An adventure by Clayton Notestine, level nill
Written for Cairn
   Okay, that’s a darn cool cover. The Appendix N Jam produced some very cool visual artifacts, if nothing else. An LLM somewhere drank half a lake dry making this thing, huge production value for a little four-pager. Format is the usual two-column affair, just eight, uh, keys plus the intro, bestiary, and spellbook. There’s a credited editor, but the editing pass must have been for formatting, not content…the main raider is Poxlin “Feral Beard” Skuggs in one place, Poxlin “The Toxin” Skuggs elsewhere for example, there are multiple issues like that. Overall appearance is nice though, and more readable than some of these products.
   Our story here is the bog-standard “giant Atlantean submarine accidentally crashes into a lighthouse and is being actively looted while the mummy it was transporting attempts to escape”. As will happen. Hooks are thin enough to break with minnows, not just trout…your players are Poxlinite mercenaries, dreamers summoned by the mummy, or treasure hunters bereft of any other affiliation. Going to be some fairly major different approaches from that one, which is nice, but its not much supported via text.
   May Gygax forgive me, there will be multiple examples of what I liked here in a Cairn adventure, of all dang things. First off, the Atlanteans are wildly gonzo…they’re all psychic octopi in fishbowls piloting barnacle-encrusted skeletons. That’s neat. I like that the mummy is voiceless unless his lung-containing canopic jar can be returned to him. I like that there are new unique spells to discover (although they tend to be silly). Loot tables are decently flavorful as well, although of course if you’re playing in a real system then you’re going to need to fill in gold totals. I dig the broad personality notes, should make for positive role-playing. All positive stuff.
   …but be not alarmed, faithful reader, we’re still in Cairn-land, for what can be improved is “everything else”. First of all, the map. My friends, this is a CRIME:

Do Not Under Any Circumstances Do This Thing. There’s a potentially cool dungeon described here, a submersible Greek trireme stuck into a lighthouse being consumed by the tides. But yeah, art is hard. But the abomination that is this ball-and-stick diagram is terrible and obtuse and should not happen. The random encounters are also “events” which are awkward and probably would make more sense in a physical environment but given each circle is a wildly different space, the events are hard to manage. Also, despite the strong personality work on the NPCs, their motivations, or rather plans, are a little ambiguous. I don’t usually complain about a short adventure text but this thing desperately needed one more page.
   Naturally the best use case here is thus to strip this for its deliciously gonzo parts, assuming you’re wanting to run something zany. That Atlantean idea is a hoot and a half, and I like a lot of the rest of the scenario flavor. If you are a person given over to a depraved mind and wish to inflict bad gaming upon your friends, AKA “A Cairn DM”, then I suppose you could run this directly in Cairn.
   Final Rating? **/***** almost entirely because of the quality of the sizzle, not because of the steak. If this thing had half the effort given to substance that was devoted to its style, we’d have us a 5/5 here instead. 

An adventure by Clyde (@LowKeyTTRPG), levels 1-2.
Written for Shadowdark
   I have…questions. You have a production written for Shadowdark, probably the easiest system to write for in the world. Level one or two. You have a generous nineteen pages to explain your dungeon, which only has eleven keys (confusingly labelled 1-3, and a-h). You’re using lots of tables, color coding, and careful long faction descriptions for what gets encountered in those less-than-dozen locations. So…WHY WOULD YOU FEEL THE NEED TO MAKE A YOUTUBE VIDEO EXPLAINING IT? Alright, Clyde, it’s cross-promotion, I get it, game recognizes game. Even so.
   The story is about as normal as it can get, the second “undead knights + monster humanoids” we’ve hit in a row. Little more spice, this time at least there’s a solid connection…knights are cursed by a dragon they killed to rest uneasily, kobolds were lairing here just chilling until taken over by some dragon-worshipping lizardmen, now they’re stealing mining equipment to break into the knight’s inner tomb to steal his dragon-fire sword. Add in a lost wedding band from a confused wandering local villager and some bandits blowing a hole into the complex and boom, there you go. It’s a lot to stuff in to an itty bitty sub-Dyson.
   So what I liked here are actually quite a few of the little details. There are neat little traps, the magic items and the npcs of note are all named and with motivations, and the map has two entrances, which actually matters. All good. I don’t know why, but I was particularly charmed by the pair of vases-with-scrolls-in-them in the final undead room with clear “break in case of restless dead” instructions. More of that, please.
   Alas, all this good work is severely undercut by the teeny-tiny nature of the map; what can be improved first and foremost is to EXPAND THE MAP. Ideally, add water features and a second level or two. Conversely, the actual map itself is perfectly functional as a small lair map, but in that case the improvement would be to stuff it less. I’m also not fond of preset loot that then requires rolling on the system table; pre-roll that crap, particular if they’re in the adventure to be anti-undead priest scrolls. Rolls are fun outdoor or random encounters, not a pregen little lair.  I really think this guy had a good story idea with some good design intent but was really under-served by his map.
   Thus it with resignation that I say best use case here is to run it as a one-shot in 5E. It would be more useful if it was lighter, or heavier, but the puffy slow-combat shamble that is 5E needs that kind of over-engineered, under-sized craft. Shadowdark can handle a lot better, brother. I guess this is why we needed a YouTube explainer.
   Final Rating? **/***** but I really think there’s some promise here. Either scale up or scale down and we have quite a decent adventure writer. Give us more next time, Mr. Clyde.

