A regional adventure for levels 3-6, by Brynjar Mar Palsson
Written for Shadowdark
   Note, this one came in as a review copy, along with a very touching heartfelt message from the author…Mr. Palsson, as you may recall, wrote one of the first itch.io adventures I actually liked, Brigands of Bristleback Burrow. Apparently, my review was the first such he’d received, and he found it encouraging. He’s done a few other dungeons over time, which I’ve bumped into from time to time. Now he’s graduated from “a dungeon” to “full-up regional sandbox campaign” with the hefty tome before us. Legacy of Iskald is a hundred-page (‘zine-size) epic of genuinely impressive scope, written for Shadowdark of all things. I’m impressed by the ambition.
   As always, I don’t review adventures based on artistic merit, but there is a lot of effort represented here. Most of the art is black-and-white, with the occasional full-page or even double-page color spread setting mood. Every monster and most NPCs have portrait sketches, and I like…most of them, slightly uneven quality/style is to be expected when you have multiple artists and illustrators. Some of the stuff is really quite gripping, and several illustrations made me laugh. This isn’t a no-value-added thing or something just to break up text blocks, when we run something like this at the table, having example illustrations to flash to the players is really nice. Otherwise, formatting is competent and Shadowdark-standard, with generous margins, well-delineated tables, and the usual custom slightly-annoying but nevertheless readable Arcane Library font. Writing is casual, almost conversational in places, but very easy to parse.
   I had an experience that I believe most of us have had, where I mainlined the Sagas of the Icelanders and immediately started building a campaign based on them. In my own case it was set in an alternate Greenland, icy and bleak and cold at the edge of the world. This is another one of those, although it is not set in a real-world version of the earth, it’s still obviously built by someone raised on the sagas. It’s a good setting for D&D-style adventure, if you told me that actual historical Vikings believed in a gold=XP system I’d believe you. Couple that with the myths of the Norse being fully populated in D&D monster manuals and in all cases optimized for “hit it with sword” solutions, then you’re in the zone anytime you’re D&Ding the Viking Era. Even if it is in Shadowdark.
   A word on the Shadowdark system…it isn’t ideal for all that a regional campaign requires, notably lacking any kind of overland travel system (pre-Western Reaches Kickstarter), and also not overly focused on character death rules during a long-term play. As is tradition, the author improvises via hacking. First we have importing from other systems, in this case using Cairn’s watch system for overland travel and ACKS II’s heroic death rules for giving XP to new replacement characters. There’s also new stuff, like calendar and weather systems, travel and seasonal mods, and of course a ritual
tracking chart…
   …because, hey, there’s a ticking clock in this regional sandbox adventure. Actually several, but the biggest is a bunch of fishmen (the cultfish) trying to figure out a control ritual to enslave a local dragon who’s been chained for centuries beneath the mountain by the region’s long-departed warlord. There’s also a troll-wife desperately trying to keep the peace between a fighting pair of greater elementals, a centipede-using shapeshifting hag trying to poison everyone in the area and imprison them in nightmares for decades, some harpies raiding around, a mercenary company of were-creatures looking for lost members, a massive ice floe with dozens of wrecked ships haunted by cursed undead, and the usual petty set of side quests too. It’s a packed adventure, with a lot of various sites that all funnel into a central dungeon.
   Which is unfortunately going to be the source of my biggest complaint in this whole affair, Hrimskegg’s Tomb. I love the idea of the dungeon…it’s a central area accessed from four different locations throughout the region, rife with multiple factions, designed to be visited multiple times to complete multiple objectives throughout the region. Everything happening centers around this dungeon, and its themes are strong, complete with a final area containing an abused dragon who’s been chained here all his life. Brilliant stuff, compelling, interesting, and perfect as an anchor for a regional sandbox…but it’s all stuffed into twenty-four room tiny (5ft square) dungeon:

