Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Dead Crab for Booty

​A pirate dungeon by Adrian Daine, no level listed.
Written for Pirate Borg (A Mörk Börg hack)
  Yar. Marstar Daine, lovar of buried treasurar and giant crabs, herein uses roughly ten pages to describe a gorgeous twenty-room isometric seaside cave map drawn by Kyle Latino (released under creative commons). The title is great, love the pun…but I’m going to have to take a while to emotionally process the fact that there’s an ecosystem of “Börglikes” out here now. Okay, life is pain, accept this, now on to our review of the play Our American Cousin.
  Very standard goth-metal pirate hack story. Evil pirate captain, who is basically Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, found an evil ancient artifact linked to Bog Standard Lovecraft Entity #4,281, took it back to his lair, Deep Ones erupted from the depths and slaughtered all his crew, so now you have aforementioned piece-of-art/map explained as random sea stuff taking over. Davy Jones is in his crab-lair with a key, nasty object is in random room, send in the clowns.
  Alright, what I liked is that there’s at least an attempt at making this place more than a hack…Deep Ones are kind of just bros unless the PCs are carrying the Evil Thingy, there’s a sad scared pirate named Tubbs, and even Davy Jones is willing to talk in some circumstances. Good. Multiple means of egress to the dungeon, which is important. Starved of rigorous random encounter procedures, some rooms nevertheless understand that encounters need to happen if players are faffing about too much. One of the pictures also inspired a fun bit of interaction, an undead turtle with a nice sword buried in it; take out the sword, turtle reanimates. Tiny bit of fun.
    It pains me to say it, but the first of what can be improved? Ditch the map. It’s a great piece of pretty artwork but it’s a trash exploratory design, just being a tree with branches, and not particularly clearly indicated branches either. There are also far far too many question marks and politely-worded suggestions. You’re the adventure, you tell me that there’s an encounter here, don’t lightly hem and haw that perhaps d4 Deep Ones should show up if the referee should feel like it on a day ending with “Y”. My earlier nice talk aside, most of the (very dense) encounters in here are also just “they attack” which is disappointing. Telegraphing that the random treasure room contains a sanity-destroying evil artifact would also be a good improvement.
  So the best use case for this thing is as a lair within your long-running (heh) campaign (heh heh) of Pirate Borg (gak). There are no innovative bits or pieces to take, really, so I guess you just put down the Kyle Latino art piece map and wait for the applause to roll in from the players?
  Final Rating? */***** but that might make it the single great Pirate Borg adventure ever written, I don’t know. 

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