didn't, well, I still blame the adventure. If someone does hurt you, you quickly heal back to full. Since there are no instant deaths, progress through the remaining locations becomes entirely assured.
* That is, until you get to the fight with Azorg the warlock. He can't really hurt you either, in fact he will only do damage in 1 won round out of 27 (or 1 out of 9 if you know ahead of time to bring a two-handed weapon for this one battle). What he can do however, if you don't kill him very quickly, which with balanced stats is unlikely due to his own armour, is whittle down your Skill until you can no longer win rounds. After that you can keep rolling for a good while if you want to, until he finally kills you.
* Consequently, characters with a low to middling starting Skill shouldn't apply. For a decent chance at victory you should pick Skill 12, Stamina 6 or 7, Luck 9 or 10, and Gold 1. (Any point in Gold beyond the mandatory one is wasted.) There are places where the adventure explicitly or implicitly asks if you want to roll against Skill or Luck to achieve something or get someplace, and if you have Skill 12 you will always be successful while keeping your Luck points for other things.
* Yet another one of these that didn't quite get the balance right.
Bugs and problems
* A rules appendix appears to have been left out, but it may not matter much. If it's only character randomization, you definitely don't want it.
* When you are in a place requiring a light source, the adventure doesn't stop you from dropping a lantern to make place for something else, and in fact mandates dropping a candle straight away as concerns carrying capacity.
* Is searching optional in 49? 1 gold will get you 2 Stamina back, so with a lantern you can get infinite money, but it's not likely you'll need it.
* In 18 I assume the positive bonus should be applied to your rolls, and in each turn, like the negative one.
* Why doesn't the spear cost more than the bow, which does the same damage but requires you to keep track of arrows? Or put another way, why is the bow in the game?
* There are some minor logical conundrums. Why are the outcomes so monumentally different between getting lost in the trackless Vileborne Forest, and randomly walking deeper into it? Why are the outcomes so monumentally different between getting caught when sneaking into the temple, and carrying out Tabatha's preferred plan which involves running in and getting caught? Who are the considerate thieves who take only one item at a time from your hovel? (Of course, you can always keep a 1 GP candle there and about once in every six visits you have to replace it, the cost of which is offset by the free healing if somehow you managed to get hurt and ran out of food. Well, there's actually no need to bother with the hovel at all.)
It's entirely possible I could have read or played something wrong. I did already catch one thing I played wrongly, though it should have had a negligible effect on my experience and chances of success. In another case I strongly suspect I didn't play as intended though in that case I blame unclear rules.
The reviews are not a clear and complete listing of each entry's faults and merits, and I'm not sure it would be easy to guess which entries I voted for or considered voting for just based on this.
What Lies Beyond the Standing Stone by Jeremy Johnson
Premise and set-up
* Science fantasy in a post-apocalyptic setting, or something along those lines.
* You belong to a line of champions responsible for protecting your people from generational extra-dimensional incursions originating from the titular stone in your low-tech, non-relocatable settlement. Look, here comes one now!
* Interestingly, this adventure would not have qualified for the Windhammer Prize, though it meets my own basic definition of a gamebook.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* No rules. In fact we're not even told to begin at section 1.
Style and presentation
* Each section is given a title. In combat sequences, these are the stances and maneouvres employed, recurring in each new fight with different contexts and results.
* Combined with the measured, unadorned prose, the effect is often a little somber and ponderous, as if we are moving through a series of woodcuts showing captured moments in time. Together they form a distinctive scenario.
* Scenes are typically made up of clusters of neighbouring sections, and in general, the closer to section 100, the closer to the end.
* Needed a little more proofreading.
Twists and trials
* Nearly all of the adventure is structured so that you will find yourself either looping around in a battle sequence until you find an exit, or following a few branching segments to reach the next battle. Since most of the adventure's endings occur at the end of the last scene and the adventure has no memory, it's only the choices made there that determine which ending you get. I would characterize only one of them as a failure, so it's not at all unlikely you'll reach what might be called a win, or under the circumstances positive end of story, in your first game.
