A ‘zine (with dungeon) by Logen Nein, level 1-2.
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  Interesting, I’m going to apparently do a mini-theme over the holiday week, ‘zines-with-adventures. Mr. Nein here is going to be wrapping up our month with a Heroes of Adventure product, not a beloved system but unlike most it’s never made me mad. The ambitious “1” on this product tells me we have a man with a dream, a dream of tons of twelve-page little labors of love, each with a few handy tables, a rule hack or two, a hex flower, a blank map to fill in, a new player race…and a two-page adventure. We’re adventure reviewers here on Crapshoot Monday, but the rest of content here seems nice. Usability probably has a hit rate about like late-stage Dragon Magazine, it’s fine. My main focus is on “A Grave Concern”, the adventure:

  The plot here won’t set your world on fire, “a local community” is under attack by dead ancestors at night, an unspecified bounty gets offered to the PCs for killing or capturing whoever’s responsible for the undead infestation. The burial grounds are “two or three hexes away” from the community with vague handwaves about encounters on the way, and finally we reach the eight-room barrow to loot and/or explore. Grave robbers have opened the place up and half of them got killed, while the “few” remaining await in ambush. Adorable little map has keys and the traps are called out individually, go to the end of the tomb and face the Ancient King, who is surprisingly willing to chat about things but also holds a magic sword and guards a treasure trove, so odds aren’t great for Mr. King receiving a peaceful resolution to his ongoing issues.
  It might be the five-day-old wassail talking, but what I liked first was the little map, not just artistically compelling in a scribbly way but a good layout for a short-shot. Traps are classic but good, a portcullis trap, a cave-in trap, and a secret door that falls forward to smash unwary openers, that last one is a hoot. Loot is flavorful without being overdone, magic items are nice (shield that can block hit without shattering and healing sword that raises the wielder as undead). Once we’re inside the mound, descriptions are tight and flavorful.
  …which leads me to what can be improved. GIMMIE SPECIFICS, DUDE. The vague stuff is completely no-value-added, I could have written that starting plot synopsis about ten thousand different starting adventures…once again, I can change details but you’re the writer, you tell me the village name, the name of the ancient king, how many grave robbers are ambushing me (!), there’s a space issue here that is actually easier to solve with proper nouns. I was also about to get all excited about the cruelty of a banshee in a starter adventure, but that’s a much milder monster in this system so...okay. But give her a name, for an example.
  Our best use case for “A Grave Concern” is as a fun little afternoon jaunt, either a one-shot or hex entry. Besides the funny door-fall trap there’s not much unique, but once you get beneath the ground it’s a fine example of the type.
  Final Rating? **/***** with a generous rounding up. What the heck, it’s a new year in a couple days. Just give me proper nouns next time, Nein. 

​A supplement and adventure by Matthew Smith, level undefined.
Written for Troika
  Ho, ho, ho and a Merry Christmas, everyone. I’m not committing to making this an annual tradition, but for this year at least we’re publishing a day away from Christmas Eve, so I looked for a holiday-themed adventure again and this is what I found. Bless me. This aggressively twee thirty-four page ‘zine is a collection of Christmas-themed monsters, spells, and a dozenish-page adventure that is less holiday-themed, more “gosh that’s a lot of deer”. Though my sins are many I blessedly cannot count “read Troika core rules” among them, so I thankfully won’t evaluate the bestiary or spell lists here. It’s mostly either stuff to support the adventure or puns/jokes…if you guffaw at there being a listing for a “Maul Santa”, then boy howdy do I have a looky-loo for you. Personally, I find this distasteful:

​  Shuffling away to the side and avoiding eye contact as best we can, on to the adventure, “Be A Dear, Now”. In this adventure we have a bog-standard situation where the mystical Reindeer Thicket is splitting into a civil war as Dark Druids influence the King Buck and the Queen Doe (the “Reign Deer”) into a marital spat which is magically inducing all deer in the area, sentient or animal, to take sides and fight one another. There are a few Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer jokes, and one of the hooks is the Santa Claus’ reindeer are no-shows, but besides that and a light dusting of snow over it all that’s about it for theming.
  What I liked is that besides those little nods that’s about it for theming. Much better than a painful hackneyed affair where all the players deliver presents while fighting zombie elves or something. I liked the magic crown that makes you grow antlers (at least I hope that’s what’s meant by “immediately grows an impressive rack”).
  What can be improved is “make this less of a painful hackneyed affair”. For all the setup work that was done the initial cause of the rift between the two monarchs is unclear and confronting each wraps up with “Dark Druid mind controls to attack”. The two sides of the thicket are more or less abstracted, with generic “this monarch’s side” stuff and a nearly abstract “map”. Specificity is the soul of good module writing and this sucker’s completely soulless. The Dark Druids wanting to supplant the Reign Deers are vague too. Social adventures can work, but they need more work on mapping, not less.
  I’m going to grit my teeth, eat some comfort-gingerbread, and admit that the best use case for this thing is to run it as a holiday-themed one-shot for a miserable group of Troika players. Maybe it’ll warm the shrived and irony-poisoned hearts of such terrible creatures. Maybe it’ll give them a little slice of Christmas cheer. Maybe…
  Final Rating? */***** because even a top-tier Troika adventure is a worthless exercise in pain and sorrow. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everybody, don’t play bad games this week, spend the time in joy with your families.

