Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… A Quiet Midwinter

​A social “adventure” by Richard Ruane, levels don’t matter.
Written for OSE.
  Merry Christmas everyone, I hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday. I’m reviewing a winter holiday adventure, so you know I’m having fun, right?
  Ho. Ho ho ho? A Quiet Midwinter claims to be written for OSE and contains many Dyson Logos maps over it dozen pages, but the confused plot is about a fey winter representative taking the role of Santa Claus looking for naughty and nice lists from infernal and heavenly sources, sitting around a little town waiting for it. Or, quoting the module directly: “what a Hallmark Holiday movie might be if it were about a group of queer fantasy RPG characters.” There is no exploration, no danger, no interest, and no substantial reward given to the PCs, the entire “adventure” here was written to fill out gossipy statblocks about interpersonal drama between multiple high-ranked ~4HD humanoids. A halfhearted attempt at investigation boils down to “there is a 50% chance someone in [location] knows where the seer who gives the naughty/nice list lives”. Oof.
  I’m trying to think about what I liked. Cover looks nice. Adobe stock art being used is vaguely charming. Format is clean.
  What can be improved here besides just deleting this embarrassing nonadventure? Well, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong about the paper-thin premise for a holiday one-shot, but there needs to be an actual game on offer. The nice clean Dyson maps are completely and utterly wasted as it is, but if you want genuine investigation, having them with clues sprinkled around and individuals marked could make sense. Amusingly, no village map is provided, which actually would be helpful in timing things, if timing mattered. In a real-adventure version of this, multiple individuals are moving around, there are timers going off throughout, and missing things would have genuine consequences. Social adventures aren’t a terrible idea, what the adventure wants to do is possible, but your protagonists should never be NPCs, the main characters at the table are the players. So…do all that. Also reward something better than 1d6pp, that’s Scrooge-like.
  The best use case for this is as an example of what not to do. Don’t put maps in that don’t matter. Don’t go long on NPC statblocks that will never be in a fight. Don’t…do all this. Very instructive. Second-best use case is using it to start a nice warm fire in the fireplace.
  Final Rating? */***** Bah humbug.

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