In the lead-up to the second annual Adventure Site Contest, I’ll make a few posts working though the creation of my own adventure site entry, currently titled Fog Valley Retreat. My players are going to be needing an adventure site next month and I have the idea, so why not go ahead and write it up all nice? I am in fact making two adventure sites for where they’re currently exploring, but the bigger one isn’t going to ever be written up for publication (because it’s using some non-commercial Dyson maps), so I knocked that out for 2-3 sessions’ worth of exploration in half an hour of prep. If it’s going to look nicer like this example site, though, I’m going to be spending a little more time.
  As an aside, drilling down a little bit on my process might make these things seem like a little more work than they actually are; I’m being careful and so I expect for this 3-pages-plus-map submission I’m going to spend about four hours of work. Some perfectionists will lavish dozens of hours on their lovingly crafted submissions but there are going to be great sites also slapped together in a couple hours. Please don’t hesitate to create and submit, a contest like this is a fantastic opportunity to get a project done, and also receive multiple sets of feedback. If you have extra time, the very best use of it is in playtesting your site, I cannot undersell how much better that makes an RPG product.
  So as a prelude, let me tell you (a bit) about my campaign; as my players have pushed deeper into the stormy central isles of my ongoing West Marches campaign (Into the Skyshadow Isles), they’ve been stumbling upon adventure sites from Adventure Sites I, notably the spider-themed linked sites of the Barrow Shrine of Corruption, Legacy of the Black Mark, and Etta Capp’s Cottage, which I’ve seeded as all being linked to an ancient elven spider-demon’s cult, the later two giving two halves of a map leading to an ancient elven hideaway in the hills….the genius module Webs of Past and Present. My elves, as all elves should be, are a decadent fallen people prone to depraved cults, and while they’re not heavily present in most of the Skyshadow Isles, a few of their moldering ruins remain on these particular isles. Looking around I spot an area where I think another site would go, if I have something nice and elven-ruiny. I could make a map at this point, but Dyson Logos has a perfect commercial map just right for something of this scale:
 
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  There’s nothing wrong with grabbing a free map for something like this, and that’s a real beauty right there. Two levels with a little bit of up/down on the ground floor, multiple means of ingress/egress, good meaningful loops, and clear clean rooms with a ton of visual interest. At twenty-one “rooms” it’s right at the max for a one-and-done adventure site, but with the more relaxed three-page limit that’s no issue. I also think it’s pretty…but it’s also something that is pretty easy to convey to a mapper at the table. I’ll probably draw the entry and the octagonal first balcony room for them first, because that’s complex, but after that they can do their mapping easily.
  Once I either pick out or draw out my map, I begin to think about the context for the site and what challenges will be presented...for an adventure site in this contest, I also want to see how it can be made more generic and thus usable for anyone’s game. So, while in my campaign this is on a constantly stormy island’s hills, I’m noting this takes place in any viny fog-shrouded valley. Should be a ubiquitous environment. I’m also preparing this to be where the elf general flees to if he does run from Webs’ site, but for the purposes of the site as a one-shot I have a generic “flight-risk bad guy”. I’m also going to note this site works as a generally-known sanctuary for moral reprobates in whatever campaign world, giving users a lot of flexibility for how to use the adventure site in any number of campaigns.
  I’m going to write up a story for the site here, but I think it’s going to be something that adapts easily to whatever generic Greyhawklike is being used. The upper left zone suggests a shrine and a private priestly complex, I’m going to tag that as devoted to a deceptive elven deity known as Saint Lilit, while the lower main complex is devoted to a god of travelers and refugees. Ostensibly neutral, this god can trend evil by being a protector of deposed tyrants and dictators. Who couldn’t use something like that? This religious hermitage thus gets known as the Fog Valley Retreat, descriptive and evocative both.
  The details of the map suggest some cool individual challenges. The hex this goes in has foggy valleys full of assassin vines, the front of the site being ivy-covered with some of that ivy as assassin vines is a classic and grants a little protection to the secret entrances. Fog is a theme that works for the elevation, I’m going to have waist-deep persistent fog present on the ground floor when doors or curtains are open, up to head-height in those lower-down rooms to the bottom right. That’s going to be an environmental effect to play with in terms of traps and hazards. Absent a map flow that encourages a “boss fight” or two, I think in fact I like the biggest combat danger to be present in the very first main room there, that big mark representing a huge statue. When someone under the protection of this religious retreat is killed, that center statue is going to wake up as an extremely dangerous threat, to be battled or avoided with difficulty. Add a clerical caretaker, random encounters, and a ghost or two, we have a nice challenging site aimed at levels 5-8.
  Which of course means I’m free to be very mean and have one of these running around in the fog:

