Murder at Moonveil Manor

An RPG Module Review

Module Name – Murder At Moonveil Manor

Authors – Vall Syrene, Mogman Dubloon (Links go to other stuff they’ve made.)

System/Character Level – DND 5E/4-6

Price – Pay What You Want

I was trying to figure out what to write about when a little voice told me “Why not write about one of the modules you played/ran somewhat recently?” I replied “Great idea little voice” and then the voice told me I should maybe disconnect from the voice chat for the moment and work on the blog post. So! Here we are, Murder At Moonveil Manor, a 5E module for characters level 4-6, though I think that if the players were all level 4, you’d want at least 4 people in the party to avoid a TPK. Some of the combat encounters can be a bit brutal. Also, I’m going abbreviate the title to MMM because typing the whole thing out is pretty long.

So, MMM is a neat mostly self contained encounter that can probably be slotted in almost anywhere you might want to put it. As a player, I played through it as part of a Curse of Strahd campaign, where our DM just slotted into the middle/end of the game, in a way that felt mostly like a breather. As a DM, I ran it as a one shot over two sessions when one of our players couldn’t make it for the weekly game, and gave all of them characters that were very different from their normal ones. There were a few reasons for this. 1. It let me play the monsters as brutally as possible. I’ve run into a problem with RPG games where I find them hard to really “teach” some of the more crunchy/mathy mechanics of combat in a good way, because I can’t just kill the players until they learn. Except in a one shot like this, in this situation I can TOTALLY go for the total party kill. And 2. It forced them to play characters that role-wise were very different from their characters, and I think that let me role play them/act them out a bit more.

Both of these runs were played on a set of maps that a friend of mine made, which brings me to my first issue with the module. No maps are included. While this isn’t a huge issue at the start, it becomes more of a problem once you move into later parts of the module, especially the combat bits, and if your players ever end up running around the mansion. I’ll talk a bit more about this later.

MMM sets itself up into six chapters, each chapter being more or less a phase. Acts one and two primarily set the scene, having the players arrive at the manor, meet the others at the dinner party, and then eat dinner. Acts three and four involve the murder of one of the guests, and a start of an investigation into what happened. Acts five and six conclude the story, involving the confrontation with the murderer, and the end of the adventure. As far as gameplay elements go, one and two are primarily roleplay, three is skill checks, and four through six are where the combat encounters begin.

While I think this general structure is fine, the biggest issue I have with the module is the following: MMM tries to be too many things at once, and it suffers for it. While the adventure sets itself up as a murder mystery, it’s really more horror themed then anything else. The problem is, these two themes sorta clash with each other.

The general progression of a mystery is something like this.

  1. Introduce the Characters/Setting
  2. Introduce Conflict between characters
  3. Crime Occurs
  4. Investigation
  5. Confront the Perp

And horror goes something like this.

  1. Characters arrive at location.
  2. Some small strange things happen.
  3. Characters attempt to leave/get help, only to discover they are trapped/bridges have been cut, communications severed, etc.
  4. Characters are picked off one by one, until the single remaining survivor escapes/defeats the threat.

The structure of MMM though, is something like this.

  1. Introduce characters and setting.
  2. Introduce Conflict
  3. Small Strange Things Happen
  4. Crime Occurs
  5. Characters(NPC’s) are picked off one by one
  6. Investigation
  7. Confront the Perp

It doesn’t really follow either structure, and the nature of the game means that both times I’ve played it, I’ve never seen the players attempt to leave the house. The Scooby Gang doesn’t book it back to the mystery machine when a horrible monster shows up, and neither do PC’s. If you put a dead body in front of your players after a dinner, they will assume this is a puzzle for them to solve, not a danger to be avoided.

This becomes a problem because the module wants to set up all the guests, so that you have suspects, but it then procedes to kill them off one by one, meaning that the mystery aspect of the game solves itself. It also means that any effort you put into setting up conflict between the guests ends up being fairly moot, because by the time it switches genres, the players don’t have a huge amount of time to investigate either. (The module also doesn’t give any dialogue suggestions for how to really run the interactions between the NPC’s, and frankly having to role play two NPC’s arguing with each other isn’t too much fun for your players. )

Secondly, of the seven NPC’s only four of them ever really feel like reasonable suspects, and two of those characters get killed off real fast, bringing you back down to two characters. I don’t really consider a coin flip an investigation.

So, does the module do horror well then? Well, sorta. Some parts of the module work really well, including the mimic attack, the mini-book mimics, and the fight with the murderer and the heart of the manor. The other parts not so much.