   It hurts to see. The dungeon itself isn’t even bad, I like the flow, I like the rooms, I like the traps and monsters and interactive bits, they’re all great. If this was one of the itch.io standard eight-page dungeons, I’d be giving it five stars. It’s written with that use case in mind, even, and for that it’s great. But this is a tiny little area that an efficient group can knock out in a single session. Since its Shadowdark, you don’t even have the 5E excuse that combat takes forever, fights are actually pretty fast here. This thing just needed 3x or 4x more rooms and a lot more space occupied to properly fit its role in the adventure. And maybe a couple more levels.
   It’s even more of a pity because there are other dungeons here in this region that show bigger scope. I love them, an overrun barrow filled with angry revenants and the Norns, an ice-crevasse filled with unique light-avoidant undead and a faithful ghost retainer seeking the heir of his master, the hag’s lair, a heist-ready inn/merchant shop, and a tower in the cliff…all of these take advantage of the third dimension, all of them are a good size for what’s being asked of them, and all of them have good design. The author can make a good adventure site. I just wish the main one had been a full-up proper dungeon.
   Regional adventures live or die based on the personalities, goals, and resources of the various factions and people within the area and this one is really excellent with that. Most of the people and monsters here have distinct personalities and are working some kind of angle, usually something that’ll lead to utter disaster for the region. This whole zone is a mass of a dozen different ticking time bombs, which is perfect for a sandbox. Freedom is infinite, but there should also be NPCs freely bumping around to destroy things if the PCs screw up. There’s also the Requisite Rival Adventuring Party around, complete and utter dirtbags. Love it.
   The other things I look for in an adventure like this are cool and interesting sites and magic and we’re solid here, too. Menhirs, swamps, giant primordial trees, a volcano (and YES IT MIGHT ERRUPT)…everything here is fun and interesting and conveyed on the map pretty darn well. This is a region filled with adventure and intrigue, just asking to be explored. There are a ton of new/custom monsters that work well, and although I might could wish for more new magic items, those that do get made are all useful and interesting.
   If you can’t tell from my tone, I really like this adventure. The central dungeon’s whiff at scale is mostly disappointing because the region does do such an excellent job at making everything else so big and epic. Level 3-6 is the “X” in B/X and it’s right and proper to step out of the dungeon and into the sagas. Legacy of Iskald does this for Shadowdark better than anything else I’ve seen and it looks like something I’d have a blast playing with even as someone who is not the biggest adherent of the system. It's here if you wanted to take a look.
****

