Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Lair of the Mutant

A dungeon adventure by The Nameless Designer, level 1
For Heroes of Adventure (writer’s own heartbreaker system)
  Here’s another slick production of an adventure, and another introductory adventure, but unlike Ashes of the Sea this is more-or-less a one-man show (with a lot of AI cycles dedicated to the Midjourney art at least). The Lair of the Mutant uses 16 pages to describe a 38-room dungeon along with intro and outro sections and a compact bestiary, loot tables, etc. The somewhat pretentiously named Nameless Designer is out there working hard on his own self-described Fantasy Adventure Game, producing it all for free apparently. I’m not here to judge the system, but I’m going to give props for this person at least having ambition and doesn’t seem to be trying to make money from his brainchild either. Laudable heart here, although the output isn’t dripping with originality. I did chuckle at the term “semi-compatible” with OSR systems.
  So you start as caravan guards wagon occupants on the way to the author’s Fortress on the Wild Frontier main adventure. Yes, it is a keep on a borderland. But now you are asked to help find a farmer and his boy that were taken to the nearby, um, Moat House. Yeah, I was alarmed at this point too…but what follows is a little weirder than the screaming “derivative” signs so far. The moat house is largely empty but underneath its swarming with giant ants who want to feed the kid you’re rescuing to the Giant Mutant Chaos Ant Mom (making this the lair…of a mutant). While the players explore the dungeon, which is more “hub and spokes” than “loops” in its map, there are NPCs to pick up, ant poison stuff to find, and at least a few secret passages to find. Vast majority of the encounters will be “they attack” stuff, but there’s some thought given to more creative obstacle-overcoming. It seems designed for about two sessions’ play.
  What I liked on this one is mostly the side-bits. A lot of effort went into making NPCs with (admittedly generic) distinct personalities, the side-stuff to poison or otherwise weaken the ant queen before confronting her is cool, and there are very flavorful quest hooks for further adventures scattered throughout the adventure. The author makes a point to make objectives, flow, and situations extremely clear, which is refreshing compared to some recent things I’ve read. The bullet pointing, while a bit excessive in places, does do a good job of highlighting the “things I should notice” part of each room. The sharp veer from “caravan guards investigate moat house” to “hunting giant ants in hot tunnels” is a welcome hint of the weird. It can be a fun session or two of gaming.
  This means what can be improved easily suggests itself while reading. Look at the farmhouse location…it’s a simple little farmhouse where giant ants took a farmer and his kid. This is not a location that needs a five-room map with keys, this is a place that can be quickly described with the cute little Midjourney art illustrating it, and bullet point the clues. That’s a good example of what feels like filler in this adventure, places where slavish adherence to the trad game WotC/Paizo format just leads to too many words for just stabbing a giant spider or whatever. The writer also clearly understands that it’s boring to just be a hack with the NPCs to free and alternate ways to kill/weaken the mutant ant queen…but unfortunately there’s also a lot of pure hacking in the main body of the tunnel. I have no idea of the endurance of this system’s level 1s, but it seems like it’ll really tax low level resources. The map, while well-meaning and with some verticality, could also benefit with a few more exploratory features. Alternate routes are good, but alternatives to fighting are even better.
  A best use case on this one is probably to use it as a very generic introduction to fantasy TTRPG gaming in this well-made indie system…which isn’t me being condemning, new players really do benefit from having vanilla starts. But it’s not nearly as deep as Bristleback Burrow’s 6 pages, nor even as engaging as say What Little Remains’ single page. And of course if you’re going to start out and adventure in a moat house, there’s a very old classic that plays so much better…so in the end, if you want to play this Heroes of Adventure system, grab the pregens and the bestiary from this and go for something older instead.
  Final Rating? **/***** A for effort, but just play the first volume of Temple of Elemental Evil. 

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Why is this keyed?