An adventure by James Melo, level 1.
Written for Shadowdark
   Waitaminute, do I detect a repeat author here? I believe we’ve encountered Mr. Melo very recently. That one was a trifold, this time we have a full-bore twenty-page dungeon, complete with twenty keyed locations and all the usual rumors/hooks/bestiary. This ratio might make you nervous at first, but it’s okay…these are the Shadowdark standard of zine-scaled with margins comfortable even by your most short-sighted ninety-year-old grandma’s standards. It’s simple, but it’s also nice and complete.
   It’s a first-level adventure, so our story is about as standard as it gets: Goblins in a cave lead to undead knights in a tomb. Goblins have pet giant centipedes. Undead have giant rats. Default railroad is “players randomly bumble upon a convoy that’s just been raided hours ago, d12 victims have been taken and are getting et”. That’s a little convenient, but your modern players expect a little hand-holding. And this is a very, very, Present Year adventure:

   I’ll grant a single what I liked point to the map is that there are multiple ways in, there’s the Boring Assumed Way with the cave opening and then there’s the more interesting way with a bunch of standing stones on the hilltop leading down to the main tomb proper. There are a few nice bits of environmental interaction, like a goblin god’s idol inflicting negatives, a pool cavern only accessed via swimming, a portcullis that opens with a lever just out of reach…all fun little bits of interaction. There’s a fun bit with the giant centipedes eating a corpse with gold on it. They’re not evil or even aggressive, but don’t mess with their lunch.
   Unfortunately, what can be improved first of all is making a little more interest in all other NPC interactions. The goblins aren’t really built with many negotiation levers, the undead are mostly undead, and the one sentient undead guy you still fight just because he wants to hand off his magic sword to someone worthy. Not a lot of interesting fight stuff either, which is understandable for level 1 but we’re looking for places to improve here. Map, outside of the one water feature, is one of Dyson’s more boring ones. Loot could also stand to be a little better…the magic sword in particular feels a little underpowered unless we’re in a 5-minute-adventuring-day mode.
   I’ll say best use case here is probably to play a simple Ye Olde Game of Shadowdarke, not anything strange or unexpected, but pleasant and almost comforting. There’s nothing here particularly worth cutting out and using elsewhere. Nobody will be sad, it’s going to be a perfectly cromulent time.
   Final Rating? **/***** without rancor. It’s not offensive, it’s not even possible to mind this thing, but there’s nothing unusual here either.