After part four, the rest of the manor activates, and this leads to traps being placed in each of the manor rooms. ( Again, maps would be nice here. ) Most of these traps are not remotely horrific or supernatural, and will either do one of two things.

  1. Kill the PC’s (Not horrific, just a death. It happens.)
  2. Not kill the PC’s (Also not horrific, they lived, why would it be horrifying?)

In addition the activation of ANY these traps more or less immediately gives away the identity of the murderer to any player/character. ( Because frankly, if I saw a set of stairs turn into a razor blade shredder, my assumption would not be “Hmm, it must be someone who doesn’t own the house” )

The conclusion of the module, a fight against the murder and the animated heart of the manor feels much better, and does a good job of hitting more of that horrific tone. The stat blocks for the manor heart itself are also pretty decent, and seem to have been well thought out. I would say that this conclusion/wrap up are overall the strongest parts of the module as written.

Overall, Moonveil Manor isn’t amazing, and it isn’t terrible. It’s all right, and I can imagine it slotting decently into another. I think the strongest parts of MMM are some of the fights, the few bits of flavor the module actually chooses to include, and the fact that it can most likely be slotted into almost any campaign very easily as a sort of one-shot/breather type game.

If I was to run it again, here’s what I would change up.

  1. Maps for each room. The lack of maps hurts, and I used some made by a friend who was the one who ran me through the first time. This is good, but it makes the whole house into one big things, instead of letting players really be in a location, where a lot of the module is based around encountering and exploring these rooms.
  2. Re-skin the traps. Given that they already give away the identity of the murderer, and the a lot of the flavor text is based around the house being this eldritch horror, I’d replace the sand pit with a gnashing mouth, the blunderbuss with whipping spikes, etc.
  3. Give the PC’s a reason to attend the party, other than “You were invited to a party”. I think this would encourage people to be a bit more interested in the house, and perhaps a bit more proactive about trying to solve things/protect the NPC’s.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll post more of these as I play em/run em.

The Tides Have It

I’ve decided to try to see if I can keep this blog updated twice weekly. Woo. That seems like it will be kinda tough, so I’m just gonna quickly talk about a few things about Animal Crossing New Horizons that have been bothering me. These are more or less extremely small nitpicks, and I’d suspect that overall, they’re not really worth thinking about for more then a few minutes, but they’re still interesting to me, so yeah, whatever.

Nitpick #1

You can release fish into areas of water that they didn’t come from.

Okay, so in terms of “Annoyed Complaints” I’d file this one up with there with “Zootopia is unrealistic because animals can’t talk” in terms of how much it actually matters, but the reason this bother me is really straight forward. The game doesn’t let us just kill fish by tossing them onto land to die, or whatnot, we can only release them with the implication that well, they’ll live. Despite this though, nothing stops you from chucking a sea horse into a lake pond, or a trout straight into the ocean. I’m not a fish person, it might even be that those kinds of fish can survive in those areas, but I feel like they prob wouldn’t do so hot. I dunno, really it just bothers me because the game on one hand says “No, you can’t just murder these animals” but on the other hand is like “Yeah, sure, cram that Sea Bass in that tiny lake pond. It’ll be fine!”

Nitpick #2

Going out and chopping down everything on a random mystery island isn’t just possible, the games mechanics almost encourage it.

I find this one “funnier” in the sense that I’m almost never bothered by content in video games.

There’s a subsection of the population that seems to think that Video Games are the Devil, but it seems like people thought the same thing about Rock and Roll, Dungeons and Dragons, reading Catcher In The Rye. I’m more of the opinion that “Shitty people are shitty people” and that if “The Youth” are being corrupted, its more likely that they went looking for it.

Point is, in terms of “Oh dear, the moral panic” I’m almost never bothered by content in games. Murder a dozen people? Sure! Blow up a boat? Why not. Kill your Minecraft villagers over and over again until you get one with the right recipes? Those books won’t make themselves.

The point is, simulated violence almost never bothers me, as does war, blood/gore/etc. It’s very easy to tell that it’s not “real”. However, the idea of just going to random part of a forest/island or something and just clear cutting it cause “Fuck it, it ain’t my home” actually does sorta rub me the wrong way. I feel like I was raised to have a certain respect for nature even digitally, at least as long as said nature isn’t trying to actively murder me. (That’s a different situation, more about Don’t Starve later this week maybe?)

