​A dungeon by Jason Renslow, no levels listed.
Written for Down We Go
  We’ve been in far too many long adventures lately, need to return to the bread-and-butter of itch.io scutwork; a two-page dungeon with a little blobby map of nine rooms, probably populated via random rolls. It comes from a little game jam for some devoted itcher’s bespoke homebrew abomination system that probably takes B/X, flenses it, and wears its skin as a suit. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s spiced up by a cute little dwarf illustration, but you’re in the bog standard here, Renslow.
  This lil’ cave system is taken over by Jerk Dwarves, who have an Obvious Trap in the form of a chest in the middle of an ambush point, where they will attempt to first extort the players nonviolently before moving into an inevitable big ol’ brawl. After wiping out the dwarves in the this initial fight (possibly chasing into one of the nearby caves), the players poke around at a trap room, a skeleton room, a curse room, and an Random Big Minotaur Bruiser room. Treasure is intimated but never explicated, not sure this is a gold=XP kind of joint, but there’s stuff to gain and battleaxes to face-tank, so it’ll fill the time while you all polish off the Cheetos and glug down that Mountain Dew.
  What I liked beyond the cute little dwarf picture and the double axe drawing was the software used to draw the map, it’s very clear (except for the excretable font chosen for the key numbering). The cursed circlet gained from an ancient shrine is a good cursed item…it messes with sleep and makes the wearer appear irritable and anxious, but fools the wearer into thinking he’s more charming. Good item curse, that. As obvious as it is, the chest brimming with leaden gold-painted fake coins made me chuckle.
  Beyond the annoying font on the map, what can be improved first and foremost should be “move the dang ambush to the rear of the caves”. There’s a tempo problem with an adventure site like this having a big pitched battle (or pair of battles) first, then the rest of the session a downbeat set of less dangerous fights plus the usual interactive bits. As an example, there’s a buried dwarf/his ghost who hates the Dwarf Leader and warns about him, needs the leader dead to be free, will go nuts if his grave is plundered beforehand…that’s got potential, but the sprawling initial fight probably pulls said leader and so the whole thing is moot.
  You see the second main thing to improve in that description, of course…why is it “Dwarf Leader” instead of “Sluggar Greyhammer, leader of the Flint Shadows”? Specificity in names, in treasure, it’s so important dear writers. If I’m playing and I want to change any detail I’m fine with changing, but there’s great value-add for just putting this stuff in there.
  No idea about the system, but best use case here is probably playing this straight but modifying the initial rooms to encourage deeper exploration of the tiny little loop rather than making to biggest fight first. I won’t be, but you can. I’ll swipe that cursed crown though, that’s fun.
  Final Rating? */***** but near enough to two stars that I rate it without rancor. 

A campaign by The Nameless Designer, all levels.
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  I’m ascending slowly in page count and scope. This is the ultimate, a massive sixty-four-page module that’s designed as a “campaign”, a 75-mile-wide island full of numerous side-quests and monstrous problems, built around a main dungeon crawl and a plot about an ancient order of magi. It’s a Nameless Designer project, which I’ve enjoyed before, and been critical of before, but that always means it’ll be bright and colorful, well-formatted with a ponderous but solid layout, loads of AI art, and a workmanlike prose that’s gone through a ChatGPT editing pass or two. At this point I’m mostly just charmed by the quixotic nature of the whole Heroes of Adventure project, but it’s mostly not my thing. Similar case here, but that’s an impressive size of sandbox. 

