Written by Warped Plots
For AD&D, levels 4-5
Summer Camp for Mythos Cultists
For about a couple of centuries, this place was dedicated to Yog-Sothoth. A remote chapel in the middle of the forest, along with several log cabins, a well, a graveyard, and even some overgrown remains of gardening attempts.      
   It’s actually kind of surprising it’s taken us this long to get to Lovecraft. Mythos creatures have a long history in D&D, where they’re treated less like Ol’ HPL’s incomprehensible and impossible horrors, more nice high-hit-die beatsticks with a few extra goopy bits. The game is fundamentally about defeating monsters, not staring at them and going mad, so it makes sense that this branch of the hobby has taken Mythos stuff this way. In Chapel here, this fundamental attitude is even extended to Mr. Yoggy himself, in this very nicely-sketched log cabin summer camp site.
   We have here a site built for a very specific usage. Although it is certainly conceivable that this site can be bumbled in to, the default assumption is that the party, in the course of doing PC Things, beats an evil thug into spilling the rumor that this chapel exists for teleporting the faithful to anywhere they want to go. Head into the woods, talk to an adorable idol made of eyes, survive a carrion crawler for a night, get a portal to Next Place on Your Quest Docket. Fun and done.
   As described, this is more of a protracted encounter than a site exploration, but there is a lovely sketch of the whole camp along with keys. Against a complicated fighter this whole area would make for a great set-piece arena but a carrion crawler is more of a bitey fight-stick, so unless circumstances conspire heavily to make for a slasher-horror-movie kind of nightmare run-and-hide scenario, mostly you’re just attempting to replicate the quality art while your players poke into every cabin. Sure looks nice though.
   There really isn’t a lot of interaction here. The altar talks, there’s a 25% chance of encountering a semi-helpful ghost, and a 25% chance for a personalized note from Yog-Sothoth found on the mummified corpse of a priest. Most of the cabins are empty, with giant bugs (spiders, centipedes) as our only threats. If the PCs go down the well in the center the writeup concedes there might be other interesting things down there but also tells us descent is tantamount to suicide with more carrion crawlers down there. Um. Okay. Maybe that’s true at levels 4-5, but what if they come back at level 10?
   Unfortunately I think the answer might be “well there’s a different quest area by then”. Despite the AD&D system tag, our only cash is d6x100 copper coins. Now, a massive unlimited (if chaotic) one-way teleport gate is a pretty useful tool/site, but a lot of the design here suggests D&D 2E+ “quest-based” campaign structure rather than “explore and loot” of the original school. That’s not to say the site isn’t useful in any type of game, it’s just notable that in its lack of cash.
   This site can go anywhere in your game, and if played straight, can massively change your game (good). I just wish it was a little more Yoggy. 

Written by Michael Strauss
For ACKS, levels unlisted (high)
Hags lairing in a wizard’s ruins
Generations ago, an Opelenean mage named Balthazar built a quiet cottage from which to study a buried edifice of elemental earth. He worked alone and eventually died alone, leaving his home and basement workshop to decay.      
   I’m xtremely amused by the shrine/temple/chapel/etc theme ongoing this ASC III, but it seems like the theme did not penetrate the ACKS community, who have otherwise really stepped up and delivered this time around. This time we're got a lair produced by what I'm assuming are a related team, Michael Strauss doing the writing while Brooke handles the art. As always, not going give extra points for a nice illustration, but I found them charming. Beyond that, we have a well-written two-column affair that only slightly exceeds the page count limit by listing random encounters and enemy spells on the map page. One frowny-face of scolding for that.
   The site's story is that we have an old earth mage's tower, fallen into ruin, now taken over as a lair by a trio of hags. In addition to a rumor table (hunter got got, hag baby left on temple steps, etc) there's a suggestion of having this lair crop up with random encounter rolls of "hag", "galdrtre", "cave bear lair", and/or "elemental place of power". I like that. The hags and the evil tree and the cave bears all interact with each other at the site, with things like the tree having made deals with the hags, or the larger of the cave bears a transformed and enslaved hunter. Good stuff. 
