Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…364 Days After Christmas

​A supplement and adventure by Matthew Smith, level undefined.
Written for Troika
  Ho, ho, ho and a Merry Christmas, everyone. I’m not committing to making this an annual tradition, but for this year at least we’re publishing a day away from Christmas Eve, so I looked for a holiday-themed adventure again and this is what I found. Bless me. This aggressively twee thirty-four page ‘zine is a collection of Christmas-themed monsters, spells, and a dozenish-page adventure that is less holiday-themed, more “gosh that’s a lot of deer”. Though my sins are many I blessedly cannot count “read Troika core rules” among them, so I thankfully won’t evaluate the bestiary or spell lists here. It’s mostly either stuff to support the adventure or puns/jokes…if you guffaw at there being a listing for a “Maul Santa”, then boy howdy do I have a looky-loo for you. Personally, I find this distasteful:

Tremble before this cartography.

​  Shuffling away to the side and avoiding eye contact as best we can, on to the adventure, “Be A Dear, Now”. In this adventure we have a bog-standard situation where the mystical Reindeer Thicket is splitting into a civil war as Dark Druids influence the King Buck and the Queen Doe (the “Reign Deer”) into a marital spat which is magically inducing all deer in the area, sentient or animal, to take sides and fight one another. There are a few Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer jokes, and one of the hooks is the Santa Claus’ reindeer are no-shows, but besides that and a light dusting of snow over it all that’s about it for theming.
  What I liked is that besides those little nods that’s about it for theming. Much better than a painful hackneyed affair where all the players deliver presents while fighting zombie elves or something. I liked the magic crown that makes you grow antlers (at least I hope that’s what’s meant by “immediately grows an impressive rack”).
  What can be improved is “make this less of a painful hackneyed affair”. For all the setup work that was done the initial cause of the rift between the two monarchs is unclear and confronting each wraps up with “Dark Druid mind controls to attack”. The two sides of the thicket are more or less abstracted, with generic “this monarch’s side” stuff and a nearly abstract “map”. Specificity is the soul of good module writing and this sucker’s completely soulless. The Dark Druids wanting to supplant the Reign Deers are vague too. Social adventures can work, but they need more work on mapping, not less.
  I’m going to grit my teeth, eat some comfort-gingerbread, and admit that the best use case for this thing is to run it as a holiday-themed one-shot for a miserable group of Troika players. Maybe it’ll warm the shrived and irony-poisoned hearts of such terrible creatures. Maybe it’ll give them a little slice of Christmas cheer. Maybe…
  Final Rating? */***** because even a top-tier Troika adventure is a worthless exercise in pain and sorrow. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everybody, don’t play bad games this week, spend the time in joy with your families.

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