A response to Dead Letters' review of Unicorn Meat

"The Unicorn in Captivity" from the Rochefoucould Unicorn Tapestries

Sam Sorensen (plus Misha and Walid) did a review of Unicorn Meat over on the Dead Letters podcast earlier this week and I think it touched on some important points and quite a few bits worthy of response, so I’m breaking the prime directive and writing up a response.

(And just to defuse any worries that any beef is involved here, Sam directly encouraged me to write the response up like this instead of just letting it go as DMs.)

This will, of course, make very little sense if you haven’t read Unicorn Meat or listened to the episode, since I’ll be responding to specific critiques in the latter with stuff from the former. 

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Re: Bullet Points
Sorry, Sam; you’ll have to pry them from the cold and vicelike grip of my mummified corpse.

Joke aside, I do have a reason for why I gravitate towards that style of information presentation: that’s how I take my notes, and that’s what I convert an adventure into before I run it. Writing the adventure in bullet points saves me from having to translate it into full prose for the book and it saves me from having to translate it out when I want to run it. Practicality and convenience carries the day.

 

Re: UM feels like it never had an outline
It technically did, but only in as much as what chapters came after which. Practically speaking it didn't have an outline, because I generally treat outlines and first drafts as synonymous.

Re: Best adventure ever
Aw shucks, Misha, appreciate it!

 

Re: Formatting and Layout
I've grown rather fond of how rough and ugly UM is, but Dead Letters is correct in calling out the weird placements of things like the page of legends and the list of things that aren’t in the module: those were added to fill space so that each chapter would start with the header and art on the left-hand page. In retrospect I should have just added more stuff to the preceding chapter, but so it goes.

 

Re: The scenario hooks
Those definitely needed more polish, no disagreement there. Depending on your game you could probably run the opening of God’s Teeth as-is and then segue towards the farm.

(Fun fact: I didn’t listen to that AP until a couple years after UM was published) 

 

Re: Information Pacing & Spacing
This is another point where I know that I could definitely have done it cleaner, but I do have a reason for why the book is structured the way it is: I wanted the module to converge on the inevitable from the outside inwards.

Chapter 1 is the outer corona: scenario hooks, timeline, guidance, and White-Eyes; it sets the  stage with the most general and gamey layer of the onion. 

Chapter 2 is an overview of the carvergirls and the tables for generating them. It draws the players in, gives them opportunities to build out their characters and their characters’ connections. What does that memory mean? What did White-Eyes or her Buchas do that made you go “she needs to die”? Does your name mean anything?

The remaining chapters go Farm, Swamp, Factory, Caves. It’s a descent. I wanted the gravitational pull of the factory and the caves below to extend into the text. You can bum around in town or muck through the swamp for a while, but eventually, you need to descend. Bethlehem ain't gonna slouch towards itself.

White-Eyes’ character writeup is 70 pages before she shows up in person because I wanted her to be present in the GM’s mind (and through them, the players) from the beginning.

Re: The Tower’s split description
The Tower gets written up 10 pages after it’s introduced because it’s inaccessible when players first encounter it: you have to force your way into it, and players probably aren't going to do that without exploring the rest of the town. But it’s impossible to explore the town without seeing the tower, so you get the external description first and then the internal one later.

Re: The Dorms not being on the map
Whoever said they’re on the map & just not labeled is correct, that is the case. Same with the factory. A minor hiccup that got lost in the mess of putting it together.

Fun fact: the description I gave Gus was that the maps looks like the shitty coloring page on the back of a children’s menu from a rural diner (I think he did a great job)

Re: None of the named NPCs are are given age grades or have locations listed
Both of these I thought were easy enough to glean from context: as faction leaders and other noteworthies they’re going to be old and experienced enough that no one else has taken the position, so I didn’t feel like it was worth enumerating.

As for locations this critique confuses me; everyone but Pugs and Birdie are opposite their location on the same spread (and Pugs and Birdie next to each other so no location gets in the way).

