I missed the Kickstarter for Patrick Stuart and Scarp Princess' newest extrusion, like an IDIOT, but at last the book is here and to quote Big P himself, "it has stumbled into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park." I make no pretense of objectivity, but in preparing to actually run the adventure I have some thoughts about it which I hope to crystallize and clarify, mostly for my own sake.
Socially Conscious Trilobite is back (queue applause from studio audience), but he is joined this time by the Backstory Gastropod, who slimes their way onto the first few pages and excretes for us a generous lore dump! DBS sets up a lengthy history, a backdrop of ancient political and romantic maneuvering which sets the trilogy in motion, yes a trilogy, for this is to be a great big multi-book fire-themed campaign! Though well-written and engaging, the backstory has to set up all three books, and therefore there are large swathes which aren't particularly relevant to this first one in isolation. There isn't much reason for players to care about the courtly drama of the Fire Nobles or the Iron Maze, for example, at least not yet.
Patrick makes it pretty clear in several places that this trilogy thing is a provisional plan subject to delays and derailments and the vagaries of post-mid-pandemic supply chain issues, but, judging by the bits of foreshadowing in these pages, the promises of things to come, the excerpts shared on False Machine, the glimpses given in interviews -- if it turns out DBS is the only published piece of the series I will be extremely disappointed.
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The typos and errors are unfortunate, and they do distract from the characteristic creativity on display. There is on average one spelling or formatting error per two-page spread, not including a couple of unfortunate paragraph breaks and a straight-up missing chunk of text of page 11. Aaron Noble is credited with proofreading but is absolved of blame since the author admits to having "fiddled with [the text] quite a bit" afterwards, to which I say, well maybe send it back to the proofreader then lmao. Importantly, these only really affect the READING of the thing as a book and not at all the RUNNING of the thing as an adventure, but still, it's lamentable.
Like the rest of Patrick Stuart's work, DBS lands firmly in the upper-left section of this chart, so do not expect perfect immediate usability. There has been quite a lot of very evident effort dedicated to page design and layout - on the outer edge of every page is a table of contents, the current section highlighted in red such that it shows up on the fore-edge of the book when closed, and as in Deep Carbon Observatory the index is set up to guide you towards basically any concept you might need - but the high conceptual density demands an accordingly high level of buy-in if you want to play it and not just read it for the ideas. The inciting action for example is a double double-cross desert shootout, with survivors from all SIX factions landing in the dungeon beneath and roaming all over the place along with the five or six tomb guardians/prisoners who were already in there. The initial conditions are very complex, but once fully understood nothing stands out as inconsistent or discordant, and therefore despite the complexity I find it easy to hold everything in my head at once as pieces of an intelligible whole*.
The design and the theme are in total harmony, and I think that's what impresses me most. The dungeon is the tomb of a queen of fire. Each room is a tessellated triangle**; each four-room meta-triangle is a thematically self-contained chunk of the dungeon (and indeed this is how the table of contents is organized, by these chunks). The Fire Triangle is an obvious connection, and at first I was disappointed at the lack of variety, but doing things this way a) places all the focus on the contents of the rooms, which are universally inventive, b) automatically Jacquays everything together, and c) ACTUALLY the dimensions are very likely to shift over the course of the adventure because there are sloth-tunnels running under everything, and the phrase "a strong impact will cause this wall to collapse" is in some form repeated in dozens of places. Fire is change, destruction, and renewal. With the custom random encounter tables, the unstable geology, the abundance of stone-melting acid and crystallized explosions, and the PACKED guest list, this is a dungeon of identical triangles that's about as fireproof as a thatch roof.
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The opening scene deserves more attention. Like the opening scene in DCO, it engages immediately and justifies itself - in fact the whole adventure is extremely cinematic, striking visuals, every room a set piece, you can see how demon-possessed baboons attacking the players in a maze of mirrors would look and how kickass it would be. The lines given for some of the characters - "Be ye company men? Be room on the ground for you yet" - fucking excellent, pass the popcorn. The bodies of the dead are fully annotated with equipment to steal, and the book even suggests the opening be used as a level-0 funnel, which I'm thinking I'll take it up on. A few possible environmental pressures are suggested so that the PCs don't spend an hour stealing everyone's socks and ignoring the tomb entirely, including an oncoming sandstorm, nightfall, and predators attracted by the smell of death, which feels maybe a little clumsy.
