​Written by Mitch Hyde
AD&D, levels 6-8
Vampire lair
  Rumours suggest a Dark Lord has taken residence in an old ruined outpost, deep in a forest forlorn. Woodsmen and elves report that a 1st circle of druids have fled their stone circle, driven away by the harassment of a powerful figure. They will offer the use of their spells and agents in return for aid.
  Look at that lovely cover, man. Amateur but clean map on graph paper, lovely pencil-drawn sketch of the site villain, wonky mix of fonts on the title…this is everything I look for in a free DIY product. Might not have a budget, but there’s a lot of love and care that went into making this cover page/map. Sets a mood.
  Looking at our cover the story of the site is pretty obvious, vampire guy has a lair beneath a crumbling old fort (the titular barbican), his brand new Renfield is causing trouble in the local area with his knightly zeal, the knight is Obviously Charmed and freaks out if cured, alternately he’s a formidable fighter but in the end just a fighter. Find a secret passway, go down into the lair proper, overcome linear series of traps and a couple nasty fights, slay vampire, leave beaming with pride. Or smarting over lost levels, it is a vampire after all.
  I’ve said nice things about the line work, so now let me talk a little more critically about the map. It’s…very linear. Highly, highly linear, just a straight line with three spokes; that one line between 2 and 8 is just a vent for a gaseous form vampire, so unless you have a very unusual potion loadout for the party or a lot of pickaxes plus patience. Linear is okay in a site this size (and it’s a pretty decent size), but combined with the relentless brutality of the traps here this is going to be tight and constraining.
  And whew boy the traps. I’d call it baby’s first Tomb of Horrors, but there is a sphere of annihilation present so maybe I shouldn’t diminish it like that. Said sphere is in a window in a room where illusionary vampire assassins hop out, throw darts, and jump back in…there’s not a lot here to telegraph the extreme danger. There’s also a dust of choking and sneezing, a false gargoyle loaded with green slime, a possessing demon mist in the false sarcophagus, invisible coffer corpses in classic giant chessboard room, a few little fire traps…I really want to know how many level 6 characters the author expected us to lose, but it’s a lot. Particularly because there are enough secret doors that you probably want your divination spells for finding those too, or else you’re just stopping in areas.
  There are some reasonably gnarly monsters to fight, too. A flesh golem is unfinished (but is active if the party leaves and comes back weeks later), but there are also some decent NPCs to fight. I like the one cursed room with a simple barbarian who’s a threat because no attack succeeds unless the striker’s full name is spoken while swinging, fun fight. There’s an MU with a spellbook but his spells not called out, bad form. Honestly the vampire himself is probably the chumpiest, particularly given he’s not resistant to turning in any special way. Love of set-pieces is shown here and they’re fun…probably a lot though. Each individual encounter is gold, but it’s too much all at once.
  There’s a lot of treasure here. Like, so much. So so much. Enough that the vampire’s final 10k and a ring of three wishes honestly feels a little cheap for the end. Over a quarter million in gold, which is incredible at first, but given the untelegraphed screw jobs that hammer away time and again, it still might lead to bitterness. Good flavoring on all the magic items.
  This is a hard one to judge for campaign inclusion. I don’t often do this, but I’d almost recommend this being stripped for parts. The initial bit with the knight Renfield is auto-included, and I love some of the trap ideas, but the whole thing needs toning down if it’s a simple bumble into. Much like Tomb of Horrors, probably best as a competition module at a con unless you’re willing to put in some telegraph work long beforehand. 

