Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Fever Black Mountain

​A dungeon by Nate Treme, level 1.
Written for Vanilla Game
  Today, we start with a quote from the best of all types of bestiary…the ancient type. Pliny the Elder on The Manticore, in this case, which makes me think positive things about how you’re approaching your monsters, and negative things about your levels of pretentiousness. A dozen pages (with generous whitespace) are herein used to describe a simple nine-room dungeon stocked with not just a manticore, but also with five or six other random rolls of story-cubes. Public domain art mostly focused on manticores spices up what is otherwise a very dry single-column presentation. It’s not flashy, but that just helps us focus on the content, right?
  The content is...somewhat random. Up in the hot hills where magical fever spreads, there’s this petrified manticore. He’s being fed blood by these monks to stop him from waking up. Also there’s hummingbirds, centipede men, black-eyed kids, and skull candles, two of the four of which just straight up fight. The locals forsake this whole mess, but in a charming note we’re told they love sending adventurers up into the hills because better strangers get eaten than Neighbor Bob.
  In addition to that note what I liked was the slightly random inclusion of skulls with candles on top...the four skulls have a table with six entries (?) to tell who the skull was in life, when the candle is lit the skull can communicate…that’s cool. The idea of being up on this mountain that magically inflicts a fever is good, albeit rather punitive for first level PCs. I do like that The Manticore is no “a manticore”, although…
  What can be improved is first and foremost to MAKE YOUR LEGENDARY MONSTER REQUIRING CONSTANT DAILY BLOOD SACRIFICE MORE THAN 5HD. Aiming this premise at level 1 in general is a mistake, there’s a lot that’s just squished down in scope because of that lowbie aim, it’d be improved a lot by being levels 4-6. A similar improvement would be roughly doubling the size of the dungeon, it’s a pretty claustrophobic environment (even assuming 10ft squares but of course there’s no scale provided). More characterization of the sentient inhabitants of the dungeon would also come in handy, too…give us some motivations, some factions, some reasons to converse beyond “die”. Alternatively, if you like the scope to be smaller, cut. There’s nothing wrong with an adventure site to bumble onto, but if this is aimed to be a small nine-roomer, then it’s overstuffed. I don’t know about expected treasure values for Vanilla Game but if you’re going to claim compatibility with “other analogous games” you also need more cash money.
  As it is, the best use case for this is to mine it for the couple cute ideas, the candle-skulls and monster-petrified-needing-blood-feeding are both fine. Running it straight up feels like an exercise in frustration, alas.
  Final Rating? */***** because it’d frankly be more entertaining to all sit down together to and read Pliny the Elder straight up. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. 

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