   Map is simple but because it's got a vertical component there's a lot more exploration choice than a simple 11-key would have without that z-axis. In addition to the basic entry via trapdoor there's a bear cave backdoor into a room with a perpetual darkness effect. The secret door links to the titular oracle room but there's also a couple-inch-wide crack leading to it from a second room, which given this is a site high enough level for gaseous forms, polymorphing into earthworms, etc...solid. 
   As mentioned, this is a high-level adventure site, with appropriately gnarly defenses. The Galdrtre isn't a monster immediately familiar to me but it's a tree-monster, those are always tough. A pair of cave bears in tight quarters is also a big nasty fight unless the hunter-guy gets his curse dispelled. Ant swarm is unpleasant because swarms. Even the humble cave locust is given a fair shake thanks to being encountered by the dozen in the aforementioned darkness room. And the hags themselves are horrifying enemies, level 9 spellcasters loaded for bear...hitting them all at once would be lethal for even maxed out ACKS parties with a bad set of saves. Good.
   All the traps are just runes of warding with ugly spell blasts, plus the semi-trap that is unlabeled potion/vial loot with some strong curses if you glug the wrong one. This is fine for something this scale.
   Besides the alchemy, we're loaded with a very decent loot sheet here. Coins from the old departed mage, of course, but also "blessed thistle" and other spell component supplies, the youngest hag's spellbook, and of course the hunter himself...he'll be a valuable henchman if he's freed (let's be honest, he's getting murdered by the PCs). The biggest "loot" is a spell-crystal-generating giant crystal geode that has a few present already but generates more at a rate of 500gp/month. I love that. Then there's the oracle itself...using it lets the user discover the nearest buried undiscovered lair, which is great, I love having something to seed even more dungeons. Of course this thing can be looted quickly at the price of destroying it forever. Very solid treasure design. 
   You can put this thing anywhere, either as a random encounter as suggested or in the seeded rumors. Just don't send your lowbies in there, they'll get mangled. 

​Written by Squeen
For AD&D, levels unspecified (Gnoll Level)
Pack Lair in Savana
Rising out of a savanna of scrub-brush and isolated stands of mesquite trees, is a cluster of grassy hills—home to a viscous tribe of marauding Gnolls known as the Yorkers. In the center of three mounds, is a ring of low stones and an old fire pit. Large entrance-holes, dug into the side of each hillside, faces the central ring.
Unbeknownst to the locals, the last Yorker died over a decade ago in the Gnoll Wars. Their former abode is now patrolled by descendants of their hybrid hyenas.      
   Ah Squeen, once more with a site both small yet pretty. In this case it’s got a full-up black-and-white sketch of one of the encounters. Seriously, give this man your art commissions:

   The site’s story is a little more commonplace, with a trio of little hills apparently formerly owned by gnolls now being used as a hyena pack’s den. There is a 5% chance of gnoll wanderers, who add on to the stalking hyenas designed to make everyone’s day real real miserable. Poke around, fight hyenas, loot a ton of mundane arms and armor plus some of the pack’s old magic loot, carry on to the next hex. That’s all we really need.
   Map here is simple but functional, three little humps with caves. Not a lot to explore, but there’s a potential fun set-piece here at least to make a single pitched battle interesting, at least. Scale once again is not “full session” but more like “place to poke around for an hour”. I don’t hate it but it’s not adding much.
   As spoiled above, the real gnarly fight here is a giant adder in the big hill; it’s slightly nerfed by the hyena it just swallowed, but still a fun rumble. The downside of animal lairs is that unless you have a druid there’s not a lot of conversation to be had. I’d be a little curious about why these hyenas are led my a male, for example, that’s a weird structure for hyenas…but nope, nothing. Our only other hazard is yellow mold, which is always unpleasant and this time doesn’t even safeguard any treasure.
   And treasure in this case is low. The secret cache of mundane weapons in the lesser hill is an interesting loot, always feels a little mudcore but its less encumbering than a copper hoard, at least. The magic bone scroll-case that silences the openers for a week if forced is a nice loot-with-a-bane bit, while there’s a great cursed ring in the form of the “ring of chivalrous combat”, which makes the wearer automatically lose initiative as he’s compelled to honorably announce his battle plans.
