The Claudia Contingency is clever re-imagining of a classic tale with a heavy dash of horror. (Bust out those Safety Tools, folks!)
The mini-campaign was clearly designed with ease of use in mind. You have a one-page scenario background, a mission structure flowchart, and a “research phase” which reminds me of Sly Flourish’s Secrets & Clues – the information isn’t tied to a particular location or NPC, it’s just there for the GM to weave into the game as they see fit. There are 2d6 Reaction style tables for, “What are these NPCs up to?”, and a list of Quick NPCs in the back, for when you accidentally make a background character a bit too intriguing and need a name and personality now.
Update: In my original review, I mentioned it’d be helpful to have a final page with all the major NPCs in one place. The author was kind enough to update the PDF with a two-page reference for key NPCs at the end!
I’m being purposely vague about the plot and focusing mostly on the design, but this adventure looks like a lot of fun to run. I definitely recommend checking it out and can’t wait to run it myself.
The Claudia Contingency is an extremely beefy, feature length mini-campaign for FIST that dives into the neat subgenre of Peter Pan horror. It is *not* a lighthearted module, and it gets very intense at points, but it is very well-written and designed.
The PDF is 23 pages, with a clean but dense layout and a lot of helpful diagrams and maps.
Contents-wise, Claudia Contingency has a great structure and sense of pacing. It has a clear, urgent hook. Multiple avenues for investigation. And a growing sense of certainty and dread that culminates in a hellscape.
There are a few subsystems for this campaign, including a CYCLOPS tension tracker that results in hostile interference if the players act too overtly. There's also a somewhat odd 'spirit animal' system for NPCs, where they succeed or fail checks based on whether that makes sense for the animal---I'm not 100% this system is more efficient that just mentioning an NPC's profession, or that it wouldn't benefit from a different name, but it is an interesting experiment.
The campaign's framework is well-organized and ultimately reacts to the actions of the players. They might go to one location, kill the big bad, and wrap up in a one session speedrun. Or they might chase down dozens of leads and then set off a nuke in a hostile dreamrealm. There's a wide range of possibilities that the module accomodates.
The writing throughout is direct, informational, and technical. It's easy to read, and does an excellent job of conveying exactly what the GM needs to know.
The threats and challenges facing the PCs are complex, with lots of ways to solve them. The foes in Claudia Contingency also have a lot of variation to them. It's not d6 zombies in a hallway. Everything feels like a unique tactical encounter.
Overall, this is a solid, atmospheric, and at times quite eerie mini campaign. It fits FIST's style very nicely, but could also be adapted for a high lethality Delta Green, Call Of Cthulhu, or NWoD mortals game.
That said, I would *not* read this if exhaustive clinical descriptions of routine abuse might in any way bother you. I said it at the start, but I'll say it again. This gets very, incisively, dark. If you've got the tolerance level for Delta Green scenarios or you normally play that type of material, you will likely be fine.
Minor Issues:
-The CW maybe undersells how intense this supplement gets with intimate partner violence, medical horror, gender horror, and state-sanctioned abuse. I'm pretty deadened to descriptions of human cruelty, but the writing here is quite strong and it got all the way under my skin.
-Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962. I'm not 100% sure that syncs up with the time period during which the NATIONAL SUBMARINE DEFENSE TASK FORCE was operational.
-Page 14, "at dusk cricket overlap" crickets
-There's a few discordant elements in the scenario and places where the tone changes a little jarringly. "Woo woo knowledge", the PSI crystals, the crocodile, the goats. The goats are neat, and feel strange and menacing, and the writing on the crocodile is really strong. The Netherland being the way it is could be accounted for by Heaton having read Peter Pan to NICO, but some Netherland elements (the PSI crystals, the lobster) really feel like they're a different genre from the stuff the submarine base set up for. If the crystals were some other sort of object, something more intrinsically connected with who NICO is and how NICO sees the world, I don't think there'd be this dissonance.
Per your insightful observations, I've fixed the cricket sentence, enhanced the content warning, hinted at a later date for the research station, and fiddled a bit with the write up for the crystals. I'm still dwelling on what a more suiting replacement could be : they'll probably be converted to shadowless statues in the next iteration/update.
