Fronds of Irrelevance

Since the Troika tourists are a group of very well-adjusted and intelligent people with impeccable taste, I figured I'd do them a solid and review one of many tepid trivalities, third in both party and rate. Alas, I only have access to two, and after a quick coin toss it looks like I'm going to subject myself to...

*drumroll*

...Fronds of Benevolence. 

From the atrocious postmodern art, to the lackluster layout, to the adventure hook that was overused decades ago, to repeating the banal phrase "hump-backed sky" about a half-dozen times, to the ridiculous price tag of $14 for all of 45 fucking pages, Fronds really is peak Troika, precisely the sort of pretentious shallow shit I’d expect from greed-driven, attention-starved narcissists who struggle to pinch out less than the bare minimum.

And just what are you paying for? What’s so thinly smeared across those 45 pages?

A boring-ass, one-way fetch quest.

To be clear, I’m not bothered much by the fetch quest angle. There are only so many adventure goals, and I'm not expecting someone to somehow invent entirely new motivations each and every time. It's that it's both boring and ass.

You have an NPC that is visually a Great Race of Yith ripoff. He needs magic dirt to avoid dying, and despite being a super important ruler who has run a scarcely described territory for so long that no one, not even him, can recall how or when he started (very convenient for the author), the characters =, and only the characters are tasked with retrieving it.

And why, you might ask? Why have a bunch of random nobodies undertake such an important mission? Because they are "fairly close" to the NPC by virtue of the adventure suggesting that the GM have the players bullshit some backstory on the spot to explain why they could even begin to pretend to give a fuck about him.

Oh sure, you could actually play the game for more than a handful of sessions in order to generate an organic connection and history for some sort of future payoff, but that requires even a modicum of work and commitment, and as we all know Troika isn't meant to be played, but even if it was the vapidware trash grifters are far too busy flinging third party crap like this about and whining on Twitter about how poor and miserable they are and how it's always someone else's fault.

The adventure states that it "should be made clear" that the magic dirt normally comes from a place simply called The Wall, but there are also vague "rumors and legends" implying that you could maybe find some at "the Blue Oak". Odd that, despite all the time the NPC has been running the country no one bothered to confirm this, given that he needs the magic dirt to not die, but I digress.

In any case, since this adventure is time sensitive I have no idea why players would want to risk the mere possibility of finding the magic dirt, as opposed to going to where it definitely came from. Unsurprisingly there's no example dialogue or additional information, so if you want to attempt to present any of this in anything resembling an organic fashion it's entirely on the GM.

After the players pick either destination they then have to select one of two methods of travel, either a "golden space barge" or a "stilt-loper". The author tries to present both choices as having merit, but the barge is only possibly useful if you're intending on going to The Wall, since it can only arbitrarily land at one location. So, if you opt for the Blue Oak then the loper is literally the only way to go. Though, I suppose you could also go on foot, since there is no mention of adjusting traveling times in cases where the barge likely crashes, and/or the stilt-loper is taken out of action.

So, pro-tip: avoid both and just leg it, as you'll avoid various lolsorandom nonsense and headaches, and there's no downside.

Anyway, once you've figured that out it's time to get pointcrawling:

I can't fault the author much for going this route because it's a vapidware trash grift that, like Troika, no one was intended to play anyway, and pointcrawls require significantly less effort to create. This method also allows him to just assign whatever travel times he wants between locations without having to worry about details such as actual distances, terrain, weather, etc, because, again, this adventure is time-sensitive.

You have 4d6 days to essentially locate the magic dirt. Not find and bring back mind you, but merely locate: the adventure states that during playtesting (sure), once the magic dirt was found the adventure was just "hand-waved" to a close without bothering to see how the characters fared on the return trip.

About what I’d expect from the Troika troupe.

Now, to be more than fair, it does mention that if you want to go through all the hassle of making the characters endure the Herculean task of retracing their steps through barely described locations devoid of purpose and interest, you can, but there are unsurprisingly no guidelines on how you should adjust the amount of time the characters have to account for that.

Oh, it also mentions that if you fail you could examine "the breakdown of peace between the pirate-princelings of neighboring kingdoms". You know, these other kingdoms that are given no description whatsoever, and so like everything else there's no real reason for the players to give a fuck. I guess the author was too busy whipping up this very useful and necessary time tracker:

Yeah, he expects you to note the passage of time by the hour, even though no locations take hours to traverse by default. The only time hours are even mentioned is for workers and harem girls changing shifts at The Wall. There was of course no need for the tracker at all: you could just keep a tally like a normal person, but I guess this lets him pad out nearly an entire page. Gotta justify that $14 price tag somehow amirite?