​  As mentioned, our plot is pretty trad, the titular magi of this misty isle summon the magical PC(s) of the party to their island to complete a trial, winners of the trial get to become apprentices of the magic order. The main trial is going into a magic citadel that mysteriously appears once every ten years, but all the side quests of the troubled island are also part of the process, the benevolent high magi wanting to see their potential recruits being good people, too. There’s a side-plot about The Empire’s secret black cloaks spying on the island and rival explorers, plus frog people displaced by a wyrm, barghasts in the woods, illusion-witches preying on villagers, and a mutant “trul” troubling an old lighthouse tower. It’s all very dense with adventure sites, plus NPC details, random encounters, history and lore drops, plus a bunch of possible “next steps”.
  In a project this extensive, of course there will be a lot of what I liked. I like the somewhat-wonky illustrations of smaller adventure site locations, where the outdoor areas are keyed before jumping into the DungeonScrawl inner maps. It’s a little goofy, but it’s charming and hey, there’s also a dragon here:

​  I like some of the dungeon maps, which are simple but have enough spokes and loops to explore. There are a lot of little dungeons around the isle and a party will enjoy the exploration. The main dungeon, The Citadel, has a fairly simple map but it’s big enough to be a genuinely interesting piece of exploration gameplay, with multiple points on ingress, three levels with some okay interconnection, a water feature beneath…it’s a genuinely fun dungeon, a fine capstone for this tradgame adventure module.
  I also, as mentioned, like that there are both good hooks coming in but even moreso there are a ton of new adventures suggested at the end, with all the possible outcomes, successful or failures, leading to new paths. Well done for the “world integration” part of this, and it makes me believe that those thanked playtesters actually did some playing here.

​  What can be improved in some cases will be to taste. My own game preferences are less about WoW-esque “yellow exclamation point” quests and more about raiding lost ruins filled with monsters for gold, but for that style this does support player agency and isn’t a railroad. However, you could still improve things along the tradgame/3.P axis by making the details stronger and the rewards more explicit. The woods are presented as a pointcrawl with forest paths, whereas a more neutral set of points-of-interest would help more exploration. The island is also way too big with those 6-mile hexes…3-mile hexes would be better, and I think the scale the adventure is actually instinctively assuming may be all the way down to 1-mile hexes, so something like a 6 or 7 mile-across island. The size between sites will means a little more wasted time and it’d be better served in general with tightening.
  Now best use case here is probably “play it with a Heroes of Adventure group” but in all fairness I think it’s trying to be reasonably adaptable. Sadly, despite all the effort that goes into this, I don’t find myself excited by the prospect of working into adaptation of the bits, and the individual pieces, while fine, aren’t worth the effort to me.
  Final Rating? ***/***** as a product that inspires admiration without love. Can’t beat the price however, once again the guy never allows a single penny to flow his way for these things. I certainly hope his quixotic quest continues. 