If I can make something a 2 page spread, it’s gonna be a 2 page spread.

Re: Termagant Street Dumpling Company
Not a Warhammer reference, actually: I was referencing the thing the tyranid unit is named after, which is the vaguely-defined entity dreamt up for The Song of Roland as a “pagan god” worshiped by Muslims (Baphomet is actually the same deal); less than ideal as a street name in that light, but streets can get named after all sorts of things.

If people don’t recognize it, it’s just a cromulent word; if people do recognize it, if they’re a freakazoid like me maybe they’ll think “huh, I wonder if this street was unflatteringly named after the people who lived here? And why’s there a dumpling company there now?” There can be, if one wants, an entire implied little history of an ethnic neighborhood in some corner of the Commonwealth extrapolated from a logo on a shirt.

I do think it’s odd that this was the reference that got time devoted to it, when you can get a 666 HOT SOUP tattoo from Stitches; if I was going to make a Warhammer reference it’d probably be something about enemies hiding in metal boxes (The cowards! The fools!!).

Re: Disconnect between art and textual descriptions
The discrepancy is there, but it's there because I wasn’t terribly fussed about exacting accuracy: I gave Rowan a loose description for each piece and left the rest in his hands, because I knew he’d get the vibes right.

Re: The Machine 
The physical description of the machine itself is obtuse, but the hosts treat it like the passage to the caves isn’t signposted at all and that’s objectively not true:

• The vibes are especially rancid and given the first bullet point = “yes, this is important”
• There are footprints leading to one of the hatches =  “someone went inside the Machine”
• There are no footprints leading out of the Machine = “they didn’t come out of the Machine”
• There are teeth on the inside of the chamber = “it can probably bite” 
• There’s fresh blood around the hatch with the footprints =  “whoever went inside did so recently, and they fed the Machine to do it”
• White-Eyes was previously in the factory and is no longer there = “White-Eyes is the one who went into the Machine.”

If all those signposts still aren’t enough, there are four Buchas in the back who worked on the killing floor (that’s why they’re the Buchas, after all) who can tell the PCs whatever clue they’re not picking up (ex: Bucha 1: “I saw it take Scrungle’s arm off last summer.” Bucha 2: “Yeah because she reached in to grab her bracelet when it was still hungry.”)

Not to mention that the players, if they’re carvergirls could just ask the GM “what do I know about the Machine?”

Also, Sam describes entering the Machine as if losing a limb is a guarantee. Quote the book:

“Entering a chamber without damaging the flesh within first (via fire, tanning fluid, cleaning supplies, etc.) or providing a sizable meal (6 units of meat or a person) triggers a chewing reflex. Save vs DEX to escape with a mangled limb or die.”

I should have added some kind of sound effect to indicate hungry vs satiated states, but the rest is a straightforward trap. Don’t go into the giant mouth without fucking it up first.

 

Re: The swamp
Yeah, probably should have added something about being able to find a guide to a specific location, but that’s not a particularly difficult thing to implement in the moment.

Re: The load bearing clue (and a lot else) is something players can miss
Unicorn Meat is designed around not having a full picture and not being able to get everything. All the locks have a key and some clues out there in the world, but they’re not going to be handed out to the players willy-nilly. Happenstance and random chance can and will drastically shift how a run through it will shake out, and yes, it is on the GM to go “all right, they’re hanging out around the Big House a lot, I’ll give them a nudge towards the kirin-horn sword via Birdie” or “well, Noodle doesn’t have a clue written down for this part, but I’ll give them one anyway. I can’t plot and prep for every single possibility; what I can do is spread the clues out enough that the players will find at least one of them, or be in circumstances where they can be directed towards one.

 

Re: The Noodle doll should be given to the players earlier
Yeah, it would be cool to do as suggested and hand it off early and give each location and character a description. This is also an extremely easy fix: if you think it should go earlier, put it earlier.