Written by WoadWarrior
AD&D, levels 5-6
Village and gnomish dungeon
  Located not 10 miles from the borderlands of civilisation and visible from Skepeside, rising ominously above the windswept moors of the wild lands, Gnomish hill has long been a symbolic landmark in the division between wild and civilised land. 10 years ago an adventuring party by the name of the Blue Band laid claim to the hill and built a home for themselves to civilise the wilderness, but were slaughtered to a man by a gnomish army. Now the hill has only its black reputation, even as the wounds left by the Blue Band slowly heal.
  Oh boy. I might have been defeated by this one.
  We’ve all had that experience, particularly in a hobby this nerdy, of someone very enthusiastic, and very creative, excitedly explaining his last awesome session to you. Rather than a tightly wound pitch, a back-of-the-book blurb, your impression from his recounting of the session is a soup of scenes, images, anecdotes, rather than a coherent sequence/plot. I think Woad Warrior’s games are probably a blast to play in, if he’s running something go play with him. I’m just a little confused as to what I’m supposed to do with the document to run it at my own table.
  Plot is a few disconnected things. There’s a little village on the borderland with some gnomes, the village is designed to be a frequently visited by adventuring parties with all the amenities a young party needs, plus a plot ticker about a bad seed lad getting into trouble. There’s a Beltane ritual that some bad guy (where) wants to corrupt, using bad lad as his agent. Gnomes will get mad if this happens and attack from somewhere? There’s also a hill with a bandit tower and a ruined village and giant dire mole tunnels to explore and maybe I’m stupid but I’m not sure how they connect to the plot and it’s all very confusing. At least the site as a site does work as a place to bump into, so…let’s judge that.
  Maps are twofold. There’s a little regional hexmap that shows exactly what I’d expect hearing “village on a hilly borderland region” and then there’s the ruins with mole tunnels all around them. I don’t know where the bandit tower is for sure but careful parsing of context clues would indicate that it’s the unlabeled and disconnected central structure? I’m fine with the layout of the area, nice to see a couple entrances to the lower level plus some mole-hole spots where a party armed with shovels and a willingness to work can also break in and/or find neat stuff. The lack of numbers for keys, instead using labels, is nonstandard. This works (unless you forget to label, ahem, TOWER), but the standard is a standard for a good reason. 

  Our threats are fey, keeping with the mild sub-theme of this contest so far. In addition to the giant moles and almost expected giant ants, there’s a moldiwarp (evil fey dwarfmole), other giant bugs, the chance of quicklings, the bandits (assuming they’re actually where I’m guessing they are), and a reasonable salting of captive/dead/confused NPCs to chat with. Maybe they understand what’s going on and will let the rest of us in. Level six won’t have too much of an issue with what’s here, amusing time fighting giant snails aside. The titular moldiwarp is reasonably dangerous unless the players somehow divine his long list of weaknesses. There’s a little think the adventure does where it nerfs some of the random encounters by having them default to being slowed, which is a clunky but workable method of nerfing monsters that really don’t seem like they need a nerf. Only major environmental note is that there are custom rules making fighting in the tunnels annoying for anyone who went into long weapons.
  Despite our fey theming, most of the treasure is muddy coins, but there’s also stuff like a solid gold rocking chair, special fungus, a pretty flower, royal banners, etc. Amounts look about right with tens of thousand of gold available to properly pay a fireball-level party, all over the place as it is. Magic items are mostly book with special flavoring, which is a good way to go with it. I do like a +1 Shillelagh as a nicely Celtic magic weapon. The rewards for engaging with the timed story element(s) are a warm fuzzy feeling and frustrating the bad guy plan with the power of friendship. There’s a neat custom spell dangled in front of the magic user but you’re unable to figure it out canonically, that’s a bummer.
  My mixed feelings about the involved baseline aside, the site will work as a fey location to bump into, if you’re in a game that has fey locations. That’ll do, just wish it was a little clearer.

  In my Crapshoot Monday, I’m always looking hopefully in the itch.io sewers for adventures of some redeeming value. There are some adventures I’ve been positive on:
*Brigands of Bristleback Burrow 
*Fortress on the Wild Frontier 
*At the River’s Edge (less for the direct adventure, more how useful it is). 
*Petra Serpentis 
  …if you see four or more stars, you know I think it’s worth at least trying to play with. But the above list are hypothetically good. I have in fact played some of these adventures at my table. They were fun. Players had a good time. These aren’t four-star “good stuff” that I loved reviewing, these are mostly three-star modules that nonetheless worked well enough for hasty inclusion in my game. Without further ado:

The Forgotten Isle of the Hydra Cult 
  Less of a full adventure site, more of a cute little lair, this worked great as a quick little location for a map, racing against a rival pirate-aligned wizard (The Corpse Master). I plumped it up quite a bit with that last bit an actual hydra, but it was a cute little Indianna Jones affair to play in as part of a session.
  Honorable mention to Ill-Gotten Gains, another adventure from the same collection, that is also seeded on the map, just hasn’t been hit yet.