You know what you need to do. I know you have a brilliant idea, or at least a mediocre one. You can draw a map in crayon, or find one online. Just figure how 4-6 gormless homicidal kleptomaniacs could have a good time, and write something up, and send it on in. Now's the time for adventure and glory...

​A dungeon adventure by Phil Tucker, levels 2-4.
Written for OSE
  Ah, the living dungeon. Not a novel notion (indeed it’s 13th Age’s main gimmick), but often a novel implementation…with this new donation for the review pool, Mr. Tucker here is a reader (who I thank kindly) sending in his own module in that classic premise. He’s selling it for money, so I won’t be so kindly as I typically am with the freebies…now let’s see how we feel about The Carnivorous Caverns…
  Our plot is a very standard “hungry sentient dungeon who wants to eat you” plot, with the titular Caverns a fleshy, hungry magical organism that generates lures (in earlier eras some gold, then an inn, now a whole village) to try and induce souls to travel down into their depths and enter the pods, to be absorbed and then copied to lure more down beneath. There are a couple ways the Caverns try to get victims beneath the fake village, either with a special poison that compels characters to run beneath the earth or by the fake-villagers trying various ploys to convince the characters to go down a hole. This means the module is effectively divided into two different adventures, one a horror pod-person social adventure, and the other a squishy living-caves type dungeon. They go well together, but they don’t have to be run together.

​  Looking at formatting, layout, and writing, the module is well-done. It’s a very colorful module, not overdone with it but with nice highlighting and sections shifting header color each time. I’m not an accessibility expert, but outside of the cheat sheets at the end I don’t think the colorblind will have an issue. That cheat sheet in the end is handy with all the new subsystems used listed, monsters all in the same place, treasure locations, etc. Unlike some of the worst OSE products, the text doesn’t go mad with bullet points and hyper-formatted sections everywhere. Your mileage, of course, may vary. Descriptions are loaded with what I think of as “Bryce Bait”, the kinds of phrases that trigger positivity from Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole reviewing fame, but that does mean scenes are very well-painted. Twenty-eight pages is a little indulgent for 2-5 sessions of content, but nothing stands out to me as particularly bloated. The art, by Toren Atkinson, is black-and-white and quite nice, just a few impactful pieces that can all be shown to the players to enhance at-the-table play.
  The first section, the fake village, is a nice little horror scenario. The only players who would be actually fooled by any of the extremely-suspicious villagers’ transparent ploys are genre-savvy role players who are extremely enthusiastic participants in their own buffaloing, but the social contract for a lot of tables does include a little purposeful dumbness that’ll play well with the creepy village. The named villagers can be snapped out of their delusions and made into highly-motivated henchmen for cavern exploration and nonsapient shadow-villagers can swarm and try to capture the PCs if things escalate. And…then there’s a weird Chutes & Ladders-esque minigame abstracting the chase, which is annoying, but that’s just a redundant way of saying “it’s a chase mechanic”, no chase mechanics are ever good. Outside of that, I can see myself running this as a Halloween one-shot and having a good time.
  Of course, if you have good players they’ll take the bait and descend into the dungeon itself, which is designed to be easy to enter but very hard to leave. Now we’re out of folk horror and gleefully jumping into body horror, with a decent-enough cavern map fully embracing the living dungeon trope in all the standard ways, with digestive acid “river”, fleshy tunnels, mites/dire tapeworm monsters, all the usual.
  Despite the rather typical living dungeon stuff, individual details are well-done. There’s a little faction of sentient but insane gut-people to chat with, the leader is involved with meat-tree dryad so you have the minimal diplomatic back-and-forth needed. Acid waterfall has good stuff to interact with, able to sphincter off the stream to open up another zone for decent loot inside the acid pools. If you like body horror, there are some fairly profound touches like an insane miserable druid girl with her head permanently stuck inside the guts of a giant mite who commands the swarming local mites. A lot of thought has gone into subsystems, like how damaging the caverns at certain areas brings everything up to a threshold where the Caverns just seal themselves off, and a symbiotic stat-boosting flesh curse to warp the PCs with. Admirable restraint is shown in letting the horror and the subsystems speak for themselves with only minimal commentary. 

