This post is a review of Once We Were Heroes by Fool Moon Productions, which uses art that’s AI-Generated. So I’ve had to set some ground rules.

As the owner/operator of Campaign Mastery, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what the site’s policy should be with respect to art by Generative AI, and the text below is the result.

Campaign Mastery Policy on AI-generated Art

1. Campaign Mastery will not use or show AI art unless it is profoundly essential to the content of an article. “profoundly essential” includes reviewing a product, tool, or published work which uses AI-generated art, or when the art itself is the subject of the article.

2. AI art will never be used to replace any original art that would normally have been commissioned from or provided by an actual human artist by Campaign Mastery.

3. When AI art is used, a disclaimer will always warn readers, as shown above. This will precede any significant article content and especially any AI-generated content. Whenever possible, a link will be provided to a plaintext, AI-free version of the article.

Campaign Mastery Policy on AI Text

1. While text generated by an AI may be quoted, it will never used to replace human-generated text. All text published on Campaign Mastery must be substantially written, analyzed, and edited by a human author.

2. Text generated by an AI may only be quoted for the purposes of analysis, illustration, or conversation (eg demonstrating prompt engineering). Any such text will be clearly identified as to source. Analyses performed by an AI must be converted into a HTML-code table.

3. Outside of direct quotation, AI may have been used for research or brainstorming, or generating outlines or summaries of other texts. Every such use will be verified for accuracy by a human and the final text will always be written and edited by a human.

4. No third-party submissions which are obviously AI-Generated in the exclusive opinion of the site owner will be accepted for publication.

Campaign Mastery Policy on AI Audio and Video

1. While Campaign Mastery is not an AV site, from time to time Audiovisual materials may appear, and some of these may be AI generated in some respect.

2. If any aspect of these materials (eg AI voice-overs, background music, etc) is significantly AI-generated, the materials will be treated as though they were “AI Art” as per the policies stated above.

This text has been added to the policies page and is effective as of this post.

The AI controversy – an overview

I always knew that this day would come eventually. I had expected that the occasion would be when I wrote and published an article on how I use AI within my campaigns, and the techniques and limitations that come with it – but that article isn’t written yet, because the uses that are most illustrative come from an adventure that hasn’t yet been played.

Or another article that’s been drafted on the limitations of AI and how it could be improved – and on how to get the most out of what’s already here.

Polarization, Content, and Hard Lines

The issue of AI-generated art and other content is one of the most polarizing issues in the hobby. It has forced publishers, creators, GMs, and customers / players to establish rules that are starkly black and white, often with the best of intentions – but when those clash, the hobby itself can be the loser.

I’m more in favor of a softer line that acknowledges gray areas with transparency. There are certain ways that I consider ethical when it comes to the use of AI, and others in which it clearly is not. Asking for anything “in the style of” a living artist is a big no-no, for example. Asking for something in the style of a long-dead artist, that’s more of a gray area.

I regard AI as a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for good or ill. Throw in a healthy dose of pragmatism, an acknowledgment that no black-and-white policy can satisfy everyone and that there can be good and valid reasons for the ethical use of the tool, and you find yourself in the same uncomfortable middle-ground that I occupy, and that the policies stated above are intended to encapsulate and define.

Ethics and Labor Rights

This actually breaks down into a number of related concerns. First, there’s the conflict between how generative AIs learn to create their content and respecting the rights and integrity of human creators.

Most AI models are trained on massive accumulations of data scraped from the internet with no concern as to the sources rights, and without recompense. And that irks those who support the rights of writers and artists. I’m one of them, so naturally, my sympathies align more with those who are critical in this regard.

But that perspective is nuanced by the reality of the internet. Once material is publicly available, it’s there for anyone to refer to and use as reference or inspiration. So long as sufficient input from outside that source is incorporated, and in a non-superficial way, so long as you are building on what has been made available and not simply copying it outright, how is what an AI does any different from what a human writer does?

If I want to create an image of a clown, and I start by doing research using Google Images on how other artists have depicted clowns to get ideas, that’s generally considered fine – because at the end of the day, I have to synthesize all those elements and ideas together into my own representation of “a clown”. I don’t generally restrict or place boundaries on those searches; I want as much fuel for the creative fires as I can get.

It’s a long-held maxim – if you don’t want something to be public, don’t put it on the internet.

Here’s a bone to chew on: if it’s valid and legal for a human to be educated by viewing online content, how is it not valid and legal and Fair Use for an AI system to use it in the same way, for the same purpose?

Shades of gray.

Some content creators argue that the results are a form of “unlicensed derivative work”. And that might be true, if only that content creator’s works were used to train the AI – but with every outside source, the purity of that argument gets eroded.

There comes a point where so many sources are being fused into one that you have to draw the line. It’s like music – the difference between doing a cover version of a Beatles song and drawing inspiration from the Beatles is clear and obvious. Both are forms of copying – but the nuance is completely different. One requires the payment of a license fee to the songwriters, and the other doesn’t. Doing them without that payment is legal and ‘fair’ in one case – and completely the opposite in the other.

You can’t copyright the D7(diminished) chord just because you’ve used it in a song. It’s there for anyone else to use.