   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…

​A dungeon by Pekka Rihko, levels 1-3.
Written for Dungeons and Dragons with “1 gold = 1XP systems”
  Well, this was a pretty thing. Soft and slate grey watercolor cover, skillful pencil sketches, gentle color palette, understated and tasteful formatting…The Beseeching Parliament is forty pages of love and care. It’s also forty pages, very complex and detailed, with an intricate plot involving multiple characters, a 70+ year backstory, worldbuilding involving a decently high-level fae lord and soul-pacts and tons of subsidiary information. This ain’t the usual Monday crapshoot, this is a hefty, weighty tome of sweeping ambition and scope. The last two adventures I’ve reviewed had around the same page count but nowhere near the breadth and depth.
  The story, which I’ll note does require sitting down and reading carefully at first, involves an adventurer family with a long history of selling their souls to the Owl-King, a fairy lord holding court on an island in the middle of a lake, in return for magical powers. Fifty years ago, the old matriarch of the family sold her soul and now time is up. Her son, who runs the house, is torn between giving up mean ol’ ma or handing over the soul of his friend imprisoned in a giant gem, but all that waits while he gets ready to host dwarven pilgrims who pay their respects to another friend, a dwarf lord who fell in battle and is buried on the grounds. There’s more drama than that but the immediate somewhat tenuous hook is that he’s looking to hire a grounds crew/house staff on short notice and the PCs hire on while scoping out his manor as a potential heist target. Yes it’s every bit as complicated as it sounds.
  However, I’ll quickly say what I liked to start with was the economy with which Mr. Rihko drops details pointing to a much deeper story. “There is also a vortex of black energy within one of the picture frames. This is what’s left of Irmine’s husband, Stewart’s father. They have no memory of him as a person, and assume he was nevermade in the tomb-halls of Ur-Saquaan.” That’s great stuff, while also functioning as a trap. The slave rebellion of Horadropolis, a sacrifice of a cat upon the Gorestone, said expedition into the ruins of Ur-Saquaan…I’m not sure how gameable all this is, but it’s great quality writing. The menace and numinous vibe of the Owl-King are on point too.
  I like more, too…I was about to get annoyed by how much of the manor’s loot is just “very valuable” in the text, but then all was forgiven and more when it was all summarized with what looks like B/X values in the end, with a comment that the players shouldn’t know the value of this stuff without appraisal. Then the author makes me even happier by listing the value of the manor looted down to the studs, even taking things like the windows, and he lists it by the cartload. This man games. Likewise, his sensibilities are personally offended by simple +1 magic arms and armor, preferring special magic abilities, but he’s more than happy to offer the bonuses in a sidebar for more bog-standard D&D. This fundamental sensibility runs throughout, and it’s appreciated.
  That’s not to say what can be improved is a null category. There’s a fundamentally unhurried attitude throughout the module that requires not just patience from the game master, but also from the players. There’s more detail in mucking out latrines and dealing with saunas than works best for a fantasy adventure. The final confrontation with the Owl King is encouraged as a very hand-wavy, almost story game type of fight, and there’s some fuzzy bit elsewhere too…the cockatrice that guards the dire-chickens pecks angrily at egg-gatherers, and while there’s an insulation suit that grants +10 on a petrification save, this isn’t going to work if its been a daily task for years. Most emblematic of this tendency is the mimic down in the basement protecting the master’s armor…it’s literally toothless, having had it teeth pulled so it now only does a d4 of damage gumming victims. There are a lot of pulled punches here, as the adventure really, really wants the players to reach the end of its excellent story. That’s at odds with 1gp=1XP D&D by default.
  All that said, the best use case for The Beseeching Parliament is as a real banger of a one-off, not quite a single session but probably 3-4 to let it really breathe. It would set a very strange tone as the start of a long dungeon-crawling campaign, but it’s certainly got hooks for long-term play. The playstyle of this really isn’t to my taste, but it’s so darn solid that I still can imagine really enjoying running this.
  Final Rating? *****/***** even with the occasional meandering it’s a wonderful time with the right kind of players and a thing of beauty. I don’t assign five stars just for perfection, but it does mean in my crapshoot I’ve hit a rare A-rank adventure, it’s ridiculous that this thing is laboring in obscurity with a PWYW price tag. Phenomenal module.
  It's also available on DriveThru.

  Check it out today...it's a marvelous collection of adventures, I wholly endorse them, already used three of them in my campaign. Enjoy, and take notes, because next year's contest is only six months away.

  In my Crapshoot Monday, I’m always looking hopefully in the itch.io sewers for adventures of some redeeming value. There are some adventures I’ve been positive on:
*Brigands of Bristleback Burrow 
*Fortress on the Wild Frontier 
*At the River’s Edge (less for the direct adventure, more how useful it is). 
*Petra Serpentis 
  …if you see four or more stars, you know I think it’s worth at least trying to play with. But the above list are hypothetically good. I have in fact played some of these adventures at my table. They were fun. Players had a good time. These aren’t four-star “good stuff” that I loved reviewing, these are mostly three-star modules that nonetheless worked well enough for hasty inclusion in my game. Without further ado:

The Forgotten Isle of the Hydra Cult 
  Less of a full adventure site, more of a cute little lair, this worked great as a quick little location for a map, racing against a rival pirate-aligned wizard (The Corpse Master). I plumped it up quite a bit with that last bit an actual hydra, but it was a cute little Indianna Jones affair to play in as part of a session.
  Honorable mention to Ill-Gotten Gains, another adventure from the same collection, that is also seeded on the map, just hasn’t been hit yet.

