One Taffer I recall being quite active a few years back that went silent for a while has returned with a T2 FM campaign.
"Mortous Liber" by Beltzer tells of Garrett staying at an inn in a small village somewhere, when a note is slipped under his door with lucrative mark: The eponymous book. The sheriff also seems to sport a fancy ring, so Garrett has a Fun Night Out planned.
Except I couldn't get any fun out of this.
The first map is the town plus sewer system. The only way I could find into the sewer system is through the trap door in the inn, which you can't get to without being noticed by the staff and inn's only customer. Except they don't care, even if you nick their stuff. The rest of the village, while containing several houses, is mostly empty and uninspiring, consisting of a couple up on a balcony (who don't care that I'm there), some sleeping villagers (who don't know/care that I'm there), far too many doors that can't be frobbed, and a handful of guards in places where they can't reach me. The only notable thing in the entire village is a frobbable cable leading from a warehouse to a large mansion. Might come in handy later, but now let's check the sewers. The sewers have lots of spiders... except it's too dark for them to see anything so they don't care, so I bonked them all over the head while standing on top of them. Eventually the sewers brought me to the police station, where no one is around but there's a suspicious-looking generator standing outside with a fuse attached to it. After finding a screwdriver and blowing the fuse the police station is out of power, but two coppers appear out of nowhere and start patrolling. A couple of bonks later I see I need to find a code to a safe and I have three keys to the front door. Using one of the keys removes all three keys from my inventory (
) and stepping through the door spawns in the sheriff in a rather crude manner.
It was at this point that I realized that no one in the FM cares, the author doesn't seem to care, so why should I care? I just quit then and there. Beltzer can churn out decent architecture and stuff, but it's all either hollow and soulless or just plain feels off somehow. Judging by the first mission in this campaign, the author hasn't learned anything in those fields, which is a shame. Maybe the subsequent FMs are better, but the first one put me off the entire campaign fairly quickly.
Easily the biggest 'meh' of the year... and a 750 Mb download at that. Four shrugs out of five for this one.