Re: Random things that have no payoff
The random details with no payoff are there because that’s how reality works and that’s how stories I like work: Bilbo finds a talking wallet in a troll’s pocket. Jonas tells Severian a story about magic beans that he never gets to finish. Ripley hails Antarctic Traffic Control. There was an age before the Elden Ring. SCP-173 was moved to Site-19 in 1993. Luke Skywalker asks “You fought in the Clone Wars?”.

The page of legends is another interstitial buffer page in the wrong place, but it is what it says on the tin: they’re stories carvers tell each other. If the reader wants to make them deliver a payoff they’re free to do so, or they can ignore them, or they can just enjoy thinking about them for a minute or two. The part of Unicorn Meat that needs to deliver is White-Eyes’ story and the carver’s ultimate fate.

One of the hosts says “Don’t tantalize me with good ideas” - if I don’t give the reader stuff to inspire them to engage with their own imagination beyond what I’ve written, I consider that a failure. It is my job to tantalize with good ideas.

Now in fairness to the critique, there are a good number of things that weren’t connected as well as they should have been: the Nightwatch Tree, several of the swamp special locations, some of the signposts for things like the Kirin-horn sword and the like. That all needed a second pass for better connectivity.

Re: Worthwhile additions of things not featured in this module
Page 66 really got the hosts’ collective goat, in a way that I thought was both kind of inexplicable in general and inexplicably venomous. The placement is wonky (it’s one of those buffer pages padding for left hand chapter starts) no pushback from me on that part, but the level of offense they take to it is weird. And I, in principle, agree with them on the point of “games that introduce things that could be interesting and then do nothing with them are lame”

The criticism that the cool ideas on the list would make the module better if they were meaningfully included, that’s fair; several of them could have easily been added without bloating and could have replaced or buffed up lackluster elements that did make it in. But the stuff on that page isn’t in the module because it isn’t in the module, and I said so right in the header. I wasn’t leading anyone on by promising something and not delivering. Nothing on that page existed in my version of Unicorn Meat at the time I was writing it - maybe it should have, but it wasn’t - but everything listed there could exist in someone else’s version of Unicorn Meat and maybe they didn’t know it until they got a push in that direction. 

Eclipse Phase is my go-to example for the principle Sam is getting at: there are multiple major parts of EP’s setting (the Factors, the Iktomi, the ETI being the 3 most prominent) that are set up as major mysteries that matter a whole lot to the setting as the whole, but are given 0 material or meaningful answers. You could cut them and lose nothing but an annoyance. It’s worse even than Call of Cthulhu’s handwavy and vague monster writeups. 

The difference between EP and Unicorn Meat, though, is that I explicitly don’t try to pin anything in the adventure to the stuff on page 66. It doesn’t exist in the module as-written. It's all non-canon… but I also think canon is a suggestion that doesn’t go any further than what’s on the page. If someone says “man it’d be cool if like, Rochefoucauld was selling unicorn meat to the moon beasts, what if a galleon of Leng shows up at the end”, I say “Fuck yeah that’s cool! You should do that!”

That doesn’t mean I’m going to include Leng-men showing up in a flying boat as part of the adventure, even if I might use it at the table when I run it. That’s not really that onerous of an edit to make, and it’s a fair sight easier to throw in some unexplained lights in the sky when the PCs get to sleep, or to replace an encounter with Brother Bones and imply that he’s Satan. 

All this is just a really good display of a fundamental disconnect between how Sam and I play and conceive of games, and something that I think needs addressed with how Dead Letters approaches critique. I’m going to call it Gundam Style vs Lego Style.

Gundam Style = You have your model, you have your directions, and while there’s some room to modify the model there are pretty firm limits to what you can do unless you really want to roll up your sleeves and get deep into kitbashing. You’re going to end up with something cool, but it is by and large going to be what the maker intended.

