I’m a horror fan (as you can probably tell by now), and I’m happy to say, OUTER SELF’s cover gave me pause. The portrait in the top-right corner is downright creepy, and I actually zoomed in to try and tell if I could detect any signs of manipulation. Whether or not the photo is doctored is irrelevant. What’s important is, it’s unsettling. Not in a jump scare kind of a way, more like something fished out of an uncanny valley.
Outer Self Photo Studio is a mission, one of 52 planned for “Mega Mall 23,” a spin on #Dungeon23 I can fully get behind. They’re set in a middle American mall that has slipped deep into liminal territory.
The Mission Synopsis is straightforward: a witch bargained with a demon, trading souls for eternal youth. I’m not sure why, but I found this darkly funny: “She is only [Insert player count here] souls away from filling her quota and gaining incredible power.”
Layoutwise, this looks exceptionally easy to run, one of those missions you could practically bust out at the table and run without reading it all the way through. I mean, don’t do that – never do that! But sometimes… you gotta. And if you gotta, I highly suggest a scenario with a smart layout like this one to make things easier for your desperate brain.
I do find the text a little hard to read. It’s perhaps a wee bit narrow, especially the colored text, which doesn’t offer enough contrast against the white background. Maybe just setting it to bold might help.
OUTER SELF follows a control panel layout, with paragraphs careful not to stretch across multiple pages. There’s a photo collage map, three and a half pages of room descriptions (a photo studio, a dark room, galleries, etc.) and all the NPCs are collected together, complete with character portraits. And I really like that the items have photo art. It reminds me of a graphic adventure from the 90s. I wanna click the dagger and drag it on the camera, just to see what happens.
If OUTER SELF is a sign of things to come, then sign me the hell up.