Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Harold Black’s Creature Emporium

​A crossword adventure by Templar’s Tabletop, levels are for posers.
Written system-agnostic.
  Do you have a Fantasy Metropolis? Is it cosmopolitan, urbane, and somehow culturally 2024? Do you also have nostalgia for malls and pet shops? Well then here’s the anachronism for you, Harold Black’s Magic Creature Emporium, a “dungeon” built from a crossword puzzle that takes twelve landscape-format (!) pages to describe a nine-room magical animal shop. It’s…weird.
  So there’s a classic type of mini-dungeon, the Wizard’s Tower. It’s a trope for a reason, mysterious magical old guys need their lairs, and having the excuse “a wizard did it” means the designer can put in all manner of silly magical traps or puzzles, with the justification that “hey, he’s a weird dude”. The Wizard’s Tower has two primary modes, one where the wizard is absent, in which case it’s a funhouse dungeon, or one where the wizard is present, in which case it’s a tight, focused heist working around a dangerous “busted” case that can mean utter disaster for a party. This module is a subset of the Wizard’s Tower, Ye Olde Magical Shoppe…all around this fellow Harold Black who is secretly siphoning magical critter essence while selling pets at his shop. Motivation for a player character B&E is left as an exercise to the reader, despite hooks being pretty easy with the premise. Which makes this product disturbingly onanismistic, but this is itch.io baby, so nothing new…
  I guess what I liked was that there were a couple of abused minions to talk to as well as a captured tiger who hates Harold as the win button. The obvious path to burglars, the shop’s window display, has a nasty trap so that’s good. Vague as they are, the adventure does offer hooks to further adventure in the form of a mystical magical otter giving a psychic treasure map or a journal of fantastic beasts and where to find them. Map layout is fine.
  Oh but what can be improved is that aforementioned vagueness…eliminate it. No system is given, no stats, which means that I for instance has zero idea how Harold is supposed to be run…you could stat him in OSE, in Cairn, in Pathfinder, in 5E, or heck, even in Werewolf the Apocalypse and I know how I could convert him to use in my preferred system. As it is, you’ve given us the idea of an animal-power-grabbing man but there’s nothing given for how it works in any game system…and then to double-down on this sin, there’s no procedure or thought given to where the wizard is in his shop at any given time of day. A Wizard’s Tower is a heist if he’s at home, so location is critical. I could do so much more critique, but this is such an overweening sin that it’s hard to focus on anything else. In Harold’s Quarters (8): “…the party finds gold here.”
  What’s the use, then? The best use case is as a tiny little bit-stealing mine, maybe taking the magic animal-power-stealing pool, maybe using the trap? If you have a cosmopolitan metropolis fantasy anachronism city, first of all shame on you, but secondly I guess that means you can put this in the city-crawl.
  Final Rating? */***** This isn’t an adventure; this is somebody telling you vaguely of their adventure outline. 

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