A dungeon by Logen Nein, level 3 or 4.
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  One-page dungeon day, calloo, callay, we get to review a single-pager. I’m genuinely pleased, twelve rooms means you can’t mess around or waste time with frippery, and this at least isn’t a weirdo art project. Logen Nein here is also giving us a treat with “not Shadowdark”, in this case an adventure for Heroes of Adventure nominally. Despite some unique monsters nothing forces use with the system, but I appreciate the adventure-site scale built for level 4’s, not the thousandth first-level adventure. I’m positive going in…
  …and then details immediately make me worried. It’s “Crafted with the Heroes of Adventure Referees Guide procedures”, which can be fine, but also practically often is terrible when adventure writers don’t realize how much effort they need to put into those table roll results. There unfortunately is a bit of “I used story dice on a random dungeon map” here, with the interestingly stringy spider-map being ostensibly the tomb of a powerful necromancer but also containing weirdo aberrations, giant spiders, golems, and drakes. Couple with the fact that the necromancer is only present as a random encounter and that the last two rooms end with “…” that beg for “insert McGuffin here”, and the final product comes out slightly doughy and underbaked.
  Poking through this dumpling, what I liked was the stringy map, actually…as completely linear as it is, the long lines are neat and the side-room with drakes does mention a second difficult egress. I love room 4, as a particular thing, a high dome that shows half the world in magnificent detail. That’s an exploration treasure in and of itself, that could be used for financial gain, to uncover geographic secrets, possibly depending on the details even spawn more adventures/quests. Great room. I also love the little in-universe blurb by a scholar about the horror that was Caul Doran, a fine example of flavor text/scene setting that doesn’t drone on long.
  The rest all needs thought on what can be improved. There’s a list of three “hooks” that all just need but two words (name, key location) to be made specific and thus actually useful. More specificity in some of the room names rather than “hexagonal room” also would go a long way; if you’re writing a one-page dungeon, you need to use every single word to convey flavor and interest, so these room titles are being wasted. I really like the tight little complex (11) and natural cavern (12) at the end of the dungeon, but these are where the descriptions completely give up on giving anything, where the flow of the dungeon should make this the climax. Bums me out…
  The aggressively generic lack of those proper nouns alas means the best use case is “steal bits”. I’d use this map as an adventure site in a heartbeat, and room 4 is a good idea that is definitely worth the steal. Sadly, running it as it is will require a lot of homework.
  Final rating? */***** in a very frustrated way, this could have easily been three stars with just another twenty minutes of creative work…or, of course, a single playtest. 

​  Today I’m going to talk a little bit about isometric maps in general. I’m going to use the beautiful Temple of the Moon Priests, winner of the One Page Dungeon contest in 2017, as an example here but it’s not going to be primarily about that. I’m seeing isometrics fairly often in my itch.io delves, some are good, some are bad, but in general I think they’ve been woefully misused. I’m going to pick on the example dungeon a little bit here, but this is more about the style as a whole than this particular dungeonlet.
  I guess I should talk first about what isometric maps even are; basically, you take a grid and make the squares into diamonds, allowing for mappers (and draftsmen) to easily make 3D maps of multi-level buildings and other structures (like caves). I enjoy sketching isometric maps myself, and there really are some astonishingly pretty works out there with 3D maps. There being X, Y, and Z-axis portrayed means a complex structure can be conveyed quickly and efficiently…unfortunately, also uselessly. Because 99 times out of 100, it’s not made for the players.
  Let’s begin by looking at the truly gorgeous piece of art that is Temple of the Moon Priests:
 

 
 
