Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… The Frozen Province

​A regional…adventure? by Giuliano Roverato, levelless.
Written for an ephemeral system running on the whimsy of a tiny orphan child.
  Trifold time, once again. Now we have not only an author listed, but also some poor individual is being blamed for layout…which is pretty wonky. This little regional thingy is inspired by the lovely cover art into making an…adventure(?) with a vaguely Japanese flavor, touching everything “East Asian” you’d expect for someone with the cultural and historical understanding of a 1968 Walt Disney educational short. The formatting choices go beyond artsy into just plain “puzzling”, and I’m reasonably sure that the “Tample” is supposed to be a “temple”. A lot of misallocated effort.
  This may shock you, but the plot of this thing is that there’s a province, and it’s becoming frozen. Hard to determine why, it’s never made explicit in the text, although there’s a vague intimation that it might be stemming from the neck of a shriveled corpse against a tree. No idea. There’s a few random encounters to be rolled three times every two days, frostbite rules exist to severely punish the players for taking any amount of time, and beyond that everyone is bumbling around getting cold and interacting with pitiful figures like a trapped frozen carp with a human face, plague-ridden bandits, and a sword saint with his Rainbow Sword, which is a sword that can generate rainbows of course. Everything is very random, and after one week the last inhabitants of the province are supposed to be gone. Enjoy the eternal winter apocalypse, players (actually, this is only ever a one-shot, at the very best).
  With the shockingly vast amount of random noodles being thrown at the wall, surely some of what I liked has stuck? Only one noodle looks even vaguely appetizing, alas, the village does have “the Purple Warrior”, a blind old veteran NPC with a broken sword who’s willing to come along as the world’s worst tagalong because he’s about to die but he doesn’t want to die here. That’s a solid NPC right there.
  Beyond that, what can be improved most of all would probably be rewriting all the interactions for a reader who’s not occupying the same skull as the author. There are a bunch of encounters written here with some very strong flavor, but it’s all very tonally at odds from section to section. First, you’re dealing with a magically enchanted immortal white cat who curses you, then you’re at the emperor’s summer home fighting a giant cricket, then you’re trying to evict a troop of monkeys who possess a single rifle. The other improvement is to TELL US WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE UNNATURAL COLD…there doesn’t even have to be a planned resolution, but as it is the mystery has no solution, you’re just all helpless in the face of a magical curse that will destroy “the whole country” in one year, and then maybe the whole word? Railroads are rightly panned but the strictest rails in the universe are preferable to a formless soup of dreamlike vagaries like this. Structure is required.
  I guess that makes the best use case for this thing to just pull out encounters but the encounters are all so oddball, while also being so boring and low-interaction, that there’s not even a lot of value in that. Good luck running this whole thing as a standalone adventure, and heaven help you if you try to fit a province with an imperial summer home, anthropomorphic carp, and rifling-toting monkeys into your ongoing campaign world.
  Final Rating? */***** as novelty for novelty’s sake is a fool’s errand. 

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Someone was proud enough of this layout to claim credit.