What’s more, consider the necessary ‘spark of originality’ that distinguishes human creation from artificial construction. In order to generate a good image, a human user of an AI has to specify a prompt, and the general rule is that the more detailed the prompt, the better the result. Is this not providing the needed ‘spark of originality’ into the resulting image?

The more vague and generalized the input, the weaker this line of argument, I admit. But where do you draw the line? How many of these creators started out by imitating someone else’s work?

Shades of gray.

I don’t see how you can end up anywhere else in the argument if you’re applying any half-way reasonable standards.

Devaluation Of Creativity

There’ is a widespread fear among freelancers (artists, mapmakers, writers, editors, you name it) that AI tools will drastically reduce the market rate for their services. Why pay $500 for a unique monster illustration when you can generate a passable image for nothing, or close to it?

And they have a valid point – up to a point.

The keys to deciphering this argument are subtle. AI images may be ‘passable’ but they aren’t going to be as nuanced as a bespoke image from a human artist. This is stealing my own thunder to a certain extent, but here’s the reality: The more detailed you make an AI prompt, the more you are likely to get something close to what you want – but the more likely it is that some crucial element, spelt out in specific detail, is going to be left out completely. And if what you’ve requested isn’t something that people routinely post images of on the internet, you’re going to struggle – try generating an image of a “crashed alien spacecraft” and what you generally end up with is a flying saucer hovering serenely in the air. People don’t take many photos of crashed objects! And if the AI can’t learn what it should look like, it can’t create something like it.

What this argument is really pointing out is that amateur-prompted AI art raises the bar of amateur art to something with much of the gloss of the professional artist. But the professional will always be better at capturing originality and bringing it to the creative table. The differences may be more nuanced than a black-and-white line drawing, but they are real.

You’re still getting something for your $500 that you don’t get from the cheaper alternatives – but it’s not the same thing as it used to be.

And this argument also smacks of similarity to the opponents of every technological advance and consequent job losses. I’ve heard those arguments advanced against everything from the word processor to assembly-line robots. In every case, there has been more employment afterwards than before, once things settled down – but in some cases, those have mandated an evolution of skill-set, and in others, a complete replacement. So the truth of the matter in this respect is, once again, nuanced.

The similarity not only weakens this argument considerably, it points out, more starkly, my previous point – you pay for the services of a human artist for what he or she can provide that the cheaper substitutes can’t. Will that result in a realignment of the market rates? Possibly. But that’s life, it happens to everybody, like it or not – things change, and you either evolve accordingly, or you stagnate.

But there is a sting in the tail – the proposition that this leads to a “race to the bottom,” where only AI-assisted production can compete on cost. And that’s a point that I can’t argue with, and hence my comments on a possible realignment of market rates.

That said, it can also be suggested that AI generators are tools – some will learn to use them more effectively than others, just as some people are better at watercolors than with oil paints. The solution to this problem is for the creators to embrace AI and use it to increase their productivity so that they can accept five or ten times as many commissions paying one-fifth or one-tenth of what they used to command, while leveraging their artistic expertise.

So this line of argument is not as cut-and-dried as it first seems.

Specificity Of Style

Artists often feel that AI allows users to “mimic their unique style” without the artist receiving credit or compensation, effectively eroding their brand and professional identity.

For me, this is a far stronger argument than the preceding one, but I think the proposed remedy (don’t use AI, anti-AI, no AI, no, no, no!) is the wrong line to be pursuing. As I said earlier, I view creating something in the style of a living artist to be an ethical no-no. Once an artist is no longer available to take commissions by virtue of being dead, that’s a different story.

I think the correct remedy here is an extension of copyright protection to include the “distinctive style” of an artist. That’s already implied in the existing protections – more strongly in some fields than others. I always remember the time John Fogerty was sued by his previous record label for sounding too much like himself. That case established (or reinforced) the principle that each artist carries with him a uniqueness of style that cannot be licensed or sold and is emphatically NOT included in the rights purchased when you acquire control over an artist’s work product.

I think the existence of generative AI advances the demand for such to be formalized and generalized to cover all modes of creativity, be it visual, or textual, or audible. I would include under that umbrella, a singer’s unique voice.

There would still be gray areas. A guitarist could argue that they had a distinctive and unique playing style, for example, and that style should merit protection. But they would have to prove that uniqueness in comparison to others within that musical field.

The final jigsaw piece would be to require AI interfaces to explicitly block requests that enter protected fields. “In The Style Of” is permissible once the ‘copyright’ on that uniqueness has expired, and should be blocked the rest of the time – UNLESS you are the artist in question, I suppose. But that gets murky, so let’s keep it clean, and ban them from being lazy, too.

Publisher and market integrity

Large TTRPG publishers have taken explicit stances, and the community judges them harshly when they waver.

Major players like Paizo (Pathfinder/Starfinder) and many prominent independent publishers have issued clear policies stating they will “only accept human-created artwork” for their products, usually citing ethical concerns regarding data scraping. This is often driven by a commitment to supporting the freelance community.

Wizards of the Coast faced significant backlash when multiple freelancers and even their own in-house content creations were discovered to contain AI-generated elements, despite WotC claiming an anti-AI stance. These incidents reinforced the community’s demand for strict auditing and absolute transparency.

