Into The Odd Review

It’s, ahem, odd: I’ve reviewed a number of incomplete vapidware trash games pinched out by lazy, untalented, attention-starved narcissists, and yet I’ve never touched on one of the first. It might even be the first, but that’s a digital abyss I’d rather not delve too deeply into, lest I uncover somehow more inept creations best forgotten by time and apathy.

I remember hearing about Into the Odd here and there, in various G+ circles, semi-coherently praised by intellectually and creatively bankrupt hobby hipsters. Back then it was a barely formatted PDF, merely a couple dozen pages of shallow ideas in length, but since then it’s …grown. In page count, at any rate: it’s still barely formatted and there’s still nothing of substance or interest and so in this regard it could be likened to a literary tumor.

There are various images shoehorned here and there. All of it looks poorly photobashed, various Creative Commons art and graphics that have been crudely cobbled together with perhaps one or more Photoshop filters smeared over the top, but without any real focus and barely-if-any relation to the rules and text on the pages where it appears:

But what else did you expect from the guy that also shoveled out post-modern visual slop for Mork Borg? Quality? Talent? Creativity? Pfffft.

The premise is that you are an adventurer, which the author calls an explorer for no discernible reason, who is, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, looking for loot, knowledge, and/or power.

While this isn’t original by any means it’s still adequate, at least conceptually, though I can only praise the author insofar that he took a tried-and-true cliche and actually retained it, albeit only at the surface level since there’s no interesting loot or knowledge to find, and barely anything to do with whatever you happen to get.

There’s a sort of implied setting, by which I mean you’re initially subjected to less than half of a digest-sized page devoted to something resembling a trite elevator pitch: the world is, yawn, somehow too big to map and too old to record. It’s vaguely suggested that the world might have once been more or less normal, whatever that means, but has been transformed in largely undefined ways to make it “odd”, whatever that means: a single paragraph makes mention of strange weeds, corrosive mists from the sea, and black mountains on the horizon.

At the start all of two places are ever-so-briefly-mentioned: Bastion and the Underground. Surprising no one, neither name is imaginative, nor is the fact that the author could only be bothered to muster a handful of sentences for each and so the discerning reviewer is left to ponder: if this is the best you could do, why bother at all?

A sentiment that, of course, can be applied to this shallow game as a whole.

To create a character you roll 3d6, because remember that’s what you might have done in some versions of D&D? You assign each result to Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower in order, because oh oh remember that’s also what you might have done in some versions of D&D?

Strength is basically Strength and Constitution mashed together, which doesn’t make much sense. Dexterity is Dexterity, and Willpower is basically Wisdom and Charisma mashed together, which also doesn’t make much sense. Intelligence is absent, which I think is, heh, oddly fitting given the overall quality and depth of this, ahem, proto-game.

Each character also starts with 1d6 hit poi—, er, sorry, hit protection, described as your ability to “avoid life-threatening damage”. The rules for damage and healing are needlessly scattered about a bit, so I’ll just explain how I think it’s supposed to work here:

• When you take damage, it can be reduced by armor, usually a piddly amount ranging from 1-2.

• When you run out of hit protection excess damage goes to Strength, and after this is reduced in any amount you make a Strength save to avoid taking “critical damage”.

• If you take critical damage you can’t do anything until someone tends to you in an unspecified manner and take a “short rest”, which merely requires “a few minutes of rest and a swig of water”, which also restores all lost hit protection.

• If no one tends to you for up to an hour after suffering any amount of “critical damage” you immediately die.

• If Strength is reduced to 0 you also just immediately die.

• You need to rest for an entire week you get it all back, otherwise nothing happens, ever.

So…interesting idea at least at the conceptual level, but is of course horribly botched because the designer is a shit-peddling hack. A very simple way to make it far superior is to have some Strength replenish with each day of rest. Make it a check or something. Otherwise as it stands you can rest for six days and see no results, but if you were able to squeeze in that extra day? Well then you would have been immediately, magically healed to full.