An adventure by James Melo, levels 3-6.
Written for Shadowdark
   Ah, the humble trifold. It is upon creatures such as these the itch.io pseudo-economy rests…simple trifold for Shadowdark, with simple words and easy formatting. There are a few oddities here…our author in this case has shelled out the money for an ISBN, of all darn things. Although there not one but TWO art studios credited, the cover image has the weird fingers I associate with LLMs (six fingers). Kind of a little confused as to how the product is suppose to get folded actually. But in such strange little deviations, we find our ultimate happy place in these little attempts-to-make-a-dozen-bucks products.
   The plot here ain’t nothing original, but it ain’t nothing wrong either. The prior in charge of the titular Abbey of the Iron Brotherhood is asking adventurers for help because his monks broke into a tomb in their excavations for the order’s founder. Actually he’s a secret cultist, all his monks are secret cultists, his demon boss is downstairs, and the adventurers are a sacrifice to free his boss? Sure, that’s fine. Big miss that there’s no statblock given for Fr. Evilbetray. Otherwise, wander around a little Dyson map and enjoy your cultist-and-undead random encounter table.
   Grudgingly I’ll say what I liked includes the puzzle, such as it is, enabling access to the not-dead-but-kind-of old knight, who’s a bit of a Last Crusade Grail Guardian. I like his magic shield…because for one thing, we need more magic shields in the world, and for the other, it’s very powerful with a light cast on it and -1d4 damage taken. I wouldn’t give it to my more math-challenged players, but it’s fun. Healing effigy that helps praying lawful characters is nice.
   Beyond that, what can be improved is going to be a long list. First and most fundamentally, a bit of level thought should be put into design before slapping “40% of the whole 10 levels” on it. Ancient Knights are just weak skeletons, cultists are scrubs, and even a Marilith isn’t that nasty. There’s also a complete and utter lack of treasure outside of that admittedly very nice shield. The map could also be improved by not caving in the stairs, of course. You have a third dimension handed to you by Dyson and you squandered it, dangit. Not a lot to explore here.
   I’m going to say best use case is to strip that shield for your loot tables and otherwise give this a pass. The map is adequate, the keys are okay, and the plot is functional, but most users would probably be better served to randomly generate their own tomb-beneath-an-evil-abbey.
   Final Rating? */***** without the slightest bit of annoyance, it’s fine, it’s workable, it’s just nothing special at all.

A wilderness horror adventure by Dungeon Crab, level not desired, but 1-3...
Written for any number of systems (so none at all)
   There’s something about horror writers, man. I know one guy who writes horror and has his stuff together, but by and large they’re a ramshackle bunch, prone to make crazed DIY art projects linked by madness and silly-string. This one’s FORTY-FOUR PAGES LONG and loaded with colorful  public-domain art, weird slanted text, and snarky writing. It’s completely insane. I’m not sure if it even counts as an adventure, but it was free and on itch.io, so I’m going to make an attempt.
   This is called a pointcrawl, not a plot, and that’s, um…correct. Our basic setup is that we have a mysterious national park amidst the Cascades in Washington, Carver’s Ridge, a lonely place full of disappearances and mysteries. Absent an overriding plot, we are instead provided a big pile of potential characters (DREAD-inspired) with individual goals, a bunch of locations filled with quests, and a complex set of encounter tables that all pull toward “The Call”, a kind of psychological/spiritual effect that gradually drives players insane while they interact with encounters…basically, there’s this song that makes you go toward getting lost in the wilds, eventually going completely “Missing 411”. There’s 44 pages here, so you could run tons of sessions here, but I am a little unsure about what the goals here would be. Every horror story has to answer the basic question, “why don’t they just leave?” There’s not a lot compelling everyone to stick around after Dave gets turned into a missing persons report, outside of “players want to play”. Not great there.
   Details are all over the map. Trails are dotted with weirdness, getting increasingly odd as you go south and west. There’s a summer camp, Camp Lackmore, that’s a ramshackle reformatory. There’s a decaying gas-and-diner as the only major hub of civilization. There’s an old firewatch tower that’s a bit haunted. There’s an old army base with an elk-monster living in it. There’s a decaying manor in the middle of nowhere. There’s an anomalous factory that’s a straight-up SCP. And there’s a massive network of caves that link all these places…yeah it’s a lot.
   Let me be the first to admit that there’s a lot of what I liked among these details. The summer camp in particular is a standout big of setting-writing, both humorous and mildly horrific, with the camp owners as an oddball couple and the counselors as a mix of layabouts and enthusiasts running four different lodges each with their own strange rituals and customs. Great. There are moments of writing that genuinely made me laugh, despite not normally being a fan of Millennial snark, but guy did a good job. There’s also some nice moments of horror writing, like with the recurrent theme of human teeth lodged in a tree. It’s got some definite levers to play with. I like the UV trail markers for the most remote trails.
   …unfortunately, what could be improved more than anything else is TIE THESE THNGS TOGETHER MORE. There’s no through-line here, and some of the stuff, in particular that weirdo factory is just out-of-context and screams “I’ve been reading SCP Archive”, not “spooky stuff in the woods”. The manor is similar, although I do know there are some surprising gothic ruins scattered around the Pacific Northwest from the early 1900’s. Monsters are also a little too lolrandom in places…creepy imagery, good, but a central point is better. Maps outside of the trail maps are of the “abstracted boxes-and-lines” variety, which is always strictly inferior to real maps.
    Finally, not enough sasquatch.
   The best use case is going to be “read as a fun creepypasta”. There are several times where I genuinely enjoyed the act of reading on this one, which is admirable. Using bits and bobs from this as inspiration for a focused lost-in-the-woods horror scenario could definitely be done, but it’d take a heck of a lot of work so I’m not sure if I can recommend it for that.
   Final Rating? **/***** because we’re in the business of reviewing adventures here, not creative writing exercises. I admire what was done in a lot of places around here but I don’t think this fundamentally works as an adventure.