   I don’t want to go in depth on the review of the dungeon-qua-dungeon here, but I’ll say it’s a perfectly fine one-page-dungeon, better than most. Some decent exploration potential with multiple means of ingress and egress, a rival adventuring party, nifty traps and tricks, a decent puzzle…beyond the baseline objection that is “nine-room low-level dungeon grants immortality”, and dodging the annoyance that comes from the system neutral plague, this is a quality product for its size…easy potential for a good one-shot or an adventure site. Three stars, endorse it. But the lovely map makes me sad.
  Ignore the warm and fuzzy feelings generated by the pretty art. Let’s instead sit down at the table collect all your dice, and work on actually running the adventure. How are you describing the initial entry point? You certainly can’t show them the pretty picture. But it’s a waterfall-with-rope, camp-plus-spellcaster over the water, cave with waterfall, and open(?) door leading to the illusory chest. You…really need to sketch this out on your battlemap. Uh oh, they want to go up the rope? Now we have to show elevation change. And that’s a big forest to convey. Uh, now they’re going down to the idol room, do we have a method of showing its elevation vs. the lower door? And how exactly does that relate without a graph mark…
  If we’re in a VTT, there’s an even worst temptation, to cover rooms with black squares and reveal as the PCs go. If you have the map on the GM layer then it might look okay on a let’s play livestream, but boy that’s a hard and wonky task to convey it to your players.
  What has happened in this scenario is that our shining-eyed dungeon master, armed with this one page dungeon, is attempting to run a dungeon delve and discovers that what he’s equipped with isn’t in fact a map, but instead an object of art. An object of art just complex enough to make running this nine-room dungeon theatre of mind impossible…the worst of all worlds. All the lush purples and deep blues, all the sharp art, it’s all for the benefit of the buyer (the potential DM), and it’s all missed by the audience (the players). They have to use the same old tools as usual, graph paper and imagination. Which is a real pity.
  If you’re following my Crapshoot Monday series (and seriously, you should), then you recently saw a boring but not hateful little adventure, Ruins of the Immortal Warlord. Although its map has nowhere near the artistry of Temple of the Moon Priests, what I really appreciated was that there were two sections of the map…one a player version, one for the showrunner. Although the titular ruins aren’t a complex environment, they are something that can be given to the players, allowing them to point to one spot or another saying, “we go there”. It adds a lot to the running of the game.
  All of this leads me to concluded that isometric maps aren’t maps, they are game art. Maps exist to center players in a concrete geographic location, to enable tactical and strategic choices…they are an essential portion of the game part of the Role-Playing Game. Art, on the other hand, exists to evoke mood, to show what the characters are seeing, to make everyone involved feel like they’re in the world, a great part of the role part of the Role-Playing Game. I’m not dismissing art at all. Good art is a wonderful enhancement for your play, grounding imaginations for everyone by ensuring they’re all on the same page. There’s also nothing wrong with having DM-only art…I should want to look at an adventure and feel inspired. But if you’re like the author of Temple, you’ve handed me something that makes me really want to run, while at the same time making it hard for me to share it with all my friends at the table.
  I myself draw isometric maps. My own adventure site, The Observatory, had an isometric outdoor view. You want to know how I used it? I slapped that bad boy down on the table for all my players to see. And point at things. And ask questions. And make plans. And then when I wrote the rest of the module, I keyed the three levels with standard top-down grid square maps. Because the isometric sketch was my own slightly wonky (but definitely useful) art, not something for the running of the bulk of the game.
  In an admirable reaction to the dense text blocks and paid-by-the-word overwriting of adventure modules in the nineties and the aughts, most indie modules now are formatted to within an inch of their lives, loaded down with bullet points, bolding, and high-density writing as well as colorful charts, tabs, and spacing tricks designed to convey as much information possible to the longsuffering dungeon master. All too often, though, these hyper-formatted modules become so thick with information that they’re almost impossible to parse on a read-through. There’s something similar that happens with busy, complex isometric maps, the firehose of information conveyed by them is a real translation problem when brought to the table. Ultimately, even the best-made isometric maps are delivering their artistic payload first, the tactical data a distant second.
  It’s not strictly isometric, but the go-to example for “theoretically good but too much muchness” is the Tower of the High Clerist from Dragonlance. Huge map, shows every single room, every single hall, all the connections and stairs and everything else…and yet practically it’s never designed to be used in a key-by-key dungeon delve. That’s not to say the High Clerist’s Tower map is bad…the ideal use is to hand the whole beautiful thing over to your players, let them look over every nook and cranny of it, and tell them to defend it with their lives. In short, it’s perfect for the use of every isometric map:
  As a player handout.

​An adventure by Taylor Seely-Wright, level omitted.
Written for Shadowdark
  Shadowdark again, I know. This one’s a little different, trying for a splattergore horror vibe. The adventure’s eight pages are littered with black-and-white AI art trying to tell the tale of a cursed town, keying both the town map and a thirteen-room basement dungeon while also trying to lay out a scenario and keep a pretty novel set of monsters forward. Clearly the product of a page limit, its working hard by reskinning book monsters and compressing descriptions, but that limitation seems to have helped, not hindered, in this case. Most of the time.
  Stop me if you’ve heard this one…there’s this town Beltine, right? And it’s a simple farming village, happy and prosperous, but it has a dark secret. The secret of the town’s prosperity is that underneath its church lies a magic music box, which was stolen from the local vineyard-owning family five years ago when the jealous villagers murdered the whole family and burned down their house. The family got the music box from a magical living puppet, who kicks off the adventure by returning to the region and then turning the burned family’s corpses into manikins and then animating them. But then the returned family cursed to a horrific existence of eternal torment and agony for some reason opt to carry out their vengeance upon the town that killed them, which somehow surprises said living puppet. Oops. Happens I guess.
  What I liked is going to be a somewhat nuanced evaluation here, because I’m going to freely admit that grindhouse horror is not my genre of choice. That being said, there’s some good design going on here. As a pretty open zombie horror scenario, there’s the essential timeline, basically a high-level description, night-by-night, of what happens if the PCs do nothing (whole village is slaughtered sans children). The dungeon, while over-fond of the gross, has decent crawling fundamentals and a pretty nice map for the scale, I’m particularly fond of a rusty lever that allows the PCs to accidentally trap themselves away from the main entrance (there’s a secret second egress, solid). The reskinning is good, focusing on visceral new descriptions for what are mechanically normal monsters (like a pile of body parts that acts like a roper). Music box that grants a system-specific “luck token” is a decent magic item.
  Still, what can be improved is probably “add a little more”. There’s just barely not enough to run this comfortably, a few crucial details missing…there’s a list of prominent villagers, for example, but instead of giving personality traits, their families names’ are given. The thin initial hook given for the PCs to be here is that The Merchant wants guards for a wine shipment, but that’s not been detailed with concrete rewards, day three of the horror scenario you want to know why the PCs are staying. Finally, the actual solution is…unclear. Will killing all of the reanimated Wronged Family fix things? Is there a McGuffin of Fixing? Do the zombie manikin puppet villagers just fall apart at some point? A village-under-siege scenario needs more details to enable the much broader set of player solutions the party will inevitably come up with. Not a LOT more is needed to really improve things, but what’s here now unfortunately just isn’t enough.
  So then the best use case is probably to strip it down for the classic Halloween one-shot (or Beltane, if your group is high on that sort of pretention). The suffering DM will need to do some work to give it focus in the one-shot framework, but it’s not very easy to drop into a big campaign, and the details are so odd that I don’t know how much content mining there is here.
  Final Rating? **/***** because it does what it does okay, but it lacks flexibility for anything more. If the theme and the AI art really float your boat probably worth checking out though?