There’s also the issue that even 1 point of Strength damage can be considered “critical”, meaning that you can basically lose a fraction of your Strength-based hit points and die in an hour. Actually, that’s another issue: the amount of damage suffered has no bearing on how long you can live and whether you are incapacitated: you can suffer 1 or 5 or 15, fail the save by wildly different amounts, yet in each case be in precisely the same critical state.

But then it’s post-modern slop so it’s not like you were paying for ingenuity or common sense.

Starting gear is for some reason linked to your highest ability score and hit protection. While you don’t get lol-so-random results like in Troika, you do get vaguely defined abilities like “sense nearby unearthly beings” or “Telepath if target fails WIL Save”. No explanation is given for the presence of any of these, not that I think the author could even begin to offer up anything remotely satisfactory.

Equipment is hilariously underwhelming, taking up most of two pages. Most everything is lumped into a purely arbitrary category—ie, crude weapon, “noble” weapon, tools, etc—with little-to-no rhyme or reason, though some items such as bombs and antitoxin get their own lines, as do the three types of hirelings that the author bothered to tack on at the end.

Your unarmed attack inflicts 1d4 damage. Crude weapons–which includes bows for some reason–are a small step up at 1d6. Hand weapons also inflict 1d6 damage, regardless as to whether it’s a dagger or sword, with the only benefit being that they aren’t Bulky.

What the author considers to be “field weapons” inflict 1d8 damage but are also for some reason “bulky”. This category includes the sword and dagger as a pair, some of the easiest-to-carry weapons ever devised. Armor only comes in two flavors: modern and crude. Both are identical, except crude armor costs less and is bulky even though most medieval armor barely inhibited you at all (yes, even plate).

It’s all very gamey in the worst way, like a board game with minor roleplay elements tacked on as an afterthought, typical of a shallow derivative fueled by apathy, greed, and post-modern…sensibilities, let’s say, as if the designer couldn’t be bothered to even begin to consider a proper way to differentiate anything, and so just arbitrarily slapped “bulky” on weapons with examples that, frankly, wouldn’t be bulky at all.

Unlike Troika there are prices, though they’re about as phoned in as everything else so I can’t exactly call it a plus.

For example, each weapon in a given category costs the same no matter what it is, so a sword and dagger, two incredibly cheap weapons, cost the same as a musket or brace of–presumably two or more but who really knows how many–pistols. I don’t even know why you need more than one pistol, as there’s no ammunition or gunpowder, and the rules don’t account for anything resembling a reload time.

You would think that a gun, being more complicated to make, would be more valuable than, say, a dagger, but nope: same cost. Also, how come a sword and dagger individually costs 2 silvers, but a sword and dagger combo is 10? How many pistols are in a “brace”? What happens if you give or trade one or more away? How many until it’s no longer a “brace”?

These are but a handful of some very obvious common sense questions that these surface level simulacra routinely fail to answer because the designer is inept and/or doesn’t give a fuck, the audience is retarded and/or doesn’t give a fuck, or some combination of the above.

Probably all.

Anyway, for I guess what you might consider adventuring gear there’s a woefully inadequate Tools category (which frankly only needed to mention Into the Odd hobby tourists). Everything here costs 1 silver, whether you are buying a short length of rope, glue, spikes (no number, just “spikes”), or a fucking magnifying glass.

The other gear category is Luxuries. This one includes vague items such as clockwork items. Or a thermometer. Or jewelry. Not jewelry as a category, it just says “jewelry”, with no mention as to what it is, how much, or the quality. There’s also whatever the hell “ornaments” are. Regardless, any one or two or however many of these things will cost you a single gold piece.

You can spend varying amounts of money depending on where you want to sleep, but there’s no benefit or drawback for any so if you’re stupid and/or desperate enough to bother playing this I guess always go with the cheapest option. Same for food. I have no idea why RPGs put this crap in here with absolutely no mechanical benefit. Even something as simple as slightly increased hit point recovery would be something.

All attacks always hit. You know, just like in real life. Ranged weapons cannot be used in melee, period, with no explanation given as to why you couldn’t point-blank shoot someone with a pistol, except I suppose some bizarre and arbitrary interpretation of “balance”.