 An adventure by Leonard Schellauf, level not specified.
Written for His Majesty The Worm
I have an aesthetic objection. That “The” really shouldn’t be capitalized. This is an adventure that tests my general rule that specific is more adaptable than general. This thing is written for a very oddball system, with tons of tags like “wounds”, “disfavor”, and “roughhouse checks”. It’s written with this His Majesty The Worm system fully in mind, with things like the random encounter table being called “The Meatgrinder” and having XXI entries. No idea how that’s supposed to work. But I still think I could make this work. Nine pages, fourteen rooms, pretty decent prose for it.
The story is that this is the cellar of a famous vintner/alchemist, now sunken into the underworld and being used as a possible link between two levels of The megadungeon. I don’t think that’s a needed context, but hey, I admire the spirit. It’s a got a mysterious entryway via fountain, it’s got a river into deeper depths, this can be a solo adventure site but its written with a mind for integration. Rumors are a variety, alchemist wants stuff, heir wants wine, etc. All of this could be slotted in most urban crawls. Everything is bespoke and unique, but there’s also some very evocative art for them. Lot of effort put into this one.  

    I’ll start what I liked there with what’s not something I usually grade on, the art. The clay homunculi are pathetic and adorable, the monsters are creepy, the fountain actually shows what’s needed to show for the puzzle aspect…excellent stuff. I also liked the fountain as an entrance, stuffing the carved face’s nose with mint stops the water pouring out and reveals a passage down to the dungeon. There’s even a callback with a door getting unlocked by stuffing a carved mouth with food. Good solid design. Like the personalities of the little clay guys, always nice to have talky stuff in your dungeon. I like that there’s a recipe you can find that makes new homunculi with a super-rare wine as the ingredient.
Obviously as always, what could be improved is adding stairs and water features. The map is…fine, miss having a vertical element but the secret rooms all have reasons, the layout is logical with decent exploratory depth…yeah, this works, but it can be better. A lot of the interaction is on the random encounter table, including the Sword of McGuffin that has a taxidermied lindwyrm holding it. I don’t like driving so much action on a table, particularly with something like that which should have a fixed location on a map. There’s also a newborn wine godlet hungry for wine that’s a little more unfocused than I’d prefer. Could have been a little more developed there. There’s a random wine table that’s flavorful, but I’d love to see some more work adding game mechanics to each type.
I’d say best use case is to have this thing in a built-up city crawl and make it an adventure site to stumble into. It’d take a fair bit of translation effort to convert into a more normal game system, but it’s got the baseline you can work with and I think the juice is worth the squeeze. Inspiring a bit of creative improvisation? That’s cool. The individual bits are all very adaptable, too.
Final Rating? ****/***** which might be the best you can get with this scale. I’m genuinely charmed and surprised by this one, good job Mr. Schellauf.