​   Treasure is all over the place, although the common OSE problem of “more magic than gold” will crop up when the time comes to tabulate XP. Village has some cash laying around, but it’s going to be hard to loot in between “these people are legit” and “shadow-zombies are chasing us to kill us”. The biggest hauls are from a way, way too high-level spirit naga who’s there to chat and absolutely murder a munchkin that’s getting too jumpy, and what the Mass Effect 3-ending-hologram-child the Caverns manifest offers if the PCs manage to scare them enough. An ending that, while remunerative, is about as satisfying as Mass Effect 3’s. The magic items are pretty decent, the best one being an intelligent sword that damages in a Fibonacci Sequence up to 144, then resets to 0.
  There are multiple ways to kill the Caverns, which is what most players will want to do, including giving them cancer, removing all the souls captured by their traps, and just setting the brain on fire. Surviving their destruction will be its own special little minigame, which actually could have used a chutes and ladders board. No XP total is given for “killing a sentient meat cave”. The fact that this thing was playtested does show up in a lot of scenarios and their resolutions.
  Ultimately, as much as I admire the module for what it’s doing, I think your own decision for use-or-not is going to be a matter of taste. OSE is a broad-appeal system so I’m sure there are Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Wormskin fans that will eat this up, while other groups less into the body horror probably won’t relish the vibe. Likewise, the village portion of the scenario requires a very specific type of player to take the bait in an ongoing campaign, while obviously playing this as a stand-alone 1-to-3 shot will mean “take this or we don’t play D&D tonight”. This thing is loaded with creativity, a credit to a designer who wants to actually play, but a lot of the elements and subsystems are fairly bespoke. So in the end…
  Final Rating? ****/***** with a star up or down depending on taste for actual play, but a firm handshake of congratulations for the skill and care in its execution.  

​A dungeon level by Attronarch, levels 3-5.
Written for Swords and Wizardry
  Interesting. In a year and a half of these reviews, this may well be the first Swords and Wizardry (OD&D) adventure I’ve bumped into. Aimed at an average party level of 4, this is also hyper-advanced for itch.io, so I’m curious to see how this jam dungeon level functions. One page of text, one page of map, sixteen keys for a pretty big area…this will certainly be an exercise to map:

  So not any deep story for this very messy mass of caves. Made to be a section of a hypothetical massive megadungeon, these halls are cloaked in a sight-reducing, choking mist. The initial entry is a garbage chute in the middle, with alternate egress found in a caved-in door, an icy river, a broken elevator, and “more caverns” beyond a ghoulish ziggurat. So, dump your players here and they’re kind of trapped. The “big bad” of the area is a demon squiggling along the wider tunnels, a hungry monster of hate treated like an ally by the other power in the section, a pack of ghouls commanded by a ghast and an agarat. Spice in a starving and lost rival adventurer party, a trio of lost minotaurs, and a single mad cultist who serves as a mobile shrieker and you’ve got all there is for monsters. Treasure is all over the place and a few traps exist mostly to add interest. Interesting that about half the real estate is unkeyed, that’s a curious design choice.
  I’m not mad about it though, what I liked here is mostly encapsulated in those factions, coupled with a very active random encounter table. There’s not a proper order of battle but it’s only a page long…you can study this enough to run the whole thing, it’s okay, and everyone sentient has motivations. I like some of the little details like the hidden corpse in a magical stealth robe covering a ton of cash. Properly massive gold hauls are present, enough to let even level 5 parties to take note…but the semi-trap entrance of the thing makes me think that hauling that copper won’t be easy.
  It may be personal, but what can be improved to start with might be a little mapping help. I use a mapper for right angle regions and the secret ramps indicate that might be the intent, but it’s an awkward map for player mapping. A single line more on the ways to negotiate with the various factions wouldn’t go amiss. There was clearly a limit placed on this as a jam submission, but the best improvement would probably be adding a single page more for these big interesting map regions and just a little more environment information. It’s the opposite problem from last week’s crapshoot, actually, a little under-stuffed as a whole.
  I’m still saying best use case is to dump your players in here and see what comes from it. You can be completely confident they’ll have solid time in this, get good loot if they’re careful, and get completely wrecked if they aren’t.
  Final Rating? ***/***** although it could easily gain a star with another page and a focus-driven editing pass. So far reasonable outcomes from this little jam. 