Since it’s my position that human-created artwork is superior to AI-generated content in specific ways, I don’t agree with the reasons cited for these policies. Many criticize AI-generated art for lacking the “soul, texture, and character” of human-created fantasy illustrations. In the TTRPG world, art often sells the ‘vibe’ of the setting, and AI is frequently accused of producing generic, overly smooth, or inconsistent visuals that break immersion, and those goes directly to my allegation that human art is better in key respects. But I do agree with the policies themselves as a general principle.

It’s when people seek to extend these policies down the scale to smaller publishers that I think problems start to arise. But I have to admit to being a bit conflicted over that problem.

Ideologically, I’m egalitarian; I favor “one rule for everybody”. And yet, in this circumstance, I think that there need to be different standard applied to different scales, and see the good and ethical use of AI generation as ‘raising the bar’ for the small operators to the point where they are keeping the big-ticket producers honest.

My policies and ideologies don’t hold all the answers, and that admission pushes me back into the shades of gray. If you can afford to, you should always hire human artists because the results will be better. If you can’t afford to, I’ll give you a pass for using AI-generated art. So there are two rules and a lot of gray in between them. But no one, hard-and-fast rule or principle yields a satisfactory answer in every case, and I do NOT agree with anyone that tries to implement one. I’ll respect their position in terms of their own products or pages – the the extent that I’m offering a plaintext version of this article, for example – but that is as far as I’ll go.

I generally think hard-liners are part of the problem in any field, anyway. Having ethics and principles isn’t a problem; expecting them to hold all the right answers every single time, that’s a problem, and a serious one.

AI Limitations

I’m only going to touch on this briefly, because it’s not directly relevant – but it does at least need to be mentioned.

AIs are not intelligent. They don’t understand a word they say. They are sophisticated systems that guess at the best ‘next word’ to follow the word they have just decided to use. That these words form sentences that have emergent properties of meaning when read by a human is a reality with which they cannot contend and can barely cope with.

Some AIs do better in this respect than others. For brainstorming, and nailing down technical details, they can present an enormous advantage – but when it comes to writing text for a TTRPG rules-set or adventure, they vary from inspiring to exasperating in equal measure, sometimes within the same paragraph!

TTRPGs and good written works rely on an internal consistency that has to run deep. Very deep. And that’s a consistency of the emergent properties of meaning within a series of statements. And since AIs don’t understand meaning…

AIs – LLMs – are capable of generating vast amounts of text quickly. They can talk the ear off a donkey, even without voice synthesis enabled! But they are prone to “hallucinations” (in which they make up facts) and struggle to maintain adherence to obscure, specific worldbuilding details. Or a specific role in the creative process. This makes unedited AI text a major liability for professional products – or for decent amateur ones.

Partnership

I view my use of AI as a partnership with a very creative research assistant. I can offer a vague idea and have it refined. I can ask for a suggestion – but I then have to take the ball offered and run with it, or use it to spark a better idea in a brainstorming session. It’s great for narrowing in on technical details – but you have to check its work. One phrase that repeats frequently in my interactions is “Ask questions for clarification if necessary.” And a lot of my inputs start by clarifying or reiterating something that the LLM has not taken into account.

I see the big picture. I use the AI to help clarify and define the details. I frequently need to steer the conversation, offer corrections or clarifications, or outright reject something the AI has suggested, while using that suggestion to clarify my own thinking to offer an alternative. On a number of occasions, the AI that I use most frequently has made three or four suggestions, and I’ve accepted none of them – but taken part of one and part of another and a touch of my own creativity and sense of narrative direction to weld the parts together into something better.

That’s leveraging the strength of the AI while using my ‘bigger picture’ to overcome its limitations. There’s a huge amount more that can be said on that subject, but I’ll save that for another article sometime.

Summing Up, Moving On

If I were to generalize and sum up my ethical position on the use of AI, it could be encapsulated in the statement, “AI as a tool or in partnership with human creativity is fine – with inherent limitations. AI as a primary generator of content that a reader or viewer would expect to be produced by a human is unethical at best and incompetent at worst.”

This is the ethical boundary that we, as consumers, have to navigate. And it’s precisely this boundary that the creators of Once We Were Heroes have forced me, and you as a reader, to confront. This game supplement heavily employs AI-generated art, and makes no bones about it:

“Recognizing their limited artistic expertise and budget, Jeremy and Matthew at Fool Moon Productions leverage generative AI to enhance their creative outputs. This includes generating thematic “original” artwork, refining existing designs, and improving written content by correcting spelling and grammar. Notably, even this disclaimer was crafted with the assistance of AI.”

It’s not my job, as a reviewer, to argue the rightness or wrongness of this policy or the motivations behind it. It IS my job as a reviewer to consider the efficacy of the results and to bring the matter to the attention of potential buyers, who can then make up their own minds.

To the maximum extent possible, this review will focus on the content without considering its source. If the use of AI has achieved something spectacularly fitting or evocative, I’ll comment on the fitness and the evocative nature of the art – and if something doesn’t fit, I won’t cut them any slack for the source; it will be judged by the standards of human art.