​An adventure site by Pakkanen, level 3.
Written for Shadowdark
  Yes, I know it’s more Shadowdark. There’s been a million of them released, this is my life for now, so dear reader, now it is yours. This one is using eight (‘zine-sized) pages to cover a lake fortress site with eleven keyed locations, with the by-now-standard formatting of a single-column pages with simple descriptions and details in bullet points, d6 rumor and encounter tables, and back pages with bestiary and magic items descriptions. The map, which is isometric, and the couple little illustrations are all by the author, very charming. I don’t know what started the trend of crediting the font but I’m never impressed when that happens. Dear module cobblers: Times New Roman, Arial, or if you’re feeling frisky, Calibri…pick one and just forge ahead.
  Our premise, thin but not emaciated, is that within this lake sits a cute lil’ island fortress owned by a lich who was pretending to be a warlord. Lich/Warlord gets assassinated by a magic blade that petrifies its victims, Warlord Lich curses the assassin and his failed bodyguards to join in him petrification, fortress “becomes abandoned”. Lot of passive voice. Now there’s a bunch of pirates on one half of the fortress, some sahuagin on the other half, and a wyvern roosting on the fortress top. Enter the PCs, holding the “Sheath of Fire Seals”, which is what the aforementioned sword turns into when it is used to rock out its target. All pretty standard stuff, but nothing bad.
  I’m going to start what I liked with that fortress map, coming as it does with both a keye/cutaway GM version and a print-and-handout player version. My usual critique of isometric maps is that while they’re a visually appealing way to convey a 3D space, they can be confusing on scale, and also the players aren’t usually seeing your very busy art piece. In this case, the cartographer/author has done a great job not only showing a scale, but also showing various heights of each portion of the fortress…which couples wonderfully with the players getting their own player map. Not only does that give them the artistic impression, the player map also stops the rather small map from being linear, showing windows and roofs that could potentially be other points of ingress or egress. Massive improvement, and adds a ton of gameplay. Great job.
  I also like the idea of multiple factions, given personalities, goals, and direction…good adventure design. The fact that he Warlich’s guards don’t know he’s a lich and will turn against him if they see him all skeletonized is also a nice touch. The magic petrifying sword is a katana and very cool mechanically, if a touch convoluted. This is the second Shadowdark adventure in a row featuring gunpowder weapons but I think these rules look better to me as a tiny subsystem, your mileage may vary on adding boomsticks to your games but it is at least reasonable and balanced.
  After being this complimentary it’s going to feel a little weird, I know, but what can be improved is “spark more joy”. While I like a lot of the ideas here, everything comes off as dry and cramped, a Lichlord who commanded vast armies, two hostile factions battling over his ruins…all that should be a much bigger place, rather than the dinky little spot that has sahuagin and pirates less than a stone’s throw away from each other. The scale of this whole thing is fine for an adventure site, but your setup and what you see are wildly mismatched in scale. The personalities of the faction NPCs are also a little on the dull side, some spice would go a long way. Take advantage of the sentience of your wyvern, too, weird that it’s okay with invaders to its route.
  Eh, best use case here is still as a workable adventure site. There’s enough here to fill a relaxing evening, sprinkling it on a map or running a one shot wouldn’t make anyone give up the hobby. Pulling the sword (with illustration) out to use elsewhere I could see, and if gunpowder is something you’d like to add to your Shadowdarks, then I think the module’s gun table works pretty good.
  Final rating? **/***** due to the excessive boredom, but the module’s heart is in the right place, you should approve of it for trying.

