Get that goose!🪿

Fistful of Feathers (played review)

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Ever wanted to watch players dive into a fairy tale forest to chase giant geese? Fistful of Feathers has you covered.

This is a played review. I’ve run this module twice.

Image Credit: https://pointlessmonument.itch.io/a-fistful-of-feathers

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Overview

This is a 9 location pointcrawl for Cairn, contained in a 10-page A5 booklet, created by Pointless Monument and available as a free pdf. It has players seeking rare goose feathers in the depths of a mystical forest for profit. It lasts 1-2 sessions of play.

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Themes

The whimsy of hunting giant geese in a forest with ‘honey mad bears’, sentient fungal collectives, and elphant sized sheep is not lost on me. Kind of like Willow but more.

Whimsy is not what I like to run as a longer game, but for a 1-2 session experience I really enjoy running these kinds of adventures. Players can access them without much effort and it keeps things casual.

Underneath the whimsy is a fair amount of risk, in a classic fairy tale style. A ‘bumblebee lake’ that possesses and drowns travellers is ripe for NSR/OSR play, with a cottage-core spin.

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Design

The hook of this adventure is one of the reasons I’ve run it multiple times. “Go into the weird forest and find some giant goose feathers” remains one of the most effective ways I have of convincing a player to get stuck into their first session of Cairn. It has the same strength that the starting adventures for Mork Borg and Death in Space do.

GMing this adventure is fun. There’s a rival adventuring party you can bully the players with and that, paired with weather events and region specific encounter tables, I feel I’ve always got something interesting to throw at players and to make the scenario feel alive.

My small gripe is that a lot of the locations are optional, which is tricky when the players feel like they have an objective that they need to gun for. It’s not very problematic though because some of the locations though are obstacles (yey!), they can’t be skipped except by taking a different route.

The locations lack connectivity beyond navigation. I like it when there are connections between points of interest in an overland scenario, that would be my top request alongside more ‘obstacle’ type locations. That said… this is a 1-2 session adventure. Neither of these are problems, and might even be ignored by players.

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Look

Image Credit: https://pointlessmonument.itch.io/a-fistful-of-feathers

I find the layout a bit tight, and I still prefer single column text. The images are a bit cramped-in to my eyes, but there’s some good choices of public domain art. The layout is clear enough though and for a free product, it’s done to a good standard.

I love the map, it communicates the terrain while maintaining that sense of whimsy that inspires players (and me). The colour coding of the pointcrawl is very helpful for remembering which encounter table applies.

Image Credit: https://pointlessmonument.itch.io/a-fistful-of-feathers

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Useability

The text is concise and direct, which is good for this style of adventure when I’m trying to get it done in one session.

Cross referencing is limited (no contents, no page references) but at 10 pages that’s not much of a negative. I wouldn’t mind page numbers and references though, LazyLitch’s Willow is 36 pages and does referencing well by comparison.

I was able to run Fistful of Feathers after briefly reading it through. It’s well suited for a short notice game night.

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Conclusion

I really like Fistful of Feathers. I’ve used it to introduce players to Cairn twice and it has always had my back. If someone said ‘hey can you run a game in 15 minutes?’ this is one of the adventures I’d think to grab. Get it free (and Cairn too).

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