   Last year, I reviewed Sigils, by the overblessed-with-first-names Sam Robb. I enjoyed it, finding it a genuinely refreshing street-level urban fantasy, written by a Christian without preaching, written with young protagonists without being YA, written clean enough I’d let my kids read without being middle-grade…altogether admirable. So, I was optimistic picking up A Sense of Murder, hoping I’d find another pleasant read.
   I found something rather more than pleasant.
   First, though, I shall begin with my biggest gripe. I open up this fantasy novel, and what do I not see? NO MAP. I understand why, having read the thing, but it’s going to be something I flag every time I (don’t) see it. The reason why it’s understandable is that the action here mostly takes place in a single city, so there’s no roaming around a vast territory here, just a point-crawl “market district”, “docks”, “embassy”, etc…if I were running this as an RPG scenario we could mostly do it theater-of-mind. But I’d still rather have a map for my players to point at.
   So is this another urban fantasy novel? Well, maybe. There are four main context-and-character combos you get in fantasy novels, the Wild Man in the Wilds (some Conan), the Wild Man in Civilization (some Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs), the Civilized Man into the Wilds (Tolkien, Lewis, B. K. Gibson), and finally the City Man in His City (Dresden Files, most Sanderson, Grey Mouser). Most Urban Fantasy is not just the urban context, but about being the last in that list, City Man in His City. In this case, we start with our protagonist as a rough lawman / travelling circuit justice out in the Fantasy West, drawn into a city by a cosmopolitan figure (the series’ titular Road Mage) who is also more comfortable in the wilds. Although both men are educated and sophisticated, if we’re looking at archetypes then I’d classify them both more comfortable in the saddle. Let’s call it a fantasy cop show and then move along.
   Setting is easy to grok, but also pretty fresh. Multiverse Rome is fighting Actual Satan across a vast network of worlds, traversed by magic. Tech levels are…schizophrenic, with the Multiversal Empire having lightning guns and the wizard using a sword, while the lawman uses a two-shot pistol. There are electric lights and steamboats and sailing ships and horses, so if you’re happy with gonzo then you’re good to go. If you’re not, it all makes sense, just calm down and think about it for a bit. Magic is all about manipulating The Weave, with some mages just able to “do magic stuff” while other people are born with specific Talents…including our first-person protagonist lawman.
   How powerful is it to be able to just tell the truth? Pretty useful for a lawman, and would be pretty useful for the empire to be drafted into their millennia-long war…which is why said mage is brought in in the first place. Lawman has to hide his power while investigating a series of child deaths that leads to a demon in a carnival that leads to finding a warlock in the city. Very nice character setup, and good plot to start with as well.
   A note on content: This is NOT Sigils. My eleven-year-old is NOT reading this. The whole thing starts with multiple dead children, and it’s pretty gritty in its depiction of evil. I found that to be refreshing, honestly, because while it never got grimdark or nihilistic evil is shown as genuinely tempting, not for “mwahaha magical corruption” reasons but because demons offer knowledge for free for their own deceptive purposes. That’s realistic. The experiences also scar the heroes, but nobody wallows in grief or trauma. Everyone has a job to do and so they sack up and go do it.
   Good guys being genuinely good is something rare enough in the space I feel the need to highlight it, and it’s something that happens consistently here. Nobody’s an idiot, nobody’s lawful stupid, nobody is perfect or angelic, but just as the bad guys are all bad, the good guys are all good, being both wise as serpents while desiring to be innocent as doves. Scars and losses will accrue, but that’s okay, and there’s something deeply cheerful about Robb’s heroes that reflect his own faith…in the end, what do they have to fear? At worst, death. All will be made new. Evil cannot win, this is an Actual Factual Ontological Truth, and it’s true in this world as well. Refreshing.
   As this is an action-mystery plot, there are plenty of twists and turns, and the Final Reveal is obvious to the reader only about a chapter and a half before it hits the protagonist, which is the perfect timing. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable romp throughout and my only final complaint is that the mystery is wrapped up but the ongoing drama for the characters has only just begun; I certainly hope more Road Mage books are forthcoming.
   Go read this one so the man writes me some more; you won’t regret it.

