Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Dungeon of the Rusting Throne

​A dungeon adventure by Emiel Boven, “low-level”.
Written for DURF.
  Holidays are over, it’s back to the grindstone, so how better to convey the feeling of eating slightly stale candy canes than to look at this red/white two-pager, tastefully accented by yellow text giving the whole affair a mildly stained look. Dungeon of the Rusting Throne is another example of the inexplicable itch.io impulse to gussy up Dyson maps by color-reversing them, which destroys the one advantage that using a Dyson actually conveys, namely that his maps are extremely easy to read. The adventure itself is a very standard dungeon crawl, written for a heartbreaker system (DURF) that I gather exists somewhere on the light-rules spectrum, just title/map front page and (landscape-formatted) key and random encounter d3 “table”. Fair enough.
  Nobody is going to be shocked by the story of this place. It’s a tomb, watched over by a slightly insane Caretaker, who wants to kill an interloping giant spider. The eponymous rusting throne is a magical cursed chair over a rusting bridge that hates all gear (damaging all non-precious metals with a worn status). There are the expected skeletons, golem, spider, and wandering cave slugs to hack at along with animated tapestries and a clear ooze to also hack at. Some “mess with stuff” does exist but outside of the Caretaker nobody’s talking.
  Now what I liked were some of the non-hacky details scattered here and there. The treasure is interesting, urns and prayer tablets and goblets and offering-gems and a giant pearl, generally requiring some gameplay to acquire (e.g., the tablets are stuck in skeletons that animate when looted, urns have a chance to break in combat, etc). Magic sword is +1 and “can cut through wood like butter”, magic boots walk on water, nice. While not exactly loaded with exploratory content, the stream running through the map gives some nice alternate routing. Recognizable D&D can be played here.                 
  I’ve got to say it, the first of what can be improved is give us a black-and-white map. Goodness, this shouldn’t be hard, it's about readability.  If you’re bound and determined to continue with the two-pager format, that’s fine, but the smaller font on one key shows me that you can expand more with those little details, having a few traps and a little more meta-puzzling, like with the half-rusted bridge and the portcullis on the river between 7 and 9, would go a long way. The general critique is that this is just a “hack monster to death” adventure, when it really didn’t have to be…make that giant spider sentient and talk as well, then you have a rivalry between two factions, each with resources to help with, each with goals, as there’s a whole new dimension of play available. Another sentence of thinking on the eponymous rusting throne wouldn’t go amiss, either.
  As is, best use case for this is probably as a tomb or crypt, albeit a hacky and simple one. Not a lot of individual bits here to steal are particularly innovative, alas.
  Final Rating? */***** because it hurt my eyes and didn’t make it up with anything better than random table generated encounters.