Lego Style = You have your model, you have your directions, and you are beholden to neither. You can dump all those pieces in a big old bin, toss out the booklet, and just throw stuff together according to your own foppery and whim. You’re going to end up with something cool, but even if you follow the directions at first eventually you’re going to make something that the creator didn’t intend, and they wanted you to do that. 

Now, I’m not going to try and persuade Sam that Lego Style is better, because I don’t think either of them is. He’s entitled to his own artistic preferences, and I like a nice Gundam from time to time. But I am going to say that when the other hosts asked “Are we hypocrites?”, my answer is “yeah, you kinda are.”

This is fine. Everyone’s a hypocrite about something, usually several things, I’m no exception there. A little hypocrisy about things that don’t matter is part and parcel for the human experience. The hosts have strong opinions about design and they’re “advocating for a certain way of doing things”, and I certainly have the same; but that can reach a point where it’s no longer productive and flips over into bad faith, and I think this section of the review hit that point. 

It’d be silly to criticize Jackson Pollock for not being photorealistic, in the same way that it’d be silly to criticize a toddler for not being Jackson Pollock. Criteria by which art is judged are situation-dependent, and the critic has to be able to give some amount of leeway to that. I might get frustrated by all the worldbuilding gaffes and iffy relationship dynamics and very narrow view of what fantasy can be in the romantasy books my partner reads, and I can drum up convincing arguments for why those things are bad, but I gotta step back and go “well, I don’t like it, but it’s also not operating in a space where my complaints are fully relevant”. Because if I don’t step back and let it be on its own terms, I’m just being an insufferable jackass and my partner has been entirely in the right to call me out on that when it happens.

One of the first things I say in Unicorn Meat is:

“Change or remove whatever you need to in order for people to be comfortable at the table and enjoy their time playing.” 

That doesn’t stop just with the content warning, that applies to everything. If the reader doesn’t like something, I want them to change it. If they want to add something that’s not there, I want them to add it. If they don’t care about this that or the other thing, I want them to ignore it. I don’t give a shit about how it’s played; the fact that it’s played at all and people are having a good time is enough. I brought my toys to the sandbox for other people to play with and I wouldn’t be here blogging if I hadn’t found a community of people who just made shit up for games and didn’t worry over making everything fit perfectly. 

So I think Dead Letters lasering in on this single page as Unicorn Meat’s greatest sin is aimed, in the name of “advocating for a certain way of doing things”, directly towards insufferable jackass territory. The hosts went and stuck to their criteria in a situation where it was less relevant or even not relevant at all, and calling Lego Style deficient because it’s not Gundam Style isn’t useful critique. It’s just dogmatism, and it makes the show really hard to get through: I don’t think I’m going to listen to another episode, independent of the hosts’ opinions of UM. The value of the critique - which was quite high when it was pointing out the problems with UM compared to other Lego style works - was only worth the cost of the rest of the experience because I had skin in the game. I don't really want to listen to them tear into someone else's work.

Re: “It’s like Appendix N but worse”
The list on page 66 is not a curated list of inspirational material, so it's not really an Appendix N; secondly, this statement completely misses the purpose of Appendix N. It’s not homework. Running and enjoying a game without being intimately familiar with its inspirational antecedents is the default experience. Providing a curated list is an option available to readers if they want a glimpse into the headspace that made the sausage.

(I don’t know, would Sam also take issue with the existence of Appendix M-DAN?)

Prime example, I’m fairly certain none of the Dead Letters guys have played LISA the Painful/Joyful, because someone would have brought it up given that it’s the ur-text for Unicorn Meat and the module wouldn’t exist without it. That 666 HOT SOUP tattoo is a reference to a song that plays when you’re fighting a guy named “Gary the Hot Soup” and that part doesn’t matter; the chaotic-manic aggressively grating off-kilter fuckery elicited by the song is what matters, but it only matters in as much as “this is what Dan had going through his head when he was writing the book.” And this post for that matter.