Before I forget, I want to mention that there's a pointless subplot about pamphlets. They "began appearing throughout the kingdom" around the same time the magic dirt supply gets cut off, but rather than introduce them in a more subtle fashion you basically just have to tell the players something like, "oh yeah, these pamphlets began appearing throughout the kingdom around the same time the magic dirt supply was cut off".

Also, you the GM are supposed to somehow make the "unhinged and fanatical nature" of the pamphlets clear, as well as the fact that "every day they gain increasing readership". Even though the characters are on a time crunch and probably won't be dicking around in town to notice the trend. In a surprising twist the author managed to provide all of one example. Well, a title at least: Theoreticalal Injustices Assume Reality: A Short Treatise On The Absurdity of Botanicalal Beings Assuming Rule Over Mankind, which I'm sure the author thought was very intriguing and intelligent, but there are no contents so good luck if the characters bother to pick one up and ask what's inside.

The author wants you to make it blatantly obvious that the two events are linked in some way, but it's for Troika so given the intended audience of pretentious hobby tourists I'm guessing this was necessary for them to even have the slimmest chance of putting one and one together. Not that it matters: the pamphlets are being printed by some guy named Feng, who is also the reason that the NPC can't get his magic dirt, so the characters were probably going to deal with him anyway. It depends on if they choose to go to The Wall or not: if they go to the Blue Oak, none of this has any payoff, not that it matters since the adventure just fucking ends once you get the magic dirty, anyway.

A very simple solution is to have the characters do other adventures in Plandra, get to see the city, know the people over time, maybe even work for Feng. This way, instead of merely telling them that there are pamphlets, and they are appearing throughout the kingdom, and that they are unhinged, you could show them: at first they don't see anything, but then the next time they return notice a few of them here and there. Next time there's more. Posters could be plastered on walls. Maybe people are talking about it. Maybe other NPCs that they've gotten to know are talking about them. Maybe some plant-based NPCs are talking about them and are getting concerned.

But, one of a myriad of issues is that, as with all vapidware trash games, Troika is meant to be bought and shelved as opposed to being used, and certainly  not for any meaningful length of time, so you'd need to take this very shallow idea and port it to another system. It might sound like a lot of effort, until you realize that the author is already outsourcing most of the material to whoever is dumb enough to try and run this mess, what's a couple hours engaged in some extra conversion work? At least then there's a chance you'd be playing in an even halfway complete and interesting game system.

Before you leave Plandra Metropolis (yes, that's what the barely described starting city is called), the players might want to piss away precious time on various tasks, such as shopping (don't know how since Troika doesn't have prices), undertaking research (don't know why since this adventure doesn't explain anything), and bothering to ask importers about why The Wall stopped shipping magic dirt. 

That last one makes sense and wouldn't take much time, so of course no answers are provided. All it says is that "All of these are good ideas but require extra time". However, if the characters try to do any of this it's as good a time as any for the GM to "drop hints or even glimpses of the mysterious Auric Liquidators", which are assassins and yep there's an assassin subplot because why the fuck not? Oh, and no, the author doesn't give you any examples or suggestions on how to do this.

Now, for the what could laughably be described as the adventuring part of this laughably inadequate adventure, I'm going to start with the golden barge path since that's the first location in the book. What can you expect?

Whelp, for the ship to take off it has to be somehow flung into orbit using an undescribed "gigantic auxiliary slingshot mechanism" because its "main drives" have decayed, two things that I'm sure the author thought were very clever. It can only land in one spot even though there's no reason since it somehow avoids crashing into the ground via a combination of "a complicated process involving retrofitted explosive charges and drag nets", which I'm sure the author also thought was clever, along with the fact that the golden barges are solar-powered, but only work in space for some reason.

You can also breathe in space, and of course there are no changes or repercussions to the prevalence of oxygen in what is normally a vacuum, but its third-rate Troika trash where you have solar-powered fantasy spaceships that only arbitrarily function in "not really space" and despite typically ferrying rich people around are only armed with "flimsy turrets", while I initially wanted to say I wasn't expecting much it still manages to disappoint by a staggering degree.

