Adventures are a strange thing to review, and before we start I think it’s important to define exactly what I’m doing here - and, perhaps more importantly, what I’m not going to be doing.
Much games criticism boils down to debating whether or not something was “fun”. This is all fine and good in a field like video games or board games, where the experience is bounded by rules and system and (largely, with caveats and exceptions) we can expect individual players and groups to have similar experiences.
This is not as much the case with role-playing games, and even less the case when we move away from system and into content. “Fun” becomes much less dependent on the text and much more informed by individual groups, to the point where it stops being useful as a metric by which to analyse the work. “Fun”, untilamtely, is meaningless. People have “fun” with FunkoPops, which are little more than top heavy paperweights. We deserve better than “is this fun”.
Play is the most important part of this hobby, in my mind, but in desiring to look at the texts that facilitate that play through a critical lens I find that I need to discard it - at least as the primary means of engaging with the text. My experiences of playing a module may inform what I have to say about it but they shouldn’t and won’t be be the driving force of what I have to say about it.
I’ve long said that I value good prose, excellent writing that sets my brain on fire. Where others look to illustrations and art to inspire them I am driven by the poetry to be found in fiction. I value clear information design, texts that are authored with consideration to how they will be used and referenced. Adventure writing straddles fiction, poetry, and technical writing, and when done well it’s a wholly unique medium. Crafting an encounter that’s evocative and unique and better than anything I could come up with myself but that also leaves space for play - for interpretation, for the agency of the players, for unexpected interactions that elevate it into something nobody could have come up with - is art.
That’s the level I want to meet these texts at, and the lens through which I want to approach them. We have been developing the tools to analyse literature for thousands of years, since Aristotle’s Poetics and earlier. My aim is to apply these tools to Role-playing adventures in whatever way I can.
It should go without saying that there is no such thing as objectivity in the critique of art. Every reaction will be biased by my own tastes. I make no apologies for that. I’m allowing myself space to be wholly selfish in the way I approach these books, because that’s the highest form of respect I can pay them - to take them as they are, and delve into my honest response to them.
The ultimate aim of public critique is not to provide feedback to the author. That is the domain of peer groups and workshops. Criticism is aimed at the consumer in the first instance - “is there something in the subjective views of this one critic that you can use to inform your purchasing decisions?” - and at the medium as a whole in the latter. Art is a conversation. Work talks to extant work, creators talk among themselves in the background, and criticism talks around the work. In a field as small as role-playing games it’s hard to separate the artist from the critic, as I’ve addressed previously on this blog. But the emergence of a critic class requires people to take the first step, and often the people best placed to take that step are those already mired in doing the work.
However you feel about the work I will go on to do on this site, try to keep this in mind: I love role-playing games and I love adventures above other forms in the medium. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t expend the energy on this.