* There is however one dissimilar ending which, in defiance of the usual way of these things, is both quicker and happier.
* There's also a secret ending you can't reach without cheating. Or can you? The end.
* I'm reminded a bit of an acclaimed Twine game that I played years ago and ultimately found disappointing: it was billed as having meaningful choices, but contrived to always present the same consequences. In this case my personal preference would have been to have some mechanical distinction between the paths beyond the stone, not necessarily numerical ones, that held some significance in the endgame, not necessarily to strictly determine failure or success. The alien world part is commendably atmospheric, but given that the rest of the adventure would necessarily play out almost the same way, I'm not sure it's enough to motivate repeated plays instead of just systematically reading through the branches.
Bugs and problems
* No technical ones, but sections 41 and 45 are identical.
Knighthood by Elie Merle
Premise and set-up
* Fantasy with folk-tale flavour, somewhat modernly filtered but not exactly a spoof.
* You are a young man from what appears to be a noble family, setting out towards the king's castle hoping to be knighted.
* 67 sections (but numbered between 1 and 100).
System and mechanics
* Three stats (rolled) and six skills (bought).
* Skills use a roll-under mechanism, combat works by similarly rolling against attack-defence differentials. There are also special moves usable in combat, at least one of which could have been more clearly worded. More things that could be have been clearer: multiple opponents attack simultaneously by default, and you strike first by default. Endurance could also have been simplified, since nobody ever does anything other than 3 or 6 damage on a hit.
* Skill values can be understood to be calculated by first using a points pool to increase them at progressively higher costs, discouraging specialization, then making a series of choices that together so far as I can tell are functionally equivalent to picking any four skills to receive fixed bonuses, then picking another type of skill bonus which apparently only applies for specific distributions. The rules themselves can't entirely keep track of all these steps, which could probably have been entirely exchanged for a simple array assignment system and lost nothing of value. My approach was to go for a distribution of 4/4/4/4/4/1 and hope my chosen weakness wouldn't doom me.
Style and presentation
* The writing is pretty simple and straightforward, with the odd amusing aside like the unsentimental revelation that your brother was eaten by a tiger on his attempt at knighthood, but more often giving very little information about where you are or how you got there, so most of the adventure takes place in a series of white rooms, whether indoors or outdoors. This isn't super atypical of folk-tales, I guess.
* Style, grammar, spelling and typography are all a little shaky.
Twists and trials
* It's not too difficult to steadily advance towards your destination. Combat may end your adventure, but is mostly weighted in your favour unless you got unlucky with initial die rolls. There's also the odd avoidable instant death. There's very little in the way of item collection - in fact, a single one - but the adventure may ask if you've accomplished certain things and provide help or hints if you have.
* The kicker to the convoluted skill selection procedure is that they are far from equal. Three of them have good uses, one of these being the only skill with more than one good use (another having a second use which you however would hope to fail). The fourth and fifth have one potentially helpful use each, but one of these is only used to mitigate the consequences of a bad choice, and the other is rendered pointless by one of the good skills. The sixth is not used at all.
* There's a two-minute mystery which you solve by catching the culprit being wrong about something which has no obvious relation to the crime. (The adventure handwaves the actual case being made against them.)
Bugs and problems
* The first section contains no choices, this tends not to be a good sign.
* In spite of the unused section numberings, several paragraphs point to consecutive sections, or to the following section.
* 82 seems like it would warrant a roll against Persuasion, but doesn't involve one.
* The fights in 23, 39 and 57 couldn't end in fewer than two rounds.
The Lost Treasures o' Cap'n Blouchard by Sean Loftiss
Premise and set-up
* You are some kind of player entity chosen to assist with navigation and decision-making on an expedition to a treasure island. Your partner Mack, who swears he isn't a pirate, supplies the map, wanders the terrain, fights the battles, and speaks every line of text.