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(Copied from my Game Jam review)
The Claudia Contingency is clever re-imagining of a classic tale with a heavy dash of horror. (Bust out those Safety Tools, folks!)
The mini-campaign was clearly designed with ease of use in mind. You have a one-page scenario background, a mission structure flowchart, and a “research phase” which reminds me of Sly Flourish’s Secrets & Clues – the information isn’t tied to a particular location or NPC, it’s just there for the GM to weave into the game as they see fit. There are 2d6 Reaction style tables for, “What are these NPCs up to?”, and a list of Quick NPCs in the back, for when you accidentally make a background character a bit too intriguing and need a name and personality now.
Update: In my original review, I mentioned it’d be helpful to have a final page with all the major NPCs in one place. The author was kind enough to update the PDF with a two-page reference for key NPCs at the end!
I’m being purposely vague about the plot and focusing mostly on the design, but this adventure looks like a lot of fun to run. I definitely recommend checking it out and can’t wait to run it myself.
The Claudia Contingency is an extremely beefy, feature length mini-campaign for FIST that dives into the neat subgenre of Peter Pan horror. It is *not* a lighthearted module, and it gets very intense at points, but it is very well-written and designed.
The PDF is 23 pages, with a clean but dense layout and a lot of helpful diagrams and maps.
Contents-wise, Claudia Contingency has a great structure and sense of pacing. It has a clear, urgent hook. Multiple avenues for investigation. And a growing sense of certainty and dread that culminates in a hellscape.
There are a few subsystems for this campaign, including a CYCLOPS tension tracker that results in hostile interference if the players act too overtly. There's also a somewhat odd 'spirit animal' system for NPCs, where they succeed or fail checks based on whether that makes sense for the animal---I'm not 100% this system is more efficient that just mentioning an NPC's profession, or that it wouldn't benefit from a different name, but it is an interesting experiment.
The campaign's framework is well-organized and ultimately reacts to the actions of the players. They might go to one location, kill the big bad, and wrap up in a one session speedrun. Or they might chase down dozens of leads and then set off a nuke in a hostile dreamrealm. There's a wide range of possibilities that the module accomodates.
The writing throughout is direct, informational, and technical. It's easy to read, and does an excellent job of conveying exactly what the GM needs to know.
The threats and challenges facing the PCs are complex, with lots of ways to solve them. The foes in Claudia Contingency also have a lot of variation to them. It's not d6 zombies in a hallway. Everything feels like a unique tactical encounter.
Overall, this is a solid, atmospheric, and at times quite eerie mini campaign. It fits FIST's style very nicely, but could also be adapted for a high lethality Delta Green, Call Of Cthulhu, or NWoD mortals game.
That said, I would *not* read this if exhaustive clinical descriptions of routine abuse might in any way bother you. I said it at the start, but I'll say it again. This gets very, incisively, dark. If you've got the tolerance level for Delta Green scenarios or you normally play that type of material, you will likely be fine.
Minor Issues:
-The CW maybe undersells how intense this supplement gets with intimate partner violence, medical horror, gender horror, and state-sanctioned abuse. I'm pretty deadened to descriptions of human cruelty, but the writing here is quite strong and it got all the way under my skin.
-Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962. I'm not 100% sure that syncs up with the time period during which the NATIONAL SUBMARINE DEFENSE TASK FORCE was operational.
-Page 14, "at dusk cricket overlap" crickets
-There's a few discordant elements in the scenario and places where the tone changes a little jarringly. "Woo woo knowledge", the PSI crystals, the crocodile, the goats. The goats are neat, and feel strange and menacing, and the writing on the crocodile is really strong. The Netherland being the way it is could be accounted for by Heaton having read Peter Pan to NICO, but some Netherland elements (the PSI crystals, the lobster) really feel like they're a different genre from the stuff the submarine base set up for. If the crystals were some other sort of object, something more intrinsically connected with who NICO is and how NICO sees the world, I don't think there'd be this dissonance.
Per your insightful observations, I've fixed the cricket sentence, enhanced the content warning, hinted at a later date for the research station, and fiddled a bit with the write up for the crystals. I'm still dwelling on what a more suiting replacement could be : they'll probably be converted to shadowless statues in the next iteration/update.
Thanks!