TSR The Cult of Abaddon - Release from NuTSR/TheEvilDM

[Thunderfoot]

Muphry's Law strikes again.

Murphy was an optimist...

 

[Deset Gled]

Back on topic... it seems that Vincent "The Evil DM" Florio has pretty much vanished off the face of the Earth, which is a particularly strange thing to do immediately after releasing a major product. As far as I can tell he's hardly done any promotion for it.

He's still active on YouTube. But it's mainly been about playing Palladium stuff, and less about D&D. This adventure was his first publication since 2019; I think he's just sticking with playing RPGs and doing social media stuff rather that writing these days. Also, my understanding is that he hasn't been in contact with anyone at TSR since Michael left.

 

[Shiroiken]

Back on topic... it seems that Vincent "The Evil DM" Florio has pretty much vanished off the face of the Earth, which is a particularly strange thing to do immediately after releasing a major product. As far as I can tell he's hardly done any promotion for it.

Given the fact that he's not officially getting paid, and the fact that the final product is a complete mess, I'm not particularly surprised. If it was a gift to help them get going, and they made a hash of it, I'd distance myself too (especially considering the terrible PR of the company).

 

[Deset Gled]

I was given a hard copy of Cult of Abaddon for Xmas! I don't know exactly when/where the copy that I have was purchased (the module has been "out of stock" on the DHSM website for a couple months), but I can confirm that it is slightly different from the one that was sold during TSR Con (in March).

As a general review: the printing quality is not terrible, but it's also not particularly good. It's saddle stapled, and the cover is low gloss. I've had cheap booklets printed from Office Depot before with same day turnaround, and this feels like almost exactly the same product. There's no shame in that, but it also makes it hard to justify the $15 price tag. It also makes it seem even weirder that the product is "out of stock" online. I have suspicions that it is still for sale in the "Museum", along with all the other TSR logo products that they took off the website.

As a bonus, the copy that I got is signed by the editor: Justin Lanasa.

For the real fun, though, lets go over the version differences. It looks like someone (maybe Lanasa, but I would never assume he did any actual work) tried to do a bit of editing cleanup with relatively little success. The first difference I noted is on the back cover. In the PDF, there was an inexplicable note by the ISBN that the cover art was by "Madre Shipton":

This was also seen on the first printing from TSR Con (note: these images come from pro-NuTSR reviewer Jason Schattner):

But it has now been changed to properly credit the artist:

That's a good change, and I support it.

Here's an example of editing the text that doesn't go so well. This is from the original PDF. Note the minor errors where it says "He is appears also sick" and "any weapon he has made while drunk may loo great when picked up". Simple errors, easy to fix:

Again, in the TSR Con printing, we can see that the text is the same. There was one slight change in the header (the page was originally going to be on a right page, but due to printing got shifted to a left page), but is otherwise identical:

In the current printing they fixed the typos in "is appears" and "look":

But they also managed to screw up "20% chance" and change it to "2 chance". Also, for some reason they also changed "there are a myriad of tools" to "there is a myriad of tools". I am pretty sure "are" is actually grammatically correct in this case. What I really can't understand is how anyone decided that one word needed to be changed while the rest of the terrible writing remains unedited.

As a final example, here are the original GM notes from the PDF:

Which were updated with these changes:

Let's start by stating that the rules for falling damage are, as written, terrible. If falling damage is actually 6d6 for falling 30 feet, just say that. The word salad is just silly; the fact that they take a paragraph to write it and still don't explicitly state the 6d6 total is outright stupidity. Obviously, whoever was editing this read that garbage paragraph and realized it needed help. But they though the way to fix it would be to change "Each" to "Every" and "but would actually be" to "Still, it would be". WTF? How do either of those changes actually help? I feel like I'm losing intelligence every time I try to compare the two paragraphs.

Likewise, I guess someone wanted to change "sparse reward" to "a scant reward" in the last sentence. I see it as a meaningless but benign change. But the person making that edit couldn't take the time to change "Gm" to "GM" or spell "whim" correctly? And that's without getting into a discussion of apostrophes, or consistency betwee GM vs DM vs Referee.

All told, the changes are very minor. Just baffling. The major issues of stealing work from Alekzander Zagorulko, Axebane, and Kimagu are still there. The module is still very basic and short; it's impressive how many typos they can fit into the small amount of text. It's definitely not worth $15.

 

[John R Davis]

The main 15 dollar worth should be:
Is this adventure any good and is it easy-ish to run?

 

[Deset Gled]

The main 15 dollar worth should be:
Is this adventure any good and is it easy-ish to run?

The Orc and the Pie is good and easy to run. It's not worth $15 dollars.

 

[Guest 7030100]

I was given a hard copy of Cult of Abaddon for Xmas!

Stay tuned for a review of the exciting sequel adventure, "Into the Temple of the White Elephant Gift".

 

[Faolyn]

Also, for some reason they also changed "there are a myriad of tools" to "there is a myriad of tools". I am pretty sure "are" is actually grammatically correct in this case. What I really can't understand is how anyone decided that one word needed to be changed while the rest of the terrible writing remains unedited.

Most of the stuff I've read on the word myriad suggests that either "there is a myriad of tools" or "there are myriad tools" would be correct. Basically, if you use it as a noun (there is a myriad of), you would use the is, and if you use it as an adjective (myriad tools), then you use the are. Also, "is a myriad of" is less formal than "are myriad," but it's a module so I doubt formality is needed. But quite frankly, he could have just written "there are many different tools" in the shop. It's unlikely that this dwarf has so many objects of so many different kinds in his shop that myriad is the best word to describe them.

I'm somewhat more annoyed, though, that Florio wasted an entire paragraph when he could have written "the dwarf is obviously drunk/tipsy/hungover." How about talking about his red nose or the way he slurs words or stumbles into things when he walks? We don't need a paragraph that amounts to "he seems sick, but any PC will be able to tell he's drunk." If you're not going to show it, then at least shorten the section to a single sentence. It's almost like Florio wants the PCs to make a check to determine the dwarf's lack of sobriety.

Looking forward to a new section to nitpick to death!

 

[DLIMedia]

I've been told that the falling damage rules was an attempt to reflect the rules as they were in the original version of D&D, but I personally don't know. Regardless of that, yes, they were badly written.

I have an early PDF of the product, and it's quite a mess. Good to know they at least attempted to fix some things, even if they failed to adequately do so.

 

[John R Davis]

The Orc and the Pie is good and easy to run. It's not worth $15 dollars.

No it isn't good. And clearly a dozen words isn't worth 15 dollars.
I was curious.