But I wanted to make that clear before we start, too.

To facilitate this review, I have been given a free copy of Once We Were Heroes. I have no other incentive to produce anything other than a fair and unbiased review.

Once We Were Heroes – First Impressions

Front Cover

You can’t escape a first impression from the front cover, but it’s not all that promising a beginning. The art of the house at the bottom doesn’t feel like any of the other art in the product, and more importantly, doesn’t quite gel with the top part as a result.

The title – for some reason, I started thinking of this as “We Were Once Heroes”, and I think that derives from a grammatical choice in the title – specifically, the absence of a comma after “Once”. It’s a piece of minutia in the larger scheme of things, but it is the difference between a statement that attracts attention and commands interest, and something that’s more vague and leaves you wondering what it’s all about. Compare for yourselves:

Once We Were Heroes

Once, We Were Heroes

The Subtitle doesn’t help much. “An Adventure About Life After You Are Left” – Left where? Left Hanging? Left Alive? Left For Dead?

For all I know at this point, though, that might be a masterpiece summary – the answer might be “All Of The Above, and more”. At least it tells me that this is supposed to be an Adventure.

But the first impression is that the subtitle is there to try and hook a reader into buying the book because the title isn’t doing a strong enough sales job, and it’s too wordy to be very effective at that job. This is back-cover text, not something that belongs on the Front Cover, especially since it’s distracting from the art of the cover.

And, aside from knowing it’s an adventure, I still don’t really know enough about the product to be interested in buying it – though price would factor into that question. I’ll deal with that toward the end of this review.

Back Cover

The first place I go when the front cover doesn’t enlighten me enough (which is usually, to be fair) is the back cover, where I would expect to find a more verbose blurb describing the product.

Okay, so there are cosmic purple swirls evocative of space, or a peculiar storm, set against what might be a mountain and the same two ‘spheres’ of existence. And aside from the Fool Moon Logo and credit, there’s… nothing. This cements the impression that the subtitle was the back cover blurb at some point, and used on the back cover it would be more effective as a tease, because it wouldn’t be trying to sell the product.

As it stands, the back cover is pretty but leaves me none the wiser.

Fool Moon Productions

I want to call attention at this moment to the Fool Moon logo, which they were kind enough to supply in a higher-resolution format – the version below is actually a compromised version of it because I had to shrink it down.

I’m calling attention to it because there’s a subtlety within it that you can barely make out in the back cover presented above. It consists – at first glance – of a wolf (evocative of a full moon) wearing a fool’s cap, and set inside a white disk (often used as a symbol of the full moon). But there’s the barest hint of something more, when you look closely.

To examine what I was seeing, I did a little digital editing to bring up the slight tonal difference that I was detecting and make it more prominent.

And now it’s clear to see that this isn’t just a yellow-white circle – it’s an actual representation of the full moon, as seen in the Northern Hemisphere.

Sidebar: Inverted Moon

Wait, what? people in the hemispheres see the moon differently?

Yep. Because the Earth is a sphere, people in the southern hemisphere are upside-down relative to those in the north, and as a result, the moon looks upside down to us, and the phases of the moon run in the opposite direction.

This image is from a post by “The Secrets Of The Universe” on Facebook, and from the logo top right, I assume that it is copyright by them. I have tweaked it slightly to enlarge the explanatory diagram at the top. Link to their post containing the original image, or click on the image itself.

But this is a rabbit hole full of traps for the unwary. Their post’s URL, and it’s text, claims that this happens because the moon is a sphere. WRONG, though they get everything else pretty much right – and got called out on the error in the comments..

This Post on Facebook by “World GeoDemo” gets the explanation right – but has the flags that identify the perceived images back to front, which is only likely to spread confusion further. But they get the explanation right.

So even the people explaining the phenomenon struggle to get the details right. We live in a topsy-turvey world, sometimes…

And all this because I wanted to know which perspective on the moon was being illustrated by Fool Moon’s logo.

Getting back to the point that I was trying to make: While it might have been more effective to have painted the ‘dark parts’ out that lie under the wolf, the normal difference shown is subtle enough that you don’t really notice, it’s only when you darken those ‘blue areas’ that this becomes noticeable.

But the attention to detail displayed in the logo, as a general statement, boded well for what I might find within the product. Nuances and details and subtlety are what it promises; now it’s up to the product to deliver.

The other thing that scrolling through the PDF to the back cover does is hint at the scale of the product – the back cover is page 158, with the front cover counted as page 1. It’s BIG, a lot more so than most ‘adventures’, by a factor of 4 or 5. And that’s an important thing to notice at this point.

Art

The art has been generated using Affinity Suite, Dungeon Draft, and 2-Minute
Tabletop. I don’t know any of those tools, but the latter two sound like they are mapping-related, and there are a number of richly-detailed maps provided, so I assume that the first was the primary source for the artwork. The disclaimer, quoted earlier, suggests that the primary human creators involved in the artwork creation were Jeremy “Wolf” Morris and Matthew “Soulforge” Walsh, who are also listed as the writers of the product.

And, for the most part, it’s not bad. I’ve included both the best and (in my opinion) worst as illustrations in this post, but for the most part, it’s effective – at communicating to the GM. I’ll delve into that comment a little later in the review; I’m still conveying my first impressions at this point.

