Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… At the River’s Edge

​An adventure setting by Brett Sullivan & Fern Cliff Studio, levels unlisted.
Written for “your favorite OSR system”
  The very first thing I noticed about At the River’s Edge was its size. No, not its page count, a modest eight pages. Nor the somewhat odd choice to do it in big A3 landscape pages. No, what staggered me is the fact that the download tipped the scales at a zaftig 142 MB. That’s practically Brobdingnagian. How? Why? Well, I believe the answer lies within its beautiful but completely uncompressed layers, relentlessly working over beautiful maps and dense tables to deliver a bucolic overgrown river valley full of adventure…at least, that’s the plan.
  This thing is gorgeous. Don’t see a specific artist credited so of course now that means we have to assume AI art, but the maps and evocative illustrations are all very cohesive and genuinely wonderful to see. The region map is colorful and flavorful but also admirably ease to parse…the hex version should be used as an example for how best to map a little region. But. There’s a single line of text on the page with the hexed map, and that’s “1 hex = _____”. There’s no scale given, instead, that’s something you’re supposed to fill in for yourself, no matter how radically different one-mile hexes are vs. six-miles hexes. This is how everything is done…the ruins? Abstracted, roll on tables. The one dungeon, an actually mapped elemental location known as the Ice Cavern? Loot is random from table, encounters are random from a table, source of the magical ice is random (yes, d6 table). Settlements are the same way except for the central hub, a little river trading hub…led by a genderless (you choose) leader who is nefarious or good (roll on table for secret motives).
  As you can tell, what I liked is basically everything that the author(s) put down firmly. The docks settlement I talked about? It’s well-designed for actually adventuring in, a rarity for TTRPG settlement maps…not only does it have buildings, but it also has secret cellar beneath the inn, with a smuggling passage that leads out to the nearby forest, a watchtower that is designed to be snuck around, an ice house that points to the nearby dungeon, and a political situation rife with opportunities. There’s a potential here for the very highest type of D&D, hexcrawling in the wilderness, I like way some of these tables would shape the campaign. Individual table entries can be very creative too, like the ruin treasures of Ogre tusk(?) daggers, stone tablets to appease the nature faction, giant otter-skin cloak allowing swimming, and a pebble with a sigil that casts a tiny blue light, very fun. The settlement creation tools are nice too, prone to make Places With Problems as you would expect and hope for. I like the regional backstory, too, basically being the site of the centuries-past battle that ended the ogre threat to the Old Empire, now both are withdrawn.
  Ergo, what can be improved is to give more solidity. I don’t think having settlement generators or ruin generators are a bad idea at all, and I’ll even say these are pretty good ones, but having the settlement half-finished and the ice cavern dungeon half-finished lost a lot in their value. You have beautiful maps and beautiful tables, but in the practical moments while everyone is crunching chips and chugging Mt. Dew while the game goes on…there’s a usability gap. The maps, while pretty, are also very DM-centric and not quite designed to be handouts, maybe the hexmap as a gray area. Basically, expending a little more effort, like two more pages (an extra gigabyte, I know), you could have this as something to run well out the gate as well as having those solid tools. This would also relieve the pressure on those big random tables, allowing the meh entries to get cut in favor of smaller tables with the gold retained. There’s also the issue of the OSR tag with miserable amounts of treasure…this is an easy fix, ye writers, just give more sources of XP.
  The best use case of this thing is probably to run a sandbox campaign, even with all those above caveats. Homework assignment is a lot more onerous than I’d usually recommend, but there’s the nucleus of a very fun little campaign in this, particularly with a canny user who knows to throw out the chaff rolls and keep the wheat. Stripping out the settlement and ruin generators would also be a lot of value for the theoretical user, quite a high quality for the scope.
  Final Rating? ****/*****, while not perfect, there’s a heck of a lot here for the discerning DM to use. Great value to be found here.

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Perfectly showing both the good and the bad.