Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
Iron DM 2012 -- R2 complete, Finals in Progress
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 5926829" data-attributes="member: 150"><p>Usually, I'd start off with some longwinded preamble, but I don't think most of you care about that, so without further ado, the results:</p><p></p><p>[sblock]</p><p><strong>Ingredients.</strong> </p><p></p><p>Ingredients are, usually, the most important part of the entry and the judgement. On very rare occasions an entry can overcome ingredient problems, but those examples are few and far between. In this case, we've got a couple of entries that are struggling to make ingredients fit naturally. A well-used ingredient is one that is an important part of the story -- if it were removed, the rest of the story would fall apart. Weak ingredients often look more like garnish -- they might be on the plate to make the dish look pretty, but they're not an important part of the meal. </p><p></p><p><strong>crippled minotaur</strong>- in SoS, the crippled minotaur is one of the humanoid monsters being smuggled to the city. This is an example of the sort of weak ingredient I mentioned above -- it could be removed and there would be no serious loss to the story of the adventure. </p><p></p><p>In MaM, the crippled minotaur is a little weird -- the ingredient has been applied to ALL minotaurs, who are afflicted with a terrible, crippling disease in their later years. It serves as the motivation of the primary antagonist in the story -- the troubled Minotaur Corbellos. It works, in it's way, although it feels like an uncomfortable fit for me. Still, advantage Mam. </p><p></p><p><strong>Rock city</strong> - In MaM, the Rock City is the setting for the story, an underground city of Minotaurs, built around the powerful tautorite pillar. The Rock City, and since these are minotaurs, the Rock Maze City -- they're a direct result of that tautorite. And the Tautorite is key to the story, but the Rock City setting is not. In none of the description of the action the PCs play through do they deal with the rock city or the maze it creates. A more fleshed out entry, not limited by word count, might have been able to make more of it, but we have to work with this entry, and while the "rock city" ingredient is covered nominally, it doesn't really enter the story in any real way. </p><p></p><p>SoS isn't much better. There, the Rock City is a destination -- it's the place the PCs are traveling to, the place the humanoid prisoners are being smuggled to, etc. The location has some influence over the story -- the type of cargo on the ship is influenced by Rock City, but if we were to rename the city "Denver" nothing that the players really interact with would change. I'm all about the interpretive twists -- making the king of rock city an Elvis clone is funny and cool, but if the adventure never gets there for the PCs to interact with it, there doesn't seem to be much point. I'm not going to give either side advantage for this one -- they were both pretty weak. </p><p></p><p><strong>Unfortunate Smuggler</strong> - in SoS, this is captain Screwbeard (love the name) who's imprisoned on the ship and might be rescued by the pcs. He's there, but the adventure would play pretty much exactly the same if he were not there -- it's entirely disposable, which makes him weak. </p><p></p><p>In MaM, the unfortunate smuggler is Thom Gamble, who is normally fortunate but seems to have had a bad streak -- he's the hook that brings the party to the underground city, trying to track him down. He's a bit more integral to the story, although I'm not totally happy with him, either. He's a prisoner that needs rescuing, and nothing about his actual role in the story draws on his being a smuggler or unfortunate. He could be any prisoner, any lost soul. Still, this is marginally better than the usage in SoS, so advantage MaM. </p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>misplaced desire</strong> - in MaM, the misplaced desire is Corbellos' reason for his actions, and the threat he brings to the story. It works okay, although it feels like a bit of a stretch. </p><p></p><p>In SoS, I'm struggling to see which specific element was intended to be the misplaced desire. Other ingredients were bolded in the writeup when they appeared, and this one does not. There are characters with desires, but I don't see any one as specific ally misplaced. So, Once again, advantage MaM. </p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>tower shield</strong> - In MaM the tower shield is the magic that keeps the Tautoric at bay, and the thing Corbellos must breach to complete his plans. In SoS, the cargo hold is full of tower shields. But, it's never important that they're tower shields -- they're generic cargo, and could have been replaced with Hawaiian Pizza without changing the story -- so, could have been better. Advantage MaM. </p><p></p><p></p><p><strong>staff of storms</strong> - In SoS, the region the PCs sail through is called