Once the barge takes off the players will be subjected to a seventeeen course meal that everyone must attend and present a short speech on whatever topic you want, and are you surprised that there are no speeches prepared for any of the NPCs?

Oh, speaking of NPCs, the captain is of course completely incompetent and self-serving (he had to dye his mustache two different colors to remind himself what port and starboard are and oh my God isn’t that just so fucking FUNNY!?), there are "five foppish geriatric couples" with no names or personalities provided, whatever a "thinking-engine" specialist is (also no name), a they/themming "tatty noble" who only wants to talk about stars, also with no name, and a tapir named Frundle with a 1 in 6 chance of being able to talk because lolsorandom.

Now, there's a 2 in 6 chance that a "void beast" will attack at some undefined point, which apparently looks like...this:

Sigh.

Andrew Walter considers himself a professional artist. But then so does the guy that scribbled a bunch of shit for Deep Carbon Observatory so I guess anything goes with these postmodern hacks.

Siiigh.

Anyway, in the likely event this happens the assassins just try to disable the just-now-mentioned-and-of-course-undescribed escape equipment before...killing themselves. That's right, they won't bother trying to take out the characters, even though it's stated that they would try after the lolsorandom seventeen course dinner. They also might plant an undescribed bomb that inflicts "many d6s of damage", because just assigning a damage amount was asking too much.

Now, if the ship takes too much damage it crashes, and there's a table to randomly determine its location, which is unaffected by how long the barge has been moving. So, even if the characters just took off and got ambushed by the void beast, or the assassins decided to plant the "many d6" bomb, they might still somehow crash at the landing station that the barge can only arbitrarily land at.

Or they could be almost at the landing station, or hovering above the rainbow badlands, only for the barge to somehow, magically, get shunted all the way back to an asteroid. And on that note, might as well talk about the stupid fucking asteroid. It's inhabited by "mole-primitives", which don't look at all like moles and more like if you ordered a fungus of Yuggoth off of Wish. They have one wing but won't fly, not because they only have one wing, but because there's a giant machine that will attack anything that it thinks has flown for some reason.

The machine is in a dome, and there's not even a hint of an explanation as to how it got there or what it's purpose is, and all it does is show "a fairly mundane selection of scenes" to the fungi knockoffs. Oh, and there's a dead astronaut in whatever crater the characters happen to land nearby. It of course serves no purpose, the literary equivalent of shaking keys in front of retarded hobby tourists.

I was surprised that if you land here that was no automatic, convenient method of escape, less so that the severity of damage, deaths of passengers, and the possibility of repair is of fucking course "up to the GM". Frankly, at this point I'm surprised the author didn't just put in a single line that said, "If the ship crashes on the asteroid it's entirely up to the GM what's even there lol".

But, even though everyone should be obliterated by the crash, and the ship should be at least damaged beyond repair, and even if it wasn't it's unlikely that the characters possess the materials and/or knowledge to fix it themselves, and even if they survived, know how to fix it, and have the parts that they couldn't possibly repair it in time to stop the NPC from dying, if you're subjecting your players to this crap and want to keep punishing them, you can just do what the author suggests and have another ship conveniently show up to bail everyone out.

If you crash into the rainbow badlands, miraculously survive but are likely unable to repair the ship since the only time repairs are mentioned is on the asteroid, what very creative, engaging, and fleshed-out content can be found, there?

Nothing, of course.

It's described as desolate despite being inhabited and featuring plenty of plantlife, and stated to be easy to get lost in, though there's no mechanics supporting this so, assuming Troika even has rules for getting lost (doubtful given that it doesn't even price equipment or have treasure), you just pick your next destination on the pointcrawl map, mark off a bunch of six-siders on the time tracker, and mosey on to the next barely-described, uninspired location.

The only thing that could possibly delay your bogus journey are the "wine colored raiders" that apparently like to mill about the place and rob people. You know, the people that virtually never come here because why would they? They are vaguely described as having "little conception of the whys and wherefores of humanity", with the only lolsorandom example being that they are surprised that people have names (but a white wine colored raider has one, so...whatever).

If you can avoid fighting then they can provide unsurprisingly unspecified "confused knowledge" of the Blue Oak. Not that you need to know anything about the place to get there, beat up whatever's there, or find the magic dirt.