* A case could be made that it's at least as much of a gamebook-style puzzle as a puzzle-style gamebook.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* You roll to determine Mack's max health, health restoration capacity, and ammunition.
* Combat includes rolling for surprise, rolling for a ranged attack (hit, effect and/or damage), and rolling for repeated melee rounds (hit and/or damage). There are also rules for evasion, flight and pursuit.
* You navigate the adventure by moving on a hex grid, turning to the section indicated in each hex to read its description, rolling to check for random encounters, then moving on the map again, and repeating this until you think you have found the location of the treasure and the relevant waypoints used to get there. There are three islands of varying sizes to attempt, with different particulars for working out where the treasure is buried, and an escalation of the range of enemies encountered.
* There are also a few codewords used on the third island, but they all spell trouble.
Style and presentation
* The whole adventure, including the rules but excluding italicized technical instructions, is written in piratespeak. Because it's Mack speaking. To you.
* Most of the adventure is made up of two components: environmental descriptions and creature-specific combat result tables. Both are varied and well done.
Twists and trials
* What you must do to win on each of the three islands is work out how the given clues accompanying the treasure map correspond to a specific progression of hexes, then use the numbers of those hexes to calculate a section to turn to. On the first island, the solution is unambiguous once you find the two relevant landmarks. The second can be solved by fully deciphering the clues or worked out with some trial and error. The third island is where either there are some deeper calculations that elude me, or the adventure eventually drops the idea that each waypoint is in some way located in relation to the previous one. But if the latter is the case, the proceedings become thematically strained; if I can determine where I should be after the ninth step simply because there's only one hex matching the clue, and I can then guess the correct treasure hex by making some inconclusive but not unreasonable assumptions about steps ten through twelve, then why does it matter what I may or may not have been doing before step nine?
* While you're doing an increasing amount of walking about, you have to constantly roll for random encounters, the likelihood of which varies between around 8% per step on beaches to around 40% in the jungles. You quickly learn to feel relief when a roll indicates no encounter. In effect, these encounters and their drain on Mack's health are the timer ticking down to prospective failure. But dying and starting over doesn't mean lost resources or information, you can just head back to where you were with restored health and possibly a lower threat level. I find the combat system is a bit overwrought for the unwelcome and distracting role it ultimately plays.
* The only traditional gamebook decisions offered - i.e. outside of grid movement, combat options and where to dig - turn out to comprise a situational complement to the health restoration system, which could just as well have been given as a brief rule. I have a hard time seeing that this feature could become relevant, even on the third island, since once you might possibly need it, you're unlikely to be in a position to use it.
* This then leaves the puzzle aspect of matching clues to terrain, which as noted gets a comparatively simple introduction in the first game and becomes more challenging in the second, but wears out its welcome in the nebulous third. I fairly quickly gave up on playing by the rules there, the clues being vague enough that just trying to line up a solution with all information available, attempting to work out what features might fit each clue and how the potential matches are or aren't lined up with each other, is sufficiently taxing without breaking it up with moving, rolling and fighting random encounters in order to record your working data piecemeal. In the end it took me long enough to arrive at a winning solution by just systematically reading the descriptions and trying to match a likely configuration to the riddle, but without understanding the exact logic of every step, so who knows, maybe it's only coincidentally correct. In a sense this is necessarily true, since there are multiple instances of several hexes used in the solution, and the adventure can't know which of these I believe to be on the proper path.
Bugs and problems
* A few procedural details were not crystal clear to me. A possibly unintended consequence of the pursuit rules is that you can end up on a hex you want to explore but the instructions tell you to move away from it; I assume in this case you should be able to just stay put and look around you. The rules don't really say anything about digging as a game action, but I guessed you must occupy the suspected treasure spot, that digging happens after you roll for encounters in that hex, and that there's no penalty for getting the solution wrong (which could happen even if you're digging in the right place). I also assumed that if you kill one pygmy of several with a shot, you turn to the new battle immediately and do not roll again for surprise.
