Introductory dungeon by Kelsey Dione(?), levels 1-3.
Written for the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide.
  Okay, I need to see what the deal is here. The glut of Shadowdark adventures from “game jams” are generally somewhat bland, generally decently built, and clearly being formatted following a very strict template: Meaningless factions outlined, tiny random encounter table, semi-helpful rumor table, well-illustrated single-level map following the Cult of Loops, and descriptions followed by bullets in a single-column that really encourages A6/’zine printout format. It’s not an awful template, but what’s remarkable is how slavish these writers are in following this mysterious template. It’s also notable how I’ve seen ZERO “out of the box” adventures…nobody’s looking outdoors, wilderness, city…all of it is down in the dungeon and you’re going to LIKE IT, scrub. So, let’s look at the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide’s sample adventure, I think the credit/blame is usually laid on the introduction for systems like these.
  In the Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, I first took a look at the map…AND I’VE BEEN CHEATED:
 
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  This isn’t a nine-room hole in the ground, this is, barely, a proper dungeon, with twenty-seven keyed areas, enough for some real exploratory gameplay. It’s more linear than it looks at first glance, with most of the looping accomplished by those secret passages, but there’s still some reasonable interest with both the layouts of individual rooms and with how the branches work. The traditional “designed to take up a single sheet of graph paper” shape of the entire complex makes sense, most of us do that, but the lack of verticality is a bummer. Labyrinths of minotaurs are traditionally equipped with mazes, but the one in the lower left is rather perfunctory. I didn’t detect a mapper role in my skim of the rules, but mazes are mostly for groups that use player mappers. It’s a functional map for scale I think…BUT IT HAS NO SCALE GIVEN. I’m assuming 1 square=5ft, but that’s not sure. Not highly naturalistic.
  My annoyance with the formatting in Shadowdark is mostly for its lack of efficiency. There’s definitely something to be said about overly fetishizing terseness, but this is something that feels…off. Some tables (like the NPC names/appearances/behaviors tables) look clearly padded to fill out a whole page, while some other descriptions feel slightly truncated do to the 40-point font in a single column. It’s not terrible, but a flagship adventure written for a seven-figure RPG system is held to high standards.
   I suppose I should talk flavor. The titular citadel is a lonely sandstone edifice in the distant scrubland, open to the sky in the center, with three entrances besides the roof-to-courtyard middle climb. It was once used by a Mad Max cult that worshipped a bull god, until the last king turned himself into a minotaur and killed most of his followers, with the rest of his men turned into beastmen who now hide in increasingly paranoid isolation. Minimalistic descriptions try and keep this flavor, at times successfully, the Scarlet Minotaur himself is nice and terrifying. There is a completely out of left field “faction” of ettercaps also present trying to loot the place, with no connection to the rest of the flavor and no presence on the map outside of random encounter tables after the first four rooms. A lot of the “completely disconnected from the rest of the world” thing I’ve been seeing in third-party Shadowdark modules is seen here, as the thing is almost completely devoid of greater context. Gogogo, we’re here to dungeon crawl, set us at the site and let’s get into the content.
  All that said, let’s look at the content itself. It’s fine. Not a ton of static monsters, which is a good thing with the monster-heavy random encounter table and the decently frequent rate. There aren’t a lot of traditional traps but there are fun and flavorful dynamic things like pillars that inflict nasty status effects and scattered magical motion-detecting bull statues that just charge in a straight line down a hallway, smashing luckless explorers. There’s decent telegraphing of the worst things, like the aforementioned pillars having a dead ettercap in the middle with wounds caused by their effects and one room with a smashed bull statue with its emerald-power-gem shattered, indicating how to deactivate them while also showing the danger. There’s a hidden checklist being ticked with “interactive room, monster room, portent room, treasure” repeated almost by rote nine times. The secret door areas being detectable by good mapping is nice, that’s the real exploration/discovery content available. Looks good on stream, I’m sure.
  Treasure feels weird, like anything with the semi-arbitrary “XP for finding significant treasure” handwave system. There are enough magic items to make for spice, while the cash bits lack the wow factor of a true gold=XP system. Most of the treasure is lackadaisically semi-hidden, although the “main hoard” is in a fantastically nasty rotting blood-choked pool of water hidden amidst countless bones, which is good placement, very tricky to extract…this also includes the only really flavorful bit of acquired loot, a bottle that holds a sorcerer’s soul. There’s potential in THAT, at least.
  As any decent system contains a reaction table, there is lip service given to talking/negotiation with the sentient monsters encountered within the dungeon, although both ettercaps and beastmen are also written to be slimy complete scumbags, craven and fairly useless/unreliable. There’s the faintest nod to ecology given in the beastmen eating rats and centipedes but we’re in the Common Dungeon Problem zone with a couple dozen human-sized beings living out eons within a few hundred square feet of territory, that’s certainly not a unique conceit but it starts breaking believability a bit if you examine their slightly thin motivations. The Scarlet Minotaur’s original identity being discoverable but not usable is a little bit of a missed opportunity.
  I’m not reviewing the whole Shadowdark system here, but I think I can generalize some lessons from the Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. There is some solid workmanship here in the room-by-room construction of the dungeon, a pleasing blend of combats, traps, and “stuff to mess with”, all in a space that rewards exploration somewhat. It’s only when I look at the (regularly spaced, good) treasure that I start to have pause…there’s an almost rote placement here, and there’s no “wow” factor to anything…which, coupled with the lack of explicit 1gp=1XP (or 1sp, or 5, or whatever) rules, means the entire exercise lacks goals. A 5th Edition adventure here would make it explicit, “kill the Scarlet Minotaur”, maybe with side-quests. A B/X adventure here would have it implicit, “this dangerous place has wealth to plunder, let’s sneak around to steal it”, maybe with side-quests (bounties). This middle-ground Shadowdark doesn’t have either, handing over a very intrinsically enjoyable little dungeon crawl utterly bereft of larger context, meaning, or long-form campaign hooks. There’s nothing mechanically wrong with this example adventure, but there’s also nothing here that makes me want to play a continuing campaign.
  All that said, is there value here? Sure. Playing it directly you’ll probably have a fun time. There all lots of little bits and pieces that I’m happy swiping too, from the slightly videogamey bull statues, to the magic curse/blessing sacrificing locations, to a few of the set-piece trap rooms. It is well made, and the mechanical solidity of this template dungeon is reflected in the imitators’ slightly above-par cobbling. I suspect a genuinely good campaign could be played using this, you’ll just have to add a lot of context and meaning.
  *** on this one, what should be average quality for a dungeon adventure. I just wish its imitators took away twenty-seven rooms as a minimum, not the high bar.  This might be literally the best it can be for the target market, though.
  The adventure, as part of the free quick start ruleset, can be found here.