So, basically, if you land here you might run into a fight, and might get unspecified information about a location that you almost certainly weren't going to, anyway. But, hey, you might see some tumbleweeds, sad ghosts that probably won't have anything of interest to say, what with their "friable" memories, and an NPC doing nothing of consequence and has nothing to offer so it's all largely a waste of time.

If you manage to get to the landing station in the barge, a bunch of "bold steel masks" scattered about the ship that you didn't know about because they weren't described until just now "crackle into life" and provide landing instructions. Because, yeah, it makes sense to have a bunch of those doing that instead of like one wherever the "astrogator" happens to be controlling the thing. Oh, and if the astrogator was killed? Whelp, the players gotta land it. How? Who knows! But, if the characters happen to fail there may be dangerous consequences.

That's right, not will, but may. Yet another "up to the GM" moment.

At the station there is booze made from millipede milk because lolsorandom, and it's apparently a big deal but not really because it has zero impact on the adventure and you're on a time crunch, anyway. Feng's spies might be here but will only know who the characters are if the assassins tell them, so…whatever. There's an NPC here who is sad and wants to restore the station to its former glory, and another that’s bored...but this is again a time-based incomplete adventure and it doesn't matter so again: whatever.

There's also a handful of equally pointless, unnamed NPCs, including a "teratogen" hunter and now I realize that the author must have just learned that that word exists (though not necessarily what it means) because he shoehorns it into this adventure about as many times as he uses "humpbacked sky".

The assassins won't attack the characters here, even though they should because no one knows that they work for Feng and their masks melt their faces when removed, anyway. Plus, even if they did...so what? The NPC will likely die before anyone gets word back to him, and even if they did he certainly wouldn't last much longer and what exactly is he going to do? It's not like the assassins were going after the NPC specifically, but the characters.

The only thing surprising about The Wall is that, due to all the other lolsorandom crap I was expecting it to be like a foot high. It's apparently so tall that "clouds form along its top", and despite being a place of luxuries and oddities no one up north wants to visit it, even though it sounds precisely like the sort of place people would visit, even if just to see how enormous it is.

I was not surprised that anyone bothers to build anything on the wall, as it's both wholly impractical and pointless, the wall possesses no natural resources of any kind, and it's ruled by "teratogenic" overlords that impose arbitrary lolsorandom rules like no settlement having more than 888 people. So, despite all of that, of fucking course there are all manner of buildings and settlements scattered about. What do they do? Who knows. Where do they get food water from? Who cares stop asking obvious questions that the author was too retarded to even begin to consider.

(Sidenote: It is very briefly mentioned that "fields" jut from the surface. While these could technically be used to grow food, this isn't specified. Additionally, it would take an absurd amount of space to feed even a single settlement, much less bring all of the necessary dirt up there to plant stuff. It would make more sense to have farmlands at the base of The Wall, but then it still begs the question as to what the settlements even have to offer by way of trade or purpose.)

There are equally ridiculous methods of scaling the wall, from a "funicular railway" to a "monkey swarm" to "fancy levitating platforms", but the GM is free to "invent something even less appealing" because this is post-modern vapidware trash and everyone and thing must be ugly, stupid, and generally awful. But why would you bother? At all, I mean: the only described location is the Green Mine which is located near the base of The Wall and is "the beginning" of the magic dirt supply chain.

Not that the location of the magic dirt is specified. Oh, no no no. The only mention is a line where it says that "finding the exact source of the magic dirt might be tricky", because the citizens of The Wall like to subject others to obscure checks, declarations, and traditions that make up the laws of many settlements, none of which are described in any fashion so have fun with that.

If the players go into the Green Mine, they can confront Feng. Oddly no assassins are here. Instead, you can beat up his assistants, a goofy-ass looking monster that is a bunch of arms and a pair of legs, and maybe some harem girls. The assistants are chained up, but allowed to leave after each 15 hour shift, and keep coming back for some reason. Again, there's no specified location for the magic dirt, but the characters can find computers that I assume have some sort of information on them, yet another thing the GM has to figure out. Ditto for...whatever the alchemical equipment might be good for.

So...yeah. Initially I thought that the magic dirt wasn't even here, that the characters were supposed to come here, maybe kill Feng, or not, not find any, and then go to the Blue Oak by virtue of it being at the end of the other path on the stupid ass pointcrawl map. But on closer examination it looks like that the characters might be able to find some, somewhere. Just...wherever the GM decides to put it, I suppose. It's probably mined from the factory, which is further down the wall, so it's likely that the characters will show up, go to the factory part, do...something, no idea, find the magic dirt, and then the adventure would just unceremoniously end.

