I'm terrible at this. I've been reliably informed that we should Always Be Shilling, but most of what I create I'm currently giving away for free (PWYW) on DriveThru. That being said, we're about to go into a season of me critiquing lots and lots of adventures, so I should probably post my bona fides. I've released quite a few longer adventures, but the single longest series of modules I've written are the K-series, One Session Kits. The basic idea for these are that you're not only getting an adventure (one-shot or plonkable on your ongoing campaign map), you're also getting everything needed to run it outside of the dice. I include pregen character sheets for the given system(s), rules references, map printouts, and, most adorably, little print-and-stand-up paper minis. I've written a dozen and released six; I really should work at making more. If you're here because you like adventure sites, check these out. As I usually say, heck, please download them for free and toss in a couple bucks later if you find them useful in your own game. My list of kits:

   First, there's my take on the "haunted manor" trope, K1: Night at Fausen’s Manor. It's an investigative adventure designed for player characters around 3rd level. In it, the players will be wined, dined, then sent to investigate a heinous crime. The players have been invited by the reclusive Lord Fausen to dine with him and discuss a job; Fausen is troubled by odd bumps and sounds in the night, something has been interfering with his mail, and recently his butler, Grimly, has disappeared. From play it's been a hit every time as players investigate, bumble into undead and devil-worship, and finally either receive their reward or loot the house down to the studs. 

   Mixing "dwarf village" and "active assault mission", K2: Assault on Mistrunner Village is a stealth or combat mission designed for player characters around 2nd level. In it, the players are thrown into a tumultuous conflict in a remote cliffside dwarf village, arriving at Mistrunner Village as an unscrupulous band of raiders led by an obsessive magician enact their assault. The players are offered the village’s treasures if they aid against the bandits, but there is an second threat up at the top of the village falls; a desperate shaman is scrambling to awaken the ancient guardians of the falls, little knowing that the gargoyles he’ll bring forth will try to kill villager and raider alike. The map on this one is always a hit with a beautiful cliffside village isometric immediately given to the players. I've been known to seed Mistrunner Village into a campaign as a peaceful place to visit that later comes under attack, it's been a really flexible scenario. 

   High fantasy always needs floating castles/islands, K3: To Bring Down the Sky is a site-base adventure built for characters of 4th level, where the players roam three small islands in the sky formerly owned by powerful wizard, Gerlia of the Winds. As the players travel they are witness to a wyvern savaging the wizard’s apprentice as he falls. Either talking to the apprentice Hugo or looting his corpse brings the players up to the sky. The islands there are slowly coming down, panicking the servants of the wizard as her machines and former allies run rampant. People love this one for the map to explore, it's a much much open-ended site for exploration than your typical "cave in a hillside". This is also one of my personal favorites for the cover picture, South American geography is wild, man.

   More of an artificer/gonzo wizard feel, K4: March of the Windmills is a social and traveling adventure built for characters of 2nd level, where the players work to thwart the mad schemes of Dolceo the Miller, who has begun a rampage upon the countryside using his animated windmill. The players will need to discover why the crazed miller is on his rampage and how he’s animating the windmill. Then, the players will have to race to reach the mobile building and rescue the miller’s victims before he reaches the next village in his path.  Yes there is a Don Quixote joke in there, definitely. It's a pretty simple little dungeon but because it's vertical, there's some good exploration gameplay. This one fits into a smaller 2 hour slot if you run efficiently. 

   Wavestone Keep contest produced this one, K5: Wave of the Sea's Stone is a dungeon adventure written for levels 3-5. In it, players will brave the adventures of a fallen god's temple, the Sea's Stone, and it's perilous inhabitants, ravaging the coasts one hapless village at a time. I love ravaging lizardmen in an adventure, and this is perfect for your lizardmen needs. Content warning: It gets a little gristly. 

   Sometimes, you just need a heist location. In K6: The Great Mansion Heist is an infiltration and theft adventure written for first or second level characters. In it players are set to raid the isolated country mansion of Merchant Lord Salmo, the thoroughly detestable local rich ruler. The adventure is designed to function as a one shot but can also be seeded into any campaign where the local ruler just needs a good burgling. Of all my One Session Kits, this one has had the most PC deaths by far as players push their luck. It helped that this one started organically in the ongoing campaign, first through rumors, then as a place to visit diplomatically, then robbed, and finally the site of a great assassination. Probably my favorite of these sites, but I've had fun with all of them. 
   Everything I write, I write to be used. Once again, please check them out for free and poke around, see if they're something for you. But as always, as we approach the new year, resolve to PLAY MORE. Have a wonderful New Year's Eve friends. 

