Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Her Sun-Shattered Tears

A dungeon adventure by Sersa Victory, level 1
For Shadowdark RPG
  Dark Sun detected. It’s a Dark Sun adventure. Ignore what it says on the tin, the setting is literally Dark Sun with all the trademarks filed off…players are slaves of a Sorcerer-Queen who rules a city state in a desert world ravaged by a literal dark sun, metal is canonically rare, etc. Please ignore the fact that this eight-page ten-room dungeon could be reflavored effortlessly into any generic Shadowdark level 1 setting. It’s a fine flavor, at least.
  The plot is mostly ignorable, basically old temple is found, Sorcerer-Queen wants McGuffin from there, orders the party to go get the McGuffin. Furthering the railroad is a storygaming bit where the players are asked how they think their queen would reward success or punish failure, then the DM secretly chooses a low-level cleric buff and a mid-level wizard blast to bless or hit the player with if they succeed or fail on a luck token roll. The final bit of sadism is that the delve begins in media res with the PCs going down in a pit with a disintegrating solar storm behind them and a stern injunction that camping outside doesn’t work, while returning to the city empty-handed leads to the queen crucifying the entire party. I begin to realize with increasing distaste that the author has a bit too much…personal…identification with this Sorcerer-Queen character.
  Moving swiftly onward from that to what I liked, despite the unrelenting brutality that’s scaled way to high for first level, there are a few reasonably metal encounters on this one. A slimy naga critter that fights over a chasm, with a hint to a door-unlock riddle inside its translucent belly. A mini-colosseum with a golem that fights a Triceratops Ghoul, which has a +1 greataxe lodged in its frill. A fake idol that weeps Cloudkill. A corridor filled with disintegration mists that nevertheless allows glimpses of treasure room beyond. All these are decent.
  Then what can be improved? Unfortunately, sometimes an adventure in fact turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. The first issue, a common one in these itch.io adventures you’ll note, is one of scale. It’s a buried temple, come on, let’s just quintuple the scale here at least…the map’s cramped nature makes it all a lot more linear than it should be, it’s also more linear than it even looks alas. The brutality also wants a higher-level party, this should be a bigger space and a level 3-4 adventure, which of course would hurt the “you are all slaves being railroaded” premise…just have to jettison that, tragic. Although the module gets a point for having a random encounter table, it gets immediately deducted for being dull and half of the encounters being noninteractive. Bad module, no cookie. The magic items also are all pretty videogamey except for the one crown that lets you once in a lifetime kill a ruler, no save, magically on the next full moon. More of that, less of “power-up healing ball of light”.
  The best use case for this one is to say to the Whizzard “no, we shall not enter your magical realm” and instead just maybe steal the idea of an undead triceratops with an axe in its frill. The whole affair comes off as needlessly adversarial, much to the unpleasant glee of the designer.
  Final Rating? */***** With a vaguely sour feeling, we know that Shadowdark can produce better results than this.

---