the Staff of Storms. I find this sort of use of any ingredient very frustrating. Sure, there are a few storm encounters on the random encounter table, but other than that, the idea of storms does not seem important to the story -- and just labeling a body of water "staff of storms" does not do much to satisfy the ingredient. </p><p></p><p>Meanwhile, in MaM, there's an actual staff, and it actually affects storms, and is actually used by the bad guy in the adventure. I'm not wowed or excited by the use, but it works. </p><p></p><p>So, MaM makes much better use of the ingredients than SoS does, on almost every count. </p><p></p><p><strong>Creativity</strong> - There are a lot of things I liked about SoS -- just not the way it used ingredients. The Rock city as Elvis's kingdom was perhaps the best ingredient use in SoS, and it made me smile (and wish some of the adventure took place there). But character names and other elements made me smile. I did have to wonder how effective a first mate who never speaks would be -- and that would either be some very cool RP or a very big problem. I'm betting on some fun RP -- a lot of the rest of the writeup reads like you're good at DMing those sorts of absurdities. </p><p></p><p>MaM also had good, creative elements, but even though the scope was grander, I was less impressed with that creativity. The Tautocite is a pretty standard dingus -- Avatar's Unobtanium, Star Trek's Red Matter, etc. It's the stuff that makes the plot go. But I didn't get the feeling that the tautocite really did much in the story -- it was there, it has that primordial matter feel to it, but in the long run it's just there. In the end, I was not as excited by MaM as I was SoS, so advantage Sos. </p><p></p><p><strong>Playability </strong>- SoS felt like I could pretty much drop it into a game and run with it. MaM was also pretty good, although it would require rewriting a chunk of whatever game's cosmology I drop it into just to make the adventure fit -- and totally changing the way Minotaurs exist in a given campaign world might not work very well for many DMs, so it's utility is limited. So, it's a small thing, but I'll give an edge to Sos here, too. </p><p></p><p><strong>Final Analysis </strong></p><p></p><p>In the end, Mazes and Mortals has it's problems, but it makes better use of the ingredients almost completely across the board. The non-ingredient good points that Staff of Storms has going for it are not strong enough IMO to recover from those problems. Still, it has a lot of good elements and could have been a strong contender with better integrated ingredients.</p><p></p><p>So, this round goes to Mazes and Mortals, and [MENTION=21629]ender_wiggin[/MENTION] advances to round 2. </p><p>[/sblock]</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Radiating Gnome, post: 5926829, member: 150"] Usually, I'd start off with some longwinded preamble, but I don't think most of you care about that, so without further ado, the results: [sblock] [B]Ingredients.[/B] Ingredients are, usually, the most important part of the entry and the judgement. On very rare occasions an entry can overcome ingredient problems, but those examples are few and far between. In this case, we've got a couple of entries that are struggling to make ingredients fit naturally. A well-used ingredient is one that is an important part of the story -- if it were removed, the rest of the story would fall apart. Weak ingredients often look more like garnish -- they might be on the plate to make the dish look pretty, but they're not an important part of the meal. [B]crippled minotaur[/B]- in SoS, the crippled minotaur is one of the humanoid monsters being smuggled to the city. This is an example of the sort of weak ingredient I mentioned above -- it could be removed and there would be no serious loss to the story of the adventure. In MaM, the crippled minotaur is a little weird -- the ingredient has been applied to ALL minotaurs, who are afflicted with a terrible, crippling disease in their later years. It serves as the motivation of the primary antagonist in the story -- the troubled Minotaur Corbellos. It works, in it's way, although it feels like an uncomfortable fit for me. Still, advantage Mam. [B]Rock city[/B] - In MaM, the Rock City is the setting for the story, an underground city of Minotaurs, built around the powerful tautorite pillar. The Rock City, and since these are minotaurs, the Rock Maze City -- they're a direct result of that tautorite. And the Tautorite is key to the story, but the Rock City setting is not. In none of the description of the action the PCs play through do they deal with the rock city or the maze it creates. A more fleshed out entry, not limited by word count, might have been able to make more of it, but we have to work with this entry, and while the "rock city" ingredient is covered nominally, it doesn't really enter the story in any real way. SoS isn't much better. There, the Rock City is a destination -- it's the place the PCs are traveling to, the place the