​   Here at the end of AD 2025 I figured I’d pause to reflect on the year. It’s been a year full of triumphs and hardships, of joys and sorrows, but I am left most of all with profound gratitude to God for my wife and children, for my family and friends and church, for the blessing of a good job where I can use my gifts to both provide for my family and do interesting and fulfilling work with people I like. I won’t go long on the personal side here, just know that while I’m going to talking gaming and writing below, the people in my life matter to me far more and I'm thankful for them all.
   I appreciate you, the e-person reading this, too. Whether you’re reading this on the blog or the Twitter (keep calling it Twittermas, none of this X-mas nonsense), it’s really heartening to see your page visits and views, not because I’m looking for some kind of “winning at the internet” points (if I cared about that, I’d be focusing more on Civilization IV game reports), but because its really nice to know somebody’s reading what you write. Hopefully what I put on here is amusing to you, be ye here because of my Crapshoot Monday reviews, Adventure Site Contests, other reviews, thoughts on maps or gaming, podcast interviews, or because you accidently clicked the “follow” button and were too lazy to correct your mistake. The comments and replies are even cooler…this is nowhere near the levels of feedback found in Sierra Online Homeworld fanfiction forums in 1999, but whatever could be?

​   Some of you are reading this because you’re frantically hitting “refresh” here looking for the Adventure Site III reviews, and don’t worry, those are coming soon. Deadline for this year’s contest ends January 1st, so by 56 hours from the publication of this post, we’ll be done with submission and its on to the judgement. We’ve already received over twenty entries and I’ve got reviews written already for every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday of January. It’s a ton of work to review every single entry, but I appreciate every single one and there are already good entries from designers old and new. This contest is going to keep rolling annually for as long as I can keep getting submissions, it’s a privilege to run.
   Of course, all these great adventures would make a body complacent, so I’m reviewing a lot of other stuff too. Every single Monday, I release a Crapshoot Monday review, finding some freebie adventure on itch.io to look at and, more often than not, be horrified by. While that’s the majority of what I find, my real dream is always to find some unexpected gem, languishing in obscurity. I’ve become well-known enough as a game reviewer that people have begun to send me things to look at, too. I’ve been generally impressed with these offerings. I also did some deep-dive system reviews, Shadowdark early in the year and ACKS II more recently. Both were positive, although one is much more to my own personal taste. As always, reviewing others’ work has helped me a ton in thinking about my own…but don’t be fooled, I also set out to make my reviews entertaining reads in their own right.
   Earlier this year ASC II came out to the acclaim of everyone who’s ever read or used it. I stand by all eight top contenders as some of the best session-scale D&D possible. Heck, I’ve used more than half of them in my own games this year, all playing great. My players finished exploring the winning site, Tower in the Lake, just three nights ago and they had a blast. You really should check it out if you haven’t already.

​   My own gaming-material release schedule (via Coldlight Press on DriveThru) has been rather sedate this year, just restricted this time to my Fog Valley Retreat, which took adventure site judges’ reviews in consideration to be polished and edited into something that plays great (run it twice). Any and all contestants can do this, by the way, if you’re cynical about it you could say submitting your adventure is a sneaky way to get free editorial commentary. That’s part of the reason for the contest, I hope everyone takes shameless advantage.
   Of course, releasing gaming modules should always come secondary to the act of play. My activity as a game master has been right about at the happiest rate. I could run multiple times every day 365 days a year and never burn out, but I also enjoy all the rest of my life too, so this has been good. I’ve run:
-7 sessions of various one-shots, mostly convention slots.
-45 sessions of my Stars Without Number campaign, all online.
-59 sessions of the Coldlight Campaign, in the Skyshadow Isles and Shattered Valley regions (including finishing the Cairn of Night megadungeon). All of these were in-person with wildly varied parties of the roughly forty or so players involved in the campaign. Players range from ages 6 to 68, and character levels ranged from 0’s in a couple gauntlets to some 18th levels that have been playing for over half a decade. The campaign is an utter delight and I look forward to decades more in this world.
   I don’t play nearly as often, I think I’ve been in roughly two dozen additional sessions as a player? Mostly AD&D, although a few in other odds and ends system. 111:24 is a fine ratio for GM:Player in my book.  
   A big part of the reason for the continued growth in the Adventure Site Contest this year is that this is the year I made a concerted effort to be more active on social media, talking both gaming and writing to a wide range of Twitter and Discord friends. Some (but not all):
-The CAG Braintrust on Classic Adventure Gaming
-Alex Macris on ACKS to Grind
-Dunder Moose on This is Dunder Moose
-Matt and Gary on Second Watch
-Jack McCarthy on Jawin’ With Jack
-Yang on Yang Yan Zhao
-Dave (DJ) Butler on Gopher Wood Lounge
-Dan Roberts’ on Dad Lit Pod
-Jason on Nerds RPG Variety Cast
And more. I’ve also been on several of the book review club panels of the Carbines and Cantrips show, which has been very interesting as a deep-dive writing review. 