The Pirates of Marwater Cavern 
  As you may know, I run an archipelago campaign, and needless to say pirates are a common roll. Needing a quick lair, I grabbed this excellent one and it played really well, sometimes a big open chamber entrance can lead to a bad exploration but this was a wonderful “delve” that had a lot of subtle details enabling careful exploration (the main chamber is loud with an echoing waterfall, lit by a skylight) and there was a great mix of traps, negotiation, and pirate fighting for the whole thing. Were I to run it again, I’d have added a touch more magic and maybe some kind of non-humanoid monster for extra spice, but for a low-level pirate lair it’s a top performer. 

Transit Precinct 45 
  Different strokes entirely, this scifi adventure was perfect for my ongoing Stars Without Number FTL campaign. I had rolled an asteroid mining system with a prisoner who had, per rumor, once bested the players’ main villain. Perfect spot for this little jailbreak scenario on a broken-down satellite station. The players planned very carefully with multiple contingencies and faked a “hyper-diphtheria” outbreak in a supply run to worm their way on board, coupling that with a rock throw to take out the prison station’s comms mast. The adventure had all the information needed to support this, packed in just eight flavorful and whitespace-heavy A4 pages. I was extremely impressed with how well it ran and everyone had a great time, even after everything broke down and they had to shoot their way out with their prisoner. I’d go back and add another star if I believed in such things. Surprised by how well it ran.

The Awful Amber Doom 
  This one is more style than substance, but the style is so wonderful and fit so well with my ongoing campaign that I just had to salt it in. Lost sunken city rising from the depths on the night of a full moon, race against time with a vampiric necromancer also seeking a pulp artifact, shadowy avatar of a batlike Great Old One…this fit so well for a session, although it definitely needed seeding beforehand (using the Hydra Cult location for a secret map to the location of the sunken city, plus divination answers with the fairly high-level wizard investigating). It’s built way too low level in the Shadowdark original for its themes, but it was a good level 8 adventure upon conversion, helped by my own preexisting tables. The evocative art helped too during their expedition. As you can tell, then, this will be a qualified recommendation, because some work needs to be done to fully flesh it out, but it was an entertaining pulp inspiration and that’s its own value. 

​Written by Nick Roman
Systemless (AD&D), levels 5-7
Hobbit thug lair
  Green hills roll to the horizon; nature’s bounty springs forth from the soft, black earth; stamping music and the scent of hearty food fill the air. In the very center of bucolic halfling country, Scarborough
Shire springs up along a little-traveled hill-country road, with hospitality aplenty for travelers.
  Ah, halflings. Happy hobbits or nasty little thieves, with very little between. While they’re a core race from some of the very earliest D&Ds, most parties will have a second dwarf or elf before gaining a spare Bilbo, and there’s a similar lack of halfing adventure sites. Ruined dwarf mines? Hundred of them. Fallen elven shrines? Can’t sneeze without hitting one. But halfling locations for adventure? It’s pretty much Lipply’s Tavern from last year’s Adventure Site Contest and that’s it. Good for Nick Roman trying to rectify this lack.
  The story here makes sense given what tropes exist for halflings. The titular shire in inhabited by a nasty old bandit halfling, with his family all under strict orders to present an outside appearance of bucolic charm to hapless travelers, while stocking their worst ill-gotten gains in a hobbit hole warren beneath. A hobgoblin warband is hiding out underneath as well, in an increasingly tense hideout situation. Salt in the fact that grandpa is dying and he’s got two different lieutenants vying for control of the estate before he kicks the bucket…explosive situation, lots of potential, can’t help but approve.
  The map is a slightly iffy scan of ballpoint-on-graph paper, nothing going to make you ooo and aah but it’s legible enough and the legend is helpful. Given the primary axis of the adventure is assumed to be social, the pretty standard geometry is not just forgivable, but desirable. Investigating players will be looking at sneaking beneath the normal-floorplan “tall hall”, you don’t want a whole other dungeon under there, you want a couple turns leading to big set-pieces, and you want a logical flow when making those skulking decisions. Nice little Easter egg in that a little side tunnel links up to D3 Vault of the Drow for the ambitious DM.
  I did miss a relationship map for the people involved here, by default every named NPC outside of dying grampa is someone you’d expect to talk with, even the hobgoblins have a warlord leader and an ogre lieutenant eager to replace him. The inn has a colorful panoply of interesting characters ignorant of the halflings’ bad behavior, the fields have poorly-buried adventurer bones that the halfling children are daring each other to touch, there’s a neglected assassin in the outhouse who just longs to kill someone on the loo…the whole thing is a mixture of charm and horror, worth the effort to grok, but needs a few read-throughs to be able to run flexibly at the table. The final reveal, that granddad hobbit is taken over by a devil, could use some lampshading.
  I do feel a lack of an official order of battle, because there’s a very real chance the whole site blows up into a massive pitched battle. There aren’t a lot of monsters, per se, but in there are a decent pile of halfling thugs, a big hobgoblin warband, plus plenty of bad guys with class levels, a mixture of fighters, thieves, and assassins, plus a gnome illusionist (mild gnome theme emerging here by this point) and the old grandpa is basically a bone devil thanks to some infernal pacts he’s made. There’s the occasional statue to dink around with and get trapped by, but mostly we’re looking at big swarm battles, should be decently threatening to an APL 6 group but they won’t be too troubled for their payday unless it’s all at once. Or there are civilian hobbit shields. The worst threat, that big hobgoblin warband, really wants the good-aligned level 4 NPC party’s help.
  Loot is okay for the amount of challenge, interestingly listed in cp/sp/ep/gp/pp for the mix of luxuries and trade goods as a quick shorthand for encumbrance. Hope you brought enough wagons, there’s some bulky stuff here. Magic is all book items and pretty standard ones at that, but there’s enough here that parties selling magic will level up pretty consistently. This is all assuming AD&D, which I’ll note is what the writer was aiming for but forgot to specify.
  I don’t foresee any issues whatsoever putting this into most campaign worlds. It’s a fairly remote crossroads location with reasonable hooks, the map calls out some specific places but there’s absolutely nothing forcing any particular world here. The juice is probably worth it to put this in your map, just know that it’s going to be a bit of a squeeze. 