   Again, scope is small here, this is no full session unless you’re playing it in 5E with a full set of theater kids on Maximum Milking Mode. It’s a fine hyena lair though.

Written by Armitage
For Basic Fantasy, levels 2-3
Gnolls in a monastic cave
Grim tales of a band of pillaging beastmen have haunted the border town of Tathor for weeks. Word spreads that the raiders are drawing closer, led by a savage called Gor the Toothtaker. Yesterday, the town’s most famous resident, the halfling minstrel Wallace Grimfoot, vanished while on a fishing trip and the townsfolk fear he has been kidnapped by the beastmen. Rumors say that the beastmen have taken refuge in the abandoned monastery by Lake Ire, a place long whispered to be haunted.    
   Thank goodness, more religious buildings. In this case, an abandoned one, but that’s fine.
   Twelve rooms over two pages on this one; single column gets a bad rep, it’s perfectly fine in something this scale. Everything’s pretty clean here, and I don’t usually comment about editing unless there are some gaps…and sadly here there are a couple gaps. Having a pool with coins glinting at the bottom but no value given for them is annoying but easy enough to miss, as an example. One can make guesses, but it’s a lot of additional friction for the reader.
   Story is pretty much what it says on the tin. Monastery built around a fallen star (actually the egg of a volcano demon, oops, hate it when that happens) is now owned by a gnoll and his “warband” (like six guys and a tagalong MU). Friendly local bard got himself captured, apparently he’s a rare NOT-Cacofonix, so there’s your added motivation. All we need, away we go.
   Our map was apparently originally a Dyson Logos joint, but it’s been modified and redrawn in DungeonScrawl, adding secret rooms and connectors. The dropped dozenth key leads to the natural cave (11) off to the side, as an always-appreciated semi-hidden secondary ingress. Loops are properly doopy, and this is a about as good as a non-vertical-component map can be. Now I could object to the usefulness of the alternate paths, but that’s about key details, not baseline layout. Fine functional map.
   We’re in low-level world, so as you might expect we’re in kiddie-land for the monsters. Gnolls are encountered in a pair, a pair with the MU, and a pair with the gnoll-boss along with aforementioned hobbit bard. The boss is a fearsome murderous raider but he’s also embarrassed by his singing ability. Variety is provided by a librarian’s shadow who gets mad at noises and an escaped pet baby owlbear who’s hungry and scared. Yeah, this does seem like a somewhat child-focused roster, with the notable exception of the demon-egg, which is only accessible via magic weapons cracking it (or waiting a year for it to hatch)…this is a horrible demon-spawn creature that’s also controllable by an item found elsewhere. How you’re supposed to learn about this item is less than clear, but it’s a cool monster/concept. Similar thing with the owlbear chick, who’s getting close enough to read that collar until dispatch? Maybe the pool with an unspecified number of coins that inflicts a geas to protect the egg if drunk from also imparts this knowledge.
   Beyond the possible loot of an owlbear, a grateful halfling bard, and/or volcano godspawn, the raider Gor Toothtaker does of course have some raided coins-an-things, but disappointingly no teeth are in the cache. The sub-boss magic user has a tiara, some pocket-rubies, and a scroll so that’s nice. Her spellbook is [404 File Not Found]. In the shadow’s library the usual boon-and-bane combo of nice magic scroll plus book of madness are found, but perhaps most controversially there’s also a map to another dungeon (5,000gp, Amulet of Controlling Volcanogodspawn). I like seeding in treasure maps among loot, but it’s a curiously specific thing here. Use with care.
   The placement of this site is as easy as pie. Obscure monastic retreats captured by gnoll raiding parties? Sure, no problem, seen a million of ‘em, always room for one more. Tone will probably fit many if not most campaigns, just punch up the menace a bit more here and there. 

An adventure by Scott Malthouse, level 1-2
Written for Against the Darkmaster
   Oh man, it’s one of these. Seven pages, double-column, outdoor “hexcrawl” with subhexes broken out, mystery plot, oddball indie system. These things are the plankton of the itch.io RPG ecosystem, churned out by the dozen every month, each one a perfect exemplar of hope against experience.  I have no idea what “Against the Darkmaster” is as a system, but it certainly looks like something that falls under the aegis of “OSR”. We’re going to see competent writing, decent information organization, and something that approaches a house style, I can dig it.