  If you ever have an afternoon free (and I recommend freeing an afternoon for this), just go walk out your door. Preparation? Comfortable shoes, correct weight of jacket, drink a glass of water, you’re not going hiking here. Just leave your front door, hit the street, and start walking. Walk to somewhere you’re not normally travelling past, find pretty paths. Take two hours, then turn around and amble back. It’s good for you, if you can avoid looking at your phone or listening to anything it might even be good for you spiritually, but however you do it, after getting back, pull up a map and look at how far you’ve gotten. Some of you are fit and used to walking and will have gotten six miles. Some of you might have only gotten three. Look at how tiny your jaunt looks on the map. It wasn’t a long drive. But then think about how big everything looks when walking, and remember that you could have taken dozens of different paths.
  This is the perspective of most humans for most of human history, you’re walking with your own two feet. If you have horses, that’ll speed you up…briefly. Unlike in most movies, games, and books, in the real world horses aren’t going to drastically speed up your long-distance treks, although they’ll definitely increase your carry capacity. Sailing ships are faster, but they take you from one place you walk around to another place you walk around. If you’re running a campaign for D&D or something similarly medieval-inspired, you’re probably using a map that’s too big.
  I avoid RPG subreddits normally, but there is a subreddit I love to visit regularly: r/mapmaking. Large numbers of very talented amateur cartographers are spending hours and hours making their worlds, often with very detailed plate tectonics, climate models, and histories. I admire these artists’ work, but I always have to wince when I see someone say “this is my D&D world”, because if they’re asked about where they’ve actually had play…it’s “well, I just plan on this someday”. These are huge spaces, too big. A newish poster on the subreddit posted his own campaign map, something the size of Germany, as “small”. He has a pretty good post about it too on his blog…but I think you could go even smaller, for wild lands (his own is settled, with pockets of darkness).

  This is my current campaign’s region, the Skyshadow Isles (real-world geography, Franz-Josef Land). I have been running an ongoing open-table campaign here for nearly half a decade, playing an average of 4-5 times a month. Now, there’s a kilodungeon in here, as well as dozens of little sub-dungeons, but these are also ten mile hexes, 184 of them, each keyed for adventure and interest. It’s only because I’m running an islands map that the hexes are so big; six-milers are what I’d use for overland. This whole area is only a little over a hundred miles wide, but it’s going to supply adventure for another couple years as it is. My next campaign, set in the same world, will be in an area based on the Shenandoah Valley slightly smaller than West Virginia. Such is a human-scale campaign map.
  I love cartography, I love world maps, and I love worldbuilding on every single scale. But don’t expect you’ll need a continent-sized area for a fantasy campaign. Once high levels hit with flying mounts and teleportation, that’s not really going to have maps an order of magnitude larger, that becomes more like planes-hopping, a modern airport existence where the highlights get hit. There’s no place like home, and home base for your campaign is something scaled for human (or hobbit) feet.

​A space dungeon by Christian Plogfors and Carl Niblaeus, what are levels? This is space.
Written for Death in Space
  Sometimes, I miss sci-fi and I have to go back. Every week I run a Stars Without Number game, I’m always in the market for cool adventures to salt into the sandbox. I am filled with hope every time. I am always disappointed.
  I don’t know Death in Space, but from looking at the brainchild of Plogfors & Niblaeus here it seems like we’re comfortably in the “grimy jobbers” territory here, which I can get behind. The adventure takes six pages to outline a prison break scenario aboard a worn-down old station, well-formatted and well-written. I’m working hard here to maintain my cynicism, and then I see the map by Mr. Plogfors and my heart is all ready to fall in love again: 

