Churn Stroke Burn impressions - This town is not going to exist in two weeks

To get the disclaimer out of the way, I received a pdf of Churn Stroke Burn from it's author and promised I'd in return write not-quite-a-review but rather my impressions on the adventure scenario after having read through it once or twice.

The reason this will have to stay as not-quite-a-proper-review is because I've only read through most of the book with proper thought, occasionally glancing over things, and because the time I'll get to run this scenario at my table will likely be somewhere in the foreseeable future so I can't really give any commentary on how well the stuff put forwards in the book translates to a game played at the table since as we all know, no plan survives contact with players.

Edit: This might just be me incessantly rambling about the book while trying to not give out the contents of the adventure at all which in retrospect may not be the best way to get people interested in an adventure, but apparently that is the way I decided to go abou it.

So, what has Sean Richer been cooking?

What is Churn Stroke Burn?

Churn Stroke Burn cover, Asmo Grimae

First of all it's a gorgeous looking book that originally caught my attention while browsing the Exalted Funeral store. The cover art is this golden sketched out view of the salt witches that play a central role in the adventure, made by Asmo Grimae whose art I absolutely adore (and don't really see that often anywhere anymore after having left twitter myself).

The interior has the aesthetics of a scrapbook filled with views and memories from the adventure scenario itself, being this mixed media collage of sketches, images and tape holding it all in piece but without making the text illegible. In fact the book is really readable despite the chosen visual style for it, as as far as readibility goes my only complaint is the map for the "second act" point crawl with the map being cut into two to better fit the two page spread, but for some reason the two halves of the map aren't aligned at same height so seeing where some of the arrows between locations are pointing takes a bit of parsing. (And for those wondering, the reason why it's laid out like that is likely to make it more coherent with the visual of scrapbook the book is going for.)

The base premise is that somewhere out at the sea something is happening. The sea horizon archs upwards instead of diving down and disappearing into the distance, salt witches have appeared in town, the storm cult that reveres lightning is acting up and weird storms and horrible monsters strike against the town time and time again from the sea. Not to mention the ships being washed up on the beach or crashing against the rocks when the lighthouse refuses to function, or the worrying number of vessels out on the sea flying strange flags, a telltale sign of pirates.
And all of this isn't the real problem, for that lies in the eye of the storm. Way out at the sea a leviathan of a whale dreams of storms and floods.

But let's get to the meat and potatoes, what are these "three acts" the adventure scenario consists of?

Like said, the adventure scenario is essentially a three act structure that moves forwards as players proceed along further and further in finding out what is going on and why and maybe even get to resolve the whole mess, potentially doing some initial back and forth between the "act 1" and "act 2" before going for a finale of chaos, stormy waters and crashed ships in the "act 3".

Starting from the act one of the town and getting to know the gist of roughly what is going on as well as getting introduced to the few different factions, the players will eventually head on to the "second act" stuff once they have accrued enough reasons to go out to the sea (and believe me the're a ton of stuff in the town that give them reasons to go out to the sea).
Going out to the sea isn't made particularily difficult either despite the fact that the PCs likely start without so much as a makeshift raft to their name as opporturnities arise left right and center to either acquire different kinds of vessels to go out to the sea with, hitching rides from other people going out to the sea, assembling your own vessel from the numerous beached ships around the town or even finding secret underground tunnels extending all the way under the sea.

And at the end of it all is the quite literal eye of the storm, the thing that is getting teased and hinted at here and there throughout the entire adventure. Once you step in stepping back out will be difficult, and unless you've ended up there very early you likely won't have time left to really turn back either.

Sure, but what are the "three acts" in terms of content?

The first act, like explained before, is a town stocked with fourteen distinct locations. Each of which have at least two encounters or events associated with them, one for when you go there the first time and another one for when you visit there a second time.
I really like this, makes the town feel alive without needing to give detailed schedule or timeline of what happens during each day in the town. It gives the town a very similiar feel to how Witchburner ended up feeling when I was running that for one of my groups.
There's also a d30 table for daily events, as well as a well as a d30 table of "nightly raids" which spells all sorts of disasters and monsters to encounter for those staying up all night doing investigating.

Example of the d30 event table, as well as the scrapbook aesthetic of the product.
All the page numbers you see in parentheses are links inside the pdf, yay for ease of use!

The second act is a point crawl of eight locations with each of them presented in a similiar fashion to how the town is, except this time each location is more concerned with how the players are approaching them (by the sea or by the hidden underground tunnels) as well as how they are leaving from the locations (again, sea or tunnels) with information about the location (and surrounding ones when leaving) is given within the context of their choice of approach, with some approach-specific encounters and events sprinkled in here and there.
Just like with the town, a setup that is very runnable without too much preparation or needing to memorise a bunch of stuff about each location. If the players decide to visit one of the locations out on the sea again, their first visit has already defined within the fiction how that place is and what can be expected to happen there so the GM has bunch of things to work with to come up with their own spice if they wish to keep the locations alive.
Like with the first act, the point crawl section also has d30 tables of happenings to roll on as the PCs move between locations. One for when they are moving from place A to B on the sea and a separate one for when they are moving from one location to another through the tunnels.

