latest_gator
| How much experience do I have? | None |
| How great is my desire to play it (0-10)? | 3 |
| How much GM prep is needed? | Weeks |
| Where do I find it? | Here |
Of course I want to play psychedelic Oregon Trail. This is an amazingly creative setting book with really neat procedures for traveling across a strange land in a wagon.
There’s a couple reasons why my “want to play” score is so low:
There’s a small system in the book that’s basically a slightly stripped down dnd 5e. 5e is maybe my least favorite system. There’s a community made Cairn conversion guide online, but doing that conversion requires some work and the smell doesn’t totally scrub off. I do still love the travel and camp procedures.
There’s a ton of creative ideas here, but every time I sit down to read it I only make it about 40 pages. Then I put it down for a few months and forget everything.
This is definitely a book where you need to read the whole thing cover to cover a couple times to really “get” the setting. As you start reading it will immediately start referring to concepts like “ka-zombies”, “V.I.L.E”, “aerolith”, “Decapolitan artists”, etc. It’s a hard read because you’re immediately thrown into the deep end on a highly complex setting that you have no reference for. There’s a glossary in the back of the book that’s usually helpful, but there’s so much weird and whimsical shit in this book that it’s a challenge to remember enough of it to understand any individual page of this book without constantly flipping around to try to figure out what something means. I want to run this setting, but I don’t want to invest so much effort that it feels like learning a new language. Even if I did wrap my head around the setting I imagine I’d have a really difficult time running the game without constantly pausing to explain shit to the players.