Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Pyx’s Pandemonium Pit

​A dungeon adventure by David Harvison, level [whatever can handle a mummy].
System neutral, let’s just assume Cairn.
  Yo, it’s the return of the One-Page Dungeon. A crossword-based OPD was good, so this can’t be too bad, right? As I said in my very first itch review, “As somebody who runs a lot of open-table sandboxes, little lairs like this are great for placing in hexes for a session-sized chunk of D&D just discoverable on the map. Ideally, a good one-pager presents a scenario that meshes well with the rest of the world but has its own little story going on, giving whoever showed up at the table a nice little bite-sized chunk of classic gaming for the night.” This little thing uses an eight-room Dyson map with admirable verticality and impressive nonlinearity, so it should be perfect, right?
  Everything in this site should be working a lot better than it is. It’s a very tight little site, a couple open pits with a bunch of interconnected caves…very possibly the best map for its size I’ve ever seen out of Dyson Logos, a place that would be brilliant for procedural, map-as-you-go dungeon exploration play. Put a couple dozen kobolds down here, I’d have no problem turning this place into a fun 2-3 hour session. And yet, what is actually here are a bunch of extremely high-level monsters, and even though only one set (3d6(!) “zombie ghouls”) are immediate attackers, the designer does expect the party will fight most if not all of them. Every monster down in the pit has a yellow exclamation point over its head, a little quest to fulfil, and one expected to be completed by grinding in this little zone. The main questline is that the demon Pyx down near the bottom needs quest components from other rooms to be freed from his imprisonment. If he’s given sufficient donkey hooves (not joking), he’s free and then treacherously attacks. I’m not joking.
  Okay, so what I liked here beyond the great (squandered) map is that its heart is clearly in the right place. Having multiple sentient monsters in your dungeon with desires and goals is excellent and should be the default. There’s not a lot of drop-in support to the site, but the hag in (6) explicitly has “certainly something your party seeks!”, which is exactly the hook you’d want for a plot-coupon style game. A tiny random encounter table does have a rival party, nice. Finally, I’ve decided I do like the one trap (although it’s not telegraphed)…stairway turns into a slippery slide, sends hapless victims hurtling down the well into a rotating secret door, deposits them in the middle of those 10.5 zombie ghouls. Nasty, but fun.
  Thus, what can be improved is…so very much. I suspect this was not playtested, in playtest for example you get a picture of how to telegraph that trap, or else actionable reactions after it gets triggered. More traps would be nice. The WoW-esque “quests” are a little clumsy, but having NPCs with goals is good, better to make it organic and think about how actual conversations could reveal the goals. The open-pit design of the map also makes fly and other similar spells game-breaking, but the monster choices call for a mid-level party, the whole place would benefit from being populated with 1-4 HD monsters instead. Finally, there’s a lot of multi-level interactions in the form of ledges, a little tactical or exploration thinking would really make those areas pop.
  I’m grumpy. The best use case for Pyx’s Pandemonium Pit is probably stripping out that map and making it a hex spot populated entirely by random tables. It’ll be okay in a plot-coupon style of game where the hag’s “insert McGuffin here” is what the railroad conductor needs for a night. Just such a waste.
  Final Rating? */***** even on the OPD curve it’s disappointing. 

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