(Honestly, I should dig up that UM playlist I wrote up a while back and never finished.)

(The final confrontation with White-Eyes, in my head, gets you the one-two whammy of “The End is Nigh” and a specific remix of “All American Badass”.) 

Re: Caves and traversal time
The caves are supposed to be flux space (“Progress is slow: 1d4 hours moving between points”), the room writeups are the sections worth noting. Should have been more clear on that.

Re: Stitches and White-Eyes’ relationship
Yep, gay. The main clue is for eagle-eyed players to catch that there are sci-fi paperbacks in the med hut and White-Eyes’ room, but nowhere else on the farm. Players with a decent eye for such things can also be able pick it up from Stitches’ appearance in the final confrontation (White-Eyes and Stitches being the carvers alienated furthest from the rest of the farm; putting them together when they’ve been isolated otherwise should trip some bells), but if the players don’t pick up on that they’ll at least be able to figure out that they’re collaborators. 

Re: Theotokos
Sam calls this an obsession of mine, which I think is unfair. One blogpost and an adventure module is a preoccupation: it’s what I’m about to write that upgrades it to obsession.

Herod the Great dies in 4 BC., splitting the kingdom of Judea into the Herodian Tetrarchy. Taking advantage of the upheaval, a bandit named Judas son of Ezekias raids the town of Sepphoris, making off with loot and weapons from its treasury and garrison and kicking off one of the endless little brushfire rebellions of the time and place. He’s a thorn in the Tetrarchy’s side until 6 AD, when Herod Archelaus is expelled from power and the Tetrachy’s territory is converted into the Roman province of Judea, now under the jurisdiction of the newly-appointed legate of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius.

Quirinius orders a census, as one does when there are taxes to collect. Judas and his men continue their banditry/revolt with renewed vigor, striking again at Sepphoris and the surrounding countryside. Quirinius sends troops to stamp out the revolt, and they do so. First death, then taxes: the Roman way.

For purposes of narrative pacing, this is the part where I mention that Judas son of Ezekias is better known to history as Judas of Galilee. Sepphoris sits less than 4 miles from Nazareth, and in at least a few apocryphal traditions it’s considered the birthplace and hometown of Mary.

You can see where I’m going with this.

To make it abundantly clear, I’m not planting my flag on this particular hill because I want to pull a Behold the Man. The reverse of that, actually. If Jesus’ biological father was a Roman soldier (or one of Judas’ bandits) - whether by direct violence, coercion, or Mary acting in self-preservation - think about what that means for the rest of the narrative.  If Jesus was sired by assault, what does that say about Mary and Joseph? Strip out all the miracles and reduce it to if > then: Mary didn’t seek out an abortion. Joseph didn’t divorce her and raised the child as his own. Jesus ended up a wandering apocalyptic preacher, yes, but one whose ethical teachings are preoccupied with the treatment of the poor and marginalized.

And if you’re me, someone who grew up Catholic (not tradcath, but definitely above-average cath levels) and left because (among many other things) the only thing the Catholic Church loves more than Mary is denying that she was a human being who lived and existed within time and space (let the woman buy a jar of wine and have a nice night in with her husband, for fuck’s sake), this radical restructuring of a foundational text into something that subverts two millennia of accumulated dogmatic bullshit and is extremely relevant to the current social climate and is relevant to my own lived experience (as I’ve said before, I spent six months living in the woods where the bulk of my human contact was with a dozen or so sex offenders every work day)... that’s the sort of thing that easily becomes a creative axis mundi. Strip out all the miracles and all the dogma and remove God from the equation and you are still left with a story that has happened to real people somewhere in time and space. If not these particular people, it has happened to others. Making a myth of it, and returning to that well over and over again to explore the questions it offers, is a way for me to square what it means to exist in a world where this shit happens. Rome comes with death and then with taxes, and we’ve been trapped in that world since we began. Gods don’t exist, and that’s what makes them useful: They give faces and names to the things that have none, playing out a story we can use as a mirror to the world.