The third act is the most chaotic one, as is only thematic for the scenario as a whole. It is a location at the end of the small point crawl that is the second act, containing within a depth crawl similiar to what Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library are.
The depth crawl is generated with the help of four tables. One for the location, one for an encounter, one for a complication and one to see what of value is left in the place. There are thirty entries to each of the tables. And of course one more d30 table to roll as when the PCs are moving from one location to another.
And of course, the goal here is to go all the way to the deepest end in hopes to resolve all of the storm and weird happenings centered around this very place.

Some things of note

One thing that I want to highlight about the book is just how tied in everything in here is to the DCC dice chain. Love it or hate it, this entire adventure is very clearly written specifically with DCC in mind. 
For me personally this means I'll have to come up with some effects for things that don't rely on manipulating the dice chain if/when I get around to running this adventure as my system of choice still remains to be LotFP. Not any gargantuan undertaking by any means, but just something to keep in mind if you happen to run some other system for your game as well.

Another thing I wish to get out of the way, and this is a very minor gripe with the book, is that while the art style and visual coherency of the book overall is amazing and it oozes style and vibes that already give you a feel for how the author might want you to present the world, the maps for both the town and the point crawl by sea stick out like sore thumbs.
There's a very limited number of other things that pop out as breaking the overall art style but the maps are definitely the biggest offender, which for me just means that if I get the opporturnity to run Churn at some point I'll make my own maps which is something I like doing anyways especially since there really isn't anything in the book that the players should have to map for themselves.

The pointcrawl map, biggest offender in clashing art styles in my opinion.
Looks very scifi in what is otherwise old-timey scrapbook in my eyes.

I should probably also finally mention the Drain Die which is a very central mechanic to keeping the chaos of the whole adventure ramping up as time goes by.
Whenever there is a random d30 table in the book, more often than not instead of rolling a d30 on it you roll on the table with whatever the current Drain Die is at. The Drain Die starts at d3 on the first day of the adventure and steadily grows by size with each passing day along the DCC dice chain before finally reaching the full d30 on the thirteenth day.
The first few entries on each table are usually rather mundane and don't have that much anything weird or eye catching, but the higher the entry is on the table the weirder and more chaotic things get. Get high enough results and you might even get some of the results might even contain hints as to what is truly going on and what is causing all these terrible storm and other happenings, or in the worst case scenario just straight up spell doom and destruction to the town and it's surroundings as they get wiped off the map.'

And a neat little detail to finish off this section, the back of the book has the DCC dice chain incorporated into it's design so if you get the physical book it'll be really easy to reference should you forget how your d3 turns into a d4 followed by d5, d6, d7, d8 and all the other weird in-between dice no other system uses.

Overall thoughts

In case it wasn't clear already, I love the general aesthetic the Churn Stroke Burn has. It oozes the spirit of a miserable town where things are only goin to get worse as time goes on but that may once have been a rather nice place to live at. The amount of weird in there is definitely way higher than I usually have clearly visible in broad daylight in my games, but it's justifiable by the current conundrum the town is facing as the scenario kicks off.
This is something I could definitely just drop in to my pre-existing sandbox and run as is with minimal changes to anything, just some mechanical tweaks to fit the DCC specific things in a more general B/X framework.

I'll have to admit I was slighty worried at times about the tone of the whole scenario, seeing things like albatross men or giant sea otters in the bestiary but having read the thing through I think they are justified well enough that they won't come off as overtly silly or out of place, especially when the whole premise of the adventure is that things are getting progressively more and more out of hand and chaotic as time passes.

Then there's one elephant in the room, the price of the physical book. Yeah, $100 is quite a steep one but also somewhat understandable considering just how much art has been crammed inside the book from various different illustrators. Not only that, the book runs thick at 233 pages so the printing costs for producing the product istelf are surely not super cheap either.
Would I pay the $100 for it myself? After having read through the book, despite really liking the content I honestly couldn't recommend it for that price. The pdf is absolutely worth the asking price of $30, but personally I'd be willing to pay something closer to $60 for the physical book so perhaps if I catch it at a sale I'll grab one.

There definitely is a lot of content and play hours crammed inside the adventure, running my own games at a very slow pace I could see it taking a good several months to run my players through the scenario with our usual schedule of one session every two weeks.

Overall a big recommend, grab the pdf from DriveThruRPG or keep an eye on any sales on the physical book and dive in - but do try not to drown.