Day-Night Theme

Encounter Illustrations

So far as I can tell from a quick glance through the pages (used to select the images extracted for this review), there’s an image to go with each encounter, though this might be an inaccurate impression. It’s something for me to look for when I dig into the content.

Scene Illustrations

I guess, right now, we get to the rub. In terms of presenting a representation of a scene or an encounter to the GM to help them interpret the text, the art is absolutely fine – for the most part. But it’s not all that useful for showing to players, it’s too small. Despite the large page count, this product would be even better if the locations and maybe the encounters were enlarged, even though this would add to that page count.

Sure, you can zoom in to enlarge the image…

…but that’s not a perfect solution. Either you cut the top and/or bottom off images, or you show players content to the side of what you’re trying to show them. That could be another area, it could be an encounter, it could be a magic item, it could be text – but what it is most likely to be is a surprise-killer.

Not enough thought has been put into how customers will actually use the product.

Having been involved in the production of Assassin’s Amulet and a few other things over the years, I can see why this has happened – it’s essentially the age-old problem of forest for the trees, and it’s an easy trap to fall into. In a nutshell, the creators were so busy actually making the content that no-one stepped back to look at usage, or not closely enough, anyway.

This goes right back to the initial content design decisions. Presenting the illustrations as full width, 1/3 height panels would need to be decided right from the beginning, because it affects the size of the illustrations that you need. It would have made layout a lot more difficult, with text in columns and illustrations not. But the product would be a lot more user-friendly as a result..

Character Illustrations

The same problem affects most of the character illustrations in the book.

Now I don’t see this as a flaw in the product; it’s a lost opportunity to improve the product, but this won’t actually make it unusable, by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s the distinction that defines what I consider to be a flaw.

The Prelude Page

I don’t know whether they referred to this internally as a prelude or a preamble, but it’s the first solid information we get about what we’re looking at. It’s worth quoting the text in full:

An Adventure About Life After You Are Left

Step into the well-worn slippers of elderly parodies of pop culture heroes and heroines, enjoying a mundane day at the Adumbral Strobus Home for Retired Adventurers. But the ordinary turns to chaos when the entire facility is suddenly whisked away to another plane of existence. Waking up in this bizarre new realm, the adventurers quickly realize they’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

As they explore their surreal surroundings, they must unravel a series of perplexing mysteries. Clues scattered throughout the complex will help them escape the pocket dimension, discover the fate of their fellow residents, navigate the bizarre mutated growths and entropic rot, and decipher the strange artwork depicting one of their own. Along the way, they might even uncover some juicy staff scandals.

Venture into the enigmas of the Adumbral Strobus Complex to uncover what Dr Mortem has been doing with the poor inmates of the Asylum for the Neglected Elderly. Confront him in the Adumbral Strobus Institute of Entropic Research to find a way to return yourselves and your home to the material plane. Can you solve the riddles, face the horrors, and lead your comrades back home? Adventure and intrigue await in “Once We Were Heroes”!

And remember, whatever you do, don’t look too closely at the toilets.

Okay, so some of the characters are presets, and some are NPCs. The premise is that a nursing home for elderly ‘retired heroes’ from many different realities gets pitched into somewhere else, and the main quest is to get home again. But there are side quests along the way that may impact the success or failure of that main quest. This is a micro-game setting as much as it is an adventure.

Nostalgia, pop culture, iconic characters, and a situation that pitches them all into one last great adventure – sounds intriguing.

Let’s talk for a minute about the Font. For viewing on the internet or on screen pages, it’s long been recognized that a Serif font is not ideal – that’s why Campaign Mastery uses a dirt-common sans-serif font for it’s content. It’s more legible and less tiring. On the printed page, that is reversed. You can read a serif font on the printed page up to three or four times as quickly as you can a sans-serif font. So this product is optimized for screen viewing and not for printing. That’s fine, it’s just something to be aware of.

Because you want headings to stand out, they are frequently in whatever font you aren’t using for your text, and that’s the case here, too. So the designers of the product know what they are doing, or (at the very least) have imitated the work of someone else who knows what they are doing, in terms of typography.

There’s something a little strange about the line heights in some of the text, however. This is usually a result of peculiarities with the actual font used, and it’s incredibly hard to get right. I can’t mark the product down because of it, but I have to mention it.

The text above is then followed by a humorous “Disclaimer” passage which at first glance might appear to be just fluff. This is written, like all fine print ever, in a far smaller version of the main font. But it does actually serve a valid function in terms of the content – in essence, it evades the likelihood that someone will disagree with the specific adaption of a specific entity from pop culture.

“Involuntary translocation across dimensional boundaries may present unforeseen hazards. Accordingly, Adumbral Strobus accepts no liability for any personal belongings that may become entropically compromised, nor for any injuries, accidents, transmogrifications, or sudden instances of extra-dimensional dissolution occurring within the confines of our esteemed establishment during such excursions. For your safety and well-being, certain chambers, thoroughfares, and inter-dimensional portals may be sealed off without prior notification.