The Pirates of Marwater Cavern 
  As you may know, I run an archipelago campaign, and needless to say pirates are a common roll. Needing a quick lair, I grabbed this excellent one and it played really well, sometimes a big open chamber entrance can lead to a bad exploration but this was a wonderful “delve” that had a lot of subtle details enabling careful exploration (the main chamber is loud with an echoing waterfall, lit by a skylight) and there was a great mix of traps, negotiation, and pirate fighting for the whole thing. Were I to run it again, I’d have added a touch more magic and maybe some kind of non-humanoid monster for extra spice, but for a low-level pirate lair it’s a top performer. 

Transit Precinct 45 
  Different strokes entirely, this scifi adventure was perfect for my ongoing Stars Without Number FTL campaign. I had rolled an asteroid mining system with a prisoner who had, per rumor, once bested the players’ main villain. Perfect spot for this little jailbreak scenario on a broken-down satellite station. The players planned very carefully with multiple contingencies and faked a “hyper-diphtheria” outbreak in a supply run to worm their way on board, coupling that with a rock throw to take out the prison station’s comms mast. The adventure had all the information needed to support this, packed in just eight flavorful and whitespace-heavy A4 pages. I was extremely impressed with how well it ran and everyone had a great time, even after everything broke down and they had to shoot their way out with their prisoner. I’d go back and add another star if I believed in such things. Surprised by how well it ran.

The Awful Amber Doom 
  This one is more style than substance, but the style is so wonderful and fit so well with my ongoing campaign that I just had to salt it in. Lost sunken city rising from the depths on the night of a full moon, race against time with a vampiric necromancer also seeking a pulp artifact, shadowy avatar of a batlike Great Old One…this fit so well for a session, although it definitely needed seeding beforehand (using the Hydra Cult location for a secret map to the location of the sunken city, plus divination answers with the fairly high-level wizard investigating). It’s built way too low level in the Shadowdark original for its themes, but it was a good level 8 adventure upon conversion, helped by my own preexisting tables. The evocative art helped too during their expedition. As you can tell, then, this will be a qualified recommendation, because some work needs to be done to fully flesh it out, but it was an entertaining pulp inspiration and that’s its own value. 

​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.

An adventure by Melan, level 5-7.
Written for Swords & Magic
  I have a little side project here. I started this foray into the TTRPG space first as a module writer, beginning with The Fall of Whitecliff and continuing with the dozen or so more I’ve released over the past eight years. It’s only been a little over a year since I’ve started writing reviews, although checking my composition document it looks like I’ve cracked 100,000 words of reviewing already (I have reviews written all the way out to April right now). I’m not the only mixed reviewer/module seller, though, others have come before…Ben Milton, Gabor Lux, GusL, and Prince of Nothing come to mind. So, over the next few months, I want to review the reviewers here, looking at how an acclaimed adventure from one of these deeply-steeped holds up. Mr. Lux, known also as Melan, is the first one I’ll look at with his oddball In the Name of the Principle. It’s what he considers his most iconic, so let’s see how it plays.
  First off, this is a very unusual adventure. Just look at the summary blurb:
  Central concept: Open-ended assassinations
in the picturesque city state of Akrasia,
with the most state-of-the-art implements
of murder, including various futuristic
devices.
  So, we have a city adventure, which is rare. We have sci-fi devices handed out to the PCs, which is rare. We have a timed(ish) mission of assassination (not that rare) that ends with a full-fledged coup and seizing control of the city, which is so rare as to be unheard-of. Added to this mix is that the sending agency who gave the PCs their mission changed their minds and sent a second team of twelve hitmen, also equipped with sci-fi gear, to protect the PCs’ target. Now, add in the fact that there’s an impending festival that has tons of strangers filtering into the city and how the ruling clique are all paranoid, use secret police, and are equipped with some nice defensive magic and you’ve got an incredibly complex adventure here.
  Format and art won’t win any originality accolades, but the module is clean and clear, mostly conveyed in two-column paragraph-based prose, with simple hand-sketched (MS Paint?) maps sprinkled in where needed. As is normal for a city adventure, sub-maps are simple, almost more diagrams than proper room-by-room exploration maps. I think that’s probably the right call for assassination use, which is similar in game mode terms to a heist. Charming gear handouts and the occasional flourish of the orders sheets for the PCs and the hit squad are nice.
  The four rulers of the city are the standard prince, general, wizard, and priest, well-characterized in succinct paragraphs that give us what we need to run interactions with them, along with just enough stats/gear to make their assassination very difficult. The other factions are faceless but described in terms of motivations and plans/responses, which is fine, but the biggest interactive group that’s only characterized in asides is the mob of the city itself.