​A dungeon by Nate Treme, level 1.
Written for Vanilla Game
  Today, we start with a quote from the best of all types of bestiary…the ancient type. Pliny the Elder on The Manticore, in this case, which makes me think positive things about how you’re approaching your monsters, and negative things about your levels of pretentiousness. A dozen pages (with generous whitespace) are herein used to describe a simple nine-room dungeon stocked with not just a manticore, but also with five or six other random rolls of story-cubes. Public domain art mostly focused on manticores spices up what is otherwise a very dry single-column presentation. It’s not flashy, but that just helps us focus on the content, right?
  The content is...somewhat random. Up in the hot hills where magical fever spreads, there’s this petrified manticore. He’s being fed blood by these monks to stop him from waking up. Also there’s hummingbirds, centipede men, black-eyed kids, and skull candles, two of the four of which just straight up fight. The locals forsake this whole mess, but in a charming note we’re told they love sending adventurers up into the hills because better strangers get eaten than Neighbor Bob.
  In addition to that note what I liked was the slightly random inclusion of skulls with candles on top...the four skulls have a table with six entries (?) to tell who the skull was in life, when the candle is lit the skull can communicate…that’s cool. The idea of being up on this mountain that magically inflicts a fever is good, albeit rather punitive for first level PCs. I do like that The Manticore is no “a manticore”, although…
  What can be improved is first and foremost to MAKE YOUR LEGENDARY MONSTER REQUIRING CONSTANT DAILY BLOOD SACRIFICE MORE THAN 5HD. Aiming this premise at level 1 in general is a mistake, there’s a lot that’s just squished down in scope because of that lowbie aim, it’d be improved a lot by being levels 4-6. A similar improvement would be roughly doubling the size of the dungeon, it’s a pretty claustrophobic environment (even assuming 10ft squares but of course there’s no scale provided). More characterization of the sentient inhabitants of the dungeon would also come in handy, too…give us some motivations, some factions, some reasons to converse beyond “die”. Alternatively, if you like the scope to be smaller, cut. There’s nothing wrong with an adventure site to bumble onto, but if this is aimed to be a small nine-roomer, then it’s overstuffed. I don’t know about expected treasure values for Vanilla Game but if you’re going to claim compatibility with “other analogous games” you also need more cash money.
  As it is, the best use case for this is to mine it for the couple cute ideas, the candle-skulls and monster-petrified-needing-blood-feeding are both fine. Running it straight up feels like an exercise in frustration, alas.
  Final Rating? */***** because it’d frankly be more entertaining to all sit down together to and read Pliny the Elder straight up. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. 

