Play FIST TTRPG scenario
Operation Copper Glow [FIST]'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| SUBSTANCE | #3 | 4.677 | 5.000 |
| Overall | #5 | 4.410 | 4.714 |
| STYLE | #9 | 4.143 | 4.429 |
Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Reposted from my public comments:
An extensively detailed scenario with great Referee resources for tracking resources and movement (e.g., travel timeline, hex maps), tables for generating random encounters, and options to extend the scenario further depending on player choice during the game. I really loved the named NPC section with quotes from each person on major players and/or topics likely to come up during the mission (e.g., jungle, UN, US, USSR, local legends).
The scenario itself is well researched and includes nuance (something I particularly enjoy in my games) with no “right option” for the players to choose; some of the NPCs make bad choices but they’re not inherently bad people.
It’s not the kind of scenario you could run through a second time with the same group of characters, but there are many ways the scenario could be replayed by different characters to generate very different outcomes.
Thank you for the review! I'm particularly happy you described my NPCs as 'nuanced' - I based everyone off historical or fictional people with small twists, and didn't use anyone who I couldn't SteelMan fairly well. Glad it came through!
Simply incredible. So often time is ignored in games and love the implementation here. The amount of sheer work is extraordinary and the love the amount of links and resources.
This is really amazing, the amount of work put into this is incredible, the handouts are such a nice inclusion, having a proper alternative to what I usually do which is take screenshots of all the gameplay bits like tables and enemy stats and post them in a private discord channel is simply awesome and something I'm going to consider for my future creations
Thanks! It took about 40 hours of back-and-forth to put it all together, not counting about 800 page of study re: the Katanga revolution pre-Jam. I'm glad to see it paid off!
A hundred years ago, roughly 2014, I ran a scenario for a homebrew Dungeon World inspired modern Shadow Operative Conspiracy Thriller that featured a memetic lifeform trapped on a cassette tape. (It was kind of like FIST, only with collectively agreed on custom Traits and a focus on Encumbrance / Inventory ala Torchbearer.) The players never listened to the tape - it was clearly smuck bait, and they didn't fall for it. After the session I congratulated them on their good choice and mentioned that I had a script, but had originally planned on actually recording it and bringing a cassette tape player to the session. I'd've handed it over when their characters got it. All of them immediately admitted they'd've played the tape if they had a physical object, even though they knew it would be a bad idea.
Since then I've been all about props and handouts. Used right, they can really change the way the session plays out and how involved players can get.
That was something I intended to mention as well but forgot, I LOVED that you included links for further information for the real-world events that inspire the mission, I did a bit of research into Cairo for my own submission and found out a lot about how the opera house featured was the first in Africa, but burned down in the 70s and now the site is a multi-story car park which is really sad.
That's very cool regarding the cassette tape, though I know how painful it can be to write a lot of copy that never gets used because the party takes an alternative route, maybe that is why sharing my creations is so satisfying because at least someone will see it other than me :D
Cairo is interesting, you picked a great place to set a globetrotting adventure session. For example : they don't pay full rate real estate taxes until a building is completely finished being constructed, so huge chunks of the city have exposed concrete support struts and rebar on the roof because "it's not finished yet" even though people live in the buildings and nobody ever works on that last phantom floor. Squab ranching is illegal but openly done, so there are all these sniper-tower looking structures randomly plopped on top of buildings in areas where the police know better than to go, full of renegade pigeons with known breeding histories. Don't get me started on how the city layout tanked their sanitation infrastructure. - suffice it to say there are a lot of biohazard rich improvised fighting trenches throughout the city outskirts.
It's a super interesting place, is what I'm saying. Hard to explain it well enough to bring to the table.
There's so much in here! I'm especially a big fan of the TSP (henchmen) rules and the hexcrawl event tables in Act 4. The logic and flow of the scenario is intuitive to any ref running the game, and the player handouts are a nice touch as well. This says it's a "scenario" but really it has enough meat to be a mini campaign on its own.
My only crits are that the inconsistent sizes of fonts and columns make it harder for my eyes to track and scan on the page and that the b/w shading of the different categories on the hex maps are perhaps a bit too similar to each other, they kind of blend in a bit.
Thanks for your review! The comment on the font/column design is particularly helpful - in future I'll probably work harder to structure the scenarios in a way that let's me maintain a better uniformity from page to page.