A dungeon by Jean-Claude ''Raznag'' Tremblay, level ???
Written for Heroes of Cerulea
  Heyo, look what we’ve got cooking…it’s another dungeon made with an 8-bit retro visual style. This is like catnip to your humble reviewer, loading him up with nostalgia and filling his heart with hope and childlike happiness. Your humble reviewer is always and invariably crushed, dear reader. This twelve-page little product covers a fifteen-room tomb for a bespoke indie little system I know nothing about, so we’re going to be in our comfort zone for itch’n. The system, for what it’s worth, is leaning hard into the retro videogame feel, with bots, bombs, and an explicit miniboss called out in the text.
  Our hook is as simple as it gets, there are random snatches of music sounding from within the crypt of a long-dead famous bard. Get ye therefore in yon tomb and somehow both settle the restless spirit(s) within and also loot the place silly. Exorcisms are cheap when you hire tomb raiders. The players wander semi-randomly through the Minesweeper-looking map rooms, encountering a mixture of undead and bots, bumping into standard issue traps and challenges in the “shove the heavy statue” school of dungeon design. Final destination leads to fighting the skeletonized bards and getting The McGuffin Orb, which our author promises will be followed up on later. All well and good.

 Putting aside aesthetics (and I love the internal 8-bit art too), what I liked here were the few vague grasps towards puzzle-based gameplay. Keys and/or bombs to open stuck passages, that’s good. There’s a good idea about Dead Bard’s music being written in various areas and playing his songs at him in the final fight will weaken him. The magic item loot is a harp that lulls to sleep randomly, that’s a good item. Good ideas, struggling to be born.
  Sadly, first of what can be improved is “break out the forceps and help, dangit”. The keys are just things that auto-drop when whatever the rooms’ fight is gets defeated. The referenced songs aren’t really explicated. Despite the initial impression, the map is purely linear, branches only, never looping and zero exploratory gameplay enabled. The bullet-format, as usual, drops needed information while also robbing us of any interesting flavor. Enter room, fight, enter room, fight, enter room, fight…it’s in keeping with the aesthetic but even then the old games had wandering monsters and interesting mapping. The miniboss and the final boss have random attack routines, which means fighting them can be a little random. Finally, let us loot that lute, the skeleton bard uses his lute as a weapon and a magic item, it’s terrible that players don’t get that one explained.
  Clearly the best use case is “disappoint a hopeful reviewer gulled once again by the charming art”. If a group plays in this they won’t have a terrible time, but it’s more of a nostalgic simulacrum of gaming than gaming proper. Using the module for the art would be okay too I guess.
  Final Rating? */***** is all I can grant despite wanting to like it more. The dearth of creativity and interest here makes me sad, but it’s ultimately inoffensive. ​

A gauntlet dungeon by Jordan Rudd, level 0.
Written for Shadowdark
  This one might be a first on this feature, we have us a level 0 gauntlet. I’m excited. The general idea for a zeroth-level gauntlet is that you get your campaign players a big fat handful of classless 1hp goobers and have them run through a highly deadly set of challenges, ideally ending the experience with a traumatized set of peasants who decide to take up adventuring, gaining level 1 in a class of choice and a lot of hilarious war stories about promising young proto-heroes who died to ratbite. It’s a very different premise from the “standard dungeon”.
  We have here an eighteen-pager detailing a seventeen-room dungeon, which I know feels like a wordy ratio but here in addition to the Shadowdark A5 paper side standard there are also 5(!) appendices plus generous margins and longish setup. The system itself (as I reviewed) does indeed support level 0’s by default, with rules that aren’t too exotic. The relevant nonstandard bits are that level 0’s have 1hp or CON bonus, whichever is higher, and they’re assumed to be able to use all equipment they pick up via beginner’s luck.
  As you would precisely expect from the title, our story here is that there’s a slime lord who has trails. Basically, cultists dedicated to an off-brand Juiblex kidnap randos and toss them into their dungeon here, welcoming the survivors into the cult if they leave via front door. A touch contrived, but sure, why not fight an evil cult? The victims/PCs start dumped in a room with a single burning torch and the exit is a straight shot immediately to the north, but several puzzles and hints will be needed to uncover a mystic incantation to open the door. Wander around, explore, die a lot, maybe find a very impressive warhammer. 

