Good day to you all. As promised, I am going to review yesterday’s event. I will go over every step of the event and the different aspects of it in chronological order. To me this means that I will go over the pre-event, the approach, the Elemental scene, the mansion’s upper floors and everything that comes with it, and lastly the basement. I will do my best to make the feedback comprehensible but if it isn’t please bear with me. So, here goes.
Pre-event:
I am pretty sure I logged in at the first broadcast. I didn’t mind it, but it was a bit weird to me now I think about it. We were asked to gather in SL, from which I assumed we’d travel ICly to the meteor site. I was hyped because DMed travel-RP is great! Then, after Rping in the tavern for a good ten minutes, there was a broadcast about a white streak. I thought, here we go. Now we get to travel and there will be earthquakes and falling meteors everywhere. Then, however, we were asked to just TP to the site. I feel this is a missed opportunity for storytelling and speculation.
Let me explain through example: A horror novel that is just a series of scares and monster attacks is not a good read. Most of the fun comes out of the buildup and the speculation as to what’s going on. Where the impending doom will come from.
This event lacked that due to, I think, instantly being TPed to the site. Don’t be afraid to throw a few little things at us before hitting us with the big one.
Approach:
To the mansion:
The approach began straight after we were Tped. We were told there’s a river and a mansion. The mansion was burning and there were glowing things. “Right, cool. The meteor hit someone’s home. I like that.” But again, things moved very quickly. Since we all didn’t get any RP moving to said mansion, going to the mansion felt rather alien to me. The lack of bridge or path to the front door also raised questions to me. (These might be answered in other events, but I think it’s a tiny plot hole) Why did these people live there at all? Why didn’t they have a path to their door if they had enough money to build a mansion? Why was there no bridge to cross the river?
How would I have solved this if the crossing of the river and the way to the mansion was indeed a plot hole. Easy. You give us a couple of withered poles, and a couple slabs drifted downriver. The crash of the meteor was so severe that even the bridge half a mile from the site collapsed. That’d give a holy shit moment that’d warrant the effects that were next.
What I did like a bout this little section was I think Squidzoid’s post of the wildlife having gotten out of dodge. That told us that the animals knew the meteor was bad and we all know that animals have great instincts. It also foreshadowed the warped animals that were left behind by the healthy ones.
Steps of the mansion:
Then, when the group arrived at the mansion, there were a lot of things going on at once. There were the trees, the meteor, the shards, the side-effects, and our Elemental friend. This left me confused and unsure what we were supposed to do. It was all a bit too close one another.
How does one solve this? Again, some of these things could have been moved to earlier parts of the event that were skipped or glossed over. First, I would have had the wildlife (A swarm of birds or something) come towards us while travelling to the mansion. This would be very foreboding. Then, with the fleeing wildlife out of the way, I would have given us the Emberlarks, or another water-based creature as we crossed the river. The warped water-based creature makes a lot of sense since they don’t really get a chance to flee the scene of the crash. Doing it this way would have freed up our attention to the things that, even though people think it is random, make a lot of sense story-wise. The things that are KEY for events to come. So…
The Elemental scene:
This part saddens me. The storytelling could have been superb if the attention wasn’t so divided. Every event, mini-event and side-event that I have attended has worked up to this scene perfectly, which, for spoiler reasons I won’t explain. But no one paid attention to it.
There were Emberlarks attacking the group while “Ember 2.0” did what I expected from this event: drain the meteor. There was nausea, which made sense. There was the rainbow hair, which made sense. But the Emberlarks should not have been there during this scene. The crystals should not have been there to grab during this scene. If all the attention had been funneled to the Elemental, people wouldn’t have engaged the vines prematurely. The Elemental deserved the attention. The interaction between the Elemental and the meteor is what I assume to be one of the key plot points of this campaign. If it hadn’t been for me by chance attending an unannounced mini-event for two (and a half) people that was in the ranger hall the day prior, even I would not have cared about the Elemental. Icly I ended up trying to tell everyone about what Gerry knows but in the chaos this all went unnoticed.
So, this resulted in Kethron 1v1ing an Elemental that fed on the crystal in the meteor while everyone else was busy with about a hundred other things that were going on. For a key plot point this should be out of the question.
How to fix it: Well. The same way as I suggested before. Make sure to spread out and build up your plot points to this one.
The Mansion:
The vines:
The living vines make a lot of sense, which due to spoilers, I won’t explain. They work with the abandoned mansion idea and serve as a perfect gatekeeper to the second half of the event. This part was good.
The horse:
Why did the horse show up at that point? Everyone was already divided and falling behind. The horse delayed the whole event by about half an hour without telling any story we didn’t already know from the Emberlarks. The horse wasn’t there before. The horse did not need to be there. If the horse was planned, you should have cut it. The horse was bad, sorry.
How to fix: Put the horse in what I describe as the pre-event. There it would have added to the story rather than taking it away from it.