But what if the players choose the other path? You know, head to the Blue Oak based on the vague rumor that magic dirt might be there?

Okay: Feng's assassins might try to poison the stilt-loper pilot with a slow-acting poison for some reason, which kills the pilot whenever the GM feels like it. And when I say for some reason, I mean: why a slow-acting poison? Why a poison at all? Why not just kill him? Or poison the characters. Or put a "many d6s of damage" bomb in the loper like they could have the barge. The loper is incredibly difficult to pilot just because, so again why not kill the pilot outright?

Not that it matters, because just walking anywhere doesn't take any additional time, so you could have just let the players have a walking robot and it wouldn’t have affected any of the adventure. Actually, it would have allowed them to carry the magic dirt because I just now realized that they probably have no way of bringing a meaningful amount of it back.

But then, they don’t have to actually go back so nevermind.

One way or another the next area is The Eyebleed. For the most part you make a climb check to determine if it takes 3 or 5 days to get by, though the GM can subject you to more pointless NPCs and a random hazard table, which can be used whenever and includes results that don't do anything (such as wind that "sets your nerves jangling").

The only interesting thing about this place, and really the adventure in general, is that metallic particles in the air can turn your eyes red for three weeks, which is a sign that the characters passed through this location. It’s kind of neat, but is diminished by the fact that it has no impact on anything.

There's no reason to go to the Emptied Cities and I'm just going to assume that as with everything else there are, at best, a few scattered notes about largely undescribed NPCs that have no real purpose besides to pad out the page count so let's just skip that. It's also more dangerous to go through The Vomiting and you won't save any time so might as well go from The Eyebleed right into the Blue Oak.

You climb down the blue oak, no clue how you even get into it to start climbing down but whatever. There are a bunch of huts, but no one is inside which means the author conveniently doesn't have to describe the contents, not that I think he would or even could, anyway.

There's a blue oak guardian, which looks somewhat like how a child might try to draw a griffin if he was retarded. You can avoid fighting it by answering a riddle and then asking one of your own. If you fail then it wants a present, and only if you don't have anything to give it attacks. I want to point out that the guardian's riddle could have been something an NPC would have known, maybe the wine-colored raiders. Or, at least a gift that it prefers, something the characters could have gone to find or traded for. I dunno, just something that would have given any one of the NPCs some use.

Anyway, after that you can fight three "gardener knights". I have no idea how dangerous they actually are, but if you win, or avoid them, or maybe even run from them, you can probably maybe eventually find "the holy tuber", which is in a pit...somewhere. I dunno, there's no map and it's maybe implied to be nearby or something, but the magic dirt is apparently somewhere in the general location in huge piles. I guess just tell the GM that you want to mill about until you find it, as there are no random encounters or anything else of note.

In any case, as with the first route once you get it the adventure ends, unless the GM wants to make you walk it back, which in this case means maybe some more Eyebleed encounters and little if anything else.

You can find monster stats in the back, which add gimmicky behavior tables and more bad art. There's also a handful of tables with mostly awful names, occupations that you won't need to mention because it's completely irrelevant and this adventure is intended to at best be a one-shot, and golden barge meals that no one will care about or remember.

This adventure confirms what I said in my Troika review:

Troika just tosses the terms [portals, crystal spheres, and golden-sailed barges] about, not caring if the readers would want to know the basics. Or perhaps the author knows his audience, that they don't really give a fuck, or are so stupid that they won't even realize that some very, very obvious questions go unanswered. Or maybe he knows that they aren't going to play it, anyway, and just churn out equally awful adventures, supplements, and pointlessly derivative "hacks".

As with Red and Pleasant Land and Deep Carbon Observatory, there's so much wrong with what little is there--including godawful post-modern "art"--that there's no point in trying to salvage it, especially given that you are expected to do about half the work to fill in the myriad gaps, and what the author could be bothered to contribute is little more than pointless page padding.

Instead, take the basic idea of an NPC dying from something, and the characters need to race to find the cure before it's too late, and just write your own adventure. Frankly, you could only do as bad or worse if you are also a lazy, entitled, untalented, grifting narcissist with delusions of being a designer, artist, or both.

Next up, I’m going to review one of those cursed scrolls that no one’s talking about.

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