​An adventure by Chris Airiau, levelless system.
Written for 5 Million Worlds Space Adventure RPG
  Whew boy, here’s another one-pager, but this time we are extremely not generic. I don’t know any details about the Five Million Worlds Space Adventure Role-Playing Game, outside of the obvious logorrheic affliction, but evidently 5MWSARPG is a near-Singularity hypertech setting with PCs called “Avatars” in accordantly powerful ships. There’s also mention of ancient “Serpent tech”, galactic councils of goodies and baddies, and “Space Leukemia”. For all that, it’s more understandable to me than last weeks’ ugly abomination.
  The direct plot for The Star’s Lash is that Space-Amish settled a red dwarf which was an active flare star being kept in check by an ancient alien device, device got meddled with and now star is flaring, which is miserable for the Space-Amish of course. The whole system is close to going completely to hell and when the players arrive the next storm happen in 1d10+5 hours (INTRODUCING RANDOMNESS WHERE NONE IS NEEDED AGAIN, 10-YARD PENALTY), lot of things are happening like a lightsail about to hit the ancient alien device, a debris field heading to the main system station, disabled training ships…it’s a good mix of stuff.
  What I liked is this tumultuous mixture of problems. Apparently this is a low-lethality system, the worst risk is sustaining a Wound and “Space Leukemia” so there’s not a lot of physical threat in the system but unless everyone plays smart there’s definitely going to be some civilians getting parboiled. For all the simplicity of the map I like how it conveys everything needed for the scenario run. Tiny mentions of the NPCs still contain light personality notes, just enough to run, so that’s well done. The author clearly knows at least enough astrophysics to not make me immediately mad, good on him.
  But boy howdy what could be improved would be adding another page, either with more verbiage or more likely with some graphical mind-map stuff like relationship diagrams. Adding physical threats would be a good idea, given the chaos of the system pirates or raiders or something wouldn’t go amiss. Pie-in-the-sky, but as nice as the disparity of the PCs having direct fast drives vs. the Newtonian travel with all other bodies in the system is it’d still be good to have relative directions and speeds for what’s in the area, particularly with timing mattering so much. Also don’t make the incoming flare a random timescale, this is a gimmie, come on.
  I guess our best use case is just to play this as a one-shot. Using the Five Million Worlds Space Adventure Role-Playing Game. Which, given that’s the objective, good on you. Sadly, not a lot of use for the parts unless you’re extremely hard up for a star system map?
  Final Rating? **/***** because it’s well done, but it’s too small unless you’re a real Five Million Worlds Space Adventure Role-Playing Game superfan.

An adventure by Robotic Topologist, level nada.
Written for system neutral
  I don’t quite understand what this even is, I’m going to have to approach this forensically. It’s a one-page product, ostensibly an “adventure”, where the adventurers are hired by a power company (?) and are supposed to infiltrate a space station to turn a bunch of orbital mirrors (??) onto a star to send it into nova (???) and also maybe survive. Although the weirdly-formatted little thing does have objectives listed, there is very little setting information, or assumed system, or…anything. I’m very confused. I don’t have to have a twenty-page backstory but it doesn’t make a lick of sense for why there’s an adventure with the plan to nuke a star…we need that to be able to run anything coherent. “Do this or else we’re not playing tonight” should be a social implication, not the only reason for play.
  Some vague attempt at design happened here. The objectives suggest…some flow to the adventure (either reposition a mirror array or send a single H-bomb into the star, then run). A huge amount of the single page is devoted to three NPCs who have some play in them, able to either thwart or aid the players in their unmotivated quest. A timer of 5 cycles, whatever unit of time that is, gives us a ticking clock. Finally, a 2d6 roll in the end tells the players how bad they’re supposed to feel after winning their adventure I guess?
  Dredging  deep, what I liked is that there was at least some thought to a contingency plan for a second way to blow up the star (although it being a fusion bomb shows a dismaying lack of sense of scale). I like that one friendly scumbag guy who tries to steal stuff and delays things because of it.
  Obviously what can be improved is all of this. First improvement is to maybe not rely on whatever title generator spit out “Sunsetting of Lutres 8”, because this thing had to be derived from that title first, I refuse to believe this guy had a dream about an adventure where PCs blow up a sun and then this followed. All of that “title first, scramble to figure out later” is shown here with a confused mess of individually functionally elements that never actually cohere. I’d frankly need that rebuild before I could even begin to find other places for improvement. But for Pete’s sake please don’t pretend a single fusion bomb could blow up a star…just call it an Ultra Quantum Megabomb or something, not something that is 50’s tech.
  All this has us in the position where a best use case is alas as an abject lesson: DO NOT DO THIS. It’s unusable as an adventure and it’s not even all that useable for parts.
  Final Rating?  */***** the format didn’t fill me with rage and sorrow and it was at least short but there’s no adventure here. The adventure itself should have been sunset.

