Review 18: Seekers of the Un-K'Nown
One of the nice things about the indie RPG scene these days is that there are a huge number of creators who are making interesting adventures in a variety of styles, and a lot of them are incredibly creative and fun to run. Unfortunately, this week I will talking about one that was not very fun to run, and was quite difficult to use. The adventure in question is Seekers of the Un-K'Nown, written by Louis Hoefer for Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC). Cover and interior art is by Santiago Iborra, Christopher Tupa, and Louis Hoefer.
I backed this adventure during its Kickstarter campaign, as the premise sounded very fun-- referred to as "Classics Mutated", it was presented as an homage to the old D&D module B1: In Search of the Unknown by Mike Carr. Upon receiving the print copy after the campaign concluded, I ended up being pretty disappointed trying to read through it.
Getting it to the Table
The first sign of trouble was the spelling error on the front cover ("detinations"), followed by some odd formatting in the table of contents.
As can be seen from the image, there are 9 pages of backstory and setup to get through before you can even begin reading about how to start running the adventure. Mixed together in this section are long paragraphs of events that happened years before the adventure would happen and descriptions of NPCs and dungeon features; at this point in the reading, I had no context for any of the latter and the information was practically meaningless when presented alongside the background plot. Finally, the section ends abruptly and transitions to a "starting the adventure" section in the middle of a page.
The way the adventure is organized, the intention is that the PCs will first do some wilderness travel through "The Lands of Boom" in search of the bunker that is the meat of the adventure, likely pulling some hooks from a rumor table. This is presented as a hexcrawl with some keyed areas but with the bulk of it empty terrain-- it even calls out that "the likelihood of a random encounter is slight", so unless the PCs move into a keyed hex, there is no provision for what happens. The encounters that are included are interesting, at least, and I do have to say that the hexcrawl was the most fun aspect of the adventure when I ran it. Each keyed hex included stat blocks for the new monsters, and a couple of interesting non-combat encounters to play with. The only one that seemed kind of pointless was the one that was most likely to be encountered at the very beginning of play (two hexes straight ahead of the starting hex, directly in line with the direction players would move based on the rumors), which was simply a bland "succeed on three skill rolls and you get all your luck back" thing. The most likely scenario would be that none of the players had used any luck yet, unless they used it to succeed on the skill rolls. It was uninspired and felt out of place in terms of actual play.
Once we get into the actual dungeon, we get more odd formatting and walls of text, as well as some very confusing boxed text in the area descriptions, which are often superfluous as the same information is repeated in the regular description. Some notable weird read-aloud text:
"Your inhibition hits a threshold."
"It is both quizzical and wearisome in its presence."
"The cantankerous sounds of stirring utensils and metal pots join this aroma to suggest a kitchen lies beyond."
"This chamber's immensity is only thwarted by its ruination."
I get the sense that they were going for the "purple prose" that was often found in classic modules, but these are something different. Purple prose is meant to be "overly ornate", but it should still use words correctly. In practice, this just made the already stilted read-aloud text seem even more out of place and awkward for the GM to read, so I didn't use it.
The module itself is riddled with inconsistencies in formatting and layout, which made it very difficult to quickly find information to reference while running. In its favor, most of the keyed area descriptions here included relevant info such as stat blocks and details about artifacts and such, but this convenience was marred by the fact that they were simply sprinkled into the paragraphs along with everything else. I happen to be looking at area 25 as I'm typing this, and it begins with a description of the area (no read-aloud text, oddly enough, one of the only areas to not include it) and continues into descriptions of the artifacts to be found there with no transition beyond an indent and bold text. Then, there is another fairly important bit of room description tacked on after the final artifact-- there is an indent, but a cursory glance would lead the reader to believe that this is still part of the artifact's description. Many other bits of information were haphazardly dispersed in sidebars, not always near the relevant areas.
Overall, there were a huge number of editing errors in the text, both grammatical and mechanical-- being written for MCC, it seemed to be defaulting to 3.5e D&D-style situational modifiers for combat quite often (which is not a thing in MCC), as well as some inconsistent calls for ability checks. There are also some items included that are clearly intended to be artifacts, but they are not presented as such-- typically in modules those are listed with Tech Level and Complexity Modifier info so that the GM can refer to the artifact check procedure when players attempt to figure out what they do; that info is missing in many cases.
Now, on to the maps.
There are 12 map files included in the digital version-- four versions of three different maps, including the hex map and the upper and lower levels of the dungeon. The four versions are split into "player" and "GM" maps (and are further divided into "big" and "hi-res" versions, whatever that means in context). The issue I had was that these were clearly designed for VTT use and only VTT use. They were intricately detailed to the point where they felt cluttered and it was difficult to identify what objects were being represented; indeed, they often contradicted the room descriptions. And because they were very detailed, the images often only made sense if you were zoomed in very far, at which point they became less useful for the GM. When I ran this, I had not yet fully transitioned away from using a VTT, and I was using one for the exploration of the dungeon. The amount of clutter and illustration on the map was distracting for both myself and my players; they would see something detailed on the map and start asking about it, and I would have to either tell them that it was just a smudge put in there by the map artist that didn't mean anything other than "this floor is dirty", or else I would try to find some mention of the feature in the text because it looked a bit more substantial than just decoration. Naturally, this was difficult or impossible to do because the area descriptions are blocks of unfocused text that bounce between explanations of what the room was hundreds of years ago and information that would be actually relevant to the PCs exploring it, and often nothing was included about the features on the map at all.
What's going on here? Impossible to tell.
The final icing on the map cake was the fact that the "player" maps of the dungeon had secret doors clearly marked (bonus points for picking a font that made the "S" look more like a "5", which was very helpful on the GM map and not confusing at all). To be fair, I did reach out to the author to point out this error and the digital files have since been updated.
What Worked?
- The hexcrawl section had some interesting encounters, which could easily be lifted for any MCC-adjacent game.
What Didn't Work?
- Tremendous amount of backstory and detail that the players will likely never learn. A great deal of text is devoted to things that happened prior to the events of the adventure, either to link it to the original B1 adventure in theme or to explain why a particular thing is in a particular place. The problem is, none of that really matters, because it has zero impact on the players' experience. A good location key will focus on the present, and provide the judge with ample detail about what is happening right now and how the PCs can interact with it.
- Layout was difficult to use. As detailed above, the text is presented in a way that makes it very tedious to search through for relevant details. Some of it was also just aesthetic preference on my part-- for some reason the author really liked underlining text to emphasize things, but the types of things that were underlined were inconsistent.
- Awful, awful maps. I would have been ok with the cluttered, busy, aesthetically unpleasing VTT maps if there had also been a cleaner version included so that I could ignore the bad ones.
Final Thoughts
I'll be honest, I didn't finish running this one. My players got through the hexcrawl and began exploring the dungeon, and after a near TPK we decided not to continue. The frustration of trying to find information in the 62 page pdf combined with the grammatical errors and inconsistent mechanical notes made me feel that it wasn't worth carrying on, and the players did not get any of the "story" because very little of it is placed in a way that they can experience it, so they didn't feel like they were missing out on any big mystery by shelving it.
You can get "Seekers of the Un-K'Nown" at DriveThruRPG but I don't recommend it. Thanks for reading!