  Be strong, reviewer. Story is dirt simple; this broke-down little satellite station is being used by a private corporation as a prison, one of the two prisoners currently aboard has kinfolk who offer $500 and a treasure map (coordinates) to spring him. Most of the initial pages explain how its vulnerable (proximity sensors are offline, maintenance schedule, supply schedule, warden’s drinking habits, security access, etc) and then keys the areas for a heist, either via bluffing or via sneaking. Showing up with nukes at standoff range does not seem to be contemplated. Three tables of random events are used to generate dynamic content.
  What I liked is more than just the arty map, don’t get me wrong. Laser-focused on one of the two infiltration scenarios, the writers do a good job of giving players all the levers and buttons needed for a heist (prison breaks a subgenre of heist). While the personalities of the guards aren’t detailed explicitly, side comments paint a good picture, along with events like another sheriff arriving with a bottle of whisky, “it’s someone’s birthday”, that’s good stuff. Paints a picture. Rumors, all costing money and all true, are also wonderful resources for players to buy.
  Unfortunately what can be improved is “a lot” when it comes to details of the most important characters, the prisoner himself…and the station. The first is a big deal when your players are bluffing their way aboard, while the second is a lot bigger when they’re trying to sneak aboard the blinded station. Giving a little more information on the deranged AI that runs the station would help a lot given it’s a character both on the social and the sneaking sides. A little bit of consideration for how the station handles the suggested emergency events would help a lot too, given those chaotic events are similar to how “players improvising” typically winds up causing fires and disaster.  More prisoners would be nice too.
  I’m going to astonish myself and say the best use case here is…use as a prison break scenario for your Traveler or SWN sandbox, or else a workable sci-fi one-shot for any number of systems or settings where grit outnumbers chrome. A little basic, but not everything has to be wonderous.
  Final Rating? ***/***** with a few qualms but it’s easily the best sci-fi thing I’ve encountered on itch.io thus far. If nothing else, grab it for the map and the rumor setup.
  This is going to do terrible things for my expectations. Hey, maybe you can turn in an adventure site that's equally adequate? Three more weeks to go.

  It's been a while, but every single week we're still playing, let's look at some more.
​
Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”:
  The crew are down to the tomb world of Frost at the behest of their new patron Mr. Budike. Within the ruined Preceptor Archive university, a hidden facility was opened by thieves…one of whom died in the depths. The path to the hidden pretech was horrific enough, with a vast pile of centuries-old bodies in center of the doomed campus, now absent three thumbs, with Medic Jenny wisely grabbing dead university personnel’s ID chips for access. The nearly pristine facility below is almost out of power and marked with blood, with the crew diverted from a life support signal by a trail of blood…leading to a cybernetic revenant looming out of the dark!
Previously on the “The Flight of the Fox”:
  Terror in Tomb World! A tense battle with the horrific remnants of a university security guard ends in victory but when the crew goes to the jury-rigged stasis chambers they find not one but three empty, with only one still active, holding a mysterious occupant labeled “Charlie Edwards”. Stumbling upon vast capacitor banks usable in their own ship, it is only due to the keen alertness of Security Chief Bulkhead that an improvised claymore mine didn’t turn the front salvagers into a fine slurry! A stairway going deeper similarly mined has the crew moving instead to a ruined elevator shaft…which has another cybernetic revenant coming up! Only the precognitive powers of Percy Crichton alerted the crew to this threat, and after dispatching the dead guardian they now delve even deeper…stumbling upon an autonomous forklift which even now menaces them in the dark!
Previously on the “The Flight of the Fox”:
  Danger deeper in the dead world! After being menaced by a rogue forklift, the crew find themselves in danger from a revenant security guard and more terrible mines…but it is in the grim heart of the ancient complex that they meet their most dangerous foe, the security chief who would not even let death stop him from protecting the sleeping charges under his protection. Now with training modules perfect for Mr. Budike’s purposes and pretech capacitors for Engineer Reynolds’, the crew carefully begin the process of waking the mysterious final living survivor from the Time Before…
Previously on the “The Flight of the Fox”:
  Poised on the precipice of unknown wonders! After meeting Captain Shin-Ji of the Budike Xenosurvey ship Yang, the crew secretively make their way to med bay where Jenny carefully begins to bring the frozen time-lost refugee back. An agonizing resuscitation leaves the elderly victim alive and sane…an ancient custodian named Charlie Edwards, dashing Percy’s hopes despite the man proudly declaring himself forklift certified. Now the crew look not into the past but into the future, embarking on a strange voyage of discovery for a mysterious benefactor…
Previously on the “The Flight of the Fox”:
  A leap into the Great Unknown! Le Renard and the science ship Yang hurtle into the outer darkness, desperately hoping they find something in the ancient trail of a vanished species’ strange map. But the harsh metaspace tear has already nearly produced a casualty, as tech Sarah Chen manifests telekinetic powers. Only the quick thinking of Security Officer Bob Johnson and the calming effects of Jenny and Percy manage to sedate the tech before she torches herself into madness. What more strange and bizarre dangers will they face as the emerge near a rogue planet in the night…
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  A dark world…but not dead! The lonely sub-Jovan rogue planet in the night sky has a companion, a cloudy moon kept just above freezing by radiation and gravity that has activity, and a menacing station in low orbit. After mysterious communications from the moon seemed to promise safe passage down, the crew in their shuttle find a bizarre biosphere in the murky slush made of foxfire and sonar, landing at another strange structure powered by three bioforms made of energy. Percy makes telepathic contact with the alien beings and after barely surviving mind intact hears a plea for freedom…while seismic shakes warn of 100ft-tall entities travelling to the lander.
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Freedom for the Zoltan, and death to the lankies! A frantic effort to free the three trapped energy beings led to a nick-of-time escape from the towering blind monster, later identified as one of the uplifted “lankies” by the grateful natives, known as the “Zoltan”. The three individuals, Pitkä, Lyhyt, and Keski, are now aboard ship as Le Renard and the Yang try to figure out the strange system’s puzzle, ruled by a mindless AI guardian and powered by the very species it was designed to serve and protect.
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Demons deep aboard the Zoltans’ hell! A daring raid on the mysterious station by the captain and crew has them freeing the enslaved energy beings more than a mile from home! Steady work by Jenny, Joel, and Alan has freed eleven of the forty-three Zoltan being used as batteries by an unbraked monster of their own creation, but now the sleek shape of an energetic guardian hunter blocks the crew from their next path, with a roar that takes them back to the frantic fubar on Glomar!
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Trapped within the bowels of hell, the walls closing in! In a pulse-pounding race against the nightmarish machine intelligence False Mind, the crew of Le Renard have freed the majority of the captive Zoltan but are now faced with the largest collection of the captive energy beings…surrounded by FOUR of the terrifying guardians. Now as time ticks down the captain and crew frantically try to come up with a way out, for their helpless new friends…and for themselves! 
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Free but not yet clear! In a pulse-pounding explosive exit, the crew of Le Renard go kinetic in their jailbreak of the captive Zoltan, trading blows with guardians while dodging the looming Lanky wardens in main corridors. A quick-thinking bit of sabotage leaves the station’s thrusters locked in a bad position and the hellish nightmare prison is now on battery power as the Slate Bulkhead, barely alive from a single Lanky punch, staggers into the main hangar bay and the airlocks slam shut. Now, in the lambent glow 42 freed Zoltan, the captain and crew make plans to make good their escape!
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Free and clear from P’frx’leen! Loose from the nightmare hell-station, Le Renard fires up the engines and send the dark nexus of the False Mind’s communication hurtling deep within the rogue planet’s gravity well. Days of healing and rest are accompanied by Engineer Reynold’s workshop working all shifts churning out improvised railguns for their newfound Zoltan friends; their masters have been set back, but the war for their moon has only just begun. Zoltan former prisoner Pitkä, alienated from his own world and curious about the wider universe, now joins the crew to explore with them, as they ready themselves for another jump into the unknown
  (This whole system was a player favorite, and their new crewmate is going to be very powerful going forward)