* 27 doesn't seem to be used.
* I still haven't received the shipment of inconspicuous gold bars I was promised.
Heart of Keros by David M. Donachie
Premise and set-up
* Maritime fantasy adventure using the GNAT system.
* You are not a sailor.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* GNAT ("GNAT, No Acronym This!") means two non-random stats, roll-under mechanism for actions, pick two skills from a list of ten for situational bonuses and occasionally action gatekeeping.
* Also inventory management, food and drink (separately in this adventure), a pool of rerolls (ugh), magic, situational reroll-based modifiers (seriously, screw rerolls), codewords, character advancement, and two checkboxes (which could have been dealt with using a codeword and an "if you haven't already", respectively). Combat is made up of finite sequences of action checks: make a prescribed number of rolls to avoid damage and then if you're still alive you're victorious.
* An equipment list is possibly missing from the rules, but it seems to make no difference what you call your starting weapon so long as you know its type and are ready to honestly respond to the adventure's question whether your pickled neutronium whale spine is "similar" to a spear.
Style and presentation
* Certain parts of sections with rules instructions regarding keyword management, inventory management, skill checks or combat have been emphasized with borders and a coloured background, but this is inconsistent across the board (or possibly follows an inscrutable higher logic, but it seems to defeat the purpose in either case).
* In some places the adventure could have used a better way of presenting conditional statements, e.g. 88 has a detached "otherwise" clause following a paragraph with four "if" clauses in succession. Similarly 11 could have said that a non-fatal climbing failure is always followed by a second, successful attempt, assuming that's what's intended.
* I found that the tone and flavour of the encounters made the world feel consistent and coherent. Scenarios like the fire boar island and the pale men wouldn't have been out of place in one of Dave Morris's fantasy entries in the Virtual Reality series. (If I were to change one thing I would maybe not have the ghost priest pop out of the ground, though it probably wouldn't seem as silly if you fixed the misplaced modifier.)
* Needed a little more proofreading.
Twists and trials
* The adventure spans about half a dozen islands and some boating antics. The middle part is spent on three islands that you can take on in any order (although rowing back and forth may take its toll), or potentially not at all.
* Water is handled in a slightly arbitrary manner. You may take the adventure's advice and conserve water early on, to find yourself saddled for the rest the adventure with a penalty because you're not given the option to drink the water you're still carrying around. In 63, refilling your flask from a pool big enough to fit a toad bigger than you are is apparently not enough to top it up. 57 explicitly presents you with a stream but only lets you take two portions, though you could revisit it as many times as you want. 71 says you can fill the flask but doesn't say how many portions this amounts to; 92 seems to be the only section that actually states a limit.
* Nonetheless the adventure is not overly punishing, and I won on my second attempt, if you count getting the treasure of Keros as winning. Obviously if one of your design goals is having people play multiple adventures with the same character, it makes sense to leave out random deaths and fatal bottlenecks, even to include ways to come back from taking lethal damage.
* Because of potential integration with the larger GNAT-verse, there are some options and considerations in the adventure - all spells and some items - that won't be available or relevant to someone who plays it as a standalone. It's possible to gain enough experience to purchase another skill or even raise Vitality, although this may be unlikely to have much of an effect if you're picking blindly. Winning also becomes a little less defined if you mean to reuse your character.
Bugs and problems
* The first section contains no choices, but at least there's a scene transition.
* 18 points to 19. 30 points to 31. 17 points to 16.
* In 4, you are looking west towards the three islands, which matches the initial identification of right as north, but the following description and options given in 4 and 94 only make sense if you are looking east. You also proceed east in 72, only for the directions to be reversed again in 16 and 30, before finally flipping back in 28.
* 75 should perhaps not have allowed repeated skill checks, and one might think at first that an "if you haven't already" should have been added to the link to 26, but allowing the player to revisit 26 at will turns out to be necessary since it may be the only way to gain Shore and proceed to the next stage of the adventure (so arguably it shouldn't have been a skill check in the first place, although this would have left Linguistics without even a convenience application).