An adventure by Knucklepunk Games, level 1.
Written for Shadowdark
  It is the tail end of the first half of 2024, and so Kickstarter’s 2023 New Hotness, Shadowdark, has finally shipped. For every hundred unboxing videos, that of course means there’s one new actual game of the system being played. And for every hundred games being actually played, there’s a new playtested, brilliant, creative, and interesting adventure being published. And for every playtested adventure being published, there are of course ten thousand cash-grab “adventure” modules being released in the vain hope that some poor moron will screw up the “$0” setting in the Pay What You Want entry field. How do you like those odds, punk?
  The mysterious Knucklepunk Games is extremely excited here about the GODLESS setting, having released The Hall of Eininnell on the world but threatening to release many, many more publications in the future. Fourteen pages of an excretable ALL CAPS font are herein used to describe a linear “adventure” in a “dungeon” of eight rooms, five of them mapped. Prose gives the occasional ChatGPT feel but we know mortal hands typed this by an artisanal sprinkling of typos and misspellings throughout the document. Experienced itchers have already started hammering away at the ole’ EJECT button, but we’re here to examine crimes as much as glean gold, so…let’s see what’s in the chalk outline, shall we?
  We begin with a description of the GODLESS setting, which is as mandatory as it is trite; gods have departed after the dragons all disappeared, elf empire has fallen, human kingdom where YOU are dwelling is basically Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s England without the wit, just muddy little hamlets in the midst of howling but somehow also dull wilderness. YOU are MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY in the TOWNE OF KHON who START IN THE MEADERY OF OLD TOM and I really can’t convey how tight this railroad is. A DARK MANTLE attacks, canonically utterly destroys and impoverishes the players’ farms in particular, and OLD TOM points the party to nearby semi-occupied elf ruins (the titular HALL OF EININNELL) for loot, but players are also given agency by being told they can choose to instead serve the local knight as miserable “surfs”. I have a brief moment of hope from these spellings that legendary writer Jim Theis yet lives, but the subsequent bits about a linear trip with punishing random encounters, a linear monastery, a secret serial killer elf monk, and a vault beneath the ruins that holds “FAR TOO MUCH GOLD FOR PLAYERS TO ENTIRELY BRING BACK TO THEIR HOMES” as well as a dragon statue disappoint me with the lack of “lithe, opaque nose” twists.
  The dragon statue is of course a petrified dragon but in a bonkers twist if a player reads the puzzle beneath the dragon THE MAKE A WIS SAVE OR CUT THEMSELVES AND TOUCH THE STATUE AND FREE THE DRAGON which, by the way, WAKES UP EVERY PETRIFIED DRAGON IN THE ENTIRE WORLD AND ALSO BRINGS BACK THE GODS. “PLAYERS WILL LEARN THAT NOT ALL PUZZLES SHOULD BE SOLVED”. Also PLAYERS WHO AWAKEN THE DRAGON MAY BE COMPELLED TO PRAY FOR HELP, which takes the form of a single x3 attack or turning the praying player into a high-level saint cleric. This all sounds like I’m joking but I’m being completely serious.
  Man, I guess I need a what I liked bit here following my usual Crapshoot Monday format. Um. I like how my brain has been tickled by the all-caps insanity so thoroughly that I can now taste the color blue. I like the mapping software that was used for the linear five-room upper map (the one that has keys of “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “X” of course).
  I guess what can be improved is to take the entire premise and maybe not be insane about it? Dropping kayfabe for a second, the usual issue of a poor/no map is a big reason for the lack of choice in this “adventure”, having concrete geography enables agency, it doesn’t constrain it. Just assuming that players want to have fun adventuring is a good bet for any writer, all the arm-twisting isn’t necessary. As a broad note, anytime you use AI art, as in the cover here, you are going to definitely have more people looking carefully over your text itself to see if AI tools were used there, too.
  It’s clear to me the best use case for this thing is as a safe and effective psychedelic. The adventure is unusable outside of its very specific bespoke setting, and I pity the hapless miner who attempts to actually pull out useful bits from this bizarre mélange. The only use case here as novelty artefact.
  Final Rating? */***** but I definitely would recommend checking this out in the hopes that another such strange publication is perpetrated again. 

