Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… It’s Simple, We Kill the Sandy Claws

​A sneaky adventure by Operant Game Lab, lowish levels.
Written for “most fantasy adventure TTRPGs”.
  Happy New Year everyone, should I be nervous? Another holiday adventure, this time a one-pager, statless, systemless…It’s Simple, We Kill the Sandy Claws is an infiltration/social adventure the keys the twelve rooms of a manor where a psychopathic magical tween ruler is hosting a party and intends to capture and kill Santa Claus because of coal in the previous year’s stocking. It’s short, punchy, to the point, and assumes that adventurers are there to actually play the game, so it’s a million times better than the last one. This makes it maybe slightly okay.
  Plot is charmingly conveyed, tiny hamlet is being ruled by one Greta Fernsby, who can transmute people into objects at will. She hosts a “mandatory Christmas Eve party”, which is a great phrase that tells us everything we need to know about her character in four words. The manor, nicely shown in this solid 3D map, has secret areas and a wandering monster (Greta being the monster) table that enables the party-going PCs to “party crawl” through the area, discovering interesting things and ideally discovering a method of thwarting the capture, caging, and death by exposure of Santa Claus. Or, hijinks that ensue for looting the single big piece of loot in the manor, a huge and unwieldy golden statue. Open-ended, interesting, and very active location.
  What I liked in this little OPD was the language first and foremost…every character mentioned has a single adjective organically sprinkled into the description the perfectly tells the DM how to run the interaction. Every word is chosen carefully, and the details are great…every item has a 1-in-6 chance to be a transmuted victim, faintly psychically screaming. Despite the small size, the scenario has a lot of possible directions and playstyles supported, and the map has multiple methods of ingress and egress, plus the all-important loops, despite it being portrayed in more of a diagram style than at literal floorplan.
  Surprisingly one thing that I won’t list under what can be improved is the adventure’s scale. For a one-shot, the OPD size is precisely correct in this case. It’s a simple, goofy scenario, let it ride. What could be improved would be slightly better railroad tracks, some offered idea(s) on how to resolve the intractable problem of an all-powerful nightmare brat attempting to murder Santa Claus…this can be ignored of course, but in a one-shot some objectives aren’t unwise. Santa Claus is also a little under-characterized, ironically. This might also shock some of you, but honestly this could be also improved by making this a more storygame system, rather than “general OSR”.
  In case it isn’t clear, the best use case for It’s Simple, We Kill the Sandy Claws is as a Christmas-themed one-shot. It’s madcap and strange, so not much to mine from it and of course you don’t stick it into your sprawling campaign. It knows what it is.
  Final Rating? **/***** because it’s limited, but it’s as good as a wacky holiday one-shot can be.