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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 5210779" data-attributes="member: 7533">Don't mind me, if I change up my format a bit...GOOD CLEAN FUNFirst, Glenn’s jealousy of what others have accomplished that he hasn’t sets the stage for Ancient Evil to take hold.  It serves as his motivation for doing Evil.  As an ingredient for the adventure, it runs the risk of being overlooked as a background element.  The adventure outline touches on it a little bit, but the way it’s presented gives Glenn the feel of a stereotypical crotchety old janitor.  A little more specific guidance on portraying his jealousy of success would be helpful…  Example phrases and insults and the like.Grace Hoobler is the cheap trollop.  She’s a potential source of information, and can throw suspicion on Glenn.  Her mysterious disappearance can also be a clue to Glenn’s diabolical activities.  It’d be nice to see her in a more central role, though…  Giving her a closer relationship to Glenn (even it was simply an unrequited crush) or a critical role in the ritual (she is, after all, a living embodiment of corruption) would make her a more integral ingredient to the adventure.The alembic is used to distill “essential essences” that are used to create the horrors in the mop buckets.  If Glenn is spotted purchasing it, it could provide an additional clue and increasing suspicion toward something strange going on in the basement.  Consideration should be given to the fact that suitably paranoid players seeing Glenn with the alembic may be tempted to confront him then and there, and possibly smash the alembic, if the chance is given…  That could short-circuit the adventure, if some care isn’t taken.The otyugh is the servant of the God of Corruption, and Glenn’s sidekick in evilness.  If played right, he makes a satisfying last-ditch surprise attack, shortly after the hero thinks everything’s wrapped up.  Given the otyugh’s propensity to lurk about back alleys looking for inebriated snacks, it would not have been inappropriate to have him trail the player character from the shadows…  Such a creature, vaguely seen in the shadows before vanishing, could really ratchet up the tension and suspense.The elevator room is the singular way into the basement, where Glenn is performing his unspeakable ritual.  It acts as a primary obstacle, since Glenn is the only one who has a means of operating the elevator.  The adventure provides a several options for solutions, not to mention any cockamamie plans the player may come up with – like crawling through duct work, or cutting through the floor and climbing down the elevator cables.The nonstop buckets are the unnatural creatures created through alchemy using mop buckets as a means of locomotion.  They are necessary to Glenn to amplify the power of his profane ritual.  I have to say, this is a terribly creative use of the ingredient.  For their importance to the ritual and the conclusion of the adventure, however, they seem like they should be just a little more troublesome to get rid of.  While they should probably stay physically unimposing, there’s no reason their mental and psychological danger couldn’t be played up.The adventure scores reasonably well as far as playability is concerned.  There is a variety of encounters – social, investigative, puzzles, infiltration, combat – and each encounter has several possible solutions.  In addition, the success or failure of the player has immediate and wide ranging consequences (the God of Corruption is loose in the world!).  You might, however, consider re-organizing the later encounters so as to make disrupting the ritual just a little more challenging.On style, Good Clean Fun scores big.  The atmosphere of the meat rendering plant and the descriptions of the mop bucket monsters are especially toothsome.  Applying these same sensibilities to the other locations and characters within the adventure would truly make it stand out.  I also like that options are given for red herrings, adding additional players and failure to stop the ritual.Making it not only a non-D&D based adventure but also a solo adventure is a big risk, but one that pays off big here.  Something I would like to see, would be taking this idea a step or two farther.  There are several indy game systems that this sort of scenario would shine in.  Dread immediately comes to mind as a game that would be perfect should the adventure be expanded to accept multiple characters.THE LOVING DAUGHTERS OF KHALID SHAHThe cheap trollop is Layla, the daughter of Khalid Shah, and especially so after her transformation at the hands of Zufir Ali.  I would have liked to see more of a focus on her trollopishness (and as I’ve said in previous judgments, first hand displays are far better than second hand stories), rather than her histrionics.  Also, considering that her father is the Grand Vizier, there’s nothing here to suggest that she’s cheap.  That aside, she is an important and integral part of the adventure, seeing as she’s the entire motivation for the PCs getting involved.Manar’s jealousy of her sister and the attention her father lavishes on her sister is what has caused the whole problem in the first place.  Here again, a direct show of how Manar treats her sister before the change happens would give the change in both Manar and Layla more contrast and more importance in the eyes of player-characters.  As my high school composition teacher would say, “Don’t tell me.  Show me.”The elevator room is the main prayer room of the chapel.  It lowers down into the rest of the alembic proper, where the subjects within are separated in Jekyll and Hyde fashion.  While clever in an evil-mastermind’s-diabolical-trap sort of way, the elevator action of the room is not particularly critical to the adventure.The entire Chapel of Tranqility is a giant alembic, meant to distill alchemical vapors that make the whole Jekyll and Hyde split happen.  It’s a slick way to pull a switcheroo on the “item” ingredient and turn into a location.  This ingredient had a good start, but I get the feeling that here you were running out time and couldn’t give it as much detail as you might have liked.The otyugh is normally Zufir Ali’s means of disposing of the “Hyde” bodies, after he completes a separation at the Chapel of Tranquility.  He is where the “Jekyll” half of Leyla ends up, and the PCs are supposedly meant to retrieve her remains, despite the fact that her remains are likely to be nothing more than a few teeth and splinter of bone mixed in with the otyugh droppings.  However, here too it feels like there should be much more to him, but you got rushed as the deadline neared.The nonstop buckets are a literal chain of buckets that deliver alchemical ingredients from the control room to the admixture room.  Though details are thin, the buckets serve as some sort of obstacle as the characters do something with good Layla’s remains in the admixture room.Playability is a little difficult to judge, here… The adventure starts out with an investigation into why the Chapel didn’t work on Layla.  All the pertinent information is gathered straight-away through the Shah or Layla, and it all points to the obvious suspect: Zufir Ali.  It’s not a terribly great mystery.  The Chapel has the seeds of a very nice mini-dungeon, but lacks substance as-is, with half-formed ideas and encounters and details that I know should be there, but aren’t yet.As I said, the Chapel as a giant alembic, has a great deal of potential style.  What could have been the strongest part of the adventure suffered the most from what I suspect was a looming deadline.  The Arabian-style setting has itself a certain amount of innate style, but with nothing to back it up, the adventure could just as well be set in any of a number of other settings with no more changes than the names of the NPCs.Overall, GOOD CLEAN FUN had solid ingredients and game play, though certainly with room for improvement, and embraced the style of the chosen genre.THE LOVING DAUGHTERS OF KHALID SHAH, suffered on all fronts from a general feeling of rushed incompleteness.This round goes to Pro-Paladin.</blockquote>

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