  My very wonderful Thursday night gaming group has a rotating set of GMs, and recently I’ve been the man in the chair. After a list of votes for system, the group settled on Stars Without Number, the Kevin Crawford love letter to classic Traveler. I was delighted, because I’ve always wanted to run the system, but the scope of the campaign wasn’t aimed at the interminable sandbox wandering that often has travelers travelling…forever. So why not add the other campaign frame I’ve long wanted…FTL.
  FTL: Faster Than Light is a brilliant RTS roguelike from subset games. The premise, from Wikipedia:
  “[In FTL: Faster Than Light], the player controls the crew of a single spacecraft, holding critical information to be delivered to an allied fleet, while being pursued by a large rebel fleet. The player must guide the spacecraft through eight sectors, each with planetary systems and events procedurally generated in a roguelike fashion, while facing rebel and other hostile forces, recruiting new crew, and outfitting and upgrading their ship. Combat takes place in pausable real time, and if the ship is destroyed or all of its crew lost, the game ends, forcing the player to restart with a new ship. The player's crew intercepts a data packet from the rebel fleet containing information that could throw the rebels into disarray and ensure a Federation victory. The goal is to reach Federation headquarters, waiting several space sectors away, while avoiding destruction from hostile ships or by the pursuing rebel fleet.[3][4] The final sector ends with a battle against the Rebel Flagship, a multi-stage fight which results in either victory or defeat for the Federation.”
  Doesn’t this sound like a great premise for a TTRPG campaign? In the first session the players all came with their PCs rolled, and we focused on creating the main character…the ship. Le Renard, captained by a Québec-expy named Bennoit LeBeau, is a Federation-affiliated (but not direct navy) frigate with not only the five main PCs but with a dozen other NPCs, run as secondaries by the players at times, and a bone to pick with the rebels after the Federation fleet they were with was destroyed. Armed with just the location of the rebel’s mysterious Controller and half a tank of jump fuel, the players start by hopping into a strange sector with knowledge that the rebel fleet will be breathing down their necks in a matter days.
  The initial session was enjoyable, with the players finding a refueling station controlled by fanatical worshippers of the Controller, then their bluffing accidentally led to a pair of infiltrators checking out their ruined bridge for messages from the Controller…and actually finding a Federation comm pad, revealing their enemy status. A tense scene to run, with half the players actually at a dinner with the station’s leader, while the two remaining at the ship fought the spies. After this first session, I began to write recaps for the following sessions to read every time. These are what we’ve had so far:
 
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  A tense standoff with the Lim 9 station administrator over Le Renard’s Federation affiliation ended in bloodshed, fortunately most of it the administrator’s. While beating a hasty retreat, Captain Lebeau and his two companions managed to hijack the station’s alert system, sending the crew scurrying. Dr. Jenny meanwhile secured the prisoner Jorge Jurgen, a hapless hostage…or helpful recruit? Blasting randomly at the station as they fled, the crew went for the inner inhabitable planet Grid after hearing of a crashed Federation scout there. Landing HARD on the desert planet, Engineer Reynolds set his crew to repairing as the command crew hastened to the wreckage of the scout, finding not just a black box with a rutter [basically a map needed to jump to another star] to another system, but also the faint tracks of the pilot Charles Danyiel, who’s terrible final message promised he would be seeking water in the desolate world.
 