“Height, weight, and chronological restrictions may apply in some dimensions, and individuals with specific physiological, psychological, or metaphysical conditions or impairments may find themselves unable to participate in certain dimensional experiences. It is advised, with the utmost gravity, that consumption of any foodstuffs or beverages discovered in alternate realities is strictly ill-advised, as Adumbral Strobus accepts no responsibility for any ensuing transformations, spontaneous combustion, or heroic expulsions of stomach contents that may result from such gastronomic indiscretions.”

The disclaimer continues for another couple of paragraphs after that.

This is exactly the sort of nuance and attention to subtle detail that I expected to find from the Logo, and so it gets a big tick. The final sentence is worth highlighting because it (a) smacks of an Alice-In-Wonderland vibe, and (b) implies that some characters who take the risk may regain some of their youth and former glory. But it also suggests that such reactions will be addressed on a case-by-case basis within the content – which speaks well of the attention to detail within the content.

The Credits and Contents Pages

Pages 4-6 cover this ground. I noted that the credits acknowledged the copyrights over D&D, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and Eberron amongst others.

The contents page reinforces earlier impressions. The introduction runs for four pages from 7 to 11, and will get looked at in detail below. Chapter 1 is “Welcome To The Adumbral Strobus”, Chapter 2 is “The Extra-planar Adventures”, Chapter 3 is “Asylum for the Neglected Elderly” and Chapters 4 and 5 relate to the “Institute of Entropic Research”. It also contains 4 versions of the Aftermath and name-drops three more entities: Mortem, Yixith, and Xeghic. At this point, I know from the prelude that Mortem is a mad scientist who has been experimenting on patients, but don’t know the other two – so I suspect (until I know better) that they are the personifications of the “Day vs Night” conflict implied by the artwork. If so, one or both are probably responsible for the transdimensional relocation – but that’s just speculation with precious little solid foundation.

I have to admit to having a minor problem with the name “Adumbral Strobus” – I keep wanting to read it “Admiral Strobus”. That might be just me, or it might be more common than I think it is. But I’m quite sure that it would trip me up sooner or later.

The 5 main chapters are then followed by 7 appendices, and Appendix C, “Character Concepts” stands out to me. It tells me – without actually saying so – that this is an adventure designed for some variety of D&D / Pathfinder, because it lists the different character classes and then offers two residents as representative of that class.

The Homages, when you look at them, are very tongue-in-cheek. The one that I used as an illustration is of “Prof. Alfus Percy Ulric Bron
Dumblebeard” – I don’t think anyone will need a second guess as to who this is supposed to represent. But that sets a tone for the rest of the product that seems a little incompatible with the content thereof – it will be interesting to see how they cope with that.

The Introduction

Let’s look at the subsections of the Introduction – “About This Adventure,” “Once They Are Heroes,” “Adventure Summary,” “Running The Adventure,” “Character Creation,” “Locales” and “Dungeon Master’s Preparation Checklist”. Some of these are subdivided.

The Game System

Quote: “Once We Were Heroes” is an adventure based on the 5th edition of the worlds most popular role playing game, designed for four to six characters, where the player characters take on the roles of the story’s heroes. This book outlines the villains and monsters they must defeat, as well as the locations they must explore, to successfully complete the adventure.

So, that answers that question, but it produces a big black mark on the product in terms of my personal taste.

You see, like a lot of others, my friends and I participated in the WotC 5e playtest, back when it was “D&DNext,” and after a while, we noticed that every time our feedback said “Zig Left,” the next iteration of the rules went “Zag Right”. There was little-or-no interaction with anyone at WotC in the playtesting feedback reports that we filed, so there was little explanation as to this phenomenon; we could only assume that “Zag Right” was the more popular choice amongst other playtesters. Slowly, what ended up D&D 5e became something we were no longer interested in playing. Some have since changed their minds; others have not. It is what it is.

The problem with tying yourself to one game system so absolutely is that you find yourself living and dying with that game system. When writing Assassin’s Amulet, my co-authors and I worked very hard at making everything compatible with both D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder for that very reason.

Does that mean that this is un-runable, or that it shouldn’t even be up for purchase consideration? Absolutely not. But it does mean that to run it, I would need to adapt it, and that adds to the hurdles that the quality of the product have to surmount.

Anyway, getting back to the “About This Adventure” text… setting for this adventure, right… can be placed in many published settings or even a world of the DM’s creation, good… Intended to be played as a one-shot, okay… Players can either choose from the provided options or create their own 10th-level characters, okay.

…The Tone of this adventure is a comedic take on a horror mystery, okay that’s interesting – those two are hard to make go together (though it can be done)… encourage you not to take it too seriously, okay…

Once They Were Heroes

“Many years ago, the world was saved by a legendary group of adventurers. They stood against the darkness, vanquished terrible evils, and ensured peace for generations…”

So the characters / PCs are not from ‘all over,’ they were allies and teammates who worked together, and then ALL of them ended up in this place? The first part is a disappointment, and the second strains credibility to breaking point right off the bat.

Were I to run this adventure, i would probably go back to my original impression – that these are retired heroes from multiple planes of reality who have been ‘parked’ in this facility; they don’t know each other; and the big thing that they offer (besides aged care) is anonymity, distance from the scenes that made you legendary, so that no-one from home can call you up one last time. This is a Retirement home.

