Cats Have No Lord

Review - Swamp World

A mucky Swamp Romp

Swamp World is a tri-fold adventure for B/X-like old school adventure games by Brad Kerr and Skull fungus. It's part of their Pamphlet Adventure Tryptich, and the only one of the three available for free currently. Players find themselves trapped in a swampy pocket dimension and need to find their way out.

What's it about?

The adventure starts with the players having fallen through a portal into a gross swamp. From there, they must navigate its dangers and weird inhabitants to collect swamp crystals to make a portal back out (that or find the eyes of the slug that contains this pocket dimension and convince it to leave for the regular world and take you with it). The swamp is a 3x6 grid of locations, with 11 described locations mixed in with the empty squares--and there's a lot packed into this little space.

We've got:

There's just a lot going on, with the hints of a few factions and disputes that might help or hinder the players from finding their way out of here.

Let's Talk about the Ideas?

I preempted this section a bit forgetting my format for these reviews, so the ideas are there above. I'll just say here that, they're good! All sizzle and no fizzle in this one for me ideas-wise.

What about the Execution?

The problem with pamphlet adventures, and something that Brad himself talked about on a recent episode of Between Two Cairns, is that you're stuck figuring out what to leave out moreso than working with what you put into it. There's just not enough space to fit everything you might want into a space this small.

So, what's here is good. Great even. Brad's writing is excellent as always, immediately transporting you into this gross swamp while also being funny about it at the right places. The setup is good as well. It has a good mix of factions and weirdos to play off of while trying to solve the puzzle of getting out of here.

I didn't mention them above, but the encounter table is also excellent. It's a d6 table with d4 suboptions each. It's got a good mix of four potential adversaries--although not all of their suboptions will directly pit them against the players--along with environmental hazards and just some weird stuff that might happen. I do question a bit the d6+d4 nature of the table, only because I'm doing the same in the adventure I'm currently playtesting and it gets to be a bit tedious when rolling encounters. I wonder just a bigger overall table with all the options would be better, but I really don't know. There's something about the nested tables that feels better when writing it somehow.

Anyway, the point is, what's here is good. The problem is what isn't here, particularly for the juicier NPCs. We get just a single sentence or two to tell us about the polite spider, the giant heron, the psychic vampire, the friendly witch, etc... and yes, rulings over rules, a good Referee can make it work, all of that, but, it's actually nice to have more to go on when there's no mechanics behind them and you as the referee have to put everything into these characters that's going to drive the game forward. I'm sure I could run this, as could many other people, but I'd ideally want more to go on for them; more about their motivations and how they might respond under certain scenarios. I know there's not space for that here, which makes me question if it could have benefited from a bit less complexity overall to allow for more detail in the important parts. One or two big NPCs fewer to allow the others to shine more. I don't know. Would this work without everything that's in it? Hard to say without having run it, which is obviously a failing of a review like this, but so it goes.

Art?

You can't go wrong with Skullfungus. Absolutely top-tier at taking the gross stuff from something like this and making it truly gross while also somehow endearing and approachable. I love it!

Summary!

No reason not to pick this up for free, and I'd honestly recommend picking up the whole Tryptich even without having read the others yet. Brad's reliable at what he does, and I personally love running his stuff, my favorite being Temple of 1000 Swords but all of it being good. Despite my waffling on the nature of pamphlet adventures, this is really worth picking up.

This is part of my new and improved series of reviews where I'll be focusing each week on something that was recently released for free on Itch.io. I'll be making a point to pay the creators for what I review (when they accept payments), and you can help support that by chipping in a few bucks on Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading!