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.

Never Going Home - Experiences running the system thus far

 For a bit over a month now I've been running an open table game of Never Going Home and I'm starting to feel like I'm maybe having a grasp on the system by now, as well as few different experiences from our sessions.
Sounds like a time for a review/first-impressions.

Book & Layout

Let's first adress the elephant in the room, which is the layout of the core book. It's all over the place.
First of all, the book is 7" x 10" in size which makes it just shy of an A4 but all the text is laid out in single page-wide column and there are un-broken blocks of text that tend to clog up even three quarters of a whole page at a time which is very slow to scan through during a game.

While reading it through casually the issue doesn't seem that big, the core rules are explained in the span of 23 pages, including character creation. Most of the sections even have neat bullet points to comb through at a glance, and I suppose so far my only issue with the book is that there's few large chunks of text that could have been condensed a lot to keep up with the theme of making the actual rules section be easy to thumb through and find the details you're looking for since it usually is the smaller details of how things work that you end up needing to look up during game. To this day I still don't know if it's a fever dream or is it actually mentioned in the book if you can choose the same modifier for a spell's effects several times.
The issue here is that the rules needed for play are scattered among the just over twenty pages and at times even repeated under other sections despite being already explain under a different header. For the games I've ran so far I've ended up making somewaht condensed player handouts for each section of the rules in Roll20 and at this point I almost prefer opening that game in my browser to check on rules rather than flipping through the book even outside of running the game.

Then right after the book jumps into giving out the setting backstory and roughly two page long details for nine of the "factions" involved in their version of ww1 including themes, general officer attitudes as well as soldier attitudes. Not a bad springing board for when you want to run your own adventures instead of the pre-written ones they offer, these just so happen to put a whole thirty pages of lore stuff right in the smack middle of the book followed by some GM advice and the bestiary which now ends up in very not easy to find place. Right after the book closes up by giving you three example inroduction scenarios, each one with a very different feel to them which can be either a good or a bad thing depending on reader.

Oh, and in the pdf version there are no bookmarks or links at all.

In conclusion, so far the feel I've gotten out of things put out by Wet Ink Games is these better than average books carried by the amazing art and suffering from akward layout choices that take away from the usefullness of their books.

The art is just gorgeous, snippets of art by Charles Ferguson-Avery

Running the game

We've certainly had a lot of fun with the system. Creating new characters on the fly takes less than a minute, making up a name has in fact been the most time consuming part for us so far, which works really well with the system as things can get deadly really fast when shit hits the fan and as a GM it doesn't make me feel too bad about having killed a character since we can drop the player right back into the game without any prep needed.

So far we have been playing through pre-written scenarios from both the core rule book and Once More Unto The Breach which is a collection of 21 adventures by various authors. There have certainly been hits and misses, different adventures have had different feels to them which isn't bad by any means and all of them are pretty much designed to be run as oneshots since that is where the system even pushes itself towards when explaining the adventure structure in the core book.

Speaking of adventure structure, Never Going Home has the absolute best presentation of adventures I've run into so far in tabletop rpgs. Each adventure comes with mission briefing which details how things have come to their current state or what/why the players are about to go through, it then gives out a concrete mission objective for the players so they know what they should be focusing on this particular oneshot before laying out the main "incidents" to run the players through. 
I really enjoy this approach as there is a lot of free space given for the GM and for me it felt like there was a lot less pressure on getting a ton of things just right and according to some tight module structure which some more traditional D&D adventures have. Instead Never Going Home simply gives you the high points to hit during play and leaves the GM to make stuff up to fill in the gaps however they see fit.

The experience so far

I thought I should also share with you guys what we actually have been through so far. For those familiar with the pre-written adventures we have so far, in order, played through Terror in Tannenburg, The Lamps are Going Out, The Angel of Mons and The Longest Night. (Heads up, the longest night needs some modifications to be fun for players as there's very little to interact with.)

We began our adventures right at the beginning of the war, before the veil between the worlds was torn and whispers from beyond started to mess with the more mentally sensitive soldiers, zooming in on happenings on the eastern front and a unit in the Russian 2nd Army.

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August 27th 1914, outside Tannenberg, Prussia — The Eastern Front.

The guns were silent through the night, but it was difficult to catch much sleep due to the oppressive heat hanging over the trenches like a wet blanket. Nearby, the village still burns and drifting smoke cloaks the dense woods all around you. Before the sun even breaks over the horizon, you are shaken out of your fitful slumber and summoned to your commander.
There, you are given new orders. You are to be sent on a special top secret assignment.