 A leveless dungeon by Yochai Gal and Francesco Zanieri
Written for Into The Odd
Oh boy, time to get back in the reviewing saddle with an ItO joint written by a couple vaguely familiar names. I don’t have high hopes anytime I see “Into The Odd”, and I wasn’t sure why…I think it’s actually because of the setting. The game is written with a weirdo post-apocalyptic scavenging scenario in mind, which certainly seems to be an impetus for adventure, but as is often the case with nihilistic settings it means that ultimately everything is meaningless, like with Murgleblurk. Dream-like, pointless, meandering, no level-ups…it’s not something that appeals to me personally, of course, but from what I see it doesn’t appeal to anyone long-term. Nobody’s playing a deep and meaningful ItO campaign over the years. So, we just get occasional pop-ups like this, made for artsy 1-hour one-shots. Crushing.
Information is also terribly organized here, just bullet points under room names.
In this particular case, we have the single most standard sci-fi scenario known to man, “ruined facility where the controlling AI goes mad from Some Kind of Art”, this case a library where music plays that addicts machines and kills people. Otherwise, we’re mostly in the “weirdo experiment rooms” here, not really leaning into the whole library thing. The map is isometric, so it sucks, but there’s an attempt at a second ingress point with vaguely-sketched “tunnels” beneath the library.
So, what I liked. Well. I do like that the Voltaic Sheet Music deals 1d4 CHA to living beings. On CHA 0, head-explosion. That’s kind of charming.
What can be improved is the whole rest of the dungeon. First, it’s a library, so maybe lean a little bit into the concept of a knowledge repository? The experimental rooms are classic “random stuff to mess with and die or mutate”, but there’s not a lot of benefit there and there’s not a lot of hinting. Yeah, don’t touch the swirling orange vortex, we get it. For a system where all character progression is based on items, you should have some more interesting items…instead of a scattergun and a one-use lightning gun.
Also, “bullet shells”.
I’m scraping here for a best use case. Map isn’t anything to extract, the ideas aren’t innovative, the monsters are dull, the story is trite, and the music thing is hard to translate. I guess grab the trap idea of music that makes your head explode? Mining deep in the squishy warm stuff in here for our single nugget of dubious quality.
Final Rating? */***** with a demoralized nod of fully-met expectations. In the end, this Into The Odd needed to be a lot more odd.

An island adventure by Avaricious RPG, for levels who knows
Written for “OSR”
   I’ve had a pretty decent experience with the “Appendix N Jam”, it’s a simple four-pages-including-cover size, usually focused pretty well on a simple scenario, often with fond bits of nostalgia bait around the edges. This one does have the $4.59 sticker and the usual format, but rather than keys we have a large number of tables and a few descriptions of spaces outlined on the map. This is a danger sign:

    Uh so this island is right off the world’s edge, outside of time and space, where the god Time sleeps inside of a volcano about to wake up. He’ll in fact wake up every few weeks, cause and eruption and mass destruction in a tantrum, then revert back to sleeping state and reset everything because Time Stuff. There are also all kinds of interesting people and places scattered throughout the island, all refugees and wash-ups from a thousand worlds, complete with multiple factions each with goals and lairs and everything.
   …we are given to understand. Actually, because, as mentioned, this is only three pages of content so its abstracted and fuzzy and generated randomly by tables and actually nothing matter because, as mentioned, there’s a huge reset button. ‘kay.
   I’ll swiftly go through what I liked because there’s only one thing, there’s a pretty good event timer showing the sequence of disaster, that’s nice for this kind of scenario.
   What can be improved otherwise is almost infinite because we’re in the realm of “more pages needed”, so I’m not going to speculate about details. Each bad guy area needs a map with keys and/or order of battle, the island itself needs more map details and random encounters, the mysterious fate-programmer-spider needs motivation and a plan, everything need loads and loads of detail…or else the island itself needs to be massively de-scoped, made much simpler. As it is this is a fuzzy idea for a little campaign, not a practical one-shot like the page count really wants. “Guy excitedly telling you his idea for a story” problem, classic.
   That’ll bring us to the best use case, as a universal lesson on how not to properly scope out a module. There’s no details to use here because he ain’t got no details, the tables to generate content make some pretty darn generic content, and the island/concept itself is so bespoke that there’s nothing to port away.
   Final Rating? */***** that’s a swing and a miss.