Seeds of Rage is an introductory game for Abandon All Hope. This is a playtest review because I had the chance to play the game yesterday night.
The Good: The adventure is good to introduce players to Gehenna and get your campaign started.
The Bad: The adventure is little more than a dungeon crawl.
The ugly: The adventure has several inconsitencies that the GM needs to work around.
To begin with, the game is great, the premise seduced me almost instantly and my players did like the idea of playing criminals..what happened later was unexpected to them. They had lots of fun dealing with sugar daddy and trying to scam him to break into Slag's cell while he was on the infirmary. They are also intrigued with whats happening because I kept all information to a minimum.
I do plan on buying the other adventures but Im afraid of what they will be. For a sci-fi terror game I was expecting somethig different than a dungeon crawl. There are some interesting moments, yes, but the master will need to be creative to make them special.
About the inconsistencies, some things let me kind of thinking and I needed to work them around. Some of theme did make the adventure better (in my taste)
About the demons: Its kind of ironic, but the main book says that you need to "keep down the number of demons and use as much human foes as possible". Yet in this adventure most foes are demons. In my play session I kept that to a minimim; they only heard an "inhuman howl" and the final foe (Slag). Keeping the suspense of whats going on in the ship made the adventure a lot more intriguing. After the first session they dont know exactly whats going on. And when they heard the howl, they got really scared!
Weird assumptions: My group did not manage to meet the Doctor, an interesting encounter. But I did find that NPC, who is supposed to tell "the truth" to the PCs weird. I mean, jumping to the conclusion that "oh yes we are in Hell and all this creatures are demons, and some of the are of guilt" seems to me like something a bit deus ex machina, I dont think that jumping to that conclusion would be so easy.
Time lapses: This one thing unsettled me but I worked around with time elipsis; if you stick to the written adventure, it feels like Perdition happens and all kind of things happen very, very fast, illogically fast just for the sake of the scenario. Its kind of illogical that an adventure that takes place in one day or two details events that would logically need more time to develop.
All in all, I would have given a 2.5 if possible. Unless your group loves dungeoncrawls the adventure will need a lot of work and tweaking to be enjoyable, and if you do like dungeoncrawls probably you will prefer another game anyway. Even tough this negative comments, the game is enjoyable, the premise great and my players do look forward keep finding and discovering whats going on. If they had discovered it on this very first adventure a lot of the charm of the game would be lost.
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