There was an interesting post a while back on Penny Arcade that I can’t find at the moment, but more or less boiled down to the following:

  1. “It’s very hard to see people in games as real people, because eventually you’ll reach a point where they behave weirdly, or bug out, or start saying the same voice line or whatever.”
  2. But the corollary is “It’s a lot easier to make us care about dogs/cats/animals, because it’s not hard to make something that really feels like a dog.” If it wags its tail, run around, barks at stuff, you’ve pretty much nailed it. It’s way easier to make a digital dog that feels “real” then a digital person.
  3. As far as I can tell, this is how I feel about forests and wild places in Animal Crossing. They aren’t real forests, but they are real in the sense of the game, and to the characters of the game. So yeah, clear cutting a pristine bit of nature so I can have an extra axe or two feels bad.

Afterthought:

After thinking about most of this, I realized that it’s more then possible in AC to harvest wood and such without actually cutting down an entire Forest, but I still thought it was fairly interesting that I was more bothered by a game saying “You can cut down all the trees” and the message that it sends to our children. So yeah, time to get children back to playing Call of Duty, Animal Crossing teaches lessons that are far too dangerous about deforestation. Speaking of which, more about Don’t Starve later this week, a game with a VERY different game play loop, but some of the same occurrences.

Sento – Ultimate Arcade Fighter

Holy shit, I want to own this game.

There are a lot of games at a PAX, and honestly, many of them do not click for me. There are things that can be fun when played with other people, but might not transfer to a single player experience, and there are things that just don’t grab me.

I personally don’t really like writing about things that very much, because making things is hard, and going “Hey, you know that thing you poured a decent portion of the finite time, the only truly real and limited thing that is yours on this planet, into? I think it’s trash.” has the all the tact and moral generosity of stomping on a puppy. Most people I know who make things have started by making a lot of very bad things, and then moved on to making better things. I know that for the things I currently make, many of them are either garbage, or “Shows promise, needs improvement” stage of creation.

So yeah, unless you directly ask me for feedback on whether I think something is good or not, anything I say will be more in the “I like it/I don’t like” sphere.

I don’t have to do anything of that shit with Senko fighter, because I mostly just want to play more of it.

Senko is a puzzle matching, fighter game. It’s a board game, which is also kinda weird, and honestly, you could make it into a video game, but I’m not sure if it would actually improve it. Pulling rows of marbles of the board, and dropping them back in to the randomizer is deeply satisfying. (Someone told me “Oh, like Potion Explosion?” but I’ve never played it, so I have no idea if that’s accurate.)

I think the big thing for me though, is that Senko really gets at the heart of what fighting games feel like if you’re good at them. Each turn, you’re making several decisions, all in one simple action. Do I want to attack, or build up for another turn? Am I going to try to trigger my characters feature, or set stuff up? Am I trying to go for a knockout, or just chip you down? Do I need to try to block something big you can set up next turn, and if so, can I even do it?

And the way you decide all of these things is simple, reach down a pull out a bunch of marbles, then do your attack. Different marbles correspond to different attacks, with combos at 1, 3, and 4 chains. There are three colors of marble, and each size chain is a specific attack, except your health is also tied to these marbles to an extent, and if one of your three bars gets knocked down, you can’t use those color marbles, locking out an entire set of attacks, EXCEPT now you can use those marbles you can’t use as part of an even bigger chain of other colors, so now, even though you’re “weaker” it just got much easier to pull off some of those bigger attacks, which is one of the coolest catch up mechanics I’ve ever seen.

I’m sure that as it gets more coverage in the coming months, and Kickstarter launches and whatnot, we’ll get more articles and stuff about it, but I’ll just finish by saying the following:

One thing I feel a lot in video games, but almost never do in board games, is the sense of having MY guy. In Smash Bros, it’s Ike or Ganondorf. In Pokken, it’s Chandalure, and in Pokemon in general, it’s Kyogre, my fat happy blue murder whale. But board games very rarely give me that feeling, even with things like Scythe, and it’s fairly distinct pieces and characters.

The DJ in Sento Fighter already feels like she’s MY dude, nailing the asymmetric options without watering them down so much they become more then just a random starting objective or something. And when this game comes out, I’m looking forward to playing it with friends, and dropping sick, sweet beats, directly onto their exposed, fragile cranium.

Here’s the link to their depressingly empty page, but at least you can sign up for their newsletter about when the Kickstarter is coming. And you should, if you like GOOD THINGS.

PAX 3: The Third Part

That’s right, it’s time for Part Three, the part where I talk about everything I didn’t already review. It’s time for more

VIDYA GAMES

MAGIC: LEGENDS

Another one I got in line for because they were giving out a free pin, except they didn’t actually end up giving it out. Pretty bummed about that, gonna try to get it at another PAX I suppose.

