First Impressions: Operation Unfathomable

Jason Sholtis's Operation Unfathomable was released Monday on RPGNow. I downloaded my final, release copy and took a look. Here are my initial impressions:



The Good:

- It's attractive. The art is evocative and interesting, as it always is when Jason Sholtis does art.

- It's well written. The writing is punchy and fun to read. Like Dungeon Dozen, the ideas are excellent and really get you going.

- It appears ready to go. Open, read, dump adventurers in, and play.

- It's fairly generically D&D/retro-clone compatible, so it should be easy to play and/or convert if you're familiar with any variation of older D&D or its inspired games.


The Bad:

- It's really hard to read in PDF. Pages can be navigated just fine using a standard PDF reader, but they're laid out side by side (so 8 and 9 are one side-by-side page, 10-11 one side by side page, etc.). That makes it really hard for me to just read, especially as I generally zoom in because I'm fairly far from my screen. That's going to slow my reading pace a lot - and make printing at home (or piecemeal) a real nightmare. (Editing later - It seems fine and normal on my Kindle, so maybe it's just having issues with my installed reader on my main computer.)

- It might be too weird for easy lifting. It hangs together well, in an "everything is gonzo" way, but that does make it a little less farmable for resources. It would be inspiring, but probably not really get you too much you could steal outright in isolation to use elsewhere.

Overall:

It's good.

I look forward to reading it cover to cover. Hopefully there is a release in PDF with a different layout so I'm not constantly scrolling, sliding, zooming, and unzooming as I try to make sure I'm going to the next page and saw everything on this one. But the content is excellent.