  The great campaign is still ongoing, here's the updates since then:
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  Searching the rainy city of Gamma for a smuggler, the crew of Le Renard find Kalicilos, an offworlder more than happy to take natural diamonds as a finders’ fee, who has a line on some valuable alien artifacts perfect for an unaffiliated smuggling ship. After a few sidebars with a local psychic and arrangement for a future meeting with the potential rebel defector, the captain and crew found Agent Johnson 9801 (known as Sally), a tough-talking chain-smoking hard-drinking Agency broad with a love of the finer things in life and a willingness to overlook the occasional lost relic., the crew met with Dr. Jing to try and best pull off their heist…all the while aware that the vast chasing rebel fleet is less than a day away from arrival.
 
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  After a tense meeting with the nervous defector Carl Theseus where they directed the scout to dock with their ship, now we join our crew along with the curious scholar Hu Jing as his “help” in researching the newly uncovered alien ruins…all the while looking carefully at the schematics of the Perimeter Agency’s formidable site defenses. Sneaking away from the approved site and the already-categorized artifacts, the crew follows the irascible Dr. Jing to a forbidden section of the ruins. Forsaking the obvious main chamber and its pair of Agency Warbots, the crew instead go to a chamber only barely breached, spending a pair of precious hours on stealthy excavation to enter a mysterious chamber with a starmap leading to no star upon its black ceiling…and an alien robot made of ceramic that moves with liquid menace in reaction to the trespass.

Previously on “The Flight of the Fox:
  In a tense standoff with the terrifying alien guardian found in the ruins on Glomar 2, the crew of Le Renard fired first in the form of engineer Joel Reynolds, leading to a frantic melee where only sword-waving Slate Bulkhead and revolver-wielding Captain LeBeau managed to hit the well-armored robot, drawing terrible wounds in return. Psychic Percy Crighton fled the chamber in a panic, drawing the guardian out with him. After murdering the hapless Dr. Jing, Percy fled down the trench only to draw the advanced Perimeter Agency warbots into the fray; but the powerful plasma weaponry of the pretech bots seemed only to empower the menacing ceramic death machine, leading to a site-wide alert. While Agency personnel battled for their lives against the alien monster, the crew grabbed handy relics and fled the scene of the crime, setting off a demolition charge to cover their tracks…only for an orbital kinetic strike to be called minutes later, obliterating the alien ruins entirely. Now battered, bruised, and in the case of Joel, blinded, the crew try to make good their escape of the system as the pursuing rebel fleet arrives, transmitting a demand that the fugitives be handed over… 

Previously on “The Flight of the Fox:
  The chase is on in the Glomar System! While ship’s medic Jenny desperately works to restore sight to Engineer Reynolds, the good ship Le Renard tries as best she can to join a dozen other vessels in fleeing Glomar 2 before the vast rebel fleet, as the belligerent Admiral Hiermonious Aiken demands the locals hand over the fugitive corvette…while the Perimeter Agency demands all fleeing ships halt for inspection, fearing a breach in quarantine from disaster at the dig site. After stalling for time desperately with the Agency patrol boats, Le Renard finally provokes a response…but not before, at Jenny’s suggestion, linking up with a heavy freighter who also chose flight to inspection. A flight of fighters launched from the rebel fleet at the same time moves to incept the fleeing ships, but the two ships’ delay proves fortunate as the extra time sees the rebels and the Agency intercept at the same time. While nuclear explosions and singularity surges show that the battle back on Glomar 2 rages fiercely, the captain desperately tries to turn the two sides against one another even as plasma begins to fly. The last rebel interceptor gets swatted down even by the Agency and the boats once more demand to board, just as power flickers and goes out. Thanks to quick thinking on the part of Security Officer Bulkhead, Percy’s cargo manifest wizardry, and clever use of the ship’s smuggling compartment, the inspectors find and confiscate what appears to be excess whiskey, barely missing the stolen alien relics. The captain and crew breathe a sigh of relief and slip at last into metaspace, but not before all seeing the grim report of Engineer Reynolds…the power plant failure was SABOTAGE!
  (Note crew morale here...I've begun monitoring crew morale as they've increasingly been desperate and shore leave is long away. Interestingly, though, I rolled the best result at this point...which makes sense. These aren't heroes, this is a smuggling ship, they're smuggling. I told the players how much more relaxed their crew seems after this narrow escape)

Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  A day in the life of Le Renard…while the captain recuperates under the care of medbot Jenny, the rest of the command crew carefully works to detect the saboteur, with security and engineering rigging up hidden cameras while Percy carefully puts his nascent empathic skills to the test interviewing every crewmember, with an especial focus on the new defector Carl Theseus. The defector passes his first test, but when the prisoner Jorge is set up to take the fall by being freed, drugged, and sent with a screwdriver to cause havoc, the carefully hidden cameras manage to catch Carl in the act of framing the poor patsy, who is once again under guard but down a kneecap. Now the crew descends on the false friend, determined to ensure the ship’s safety and security against the snake in the grass.
  (I would never insert a false defector like Carl here, but I'm not running the rebels...that's my nine-year-old son. He's making clever and really devious choices, and the false defector was a nasty play that's all him).

Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  Death to saboteurs! Double-agent Carl Theseus was interrogated via drugs and confessed to being a plant, placed to sabotage or at least reveal Le Renard…with a ship loaded down with hacks to support the mission. Now with the traitor spaced and the scout ship cleaned, Le Renard is only stronger going forward to meet with the eccentric “Art Dealer” Gan Budike on the vast station Grojec 1 orbiting the tomb world Frost in the Backdoor system. The relics are his, but the command crew also debate selling the location found amidst the alien ruins…a rogue planet in the outer dark, mysterious and alluring.

Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  New patron…and new perils! The crew of Le Renard head out for a hard day’s night on the town while the command crew meet with the mysterious Mr. Budike. While the wealthy magnate is more than happy to pay a fair wage for the alien artifacts and hints at more smuggling jobs to come, it is the intriguing star map that has him most involved. After a high-stakes negotiation, Le Renard is now under contract as an escort for a scientific expedition to the dark planet…and getting its spike drive upgraded to make it there and back again with safety. Pushing for a little more, psychic Percy also requests a precog chamber to aid in the navigation, which Mr. Budike is willing to part with…if the crew will in turn retrieve valuable pretech from the airless tomb world below!
  Without a doubt, this is one of the most enjoyable campaigns I've ever run. NOW it's going to begin to really open up with a new job and a ton of possible new cargoes and destinations. They've had choices before, but with a Spike Drill-3 drive and a full tank of gas, now the sector's their oyster...although the rebel fleet still lurks out there if they linger anywhere too long.

A perilous underground exploration adventure by Gray Dungeon Dealer, “For High-Level Characters”.
Written for “OSR” (uh oh).
Being sold for SEVEN UNITED STATES DOLLARS
  Someone suggested I look at the itch.io gleanings for high-level adventures. I didn’t hate the cover on this one, so I figured why not. This thing…this thing, though. It’s pretty enough, with bright gonzo flashes of imagination, evocative art (by Eve, whoever that is, good job), and a landscape format that isn’t too terrible. Unfortunately, no targeted system is listed, instead it is the dread “for OSR”, which means something different to each person. It’s almost as systemless as Trilemma Adventures, with less brevity.
  First of all, what does Gray Dungeon Dealer mean by “high level”? Enemies range from HD8 to HD18***, with status effects that are either handwavium (age nearby souls 1 year per round) or pitiful damage burps (3d6 damage). By high-level I think we’re talking about level eight or so, then? There’s nothing that feels like characters of 11+ should sweat about. Whatever the system is, it sure as hell isn’t gold=XP, despite all the hard work on the magic loot there’s nothing worth cold hard cash here. A new magic system entirely built on draining WIS makes me think of 3.P-style ability score damage. The dread term “disadvantage” does crop up so one thinks Shadowdark, but there’s also “save vs. breath”. What we actually have is the designer putting out the frenzied product of his own imaginings, unplaytested outside of a session of magical tea party, so there’s no definite planned level.
  What’s the actual story here? Well I hope you’re planning on this being a one-shot because this location definitely Has Implied Setting out that wazoo…the titular tower is in the middle of a vast cavern (charmingly illustrated) of mostly ash, which is of course the comprised of the dead bodies of the Titans after their souls burned out their mortal flesh countless eons ago. Like you do. And of course, the tower of the Titans has a clockwork centipede monster underneath from the Everted Minaret below, and a vine dangling above from the vast subterranean crystal-lit jungle, the Entangled Deep. Two things jump out…one, that all sounds kind of cool, and two, how on Oerth am I supposed to do anything gameable with all that? It’s setting fluff that doesn’t matter, along with dire snails and ancient predatory trilobites in the Ashen Plains for the “overland” portion of the adventure (single page, no mechanics provided).
  Once you get to the tower content itself it’s…kind of a standard linear ancient ruined tower. Golems at the door, check. Trap on the floor along with rune-covered rock the grants magical power, check. Story-delivering wall-mural level, check. Cracked level with cindervine growing out of crack and a valuable magic flow that angers the mote-flies buzzing around, check. Top area with dead body of a Titan, check. Basement with said clockwork centipede monster, check. Random encounters are with the shade of that Titan triggered by being noisy or annoying the GM personally. If said Warden is fought, there’s a note “put*on*gothic*chants*or*Dark*Souls*boss*music”, cute.
  Appendices in the back of the slide deck (landscape format, again) are concerned with three things: First, the oddball “centurypede”, which is a fairly easy bossfight outside of the year-draining-aura and has an extremely involved backstory regarding wizards in the aforementioned Everted Minaret deeper underground (like the Entangled Deeps, the module promises future products detailing said locale). Second, we hear about Titan magic, Pyromancy, which is granted by a billion-year-old runestone and is powered by the caster’s own soul (WIS drain, no recovery rules)…and does at most 14d8 damage in one particular fire spell? Look I like Soulfire from the Dresden Files too but it’s a weird implementation. The third and final appendix details the magical knick-knacks, paddy-whacks, and given-out dog bones found in the tower, where the dribs and drabs of primordial creation are used to…add a die of damage to your Fireball once or upgrade your +2 sword to a +3. An arrow of the Titans can be used as a +2 spear that level drains on a crit, I guess that’s okay. The centurypede loot is a fate thingy that might vaguely be used for rerolls? That’s your homework, sucker.
  It’s not Monday but sure, I’ll say what I liked on this one. There’s some genuine imagination shown here, which, coupled with the fine illustrations, make this little product somewhat entertaining to read. Like a mid-quality False Machine or Goblin Punch blog post, you can kind of cross your eyes and fuzz out in a mindset that feels like creativity, at least. Given my own system accommodates ability damage fine there might be some Soulfire spells I weave in because Jim Butcher won’t send a cease-and-desist to my home table. I don’t know if I enjoyed the instruction to play background music when the Warden fight happens ironically or directly, but sure, you get a point.
  What can be improved? Oh heavens, so very much. First, what I’m not critical of…it’s a small, linear site, very simple in layout…but that’s okay, there’s a use case for those. I’d be embarrassed to ask for $7 for it, but hey. Rather than nit-pick though, I’m just going to say the way to improve this thing is TARGET A SPECIFIC LEVEL RANGE IN A SPECIFIC SYSTEM. Every time I look at this trying to figure out how it’d actually work in play, the resolution goes all blurry, this isn’t made for, for example, 4-6 OSE characters of level 8-10, it’s made for “high level OSR”. Which is useless.  
  This means our best use case is tragically as a one-shot in GLOG or something like it. Although with some effort there are good ideas to be mined here and there, I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze. I’ve had to squeeze it in this process anyway but that’s an expensive glass of OJ. With medium pulp, the exact amount nobody wants.
  Final Rating? **/***** by my usual Crapshoot Monday standards for free or PWYW products. */***** only for something that’s being sold for 175% the price of Black Wyrm of Brandonsford. *** post if I saw this on an OSR blog.

