Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… The Library Beneath the Sands

​A dungeon by Jonathan Dersch, levels higher than 1 probably.
Written for Knave
  Huh, I didn’t know that was even possible. People write dungeons…for Knave? I don’t hate the little rules-light system, but it’s more admirable to me as a thought experiment and as a con game than as something to be regularly played at home. It’s so light that there’s no problem at all adapting any number of modules to its simulacrum-of-game-playing state. At least it’s a nove…oh, never mind, it’s sand-buried library #4,825. I’d say it’s a classic pulp trope, but with kids these days its probably more that one episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender left a big impression. What we’ve got here is a classic trifold adventure, this time with a blessed lack of artsy pretense because it’s using its two-page limit to cover fifteen rooms. Terse writing is the name of the game, but it’s well-laid-out and decently evocative at times.
   You know the plot, I know the plot, everyone knows the plot. There’s a dude who wants the PCs to get an evil book from a lost library. The lost library was buried in the sands and has man-faced scorpions, elemental mummies, and a sealed efreet plus some genuinely nifty tomes of messing-with-elements scattered around. There’s some rumors, a couple mild riddles, a general system of librarians’ special coins being used to unlock things…okay, it’s not a novel setting, but there’s some very solid adventuring to be done here. Eschew reviewer ennui.
  Honestly topping the list of what I liked are the Knave-specific mechanics, things like librarian robes holding extra tomes, the magic tomes that suck in nearby [element] to be explosively released upon reopening (guy definitely was influenced by The Last Airbender), special glasses that boost spellcasting, and a dust cover that lets a tome be used twice a day. All very Knave, and taking advantage of what I think was the unique bit of design of the system, the spellcasting system. Beyond that, I liked the riddle to solve how to open the red stone seals, and I liked the bits of writing that conveyed the mood, “uninhabited except for a long eared goat tied to a post”, that’s good. And hey, the very simple map did have some vertical play, which I’m always glad to see. Very cutely illustrated too.
  To be frank most of what could be improved is caught in a simple editing pass. There’s a riddle about the wind opening vaults, but those are just more “use a coin” locks in the text. Details about little animal-themes for the individual librarians don’t really have a payoff. The nod at competing motivations between the railroad patron quest and the efreet isn’t really fleshed out. Random bolding makes things a little confusing at times…and if I’m going to start talking about that level of formatting quibble, it’s a pretty decent product.
  The best use case for this, honestly, would be to run it using Knave at a con (but level up those Knaves because it is not a level 1 adventure). It’s also a more than adequate adventure site to sprinkle onto a sandy !Egyptian hexcrawl. Plundering it for parts also works well enough, the riddles aren’t new but they work in conjunction with the elemental loot very well.
  Final rating? ***/***** for nothing earth-shattering or hyper-original, but a competently put together little dungeon site. Well done.

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