​An adventure by Sam Joice, levelless (2D6 system).
Written for Orbital 2100
  Now for something completely different. Zozer Games made some kind of 2d6 system set in a near-future solar system, called Orbital 2100, with an apparent focus on hard science. I can dig it. The Edge of Terminator takes a tight four landscape pages (hyperlinked) to describe a sweaty repair mission on the titular edge of Mercury’s sunlight terminator. The writing is terse and strictly utilitarian, the scenario design is stark and simple, and the illustrations are minimal…but there’s playtesters credited, there’s an understanding about what’s needed to make a game, and so there’s an actual game to be played here.  
  There’s apparently a theme going on through this big scoop of sci-fi adventures, and that’s “solar flare”. Mr. Joice here knows how to use that kind of a keyword, though, and so our plot here is that an automated mobile mining platform on the planet Mercury was knocked out by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun, it’s the job of the crew of pregens launched from Hermes to get the platform back up and running before the planet’s slow rotation brings the platform into the burning sunlight of the day side. The suggested timer is 3 real-world hours, with a timeline of exactly how long everyone has after that before they die of heat. Each of the six pregens (extras are NPCs) has a secret extra goal, some more hostile than others (steal stuff, add a secret shunt, find the traitor, etc). Here’s your cute little diagram, now get out there, slugger.
  In case it wasn’t obvious, what I liked on this one is the focused minimalism. I grew up reading hard scifi stories written in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s so the genre is appreciated. The PvP is always a dangerous thing to resolve, but all the spice is in those competing secret goals, I like that everyone knows each other character has some other secret goal…sweaty paranoia is the name of the game, that’s good design for this kind of genre. The tight time limit is very good.
  What can be improved, though, would be to add more spice. Please. While everything essential for running the game is in here, there’s a lot of pressure being put on the players (or the GM if the traitors are NPCs) to make the chaos and turn an exercise of simple planning into a tense adventure. While the time limit helps add tension, there’s a missed opportunity for the worsening environment to add both potential complications and push-your-luck calculations…ideally, the initial diagnosis and work should be unpressured and the secret skullduggery a focus, while towards the end the dawn of Mercury’s burning day focuses everyone into a frantic race against the lethal light. The potential is there, just another page of complications and more timeline breakdowns would have this whole thing really pop.
  The best use case is of course to make this a one-shot using any Traveler-lineage game system. Not a lot of use for things-to-strip-for-parts, unfortunately.
  Final Rating? **/***** because there’s some work to be done to bring it to its full potential, but there’s a decent kernel here.

  Get hyped, my friends. In a mere seventeen days, Adventure Site Contest II will open for submissions. Similar to the first, we’ll have a set of standards that are similar but slightly different per judge; the top eight of the adventure sites (selected by averaging the ranked-choice voting of the judges) will be selected for inclusion in this year’s compilation, with the top two gaining further glory and accolades. 
 
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.
*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 3 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 1.5 pages, submit at 1.5 pages.
*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) or old-school sci-fi like Traveler or Stars Without Number.
  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.
 
  These submissions would be judged and most importantly reviewed with at least a solid page of reviewing, like Bryce or Prince or Melan manage. A pool of interested volunteer judge reviewers are engaged, notably myself, Owen Edwards, Grützi, JB, and Scott M. Judges are welcome to submit to the contest as well, but they obviously can't rank their own work. Selection of the top 8 adventures will be ranked choice, which then get bundled into a free product on DriveThru, published under a creative commons attribution license (so it can be shared, but credit to writers). This is similar to how the One Page Dungeon did it.
 
My Own Standards:
  I’ve certainly reviewed enough with my Crapshoot Monday series to give contestants my kindly standards for that; I will still be looking to highlight what I liked in submissions, give some ideas about what might be improved, and the use case evaluation is what I’ve outlined in my article. I won’t be giving direct ratings as I go, but I will release my ranked choice evaluation in the end. Perusing the previous contest’s reviews should help. Generally, here are the things I’ll be looking at:

• Adventure Structure.

  I will be looking to see that the adventure(s) in the site flows well as written, enabling a wide spectrum of gameplay and interest. Ideally, PCs should be able to solve challenges with a wide array of solutions, leading to “boy that was a fun night of D&D”. This means narrative satisfaction and engaging gameplay both.

• Site Geometry.