The mansion (Bottom floor):
There seem to be mixed signals on this floor. The mansion was abandoned, yet there were corpses. The corpses, from as far as I managed to gather, weren’t the original inhabitants of the mansion. So, questions are raised. Where are the original inhabitants? Why were these people here? Who were these people? These questions weren’t answered by exploring the bottom floor. However, I won’t write this down as a bad thing. This could perfectly well be foreshadowing for events to come, and this is exactly what I hope it to be. Icly, the corpses did provide a lot of character development for Gerry, so that makes me a happy boy.
The second conflicting message also comes from this exact room. Why did the meteor’s crash corrupt animals and send wildlife away, but not cause these people to haul ass? Why did the meteor crash make a 30? foot crater but didn’t do more than shatter the window of the bottom floor? Why weren’t parts of the vault beneath damaged? (More on this later.)
The mansion (Top floor):
The top floor seemed more of a looting parade than anything else, and that makes me happy on one side and a tad eh on the other. I would have loved to learn more about the people who built this mansion. We found a medallion with the initials RR and I really hope this become relevant but I severely doubt it. The initials, since we didn’t really find anything else, seemed made up on the spot. The things that were left behind, while nice, didn’t make it seem like the home was abandoned on one hand (Who wouldn’t take their indigo perfume? Or their jewelry?) but on the other it did. There were no clothes except a singular sock in one of the drawers. I am really unsure what to make of it and I pray that there’s more to come that has to do with these mysterious people of the mansion.
The Dungeon part:
Right. I will go through this chronologically and try to convey my exact feelings during the sequences.
First thing I noticed about the dungeon was the fact that nothing was damaged despite a meteor striking right beside it. This, I suppose, can be explained by solid foundation and all that, but still.
The second thing I noticed were the pillars in the first room and I was excited. I was like, yay, a puzzle! With Gerry supposedly being the common sense rather than book-smart character, he should be good at this! And so it went. We managed through IC teamwork and lots of fun to solve the puzzle with the directions. This was great! I loved this puzzle.
Then we came to the second part, which was a sort of moving wall puzzle. This one struck me as weird. It was only solvable from one side while the others were locked in a room. I had hoped this puzzle also involved teamwork but it didn’t. This puzzle was solved semi-icly and already felt a bit rushed. (This says more about the players than the DMs but I will point it out nevertheless.)
Here I would have swayed from the chain of puzzles and kept the number game for a later stage. An encounter would have been great here but rather than that, we got another logic puzzle. Here players started to get frustrated and I am pretty sure that if it weren’t for Cukie OOCly managing to solve the puzzle, we would still be there. The immersion here was shattered for me. We were just solving the puzzles and not RPing anymore.
Okay, I thought, maybe NOW we’ll get something that isn’t a puzzle. With a damaged dungeon or burrowing creatures (Think Bulette from 5e or something) an encounter would have dragged everyone back into character. Or storytelling. Storytelling would have been great here. How awesome would it be to find one of the original owners or a bandit who was trying to break in, giving us a bit more backstory. We got none of that. We got a maze. While I OOCLY didn’t mind the maze, I again, was dragged out of character rather quickly. Together with Elz I tried to go about it ICly but since other players were OOCly running ahead and all that, that was thrown out the window at some point. Great maze, bad for RP.
Then- Okay… I thought-… Maybe, just maybe there’s not another puzzle. I was so wrong. The last puzzle was the worst of all. A math puzzle. I thought the DMs were joking but no, we got a math puzzle. To say the same thing as I told Jasper yesterday: yes this was just DM sadism and 0 RP happened during the whole thing. We don’t talk about the math puzzle.
That was the end of the puzzles, thank god, and I was really curious as to what this was leading up to. Was this going to be the big reveal that tied it all together? No, it was a vault filled with gold and things. There were 0 hints as to what this family was and why they abandoned the place but left the gold. There were no notes. There were no items that told any story. (Except maybe the painting but at this point I was so OOC that I forgot to ask about it.) I suppose I should be happy that Gerry ended up with a magical artifact here, but it feels OOCly earned by being good at math and decent at puzzles.
Then we all left and the first IC thing came from a fellow player. It was Podric who stayed upstairs burning corpses who reminded us that we were potentially robbing corpses. It was 3am at this point and I didn’t stay for the roundoff. However, since the DMs also went bed, I doubt something else happened.
In conclusion:
I hope you understand these feelings and don’t feel like I am bashing at all. I genuinely hope there’s going to be some more story coming from this mansion and that we learn who R.R. is and where he/she went without the money in his vault. I also genuinely hope we get a second event much like this one where the attention is properly drawn to the elemental. I have tried to be constructive with my criticism and hope you understand it for I believe many players feel similar to me.
I do want to mention, however, that I really appreciate the amount of effort that clearly went into this build and the writing. I also love the campaign still and will still try to make sure I am at every event. Thank you Dms! Might you have any questions, please feel free to hit me up on Discord or PM me.