If you attack an enemy while Impaired, you’ll only deal 1d4 damage no matter what your normal damage is. Conversely, if you attack something and are Enhanced you instead deal 1d12 no matter what. It would have made any amount of sense to just say “roll damage twice and take the lowest/highest result”, but then that requires juuust the teeniest, tiniest bit of critical thinking.

Adjusting damage output is the only effect of being Impaired or Enhanced, mind you. Even sillier, one of the examples for Impaired is “firing through cover”. In a normal game this would affect accuracy because that actually makes sense, but you can’t do that here because, again, it panders to hobby tourists so every attack magically hits.

Even if, say, you’re loosing an arrow at a guy hundreds of feet away, mostly concealed by an arrowslit, surrounded by other mooks, whilst half-blind and trying to ignore the latest batch of Brody Bunch hangers-on desperately trying to convince you that 1:1 time is a valid way to play and/or has any sort of benefit.

It’s like 5E’s Advantage/Disadvantage, just by another name but just as retarded.

Blast weapons affect an arbitrary number of targets. Sure, it says “all targets in an appropriate area” but there are no examples so it’s entirely up to the GM to bullshit the results.

If you are “deprived” of something you can’t benefit from resting, and since there’s no rules for starvation or dehydration if anything stops you from resting then you might as well not bother, because this is a superficial derivative for goldfish-brained casuals who lack the attention span to track something like a character both starving and, say, freezing to death.

Not that there are rules or even recommendations on either of those things.

While the bulky term is mentioned multiple times, it isn’t explained until page 19, the very end of the playing the game chapter. You’d think the author—or, rather, an even halfway competent designer—would explain it in the starting equipment section or even in what could be laughably described as the equipment section but, nope, tucked into the ass end of playing the game is…certainly something, I suppose.

Bulky items “generally” require two hands or significant storage to carry. Generally, so…not always, though no exceptions are given. So, yeah: a dagger and sword magically require significant storage to carry, even though, again, these are some of the least cumbersome weapons ever created, but then what did you expect when your vapidware trash game is fueled by nonsense board game logic?

Note that a sword or dagger isn’t considered bulky. No idea if it means a sword and dagger pair, or if you are carrying a dagger there’s no problem until you pick up a sword. Even more amusing is that anybody regardless of Strength carrying three or more bulky “items” is immediately reduced to 0 hit protection.

So…you can have three swords, which frankly isn’t that unreasonable, and carrying these will present absolutely no issues whatsoever. You can then strap a dagger to, say, each leg. Also no problem. It’s only when you pick up that third dagger does your HP immediately plummet to 0. Hell, you can carry three swords, two daggers, and then a bunch of other random shit without any issues, just don’t you dare lay a finger on another dagger!

This is only somewhat more amusing given that none of this is impacted by your Strength, meaning that characters with Strength scores of 3 or 18 can carry the exact same amount of crap.

(I should note that I fully expected this game to utilize a nonsense item slot gimmick, but try as I might I couldn’t find any rules on carrying items besides three Bulky things. Honestly I’m not sure what is worse: item slots or…whatever the fuck this is supposed to be. They’re both vastly inferior to just tracking gear like a normal person. Frankly, if you’re just going to half-ass a nonsense encumbrance gimmick in a pathetic bid to justify your gameslop just don’t bother at all.)

Arcana are magic items by another name, I suppose. Instead of a proper table it does the “d66” gimmick, but only for the least powerful/useful versions. I’m surprised that they mostly have useful features without any contrived drawback, less so that none are described visually, and effects barely so.

For example, the pale flame causes an object you touch to glow with white light. The pale flame isn’t described, and I guess you have to touch the object, and not with whatever the fuck the pale flame is. There’s also no duration. The object causes a “chilling pain” if you touch it while it is glowing, but no mention of how much damage so…whatever.

There’s also the soul chain, which isn’t described in any way. A target you touch has to make a Dexterity save or lose 1d6 Willpower, and you get a glimpse of whatever they desire. Again, I guess you just have to hold whatever the hell the soul chain is, and your touch causes the Willpower drain?

With the flesh-tome of babble you can speak in a “strange sounding language”, and every living thing can understand you, and also reply in the same language. Do you just have to hold the book? Read from it? Can it just be in your backpack?