A dungeon by Matt Wuertzer, level ~4.
Written for Shadowdark
  Here’s your reward for getting a positive review in Crapshoot Monday: You get another review. If it’s free on itch.io, at least. In the Last Voyage of the Shadow, we witness the author vastly expanding his scope, taking 33% more pages (up to four) to describe 50% more rooms (twelve). The setting isn’t anything astonishingly fresh, just adventuring in the ship (barge, actually) of a failed Shackleton Expedition. It’s written about as well as last time, formatted neatly, same offset bullet points and clean tables and workmanlike but flavorful descriptions. It’s fine.
  The story is that this captain took the barge(?) Shadow north on a mission of exploration, found a mysterious cursed orb, got himself locked into the ice, and then everyone died after the usual cannibalism and madness. Players who explore Ernest Shackleton’s Bad Day Out start with a siren fight if they go into the lower hold’s hole, then poke around looking at nonreactive frozen corpses…until the captain’s cabin where he’s clutching the Bad Pearl of Badness. Touching the pearl animates all the corpses as undead, a very nice shock if they haven’t come up yet as one of the d4 results on that random encounter table. Setting warning: This ship has gunpowder, cannons, and the captain owns a flintlock pistol…which for about half of you means you’re more on board, the other half will immediately check out. YMMV.
  What I liked is at least the idea of that set-piece…spend most of the night after the initial siren fight just poking around the freezing spooky ship, gaining piecemeal bits of information, then come upon the captain and wham, frantic frozen zombie swarm fight. Good idea, even if the encounter table might spoil it. I like the chance for a hilarious “oh crap” moment with the gunpowder in the hold too, there’s a chance to set it off…which in turn has a chance to crack the ice and send the boat hurtling to the depths. Love that scene.
  Obviously then the first of what can be improved is taking a look at that random encounter table. Any set of players with more genre savviness than a midsized turtle will of course know all those corpses are going to wake up at some point, but it’s still a bummer to have zombies moving before the big huzzah. The ship/barge is also a little too…predictable, something twisted and damaged by being trapped in the ice could be riven and damaged in ways that allow for more up-down movement than just “hold or upper deck”. That could also help in making naturalistic traps too, pits and spikes and whatnot. The cursed pearl is underwhelming too, and unfortunately, it’s the only magic item. The biggest grounds for improvement might be a weakness of the Shadowdark RPG System, but give us adventure bits for reaching the ship. As it is this remote arctic expedition starts with just “you arrive at boat”…let’s make the getting there an adventure. If Shadowdark can even enable that gameplay.
  The highly specific setup means that the best use case is going to be playing this straight, unfortunately just as a one-shot. There might be a little mining of the gunpowder thing or the set-piece idea, but those are pretty darn broad. Cannon and gunpowder rules look…sane, at least, but I leave it to the Shadowdark aficionado to decide if this is the supplement he wants for boomstick inclusion.
  Final Rating? **/*****, competent but not inspired.

