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THE FACILITY's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
SUBSTANCE | #16 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
STYLE | #17 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
Overall | #17 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
don't think I can add anything that hasn't been said. Great ideas, feels like it needs to just be worked through a bit more. Great job!
A lot of nice ideas here but I found it a bit too tricky to read, I think a few font choice and some better spacing of content would do wonders for this
The Facility is a narrative mini-campaign for FIST centered around industrial mad science. Honestly it feels a bit like a Half Life mod, but not in a bad way.
The PDF is 10 pages, with text blocks and a few pictures. The text blocks are dense and cluttered, and most sentences are either a little short on punctuation or a little run-on, making them tricky to read.
The plot of The Facility isn't communicated in detail to the GM or players, but it's fun and atmospheric in the same way as something like F.E.A.R.. The players are born in a lab and sent to die in a city. Said city is a Silent Hill style hub for a surprising number of different spooky locations. Revisiting a single location enough times sends the players to the titular Facility and triggers the endgame.
For GMs that like a kind of violent FPS dreamlogic, this is a good match. The players will ultimately make meaning out of it on their own, however you may have to occasionally push them to hit certain key event triggers to keep them moving through the plot.
In addition to the mini-campaign, The Facility also has a bunch of new items, TRAITS, and enemies. In general, they're all very flavorful, and directions are given to let the players develop more TRAITS if the custom enemies feel too powerful.
As far as useability goes, the way this is written makes it pretty hard to read, but its contents are sorted into different chapters, and there's a page for GM's notes at the end---which is a really nice touch.
Overall, if you hunger for old 2000s era FPS and want a FIST campaign that channels that, give The Facility a try. It's a little tricky to read, but it's got a lot of heart.
There are a bunch of interesting ideas in here that could be used to craft a few fun sessions with the right group. Unfortunately, it starts with implanted bombs that go off of players don't follow the rails. The first threat is a group of hospitals each with 4 armor/double digit health/1d6+4 damage, even one of which is most likely a TPK for new FIST characters. The text is in very long page-wide paragraphs, one a page and a half long, written in a stream of consciousness manner that switches tenses around, making it really hard to initially parse and later re- find information.
For all my above gripping, there's a lot of good material for inspiration in here! The bookended twists, the creepy office with Pam from Accounting acting like a rabid Necron hybrid, the oppressive atmosphere of the city ... If the author spent time tidying up the text and adjusting the mechanics of the threats they'd have something others could easily use to kick off their campaigns with killer first sessions.
My favorite part is how the twist ending is hinted at throughout without ever being super obvious at the time.