Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Monastery of the Mellified Monks

​An “adventure site” by David Harvison, levels 3-5.
Written for OSE
  Oh goody. OSE, actual level range given, Dyson map without weirdo colors, spiel calls it an adventure site…in the dreck-mines of itch.io, there are all great signs. My ardor cools somewhat when I see that it’s a fifteen-page document for a dungeon with seven keys (I think it’s officially a 5-room dungeon map), but at least the author has used that generous page space on clear wide fonts, nice cute little art bits, and sidebars that are actually helpful. Rather than the desperate arthaus style, this is just something that looks…nice. Worthwhile goal. This thing is almost like an Adventure Site Contest entry, just flabby and uncut.
  The eponymous monastery doesn’t actually appear in this adventure, but rather the monks’ mellification (turning corpses into honey) cave is the focus, a spot where they embalm devotees in their honey to make magical healing corpse-honey (whew), a nasty swarm of “vulture-bees” have invested the cave and killed a lot of the monks, which leads to place’s current situation. A nice set of hooks and rumors lead the players to the cave with variable levels of clued-in-ness, and thus begins tonight’s D&D adventure. Hope you like weapon-immune swarms, because they sure like you.
  Man, what I liked is a lot in here…the premise is creative but grounded, and your reward being extremely valuable honey made of long-dead monks is great stuff. Face-masks and torch-based fumigators as the “special items” picked up early works nicely, although I’m not sure how well fumigation will work in combat. No proper traps exist, but there’s a combination of natural hazards (rickety bridges) with nasty gotchas (zombie-honey-monks in crypts) that fulfils the trap place in everybody’s heart. The custom monsters are a mixed bag, but the bee-breathing bear corpse is a fun one (and very deadly potentially). Bonus half-point for an alternate exit in the water feature, albeit abstracted to “miles away”.
  Really what can be improved mostly comes down to editing. It’s not quite right for scale…there are a few too many hacky fights, and not enough other interactions, for what’s essentially a 5-room dungeon. There’s actually the faintest whiff of the “Five Room Formula”: Guardian Challenge-> Puzzle or Roleplaying-> Trick/Setback-> Climax/Bossfight->Reward/Revelation. That’s not a terrible formula, and notice how the ratio of fights vs. other interaction goes. The weaker elements like the honey-zombies and “yet another swarm of bees” would be better if they weren’t automatic hackfests. Alternately, if the author wanted this many fights, a bigger map would have helped. A third option, if the map was a must, would be to add a little wandering movement to the place, which as a loop with a lower water feature definitely would support that dynamism.
  All that said, best use case is to plop this adventure site into your hexmap or to run this as an independent one-shot, despite the shortfalls this will be a fun, flavorful time. The ideas and mechanics of mellification, corpse-honey, bee-bears, etc are all good ideas for raiding too.
  Final Rating? ***/***** for a simple but slightly above-average adventure…which of course makes this one of the pinnacles of itch.io module design.

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