​  To begin, what I liked was how the information was organized, which sounds like a mild praise but its genuinely very well done here, puzzle dungeons are hard to convey even with puzzles this simple, and there are fun things with printable handouts, items and monsters neatly cross-referenced…very well done. I also liked a couple of the new monsters and the magic hammer. Layout of the map is pretty solid for a single-level dungeon, and I like that there are a couple alternate ways out (hilariously, one is only accessible by goblin or halfling PCs, who will probably then proceed to drown at a DC18 CON). Some people might dislike the jocular tone, but I found the occasional aside like “what happens when you lcik a puddle in a slime dungeon” to be fun. The “random bits of useful loot” table takes the system’s mania for trivial tables and makes it interesting. I like the acid trip slime that gets used to decipher runes. Good art.
  What can be improved is to first look a bit more at your level 0 zero premise. There are things that deal d8 or d10 damage, but the Shadowdark system will only have about 5% of the 0th-level PCs rocking more than 2 hit points, with the vast majority only at 1. Good slime heals for a d4, which is also funny. The contrived premise could have done with slightly better worldbuilding for campaign integration and the puzzles are in the point-and-click “find the doodad” mode by and large, more outside of the box problem-solving should be encouraged upon setup. Rather than indulge in an NPC-generator table, a handful of fleshed out pre-generated NPCs would be appreciated.
  The module does what it sets out to do, best use case here is to dump a hapless pile of fresh level 0 Shadowdarkians down the hatch and watch them fumble around to escape, all the while dying in droves. While it doesn’t take the gauntlet concept anywhere particularly fresh, our writer understood the assignment and turned in something that’ll make an enjoyable night of adventure. Putting it to a secondary use as just a simple low-level dungeon will work fine too.
  Final Rating? ***/***** for being a competent execution of the concept. Neither the meatgrinder nor the wild high-energy acid trip that Dungeon Crawl Classics release, but it’s a well-done module that’ll be a breath of fresh air for groups new to the concept. 

A one-page dungeon by Francisco Lemos, low-level.
Written system neutral
  “Crimson Ice” is a nice evocative pair of words, conjuring the grim vision of frozen blood. Nice title.
  We’re back in our happy space, reviewing a densely-formatted one-page-dungeon put up by an artist with genuine talent but a questionable eye for table usability. Lemos is a familiar name, I forget his module’s name but I remember cute mushroom-men and a very detailed isometric map. There’s a dearth of adorability in the illustrations on this one but the isometric Is very detailed again. As is dismayingly common, there are no numbers in the keys, just arrows pointing to a given spot. It’s a workable way to convey a dungeon, just a little ham-handed.
  Our dungeon’s story is pretty much the bog standard, there’s a crypt underneath a church rumored to contain vast riches, players go in there, whoops…deranged cultist is feeding adventurers to a gross fallen elder thing from beyond the stars. All completely normal stuff, you fight it and wonder where all the loot is but I guess the world is saved or whatever.
  I’ll start what I liked first with one charming little wrinkle, the front crypt has a dead decapitated corpse of a local hero in it, his undead talking head is lodged in a skull-wall elsewhere and has useful information. The art style is gross and visceral, works very well for the “show to the players” use for art in a dungeon module. Layout is more linear than first impression, but with enough depth (and a secret second entrance) to make exploration interesting given the site’s small size…
  …but what can be improved is yep, you got it, STOP RELYING ON THE ISOMETRIC MAP. It’s the usual litany of complaint about an isometrically mapped dungeon, in that as pretty as everything is its hard to convey to players and it generates a lot more visual complexity than it has in game-practical terms. Generic system-neutral is biting us again, having a specific system that isn’t what I’m running this in still makes conversion easier than whatever the heck these stats and dangers are supposed to be. The random encounter isn’t terrible, but having the sub-boss as part of the wandering table makes for some weird pacing if the cult priest guy is encountered in the first room and killed…or never rolled at all. Another call for specificity in that. The handwave about the final bossfight with the elder god thingy also begs for some instruction. Even for a One-Page Dungeon, there’s room for more details there.
  The best use case here is to use this as an adventure site for a generally sprawling campaign, seeded in if there’s a call for cosmic horror forces added in. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of homework required to make this usable in any system weightier than DREAD.
  Final Rating? */***** with a genuine nod towards the artistic skill exhibited in the presentation. If only the steak matched the sizzle. 