* 5 doesn't say what happens if you succeed at the check. Presumably it should have continued using parts of 43 and then led to 97. Since you can't have Seasnake in 27, currently 97 is unreachable.
* 2 doesn't fully make clear whether eating there counts as using up the ration you just gained, and if so, why the fish don't retain their too-salty quality if you save them.
* The spell options in 76 assume that you successfully cast the spells. As a parenthetical note, the inclusion of options like these raise the question why you couldn't do something similar in other parts of the adventure.
* You should logically gain Shore in 11; what you additionally learn in 55 relates only to Sea.
* Gaining Sea in 16 is pointless since you must already have it.
* It's possible to have the materials needed to repair the mast yet not be allowed to do so; this can happen if you visit 17 (which could just have linked to 46), but also if you resurrect after being killed by the pale men.
* In 80 the merrow's pearl immediately disintegrates to no effect when exposed, but 27 implies it can be used for illumination with no risk of losing it.
* There should probably have been some checkbox or codeword in place to keep you from acquiring multiple greenstone tablets and attendant experience.
Operation Dead Dawn by Tom Perrett
Premise and set-up
* Zombie apocalypse? The slow, shambling kind.
* You are a cool military type doing military things with military attitudes alongside your military buddies.
* 67 sections.
System and mechanics
* Fixed starting health and equipment.
* Combat is done by rolling on tables and successively eliminating oncoming zombies until they're all extra dead or they reach and kill you through accumulated damage. The latter isn't really going to happen though.
* Instead of one ranged combat table and separate range modifiers for sidearms and automatic weapons, the adventure could have presented two tables with all the modifiers baked in, which would take up as much space and save the reader the arithmetic.
* There are also rules for healing (unneeded), evasion (unlikely and unneeded), and team members (could to a large degree have been baked into the tables).
* Codewords are employed under the designation "Narrative Events".
Style and presentation
* I was willing to give the grim, dramatic prose the benefit of a doubt at first, and a certain measure of cool military tropes can be expected in the genre, but when eventually the adventure was producing sentences such as "The helicopter claws at the sky, ascending with a mixture of urgency and remorse," I just wasn't feeling it. I'm pretty sure the word "belie" is misused throughout.
* Ghost was OK though, that is except when his "exclamation slices through the air like a warning siren" or some such.
* If the operation is actually designated Operation Dead Dawn in-universe, we aren't told.
Twists and trials
* You proceed into and through the super secret military lab base and occasionally fight small groups of zombies. You can make one narrative detour early on and there's one place where you can choose between two short paths with differently flavoured zombie encounters, but for the most part, games will follow the same route. As long as the dice gods haven't marked you for special treatment, you will proceed to one of four endings, one where you die (less likely) and three being about the same level of gloomy for different reasons.
* I strongly doubt you could ever lose in combat without actively trying to; one avoidable fight where you have a fixed 1 in 6 chance of failure is as bad as it gets. After my first game I had more ammo of both types than I started with, and a bunch of accumulated healing items that I never used for the simple reason that I never took any damage. If combat had actually been dangerous - if you risked zombification, or even just damage - and if your choices had had more of an effect on how much you had to fight, then no doubt this could have resulted in some degree of tension and urgency as you sneaked about the base (and for instance getting into the armoury or saving Rodriguez might have actually mattered).
* The adventure commendably inserts a couple of moral choices towards the end, but at least partially fails to explain their significance. The hard drive is "lost forever" - why? Did somebody eat it? The "epidemic" is "unchecked" - why? What's changed? The zombies have proven eminently shootable, send in a few more people with better gear and a proper briefing like maybe you should have queued up to begin with and what's the problem?
