Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… The Hidden Fête of the Krakonspiracy

​A dungeon adventure by Michael Dingler, levels 2-4.
Written for OSE.
  Driven by a passion for the circumflex, with a watery hub-and-spokes style Dyson map in hand, Mike Dingler had a vision, one of secret shapeshifters and hidden councils. Fourteen pages gets us thirty keyed rooms along with an introduction, a rumor table, random encounters, and a little bestiary, all written in the nicely standard “paragraphs with bolding” style. The somewhat sprawling map is supplemented by little subsections reproduced on the relevant keys’ pages, possibly more than needed considering the linearity but it’s a nice touch. Well-formatted adventure.
  The story of the dungeon is that an “Ur-krakon” is hanging out amidst some semi-sunken ruins, dreaming cosmic dreams. The beasts’ mere presence is enough to empower a bunch of sea critters, letting them shapeshift to infiltrate land-dweller society in some sort of…Krakonspiracy. The initial plot is hooked by the rumor table but peters out towards latter half of the zone, but the big krakon dominates everything there, so that’s nice. A couple teleporters, one requiring a secret bad guy badge, have the potential to radically shift an ongoing campaign on a deep level. Also bumping the krakon once gets the offender sleepily slapped, but bumping it twice wakes the big guy up, a region-level disaster at the very least. Water combat is handled in a hilariously brief fashion, “if it’s knee-deep, -1 to hit, if you’re swimming it’s -1 to hit and damage”.
  As the reader can probably tell, there’s a lot of what I liked here. Hub-and-spokes isn’t the best type of map, but it does at least give choices. After the rather meh initial block of rooms the party makes it to a vast dim chamber, with the looming black presence of the ur-krakon more felt than seen over deeper waters, great scene. There are individual encounters along the spokes that have diplomatic potential, although everyone within the dungeon is badguy, so treachery can be expected. Loot is plentiful, although too often easy to retrieve, while the magic items are both flavorful and cool. Screw a +1 dagger, how about a +1 golden dagger that can scribe a spell on the back of a living creature, which if cast then kills the creature? You could quibble about power levels for the noted level range but that’s cool. The fights (and there will be a lot of fights) generally have something to them beyond hacks and although there’s not a massive order of battle, rooms do react to neighboring rooms. The default patrols are innocents who will be prone to follow anyone’s orders. Good stuff.
  What can be improved here are all things within the writer’s not-inconsiderable skillset. For one thing, more hiding of things/trickiness to the loot would help. There’s a coracle (described as “leather-and-bone”, good) that just sits there, making moving around in the magic mutation brine easy. Better if it were hidden, or had a waterline leak, or hosted a rabid attack barnacle. The lip service to the whole thing not being just a hack is good, but more motivation and goals (mini-faction-play) would be great. The initial premise, of a fête full of conspirators, along with a large variety of aquatic races, means this should be something rife with politics…and, tragically, it isn’t.
  Thus, the best use case is, sadly, going to have to go into the one-shot bucket (more likely 2-3 sessions with a typical OSE group). The adventure has a lot of implied cosmology and hooks that would make it pretty disruptive to the standard campaign. Individual encounters and ideas have some mining potential, but that pervasive fish flavor is going to be all over everything. It’s the Japanese snack food of early-level drop-in adventure modules.
  Final Rating? **/*****, it’s nicely put together but ultimately it never achieves beyond “competent”. 

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Wonderfully formatted, though.