​​Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Down to the sweltering surface of Arcturus IV! Arriving in the tightly-packed binary system of Arcturus, Le Renard proceeds to refuel within the heavily-industrialized system gas giant while the command crew sets course for their contact’s planet in the shuttle. Facilitator Priven Lal greets the command crew convivially and gives a fair price for their alien relics, but to transship the valuable pharmaceutical Crimson subtle work is required, either braving rival smuggling gangs at night or the brutal melting heat of the day. But that’s not all, deep within the city Percy also searches for psychic aid for the newborn telekinetic Sarah Chen, lost and scared back aboard ship.
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Back in the smuggling saddle! Le Renard hovers above the burning nightside of Arcturus IV, awaiting the final and most crucial portion of their cargo, the rare drug Crimson, to be snuck past the rival gangs and semi-legal corporations along with a metapsion Percy has sought for the suffering newborn telekinetic Sarah Chen.
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  A sweaty drug deal does sideways! The command crew, along with elderly but forklift-certified custodian Charlie, manage the Crimson pick-up without a hitch but emerging from the warehouse leads to an ambush…but not a surprise one, thanks to the precognitive powers of Percy! All to the good, but the second attack by jury-rigged drones devolves to a scary situation, defused this time by Joel and his sniper rifle along with Slate and the Captain’s pistols. Now the crew is loaded and ready to go, but one final passenger remains to be freed, the nervous captive metapsion Teve Pezal...
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  A breakout that leaves crumbs! Percy Crighton, passionate about safeguarding the newborn psychic Sarah Chen while also helping nervous captive metapsion Teve Pezal, led the crew down to the gangland of Arcturus IV with a case of Glomar Whiskey and the ghost of a plan. Claiming to be working for the new Controller-affiliated boss in the system named “Carl Theseus”, they successfully bluff their way out of the gang’s jam and fled while angry Controller-affiliates demand all ships lock in place. Now in the glowing system of Al-Dua with a hot cargo of Crimson and a low bunker of fuel, Le Renard approaches with caution as inspectors ask her to heave-to!
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  The drug smugglers become arms dealers! After a shockingly smooth transfers of the contraband Crimson in the radioactive husk of Al-Dua, the captain and crew decide to go to Haiomed 24, where primitive cyborgs pay top dollar for used parts! A simple salvage mission to the ancient space wreck of Schipareli 8 forms a new wrinkle, as the crew are welcomed aboard the nuked station with open robotic hands!
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  Friends and nofriends in the ruins of Schiaprelli 8! On the hunt for cyborg parts the crew of Le Renard finds more than they expected with friendly if dimwitted robots who welcome them but are also in need to help, with their automated repair factory disabled. Descending with the help of Zoltan energy, the crew meet malfunctioning and mad loader bots on the hunt for power and parts themselves! Now the crew approach a massive factory area filled to the brim with parts, ominous in the silent darkness!
Previously on the “Flight of the Fox”:
  The crew have a staunch refusal to be fixed! Deep with-in the radioactive bowels of Scapareli 8, Jenny and her companions explore the powered-down lair of the FIXU-system, desperately needed by their new robot friends! FIXU insists that to properly fix the robots a full brain replacement is required, and after the crew objects strongly, half a dozen headless friend-bots violently object! After a thrilling fight, now the station itself is reprogrammed and Le Renard leaves with happy friends and a hold full of cy-bernetic parts…now they’re off to Haiomed 24 and new adventures ahead!