Some may find that this interpretation is even harder to swallow, in terms of credibility, and it probably is – if you run it using normal characters and not the ‘pop culture icons’ provided. But that risks undermining the ‘fun factor’ and making this all too serious. And if you create your own versions of iconic pop culture characters, you’ll find yourself back at the same basic question.

Of course, you may find that the premise doesn’t stretch your credibility as badly as it does mine – but that still doesn’t negate the possibility that your players may struggle with it more than you. So this is something that every GM will have to at least thing about addressing.

The introduction then goes on to outline the adventure, but I’m not going to get into those specifics, there’s a lot of information that players will have to find out the hard way.

The plotline breaks down into three main sections – a ‘get to know you’ routine morning (my comments above pay into this section very heavily); a sudden event and their need to work out what’s happened and what they can do about it, which leads into investigating the mystery and stumbling across side-plots; and the ultimate confrontation and resolution of the plotline.

Running The Adventure

This is pretty standard fare, with no surprises. Stat blocks for all encounters, and any spells or equipment referenced are provided, so the PHB and DMG are the only real requirements.

Character Creation

This section contains ‘meta-rules’ for character generation and explicitly references the PCs as parodies of pop-culture icons, who have aged and retired. Outlines for equipment (very limited) and aging the characters (may not go far enough, but there’s a playability need that has to be taken into account).

“Additionally, randomly allocate one flaw and one feature to each character, either by rolling a d20 and referring to the table in the Appendix A or by dealing cards from the provided deck. Encourage players to incorporate these traits into their role-playing to add depth and humor to their characters.”

The text also states that the characters supplied in appendices C and D should be considered backups for players who are struggling to create their own characters, not as the primary source.

Locales

Interior maps are provided for three buildings within the Adumbral Strobus complex – the Home For Retired Adventurers, the Asylum for the Neglected Elderly; and the Admin building, which includes the facilities belonging to Dr Mortem.

There are two pocket dimensions, the Everburn and Evergloom, which have an interesting cosmological concept that makes total sense in terms of the adventure as described (I’m being deliberately vague to leave players who may read this in the dark).

Visiting these pocket dimensions is not quite what players might expect – there are stings in the tail that are exactly the sort of thing that I like to build into my own campaigns.

This section also categorically identifies Yixith and Xeghic, who were name-dropped in earlier material, and their relationship to the plotline. I have one suggestion to make in this respect but don’t want to make it too easily accessed, so it’s in black text against a black background in a text box below – select the text contents with a shift-and-mouse-drag to read it. The text DOES contain spoilers that will ruin the adventure for any player who reads it, be warned.

One realm is a microplane of life and the other of death. Yixith and Xeghic are inhabitants of these microplanes, one to each. The depictions of each match the illustrations of the microplanes. I suggest REVERSING the indicated images WHEN THEY ARE ‘AT HOME’ so that they contrast with their environments. This will throw a curve ball that is likely to deceive even experienced players – for a while.

After a spot illustration of a nameplate that is REALLY hard to read, the introduction segues into a brief description of the setting – the grounds of Adumbral Strobus, the retirement home building, the Asylum, and the Institute.

Maps vs Battlemaps

The creators suggest using theater of the mind, with the GM referring to the maps provided for cues and the battlemaps in Appendix G reserved for combat situations. They point out that this will speed play, which is true. But they don’t mention that a battlemap should only be placed on the table when combat is actually about to begin – don’t telegraph the situation to the players! Stay in theater-of-the-mind mode until the last possible moment.

This also plays into my statements regarding image size. It can be argued that these are intended only for the GM, and not for player consumption, and it seems clear that this is what the writers had in mind; but it can also be argued that using theater of the mind is sped up and improved by giving a common visual reference for the group to process.

Prep Checklist

This has some additional steps not previously mentioned, and shouldn’t be ignored. But that’s what is most likely to happen because the only two entries on the first page on which it appears are reiterations of advice already provided. All the new content is on page 13. This is the biggest misstep so far in the content, in my opinion; if this is as bad as things get, OWWH will deserve very high praise and recommendations, indeed.

Encounter Balancing

Closing out the Introduction is a section on Encounter Balancing. There’s nothing startling or wrong with this section; the biggest issue is what is Not there.

This adventure is designed, according to the “About This Adventure” text, for 4-6 characters, with a presumed ratio of one character per player.

This section shows how to adjust encounters for 4, 5, or 6 players. It also has an adjustment for having less than the recommended number of players (3). But it makes no accommodation for groups with more than the recommended number. It’s not likely to come up often – but surely expending the three lines of text needed to cope with 7 or 8 players would not have been too much to ask?

That said, as I commented above, if this is the biggest faux pas, this adventure will be doing very well indeed.

Looking Deeper – Chapter 1

I’m not going to break this down into subsections the way I did the introduction – there will be too much trouble with spoilers if I do that. Instead I’m going to skim the chapter and report back.