Bugs and problems
* The rules could have been patched and clarified in places. There is something called "the current fight or flight modifier", which seems to reference the number of other people in your group. The stealth rules should presumably have said you must roll equal to or over the target number, and even when rolls are allowed they are frequently impossible to make (because you can't roll higher than 6 with one die and there are no positive modifiers to stealth, but always a negative one), so there's rarely a reason not to ambush. Squad members can be made to take damage, but you are not told their initial health (not that it matters, because double zero is still zero). Does Dr Falkov count as a squad member for all purposes?
* 1 points only to 2. 2 points only to 3. There are plenty of transitional sections later on, though it kind of makes sense to break them up when there's combat. Several sections point to consecutive paragraphs.
Malevolence in Makivel by Tiago Filipe Costa
Premise and set-up
* Fantasy with cosmic horror flavour.
* You are a Xaeno, a being not native to the world in which the adventure takes place, and you are recruited by the local SCP Foundation branch to deal with some demonic incursion inside a region ravaged by chaotic influence.
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* You roll two stats and have a fixed starting health.
* Six skill values are calculated using a somewhat convoluted procedure that could have been simplified to a fixed array (with or without the final two modifiers baked in). Skill checks use a roll-under mechanism and you would expect to fail most rolls were it not for the fact that the adventure also drops a ton of items on you from the start, which give you additional and permanent stat and skill bonuses... I think. Nevertheless it's quite possible to reduce your chance of victory to next to nothing at character creation.
* Combat uses an FF-style roll, add and compare mechanism, but also adds an additional defence roll each round. There seems to be something missing when it comes to damage, though. Damage values for items and enemies are presented as modifiers, and section 10 implies you can kill an enemy with Life 10 in four rounds, so there must be some other damage value. I'm assuming it's the difference between the attack value and the avoidance value, but the rules just don't say.
Style and presentation
* The writing and editing are generally fine, but there are a number of odd words and phrasings that could make you think English is not the writer's first language. The tone in some parts of the comparatively long dialogues also feels off or inconsistent. The main character is sometimes presented as smooth and cocky, at other times easily flustered or nonplussed.
* The setting and characters possibly fit into a larger context, though a drive-by reader is largely left guessing at how to feel about the specifics of the ending.
Twists and trials
* There are a number of ways to fail the adventure, most resulting directly or indirectly from failing a skill check. You are sometimes given a choice of two skills so you can pick your best option, and the adventure also features compound skill checks where you add up multiple skills and roll against the total with more dice, which is a pretty neat mechanism - where it makes thematic sense, at any rate.
* There are number shenanigans for using some codes and items, though you are always prompted for these, and there are other important items that do not use them.
* You don't have to do a lot of fighting as long as you pick non-belligerent options and don't screw up in other ways. At the end however there's a long battle designed to not be winnable, though it's not really losable either, and just makes you do a lot of rolling (so I skipped all but the first couple of rounds).
* If you guess a certain password as explicitly allowed, it's possible to skip more than half of the adventure, although you'd need to be quite lucky with rolls to win.
Bugs and problems
* The management and use of items is more than a bit unclear and counter-intuitive. Why does armour make you more likely to be hit and damaged in combat? Should it be assumed that accessories, not mentioned in the equipment rules, provide their modifiers without being equipped, or is there supposed to be some property separating them from items with no given type? Does carrying around random recipes make you better at Chemistry until you use them up, or is the bonus applied only at that time? Since the adventure seems to say you can take every item when presented with sets to choose from, and the rules imply you can freely equip and unequip them, does that mean you can just switch in the heavy armour stuff whenever you are told to make an Endurance check, then switch it out again? The rules could have stated more clearly that although damage doesn't stack for weapons, their stat bonuses do, or at least I think they do. 40 reminds you to not "forget about your Inventory limit", but none has been given, unless it's just referring to the slots, or perhaps the character sheet is meant to imply a limit of ten or maybe fifteen items, it doesn't say. 89 says you "waste no time" after taking some books, but clearly at some point you must spend enough time reading them to get their bonuses. Why are the best picks in the Organization's armoury worse than whatever junk is lying about in the Asylum's staff room? Why do the Gloves of Pickpocket and Science of Deceit book only ever help with accurately throwing an object?
