NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 5219433" data-attributes="member: 7533">THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTHBianca is the girl with pigtails.  She’s a stereotypical spoiled little brat.  Reading through the adventure, I kept envisioning her as an older version of "Darla" from the movie Finding Nemo.  She doesn’t seem to serve a great deal of purpose in the adventure, other than as a terribly annoying foil.Disneyland, of course, is the “happiest place on earth”…  All of its advertising has said so for decades.  With all the secret behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on at the real Disneyland and Disney World to keep the places running, this has a surprising amount of potential as a setting for an adventure.Uncle Matt’s departure from the food court serves as the half eaten lunch.  It marks the transition out of the introductory chapter of the adventure, but has little other meaning.”Snoop” is first Snoopy, then Snoop Dogg, the infamous rapper.  As is, Snoop Dogg acts as a quick set piece encounter, and later as a possible high profile target for the evil Yiggish bat-snake.  On one hand, I hadn’t even considered using him for this ingredient…  Very clever, that.  On the other hand, I see this as a big missed opportunity.  Imagine if instead Snoop Dogg was secretly an old hand when it came to encounters with unspeakable horrors from beyond the realms of reality?  There’s potential there for an unusual and long-term patron for the heroes.”A snake, a snake!” mainly refers to the snake attack during the Jungle Cruise ride.  The realization that it’s not an animatronic robot, but an actual snake is a great interpretation of the ingredient’s phraseology.  Also, the Yig ties into this ingredient as the Big Bad Evil Snakey Guy, and the as the whole purpose for Uncle Matt’s ritual of nastiness.Matt the Insstigater is the lisping Uncle Matt, leader of the Cult of Yig, and head ritualist.  He bring everyone to the park, and then more or less vanishes from the adventure until the PCs stumble back upon him at the end.The playability of this adventure is a concern of mine.  For much of it, the PCs don’t have anything to do, except sit and watch things happen.  In the few spots where they get to do something, it seems to make little difference to the outcome of the adventure one way or another.  Consider the first Chapter of the adventure: The PCs are introduced to Matt and Bianca, they get to watch Bianca be a twit, they get to watch Uncle Matt let her get away with it, and they get to watch Uncle Matt subdue a giant snake.The style of the adventure has a good head start, beginning with it’s location (Disneyland), a major NPC (Snoop Dogg), and the chosen game system and genre (Call of Cthulhu).  Although it suffers, in my opinion, from an odd mixture of goofy humor and macabre horror.  Choosing one or the other – Scooby Doo or Lovecraft – and sticking to it might have made this a much stronger entry.THE FINAL HUNTMatt the Insstigater is the Lunar exalted that the PCs are sent to hunt down and kill.  While his real name is “Matthias”, his rivals call him “Matt the Insstigater” for his propensity to start trouble.  He’s the entire purpose for the adventure.  The explanation for the misspelling is amusing, but a little thin.“A snake, a snake!” is how the badger-mutant refers to the behemoth to whom the PCs are directed for information.  While I know the temptation is difficult to resist with such an ingredient, the reference to the internet meme comes awfully close to crossing the line into silliness.  It’s take a thoroughly skillful DM, or thoroughly oblivious players to not have the game take a lengthy turn into digression at that point.The girl with pigtails is literally has pig tails.  She’s a boar-mutant, daughter of the beastman chief, and bringing her to the behemoth to be eaten is the “rats in the basement” that net the PCs a riddle that should lead them to the next step toward Matthias.The happiest place on earth is part of the riddle that leads the PCs to the Luminary.  It refers to the realm in which the luminary lives…  A veritable Utopia, such that he can feed off the sublime emotions of it inhabitants.  A very tasty usage of the ingredient.The half-eaten lunch is the Luminary’s price for divulging the whereabouts of Matthias.  Specifically, one half of each PC’s soul.The implementation of snoop in this adventure is the least satisfying of the ingredients, I think.  Either explanation is tenuous, and both feel like post script justifications of something that didn’t quite actually make it into the adventure.The adventure, at its heart, is a standard “hunt the bad guy” sort of plot.  There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Everybody likes that sort of adventure now and again.  Just be careful for a few possible problems…  First, the adventure uses a fairly standard video game device to advance the plot.  One NPC directs the PCs to a person who might know the location of the Dingus, but first before he tells you, you must perform this task for him.  The next NPC doesn’t know where the Dingus is, but he can tell you if only you pretty please complete this little side quest. And so on and so on through a string of NPCs and side quests until you finally get to the Dingus.  In this shorter adventure, it really only happens two or three times, but it can make for a terribly linear plot line, if dragged out for too long.Also, there two spots where there are possible choke points, depending on what the players decide to do...  The first is the riddle.  It's a rather obscure riddle, and the answer refers to an in-game location that players may or may not now about.  Unless they have intimate meta-knowledge of that specific part of the setting, the only way to get the answer is for the DM to hand it to them.  That's a very frustrating and unsatisfying sort of riddle.  The second is the Luminary's price for traveling through his realm.  What happens if one or more of the PCs refuses to let him nibble on their souls?  It's never considered in the adventure write up, there are no other options suggested, and it could stop the adventure cold, depending on how stubborn the DM and PCs decided to be.The style of the adventure is nice, and has some good imagery: the two tribes of mutant monsters, the enormous snake behemoth, the Luminary's dangerously perfect domain, etc...  Watch the silliness with the boar chieftain, though, it would be easy to break the otherwise slightly more serious mood of an anathema hunt.  There's a lot of ways this base could be built and expanded upon, if you had more time.This is a close decision for me...  The use of ingredients are fairly even between the two.  I think THE FINAL HUNT has an advantage over the THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH for playability.  Even though the plot line is a bit linear and there's a couple of potential choke points, THE FINAL HUNT has the PCs driving most of the action, whereas for much of THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH it feels like the PCS are just along for the ride.  THE FINAL HUNT also gets a slight edge on style.  The NPCs and scenery are descriptively interesting, and have a lot of possibilities for interesting interactions.  THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH has a lot of potential here for surprising revelations about popular theme parks and rap stars, but seems to fall flat by giving us all the usual things we expect to not expect.  Furthermore, the adventure is confused about whether it should be goofy-horror or gruesome-horror, and the two don't mix well here.Sansuo with THE FINAL HUNT wins by a nose.</blockquote>

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