​An island hexcrawl by Igöör, level not specified because…
Written for Mörk Börg
  Okay, we’ve been entirely too positive around here. Not only is January blessed with adventure site reviews, and even the usual Crapshoot Monday depressant has been underperforming with a couple decent modules in the past two weeks. What can we do? Mörk Börg to the rescue, those are always miserable. In the Island of Par we have six pages to describe a decent-sized island with half a dozen questlines and multiple sites of interest. Ambitious to the point of being confusing, but it’s trying really really hard. My eyes don’t hurt from yellow, it’s in a slightly pixelated black-and-white, so that’s automatically made this my favorite Burk Mhurg adventure.
  The premise is…interesting. “I see your assumed end of the world campaign frame and I reject it.” The titular island is isolated from the standard crapsack world and is a somewhat less crappy sack with its own unique cosmology about sleepless ancient creator giants, sentient growing mold, and generational curses that I’ll call “Goblin False Punch Machine”-like. Should be a GLOG adventure. The six “quests” are encountered procedurally and tell a bit of a story while weird nasty dangers get bumped into in several cases. Factions also exist with at least notional motivations.
  First piece of what I liked has to be the map, it’s well-illustrated and has a flow that’s both coherent and naturalistic while still being interesting for a campaign. I also like the setting’s history and story setup, it’s a little bit gonzo and a little bit derivative at times but it’s also generally pretty cool. I love the Wrong Sheep, fake sheep-lures tethered to a cloud-sized hidden psychic predator with hallucinating effects. Some of the factions are nicely adventure-spawning too, set up for conflict via PC proxies.
   …but for all that, what could be improved should be fairly obvious. This thing is six pages long. I mean, they’re big landscape spreads, don’t get me wrong, but all the admittedly cool ideas and actionable seeds in the world kind of struggle when the execution phase comes, particularly in such a low-procedure rules-slim game as Mörk Börg. I should be the biggest booster of this module, I love regional campaign frames with precisely this level of interest and incident, but as punchy as the individual ideas are here, in the six pages there’s just not enough details to actually run this thing, not without the DM having to invest a lot of time in the prep. Laudable ambition that needs about twice the page count to properly turn it into the campaign it desperately wants to be.
  That said, if you’re the victim of a Mörk Börg game the best use case for The Island of Par is to run it as a high-effort, handwavey-at-times campaign, it’s certainly a lot better than anything else I’ve ever encountered for the system. Admire the ambition, it might just not have the support available from the system proper.
  Final Rating? **/***** which while not great, is more because it misses the usability mark rather than any fundamental issues. Not quite breaking the positivity trend here.