  I love the city writeup, which is where the main meat of the module is found. Akrasia is a wealthy city, not at the center of an empire but almost a bedroom community for the “big city” elite. Greco-Roman elements convey a certain feel, conjuring an impression of a Rome or Constantinople in miniature, complete with essentials like a main aqueduct, a temple (one target here), a wizard’s tower (one target here), and a Neo-Classical palace (two targets here). The biggest campaign-significant element about the city is that the whole thing is focused around a big planar gate where annual sacrifices of young men and maidens get sent off into the unknown during the mystery festival. The least obvious element of the whole scenario is how the PCs are supposed to rule it if they manage step 2, control the darned thing. One assumes that at some point the PCs find the second hit squad with the order rescinding the initial plan, but if they don’t, then there’s not much GM support on how to wrangle the restive city. There is a chance to blow the whole place up though.
  Which leads me to probably the most controversial aspect of the adventure, those sci-fi elements. In addition to starting the players out with laser pistols, force cubes, and a bomb, there’s integrated futuristic stuff throughout the adventure, most notably that the middle of the palace holds a rocket ship; launching the ship destroys the palace outright and there’s a 1-in-3 chance that the thing malfunctions during ascent, turning into a fireball that wipes out there whole city. If the rocket doesn’t blow up, whatever hapless PC(s) are aboard are more or less out of the game heading to interstellar space. More intimately, the grand poobah of the city does all his public appearances in a Magic Popemobile: A hovering glass bell that blocks all weapons and deflects most rays/magic. While this hews to a very respectable tradition of classic D&D, your own personal milage may vary. While some of the gear could be reflavored as magic items, the underlying technomagical assumptions underlay a lot of the adventure’s core.

​  This thing is hard to accurately access because it is Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Not only does it assume a lot on the part of the DM, what with all the timers, factions, and locations…this is also not an adventure for all players. The sprawling open-ended nature of the scenario demands a lot of agency from the PCs. Treating this like a loot ‘n scoot assault, even at levels 5-7, will see the PCs failing fast, and the scenario falling apart once its clear that the mission is cancelled by the original senders will frustrate some parties. Not a scenario for every table I’m sad to say. Hard to seed into an ongoing campaign, and rather complex for a multi-session one-shot.
  There’s going to be a break out of ratings, then, because I’m always looking for usability. I admire this scenario a lot, but I’m not going to be one of the primary audience of users. Thus:
****/***** for most users, challenging as it is there’s also a lot of value for inspiration/stripping for parts.
*****/***** if you’re an advanced DM with high agency players who’s not allergic to gonzo elements.
***/***** for the single session/con slot user or someone with more go-along to get-along players.
  An impressive adventure, I suspect it’s going to be the best of the reviewers’ modules. Worth checking out for anyone, as it’s free and fascinating.  