  I've been getting questions about the next Adventure Site Contest, and let me assure you, I have zero intention of ever stopping this thing, I love seeing the creativity and craft in these things. You've got a long while though, this is a winter contest. Just so you keep it in mind, the essential stats:
  Submissions are open from November 1 through January 1, with judging to immediately follow. 
The Basics:
  Submitted adventure sites must be:
*Small enough to stumble on in a hexcrawl or in a city, call it 5-25 keyed locations, ideally a single session's content.
*The location nonetheless has a story to it, with potential hooks/rumors, and would make a satisfying night's D&D session.
*Page limit of 2 pages excluding map(s). Fonts limited to “normal” (eg, Times New Roman, Arial, CalibrI), no smaller than 10-point…basically, aim for easily readable. Please note this is a maximum, not a minimum...if your site is complete at 1 page, submit at 1.
*At least one map; if using someone else's, must be legal to use in a publication.
*Must be compatible with TSR-era D&D So B/X, OD&D, AD&D or a very close retroclone (ACKS is close enough, Shadowdark is not, if that helps).
  The focus is for something that is usable at the table. A harried dungeon master needs to plausibly be able to seize your site and reasonably present it to his table of 3-6 over-caffeinated (or slightly drunk) murderous vagrants for all of them to have a great time.
  This isn't a long site by any means, so I certainly wouldn't start writing now for an adventure five months from now, but the way to prep is PLAY MORE GAMES. Be playing, be thinking about adventures, write down notes. I'd be horrified to hear about someone editing and messing with an adventure site from now until submission time...but if you write NINE, and submit the one that played best? That's great.
  If you want to see what's won in the past, they're still there for free, here and here.

​A dungeon by Liam Pádraig Ó Cuilleanáin, leveless.
Written for Cairn or Pirate Borg or “system agnostic”
  I have no idea how to pronounce the author’s last name, so I’ll die a critic.
  There’s a certain list of red flags I’ve accumulated reviewing itch.io adventures, among them the usually-exclusive tags of “made for a Cairn jam”, “Borglike”, and “system agnostic”. This twenty-four-pager manages to flap all three at once, impressive. Worrying. It’s advertising itself as a bog-standard “rustic village on the edge of a mystic wood with problems solved by delving in a dungeon”, which of course is how the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford made its publisher many thousands of American dollars. Less scope than Brandonsford, though, the “dungeon” is only nine rooms and there aren’t a lot of keys in the hexcrawl either, an efficient group could knock this out in a single session. But despite this version being marked systemless, it’s clearly a Cairn adventure, so I’m sure the Cairnies can milk a six-month, five-session campaign out of this thing.
  The plot is probably what you imagined the second you see the booklet. Ghost hounds plague a village and its requisite gloomy forest because the Bog Standard Local Bandit Gang broke into the Bog Standard Evil Baron’s Lost Tomb, with a lot of side drama going on with the local villagers and a semi-orthogonal coven of hags off doing Witcher Things. A lot of effort has been poured into personalities, relationships, and motivations which isn’t my cup o’ tea but I’m sure that’s crack for the average Cairnamaniac.
  There’s the occasional aesthetic flourish here that rises to “what I like” level, it’s not an unattractive product, with tasteful illustrations and solid formatting. I like that there are multiple methods to solve the hound-haunting issue, with one of them being “unleash the undead tyrant ghost on some distant land instead of around here”, that’s good. It’s tiny, but the nine-room tomb’s map is a perfectly workable shape with a little exploratory interest, and has an unmarked player version in the back, which is always welcome. The three hags are nice and gross too.
  What can be improved is pretty much all other aspects here and can be summed up “please add more adventure”. The tomb is a good example…the map is fine but the encounters are shallow, no thrill to be found in either rewards (a sword that eats a core memory on hit that needs to be recharged in brain matter, whee) or in fights (sword is wielded by a skeleton, yawn). At least the undead are assumed to be potential fights, there are stats given for inhabitants of a bear cave, the hags’ cottage, and the bandit tower but it’s pretty clear from the setup that players are instead supposed to chit-chat with the local threats and understand their wants and needs. That’s not bad, but adding tactics and interesting terrain and perhaps even spells make adventurous play a lot more interesting. Nary a swash nor a buckle is allowed for in this thing beyond smacking ghost dogs.
  Eh, the best use case is to ignore the system neutral claims and read it in the original Cairn, doing diegetic dealings under a slightly scribbly moon. There’s not much beyond the okay map worth stealing here and even that is only after you’ve exhausted your Dyson/Matt Jackson stockpile.
  Final Rating? */***** yawning and tired, not at all mad about it. Well-meaning enough product just lacking any originality or spark.