​Written by Jacob72
Classic D&D (B/X), level 3-5
Lost elvish tomb
  The players find a map pointing to, or hear word of, the lost tomb of the elvish prince Calithilben is said to be close to the tiny ruined druid chapel in the village of Sorn, a sorry place of some two dozen low stone and turf windowless huts. The grounds of the chapel are bounded by a circular wall and shared with a single man-sized standing stone. When the party arrives in Sorn they learn from the headman Jasper Hurley (middle-aged, dirty, bald crown with wild hair, worried and truthful) that the local herbalist Tilo Dietl and his teenage son Hempel have been surveying the stone and have now gone missing. They believed that they were close to finding the tomb of Calithilben.
  I’m charmed by the gentle suggestion at the beginning of this adventure site, where our noble author shyly suggests that this works best if there are no elves in the party. I think that in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Five, “fae jerk” is a safe elf default assumption. I’m sure some long-winded philosophical essays could be written as to why, talking about social, political, historical, and religious developments in the past half century, but I’m going to blame Rings of Power and leave it at that.
  Our adventure site is a standard little tomb-inna-cave complex with a long(ish) adventure hook involving a kidnapped herbalist and his son, a small bandit party led by a pair of werewolves, a smashed fairy village (smashed by giant toads or stoats, I believe), and of course the actual tomb itself with a giant bee theme. Little bit involved for the hook but a muddy hole in the ground and a promise of bad guys to kill should bring players in easily enough.
  A little aside on the formatting. There’s a standard of bolded monsters, italics treasure, and then some kind of special designator for traps/magic. It’s not strictly needed, but having big solid paragraph blocks without the threats/rewards in any way called out makes it a little bit difficult to parse while using a module at the table. Format can be overdone, and what “too much” looks like is something that’ll be a subjective taste, but this one was a little slower to parse without that formatting pass.
  Our map is a set of caves, a phone photo of pen/pencil on graph paper. I like the use of color to make the water feature pop and elevations stand out more, but a crisper scan would help. Again, not an art contest, so moving on to the map’s actual features I like the flow in the beginning with the river, the fact that everything narrows down in a single pinch point at the middle is realistic, but a little bit troubling during play. Blobs-with-tunnels are how real caves often work out but it means that the exploration becomes a little bit linear. Perfectly cromulent map for a site, in the end though, and the 13-key size is just about perfect for the contest’s scope. 

  A lot of attention is paid to environmental effects, making a nice and naturalistic set of hazards early on with a tight 2x4 entrance to the whole thing, risky bridges, a deafening waterfall interfering with casting and surprise, toad mud-holes, the like. Once you get to more worked-stone areas, that’s where a trap spraying poison gets found and a well is present to much around with. A monster/trap/situation crops up in a couple places, with an elfgate that can summon more elves from Fairie and a changeling (reskinned doppelganger) in a cave impersonating the titular herbalist’s son. Interaction, good.
  Beyond the sneaky doppelganger and the son NPC (infected with lycanthropy and trapped in a fairy ring, good), our fights and wandering monsters are naturalistic; giant stoats, giant toad, bugs, sprites, elves…for a tomb there’s only one undead part, which brings a couple wraiths out if graves are desecrated. Our “bossfight” is four bandits and a pair of werewolves, so I think level 5s are going to steamroll the spot, while level 3s better be lucky with their sleeps.
  Treasure is a little sparse for the stated level range, total of ~8,799 (some cash is rolled for), but what’s also interesting is that it’s pretty darn front-loaded, the first two areas hold over 5k in a chest and some sheepskin bags full of electrum. Magic items are all book but pretty decent, but if this is indeed for B/X then you’re not getting XP for them either…I think level 5 players will be more than a little unhappy about facing wraiths and werewolves for pocket change. The distribution and hiding/guarding level is fine, but I’d personally multiply all the cash past the first two rooms by about x5 at least, if you’re going to put your suggested level that high. One odd place is a little graveyard that has the implicit assumption that the players will go corpse-robbing by default, there’s a statuette retrieved that has no listed value.
  This adventure site is fine to place almost anywhere, a cave system with a fae tomb deeper in is easy to run with baseline assumptions of “standard D&D”. Just an edit pass needed to tune up delivery and buff the rewards and we’re in archetype range. 