​A dungeon by Olle Skogren, level 5.
Written for ACKS
  After that nastiness, I need a palette cleanse. I just reviewed a false Temple of Hypnos, lazy and unformed. This reminded me of the REAL Temple of Hypnos, (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/375980/the-temple-of-hypnos) which I read lightly back in the day when No Artpunk I came out but never took a deep dive into. My Next Campaign will be a sprawling Greek-themed West March in a ruined and overthrown !not Shenandoah, I’m calling it Shattered Valley…a good dungeon that was a temple to Hypnos would be perfect for that. I’m confident with the good reviews the adventure received that it’ll at least be decent, but will this be something that I want to run myself? I’m curious to see, so I’m going to review this adventure and the final rating will be most importantly “is this going on my campaign map”.
  As an aside, I have read three reviews of this adventure (Prince, Melan, Lynch) but outside of recalling they were positive it’s been years, so I’m not responding overtly to any of those other reviewers’ points. I might be subconsciously remembering bits, although this is the independent release so presumably there are differences. Also, I’ve exchanged a few emails with Mr. Skogren in the past, including submitting to his contest earlier this year, so while I don’t know him well, he’s certainly in my books as “seems like a good dude”. Take of that what you will for bias.
  To start us off, what’s the module’s scale? Aimed at level 5 for ACKS, which means it’s still pretty portable to other old school D&D as there’s not a lot of army/domain stuff yet. The main content takes eleven pages to outline a reasonably complex situation in a 6-mile hex with seven locations, all focused on the twenty-one room main dungeon (the Temple of Hypnos, natch).  Prose is obviously not terse with that page count but it’s efficient and not overly flowery. Formatting is unobtrusive, no bullet point madness but a fine sprinkling of bolding and italics for emphasis…the bog standard is the standard for a reason, this parses fine. Maps, both B&W and color, are provided in both keyed and unkeyed versions for VTT use. Dungeonscrawl and MS Paint look to be the medium, which is fine and clear. Layout is fine, it’s a Greek temple, and looks like a good Greek temple:

  The situation leading into the titular temple is just about the right level of complex, a nasty night hag has taken over the temple and is impersonating the god Hypnos, sacrificing pilgrims in a ritual and sealing away the evil ones for Hell while making the non-evil ones into soulless zombies (sleepwalking bodies, souls act like shadows trapped in one section of the temple). There are three potential hooks leading into the temple so as you and I both know, the answer is “all of these happen at once”. I’m not particularly enamored of the cloud giant wanting a silk robe off the giantest Hypnos statue, but a mid-level wizard insomniac and a wannabe barbarian despoiler are both excellent factions to be looking at the temple. Like most of the best outdoor dungeons the place can be openly walked into, dangerous but very doable to just infiltrate.
  I’ll hop into my normal rhythm and talk about what I liked.  Uh, a lot? The setup is great, giving players multiple levers to pull and the background is difficult to sus out but rewarding, most notably for instance in waking up the high priest of Hypnos who will gladly join in on any quest to retake the temple (but who takes a dim view of looting I’m sure). The drowsiness mechanic added to the temple is simple but adds flavor, the sleep theming is strong without being overwhelming…I like that a lot. Treasure has basically no misses for me, a nice mix of obvious and hidden, with the obvious stuff really hard to steal, and the contents are all realistic. There’s no tick-by-tick timeline here but I do appreciate that there’s about a month before the local powers that be lose patience and kick over the whole anthill, ruining everything. Just a solid mix for a very real place.
  I will note something that makes this place perfect for my purposes but might be a little bit of a hard fit some campaigns…this thing is really Classical Greek. Not real classical Greece, of course, but I had to do a double-take to make sure it’s not written first for Neoclassical Greek Revival. The only “standard” is the bugbear servant company working for the hag and I can turn those into minotaurs without breaking a sweat. So YMMV but it’s great for my Next Campaign. Means it wouldn’t fit at all in the Current One, though (still about 2 years’ time in this I think).
  That doesn’t mean the “what can be improved” category is empty. There’s something…static, almost, about the site, an almost videogamey sense where cutscenes play as the players enter and area. The worst offenders, personally, are the charming but very artificial scenes like a satyr teaching a bugbear to play the harp, the bugbear gets frustrated and breaks the harp over the satyr’s head. Charming, yes, but what happens if the players hit the site a week later? Likewise, in a kitchen there’s a creepy bit of horror with a sleepwalker “zombie” cook missing his meat and chopping off his hand, then bleeding out with no reaction. Good horror, but reeks of artifice to have that happen just as the PCs enter into the room.
  Still, the best use case for this is either as an excellent one-shot (pregens are provided, wonderful added value) or as a temple site in an ongoing Greek-themed campaign. Wouldn’t be bad for the ACKS-standard Roman theming either, I reckon. Good use out of either case.
  Yeah, final rating *****/***** because I’m putting it in the game and using it. I don’t reserve five stars just for perfection, because it isn’t, but this is just about ideal for its scale. It's even a nice valley so fits the terrain.

A dungeon by Álvaro Rubianes Pérez-Uhía, levelless.
Written for “OSR”
  Well, I got excited for a moment when I saw this title. Olle Skogen’s “Temple of Hypnos” was an excellent entry from No Artpunk I, later released as a stand-alone module. This…is not that. This is a one-page dungeon (plus an addition page for map) that details a simple nine-room complex. The one admirable bit of unusual design is that this is designed to be a small section of a larger dungeon/megadungeon, bumped into as an apparent side room with a secret door leading to the rest of the complex, which in turn has few other exits to tie into the rest of said bigger dungeon. It was made as part of a Jaquays memorial jam so perhaps there’s a bit of Thracia in there with the side-cavern thought. 
  There’s certainly a theme present here that’s suggested by the Greek god Hypnos. Place was a shrine to Hypnos that got invaded by random Vikings, magic sleep dust got tossed into the fire and put everyone asleep, now it’s a sleep zone in stasis basically until the magic fire is put out. Initial room is filled with pink mist that makes people sleepy, waking up from sleep reveals the secret door into the rest of the complex. Everything is fuzzy and dreamlike, not really because of the flavorful prose, but because absolutely none of the dungeon comes with any stats or mechanics.
  TRIGGER WARNING, TERRIBLE DESIGN: IF PLAYERS DIE IN THE COMPLEX THE DM IS DIRECTED TO HAVE THEM WAKE UP IN ROOM ONE, IT WAS ALL A DREAM.
  Blinding myself to that mortal sin, what I liked was the basic scenario setup, it’s a perfect reason for living occupants to be in stasis when a site gets stumbled on, and (although the author declines to detail it) there’s a nice explosive bit of potential if the PCs put out the sleep fire and wake up the two battling sides in mid-invasion, that’s good stuff. I also like the multiple connection to “the rest of the dungeon”, that’s someone trying to make an adventure site as something encountered in a big dungeon campaign, not bad. Finally, the best find in the complex is a bucket-helmeted fighter next to a fountain with memory-erasing water. Free henchman, or replacement PC, nice.
  That it for the unalloyed good. What can be improved first, second, and third is specificity, in names, stats, spells, treasure amounts, lock difficulties, magic sleep mist mechanics, secret door detection, etc etc. There’s potential here, but with everything set up so vaguely, if I were to try to run this I’d have to put in more prep time than the author did. The sons of Hypnos as random encounters are a potentially interesting idea, but once again the boon/neutral/bane results of various Oneiros aren’t detailed so it’s a lot of effort to dump on the suffering DM’s lap. Magic items suffer the same trouble. Just…give one more page with all the numbers filled in for a specific system and we can work with this. Also get rid of “it was all a dream”.
  The best use case for this would be as intended, a sublevel in a megadungeon, but that’s a lot of work for a pretty mild benefit.
  Final Rating? */***** but it could have gained two stars even if it was just given the work of specifics.