With that said, actual gameplay was pretty decent. I wouldn’t consider myself a huge ARPG person, but Path of Exile is my second most played game, and I’ve played a decent amount of D3 on switch.

Overall, it seemed pretty fun. I’m not sure I would play for the story, as it was pretty “eh” or get into end game, but I can see it being something fun to pick up and play with friends. The whole Magic: The Gathering theme thing is reflected in the fact that you have a deck and your abilities are constantly switching. In theory, this sounds cool, in practice, I more or less just spammed whatever was off cooldown.

But like, show floor demo. You can find more about it here.

DRAGON FANG: Drahn’s Mystery Dungeon

For me, when I think the mystery dungeon games, I mostly think of the Pokemon ones. I know there are some others, but I really loved the first few of the Pokemon ones, and so every time I see a mystery dungeon game, I really want it to be good.

I’m gonna just get this out of the way. I don’t think Dragon Fang is very good. It has a very nice art style and whatnot, but unfortunately, it’s also a port of a Japanese mobile game. So yeah, while the actual game play could be good, and there are some neat ideas, it’s mostly just a very watered down dungeon crawler, where most of the enemies get more interesting powers then you do. Additionally, a lot of the good monsters are locked behind Gacha.

So yeah, skip this one, but if you really want to try it, it’s free on Steam here.

AREA MAN LIVES

Didn’t play this one, did check it out, but it was a neat VR title. it seemed weird enough for me to mention it. I’ll be honest, I’d really like to play it when it comes out.

Find out more about it here.

KEMONO HEROS

This was at the NIS booth, and since theey made Disgea 4, which has been my go to game on the switch the last few months since I got it around Christmas.

Not too much I have to say on it, it seems cute, just didn’t also seem like it did anything fascinatingly new for me to spend more then a few minutes playing it, and then mention it. Find out more about it here.

One more PAX post to go, mostly just about Sento Fighter, and how I don’t own it yet, and why can’t I buy it yet. Until then, see you next time.

PAX EAST – Part 2

Okay, let’s talk about some more stuff to cover. That’s right, it’s time for more

VIDYA GAMES

RELIC HUNTERS LEGEND

This is a sequel to Relic Hunters Zero, a free game that according to steam, I played for about 2 hours. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t remember it at all. I played a bit of the new one, and it was… fine. However, at a PAX, fine doesn’t keep my attention, and so I wandered on. Here’s a link if you’re curious though. If a cartoonish Destiny/Diablo mashup sounds like your sort of thing, you might enjoy it.

MAQUETTE

Maquette is published by Annapurna Interactive, the people who also published What Remains of Edith Finch. I’m gonna be honest here, I got in the Maquette line because they were giving out a free pin.

Clearly the moral of this story is that I do way too much book judging by covers, because Maquette was one of my top three games at the show. It’s a really cool puzzler where you move objects around to solve puzzles, except that your central point of interaction is a small model of the much larger world outside you, and you can move things in the small world, or the big world, to make them exist in the other.

There also seems to be as story about a relationship falling apart that’s also told in the game, and I’m gonna be honest, it felt a bit too real for me, but that’s a story for another day.

Just go play Maquette. If you looked at it and thought “Oh, someone made another artsy walking simulator” you’re dead wrong. There’s a really cool game here, with some big ideas, and I’m honestly really excited to see more of it.

You can learn more about it here, on it’s Steam Page.

RISING HELL

I was gonna write a bit about this, but it looks like it has a demo on steam? And the demo comes out in like two days? So yeah, I’m just gonna wait two days, play the demo for probs longer then 15 minutes I played it at the show, then write about it. That just seems like a better policy.

WUNDERLING

I have been trying to figure out what to say about Wunderling for a while, and have been failing, so I’m just gonna type things and post them. Wunderling is small and cute, and as a result, I want it to succeed. Wunderling’s primary game play mechanic is simply that you can’t actually control your character, you can only control your jump. And while that seems really simple, there were some moments in the demo that were really clever, and made me want to see what the rest of the game could include. For example, one of the secondary mechanics is that if you don’t pick up a collectible every now and then, you die. In the opening levels, this was really simple, but one area had a hidden chest that required you to skip collecting some of these earlier, so you could grab the chest later, and if you picked them all up, you would actually starve to death.

I dunno, I just want to see it work.

That’s all for now I think. This took longer to write then I was expecting, but I think I’ll be able to wrap the rest of this up in part 3, and finish giving my thoughts on the stuff I saw at PAX East.