​   …because there’s more I do than gaming. Along with my wife Karen, I write fiction, both sci-fi and fantasy. We’ve been working together for a long time on novels, submitted to a few slushes with earlier work, but this year was the year we kicked up into a higher gear with media activity and networking. In April I went to a local comic convention to map the territory a little bit, but the real push started at LibertyCon, a Chattanooga writer’s convention in June. We’d been researching the market for years so I found it less educational than I’d hoped, but I met some great people and found some very good reads. Learning about a few of the smaller publishers there, we’re now working with some of the decent ones:
   Raconteur Press specializes in story fiction anthologies (although they also do novels) and had some themes that interested us. One of the stories we’ve submitted, “In the Company of Shepherds”, appears in Mercs and Mayhem as our first official writing credit (B K Gibson, right there on the cover). They’re a great group of people and one of the very few places to submit short fiction that won’t automatically algorithmically tank you just for contributing.
   The world of that story mentioned above is where our Grecian-themed novel trilogy takes place, starting with Shepherd next year. We’re going to have all three novels written before the first releases; in a world of George Martins, Scott Lynches, and Patrick Rothfusses, I’m not going to ask an epic fantasy reader to start a series that won’t be finished. We’re in talks with John (JF) Holmes for publishing this one; his Cannon Publishing has dabbled in fantasy before but he’s looking to spin off a new imprint with a fantasy focus next year which is where we’ll probably land. Of course we’re not going to ask a publisher to sign for all three at once, but one way or another, this story’s getting told.
   That’s not the only iron in the fire, of course. In addition to sending Rac Press a middle-grade boy’s adventure book, we’ve a sent a novel in to Ark Press for their “America 2076” contest and there’s a pitch sitting on Alexander Macris’ desk right now for a short story added to his upcoming Auran Empire fiction anthology. Co-writing doubles output of course, but just this year Karen and I have completed:
-3 full-length novels
-1 middle-grade novel
-1 novella
-6 short stories
   It’s a lot of fun and a pretty good output for a hobby. We, uh, don’t watch a lot of TV or play many video games anymore. All in all, I’m happy with what’s been done this year and look forward to 2026. As for what’s coming? Well, there’s going to be a lot more here on all that soon. But soonest...here come the ASC III reviews. First one on Friday…

​An adventure by Gwen C. Katz, level 3
Written for D&D 5E
  Welcome back to Crapshoot Monday, friends! I hope your Christmases were all wonderful, filled with laughter, fellowship, and gratitude. I hope you’re looking forward to the new year, and those of you working on your Adventure Sites…hurry it up, you have just a few days left until January 1st. I thought about looking for something particularly wonderful among my itch.io reviews, a bright light of game design, but another Christmas-tagged adventure bumped up into my queue, so why not go again? This is probably a mistake…
   …but hey, the palette is pleasant at least. This is a sixteen-page 5E adventure, of all things, so outside of some hilariously bloated statblocks we’re going with simple double-column text explaining everything at extreme length, written with generous helpings of whitespace and probably far too much italic read-aloud. It’s a clean, friendly presentation though, so that’s a pleasant contrast to what we had last week.
   And goodness gracious me, we couldn’t ask for a bigger tonal contrast in our stories, either. This adventure is twee. How twee? Well, this is an example of your in-module art:

​   I think my pancreas is screaming from the sweetness. Our cozy setup is a Beast Market on a snowy plain, where intelligent talking animals buy, sell, and trade. The best shop is that of the field mice family, the Crumbs, who run a pastry shop with magical petits fours, each giving a magical effect (like Reduce, Spider Climb, Fly, etc). The littlest and cutest Crumb, little Billy Crumb, gets himself lost, avoids wolves, hides in a cave, and now its up to your party to save him. The wolves drive the PCs into the cave, which has a series of challenges overcome by magic from the pastries. Finally everyone fights a roper in the end. Simple, cute, in-and-out with holiday cheer.
   Beyond the tonal relief, what I liked here were those spells chosen via pastry, coupled with the fact that the mouse-sized versions only last a round while big people-sized once have the normal spell durations. The resultant cave navigation puzzles are childishly simple, but hey, it’s something. The monsters are nicely challenging for level 3, good for a one-shot. In general, the scope and scale of this is exactly what you want for a holiday one-shot. I also like that its not doing to thing so many of these try to do, shoehorning in Santa Claus or otherwise making it on-the-nose. Just snow and cozy vibes, I can dig it.
   What can be improved, though, are all along the lines of “make this a better adventure.” While the charming flavor is off the chain there are a lot of rails beneath the snow here, and there are no real points where choices can be made outside of the typical tactical choices in combat and the occasional “do we go through the tunnel that requires reduce or the tunnels that require water breathing”, and even those aren’t truly at risk because the module tells you if your players screw up and waste magic treats, they’ll find replacement ones in a pile elsewhere (always at the number = players). Much better would be to have certain of these helpful items scattered around but otherwise let you players use ropes, their own magic, halflings, and/or their own clever outside-the-box solutions to the navigation challenges. Again, good idea, but bad execution. All the combats are likewise only grindy beatstick fights. You won’t spoil your cozy feelings by adding some real gameplay as well.
   Thus our best use case is “play at a family gathering with very small children”. Which, let us be honest, is in fact the best use case for 5E anyway. I can’t see stealing many bits from this unless you run a game with a very high level of twee whimsy normally. If so, hey, mice selling tiny petits fours with magical effects are a great addition.
   Final Rating? **/***** probably only because of my eggnog-glutted state of contented torpor. It’s not much of an adventure but it is a cozy little thing built to purpose.