I skimmed the PDF trying to find an answer, and found a section nineteen fucking pages later called Discovering Arcana. Why the hell isn’t this before Arcana are (barely) described? Or at the end of that section? Mind you it didn’t clarify anything, and seemed to be shoehorned here to pad out the treasure and riches “chapter”, which is just four pages counting a badly photobashed image

But then I suppose even the most hipster of indie hipsters would balk at a one-page “”””“chapter”””””.

Maybe.

Depends on if they’re “allowed” to negatively criticize it.

There are a couple pages mostly devoted to leveling up. There are only five levels, and you advance based solely on the number of expeditions, which isn’t affected at all by what happened or how long they lasted.

Now, this could have been easily handled by simply creating a table that clearly states the number of expeditions required to reach a given level, but that wouldn’t have taken up as much space and there’s already barely anything on the pages as is, so the author created a sort of list with plenty of padding between each level to give you the illusion of content.

Which would also describe virtually all of the book, really, but I digress.

For example, level 1 is “a brand new character, you are ready to go on an expedition”, level 2 is “you have survived at least one expedition”, and level 3 is “you have survived at least three expeditions since reaching [2nd-level]”. In other words, you need to survive four expeditions to get to 3rd-level, but again this would have drastically reduced the amount of unnecessary text.

Getting to 4th-level requires a total of nine expeditions, and for no particular reason you can’t get to 5th-level unless you have a 3rd-level apprentice and survive but a single expedition. Basically, you cap out after 10 expeditions, meaning that you can hit the level cap in less than a month, assuming your character takes breaks now and then to do…what the fuck ever characters are supposed to be doing when they aren’t looking for banal magic items or bothering to employ the woefully anemic business/army rules.

Starting a business or setting up an army costs 10 gold pieces. Doesn’t matter how big it is or what you’re doing, because that would require some amount of effort to figure out, or even just bullshit some values for a small army, medium army, business with medium risk and high profit potential, business with low risk and low profit potential, etc.

Similar to playing this trash game in the first place, why you would bother starting a business is beyond me: there are only five levels, you don’t get anything meaningful anyway, and there’s nothing to do, no customization. A business brings in 1d4 gold each month, but also costs 1d4 gold, again, regardless of initial investment, what you’re actually doing or how big it is.

If you can’t pay the gold for…whatever reason it just immediately collapses. On the plus side there’s no additional loss or penalties, so you can just try again later without any impediments.

A business can somehow make a profit. How this happens isn’t explained but if it does then the amount of gold you make is increased by a die, so if you were making 1d4 you then start making 1d6. The upside is that this amount magically never decreases, but the downside is that you roll the same die for the amount you have to pay because as we all know every business always has the same chance to make zero profit in a given month.

Oh, and regardless as to how long it’s been going or how much profit you get if you can’t pay off your expenses the business still immediately, automatically collapses. No, you can’t even abstractly sell assets, get a loan, maybe reduce your income die by a step to pay anything off. Nope, it just folds and you gotta start over from scratch. Not that I’m sure why you even need cash beyond buying whatever weapon and armor you’re cool with because you can’t even starve.

I think the point of getting an army is to just have it follow you around into dungeons and fight on your behalf. You can also hire mercenaries but an army is like an amorphous blob that is magically immune to individual attacks, and attacks made against “individuals” are Enhanced so they always inflict 1d12 damage meaning there’s little reason to equip them with decent weapons, or at all.

They can suffer damage and have stats but I couldn’t find anything that explains how to determine starting stats so oh well.

Then there’s a list for stuff like houses and cannons. Cannons deal 1d12 damage, and since a fort only has 15 HP expect it to get blown up pretty quickly by anyone packing cannons. Houses cost a measly 10 gold, not that you need one because it’s not like you’ll have anything meaningful to store and it doesn’t have any mechanical impact.

Though the Treasure and Riches page mentions artwork, gems, and a “huge variety of coins”, the only treasure described are copper pieces, gold pieces, and bank notes. What makes this especially pathetic is that it’s clear the guy is just barely tweaking D&D and it’s not like most of the legwork hasn’t already been done for decades.