​Written by Tristan Shoudy
AD&D, levels not listed (mid-ish)
Haunted greenhouse
  A ruined greenhouse that has been long abandoned rises about the grasslands surrounding it. Within the crumbling palisade surrounding it are shells of other ruined stone and wooden structures. It was once an alchemist’s greenhouse but was left abandoned long ago after he was slain. Prior to his death the alchemist has imported Crocodiles from the south to act as guards for his precious greenhouse. After his death the crocodiles remained but soon perished. They soon rose anew as ghost’s continued to perform the task they were given in life, with renewed dedication.
  Since the beginnings of the hobby, there’s always been tension between in-fiction character power and “levels”, a very game-centric concept. In the simplest conception of D&D, character levels correspond with floors of a dungeon; first levels are on the first floor, second levels are on the second floor, etc. Higher level characters should face higher hit-die threats, with commensurate higher-level rewards. In a realistic world, while there will be more or less dangerous areas, some variety is to be expected, and certainly in a sprawling long-term campaign I’d hope for low level adventure sites to sprinkle around for new characters in an established high-level character’s domain. Despite the artificiality, tagging an adventure with “levels X-Y” is a wise practice, useful both to reviewers and to the user. Here, for example…if I send my max-level players into this site, they’re going to sneeze and destroy everything. But if I send in four hapless level 1’s, they’re dead.
  That metacritique aside, the story here is fairly simple…alchemist guy has a greenhouse. He imports crocodiles to guard his greenhouse. He dies. They die. Now the greenhouse and the fort around the greenhouse are ruins and overgrown and guarded by ghost crocs. As will happen. Also the greenhouse is a redhouse because the plants (unspecified) are red.
  I’m going to stop overusing the word simple, so the map is…okay. Works fine as a little fortified site, just not a lot of stuff to discover. A lack of random encounters or order of battle means we’re just meandering from space to space poking at them. Drawn well, clean lines, and si…er, basic, is fine but you need spice if you’re going to have a simple location like this.
  The nicest bit of spice is in trap for the ledger room (5), which sprays a mist that inflicts “death by cardiovascular-renal disease in 5 days”, now THAT paints a picture. There’s a sad miss in terms of interaction here with those crimson plants, both hooks mention them as a general draw to the site, but besides being something with a sticker price this was a perfect opportunity for something weird.
  This applies to the crocodile spirits too. Skeletons of crocodiles that have ghosts issue forth? That’s a great idea, it’s a pity that statwise these things become just lower-level ghosts (aging fear aura, nasty). A wight, ghouls, and sixteen skeletons fill out our monster roster, they’re doing stuff upon bumbling into their rooms but are otherwise not particularly dynamic. As is an issue with any all-undead adventure site, there’s the question of cleric turns completely trivializing everything.
  Treasure mix is good, but some of it is laying completely unhidden and unguarded. 12,141gp, over half in the fragile red plants, feels like an okay payday for the site’s scale and the hit dice of the enemies, but once more you have the Cleric Question. Loads of magic items for eight keyed rooms.
  Insertion of this adventure site into a campaign is really a question of specifics. I like the premise, I like the idea, I like ghost crocodiles, weird overgrown alchemist gardens, ruined forts…just needs another editing pass to add specificity, and I think you’ll see this really pop.
  Also the crocodile skeletons should totally attack along with the crocodile ghosts.