  The physical geography of the site needs to be fun and provide interest, and actually matter. Now this is not an art contest…nobody is getting dinged for a map in MS Paint, nor elevated for full-color 3D modeling. As long as the map is clear and understandable, it can be ugly…but there needs to be a good site to explore, something that’s cool and gives some choices in the act of play. Personally, some well-integrated verticality is usually worth bonus points. Note that the top two last time used a linear affair and a procgen, just make sure the map fits to concept.

• Descriptive Power.

  The writing should be strong and efficient (remember, only three 8.5x11 pages at max), conveying the situations, monsters, and challenges evocatively and in a way that sparks the imagination. This is not an English assignment, please do run some basic copyedits by your text but grammar and spelling errors won’t be held against you. As an aside, do try to give some thought to how the information is formatted/conveyed, things like bolding, underlining, italics, map labels…all can definitely help, but just know it can be overdone as well.

• Nifty Stuff.

  Creativity is a plus, cleverness is a must. This isn’t No-Artpunk, if you want to make new monsters, items, spells, etc that’s fine, but everything new is going to push against the strict page limit here. Better to use some orcs and a pit trap cleverly than to stat up a new Living Mobile Orcish Pit Monster. Nasty traps that are well-telegraphed? Great. Secret doors with subtle clues? Wonderful. Focusing on using the elements already available can lead to very engaging, impressive moments. Neat personalities for the NPCs help too.

• Plugability.

  Some thought to how the adventure site fits into the broader context of the game is warranted. Hooks, rumors, how the PCs find the site are good. Tagging the environment, like “forested hills” or “seedy vice district” where the site gets placed is a good exercise. If someone wants to run your adventure site as a one-shot, great, but putting thought into how it integrates into a campaign world will do wonders for the verisimilitude of your submission.
  I’ll also have a few little things I personally look for to give bonus points. Crediting playtesters is good practice, I give a bonus nod for playtesting. I’ll be looking favorably at higher-level sites, just for sheer value-add compared to the trillions of “level 1-2” content already. Original cartography is also going to be a bonus over repurposed Matt Jackson or Dyson Logos map. None of this is to say that an unplaytested level 1 Dyson map adventure site will dinged for all that, just like to see the stretching.
 
To the Victors Go The Spoils:
  Malerex of the Merciless Merchants, will once again offer Merciless Merchants adventures for the prize pool. Josh/Gus from the Classic Adventure Gaming podcast have advertised this, and anyone involved should definitely blog about it. And you should get involved too…submit, read, or at the very least give us a shout-out…I’d love for as many contestants as possible to hear about this.
 
  Submissions will open starting October 1st through January 1st, with judging aiming to be done by the end of February. It’s been organized via the CAG podcast’s Discord, but submissions can be made to my own email here. If you have a blog and a desire to join in the judges, drop me a line; feedback is the value that every contestant will be getting out of this.

​An adventure by Francesco Spedicato, level nill.
Written for the dread System Agnostic
  Trifold time again, this time with a black background so I guess its primary market is people who want to passively-aggressively drive up their workplace’s printer costs? Anyway, it does the bare minimum by having a node-and-line map of its nine locations and a thin but viable set of story beats and plot. Slightly abstracted location, but hey, there’s a d6 table that has adventure prompts and a d6 table with 10 entries for unexpected surprises. A threat track abstracts the increasing danger every time the players fail badly or waste time and if it hits 5 everybody dies. Our expectations were low and you barely met them.
  Plot is pretty easy to grok. There’s a mining rig located on a water planet, where prisoners are used to mine [something]. You (oh yeah, it’s second person baby) had to deliver mail to the warden, and while you’re there a pulsar pulse knocks out the rig’s [something] and now prisoners are escaped and everyone panics while the rig collapses. Wander the prison sectors, pausing occasionally at the odd parsing of Google Translate, and make it to your ship while enjoying vignettes of violence and terror. Charming.
  Given I’m in my late thirties of course what I like has to include the occasion charming ascii art piece, sure. There’s a few nice situations to wander in to, like prisoners trying to use a dump truck to force the jailors at the spaceport to stop blocking the landing pad. The initial Chambers-approved start is “prisoners break in to the room with zip guns”, that’s hard to go wrong with. Even though I would do more with it, a threat track/timer helps make the whole scenario nice and frantic.
  That’s it, there’s no more good. The first of what can be improved is the smallest, just do an editing pass over things. Secondly, more generally the rooms and situations are all stick, no carrot…some concrete gear would make all the choices a little more interesting, as well as some idea of rewards or push your luck enticements encouraging players to risk delays in this timed scenario. Of course REAL TIME RECORDS ARE ESSENTIAL…better to have a scale on the rig “map” and a number of minutes until the rig collapses, but that’s antithetical to the itch.io soul. A bit more thought on other hazards than “prisoners and panicky jailors” would also be an improvement, the scenario as-is wouldn’t be to hard to set on a twenty-first-century Gulf of Mexico or North Sea oil rig, and that’s not taking advantage of all that the genre has to offer.
  The best use case for this is then unfortunately just a rather dull one-shot game. This might be a passable session of Dread, although the horror is rather muted. Not much to steal for use elsewhere.
  Final Rating? */***** with a resounding “meh”. I need to stop looking cheerful when products with ascii art come across my queue, it’s always a disappointment. 