• While I can guess, I don’t know for certain what “Balloon Volleyball,” or it’s in-game equivalent, “Beholder Ball” is.
• It would have been a good idea to warn the GM to come up with “20 questions” for the Getting Ahead game. Unless this game is also not what I think it is.
• Tess Trill – every facility of this type needs a hot girl for those characters that way inclined to drool over, and she fills that need here. Her male equivalent for those looking in the other direction is the cleaner, Fenim. The text hints that he might have feelings for her, about which she is naively ignorant. Adding the above to their respective descriptions adds massively to the background and general realism of the setting – even if they are cliches.
• That credibility is severely needed to counterbalance the presence of Derrick the Chevalier. Older nobility, as a general rule, do NOT get shuffled off to somewhere like this. Instead of an actual Noble, he should be a commoner with delusions of Nobility – or maybe pretensions of Nobility.
• This whole sub-sequence would be a lot easier to roleplay if there was some indication of what this group was actually up to – they are clearly up to something that they probably shouldn’t be. The GM should probably also prepare some relationship cues that can be expressed through dialogue with the PCs. These might be friendly (“Don’t forget we’ve got a chess game to finish later”) to softly hostile (“Mind your own business, [PC], and I’ll mind mine, and we’ll both be happier for staying out of each other’s way.”) In general, I get the impression that the PCs are the ones who have ‘settled’ into a calm existence in the retirement home, while this group are those who are still rebelling a bit and bucking the discipline. That too, would be useful direction – especially if that wasn’t the impression the creators intended.
• Okay, now we get the explanation of the 20 questions game. Some sort of indicator at the first mention that ‘details will be provided below’ would have been helpful.
• While the text solves the puzzle, some sort of motivation on the part of the guilty party would be helpful.
• Context within the adventure explains the Beholder image – so my earlier comments regarding it can be ignored.
• The first real plot hole – “After the conclusion of the pirate hunt game”… but no such game has been specified or described.

Nine notes, two of them canceled out by a third, and only one (maybe two) really critical. I’ve read a lot of adventures and while there have been one or two that have scored ten out of ten for content, the vast majority have far more serious faux pas and plot holes.

Narrative Content

Most importantly, the narrative generally succeeds in bringing the location to life in a way that feels natural, realistic and interesting. Nailing any two of those three can be difficult, ticking all three boxes – especially in such an unorthodox setting with… unusual… characters is top-rate work.

Locations, Encounters, Mysteries, Solutions, and Action: Chapters 2-4

At this point, I don’t think I need to delve into these areas too deeply. While it’s possible that one of them will lower the established standard, there’s no reason to expect it. A quick skim of the next few chapters confirms that impression; this is a really well-written well-crafted adventure.

It may have the occasional small hole for you to plug, but nothing that won’t be easily taken care of if you do what everyone always says to do and read the whole adventure before play.

I’ve very much been mindful, in writing this review, not to read ahead, but to generate my comments as I came to each passage of content. That permits an honest impression of what’s actually presented by that point in the product, with no cheating by looking ahead.

When I was selecting images, I was deliberately careful to avoid reading any of the text. When I was reading the introduction and making comments on it, I wasn’t looking ahead – I was reacting to what was currently in front of me, in the context of what I had already read. Similarly, my notes on Chapter 1 were very much stream-of-consciousness as I was reading – and you can see in those comments where that caught me out.

Above all else, I was making every effort to make this review both honest and comprehensive, without any bias resulting from the source of the artwork. I hope that I’ve succeeded in reviewing it without any bias or taint, so that you can make a fair assessment of what’s being offered without compounding of any bias or taint from considering the art source.

Price

The price is Australian $7.58 which is $4.95 US. I would actually expect the price to be $5 from this conversion, I suspect that what I got was the “live” conversion rate and not the daily rate. And if you don’t know the difference, don’t worry about it.

Where Do You Get It?

https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/535760/once-we-were-heroes, or just click on any of the illustrations excerpted from the product.

The Judgment Call

So here’s the bottom line: If you are really seriously opposed to AI-generated art in RPG products, I don’t think this adventure will change your mind.

If, however, you are willing to even contemplate the possibility that there are potentially valid counterarguments to that opposition, this adventure has enough merit that you should contemplate buying it.

Only the maps are really essential for play; you can blank out every other illustration and still be left with a product worth your attention. It will be diminished by that act, but that’s your choice to make.

If the art had not been AI-sourced, there are two possible paths that this adventure could have taken:

• Far less art, far weaker presentation, and far less appeal despite the length. Marketplace viability would probably require reduction in the price by 1/3, eating directly into the profits and making the existence of another small publisher less viable. Or,
• Far less art of potentially slightly superior quality, and a price tag closer to USD $40 – a price that would be sure to compromise sales. The net effect is the same – reduced profitability and a small publisher becoming less viable within the hobby.

Some may argue that no publisher that crosses their hard line deserves to be viable in the market. I think that’s going too far.

For my (metaphoric) money, Fool Moon have done everything right in terms of ethics, here. They are up-front about the art and its source. They have done their best to leverage the output to the maximum benefit of their product without making it an indispensable element of that product.

Is it the greatest RPG product ever published? Probably not, but what right do you have to expect that – especially at this price point?

Is it worth every one of those US dollars? I think it is, and then a couple. And I don’t think you can ask more of Fool Moon Productions than that.