   The story here is something right out of the sagas; lord guy weds fairest maiden in town, jealous jeweler contacts local bog witch to curse a wedding band he gives as a gift, lord wears band and thus sickens and gets fed on by ghosts every single night and is dead and about to turn into a ghost himself. All very Norse, a little bit spoiled by all those involved being “Dusk Elves” for not a lot of benefit but there’s a Silmarillion vibe to the plot too so I’m okay with it. The PCs are assigned to solve the mystery of the lord’s illness and presumably eventually confront the bog witch about it. ‘Kay.
   Honestly what I liked most here was that saga-by-way-of-Tolkien flavor of the story, it’s a little awkward to mesh with “drunken murder hoboes solve your case” but that’s every mystery plot. I approve of the module’s manful attempt to make the story’s resolution open-ended. I liked that the Murk Witch is a fallen elf woman whose true name is discoverable, and using that true name gives a tremendous debuff on her in a fight. The ring’s curse itself is nice and gameable. The writing conveys mood, scene, and especially NPC personalities very well, which is helpful in running this somewhat difficult-to-manage scenario.
   As you may be picking up, what can be improved first and foremost is “give us a bit more of a roadmap to the solutions”. It’s all well and good to encourage other solutions to your puzzles, but there should be a logical sequence for a normal solution set. In particular there’s a whole area to the southeast of the hexmap involving a human settlement, an undead giant in his burrow, and a water elemental who can fix curses…it’s all fine in and of itself, but it’s rather disconnected from the main story here. In general, the maps are a bit wonky, the mainhexcrawl is five-kilometer hexes which is huge, then the little sub-maps are pretty pointless, not much exploration happening here. If you have a map, you should ask yourself why you are including it in your page count…and most of this stuff didn’t need to be added for gameplay purposes, just there to break up block text.
   The best use case for A Soul to Take is probably “play as a low-level adventure in Against the Darkmaster”, although it can certainly be adapted into most other systems without too much difficulty. The juice being worth the squeeze is more up for debate but the right game master with the right players will certainly have fun with this.
   Final Rating? **/***** with another star easily added if you’re someone who loves the flavor (curses, mysteries, social interaction, swamp hags). It’s competently done, just a bit of a lift for not a particularly original story.

​Written by Jason Blasso
For OSE, levels 1-2
Bat cult caves
VILLAGE of DAX
25 farm village. Distraught farmers cry over their cups in the tavern about the Night Scourge, a black mass that descends nightly from the sky to drain their animals dry of blood, turning them into zombies. Farmer Jebbet saw it one moonlit night coming from the west. Farmer Kidde attacked it when it landed on his prized milkcow but he was killed, turned into a zombie, and killed again. 4 fed up farmers, suspecting the evil comes from Mount Mondax, left and never returned. A party of 5 adventures followed the same fate soon after. Farmers now keep their animals indoors with them at night and it’s getting crowded.    
   Thank goodness, it’s a temple. I was getting a little out of my depth seeing multiple adventures without some kind of shrine/temple/church/place of worship to invade. Unusual to go this long before hitting an OSE adventure, but we knew Mr. Blasso here, and he seems to enjoy the system. As usual with his modules, everything is well-formatted, well-considered, with a clean and pleasing look. Good to have a level 1-2 adventure too…we need high-level adventure sites, but that doesn’t mean that low levels should be completely ignored.
   Our plot, well-conveyed in the preamble above, is your bog-standard evil-cleric-of-a-dark-bat-god-summons-swarm-of-giant-bats-to-eat-all-the-local-livestock-and-turn-them-into-zombies. A local yokel brute squad and an NPC adventurer party already done got themselves et, so now it’s time for the heroes to avenge farmers and milk cows with the added inducement of a $1,000 bounty. And hey, added cash for each farmer corpse. Go have fun storming the caves.
