pukunui
Legend
Half-baked sandboxes that are frequently devoid of anything meaningful. The writers had a story they wanted to tell and the sandboxes are just there as a “See, look, it is an open world! We swear it!”Whereas, for us, there were large sandboxes created on purpose at various points in the game, in Mytros in particular and now in the islands, and it's actually great and not railroady at all. We need to find allies for the end of the oath, we need to solve problems for our allies, we need to progress our various heroic quests in line with our background, we try to understand hundreds of years shrouded in mystery, and we decide exactly the path that we need to take, and discovering new lands at every opportunity. Really great, honestly.
In other areas, the campaign is full of heavy-handed nonsense and clunky encounter locations.
Some areas and NPCs get more than enough detail while others don’t get anywhere near enough. The maps of the islands are pretty to look at but are fairly useless in actual play, with nothing much on them and no scale with which to judge distance or travel time.
It’s also full of errors and a number of the monsters and magic items have mechanical problems. Some of the races are trash while others are OP. Same goes for the subclasses and spells. I asked the authors if they would be issuing any errata but they said no. Odyssey was a “one and done” thing for them.
It seemed obvious to me that the writers were still in CRPG mode. I don’t think they fully understood how to make a TTRPG campaign work properly.
I think I would rather attempt to run Dragon Heist again than have another go at Odyssey, and I am not going anywhere near their Viking-themed follow-up.