Sinister Red, Zine Review

This is my attempt at taking a look and reviewing the Zinequest 2 projects I backed.

Disclaimer

- In the interest of full disclosure I bought this with my own funds.

- I was a backer on their Kickstarter campaign and paid 5 US$ for the PDF version of the product in February 2020.

- Nobody is paying for this review. All of the opinions you see are my own.
- Nobody is approving or reading this post before it goes up.
- I have no relationship with any of the authors of this product.

Overall feel

Sinister Red is a 32 page-long zine (including title page and table of contents) written by Rudy Mangual and beautifully illustrated by Yvette Lopez. It details twelve locations in a pointcrawl, plus The Island, a more fleshed out locale spanning numerous pages. Playtesters are credited, which gives the hope that it was actually put to the table before release.

 

The watercolor feel of the art is evocative and abundant (see below). Every single page has a piece on it! The abundant red color emphasizes the underlying themes and landscape of the adventure. It has an eclectic and collage structure to it, that fits the module's mood.

Formatting and presentation are of my liking. Each of the (pointcrawl) locations has a one to two-sentence read aloud, followed with summarized bullet points. Then, more complex features, relevant items, creatures stat-blocks etc get detailed in the rest of the page. Bold and italic fonts are used to remark important or flavorful keywords, respectively.

The PDF is decently cross-referenced with hyperlinks and page numbers to help navigation. Missing bookmarks, even with the project's brevity, seems like a missed opportunity. Omitting PDF layers will make it hard (and costly!) to print at home.

 

The (pointcrawl) Adventure

There are 12 points of interest, taking a single page each, and The Island, a final location with considerable detail (and eight island locations of its own).

How do the PCs get to this literal sea of blood? There are a few hooks, but probably they are pooped from a portal. A demi-plane of fever dreaming, oozing crimson flavor, could do well for an adventure more elaborate than "goblins in a cave". There are vampires, but of the mutated and alien kind (high on blood!), rather than the gothic decadent nobility we are used to seeing.

First points in the crawl are heavy on combat, as I feel all the foes presented are the kind not to be negotiated with. There is also little for the players to interact or experiment with. But at least they get a sense as to where they got, and can start drawing their own conclusions as to what is going on here. It is only when we get to the middle portion (locations 4 & 5) where more interesting NPCs start to flourish, presenting pointers, rumors, and quests.

One piece of mild criticism I have is... What system is this written for? B/X? OD&D? It's nowhere to be found, but some assumptions are to be made by the referee reader to peruse this adventure. In the OSR space, everything is fairly compatible, but the devil is in the detail, e.g. treasure quantities assumed.

Continuing, locations 6-9 seems also heavy on the encounter side, and even if the monsters could be negotiated with, and are unique, there is no tactical depth or again, interactivity, for the players to engage with.

The Island, albeit again suffering from the overabundance of foes, presents more interesting spatial design, with players having to find ways to climb to the upper half of it, the Ruined City, and ultimately the palace. I wish some NPCs (for instance Hernan Corteso) would have more fleshed out wants and goals, as they could make good allies to the PCs if a deal is struck towards a common goal. This is implied, but not clearly spelled out. At least the Vampire Queen is given more details (but no stats, or at least a HD range to assess her prowess, so we assume her a goddess).

Now the tower, even though extremely linear by design (bad!) has more interesting and fleshed out encounters, that I think do work well on paper, and could translate to some puzzled players. I like them better. The final encounter, The Stand Off, is imaginative enough and has interesting outcomes laid out, which could wreck the campaign or bring it back to a more traditional plane.

End sprinkling

The last three pages of the zine have a few helpful tools (in the form of tables) for the referee. NPCs, Random Encounters, and a d66 table of "I Search the Body/Room/Rubble" type. Short and punchy, I like these. Note that most monsters are cross-referenced for gaming statistics to other pages of the pointcrawl proper, but it will result in more flipping back and forth. And some of the items are powerful and dependent on the group (gun, etc), but imaginative and meaningful, as should be in an OSR adventure.

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This concludes the review.

 

Interactivity is hurting here, as I believe the pointcrawl nature does. Laying the adventure elements differently, removing many of the spelled out encounters, or at least making them more interesting for the players and meaningful would go a long way. The Island, and more particularly The Tower are much more to my liking.

 

Sinister Red is good for a zine coming out of nowhere (at least for me, I knew nothing about the authors involved going in). If not to use wholesale in a planescape or high gonzo campaign (with some work to fix the interactivity), then as a visual treat and to pilfer for ideas and visual flavor. A nice surprise from my Zinequest 2 purchases.