Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Tannic

​A forest point crawl* by Amanda P, levels 1-3
For Cairn or OSE.
*Hexmap and minidungeon
  I didn’t set out to find the precise opposite of last week’s adventure, but boy howdy did I find it…Tannic is a 36 page(!) digest adventure where the PCs are presumably charmed by the twee little village of Tannic into finding three lost teens, located in a six-room dungeon “ten hours away” on a teeny hexcrawl map that’s getting called a point crawl. The idyllic little region is untroubled by anything beside a burned-down second village and the tomb of the old local lords, so no points for guessing where the teens have gone. The adventure has a ton of very detailed filler, including festival games, relationships of villagers to two of the missing teens (nobody loved the other one), and what feels like a hundred pages of Forestry Service plant pictures. There certainly are plenty of specific names. This thing claims to be good for a single session or two if the players are particularly inefficient.
  My initial interest in a 36-page regional adventure cooled somewhat when I noticed the ‘zine sizing and 36-point font. Er…fonts. There’s a somewhat random assortment of formatting decisions here, a lot of bolding and bullet points and plenty of description, but then there’s things like one of the lost teens not being pointed out in the bolding. It’s a well-meaning product with cute little hand-drawn illustrations and cartography, and layout might be baffling, but I was never completely lost. There are some monster stats in the back for both Cairn and OSE, but then there are also notes like a bunch of haunted bog iron having “stats as gelatinous cube”, which should certainly be a confusing fight. Although it’s 1d6+1 of them against level ones, so I guess your players won’t be confused for long. There’s a weird running theme, which I know isn’t due to OSE so I’m blaming Cairn, of drinking random and unsafe water, including nasty brown water in a tomb? The best I’ll say is that this adventure communicates a vibe.
   
​  There’s some of what I liked in the vibe, nothing wrong with a New Jersey Pine Barrens adventure. Its heart is in the right place with the NPCs, both villagers and monsters, all having motivations and personalities, I don’t think a single thing here is just “they attack!” Specific names are all given for most of the characters a party expects to bump into, which helps in the running. The last two teens are charmed by an undead guy, nifty final confrontation potential there. Treasure, while hilariously stingy, is generally quirky and interesting.
  When I get to what can be improved, I get confused a bit. The tomb map for all its tiny size tries to have loops and multiple ingress points, but as it is the alternate paths don’t allow for bypassing anything. The product honestly more than anything else suffers from too much space to play with…cut this thing from 36 pages to 18, and I think not only do you have tighter descriptions, but you have more uniformity of formatting, too (things like having the dungeon map shown twice, once before the keys, once after, just feel like space filler). Bullet points occasionally being used is tasteful, but when everything is bullets it feels choppy…this is another case where simple narrative two-column formatting not only saves space, but also makes the writing flow better. Also, if you’re going to advertise something compatible with gold=XP like B/X (OSE), you need to have treasure values higher. This doesn’t make this a great adventure, but it makes it at least average.
  The best use case for this thing is to help in discouraging someone from playing Cairn.
  Okay, that’s mean, the best use case for the actual content is pulling out the bits, there are a few nice encounters that I could see myself adding to a random encounter table (although interestingly, none of them are in the random encounter table). Unfortunately, “runaway teens” adventures are about as common as “goblins in a hole”, so I can’t see myself really favoring this one.
  Final rating? */***** in OSE. It’s probably a *****/***** Cairn adventure, I dunno there.

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