An adventure by Grant J. Fleming, levels?
Written for Mork Borg
  This is probably my least-favorite Crapshoot Monday tradition…the Monday before Christmas, I look to review Christmas-themed adventures. They’ve typically been rather abysmal, obsessed with fighting Santa and subverting expectations. Joy. So what do I do to myself? I find a ten-page MÖrk BÖrg horror adventure so I can just smush together all my least favorite things at once. Ho. Ho. Ho. At least its written in normal single-column prose and there’s a lack of the usual yellow vomit and terribly ugly art. We’ll call that progress?
   The story, and OH BOY are we going to railroad you onto this story, is that the PCs get caught in a blizzard after chasing promised treasures rumored by a trader named Mr. Finch. They find refuge and are welcomed into the home of an old couple, Carol and Klaus, with their children Rudy, Donner, and Wilhelmina. They’re cannibal serial killers who work for a nightmare meat trader who sells tainted meat that turns people who eat it into ghouls. Carol’s an antlered demon. The little girl is also a demon but supposed to be played cute and adorable? Warning the town does…something maybe? Its all extremely vague. Also if you TPK then everyone wakes up cold and serving the trader guy as ghouls. Mostly, I think the adventure was written to riff off standard Christmas song titles, like:
OH COME, YE UNFAITHFUL
LADY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
SLAY RIDE
HE SEES YOU WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING
DO YOU FEAR WHAT I FEAR
CAROL OF THE HELLS
YOU’RE A MEAN ONE, MR. FINCH
And, of course, SILENT NIGHT
   Charming. Clever. If you like this kind of content, you’ll love this module. Also, if you like this kind of content, please leave.
   Yeah what I liked will be sparse but I did appreciate the TPK outcome with dawning horror, that’s good for a one-shot. Not sure if “liked” is the correct word, maybe grudgingly admired.
   What can be improved besides not embarking on this terrible venture in the first place? First, this is a Murgle Blork adventure, so of course the players will assume the older couple and the rest of the family are murderous serial killers. Advice to distract players if they’re growing suspicious is ridiculous, everyone knows this is the trope. The agency-stealing crap like drugged schnaps coupled with a “try not to TPK the party while attacking them out of a deep sleep” is completely unneeded. Blurk Meegles are playing this for gore-drenched death metal horror vibes, they’re going to be all on board getting ganked. There’s a potential investigative story here if presented a different way, but as it is the players are just expected to sit around for magical storytime.
   Okay, I took a break and hammered my frontal lobe multiple times with a claw hammer while listening to screamo at max volume. Having now gotten myself into the headspace to mentally model the average Mook Booger, I’ll say the best use case is to strap your party onto this railroad and choo-choo them all the way. Trust me, they deserve worse even than this.
   Final Rating? */***** because this lump of coal in my stocking is black and crumbly and completely without value. Piffle and humbug. 

