Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Down and Out in Schleswig Sanatorium

​A “dungeon” by Rugose Kohn, no level listed.
Written for Mörk Börg
  Roughly 2.931 seconds after hearing the premise of Mörk Börg, an infinite number of monkeys began hammering away on an infinite number of yellow-painted typewriters with a single solitarily mission statement: “Make a messy splattergore adventure set in a totally metal sanitorium.” The one of those monkeys? Rugose Kohn, who spends fourteen pages describing elevenish rooms (some abstracted) in a big city’s horrible corrupted sanitorium. It’s formatted in a deliberately ugly manner, randomly splayed out in twisted bullet-point lists that are as incomprehensible as they are dull. Map is highly abstract. Let’s see if the RMG (random-monkey-generator) made anything new…
  The plot, which I think you already know instinctively, is that your Borgs are going into this sanatorium (full of the insane and also the king’s “rivals, family members, and rival family members”) because of (d4) waking up there committed/visiting a friend/hired to rescue a child/going to grab an artifact in the basement. The inmates are running the asylum and one guy is using said child to open up a portal to the (a?) plane of death, which will turn everyone into zombies. Room contents in the main floor of the sanitorium are randomly rolled. Also there’s an evil washing machine.
  Right, what I liked was that one joke about the family rivals. The “washingmachinemouth” monster/portal to the Plane of Infinite Sewer was needlessly convoluted but the fact that it can be used in the classic “bag-of-holding/portable hole” scenario to disrupt the aforementioned portal to the plane of death. Not bad. It’s easy to miss, but there is a random encounter chance. Otherwise…not much.
  As you’d expect, what can be improved is…most of it. There’s nothing incredibly wrong with the scenario on its face, but the first thing is to playtest your adventure. This is clearly an art project being sold, but pity the poor Murk Burgling that tries to actually use this to play a game. Rather than having random tables, a product of this scale should just give exact numbers on the fixed encounters. Likewise, rather than having a random timer until Bad Guy Summons the Thing, have a fixed timer, ideally with some effects telegraphing it. Obviously, the map (DRINK) could use less abstraction, a building in a city should have multiple places to enter and exit, but there’s no thought given to that on the “map”. Which once again shows the complete lack of playtesting, because even the most drunk/high pack of metalhead Borglings will still ask about climbing the bricks.
  Thus, a best use case for this cannot really be found. It’s unusable as an adventure and it’s offensive aside, not offensive in terms of gore descriptions or insane patients dancing naked but just offensive in how little it wants to be actually used to run a session. Parts aren’t really harvestable, either. Just sad.
  Final Rating? */***** of course. Only because I’m saving zero stars for something that gives me an active headache.

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