The section explaining how magic items work is 28 pages after the section that briefly mentions specific magic items. This should have been right before that, or that should have been right after this but I guess organization is hard. Anyway I’m sure it explains how magic items work so moving on.

The page spread on hazards specifies that all hazards no matter what should be noticed automatically by any character, unless they are running, visually impaired, or distracted. In other words, the game’s difficulty defaults to hobby tourist which isn’t surprising given the intended audience.

It seems like any character can auto-pick a lock over an unspecified period of time. I agree with this because locks are hilariously easy to pick, especially medieval ones, though I don’t think the author went this route because he bothered to perform even the slightest amount of research on the subject, rather he knew his intended audience would sperg the fuck out if they failed to pick a lock and had to conceive of some other means of bypassing it.

There is no proper monster section. Instead the author deigned to slap together a four-page “chapter” called Encounters. Here you are given a pittance of rehashed advice on how to make a monster (why isn’t it called Monsters instead of Encounters is puzzling), with around half of it graciously devoted to providing you with all of seven monsters.

Only one is sort of described, but there’s also no terrible photobashery so you, well…this isn’t so much you win some and lose some as it is you lose some, and then you lose some more, but the second time around is more than the first time.

Limping out of the gate there’s a dust hag. It’s presumably a hag, and it can turn to dust at will, but there’s no explanation as to what this entails so…yeah.

She attacks with her claws, though no damage is provided so might as well spam the “dust staff” attack, which doesn’t involve a staff at all and envelopes a target in dust that deals Willpower damage unless the target makes a Willpower save. It ends on a successful save, but you can just keep spamming it, and since there's no limitation the hag could technically hit the same target with multiple “dust staffs”.

She can also create an eye that lets her see through it, but there’s no maximum range or whatever. The eye can be destroyed to deal 1d6 Willpower to the hag, but no mention of how much hit protection it has, or its Strength so…I guess you figure it out?

The whole thing reeks of ShadowDark, where Kelsey was too lazy and incompetent to give monsters more than one or two things to do, though this came out much earlier so I guess it’s more accurate to say ShadowDark reeks of Into the Odd. Or that they both reek of slapdash, post-modernist Nu-SR (Nu-Superficial Rehashes) shit.

Oh look the Strange Hunter is the predator hurr durr because remember that movie exists?

I’m surprised that the author bothered providing damage values for its shoulder-mounted beam-gun and “strange blade”, less so that it doesn’t have any special ability to remain hidden. The only thing I’m curious about is if the author didn’t want to add even a single line stating, for example, “ranged attacks against it are Impaired” because it would have messed with the layout, or if he was just too stupid to come up with something so simple.

No idea what a bone crawler looks like. It has claws and can try to pin you down to enter your mouth so that it can auto-kill you and hibernate within your body. If no one else does anything to it for an entire month it emerges with better stats, but no idea if or how its appearance might change. Not that you knew what it looked like in the first place.

I think it’s supposed to be a barely tweaked facehugger/xenomorph, but all it does it claw you so…meh.

There’s also a dead echo, which is…something that only bothers you if you kill something using a “cursed black gun”, which is only found only within Bastion’s vaults. So…just don’t do that and there’s no problem. I guess it’s technically described, appealing as a “mutilated copy” of whoever it is haunting. But again, it only bothers you if you kill with a specific cursed weapon found only in one place, so why waste page space on this instead of something of more general use?

In a normal game produced by someone even halfway competent that gives a fuck, The Odd World chapter is where you would expect to get some setting information, something to help you understand what the world is like and better write thematic adventures for it.

Alas, this was in fact not produced by someone even halfway competent who gives a fuck so of course it’s a scant four pages. This includes a poorly photobashed image taking up an entire page, and then another eating up about a third on two more, so if we’re being generous there’s probably…I dunno, a page and half worth of text?

For the entire world.

You get a few more sentences about Bastion and the Underground, as well as a few for the countryside, which mentions “smaller cities”, none of which are named or detailed in any way but were you honestly expecting them to be? There’s a bit about a place called the Golden Lands, which is “a rumored land of limitless power” and then the other two sentences are just about how no one has found it.