humanoid prisoners are being smuggled to, etc. The location has some influence over the story -- the type of cargo on the ship is influenced by Rock City, but if we were to rename the city "Denver" nothing that the players really interact with would change. I'm all about the interpretive twists -- making the king of rock city an Elvis clone is funny and cool, but if the adventure never gets there for the PCs to interact with it, there doesn't seem to be much point. I'm not going to give either side advantage for this one -- they were both pretty weak. [B]Unfortunate Smuggler[/B] - in SoS, this is captain Screwbeard (love the name) who's imprisoned on the ship and might be rescued by the pcs. He's there, but the adventure would play pretty much exactly the same if he were not there -- it's entirely disposable, which makes him weak. In MaM, the unfortunate smuggler is Thom Gamble, who is normally fortunate but seems to have had a bad streak -- he's the hook that brings the party to the underground city, trying to track him down. He's a bit more integral to the story, although I'm not totally happy with him, either. He's a prisoner that needs rescuing, and nothing about his actual role in the story draws on his being a smuggler or unfortunate. He could be any prisoner, any lost soul. Still, this is marginally better than the usage in SoS, so advantage MaM. [B]misplaced desire[/B] - in MaM, the misplaced desire is Corbellos' reason for his actions, and the threat he brings to the story. It works okay, although it feels like a bit of a stretch. In SoS, I'm struggling to see which specific element was intended to be the misplaced desire. Other ingredients were bolded in the writeup when they appeared, and this one does not. There are characters with desires, but I don't see any one as specific ally misplaced. So, Once again, advantage MaM. [B]tower shield[/B] - In MaM the tower shield is the magic that keeps the Tautoric at bay, and the thing Corbellos must breach to complete his plans. In SoS, the cargo hold is full of tower shields. But, it's never important that they're tower shields -- they're generic cargo, and could have been replaced with Hawaiian Pizza without changing the story -- so, could have been better. Advantage MaM. [B]staff of storms[/B] - In SoS, the region the PCs sail through is called the Staff of Storms. I find this sort of use of any ingredient very frustrating. Sure, there are a few storm encounters on the random encounter table, but other than that, the idea of storms does not seem important to the story -- and just labeling a body of water "staff of storms" does not do much to satisfy the ingredient. Meanwhile, in MaM, there's an actual staff, and it actually affects storms, and is actually used by the bad guy in the adventure. I'm not wowed or excited by the use, but it works. So, MaM makes much better use of the ingredients than SoS does, on almost every count. [B]Creativity[/B] - There are a lot of things I liked about SoS -- just not the way it used ingredients. The Rock city as Elvis's kingdom was perhaps the best ingredient use in SoS, and it made me smile (and wish some of the adventure took place there). But character names and other elements made me smile. I did have to wonder how effective a first mate who never speaks would be -- and that would either be some very cool RP or a very big problem. I'm betting on some fun RP -- a lot of the rest of the writeup reads like you're good at DMing those sorts of absurdities. MaM also had good, creative elements, but even though the scope was grander, I was less impressed with that creativity. The Tautocite is a pretty standard dingus -- Avatar's Unobtanium, Star Trek's Red Matter, etc. It's the stuff that makes the plot go. But I didn't get the feeling that the tautocite really did much in the story -- it was there, it has that primordial matter feel to it, but in the long run it's just there. In the end, I was not as excited by MaM as I was SoS, so advantage Sos. [B]Playability [/B]- SoS felt like I could pretty much drop it into a game and run with it. MaM was also pretty good, although it would require rewriting a chunk of whatever game's cosmology I drop it into just to make the adventure fit -- and totally changing the way Minotaurs exist in a given campaign world might not work very well for many DMs, so it's utility is limited. So, it's a small thing, but I'll give an edge to Sos here, too. [B]Final Analysis [/B] In the end, Mazes and Mortals has it's problems, but it makes better use of the ingredients almost completely across the board. The non-ingredient good points that Staff of Storms has going for it are not strong enough IMO to recover from those problems. Still, it has a lot of good elements and could have been a strong contender with better integrated ingredients. So, this round goes to Mazes and Mortals, and [MENTION=21629]ender_wiggin[/MENTION] advances to round 2. [/sblock] [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
Iron DM 2012 -- R2 complete, Finals in Progress
Top