Review - Cold Blows the Wind
Weird Danger At Sea
Cold Blows the Wind is a three spread adventure for FIST:Ultimate Edition by Peter J. Boyle. Players find themselves investigating the strange disappearance of a Navy vessel at sea.
What’s it About
Players are sent to investigate the disappearance of a Navy vessel that was lost while voyaging to a secret research facility, which has itself gone suspiciously quiet recently. Along the way they have to deal with pirates, while inside the research station they encounter increasingly horrific situations with mutated fish men. Ultimately, they can find the maniacal commander of the station, powered up by otherworldly energy and conducting experiments to produce the fish men. There’s some supremely weird and interesting stuff in here.
Let’s Talk About the Ideas
Fire. You’ve got a biological anomaly spreading out and affecting wildlife in an exclusion zone. We’ve got pirates that players could maybe make into friends, but who could also become enemies. We’ve got mutated humans, a military commander mad with power, and just a bunch of messed up stuff happening on the station. The ideas are great.
What About the Execution?
I’ve generally avoided overly-negative reviews on here in this recent series. If I don’t like something I’ve read I just won’t talk about it. When I’m pulling from the free adventures on Itch, I don’t want to assume folks are open to that kind of criticism. But, in this case, even though I have som serious criticisms of this work, I felt it was worth it to post anyway because I think it’s so close to being really good.
My first issue is the layout. It looks very nice, working with various fonts and sizes and placement and images in a way that’s chaotic but works at the same time. But, when you do a layout like this, you’ve got to be carefully how the sizing and placement draws the eyes around the page. Here, I was staring at it for a while trying to figure out which part I was meant to read first. Parts that you should logically read midway through the flow of the page are the things that stand out the most, while the actual first part is hidden on its own in a corner. I got there by the end, but it could better guide you through the text.
My other issue is that there’s not much space for player choice once you get into the research facility until you make it to the final encounter. So, we’ve got this scenario where dealing with the pirates on the front end and dealing with the big bad on the back end are both good, open-ended challenges, but the path between them is just a straight line through a series of rooms/scenes. I would have liked to see a layout in the research center that gives them choices to make there too. The one part that’s opened up a bit is just left for the GM to fill in that space with some scenes that don’t actually affect anything until they reach the next key scene.
I’m sure this could still run fine at the table despite all of this, but I think it would be significantly improved with some reworking of what I mentioned above.
Art?
I mentioned it above, but the layout is stellar apart from the information flow, and the layout is the real art going on here. Rather than talk too much about it, just look:
Summary.
Despite my criticisms, I think this is completely worth checking out for the ideas in it alone. A GM could easily tweak it a bit to make it great at the table.