  The reviews are coming in, and the people love it. Adventure Sites I is a tremendously useful compilation, everyone who's grabbed it (here) has had nothing but great things to say about it. Personally, I've been able to use three of the adventures at my own table so far (Legacy of the Black Mark, Barrow Shrine of Corruption, and Etta Capp's Cottage) while also having seeded a couple more that have at least been seen (Lipply's Tavern, St. Durham's Home). I'm planning on using every single one in my current campaign or in the next one. Play reports are pouring in from both one-shots at cons and from use in big open-world campaigns. My own sessions with the adventure sites were incredibly successful, everyone had a complete blast.  
  There's another contest in the works, here. Olle was unaware of our contest before launching his own, but I'm not going to complain at all...the community can only benefit from more of this kind of thing. Please look at his contest, it's a little smaller-sized than the adventure sites, but still a great and useful idea. 
  I've also had 4-5 takers to the Isle of the Dead gauntlet I threw down in June, anyone interested is welcome, the painting is evoking some amazing work...
  I will definitely make this an annual contest, with some small modifications. Be thinking about your next submission...I think I'll be opening for submissions in October, with a deadline of January 1, 2025. In what we're calling the "Grützi Rule", page count will be allowed at 3, but fonts also need to be limited to nothing smaller than 10-point, Arial/Times New Roman/Calibri. I'll be adding in Traveler and Stars Without Number too...old school sci-fi is an oft-neglected field, but it's another side of the genre that I'd love to see explored. Watch this space for more updates as we draw nearer, but please...do check out Olle's own contest. And KEEP PLAYING, by all means...seed these into your games, rate the compilation, and spread the word...
  ADVENTURE SITES II IS COMING

​An adventure by Nate Treme, level nill.
Written for no system
  One-page dungeon time, this time cranking up the color and the gonzo settings all the way up to “phantasmagorical”. Just looking at the thing puts me in the mood for hyper-fast midi music, high on the beeps, low on the bloops. The single page has eleven keys for a linear series of nine hills leading up to a big bad evil guy. There’s a surprisingly dense set of text blocks here describing the weird journeys, light on mechanics and verisimilitude, heavy…nay, zaftig on strange loony creatures and scenes. I don’t know if Nate Treme is the same as Fever Black Mountain’s Nate Treme, but if so, you’d be hard pressed to imagine a higher contrast pair of products. Colorful cartoon world, both in presentation and content.
  Premise is your basic star-jelly-from-beyond-space-lands-on-mountain-and-magically-inflicts-have-of-clouds-upon-the-lower-world-plunging-them-into-centuries-of-darkness, PCs have climbed up out of the mists and must climb every hill having wacky adventures until they reach the big bad, who polymorphs them into pigeons but is made of jelly and thus “easy to defeat even by pigeons”. Along the way parties meet two mountains that are inhabited by annoyed earth spirits, a mystic cow sage offering her milk (uh…), a couple secretish bonus cities, a demon-heated licorice volcano, and random encounters of things like jelly hawks, sponge ogres, shock boars, and ancient landmines. Do you know how to run any of those extemporaneously? You better hope you’re playing Lasers & Feelings, because any system with more crunch than that is going to be sweating.
  I’m going come out and state again that I do not enjoy gonzo, so what I liked is going to be pretty sparse here. Assuming you buy into the gonzo, this is in fact a fine premise for a one-shot, terrible scope for adding to a campaign but this is a good night of wacky fun if your table likes those. The art/map is really cute and engaging, I like how the linear (with two branches) succession of ascending hills is shown. There’s an attempt at some mild backtracking interactions, which is good…in fact, there’s a general attempt to make encounters interactive, with roughly half having a nonviolent resolution, admirable.
  It’s evident first then that what can be improved is to give us some mechanics. What is a slug farther and how does he do his farming? What’s with the bats of the City of Mog? What are chalk goblins?
The people want to know, Treme. Treasure and climbing procures wouldn’t go amiss, either. I know it flies in the face of the one-pager format, but this is probably better two pages, honestly. It feels like a quibble, but this is also something where the format should be reversed; the keys descend top-to-bottom, while the hills ascend bottom-to-top. If you are going to do a single-pager, don’t be afraid of shaking up the formatting standard slightly to better convey information.  
  The best use case here is to use it for that which I personally shall never use anything…a gonzo silly one-shot in an ultralight improv TTRPG system. I know, some of you broke out in hives over that, but for thems that like such things, you can do worse. Sadly, every single solitary part of this creation is so gosh darned weird that there’s nothing to extract for broad use or inspiration.
  Final Rating? */***** but maybe one extra star could be granted for those of you who have a much much much higher tolerance for lolrandom humor in your games.