​A dungeon by Pekka Rihko, levels 1-3.
Written for Dungeons and Dragons with “1 gold = 1XP systems”
  Well, this was a pretty thing. Soft and slate grey watercolor cover, skillful pencil sketches, gentle color palette, understated and tasteful formatting…The Beseeching Parliament is forty pages of love and care. It’s also forty pages, very complex and detailed, with an intricate plot involving multiple characters, a 70+ year backstory, worldbuilding involving a decently high-level fae lord and soul-pacts and tons of subsidiary information. This ain’t the usual Monday crapshoot, this is a hefty, weighty tome of sweeping ambition and scope. The last two adventures I’ve reviewed had around the same page count but nowhere near the breadth and depth.
  The story, which I’ll note does require sitting down and reading carefully at first, involves an adventurer family with a long history of selling their souls to the Owl-King, a fairy lord holding court on an island in the middle of a lake, in return for magical powers. Fifty years ago, the old matriarch of the family sold her soul and now time is up. Her son, who runs the house, is torn between giving up mean ol’ ma or handing over the soul of his friend imprisoned in a giant gem, but all that waits while he gets ready to host dwarven pilgrims who pay their respects to another friend, a dwarf lord who fell in battle and is buried on the grounds. There’s more drama than that but the immediate somewhat tenuous hook is that he’s looking to hire a grounds crew/house staff on short notice and the PCs hire on while scoping out his manor as a potential heist target. Yes it’s every bit as complicated as it sounds.
  However, I’ll quickly say what I liked to start with was the economy with which Mr. Rihko drops details pointing to a much deeper story. “There is also a vortex of black energy within one of the picture frames. This is what’s left of Irmine’s husband, Stewart’s father. They have no memory of him as a person, and assume he was nevermade in the tomb-halls of Ur-Saquaan.” That’s great stuff, while also functioning as a trap. The slave rebellion of Horadropolis, a sacrifice of a cat upon the Gorestone, said expedition into the ruins of Ur-Saquaan…I’m not sure how gameable all this is, but it’s great quality writing. The menace and numinous vibe of the Owl-King are on point too.
  I like more, too…I was about to get annoyed by how much of the manor’s loot is just “very valuable” in the text, but then all was forgiven and more when it was all summarized with what looks like B/X values in the end, with a comment that the players shouldn’t know the value of this stuff without appraisal. Then the author makes me even happier by listing the value of the manor looted down to the studs, even taking things like the windows, and he lists it by the cartload. This man games. Likewise, his sensibilities are personally offended by simple +1 magic arms and armor, preferring special magic abilities, but he’s more than happy to offer the bonuses in a sidebar for more bog-standard D&D. This fundamental sensibility runs throughout, and it’s appreciated.
  That’s not to say what can be improved is a null category. There’s a fundamentally unhurried attitude throughout the module that requires not just patience from the game master, but also from the players. There’s more detail in mucking out latrines and dealing with saunas than works best for a fantasy adventure. The final confrontation with the Owl King is encouraged as a very hand-wavy, almost story game type of fight, and there’s some fuzzy bit elsewhere too…the cockatrice that guards the dire-chickens pecks angrily at egg-gatherers, and while there’s an insulation suit that grants +10 on a petrification save, this isn’t going to work if its been a daily task for years. Most emblematic of this tendency is the mimic down in the basement protecting the master’s armor…it’s literally toothless, having had it teeth pulled so it now only does a d4 of damage gumming victims. There are a lot of pulled punches here, as the adventure really, really wants the players to reach the end of its excellent story. That’s at odds with 1gp=1XP D&D by default.
  All that said, the best use case for The Beseeching Parliament is as a real banger of a one-off, not quite a single session but probably 3-4 to let it really breathe. It would set a very strange tone as the start of a long dungeon-crawling campaign, but it’s certainly got hooks for long-term play. The playstyle of this really isn’t to my taste, but it’s so darn solid that I still can imagine really enjoying running this.
  Final Rating? *****/***** even with the occasional meandering it’s a wonderful time with the right kind of players and a thing of beauty. I don’t assign five stars just for perfection, but it does mean in my crapshoot I’ve hit a rare A-rank adventure, it’s ridiculous that this thing is laboring in obscurity with a PWYW price tag. Phenomenal module.
  It's also available on DriveThru.

