The Iron Coral (Into the Odd)
I just concluded a play-by-post play-through of the The Iron Coral by Chris McDowall. We played the first floor in the second edition of the rules (the first edition entailed only this first floor) and kicked things off with the players in a boat towards the iron coral. The initial setup is very flavorful and eerie and it was easy enough to draw the players into the world. The dungeon itself has a very high encounter frequency and an interesting encounter table that keeps things in motion and reliably created a dynamic dungeon feel for our group. Monsters felt new and interesting to interact with (screaming balloon creatures!) and room descriptions despite being VERY terse pushed my imagination into the right direction to give interesting descriptions and decision setups to the players. However, the dungeon is very sparse of "answers" for lack of a better term: finding out what happened or what the iron coral is, is pretty much left to the interpretation of the players and the GM. There is no initial description of the events that led to the coral's emergence or an overview of the secrets the players might uncover. On the other side, there is great treasure to be found here (the pair of gloves) that enable a lot of fun game-play moments and the overarching theme of strange coral-nautical-steel-dungeon was a nice change of pace from the classic fantasy dungeon fair.
Into the Odd as a rules-system again proved itself tailor-made for play-by-post games, as it keeps a very low overhead on transactions between players and and GM and thus keeps the action moving at a reliable pace even when the post-frequency slacks from time to time. We had a few minor points of discussion about the rules, where we were unclear about whether we apply later rules innovations from Into the Odd adjacent games (such as the scars from Electric Bastionland / Cairn or the ganging-up rules). Generally, I would say those later rules additions are definitely worth your while, in particular the ganging-up rules (only use the highest attack rolled, not all of them). Overall, great fun! 7/10