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Path of the Golden Thread's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Writing: Is the adventure original and fun to read? | #68 | 3.408 | 3.643 |
| Usability: Is the adventure easy to use on the fly? | #103 | 2.739 | 2.929 |
| Overall | #104 | 2.962 | 3.167 |
| Fun: Is the adventure fun to play in an OSR playstyle? | #113 | 2.739 | 2.929 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Really pleased at the inclusion of a tarot deck as generative tool! It alongside playing cards are something I’ve been very interested in using as well. The edition and art you’ve put together is very alluring, I can tell you’ve got some serious potential as a designer, please don’t stop improving! Play with spacing things out a bit more, and I can assure you you’ll be in for a surprise. Tarot Duel is also very gorgeous! Definitely followed.
I feel like I'm looking at an occult program about to crash my computer and infect both my favorite tarot deck and my Curse of Strahd home game. Sick
This is really cool. I'm seeing tarot cards more and more in the gaming space and definitely need to get myself a deck! I really enjoyed the artwork in this too, and it looks like it would have the potential to make a great solo-RPG! Great concept and game. Well done!
Thanks buddy, tarots definitely deserve a spot in TTRPG, and it seems like more and more people are noticing it as well
Very very cool concept! The art and layout is also extremely well done, very enticing. Some of the explainer–text on p.2 is a little hard to parse – leaving me a little confused as how to actually use this. But I've also never used tarot cards before, so there's that. Overall really cool – would love to see how this would grow as a project beyond the tight 8–page limit of the Game Jam.
Pardon my caps, but THIS IS SO COOL
Thanks buddy ;)
Outstanding visual art style, the colours, fonts, and drawings all look beautiful and fitting. This however distracts from the content, and made it hard to read for me personally. The ideas themselves lack a certain continuity, which is best illustrated by an example fron the first page "Their goal, of course, is to wake up and leave this strange land." Up until that point, the idea of a dream world was not discussed, and should have been introduced earlier. Another issue with this quote is that it presupposes the actions of the PCs, which goes against the spirit of good OSR gaming for me - why did "the group wander[ ] off, rebutted"? Why do they want to get out?
The lack of choice is also apparent both in the secrecy of the tarot readings, giving players no feeling for what they are actually doing with their cards, and in the compressed nature of the "six mile hexes" themselves. The prompts in both major and minor arcana are interesting, but do little to flesh out the setting or the characters within it, outsourcing the heavy lifting onto the shoulders of the GM while having no tangible effect on the future of the campaign itself, since by their very nature the spheres are disconnected.
The central remedy to all these issues for me would be to stow away the exciting idea of dimension hopping for a future project and focus on the reading of tarot and the surrounding cultures. The gambler who is used only as a set piece could be fleshed out and focused on, maybe being the only member of a clan who knew the tradition of both reading and drawing fate with his cards, as such being an interesting wandering NPC who has to be tracked down and bargained with to be allowed to have the fates examined. But that's just an idea.
As the title wants to imply, the Path and heroes' journey was really the focus of the project, not so much the incipit or ending. Or a plot either.
Tbh these elements would have been greatly expanded if the Knave 2e jam submission limit wasn't just 8 pages. Everything ended up getting crammed together a bit as you noticed :) but thanks for the feedback, if this gains some interest in the shape that it is I intend to get to work on an updated version!