I Read "ItHot3bw" !!

 OSR CIRCLEJERK WARNING - I know Noisms well and play with Dave Greggs on the regular so strap on your circlejerk face guard.

Noisms of Monsters and Manuals has released his latest Kickstarted effort; In The Halls of the Third Blue Wizard, Volume 1, or as I shall be calling it "ItHot3bw"

So what did I think?

I liked it.

Art good = Fresco with Orcs good

Fiction Good = 

surprisingly not terrible at all

good elf birth scene

decent dungeon delve from the pov of a linkboy

a lot of potential to explore here

Adventures Good *largely* = 

Good inspiration

Good individual content

Some issues with playability

and most importantly, FOR ME, any problems with playability and text arrangement massively amplified by the FORMAT of the whole text

THE CONTENTS

"Offspring of the Siphoned Demon" by Ben Gibson - I did not really like this one I am sorry. If you did post a review to even the karma.

"The Black Pyramid" by Terrible Sorcery - COHERENT and PLAYABLE. Do you want to play in a dungeon that isn't a bunch of crazy pretentious bullshit and you can get it done in a session or two? Well here you go.

"The Chevrelier" by Brian Saliba - entertaining for as long as it was and probably good it wasn't longer as the idea was slight.

"Fresco with Orcs" by Joel Sammallahti - a very good illustration, my favourite of the book, I both want to know more about this world and situation, but also do not as, it would only clarify that which should remain pregnant with possibility.

"The Cerulean Valley" by George Seibold - a dense, coherent and interesting hexcrawl with a very good map - very playable, just charming.

"The Thirteen Dwarves" by J. Blasso-Gieseke - an amusing aperitif piece of dungeoneering meta-fiction about endlessly repeating dwarves, also exactly the size it is meant to be, which is short.

"Winter in Bugtown" by J. Colussy-Estes - nice side-on map, good concept might be difficult to use.

"Goblin Cave Battle" - its Kelvin Greens art, I do not love it myself but hopefully you do.

"The Hollow Tomb" by Harry Menear - a decent dungeon, compact, drowned lower level, tragic backstory.

"A Turn of Fortune" by Jose Carlos "Kha" Dominguez - Dungeon with what I found to be an inventive but maybe frustrating core concept of living/unliving statues, visible in magical mirrors, a whole dungeon layout mgical trick thing which is neat in concept. How will it play through?

"The Belly of the Fishy Beast" by Sam Doebler - an image AND a dungeon and a map, probably the most immediately playable thing in the book.

"The Beloved and Oft-Recounted Tale of the Mysterious Birth" by J.C. Luxton. A luxurious and well-written scene or story fragment from an Eld Court. Feels _very_ ItHot3bw I liked this one.

"The Transmuter" by Luca Vanzella. Excellent picture. Also feels very ItHot3bw.

"The First Fantasy World-Builder: William Morris The Well at the Worlds End by Roger SG Sorolla. Scholarly article, massive blog post and/or world creation thing? Whatever it is this feels VERY ItHot3bw - there are, or were, some bloggers who it felt were always meant to be in print - Tom K's Middenmurk was an exemplar of this, long posts with very rich language and almost as much an essay as a piece of experimental fiction and world building, more of this sort of thing please. Like, you can't lean back in your chair and smoke a pipe in your hobbit hole in front of a fucking computer, you can with a book and I feel like this is the kind of book ItHot3bw is trying to become.

"Moonrythm Mire" by Dave Greggs - ok, LOTS of caveats - know this guy, play with him, weird intense lyrical fantasy, ARGUABLY waaay too many moving parts. I liked it a lot. There were no adventures where I wanted to edit the content but many were I did want to move text around for clarity and playability and this is one. Ok I liked it a lot. Bizarre encounters in a magical mire with various Bande-Dessenie style factions and entities bouncing into each other and being weird.

"The Garden of Khal Adel" by Zane Scheider a location-based adventure in a musical-themed supercave (I think) with Goblins. Is decent, I was hoping for more orientalism from the title but ok.