​An adventure by EM Hundis, levels 2-4
Written for Shadowdark
  I’m seriously not trying for a theme, but it’s another four-page Shadowdark island crawl adventure we just bumped into here. This time, it’s not with a dungeon portion at all, rather a little island (no scale given) abstracted point-crawl. It’s written in more or less the Shadowdark standard format; double column, That One Font, flavor in the front, monsters and factions to the back. It’s all a good setup and although the prose isn’t very evocative, it’s at least windowpane. We could complain about the AMOUNT and the CLARITY of what’s written, but at least as module writing goes, it’s fine.
   So I’m at least able to grok the initial setup. Our initial railroad is “so you’re shipwrecked”…but after that the idea, at least, is pretty solid. Island has an old ruined city with the titular Living Artifact at its center, an item of great power that in game terms only causes heartache. Three factions control various places on the island, each has different distinctive flavors and suggest different final boss confrontations. The most cultish of the factions does own a boat to leave the island. Um, on a little northern islet so I’m not sure how you get to it. Also the final boss of the barbarian faction shows up by default in several places. Basically, the initial setup is clear but I’m not sure how its all supposed to end unless you just automatically ally with the Tainted. Introduction scene is very nice though.
   So what I liked then is the setup stuff. The adventure isn’t really set up to be a hexcrawl or pointcrawl, it wants to be a diplomacy adventure dealing with faction rivalries both internal and external, and it does a decent job at that. I like the scenario as a whole, it’s ripe for one to three nights’ adventure depending on how focused or chatty the players are feeling. On the random encounter table, there are “knifebeak furywings”. That’s a great name for a good scary random encounter.
   Alert readers will predict the first of what can be improved: BETTER MAPS PLEASE. The island has no scale given at all. There is zero map (or even geographic description) for the ruined city, which apparently is just loaded with lagoons and canals. Finally, the Deep Sanctum, home of the nightmarish corrupting Living Artifact is…a map of a circle. This is terrible. Really, all the confusion is caused by this refusal to give us any physical distances or details, a concrete pair of map pages would do wonders. Generally, the whole thing is just underbaked…give us more dungeon space, a ruined-city-crawl, maybe little side-sites. The story wants a much bigger product than what we got, so the answer is either give a bigger module, or go with a different adventure scenario. Some stories are novels, some are flash fiction, but it’s a bad idea to try to stuff the former into the latter.
   Which means regretfully our best use case is probably just to do a ton of homework and expand it to its proper length, or else use a couple enemy or artifact ideas to add to another area. Pity but it would require a very particular set of magic tea partiers to run out of the box.
   Final Rating? */***** but it’s close to a second star. I’d love to see an expansion.  

An adventure by Daniel Herz, level 3
Written for Swords & Wizardry
   As a disclosure note, I received this as a free review copy from Stromberg Press. I've given good reviews to Stromberg titles before, and as you'd expect, this one has top-notch art and layout. That's not what I ever rank, but a very pretty product, even so.
   In my active and rambling youth, I spent many a day out in the wooded foothills of my Northern Alabama home, both with friends and alone. I’ve had slips, falls, and treacherous climbs. I’ve encountered venomous snakes, bears, and deer in rut. I’ve even done multiple rock wall climbs, free or with guide ropes. In all those many hours, there are only two times when I’ve been in genuinely life-or-death situations, and both times were when someone decided to go spelunking in our karst caves. It’s crazy how dangerous caving can be, and yet in D&D we treat clambering around underground as routine. “Just toss the thief and some rope at it.”
   Not so here, we’re in a real cavern this time. Heretics’ Grave is all about caving, devoting its first two post-preamble pages to rules and tables for climbing and descending slick natural cave slopes, wedging through tight and confined tunnels, and crawling through 2’-wide entrances. Then the end of the product has two pages of diagrams for how torchlight propagates up and down cervices and cracks. This is some deeply focused detail-oriented rules-making and I am here for it. Plus, it’s terrifying.
   So outside of a hyper-realistic ruleset, what’s the point of this module? Well, it’s a twenty-one page adventure site, mostly single-column text, focused on a cave designed initially to connect one location to another (the author says it was used to bypass an enchanted castle’s thorn wall, classic). The titular heretics were some knights who hid down at the bottom of the caves and then died, and then rose as ghouls, like you do. Add in an exiled wererat and plenty of creepy-crawlies and you’ve got a dungeon filled with nasty dangers that should fill one to two sessions with its fourteen keyed main areas (many of which have sub-sections, a/b/c, etc). 

​   Natural cave maps are always an interesting choice for a dungeon map, and it doesn’t get much naturally than these. The odd splatter of passages, the way things tumble all over each other and slop up and down wildly…good luck using a player mapper here, and I hope even as the GM you’re equipped with dot-matrix paper to map on instead of square grids. This module doesn’t just color-code the top-down map, but also gives side-view cutaways for each section to show elevation changes, which is great. Despite how noodly it looks, it’s pretty linear. Given the whole site exists as an A-to-B shortcut function, the linearity is the point and very realistic, too. Grappling with the complexity here is part of the point, but it will be a hassle. 

