Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… New Rats In Old Bastion

A…hotel? adventure by Ryan Mossbarger
For Into the Odd
  I feel queasy. New Rats In Old Bastion is a hideously ugly 17-page art piece pretending to be a 13-room…dungeon? It’s a mixture of eye-hurtingly bright clashing illustrations and extremely mundane keys describing a mostly linear set of dry encounters punctuated at determined intervals by extremely dangerous “random” encounters. The dungeon is a hotel’s basement. There are weird-looking creatures down there that otherwise act exactly like the standard “giant rats beneath the inn”. You are ratcatchers. This is hell, but not how it wants to be hell.
  The primary appeal of the indie darling game system Into the Odd is that it’s all about getting together parties to leave The One City (Bastion) and go…into the outer world, which is very odd. It’s a light system, but there’s something cool about the setting, kind of a grungy treasure hunt among the bones of strange alien beings. Reference Roadside Picnic for the old-heads, or steampunk SCP for the youngsters...like the best weird bits of Arnold K’s worldbuilding, actually. It’s not for everyone, of course, but it’s definitely fresh and interesting. So what do you do with this setting? You…decide to have adventures hunting rats in the middle of the city.
  What I liked was that one Ratatouille joke. Some of the formatting was okay at times. It was short.
  The start to what can be improved is “strip out the art”. The map looks vomited-on, the unpleasant images don’t illustrate anything helpful…I guess the module is attempting to communicate a mood, but the mood is “headache”, mixed with “nausea”. There’s also a lot of wordiness that can be cut, including a completely useless 3-room key of the ground floor of the hotel, this is IttO, never was a system better suited for escaping the tyranny of the “keyed room” format for light bit of socializing and mood-setting. The broader improvement that is “re-examine what makes IttO appealing and get out of the city” is a long-term project beyond the scope of this review.
  Best use case for this module? Saves money on Ipecac. There’s a weird crown thing that allows viewing auras that someone hard up for magic items (IttO GMs) might want to steal.
  Final Rating?  /***** My eyes hurt.

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