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  While making repairs and salvaging scrap on the desert world of Grid, our heroes discovered more dangers than mere dry heat, as Le Renard discovered when a massive earthquake rolled in less than an hour after Engineer Reynolds finished repairing the landing struts. Following the lost pilot’s tracks to an oasis one hundred miles away, the Captain and his crew discovered a primitive civilization led by a “chief’canic”, who worship machines even as their ancient terraforming gear winds itself down. The Captain’s initial attempts to ransom the lost pilot ended in failure but Chief of Security Slate Bulkhead made contact with a rebellious “under’canic” who offered to free the lost pilot if the crew could heal the machines of the Ancients. The crew are now within a vast ziggurat, as their engineer frantically tries to fix the barely-understood pretech machinery…and as sonic booms announce the arrival of the advance scouts of the rebel fleet searching for them overhead.
 
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  As brilliant Engineer Reynolds fumbled desperately with the advanced terraforming machinery wracking the desert world of grid, the rest of the command crew discovered, and then fought an ancient robot guarding rare pretech deep within the facility. With the help of a grateful local, the crew used a combination of stealth and distracting medical miracle-working to rescue lost pilot Lt. Chuck Danyiel. Rigging the pretech terraforming stations to send out bursts of confusing static, the crew manage a thrilling escape from the six circling scouts, forerunners of the imminent rebel fleet. Leaving at flank speed, it is only within the confines of metaspace that the communications officer discovered a hidden message from one of the rebels, speaking of a desire to defect…and warning that the fleet was less that two days from the Makis System. Now in the famously neutral Glomar System, the crew are low on fuel but a little higher on hope, making their way to the system’s solitary gas giant to refuel and take stock of their latest destination.
 
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  After taking a little time refueling while hiding on the dark side of the gas giant Glomar 1, the crew votes to make contact with the aging mining station in orbit around the world, where a committee of workers, having thrown off their bosses’ control, are up a creek without a paddle with nowhere to sell their refined fuel. The captain has convinced the committee to authorize Le Renard to find a smuggler contact on the system’s main planet of Glomar 2, where alien ruins entice a lively population of smugglers…and the ancient Mandate-era Perimeter Agency ruthlessly works to suppress export of the most dangerous maltech found among the bones of the aliens’ lost civilization. But that’s not the only wrinkle in this sticky situation; as Le Renard makes landfall, the sensors officer notes a pair of rebel scouts docked on the system’s station, including the drive signature of the hopeful defector. Will the crew find a smuggler for their hapless miners? Will they manage to find a rutter to leave the system along safer routes? Will they manage to evade the rebel fleet, which must be on its way…
 
  I’ll continue posting these recaps as the campaign goes along. If anyone is interested in terms both specific to Stars Without Number, or general concepts from the game, please, ask away…science fiction gaming is a very different experience, even though many of us have played at least some before, and it’s been a learning experience for us all as we play around in the system.

​A dungeon by Guilherme Gontijo, levels unlisted.
Written for Bronze Hack
  Oh boy, a dungeon crawl for an unrecognized heartbreaker? And it’s a lavishly colored trifold? What joy. The only way to make this a classic Itch Trifecta is a completely unsatisfying node-diagram “map” pasted over a landscape. And no…we rather have a new, fresh, abomination before us, a blocky greyscale ascii-art map that somehow manages to ape the stylings of Rogue or Dwarf Fortress with none of the charm. A scale is given so it’s usable, but this is one very unique method of conveying information here, let’s see if it works for him, Cotton. The whole thing is written in an oddly chatty style, with many “lots of X” and “there’s a Y” turns of phrase, it’s a little strange and nonspecific.
  The plot of the crawl is pretty standard. Rich guy has exotic garden. Rich guy’s son dies. Rich guy makes pact with dark powers and returns son to life as monster. Monster eats stuff and takes over garden. Rich guy asks to clear garden to reclaim it. Son in human form mysteriously helps PCs. PCs accept quest or we don’t play D&…er, Bronze Hack, tonight. The challenges to overcome on the way to the titular Beast are all what we expect from that premise, whenever there’s anything specific (traps are just marked “trap” on the map, not detailed). Vine “walls” are presumably impassible, as are water squares? There’s pools that turn bathers to gold and back again, there’s random bugs and leopards to fight, there’s a backstory that the adventure is pretty optimistic players will find…and the Final Bossfight can be solved with a lute playing a song?
  What I liked about the adventure was the art, sorta, which being uncredited means I assume is AI-generated. The map isn’t completely hopeless in terms of layout, that’s good. I’m not sure if the backstory gets conveyed successfully but I do like the idea of the history of the site mattering in the final confrontation. Pools that turn people into gold are a fun thing to mess with, although the Inevitable Player Monetization Schemes are left unaddressed.
  That all seems negative but looking at what can be improved yields quite a bit that’s hopeful. A lot of things that are unclear, like the traps, could be settled with just a little bit more explanation. Things like “d100 bugs” or “d4 leopards” or “d100 coins” could be standardized into definite numbers, which helps. As with any mystery with clues at a TTRPG, multiple chances to gain access to the useful backstory bits would be wise. Couple those improvements with a little more thought on things like the infinite gold-making ponds and you have a nice little minidungeon.
  We live in this reality, however, so the best use case here today is to take the communicated vibe and/or the backstory-puzzle-situation to a better map and ignore what’s presented. Running this straight out would be a little dull but wouldn’t be torture.
  Final Rating? */***** as a less than inspiring first impression for Bronze Hack. Better luck next time. 