Two men from the same squad were found dead this morning, killed in their sleep. There were no visible wounds found on their bodies, and no bullet holes in their clothing. Despite the heat they were found with a layer of frost covering their skin and their eyes were wide open, as if terrified. A cursory examination by the medics indicated that they had indeed been frozen to death.
Your mission is to investigate the bodies, interview those who might have seen something, and uncover the reason for their peculiar deaths. If this is some new weapon at work, the Generals need to know about it immediately. 
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Mission Objective:  Your mission is to investigate the bodies, interview those who might have seen something, and uncover the reason for their peculiar deaths. If this is some new weapon at work, the Generals need to know about it immediately. 

From here on out we skipped forward in time to bit after the tragedy of battle of Somme where the massive amounts of death during the war had finally reached the tipping point of tearing down the veil between worlds, causing horrors beyond human imagination to pour out into our world.

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March 20th 1916, near Lake Narach, Russian Empire — The Eastern Front.

Near the end of a long day of fighting, deep in the enemy trenches, the rush of victory almost compensating for the twist of fear and disgust in your gut, your squad rounds a corner just in time to see the members of an enemy squadron retreating up a ladder and back to the relative safety of the captured ground they’ve held for months. Your unit surges forward and quickly piles out of the trench after them. Ahead of you the enemy soldiers rush into a small village. Arriving at the edge of the village you don’t see the soldiers, or anyone.
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Mission Objective: Find the enemy soldiers.

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March 26th 1916, somewhere west of Lake Narach, Russian Empire — The Eastern Front.

Several days after the hasty retreat from an unknown monster that a bunch of corrupted soldiers were calling the Night Master, the squad can still sometimes hear screeches and flapping of wings in the dark nights as you've been hiding trapped behind the german lines.

Surviving soldiers of your unit scrambled together beyond the accursed village of purple flames in the past few days that you have pushed through on shared and carefully conserved rations. Some familiar faces are still missing but now there is barely enough food to survive through another day.

The german soldier that Ivanovits and late Pyotr saved from the village has been following your unit like a lost puppy, and few of your guys have actually built some sort of rapport with the poor soldier to the point that there appears to be some kind of mutual understanding going on among them. These same guys from your unit have now informed you that according to the german soldier, there is supposed to be a town or a village of some sort not far from where you are currently hunkered down. All that sits between you and the town is barren no man's land left behind from when the russian army had not yet been pushed as far back as it is now, lined with a maze of assumedly empty german trenches.

Even without understanding what the german soldier is talking about most of the time, everyone in your unit has recognised few words from among his utterances as he's been pointing and throwing his hands towards the direction of the supposed town; "Angel", "Saviour".
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Mission Objective: Investigate the town, find food for the unit.

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March 29th 1916, Kovno, Russian Empire — The Eastern Front.

During your stay in what you've found out to be the town of Kovno the unit has been making themselves comfortable to the best of their ability, enjoying this sudden bout of normalcy in the empty town. Somebody had even found a radio in one of the houses near the train station.
Most channels are dead, and one is playing a nationalist sounding german anthem over and over. It may not be your preferred musical genre, but anything is enough to constitute as entertainment for the men in the unit. The German soldier can even sometimes be heard humming the tune or seen sitting by the radio while looking lost in thought.

But sometimes, when the radio briefly turns to static, people are swearing they've heard someone speaking russian amidst the white noise. More inquisitive members of your unit had made it their goal to decipher what it is that you are hearing mixed in with the static.

One of these days when walking by the building one of the men investigating the mysterious static noise pulls you in to the building. The small group of soldiers that have stationed themselves around the radio press for you to take a seat, one of them starts to fiddle with the channel selector while the others explain to you how they have found a channel where the spoken russian keeps repeating over and over behind the white noise.
After listening to the static for a moment you can make it out as well. Coordinates, as well as a roughly estimated location a day east from Kovno that someone is repeating over and over in russian.
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Mission Objective: Investigate the location heard on the radio. It's on the way back to the front and the message is in a friendly language. On top of that the amount of food you can scavenge from this town is running low anyways.

The missions after the first one were modified slightly in terms of the fiction involved to accomodate for the location of the unit we're following for these games.
Currently they have broken out of some form of time or space anomaly that the radio signal was coming from and have made it back behind their ows lines. No friendlies in sight as of now, so we shall have to see what the unit decides to do next.