​   As soon as your players walk into the caves, they are most like greeted by the dwarven wererat who makes the caves his home. Not a particularly threatening combatant, he’s supposed to be friendly-but-paranoid, and plans to treacherously murder any PC he can isolate. Utter crapsack of a person, which is a fun (if predictable) interactable character. Sadly, the ghouls aren’t given any interactive business, just being a bunch of chomp monsters. It’s fine, but kind of a waste considering the rare benefit of ghouls is their sentience. Everything else to fight is either vermin or Magical D&D Monster (like darkmantles).
   Your party’s thief is going to be shining like the sun, down here with all these climb checks, so I guess its fine that there aren’t a lot of traps or locks to bump in to. Hazards are a little repetitive, mostly slipping, falling, or slipping while falling…which is fair, but I do feel like a little more secret passage stuff could be finagled. The only locked “doors” are a few areas where the wererat wedged shut things leading to his various caches. Which are then junky.
   Players are often groaning when they hit natural caves not because of the difficulty in mapping them, but because the treasure is often crappy. There’s an uninspiring collection here, mostly in the wererat’s little hiding places (muddy), amidst the rusting armor left by the ghoul-knights (muddy) and a single golden goblet worth $1,400 as the very end in a pool (wet). It’s a level 3 location, so the paucity of magic items is defensible, but it’s a little sad. I do like the little twists on a couple of them…there’s a bedtime story scroll that acts like sleep with no save but presumably takes longer to read, and the heretics had a +1 shield that interferes with that one particular god’s clerics casting spells within thirty feet of it. Amount of cash is fine, it just feels sodden and rusty.
   I can see using this thing in my game. As adventure sites go, it’s placeable darn near anywhere just as a cave system anywhere you have limestone, but its even better as a method of bypassing other paths, which is the original use case. A lot of rule-work needs to go in at the beginning but it’s an extremely realistic and gameable take on spelunking.
   *** for most uses here, but I could easily add another star if you’ve got a specific need for this environment as a gameable bridge between locations. Good job on this one. 

A dungeon by Ethan Franks, level ~5
Written for D&D 5E
  There’s a surprising dearth of 5E content on itch. Not sure if it’s because of the artistic inclinations of the community, making them less likely to design for the “mainstream”, or if it’s because the 5E fandom is siloed off into their own marketplaces. This jam, the Appendix N Jam, seems to have brought in some of the mainstream, like Mr. Franks here. He made a tight little module too, only five pages (including cover) for fifteen keyed rooms, which is even more impressive considering the module stats up all the monsters with the Standard Fifth Edition Chungus Statblocks. Our font choices are…interesting, let’s just say, and the tables are formatted a little wonky, but everything is readable. Columns are of an uneven width. Production is pretty solid otherwise, nice to see.
   Our story is pretty much what you expect from that cover. Mr. Hades is your bog standard insane wizard (alchemist flavor), complete with cult of drugged followers, who’s using the squishy and oozy bits of the local townsfolk to make horrors beyond mortal ken in a quest for immortality, yadda, yadda. There’s a nice “starting table” that contains six different initial hooks for a party and suggests different locations to start in, so if you’re bandits looking for loot you’ll be plopped in front of the storage room, while freed cult members start in the guard barracks, etc. It’s a nice idea but I would have rather integrated that a bit more with rumors. Still, it adds spice to an others very standard mad wizard/cult hideout scenario.
   What I liked here was first off the other table on that first page, the Loot Table. Outside a couple peanut butter anachronisms (we’ll come back to this), the loot is cool and creative and magical and weird. Rolling a ‘1’ and getting toenails? That’s solid. I liked the way the adventure marked its maps, too, with a simple set of color-coded icons showing monster locations and items on interest. More adventures really should do this, it helps a lot in the running. A could of the magical items are nice, the Cultist Robe is good light armor with poison/con check protection and under the toilet there’s a bag of holding, which, ew, but also that makes sense. The tone of the writing gave me a chuckle-like-emotion briefly.
   …but what can improved first is eliminating the very anachronistic and tonally off-beat peanut allergy given to the big bad Hades (and his Abomination-Form, if he completes his ritual). Random sources of peanut butter can be found around the module and it’s more or less an insta-kill if it can be introduced to his bloodstream or into his mouth. Which suggests terrible gameplay as your dragonborn paladin holds this guy’s mouth open while the tiefling warlock stuff a sandwich into the BBEG’s face. Ah, 5E. The map is three levels high but linear, which is a real missed opportunity. Despite the complexity of the LOOK, the PLAY of this map won’t have exploration at all. Pity.
   Best use case here is probably to serve up to your extremely non-picky group of D&D 5th Edition players and have a decent night of beer and pretzels. Nothing here is original enough or interesting enough to swipe for use anywhere else. It’s fine, just unmemorable.
   Final Rating? */***** but that’s probably one extra star if you’re one of the suffering abuse victims known as a “5E DM”. Nothing criminal here, so I’ll depart without any ill will. As a bag of holding beneath a toilet goes, it’s not all that full.