Very compelling. I’m sure no one else could have possibly conceived of Atlantis by another name and then not bothered to provide any details about it.

And, finally, at around the halfway mark we get to the first of what could very generously be technically labeled an adventure. It’s a series of text boxes with bullet points and words, presented somehow lazier than the setting description:

There’s a random encounter table that the author repeats whenever he needs to eat up some space, and a few monster entries refer you to various rooms for stats (see the above image).

Sometimes a room has some sort of gimmick. For example, room 2 is The Red Room. Here if you cut the wall for some reason it slowly heals, and if you fail a Willpower save you’ll fall unconscious and be slowly digested.

This is the only room where this happens. Additionally, you’re only digested if you fall asleep: otherwise you can hang out in the room, do whatever, and never suffer any damage or consequences.

Room 3 is the Collapsed Escape Route (presumably you could excavate it but there are no rules or guidelines so have fun figuring that out). Here an undefined number of tendrils with an undefined range will emerge and attack you.

This is the only room where this happens.

One of a myriad ways to easily and greatly improve on this dull dungeon would have been to repeat certain effects so that players could learn. You could do this by color-coding rooms, or even size and shape. So, red rooms could digest you and narrow passages have tendrils. Could also use visual cues, or description. Maybe the sleep effect is sound-based, so if characters hear certain noises could realize that going into a given area might knock them out.

It reminds me of Maze of the Blue Medusa, where each room has its own absurd gimmick to amaze and distract retards, just more restrained. It also reminds me of Red and Pleasant Land, where many rooms had little to no description:

“Contains horse stuff”. It’s like if Joss Whedon wrote an adventure.

Into the Odd is the literary equivalent of deciding to record yourself making a sandwich for YouTube, and slapping that ham you get from a deli that looks like a congealed brick and a slice of Kraft cheese between two slices of white bread, and then deluding yourself into thinking that you accomplished something of merit.

Actually that’s still technically a complete sandwich, so I guess it would be more like saying you’re going to make a ham sandwich and then forgetting the bread. Or knowing that you need bread but can’t be bothered to go to the kitchen to get it, or bug your parents to go to the store to get some. So, you just pretend that a slice of cheese layered in the foundation of disgusting brick ham is sufficient.

As with Mork Borg, Troika, ShadowDark, Index Card RPG, and countless other games in the Nu-Superficial Rehashes genre, Into the Odd lacks purpose and fails to justify its existence. It’s essentially a heavily stripped-down version of an older edition of D&D, with stale tweaks and house rules. These changes barely impact the game, are deeply flawed, and/or don’t even make sense.

You can get a similar experience just by playing D&D. Probably OD&D, though 1st or 2nd also largely lacks character growth so they could work. The upside is that you’ll have a more or less complete game with rules that cover common adventuring scenarios and circumstances. Encumbrance and weapons will make sense, or at least more sense. If you go with 2nd Edition there’s also art that is both better and actual art, plus better formatting all around.

I guess the only potential downside is that there will be, y’know, rules, though you can just ignore them. You probably were anyway, because flipping through a book can take a minute or two and some people just don’t have the attention for that sort of thing. But if you can be bothered to, well, read it’s quite beneficial: speeds up time and keeps things consistent, and can reflect what the designer intended.

As for the setting, you could simply declare that the game is largely set in a Layered Metropolis, and you’d be just as prepared. Hell, you could even go the extra meter by slapping a generic name onto your Frozen North or other regional clichés, though with interesting treasures and meaningful activities your players might actually feel compelled to visit those places.

(And if you wanted to at least mine something for ideas, for the city at least, just get the 3rd Edition D&D book Sharn: City of Towers. Whatever edition you’re using doens’t matter, it’s got maps and names and hooks you can feasibly use or repurpose.)

But I get it: Into the Odd isn’t a game meant to be played. It’s intended to be purchased for a fleeting dopamine fix—something that won’t challenge your diminishing intellect and attention span, something you already own countless variations of under different names, something you’ll probably never read or use (not that that will stop you from buying the next poorly conceived vapidware trash grift).

Something that, with merely a pittance of passion, a bit of effort, and a relatively calm weekend—assuming you can stay off social media—you could have easily created yourself.