   Map here made some interesting choices. Unlike the “hyper-realistic caving” choice made elsewhere, this is a bunch of bubbles or rectangles, descending deep into the earth in almost a mind-map manner. I don’t love the look aesthetically/realistically, but I will compliment the cartographer for making a natural cave map that I’d be comfortable describing. Having three points of ingress/egress is good, although the third, that chimney in the BBEG cave, isn’t very likely to be the first choice. Good secret passageway with the kobold’s little tunnel, almost working like an in-dungeon teleporters. Loops are just 000 next to each other and I could wish for more over-under rooms, but the elevation changes combined with challenging slippery wall climbs are fun. Fine map.
   Starting adventures require a real delicate touch. We want to challenge fresh players and their low-level characters, but with hit points typically in the same range as a single monster attack and few resources outside of rope and rusty daggers, those challenges can’t be too intense or you’ll annihilate everyone. Most of the non-monster hazards here consist of walls and pits, reasonable things to try and overcome. The main cave is so coated in guano that PCs get sick, lovely. It’s when you have mixtures that things get a little intense, like yellow mold in one cave or a green slime variant floating in a pool that conceals platinum coins. Classic, and a good risk/reward choice, but edging more to level 2 difficulty than strict level 1.
   Monsters are even more gnarly judging by that metric. Giant rats, fire beetles, giant centipedes, that’s all standard, but they appear in large numbers. Skeletons and skeletons mixed with zombies, especially the undead adventurers, will be pretty nasty to fight if your cleric doesn’t manage to get off his turn. I do like that there’s a night state/day state where the players would honestly be better served to plunge into the deeps after nightfall, which is a bit unusual. The cleric isn’t that rough to fight (and flees if he gets hurt), but the swarm of vampire bats is a brutal fight for newbies and deep in the rear there are even worse things, including a gargoyle guarding the treasure trove. Better hope you figured out the way past without combat. I do love that the kobolds are presented as a group to interact with by default, it’s always best in a dungeon if someone can chat with the players in a silly voice.
   Assuming the evil bat-cleric doesn’t scupper away the bat idol he worships in the guano cave, there are a couple nice ruby eyes to loot in it, and destroying the thing unleashes a tide of blood which washes away enough bat poop to find what must be a disgusting +1 sword. Other magic loot is the cleric’s own cloak of flying, the dead elf’s +1 arrow, the dead magician’s scroll of invisibility, and a single healing potion. Don’t worry, as difficult as some of these fights are, your players won’t complain about lack of reward. Even outside of the farmers’ bounty, these caves are pretty rich, with three thousand gold pieces just in the treasure cave and in the cleric’s sleeping chamber. Pretty solid for a day’s work. Downright overgenerous, with a full clear.
   As for placement in your campaign…it’s an evil bat-shrine in some caves, c’mon, how could you not find a place to stick this? I would use it not so much as my starting villages’ initial dungeon but rather as a catch-up dungeon for players joining later in the campaign. For that admittedly rather bespoke purpose, this thing is perfect. 

​Written by Daniel Hicks
For ACKS, levels 4-6
Crashed UFO
Possible Hooks/Rumors
 A ball of fire fell from the sky and felled many trees.
 Green wolves with three jaws are hunting cattle and melting fences.
Surrounding Area and Exterior
An 800’ long line of fallen trees ends with 200’ of shallow ditch, the ship, 100’ across and half (15’) above the dirt, at the end of it.    
   Of all the adventures released during the TSR era, perhaps none cast a more controversial shadow than Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. In the gonzo beating heart of the hobby’s earliest days, having a crashed alien spaceship fit the vibe completely, and most of the early players didn’t find it all that weird or contradictory to be fighting robots and scrounging ray guns with their knights in shining armor and robed wizards. It’s a tradition that’s been carried forward for a long time; even the historian’s own ur-megadungeon, Arden Vul, is heavily built around a wrecked spaceship. But there are those who prize realism and verisimilitude over gonzo madcap craziness, and for those people, mixing sci-fi into their fantasy induces anaphylaxis.
   That’s for the stolid and stodgy AD&D simulationists, however. This here is an adventure site for ACKS, and as we’ve learned from the adventure site contest here, ACKS means wildly imaginative gonzo sites of high-strangeness and imagination. Take your simulationism somewhere else, Tylenol-boy, ACKS is for the gamers. Our story is that a flying saucer crashed for [reasons] and now the acid-wolves it was holding are melting the local’s livestock. Go loot it/kill the aliens/maybe accidentally blow it to bits. Have fun.