Anyway, bringing it all back around to Unicorn Meat: White-Eyes is 100% using her son as an instrument of her revenge, but she still loves him. The PCs arrive at the Bottom of the Pit just in time to see her holding him, drawing out the moment because it will be the last and only time she will ever be able to. That’s why there’s the time-displacement effect there: it’s a contrivance so that the PCs will always arrive just at the critical moment. Her assaulter is never named, and appears only as a skull at the bottom of a chamberpot: he gets what he’s owed, and he doesn’t matter in this equation.

(Also you should watch Justin Sledge's video on this topic, he does a much better job than I at laying out the context.)

Re: Disappointment that the bottomless pit has a bottom
Quote the description of the Bottom of the Pit:

“An awe-inspiring Brobdignagian form stirs underneath, obscured by placental tissue.”

Whenever you think you’re at the bottom of the barrel, there’s always another barrel just below it.

Re: The Theocarnequs
Reverse-EVA was not intended (or at least, I don’t remember intending it), but it is on-point and a generally accurate description. If Shinji had been marinating in a cocktail of unicorn blood for months as the preliminary spiritual refinement needed for apotheosis.

Re: Dark Unicorn Trinitarianism 
Can’t remember if it was intentional or not, but it’s certainly applicable. 

Re: No lore for the Beast Below
With the space I had available, there’s nothing I could have written that would have added any value. It is very old, very powerful, very far away, and very bad news. Anything further would be overdoing it. That may indeed be a cliche, but I’d rather evoke that cliche than the dreaded sin of Lovecraft pastriches and overdo it while still saying nothing.

 

Re: “It’s almost cool but it isn’t actually. It’s gesturing towards such cool ideas but, like, does not actually connect them”

I kid, I kid. But I really do talk with my hands a lot, my friends poke fun of me for it.

I don’t connect the elements explicitly in many place, because I think implicit connections are fun. That's part of the game of me. I’ve written how many thousands of words of unhinged Elden Ring theoryposting? Valeria called UM “VaatiVidya bait” and that's the one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten about anything.  I like giving readers that moment of “holy shit is this evil unicorn trinitarianism!?”, because even if it isn’t, I at least got them engaged.

Re: The Finale
Sam’s critique of the finale glosses over a critical part of the encounter: the first thing White-Eyes does is give the PCs the option to just turn around and leave. It’s meant to be a choice players struggle through. If I’ve done my job right, it should be something that the PCs (or better yet, the players) have to struggle through. By the end of the adventure they should have seen and experienced enough horrors that they’ll at least consider taking White-Eyes’ offer and letting the world burn.

(I remember getting tagged by a woman on Twitter (can’t remember her name or dig up the post, now, apologies) who said that her players were divided so strongly on this point that they actually argued it out at the table.)

In its unmodified form, there’s nothing remotely close to a happy ending in Unicorn Meat unless the players manage to dumb-luck their way into finding one specific chunk of rock in the swamp and get it to the right person. That’s the point I’ve been hammering home the entire module: there is nothing good at Sunny Smiles Unicorn Farm. 

But by that same token, if someone wants to change that ending I encourage them to do it: friend of the blog Michael Kennedy was one of my playtest DMs, and he included an entire subsection of the adventure where the PCs went into White-Eyes’ subconscious dreamscape and were able to get Stitches to break through to her that way. It fit in with the tone and vibe of that campaign better than the ending I wrote in the module, and that’s cool!

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And there we have it. I still technically have twenty-some minutes left in the episode, but like I said up above it's gotten pretty hard to listen to and the returns have diminished. I think the hosts made a lot of good points about nuts and bolts (stuff that will definitely make it in to future adventures should I ever write another), but fell off sharply when they moved beyond that. Still, I'm glad they did the episode and hope the show does well. No harm no foul.