​Written by A. M. Jackson
AD&D, levels 1-2
Levitating wizard lab
  This construct was built by the once-great wizard Thenzur for magic-users to find his spell, which can only discovered through exploration. He is known for a spell that is on p. 68 of the PHB, which creates a “circular plane of null gravity.” He was known to carry every coin out of the dungeon; this structure is what he made from all the copper: a giant cylinder 200' wide and 60' high.
  There are two main flavors of “wizard adventure site”. The first, classic, is “wizard’s tower”, which we have already examined in one of its more fairytale standard incarnations. The second, only slightly less rare, is “weirdo puzzle lair”, and that is what Mr. Jackson has delivered to us with The Copper Circle. Levels 1-2, which, hey, newbies need adventure sites too, the adventure site is only a dozen keys but every entry is pretty complex.
  Our gonzo story here is motived by the question, “how do we house the must-be-discovered-in-play spell Floating Disk in an adventure site?” In this, the LEGALLY DISTINCT AND NOT AT ALL COPYRIGHTED Thenzur’s Soaring Circle is the primary spell focused on in a giant copper cylinder piloted by psionic pygmies that vrooms around as they search for their long-dead master. Go inside, bumble around looking at puzzles and interacting with low-level threats (and a few puckeringly high-level chats), leave having captured your MU’s much-needed spell scroll along with some gonzo friends made along the way. Or a slightly ambiguous feeling from murdering some neutral guys. I do really like the detail that this thing is made by the wizard with all the copper he’d taken out of every dungeon, nice touch.
  The map is given with both DM and VTT versions, not strictly needed but a very nice touch. For a very small location it’s got some nice variety and the fact that there are three ingress points gives some reasonably different approaches here. For a hovering magical cylinder one could wish for a little bit more verticality but there’s nothing wrong with the layout here. Looks cool too.
  As this is a little puzzle dungeon, there are of course lots of tricky little traps and interactive bits. There are several statues of the wizard guy that are missing arms/spellbook/etc, putting it all together unlocks a chest under each statue that contains the floating disk spell scroll and a little treat, alternately these chests can be opened by magic words, which are written in turn on a piece of paper that got ripped into scraps, so it’s recoverable. Other trap/tricks involve invisible floating disks, natch. None of the puzzles are single-solution, which is good, and some of the traps will absolutely murder careless PCs but all of them are well telegraphed. It’s fun. Moving the magical cylinder requires some complicated fixing and then 150lbs of organic matter, nice.

​  Monsters are suitably gonzo for a hovering copper cylinder belonging to a high-level wizard. Psionic pygmies are weird and happy to talk, demonic manes are running amok in one of the rooms, a bronze dragon(!) hangs out in another room, cheerfully willing to commission the adventurers on a side quest. A bit more standard grey ooze and NPC thief fill out the roster, there’s potential for death here but nothing obscene. Just about right for a first level site.
  So the point of this adventure site is to give out a spell, but there’s enough cash on hand here to squelch any resentment out of the rest of the party. The big hoard that is the young bronze dragon’s travel purse probably won’t be taken. Intangible reward of the pygmies offering to give the PCs a lift to somewhere is a good idea. The module acknowledges that there’s a sticky question of what happens if the players take over the cylinder itself…a floating copper base that can travel 80mph is a very gamebreaking thing to hand out at level 1, but with a shrug and a head scratch the DM is told to just handle it.
  Insertion into a campaign world is a gonzo tolerance question. If there’s a high-magic AD&D “standard”, then I see zero reason not to put it in directly. Otherwise, it might want to be contained a little more carefully, as a portion of a bigger dungeon. Still nice to have a gonzo wizard lair handy and it’s a high-quality one. 

​Written by Riley
S&W, levels 1-2
It’s a wizard tower, duh.
  Hidden amongst a copse of trees atop a small cliff lies the tower of Santha of Nikoza, the Conjurer. Recently villagers have reported seeing undead and hearing strange moaning sounds.
  I don’t know if you’re like this, but from multiple conversations with other sandbox DMs, I know a lot are like this. We become map magpies, grabbing random little maps from everywhere, squirreling them away on phones or laptops to grab in emergencies, when lairs are sought or hideouts are discovered. In my maps folder, I have a subfolder labeled “spires” that’s just loaded with tower maps, they’re endlessly useful. Towers as fortifications, rocky spires as dragon lairs, towers as prisons…plenty of other uses, but far and above the most common tower is Ye Olde Wizard Tower. Thank you Riley, we need the classics.
  The story is…uh oh, we have us a Subversive Twist Tower. Evil necromancer? Actually neutral alchemist. Skeletons wandering around? Human mercenaries with their flesh turned invisible. Those moans? Captured blink dogs. Also because it’s a dude experimenting with blink dogs, there’s an ogre who’s a teleporting Quantum Ogre. Let he who hasn’t made that joke himself throw the first stone. The wizard is happy work with adventurers who are friendly, but everything being set up to look like an evil lair means you won’t normally start out with the talking, more likely it’ll be all murder after a series of unfortunate misunderstandings.
  I have mixed emotions about subversive “aha, tricked you” twists in adventures like this. On the one hand, there are already plenty of low-level necromancer towers in the world, so it makes sense to sake it up a bit. On the other hand, players often regard these as dirty tricks, getting annoyed with the subverter. On the gripping hand, this is OD&D level 1/2, so this is written to be, if not the first adventure, then at least one of the first few, so this sets the tone for an entire campaign. That’s…well, it’s going to be very group-and-DM-dependent, let me leave it at that.