* 2 says you have three attempts to open the door and then that you die if you haven't succeeded after the second.
* In 73, the cyclops apparently has two (or more) eyes.
* 15 should point to 64 instead of 70.
* 64 says the corridor is too narrow for two people to fight you at the same time, then still has you fighting them in parallel, which makes little sense while being mechanically pointless.
* 28 is missing the option to ask about the door (which may lose you the game).
* 34 and 46 should perhaps each have had an "if you haven't already" to prevent you from rolling until you succeed (even though being there and doing that is not good).
* 18 seems to say you attempt to run back to the previous intersection and take the left path, but if you succeed, you are sent forward on the path you were on. My guess would be it's the text that is misleading, not the link that is wrong.
The Curse of the Snake Queen by Christopher Bünte
Premise and set-up
* Fantasy adventure, a kind of miniature dungeon crawl with six rooms.
* You are a novice adventurer hired to investigate why people keep getting killed up in the hills and maybe put a stop to it. What could possibly go wrong etc.
* Actual amount of snake queens you can date in this adventure: zero.
* 100 sections (numbered from 101 to 200).
System and mechanics
* There are five stats determined by nonrandom allocation, and a fixed starting health. Action checks are roll, add and compare with a target number.
* Combat involves alternately rolling against attack (one stat and weapon bonus) and defence (another stat and armour bonus). These rolls are made in different sections that you may need to flip between repeatedly, although probably not too many times.
* There are universal checkboxes (which are essentially codewords), section-specific checkboxes, and one case of monster count checkboxes.
Style and presentation
* Some rules and procedures (mapping, poison) are only presented after you begin playing, in separate sections. One might argue that the player deserved to know how combat works at least, in order to make an informed attribute allocation.
* The adventure appears to be constructed to fit a reusable design pattern, with for instance weapon and armour modifiers that could change but do not, gold collection, and a checkbox array that goes beyond what is used here. As a standalone it could have been simplified in various ways, such as baking the static modifiers into the combat rolls. By simplifying navigation and combat presentation and moving some things to the rules, you could probably shrink the adventure by a fourth in terms of sections.
* The adventure makes liberal use of the permission to include illustrations and diagrams if they serve a puzzle function. Also, skulls.
* Overall the presentation is nicely done, with the map fragments, fonts, skulls and everything.
* I found the introduction a little jumbled and awkward in places, but the writing in the adventure proper is fine and well edited.
* 172 is neat.
Twists and trials
* To win you must, in addition to beating a few combat encounters, solve a few escape game-style puzzles, none of which should stump anyone with any experience with such things. Despite the map movement system, progress through the adventure is largely linear. Getting to section 200 should obviously be considered a win, even though 137 will potentially leave you 10 gold pieces richer. The endings overall leave some questions unanswered.
* The skills are not equal in this adventure: in a sense, any point not spent on Dexterity or Strength is wasted. Education and Intelligence have one use each, both of which can be repeated until you are successful, neither of which helps you win. Perception has three uses, one of which is inconsequential, the other two of which are potentially helpful but probably not needed. Meanwhile Dexterity is very useful in combat and has two other uses, one of which is marginal and one of which is pointless, while Strength is useful in combat and is used to shrug off poison.
* It's not clear whether the bolding of gold coin amounts means you are supposed to be able to play the same character in multiple adventures, but notably there are instant deaths for anyone who misses a clue or makes an unfortunate assumption about some puzzle.
Bugs and problems
* The first section contains no choices.
* 138 should read "If you were poisoned and need to know...", since if you weren't poisoned the instruction at the beginning of 140 is inappropriate, and if you were, applying the poison rules should not be optional.
Are You the Hero? by Andrew Wright
Premise and set-up
* Can it be... the latest in the evolving line of Wrightean Fabled Lands-style exploration and resource management games?
* Sort of, but with a little less emphasis on the resource management than the previous ones I've played, and perhaps more accurately a quintet of mini-adventures that allow some hopping back and forth.
