Dan D (of the venerable blag, Throne Of Salt) has recently released Unicorn Meat an adventure about a rundown unicorn farm in the backwoods taken over by ex-indentured, feral young girls, and other horrible thing. And it is fantastic.
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The safety section <3
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There is a very deep sense of….. coziness? Is not the right word, humanity perhaps. Familiarity? Closeness? Despite the horrid situation. The characters in the module carry a large part of this. So does the setting, something about the muggy backwoods crawling with terrible monsters rings a note within. It all feels horrible in a deeply human and sympathetic way as well as alien and terrible.
The vaguely late 19th century setting also interplays quite well with the aforementioned familiarity (I do not think the module would work as well reskinned for a more medieval time period, its really well-knit (you could make it work definitely, just not as well))
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Im not really sure why the muggy backwoods with Appalachian folklore mixed with root magic borrowings speaks so deeply to my soul and feels so... familiar, given how removed my childhood is from such contexts. But damn does it have Vibes.
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Layout is clean, simple, and flows like butter. The pdf is nicely hyperlinked. Text is broken up and spaced out, you're never focusing on more than a paragraph's worth of text at a time. Terms and names are bolded. Makes for easy skimming.
Visually, the illustrations really tie up the whole module in a bow. The npc portraits ooze personality (and make for handy little play aids). Theres just enough illustrations in total to nail down the vibes in your head without prescribing or limiting your own portrayal of the farm.
There's some moments of more flavorful layout (like some <Redacted> black bars) however they don’t interfere with readability or usability at all, which is excellent.
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The tables for character creation are excellent and just beg to be used in rolling up a party of carvergirls
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Hits this blend of folkloric and not-exactly science, but more ‘sciency’, horror. Mutations and witchballs. Old folk magic pulled up from Appalachia and the swamps blended with ‘this is not a place of honor’ monoliths of a long dead culture.
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Oddly strong tonal similarities to Deep Carbon Observatory, would pair excellently with each other.
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There's also still a lot of mystery and open-endedness to the module, not everything is fully explained. Like what exactly the beast-below is, or why there's a bunch of seemingly metallic but actually crammed with meat technologies. It's artfully done, enough to keep nagging at the mind, and keep it mysterious, but never a roadblock to play.
There's a segment on legends, nothing immediately relevant to play but which drives home the mood, and fleshes the carvergirl’s culture out for anyone running them.
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Unicorn poop can be smoked to make you high (also all the other skinning unicorns for parts).
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Minor point, the beginning of the caves section describes travel as taking 1d4 hours between locations and this makes sense for a portion of it (the tangled caves under the swamp) but not other parts like the pit.
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Instantly infatuated with all the npcs. There's a lot of humanity, both sympathetic and cruel, crammed into them. I'm reminded of the better kinds of post-apocalyptic media, where everyones broken in some way, even the awful one’s, and the humanity of it strikes a cord. Everyone’s fucked up, but its clear that its this polluted place and the evils done there that's done it
Near the start of the module there's a list of “things to remember”, in that these two are the first ‘you know these people, everyone has a name” and “everyone has friends, everyone has enemies”. Which drives home some of the modules underlying tone. Things are fucked up but everyones people.
(This also makes the monsters stand out even more, their proper weird and messed up).
Oh and also very simple, and yet excellently done factionalism.
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| Art by Rowan A. |
Pugs and Birdie are my favorites I think, all the characters are amazing but these two are my favorites. Something about their demeanors makes my heart go out to them.
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Everything about the nightwatch, their tree, and the witching hour. Proper folk-magic (and horror) vibes that meshes fantastically with everything else. I feel like there could be a bit more allusion to the witching hours existence in other parts of the module, but gosh is it good.
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The descriptions through the module are extra evocative, and minimalist in just the right way. Tiles described as teeth is one of my favorite bits.
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Random generation of a hunting expedition via drawing from a deck of cards is mwah, very simple, easy to use, and a fun and different way of doing random gen. Kinda makes the generation feel more oracular and less mechanical as it might if you were just rolling on tables.
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A little thing, but a solid chunk of the npc portraits are smiling, it's not necessarily a happy (or well… normal happy) smile, but a goodly lot of them are smiling in some way, something which says a lot about the tone I think.
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I'm not sure how I would run this module with adult player characters. It can definitely be done, feels a bit tricksy to navigate, gotta hit the right tone for interact with feral children trying to knife you. Carvergirl games definitely would run more naturally. Im eager to her the play reports eventually roll in.
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“At least it’s not a hippo”
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White-Eyes plan is just really good, the kind of thing where players end up torn on weither to stop it, join it, or what. Deeply sympathetic and also clearly about to unleash some chaos. Also just excellent as conceptual weird-ass magic-science (I adore the description comparing the Theocarnequs to the Beast as a god to a leper).
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All the other stuff I didn't remember to include or couldn't properly express while writing this.
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This hasn't really been a very coherent post, ramblings mostly, cause its just a damn fantastic adventure. I'm defiantly going to spring for a physical copy eventually.
The time is neigh! You too should go out and get Unicorn Meat.
Thanks for the review!
ReplyDeletePugs and Birdie were some of the first characters made for Unicorn Meat, back when it was just a short story, though their roles were different (Pugs was in charge of the carvers as "the capa", Birdie was essentially the farm secretary.)