Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… The Barrows Hunger

​A set of dungeonlets by Brent Edwards, levels are for the unenlightened.
…because yup, written for Cairn
  I’m used to experiencing familiar emotions when reading a Cairn adventure. Annoyance. Boredom. Ennui. Contempt. Bafflement. In The Barrows Hunger, Brent Edwards takes nineteen laborious pages over nine 1-5 room Dyson maps to induce in me an unusual emotion for the system…disappointment.
  Right, so we got nine little barrows, easily one of the least inspiring of the free Dyson maps…useful enough for your VTT if you’ve rolled a random lair result overland, but nothing that encourages exploratory play in each individual site. All nine are reimagined here as a set of fake burial mounds that are actually the nine heads of a vast buried hydra, six of which are dead, three of which are still semi-alive and are looking for meat, using their malleable claylike saliva to generate facsimiles of loot to entice tomb-robbers. A cultist worshipping the hydra runs a sad ramshackle “museum” of a fake fallen empire, telling stories about the nine rulers presumably interred with the barrows (surprisingly detailed) and encouraging the adventurous to get themselves et. This flash of admittedly complicated creativity is followed up by page after page of fake treasure and explosive spit monsters.
  As should be obvious what I liked are the bizarre flashes of creativity…most of the time. There’s something neat about adventuring within portions of a slumbering/dying/quiescent gargantuan giga-monster, that’s a good idea. The only two pieces of magical loot in the adventure are nifty, a linked pair of black glass daggers that attack together and especially the calcified lens of one of the hydra’s eyes that can be used as a shield, it grants views a split second into the future, imposing disadvantage on attackers. Now that is a magic item, whew. I kinda liked the museum curator/cultist guy…it’s kind of touching that he really does care for the hydra, desperately trying to help one of the dying heads by tending to it every night. The brief summary of the nine fictional rulers purported to be buried in the barrows isn’t just worldbuilding fluff, but clearly gameable as smart players will definitely ask about that. Good bits.
  There is, however, a long list of what can be improved that’s mostly the unpleasant stuff, and the underbaked stuff. I know it’s Cairn, where the levels are made up and the loot don’t matter, but the whole area is essentially a cruel bait-and-switch designed to inflict nothing but pain and disappointment on the characters. The adaptive hydra spit engulfs and hardens, and then explodes if cracked, all presented as just pure anti-player mechanics. Loot is terrible mostly, the only valuable bits really beyond the aforementioned calcified lens are from previously tricked adventurers. Feels bad, very choked. There’s a real lack of incident in the encounters, the bad loot is coupled with “screw-you” traps…trap-heavy dungeons can be good, but more telegraphing would improve the play a lot. Finally, that previously mentioned gameable background being better integrated in the barrows would be a huge improvement.
  Awkward to find a best use case here. The highly flavorful premise means the barrows are useless as independent lairs/sites, but the whole thing is a little uninspiring to play. Might be that the best takeaway is that “buried and dying kaiju as a dungeon” initial seed and then go write something with interesting cartography and better interaction.
  Final Rating? */***** makes it about average for Cairn but that’s about all that can be said.

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