* Fantasy adventure like the rest of its kind. Death Hog! Weed Nymph! Bone Clone!
* 100 sections.
System and mechanics
* Basically FF with the serial numbers filed off.
* There are some differences, though. Damage is treated as a variable; there's an armour rule which is a little awkwardly worded and annoyingly means a lot more rolling; stats are not rolled but allocated; Stamina is effectively halved to use the same numeric range as the other stats, affecting meals, use of Luck in combat and Escaping, but not regular combat damage - on the contrary, in most fights you and/or the enemy will likely have the potential to do more than the usual amount.
* There are also missile weapons, a carrying limit and checkboxes.
Style and presentation
* Well written with some humour and colour. There's weather, terrain, vegetation, wildlife, people.
* BONE CLONE
Twists and trials
* In this iteration of the free-roaming concept, there's no overland movement grid or travel cost: you can freely zip between the five mini-adventures, each of which spans about 20 sections. They are all structured in somewhat different ways, providing some variety (and one does consist of a movement grid). In one sense the adventure is the least linear in the contest aside from the idiosyncratic pirate game, but a successful (or very nearly successful) attempt will still have you turning over most stones.
* Victory means winning all of the five sub-adventures in any order. You can stop earlier and accept a lesser ending, although this seems somewhat pointless. It's possible to shut yourself out of beating two of the locations.
* You start out humbly, armed with a simple club. However, after finishing the quests in one or two locations, you will be able to buy the best equipment.
* After that, combat becomes a formality, since nobody will really be able to hurt you, assuming I understood correctly how armour works, and if I didn't, well, I still blame the adventure. If someone does hurt you, you quickly heal back to full. Since there are no instant deaths, progress through the remaining locations becomes entirely assured.
* That is, until you get to the fight with Azorg the warlock. He can't really hurt you either, in fact he will only do damage in 1 won round out of 27 (or 1 out of 9 if you know ahead of time to bring a two-handed weapon for this one battle). What he can do however, if you don't kill him very quickly, which with balanced stats is unlikely due to his own armour, is whittle down your Skill until you can no longer win rounds. After that you can keep rolling for a good while if you want to, until he finally kills you.
* Consequently, characters with a low to middling starting Skill shouldn't apply. For a decent chance at victory you should pick Skill 12, Stamina 6 or 7, Luck 9 or 10, and Gold 1. (Any point in Gold beyond the mandatory one is wasted.) There are places where the adventure explicitly or implicitly asks if you want to roll against Skill or Luck to achieve something or get someplace, and if you have Skill 12 you will always be successful while keeping your Luck points for other things.
* Yet another one of these that didn't quite get the balance right.
Bugs and problems
* A rules appendix appears to have been left out, but it may not matter much. If it's only character randomization, you definitely don't want it.
* When you are in a place requiring a light source, the adventure doesn't stop you from dropping a lantern to make place for something else, and in fact mandates dropping a candle straight away as concerns carrying capacity.
* Is searching optional in 49? 1 gold will get you 2 Stamina back, so with a lantern you can get infinite money, but it's not likely you'll need it.
* In 18 I assume the positive bonus should be applied to your rolls, and in each turn, like the negative one.
* Why doesn't the spear cost more than the bow, which does the same damage but requires you to keep track of arrows? Or put another way, why is the bow in the game?
* There are some minor logical conundrums. Why are the outcomes so monumentally different between getting lost in the trackless Vileborne Forest, and randomly walking deeper into it? Why are the outcomes so monumentally different between getting caught when sneaking into the temple, and carrying out Tabatha's preferred plan which involves running in and getting caught? Who are the considerate thieves who take only one item at a time from your hovel? (Of course, you can always keep a 1 GP candle there and about once in every six visits you have to replace it, the cost of which is offset by the free healing if somehow you managed to get hurt and ran out of food. Well, there's actually no need to bother with the hovel at all.)