​A set of dungeonlets by Brent Edwards, levels are for the unenlightened.
…because yup, written for Cairn
  I’m used to experiencing familiar emotions when reading a Cairn adventure. Annoyance. Boredom. Ennui. Contempt. Bafflement. In The Barrows Hunger, Brent Edwards takes nineteen laborious pages over nine 1-5 room Dyson maps to induce in me an unusual emotion for the system…disappointment.
  Right, so we got nine little barrows, easily one of the least inspiring of the free Dyson maps…useful enough for your VTT if you’ve rolled a random lair result overland, but nothing that encourages exploratory play in each individual site. All nine are reimagined here as a set of fake burial mounds that are actually the nine heads of a vast buried hydra, six of which are dead, three of which are still semi-alive and are looking for meat, using their malleable claylike saliva to generate facsimiles of loot to entice tomb-robbers. A cultist worshipping the hydra runs a sad ramshackle “museum” of a fake fallen empire, telling stories about the nine rulers presumably interred with the barrows (surprisingly detailed) and encouraging the adventurous to get themselves et. This flash of admittedly complicated creativity is followed up by page after page of fake treasure and explosive spit monsters.
  As should be obvious what I liked are the bizarre flashes of creativity…most of the time. There’s something neat about adventuring within portions of a slumbering/dying/quiescent gargantuan giga-monster, that’s a good idea. The only two pieces of magical loot in the adventure are nifty, a linked pair of black glass daggers that attack together and especially the calcified lens of one of the hydra’s eyes that can be used as a shield, it grants views a split second into the future, imposing disadvantage on attackers. Now that is a magic item, whew. I kinda liked the museum curator/cultist guy…it’s kind of touching that he really does care for the hydra, desperately trying to help one of the dying heads by tending to it every night. The brief summary of the nine fictional rulers purported to be buried in the barrows isn’t just worldbuilding fluff, but clearly gameable as smart players will definitely ask about that. Good bits.
  There is, however, a long list of what can be improved that’s mostly the unpleasant stuff, and the underbaked stuff. I know it’s Cairn, where the levels are made up and the loot don’t matter, but the whole area is essentially a cruel bait-and-switch designed to inflict nothing but pain and disappointment on the characters. The adaptive hydra spit engulfs and hardens, and then explodes if cracked, all presented as just pure anti-player mechanics. Loot is terrible mostly, the only valuable bits really beyond the aforementioned calcified lens are from previously tricked adventurers. Feels bad, very choked. There’s a real lack of incident in the encounters, the bad loot is coupled with “screw-you” traps…trap-heavy dungeons can be good, but more telegraphing would improve the play a lot. Finally, that previously mentioned gameable background being better integrated in the barrows would be a huge improvement.
  Awkward to find a best use case here. The highly flavorful premise means the barrows are useless as independent lairs/sites, but the whole thing is a little uninspiring to play. Might be that the best takeaway is that “buried and dying kaiju as a dungeon” initial seed and then go write something with interesting cartography and better interaction.
  Final Rating? */***** makes it about average for Cairn but that’s about all that can be said.