​An adventure by RavensDagger, LL0 to LL3.
Written for Lancer
  As a man in my late thirties, of course I have strong positive feelings about MechWarrior. Unfortunately, as appealing as BattleTech is, the game seems to be like owning a boat or a horse, something people who make a lot of money do instead of being rich. The pitch for Lancer is all about being a copyright-free Mech Warrior in a TTRPG space so I’m all ears. Haven’t read the rules, but sure, lets see how the system does in itch.io freebie adventure space.
  First though, we find a few red flags in the document’s stats. Thirty-three pages, single-column, with a format editor credited, a bunch of artists credited, but…no playtesters. Editing was evidently for format, not spelling or continuity (my personal favorite was players typo’d to “platers”). Table of contents which tells us that “The Game” doesn’t begin until…page 14, almost halfway through. It’s nice-enough looking, and the art is uneven but charming, but once we do get to “The Game” it’s divided into a Prologue, three Chapters, and an Epilogue, which is a very “tradgame” setup, and there are zero maps in the main section. Finally, our setting is the Little Dipper, as a sector…which means that the author has no idea how stellar cartography works…a constellation isn’t a bunch of stars near each other, it’s an arrangement of stars based on how we see them from Earth. At ~130 light years away, Kochab, where the bulk of the action takes place, is far nearer to the Solar System than it is to Polaris (sector capital), at ~440 light years away. This is science fiction, please get the basics right.
  Our plot, and as “this is a Narrative Module” you can bet your sweet bippy that we’re on a railroad here so it’s only ever one plot, involves a lonely colony on a desert world (called the only planet in the Kochab system, which, by the way, in real life we already know contains at least one super-Jovian in the inner HZ), taken over by mercenaries off a rival corporation, doing, uh…something. No matter what the platers do, they crash land, get into a fight, investigate one of two sites, get into a second fight, and then investigate the final site, getting into a third fight. Maps for these mech battles are your job to figure out, GM, but no matter what happens the platers level up in the end.
  I hurt because I care. What I liked is the formatting and clean design of the module. I like the color and illustrations, gives some nice visual interest. I like the idea of a series of scenes in a sequence map, much as I would complain about the simplicity and the lack of choice mattering.
  Thus, what can be improved first is make interesting tactical maps. The combats are the only place in this entire thing where plater choices affect outcomes, which means those are where the game is actually being played…and that’s where we have handwavy situation descriptions without a battle map. Oopsie. Despite NPC profiles being lavishly described, with three pages for just five characters, the gameable content is low and could easily be improved by giving better motives and something for clever platers to work with in negotiations or interrogations.
  Also please get your astrogation correct.
  I have no idea about the average quality of Lancer adventures, so it may be that the best use case for this thing is indeed “play a Lancer campaign with it”. Personally, I plan to look at some aspects of the formatting and illustrations and hope to learn for my own publication adventures. Sci-fi adventures are, from experience, not a profitable venture but there’s always passion projects.
  Final Rating? */***** and a single regretful sigh. I was pulling for you, module. 

​An adventure by Evlyn M, levels are a capitalist tool of oppression.
Written for “old school”
  There’s a really grim story lurking behind many creatives’ DIY passion projects, but I don’t think it’s all that subtle on this one. Spinetooth Oasis has presented itself as an adventure location, using forty two pages to cover less than two dozen keyed areas illustrated with crude but very psychosexually disturbed sketches. This work of…let’s call it art…involved multiple contributor-perpetrators but the primary organizer is claiming the majority of culpability here so we can hope that this isn’t a crime ring, but the association is definitely unsavory.
  The ostensible situation certainly has potential. Oasis in the midst of a canyon has valuable herbology, halfling tribe lives around the oasis wants to be left alone, owl/cactus cult does unsavory things with owls and cactus, ambulatory cactus creatures wander around in service of a minor elemental cactus godling, two rival bandit groups camp out in a tense standoff on either side of the oasis. Abstracted caravan bumbles in innocently into the middle of all this looking for desert drugs and refreshing water. There’s a little dungeon in one side that also is there because it’s there. Nothing wrong in the baseline, it's in the details and the extremely genitals-obsessed crude drawings that things start to fall apart.
  This was released in 2017. Whatever dark path was being walked down, I’m sure it’s complete now.
  Grudgingly, I’ll admit what I liked was the setup, it’s way way too abstract in places to be playable but at a high level that’s certainly a scenario for one or two sessions’ entertainment. The map, while simple and DOES NOT NEED TO BE ISOMETRIC, is made with a modicum of skill and not too unpleasant at a distance.
  So what can be improved here beyond “don’t collaborate with someone who hits the f way too hard in the word “flesh””? Well, while you have a lot of personality notes amidst the NPCs there’s not a lot on their deeper motivations, a strange omission. There “dungeon” piece is a bunch of caves without exploratory potential, better mapping (TOP DOWN PLEASE) as ever gives more choices for players. Vaguely creative-ish scenes need better connective tissues in general, relationship maps help if you’re trying to turn this into a social adventure. Being less puerile and suspicious in general would of course be ideal, but I’m not sure if that’s something this authorial team is capable of.
  The best use case for this adventure is as a prosecutorial exhibit in a criminal trial. It can also be used as a warning, a terrible totem of revulsion and terror to discourage someone from letting that id run wild. It’s also fine for kindling in its POD version.
  Final Rating? */***** while technically an “adventure”, not really practical for running without a ton of effort.