   Well we’ve reached the end. After a long journey, we’re finally at the appendices, mostly filled with essential-but-not-particularly-interesting-to-comment-about-in-review stuff like “Conditions”, “Index”, and “List of Kickstarter backers”. Of far more interest, though, is the appendix detailing the baseline Auran Empire Setting. It’s pretty decent, although spare. Far more details are found in official modules and splats like the ACX series, the dwarf-focused By this Axe, and soon in the upcoming Before All Others for elves. For the purposes of this review, though, I’ll be keeping to the baseline Revised Rulebook. The other two core books Judge’s Journal and Monstrous Manual also will expand setting information, so I’ll note that when I come upon it.  
   First off, a note on RPG setting documents (books, appendices, modules). They’re…interesting. Technically, no TTRPG system needs a setting, because while rules do imply certain setting assumptions, there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of milieu and that’s the first lever most game masters will fiddle with. If someone tells you “I’m playing ACKS”, certainly don’t assume they’re playing in the Auran Empire. Nevertheless, these kinds of setting bibles are fun to read for entertainment if nothing else, and if they’re well-designed then the setting itself should inspire the reader, suggesting adventures and campaigns just from how all the pieces are set up on the board. At the very best end of the spectrum there are some settings so compelling that people play them even in different systems than intended. People playing Dark Sun in Shadowdark, for example…that’s the pinnacle.
   The Auran Empire is basically Rome. Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s not very specific, and a lot of settings have “Rome, but X”, here though you are in a very specific Late Rome, where I describe the current situation as “what if Septimius Severus heard about the Mongols and left along with the Persians to go fight them in the Steppe”. The Empire is crumbling on the borders, with many outer provinces lost recently to revolt or conquest, leadership completely focused on infighting, and a general sense of doom and gloom hanging over everything. Terrible place to be a peasant, but a nice hearty stew for adventurers. Couple it with all the neighboring kingdoms in a Mediterranean Sea region (but east and west flipped…don’t worry about it, most of us are a little Eastwexic), and you have a nice region ripe for adventuring, conquering, and yes, even kinging. 

   You might notice on the map and in my description that there’s not a lot of territory devoted to the Fantasy Standards of “dwarf holds”, “elf kingdoms”, “orc lands”, etc. Demihumans do exist in ACKS but they are very much given a short shrift in the core book. Dwarves occupy a dwindling territory inside a couple mountain ranges, while the elves only occupy the one woodsy kingdom to the east over there. “Bad guy humanoids” like orcs, ogres, goblins, etc, were all magically created by the Standard Ancient Bad Guy Empire From Long Ago via cross-breeding, so they’re all irredeemably evil beastmen with animal features (who’ve eaten every missionary they’ve ever met). Other sentients like giants, dragons, lizardmen, etc all do exist but they’re also pushed to the edges. You can play with your standards, but the setting assumes most stories are humans dealing with humans.
   Fantasy “races” aren’t at the forefront, but given this is a historically-focused setting, much attention is given to the different human races (nationalities, ethnos, etc). They might have different names, but there are Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Norse, Gauls, Greeks, Huns, and every other equivalent for the complicated mix of peoples profiting from the Fall of Rome. It’s made explicit by the table outlining Cybelean languages and their real-world equivalents. It’s cleverly done, even extending to how the lizardmen language (draconic) is derived from a real-world language isolate (Sumerian). Which means we should all get very nervous when the Judge starts speaking in Basque. We’re in a world extremely grounded in actual history here.  
   This does not, however, mean that we’re in a low fantasy, or sword and sorcery, setting. Magic is very common, with about half the classes some manner of spellcaster, and percentages found in population numbers (because of course there are) conveying a picture of a world where low-level casters can be seen daily in a city and at least monthly even in rural locations. Every race and species has access to magic, too, although the default classes imply that dwarves are restricted to divine lists while elves trade only in the arcane. The immediate objection from the genre-savvy “but what about tippy-verse”, where magic is so ubiquitous as to be silly, is answered by the fact that most spellcasters cap out at only level 6 spells, while the highest-level stuff is restricted to ritual casting out of special locations. The old “Gandalf was a 5th-level magic-user” canard is given the contempt it deserves, but high-level wizards and crusaders are pretty rare and even their worst manifestations aren’t in command of the whole world…
   Because ACKS II does something very deliberate with its balance; warriors command armies, and those armies are expected to be used as a core part of the game. Core AD&D is more balanced at high level than it gets credit for, but that’s mostly via fighters getting highly magical gear to keep up with the magic-users and clerics and druids and whatnot (thieves get nothing and they’re happy). ACKS certainly will have its high-level fighting types well-kitted out with magic, but even more by default every high-level fighter comes at the head of an army. With all the import and world-definition that implies. Your wizard may summon demons or unleash fireballs, but your fighter commands a canal to be dug or a city to be razed. The game doesn’t speak just in terms of half a dozen people in caves but wants there to be adventures dealing with battlefields and cities, too.
   Which, in turn, means the world is set up for different stories. In Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, a dread necromancer raising up vast armies of undead is dealt with by sneaking into his tower and killing him to break his McGuffin of Undead Control. That happens in ACKS II, but the story might just as well go that King Dave calls in favors from his allies and their forces meet in a pitched battle leading to dread necromancer’s defeat, or indeed even a massive campaign with multiple battles. Heroic man-to-man engagements still happen here, but not everything depends on a small band of adventurers. The State itself fights, and the world thinks not in terms of a pair of hobbits chucking magic rings into the nearest volcano, but in the collective story of evil being defeated by the Senate and the People of the Auran Empire. Which, curiously, makes how the game setting treats Law and Chaos very different.
   Rather than the Good vs. Evil focus of most D&D lineages, ACKS II has the one axis, Law vs. Chaos. This is reflected in the polytheistic pantheons, where Empyrean Lawful gods are set in opposition against the more primordial Chthonic Chaotic gods, and PCs are expected not to be dispositionally Lawful always, but by default are on the side of Law and civilization against the nihilistic Chaos. Game mechanics reinforce these defaults, in a way that ironically baseline D&D contradicts this tendency. Small-band D&D is fundamentally about the homeless, be they murder-hoboes or the more common band of well-intentioned drifters. Not so in ACKS; the game is focused on giving characters property and thus a stake in society. This isn’t the most heavily emphasized explicit message of the rulebook, but it’s an implicit assumption that seeps from every pore. The setting’s Auran Empire is in trouble, and while in some D&D games that would mean “hey, awesome, more quests get generated”, here in ACKS that means the world is set up to break down and threaten the beloved domains given so freely to the players. That’s a form of quest-generation too, but it means that your heroes of the setting at fundamentally defenders of order and stability.
   Clever, clever game. This setting teams up with the mechanics to make ACKS more focused on Law vs. Chaos than any other game in D&D’s storied lineage, and it does it not by shackling players by game-mechanical oaths and explicit alignment rules; it does this by handing them crowns. And then threatening those golden rewards.
   But of course, players are players and they also want to fireball dragons. Next time, I’ll move over to the bestiary and we’ll look at the much more workaday set of threats that will be the conscious focus for King Dave and his companions. 