  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 wizard’s mansion by Daniel Herz, art by Dan Sousa, levels 1-3
Written for B/X (with houserules, natch).
  Here’s a first, someone sent me a reviewer copy for his new module. His marketing copy mentions keywords like “Classic Adventure Gaming” and “adventure site” so I’m sure I’m in a few Discords with Mr. Herz here, but I don’t know his tag and that’s good, I’m happy to review this and maintain objectivity. I can’t promise a review to everyone, but hey, I’ll at least look at it if you send me your stuff.
  And Slug House is quite the chunk to look at, too. A hefty 66-page (A5) document outlining an 82-room wizard mansion, there’s a lot here on this one. My personal bugaboo gets tickled on a formatting note, with single-column, but it’s got clean, solid language, standard bolding-and-italics for emphasis, and credited playtesters, promising. A generous helping of original art is also expanding the page count somewhat.
  I’ll discuss the art for a moment as an aside…it’s really good. I don’t feel qualified to judge art and I’m going to typically examine adventures based on how they run at the table, less their aesthetics, but Dan Sousa (contact linked in module) not only makes the fun and very colorful cover, but absolutely knocks it out of the park with the interior B&W pieces. Not an expert on these things and I’m not an Art Reviewer, but this stuff seems like it’ll really help convey scenes to players. Just look at what greets them as they enter the courtyard:

​  Our basic module plot isn’t going to shock anyone. Wizard has a mansion. Wizard likes experimenting with polymorphing. Wizard turns himself into a giant slug. Wizard’s home is taken over by experiments while he wanders the halls as a maddened slug. Wizard’s guards continue to hang out in the front area of the mansion, enjoying it as a hideout for low-level petty criminal activities. Hobbit moves in next door and opens bistro catering to the guard/bandit gang. Sorceress seduces gang leader and hangs out with her girls while bilking them dry. Everything here is perfect for a fine urban adventure site, established factions and motivations and everything else all delivered in a nicely organic fashion. As an aside, the author says in the intro blurb that this wizard house could also be set in the wilderness but no way, this is the most urban city adventure that has ever urban city’d. All to the good, just don’t lie to me able trying to place this in the middle of Mirkwood.
  Before I dive into the meat, a quibble about information organization…I like starting with a brief background and the factions, but the monster roster and system conversion notes being in the front while the maps are in the very back rankles my sense of order. It rankles, sir. Nothing fatal and probably better for a print product but it’s just an annoyance.
  The maps, once we find them, are quite good. Two-story main mansion and a basement beneath, decently spacious without being absurdly unrealistic. Everything is nice and clean, traps and doors clearly laid out with lock/secret door indicators only taking me about two seconds to grasp. There’s a nice flow throughout the mansion with plenty of loops both vertical and horizontal, clear zonal distinction, and some alternate means of ingress/egress. This thing works as a map and I’ll bet it’s not too hard on the mappers, either. 

  The initial entry to the mansion is that very nice open courtyard, which is open every day except for ​those sacred to the moon goddess (full moon and new moon), and less occupied in the rain. The aforementioned gang is still in their old barracks on the west side of the courtyard and they don’t mess with the main house, while the halflings have set up a restaurant on the east side that clings like a barnacle to the mansion and only connects via secret tunnel. There’s a well with sounds occasionally coming from it in the middle of the courtyard that leads to the basement, the main door is wizard-locked, and the gang’s barracks is pretty heavily occupied. I’d place bets that most groups default to getting in to the mansion via the halflings’ tunnel, because they want spices from the mansion’s garden (for a 6sp pittance). The NPCs are built so that they support long-term play over multiple sessions, with the courtyard as the typical starting area to be negotiated around each visit. Good setup, like an urban adventure version of the Keep in B2: Keep on the Borderland. Obviously, murder is always an option.