   Nothing is as potentially weird and wild for your adventure as a crashed alien spaceship. You have the chance to have weird non-Euclidean geometries, strange teleporters, wild rooms. You’re unconstrained by what is normal, what is stolid, what is Earthly. Um. This ain’t that, this is a flying saucer, so it’s a disk. And that disk is flat, so only one level (drink). There’s nothing wrong with the layout for a quick exploration, but it’s certainly not taking full advantage of the premise’s potential.
    Well, how about our monsters? Weird cool alien stuff right? Well, sadly, all our sentient aliens died either in the crash or in the triple jaws of the acid-hounds, but at least there are alien critters. Well, reskinned hell-hounds, with acid instead of fire. And nano-swarms which are basically reskinned specters. Once again, fine for battling on Tuesday night’s session, but nothing that really takes full advantage of the strange.
   Traps and hazards and obstacles are all zappy-bits that you’d expect (and locks are picked at a -4 because tech). There are two states to encounter the UFO, at first with power still at full, zapping attempts to cut into the hull and fully lit, or later when everything is in standby. I like how thief Deciphering skill is used to figure out alien script. I really like the fact that clumsy medieval-era PCs are very likely to accidentally blow up the entire ship before or after uncoiling all the engine’s platinum wire…that’s a good bit right there. Everyone enjoys playing “caveman in the F-22”.
   Now obviously we can’t give them that whole flying saucer, but what about the other loot? Well, the weird alien jumpsuits are worth something for their material and there’s an Alien Thomas Kincaid painting worth a little cash, but the most exciting items are the nano-regeneration patches (kinda, they’re basically just nice healing potions), the engineer’s eye (x-vision item usable once a week), and of course a ray gun. The ray gun is a little weak, unfortunately…either 1d12 damage on the deadly setting, or a single round’s incapacitation when set to stun. Very nice that it have both settings though.
   Use of this adventure site will really depend on your game’s tone. As always with this kind of gonzo, appropriateness will be highly table dependent. If a UFO crash fits, or for that matter doesn’t not-fit, then sure, toss it in for a half-session poke. 

Written by Squeen
For AD&D, levels unspecified (Hill Giant rassiln’)
Waterfall Pass
The source of the Feyderlyne is revealed here to be a tidy lake feed by two majestic waterfalls. The northern fall is easily the more impressive, tumbling 230-ft down the mountainside. The southern feed is less majestic, cascading modestly down a less extreme grade.
Along the northern fall, an narrow trail with sporadic carved and natural steps climbs aggressively. To the east, another trail hugs the lower watercourse through a deep ravine overhung with pines and cedars.     
   There's something very different about the "outdoor" adventure site. They're very rare compared to the standard inside-the-walls dungeon, and I think there are several reasons. First, of course, there's the evolutionary reason. Chainmail and similar wargames took place on wide outdoor battlefields, only shifting to a recognizable D&D game mode once the little fighting guys snuck through underground tunnels. Secondly, there's an almost dismaying amount of freedom in an open, unwalled environment, so much so that players get nervous, not just dungeon masters. The third reason is probably shown here...having an outdoor site is a much tougher artistic requirement to convey as well.
   Enter Squeen's Twin Falls:

   Adventure Site Contest is not an art contest. Holy smokes though, I love this sketch. It makes me want to print it out and place it in front of my players, making them "ooh" and "aah" at all the muted, pretty colors and fine linework. This is also a clearly designed site, a trio of paths meeting at a high waterfall confluence, useful in a wide variety of settings. This map doesn't really need exploration, per se, but there are navigation and pathing choices. The giant cottages, on the other hand, just sort exist.
   I think the story here is pretty obvious from the map(s). Two hill giant "brothers" (actually a separated ettin) make their home at the titular twin falls, challenging passers-by to wrestling match; if the passer loses, he's forced to be the giant's servant for a year. Classical/fairytale feel to that. Pretty simple.