​An adventure by mucilage, levels 2+
Written for Shadowdark
  Oh man, I love this cover. The fake old used sticker and barcode, the old-school trade dress, the visual design…every part of this screams “old gem of a module” except for the quirky author name/punctuation. I know its Shadowdark but thanks to the jam that produced it the actual product is an admirably tight four pages for a five-point overland adventure leading to a six-room dungeonlet. The interior is nicely set up too, with art and maps that inspire as well as clear, readable text in all cases. Prose is clear and flavorful, format is simple but helpful…content aside, this mysterious pseudonymous writer certainly knows how to present a product.
   The story itself? Classic. Drunk brags about giant ruby found on a map, gets assassinated by the pirate captain featured on the cover, and once the cutscene is over and players regain control of their characters they’re given leave to go ye therefore to the ancient elven ruins hot on the heels of the pirates. Chase through a pointcrawl, crawl through a point chase (er, minidungeon), then have a nice final battle. “Elf” flavor isn’t very strong but we’re loaded with “jungle ruins” so I exercise the power granted unto me by The Reviewing Community and declare it good enough.
   If it’s not clear by now, what I liked quite a lot here even after presentation is the flavor, this sucker makes me wish I was running something cutlass-adjacent. There are some nice details, too, like how in-dungeon dangers are all either telegraphed (pirate leg stumps next to a guillotine trap) or avoidable by being friendly (just don’t take the elderly basilisk’s key), that’s good stuff. I like the final groin-kick of the giant ruby being load-baring, dumping the whole final chamber out onto a cliff when its grabbed. There’s very nice rumors and clues in the point-crawl too as everyone struggles along the coast towards the hidden shrine. I’m very excited about the magebane shackles as a magic item, they grant +1 AC but make the wearer mute. That’s darn good game design.
   Can’t say there aren’t things under the “what can be improved” category though, of course. The point-crawl is a nice idea with cool flavorful points of interest, but most of them lack a, well, point, plus it is rather unclear how players choose forks or branches. The name of the hidden shrine is given away in a cool encounter on a side path, but that doesn’t seem to matter at all. My old enemy, random numbers on the encounter tables where you should just have a number, rears its ugly head with “1d6 pirate ships” of all darn things. I’m not fond of the pirate captain being at the final room’s door trying to pick the lock no matter how long your group takes, but that’s my usual hate for en media res in a freeform adventure. The backstory of the cursed queen in the hidden shrine is likewise irrelevant and not even discoverable in the course of normal play. In some respects, I’ll bet a lot of these issues stem from the tight page count, a better version of this adventure probably exists with a couple more pages of text.
   Quibbles aside, best use case is to use this as a classic “treasure map reward” in an ongoing campaign, cutscene with the murdered Billy Bones or no. Those magebane shackles are absolutely going to see action in my game(s), so that’s worth the price of admission alone.
   Final Rating? ***/***** with another star easily added the writer could go back and fill in a little bit more. Despite it not fitting my current campaign, I might be using this myself, possibly as a DREAD scenario or something else along those lines. Good job.