​  Once we get into the mansion past the courtyard (via secret doors, scaling ivy, well, tunnel, or main door, good variety), then we’re in “dungeon mode”, with the resultant random encounter rolls and all the rest. The random encounter table is nice and dynamic with lots of if-then stuff responding to player actions despite only having d8 entries, the only screw-you result is the titular slug-wizard himself, who is gigantic and vomits acid like a dragon’s breath weapon. The only mercy is that the first shot of the acid breath always misses because the slug is rangefinding…this is where I note that while the module is 1-3, the playtest apparently had 6-9 PCs, which means that yes, this sucker is going to melt some newbies. A lot of the combat for the module is generated by these random encounters (1d6 every two exploring turns, but a lot of noisy stuff provoking extra rolls), so the table is very important. Being a slug, salt is the preferred method of executing the dungeon boss with an average of nine pounds of it required to kill him off fast. Do you know how much salt costs in B/X? You’ll be figuring it out by the end of Slug House.
  The mansion, proper, is chock full of “weird wizard’s tower” type stuff. Oddball magic items that nevertheless feel natural and magical, often with costs that feel organic. For example, at the entry there’s a table with spaces for six magical bells, with a few of them missing (to be found elsewhere). Ringing them opens various doors or grants various nice magical effects, but of course that’s loud and so random encounter check is automatic. It’s good, and there are multiple effects like this.

​  Traps and magical effects are sparse, but typically make sense. Rotting floor drops you into the poop chute (and hey, more connectivity). In the upstairs there are a couple corridors with magical stairs, leading to one another. It’s basically a teleporter to open up the map, of course, but rather than being a magic circle or whatever, it’s just go up stairs in 39B, wind up landing in 38B. Smooth, naturalistic. Also covered with slug slime, gross touch that takes on real menace if slug-wizard-dude has already been encountered and melted Dave’s promising 17-strength fighter.
  Monsters are also a decent variety of challenges and types, from butterfly-stirges (they look like lovely calm butterflies, but they suck your blood), to skullhounds (hounds with skullfaces), to the usual mélange of bugs and undead and magic elementals and homunculi and That One Imp that you expect in an abandoned wizard home. Troglodytes snuck in from below and are just chillin’ in a couple places.  Outside of the slug himself there’s nothing too egregious for levels 2-3, I will once again reiterate that level 1s are going to sustain some losses.
   Our initial spiel informed us that there’s a total of 21,000gp in the whole mansion, but it’s wildly scattered around. There are the occasional parsimonious hauls of a couple dozen silver, there are tiled rooms where scraping all twenty-one decorative tiles yields up a little over 100gp, and then there are decent-size hauls like buried treasure under the back garden tree being worth a couple thousand. The biggest single chunk is in the basement’s vault with some nice magic items too, guarded by obvious locks and a subtle trap on the helm of telepathy. There’s a nice balance of risk=reward in most of the loot retrievals, with a few unguarded bits protected instead with obscuring stuff like a dirt-caked bell or a magic sword tucked under a moldy bed. Magic items that get identified get a long writeup in Appendix II, would be indulgent in the key but it’s nice in the back matter. Mr. Lynch will approve.
  The only other thing of note in the appendices is the very nice Appendix III, “Handouts”, which has a list of the fourteen notes that can be found while exploring the mansion. Just hand the PCs each one as it comes and you get a nice little in-world bit of story, also usually containing hints about what’s going on for the clever players to be either helped or go off on some quixotic quest extrapolating wrongly. Nice touch.

  As you can tell I’m sure I’m very impressed with the entirety of this module, it is a rollicking good time from top to bottom. My skepticism about sending in level 1’s and my scoffing about placing this in the wilderness aside, there really are no major misses. I like the aesthetics of course and the occasional dry wit that breaks through even the non-American English language, but I’m always first and foremost going to look at an adventure module for how it’s designed for table play, and this one is golden.
  Final rating of *****/*****, one of the finest city-based adventure sites I’ve ever seen. See it here.