  Timing things out great for Adventure Sites II (coming soon), Olle Skogen has just wrapped up his own Delightful Dungeons Contest, which will end with an all-entry compilation put out for free in pdf. I put in my own little dungeon (a smaller part of an incoming hexcrawl project), which didn't win, but the competition was strong and I'm glad to support it. The page limits in his competition were tighter than in the Adventure Sites, just two pages including maps, but it looks like a lot of good work still went into them and I personally will be using several. 
  In addition to the winners, there were some very interesting offerings that I personally would highlight.
-The premise of Forgotten Treasure is genius, a low-level adventure about a pair of villages fighting over the hundreds of thousands of copper pieces left behind by adventurers after they killed a dragon.

-My favorite aesthetic map of a little site I've seen in a long while was in Widow's Keep, where the standard Monster Mash of grieving goth widow, vampire, ghouls, zombies, and a werewolf because of tropes is massively elevated by how clean and interesting the site's map is.
​-I've put Mussayad's Tomb in my map very near some other nasty barrow shrines...it's an incredible level-1 newbie tomb, nasty left hooks in some cases, huge rewards in others. I like stuff like this for onboarding a table of newish PCs in the big open table games, plus it's great for the more 2-3 hour slots that sometimes occur. 
  My personal review standards haven't changed a lot over the past year and I think with at least one review a week it's pretty obvious what I like and dislike. I'm not going to be the only judge either, of course. But if you're thinking about submitting to ASCII, you should definitely check out these for inspiration and tips. And then luxuriate in twice​ the page count.

​A horror one-shot by Sam Bell, level nill.
Written for use with “any sci-fi or horror system”
  Happy September, everyone, and Happy Labor Day to those of you who get it off (so non-laborers). I’m doing a little mini-theme this month, “Sci-fi September”, where for the five Mondays of this month I’m reviewing science fiction adventures from my itch sewer-diving. Given I’ve added Traveler and Stars Without Number to my permitted systems in the next Adventure Site Contest, why not give a baseline?
  This was a stupid idea. Zenith-47 starts us out with a twenty-page “modular” horror adventure where details are “modular” (meaning changed based on table rolls) or tagged in brackets like [Generic Name] for the players’ ship. Oh and of course it’s horror, because that’s apparently the default sci-fi mode. Oh and of course no map is provided because mapping is hard. The list of recommended systems is wild, “Mothership, Ten Candles, Dread, 2400: Orbital Decay, Ironsworn: Starforged, Stars Without Number,
Scum and Villainy”. Format is a nightmare of bullet points with sub-options to somehow make SWN and 10 Candles both work.
  The plot, such as it is, is that space station Zenith-47 got hit by a solar flare which woke up the Big Bad [HAL, Xenomorph, zombies, mutants, Darkness, Living Magic Flare] who lures the players in to Inflict Horror Things On Them…hilariously, if the players turn down the call to adventure their ship automatically takes them to the station because Galaxy Mandate Rules force them to help the mayday. The modules aren’t mapped so by default you’re supposed to walk from one to another, experiencing bits of scariness, until the lab module where the [Big Bad] is confronted and [defeated by things] and then an escape pod just…happens? What a jumble.
  I don’t know what I liked, the experience of reading this product was its own little horror one-shot. There are occasional flashes of okay writing, where I think this would actually be a functional, if underbaked, little adventure if just one of the antagonists was chosen. But…
  What could be improved even in those cases would be more restraint. I don’t demand every horror scenario follow the TOMBS cycle but for the love of Pete a little bit of subtly wouldn’t go amiss once in a while. HAVING A MAP makes everything better of course, I don’t care about making it artistic, just a ball-and-stick space station diagram would do wonders. I could say an improvement would be to have a single horror element or antagonist be even slightly original but that’s just pie-in-the-sky wishcasting.
  Sometimes, the best use case for a product is as a cautionary tale to others. I can’t imagine anything gained from trying to use any portion of this module versus making a scary space station scenario myself using story cubes and stickle bricks. Which, trademark, is a great name for a new TTRPG system.
  Final Rating? */***** because it didn’t actively nauseate me. Misallocated hard work is always sad to see, best not to linger.