   Beyond the giants, there are gnoll servants, wild boar livestock, stirges in the cave, and electric eels (maxed HD) in the lake. Not a lot of threat really, but the giant “brothers” have that very weird backstory that does actually apply if they’re tricked into wrestling each other or hopping into the magic-dispelling lake, that turns them back into a single ettin, makes their magic cottages turn to dust, and gives your rather confused players a “gee that was odd” moment. Otherwise, everything here is very normal, with chances of the gnolls out doing chores along with a giant or two, the boars gamboling about playfully, and the eels just chilling.
   There’s an insane amount of loot here for what is otherwise a pretty small/short adventure site. Aforementioned lake has a magic meteor stone in the bottom, capable of being harnessed for wishes. The giants’ cottages are filled with enormous piles of gold and jewelry, along with magic like a Ring of Warmth, potions and scrolls, and a freaking Javelin of Lightning. Not what I would put behind twelve HD of eels or a pair of eight+1 HD giants. Innate magic resistance from drinking the lakewater doesn’t come close to buffing these critters enough to protect such a haul.
   Placement of this adventure site is pretty easy, just have a stream’s headwaters be in some hills. I’m more concerned about the scope here, ideally this is a place that gets visited multiple times but the line between “TPK” and “steamrolls in an hour for all treasure” probably isn’t very wide on this one. Drop-dead gorgeous map though.

Written by Matthew T. Austin
For Savage Swords RPG levels...?
Ruined Snake Temple
Deep in the jungles of Hasua a lost temple to a forgotten goddess lies in ruins. Hasuan witch doctors tell tales of an evil cult cursed by the gods where a serpent crown worth a king’s ransom lies hidden. Natives fear the place for a terrible creature lurks within the ruins hunting those who get too close.    
   Ah, good, another one got the memo about this year being all shrines and temples. Unfortunately, the memo about closely hewing to the originals and retroclones seems to have got a little garbled in transmission; this is written for Red Room’s Savage Swords RPG, which appears to be an independently developed TTRPG system. It gives me a good chance to talk about the value of specificity, though, so I appreciate that.
   I don’t know Savage Swords RPG, not really. I can tell from name, trade dress, and overall vibe that we’re looking at something optimized for the Sword & Sorcery genre, more Conan than Hobbit. I can dig that, but unlike with, say, ACKS, I don’t immediately understand the core math and how it translates to B/X for example. So monster manual page references and direct stats don’t help me in the running…but, and this is crucial, those monsters are extant and statted, which means I can easily fill in my own system of choice. I don’t have to understand his vampire bat stats to see these are single-hit-die creatures with a mild weakening poison (or disease) bite. That’s easy to swap in. I don’t know what a Strength check with a 15TN is exactly but I understand order-of-magnitude to translate to a bend bars check. In all cases, having a specific system in mind is better than “generic/OSR”, even if it’s not a retroclone that precisely translates. Cool. Also gold values are specified.
   The site’s story is, now stop me if you’ve heard this one…ancient temple to a snake goddess with the potential to have its goddess reborn into a horrifying avatar. Yup. It’s like history, it rhymes. This one’s not being actively inhabited by an incense-burning snakeman cult, rather more on the “passive location” side of the scale, but the temple’s there, it’s got a lot of loot, so what more reasons did your PCs really need to go delving?
   The map has a most pleasing look, and it pleases me to see verticality as well. Unfortunately I had to squint a bit to find a few key features (notably the spiral staircase) and it was also thus a bit of a hassle to sync the tear in the upper floor down with the lower. Beyond that bit of confusion, though, it’s a fine exploration environment, which a nice mix of loops-with-spokes, some solid navigation hazards, and of course the S&S-required dead-end traps cropping up here and there too. A good approach here; make a simple walls n’ halls initial sketch, then add an earthquake or giant’s tantrum to rip and tear the whole area a little. Four and a half stars, would explore again.
   Traps and hazards, as you’d hope for a crumbling snake-temple, are mostly in the “fall and slide” or “whoops, now there’s a snake in your hand” vein. Favorite of those is a pool where a statue’s mouth opens and disgorges a stream of vipers, nice. Yes, there are vines hanging from the ceiling to swing over the crevice with, what are we, barbarians? In most cases the traps don’t deal direct damage, just inflict a monster on our victim. This is fitting.