Coils - a good illustration by Bert Bogaerts

"She Who Came to Oldgraves" by Autumn Moore, a dungeoneering story from the perspective of a local linkboy hired by the strangers who came to his village. Nebulous horrors and strange deaths await. Will there be anyone left to pay him his sliver piece by the end? In its content and theme this also feels very ItHot3bw. Classic Dungeoneering para-fiction. Not like 5e im-the-dragonborn-in-the-party stuff but maybe stuff like the story of the Silversmith who identified a magical ring for passing adventurers he never saw again and was perhaps cursed by dreamlike memories of an ancient time for a while, or the father of a runaway boy trying to find him, tracing his wanderings through life and death situations but always arriving after the event.

"The Devil in the Land of Rushes" -  by Noisms. Another boatload of Circlejerk warnings but I really liked this! Another really fucking dense adventure, in this case map based. Ages ago this was intended to be one part of a book of location based adventures set around where we lived. The book didn’t happen. My part became Silent Titans and Noisms part went through many and various changes over the years and now it is about as close to complete as it is going to get. If you were wondering what lies to one side of the sea in Silent Titans, well it may be this.  or perhaps this is yet another version or mirror-verse of that exact same land

This also feels VERY ItHot3bw but it would as it is Noisms and the basis for that aesthetic.

Should I go deep on this? It’s a location-based adventure about a timelocked land with the feel of North-West England in which the Devil is the main antagonist and everyone is cursed in various ways. ITs very bucolic, eerie, Alan Garners the Owl Service or Mythago Wood etc. Even 'The Sleeping Giant'.

SO MY COMPLAINTS ABOUT FORMAT AND ADVENTURES

Page Size and Column

 - A5 page size (roughly) and single column is awkward for text which has to be referred. I feel like read-across is bad when the text is dense and at these page proportions.

Adventures spread out over the book

 - so what if you want to play *just this* adventure and nothing else? And if you want to run it from the book? Not only are you flipping between small pages but you are doing so within a larger text, almost all of which you don't want at that time.

Inter-Referability is a Nightmare

Many of the adventures have some complex particular spaces and locations, plus bestiaries, if/then tables and descriptions, some fun random generators. But the pagination, titling and breakdown of information hierarchy is nowhere near bold, strong or designed enough for my taste.

POTENTIAL WAYS FORWARDS

More fiction? (if its any good, if David can get enough actually-decent fiction). The format seems made for these short, specific and dense fictions.

More scholarly articles/blog posts/essays - really the kind of thing where it is all yet none of these. The format also seems made for this kind of thing maybe even more than blogs. Like 'here's the Palace of Morpheus in Spensers Fairy Queene and here is a map of what it would be like to sneak into it and here a discussion of the metatextual adaptations of the character and here are some treasures and an encounter table kind of thing.

more ART - Of course artists are MUTE BEASTS but they can be paid readily enough. Art additions could be added to a Kickstarter relatively easily?

Interrelation of fiction/adventures to the art? don't know if Noisms would want to do this but if you could create a unified 'package' of an art piece, a bit of fiction and a playable adventure for each section that would be cool, would be a fucking nightmare to organise and edit though.

Separate adventure PDF's? Many people play from the PDF anyway and its the simplest way to make an adventure "more playable". Could be sold as a bundle like here’s the full text PDF and here are the adventures as sperate files.

Improved layout and information design for the adventures - this is expensive, time consuming etc as well, even getting things on unified spreads without hanging paragraphs would help

Playability editing of titling and information hierarchy? Clearer bold titles and section headings. I like double-column but that’s me.

Read-to-play editing of text? A taste thing. Editing adventure text so there are less hidden recursions, more say-as-they-see descriptive text.

A SPINE.. of course this is a pipe dream BUT, the density of the text, the extent to which you have to refer to adventures in order to actually use them, it would be cool if a hardback with a stitched spine could be made it turns it from more of a magazine into more of a book, and seems to fit the nascent Hobbitcore visionary aesthetic and social movement which appears to cluster about "Hot3BW".

This may sound insane but I actually believe that if the book was in hardback, better laid out, in 2 column format for the adventures, the very deep density of the adventures would be converted by some strange alchemy from quite frustrating to Good, Actually, just by the manner of their instantiation rather than their content.

One thing I absolutely INSIST ON for the next issue is an introduction written in the voice or the titular Third Blue Wizard, the editor taking on the Persona of a magical intermediary is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for a publication of this type!

I hope Noisms keeps this one up, OR IS IT GOING TO TURN OUT LIKE THE PERIDOT DAVID????