​  It’s been over eight months diving amidst the dire dreck deep in bowels of the itch.io TTRPG publication space. While I’ve found the occasional gem amidst the turds, the general quality has wavered from “uninspiring” to “insultingly abysmal”…although often the result is entertaining to review, if not to attempt to actually use at the table. While I’ve hardly covered everything, as time has gone on I’ve noticed some systems that spike intense feelings of nausea and dread, where you just know an adventure for the given system is going to be terrible. Meanwhile, there are other systems that give the struggling reviewer…if not hope, then at least mild interest that what’s been written isn’t guaranteed to be awful. For the occasional hopeful module-grabber that isn’t on a machoistic dream-quest to purify his psyche through agony, I figured I’d give a quick guide:
 
“System Agnostic”
  Do not walk, RUN. This is a clear indicator of a passionless brainfart, released to make a quick PWYW buck, never playtested, never intended to be actually used. These are almost always spawned from a jam or a writing prompt, not a passionate idea. MARK OF TERRIBLE QUALITY.
 
“For B/X”
  This is the Basic Mark of OSRness, sorry AD&D bros but most people playing, are playing B/X. It’s a fine system* for what it’s being used for, typically adventure sites that can be used in a casual ongoing campaign. It’s a mark of probable quality.
  *Actually have read/played this one of course, it’s good.
 
“For OSE”
  Very common, typically going to be more regimented in its bullet-point formatting but of course being just B/X it’s a fine system*, there’s an outside chance of being playtested, although its often a cash-grab too. Designed for one-shots rather than campaign play. Mark of possible quality.
  *Actually have read/played this one, it’s good.
 
“For Shadowdark”
  There must be a style guide for this one, because all Shadowdark adventures are alike in scope and scale (one single session, dungeon-based, loops in map mandatory). Exclusively one-shot scope. The cash-grab chances are decently high, but the style guide means there’s at least some chance of a decent little dungeonlet. Mark of possible quality.
 
“For Heartseeker”
  This is a mysterious system to me, but multiple adventures written for it means it does have at least a dozen audience members. This is a fairly typical heartbreaker system in that it has very stylish, but very unimaginative, content. One-shots only, despite nods at assumed ongoing campaigns. Mark of low quality.
 
“For Mausritter”
  Cute art will happen, as will incredibly generic adventures. I hope you like the thought of little mouse-guys having adventures, because the content itself holds absolutely nothing novel. Mark of low quality.
 
“For the Vanilla Game”
  At least we can’t claim this is false advertising. Not idea what the system is like, but it seems to spawn very vanilla adventures. Nothing offensive, and with an idea of ongoing campaign play, but bland. Mark of boring quality.
 
“For Heroes of Adventure”
  The most high-gloss “trad” adventures of these amateur efforts, these feel like classic efforts from the era of D&D 3.5…which, given the system*, makes sense. Scope and scale will be big, fine with multiple sessions, even happy to release a yearlong campaign. Written very long, always. Designed to be actually played, which is inspiring. Mark of possible quality.
  *Read and reviewed the system, it’s got some selling points.
 
“For Vaults of Vaarn”
  Gamma World by way of ugly colors for its garish pages, Vaults of Vaarn has no sign to me that it was ever in fact played. The one-shot “idea” adventures produced here show a really rough style guide being worked from. Mark of bad quality.
 
“For Into the Odd”
  Attractive to the worst sorts of artsy creators, there’s an unpleasant set of formatting and vaguely steampunkish art choices inevitably being made. Mark of bad quality.
 
“For Cairn”
  Oh man, there are so many adventures for this, it’s a very active little cult. All the adventures are long and have a woodsy/wilderness theme, which is normally my jam, but there’s so much pretense dripping from every product, the “adventures” are self-important beyond belief even as they typically have the most bog-standard content imaginable. One-shots always because there’s no leveling setup. Mark of terrible quality, but not the worst because…
 
“For Mork Borg”
  Oh man. The colors are going to upset my tummy, the font will be barely readable, and the formatting will be random…but the content will be even worse. Sure, it’s going to be edgy, but it’s also guaranteed to be a “14-year-old in a Hot Topic shirt”-level of edgy. Mark of terrible quality.
 
“For Troika”
  Immediate nightmare. To see this is to know pain. This little symbol means the most nauseating, annoying, overwritten, underbaked, never-played product you’ve ever seen in your life. MARK OF SATAN HIMSELF.