   In addition to the usual vipers and pythons and a cool cyclopean cobra, the verminous enemies are a special named giant spider and a giant squid. Once again, very easy to find in your system of choice’s default monster manual and insert the appropriate monster. The cobra is a particularly funny fight/interaction…if a PC is willing to strip naked and bow, the thing just slithers up and “gently” bites the PC, conferring a blessing of venom immunity and snake-friendliness. This won’t usually happen. Other fights are zombies, a mummy, and of course the goddess herself if someone puts a crown on her statue’s head, and that fight is a properly horrifying nightmare. Good S&S style of monster fights, pity there’s not a ton of talking unless you put the loot on the loot with that goddess-summoning.
   Loot is fine, by and large, mostly standard-issue gold and silver coins plus jewelry. I like the decent pile of loot being worn by priestly corpses that, naturally, makes them rise as zombies if it is taken. A few misses for me personally are no magic items/loot to be found on the goddess if she gets animated, nothing in the pool with the nasty giant squid, and nothing in the hard-to-reach mummy’s coffin. Considering he’s making a single-minded beeline to go animate the goddess, that’s a big miss not dangling something cool in front of the characters to delay them chasing him. Still, what’s there is neat.
   This thing can be placed in any campaign, of course. It’s another ruined snake temple, there are literally zero reasons to not place more ruined snake temples in your game. Personally, I’m fond of the idea of a place that can be visited multiple times, perhaps with an initial exploration and then a later return to fight the big bad. Regardless, this thing is going on my map, just a pity it needs a little more homework to make it run at its very best. 

An adventure by Colm Norrish, level irrelevant
Written for Into the Odd
  Heavens to Betsy. There’s pretense. Then there’s tense. This thing is so pretentious it might actually be post-tentious. How much so? Well, the module uses old public-domain art. Sure. Reasonable. Can even be classy. We characterize this as “ART IN COLLABORATION WITH THE LONG-DEAD”. Holy cow. Look at this formatting, eesh.
   This might just be an Into the Odd thing, I feel like I’ve seen this before. Thirty-six pages is crazy long for most itch.io adventures, especially with only twenty-nine keyed areas. Some of that is explained by the formatting; it’s two-column with generous margins, lots of “collaboration with the dead” art, and stuff like the choice to repeat the entire simple map of each “level” on every single page. Even so, there’s a vague impression of filler, of stretching to bring this free product up to some kind of arbitrary page count goal. Nobody’s printing this so the electrons are free I guess, but this does strike me as a bad goal.
   The plot, or perhaps the impressionistic dreamscape evoking the idea of a plot, involves a ruined mansion, an extradimensional tower beneath it, and a mystical mountain beneath in the middle of a shallow eternal lake inhabited by a faceless woman who grants boons in return for memories. Also, the adventure wants to SAY THINGS about ART. It’s about as interminable as that sounds, with new IttO race and class options based on “tower-dwellers” and “artists” respectively. Ostensibly, there’s a plot hook involving an outsider sculptor’s kidnapped daughter, but don’t worry…we don’t expect heroism, we expect you to explore metaphors while exploring the inner worlds of your characters. This is something very 2013 OSR, from top to bottom. 

​   I’ll try to knock of a dozen years of cynicism and say what I liked here were the production values as a whole. The DIY ethos is alive and well in this little corner of the hobby, and there’s something almost charming about the sincerity here. A few of the individual set-piece rooms are okay, I am fond of the lock room where “anything, including a body part, can be used as a key, but the key is destroyed”. I’m a sucker for traps that disarm like that.
   I could get drowned in details but I think what I’ll suggest for what can be improved here is the much more general “figure out how to make these things gameable”. You have a febrile imagination, dear author, rife with creativity and with a genuinely good eye for matching old public-domain art to RPG situations…but you need to make those situations places where gameplay happens, where players make meaningful choices that effect their outcomes. Fundamentally, all that creativity and production value won’t make for a meaningful experience that actually sticks with the players if they’re not playing the thing. This is just your vacation slides as it is.
   Thus your best use case beyond reading this for interest or “make a mood board” is probably stealing some of the individual rooms/traps/situations for use in other dungeons where real gameplay is actually supported.
   Final Rating? */***** because I’m rating game material here, not art projects. Respect the effort, but it alas won’t play at the table.