​  The map is fairly simple, but lovely. Let me once again note that this isn’t an art competition, but I do want to highlight skilled map illustration where I see it. Something like this, clean, simple, and direct, is wonderful for the scale of “adventure site”, and the tower illustration is great for showing players “this is what you see”. Towers are interesting locations to set up, because by default they tend to be fairly linear going inside…which is why window locations should be carefully depicted to show enterprising PCs alternate ways inside. No player will ever enter via front door if they can help it. The caves beneath give alternate means of ingress, which is good, although missed opportunity to have a secret passage between 10 and 6B there. Still, loops are overrated and the size is perfect. 

  Non-beatstick threats are limited to an exploding glyph and awkward/dangerous traversals (climbing tower, squeezing into spider cave), but there’s a reasonable amount of danger for level 1. The random encounter down below in the caves is the aforementioned quantum ogre, while up in the tower the wizard and his “skeleton” mercenaries are the random encounter. Beyond the subversion trick, the mercs are skeleton-looking to possibly bait out a clerical turn attempt or two. Beyond that, it’s the low-level basics of a level 4 wizard, spiders, centipedes, and blink puppies, because why not force the players to feel like puppy-killing monsters, right? Got to make the newbies feel a little sweat for their payday.
  Said payday is a little sparse, even for a small level 1 site…2,847.3 golden pieces doesn’t go very far even then, although its nicely mixed up with some hidden, some flavorful, some scattered, that’s decent placement. Magic items are a mirror of mental scrying, a magic net, potions of skeletonization (makes you look like a skelly), and a +1 greatsword. Biggest miss is no hidden spellbook, c’mon, we’re robbing a wizard here and your Basic MU needs those spells. I’d boost the amounts a bit but I’m like the contents themselves.
  Placement in your campaign should be a breeze, really just depends on how trope-tolerant your players are. It’s a simple, charming little mage tower, sometimes that’s all we’re asking out of life.

​A “micro campaign” by Taylor Milley, low level
Written for ShadowDark (emotionally)
  Oops. I try hard, here at Crapshoot Monday, to deliver a free adventure review each and every week. Despite the advertising, this black-background little art project is barely an adventure, more of a…something else. Hard to say what it is, eight pages, kind of a setting, but very weird. Although it claims to be written for ShadowDark, it’s got very little to do with the system…which, given it was apparently released in early 2023, means it was a cynical cash grab. Except it’s PWYW. I don’t know, it’s got little artsy stuff and it’s very confused. This thing tries hard, going from a poetic history blurb, to a village description, then a…bestiary? Then a hexcrawl that talks about stuff, and little classified ads for the village’s shops…I don’t get it.
  The setting, as it is, is the bog standard “ruin-haunted abandoned borderland region with a single point of light village, its economy entirely based on adventurer plunder”. Which, while it lacks verisimilitude, also manages to be trite and insipid. Ruins on the hexmap are invited to be “whatever your favorite other modules are”, thanks. Weird thing.
  Reaching a bit, what I liked was the hexmap, it’s simplistic but perfectly functional for a campaign. I like that there’s this random stag that watches over the region and gives luck bonuses if spotted. I like the in-universe establishment ads, discretely in the back of the document.
  …what can be improved is everything else. Again. The hexcrawl is a thin premise and adding actual ruin descriptions, at least in a Wilderlands of High Fantasy length, are needed to make it legit, I can always replace a light description with my own adventure sites but give us a default. Making the ideas like the Luck Stag and rival adventure sponsors more gameable wouldn’t take an exceptional amount of effort but as it is these thin ideas just don’t have the umph. Couple that with the bestiary being so light…I think the formatting was why these ideas don’t get fleshed out, when you’re having to laboriously draw everything out in MS Paint, you’re going to be having a hard time writing long descriptions. Of course a fundamental improvement for a hexcrawl product would be picking a system that has a wilderness procedure worth a darn.
  The best use case for this might be…use the little ads for the adventure shops? The hexcrawl is just so so think I wouldn’t want to use it straight for love or money.
  Final Rating? */***** and that’s only because I save zero for only the actively repugnant nightmares.