Love the look and the design does a great job portraying that war tension. STEELHANDS is quite a cool addition!
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TEMPESTUOUS STORM: A FIST SUPPLEMENT's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
STYLE | #1 | 4.700 | 4.700 |
Overall | #3 | 4.550 | 4.550 |
SUBSTANCE | #6 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Tempestuous Mind (also called Tempestuous Storm in the thumbnail and itch page title) is 2 page mission for FIST about liquidating a Soviet psychics program being run out of an oil rig.
The PDF is well organized and professional, with a lot of graphics and easily processable data to anchor the paramilitary feeling of the setting.
The structure of the mission is likewise clean and well-organized, and there's no danger of the PCs losing the plot. The PCs infiltrate, have a series of setpiece encounters, and things cultimate in a supernatural shootout.
The overall vibe is a little bit Call Of Duty, with a more grounded feel than many of FIST's supernatural-heavy missions. There's also a little bit of CoD's "morally gray actions are fine if you're the good guys" motif, so do expect to a) kill children, and b) have them thank you for it unless you pivot off of the module's intended path.
There *is* a really neat bit of game design tech tucked at the end of the scenario in the form of a CHOKE stat for NPCs. CHOKE functions a little bit like a morale score, but it causes an NPC to take rash actions. This adds a great bit of mechanical color to things like civilians in war zones, or combatants who are more enthusiastic than they are professional.
Overall, if you want a grounded, modern-military-feeling FIST scenario with clear stakes and some neat fights, this is an excellent choice.
It may shine especially with pre-gens or a restricted TRAIT pool, ensuring that the character concepts are relatively serious and don't interfere too much with the intended flow of the mission.
Pages are backwards the second page is first besides that I liked it.
It does look that way, but I'm almost positive that's intentional. The trifold is designed for being printed out, so the "Cover" (ie page 1 of 6) is the rightmost entry on the sheet with the last two pages (5 and 6) to the left of it. That's perfect once it's printed out and folded, but on the screen it makes you pick between skipping the first page or showing the last two right up front like the author did here.
There are a few ways to handle a one-folded-page design. This layout is a viable option. (I used the same setup in one of my Jam entries, Berling 198x)
I'm loving this FIST-Zeitgeist drift towards RATIONS style pamphlets/brochures. Tempestuous Mind is a solid action-forward op with a few moral choices along the way. Plenty of martial risks and opportunities for PCs to shine.
Setting a tactical op on an oil rig is a classic and fits well with the MGS inspirations for FIST. Kiddos trapped in tanks as living biocomponents for CYCLOPS is a strong callback to the first RATIONS entry.
A thematically appropriate piece, competently executed. Nice!
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