Included also is a very artpunk minimalist character generator, with blurbs connected by intersecting lines. PCs start on the left and move right either by dice roll or choice, and intersections with another PC's timeline indicates a past encounter. I like this! It seems like an efficient way to deliver worldbuilding and get people engrossed and invested from the beginning, but the life events (the blurbs) provided are a little scanty on the detail and I think would need some expanding (although I don't know - maybe less is more here?).
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I'm flagging here, stay with me. Monsters are cool. Baboons, witch made of leaves, flamethrower skeletons, scab-faced Company hitmen, melting ice demon worshippers with gold pins in their eyes. A wraith with hooks for hands who is so evil that if she ever touches the floor she'll fall straight through to hell. All are hits, brought to life with maybe I dare say the best Scrap art yet? Could be. They're brought to further life by an appropriate and good sense of agency, though I'm missing the "How Events Unfold Without the PCs" timeline as seen at the back of Deep Carbon Observatory. What ultimately happens if the ice demons get out is left to the GM, which is a missed opportunity for sure.
Traps are cool. Many are broken; broken traps are good, they make the ones that work hit a lot harder narratively, and some of them still do work very well. One of them releases a predatory Pompeii ash cloud with a face which then joins many of the random encounter tables, one of them is a room that slowly fills with helium and will only unseal when a hidden pilot light near floor level goes out (completely brilliant, multiple intuitive solutions that reward real-world knowledge and quick-thinking), set piece upon set piece! Many rooms have something of a fun house vibe, balanced by others which give insight into the deep history of their builders, hints at an alien culture, the kind of environmental storytelling I tend to eat right the fuck up.
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Besides the typos, I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus is let down most by being the first part of a trilogy. It tries hard to be a self-contained adventure, but on reflection there are a few too many narrative threads that aren't particularly relevant, a few elements that aren't followed through to their most satisfying conclusions, a sense of being unmoored from the wider world (beyond needing the same work to integrate it into an existing setting that all adventures need) - and since we do not yet have the other two volumes this first must be judged alone. I still think it's fantastic. To try and put this into perspective: I don't think I would run DBS, by itself, without doing a lot of work to expand things, clarify the consequences of the players' actions, tie up those narrative threads - work that books two and three promise to do for me - but I like what's here enough to seriously consider doing all of that if indeed those books never make it out of development hell. Even after my failure trying to do something similar with Stonehell! I have clearly learned nothing!!!
Demon Bone Sarcophagus can be purchased here, along with the rest of the False Machine family of products. I think the hardcover is worth it (it's a beautiful object), but at least get the PDF, if for no other reason than it makes it more likely I personally get my hands on the rest of Broken Fire Regime.
Also, Patrick just launched a Kickstarter for a new book! A vast tome containing nearly the whole of his blog, sorted and indexed, and (I'm assuming) injected with a House of Leaves/National Treasure-style codex of some sort to lead one lucky reader through a series of convoluted clues to a fabulous treasure buried somewhere in the Wirral.
*With a few exceptions. I don't know why the Company chooses to store its supply of incredibly deadly acid in mobile, half-sentient, lady-shaped glass golems, except that it sounds really cool. Maybe barrels or something would be easier to deal with? If the fire queen's wandering Cheshire-esque heart wants to sleep so badly and can only do so if you take out the artificial, emotion-deadening heart-machine in her corpse, why, when you do that, after the Cheshire heart finally curls up in her now empty rib cage, does she then turn into a wee ruby man-baby and jump right back out to accompany the party as a memory-enhancing mascot-familiar? Is the baby still her?
**Further dynamizing (dynamicising?) the layout are three (count em!) secondary "connectivity systems," if I may be so bold, two sets of tunnels and a network of spatial anomalies (portals) left by a rampaging demon whose skull is currently pinned to the floor by the sword of a porcelain warrior drone buried with the queen. The options players have in navigating this space is seriously impressive; the one thing I'll say is that there's not any verticality to anything, but it's interconnected enough that honestly I don't think it matters.
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