Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Thieves’ Quests: The Early Bird

​A quest by William Greve, levels unlisted.
Written for 5E
  What? Itch.io actually has 5E content? Well, it’s 5E, but “content” is debatable I suppose. Thieves’ Quests: The Early Bird is nine pages, plus two map pages, taken to describe a simple quest given by a thieves’ guild to raid a secret agent’s apartment for information she’s been gathering on a valuable alchemist and I can’t keep describing this my eyes are bleeding. Cute and anachronistic MS-paint illustrations certainly make it a colorful product, and the formatting is inoffensive, but it is over-written beyond belief, hammering away at things shown by those illustrations and the very detailed maps. It’s all very wearying.
  What we have here is basically a heist, breaking into the apartment (!) of the secret police agent (!!) above a restaurant (!!!). The main gimmick is that the agent lady has a magic desk that with a drawer that uses different mechanical bird-heads of all the apartment’s many clockwork birds (!!!!) to open into different contents. Wandering around the apartment contains no real risks outside of a single trapped crow-head, and the pressure is “if the DM feels like it, maybe the agent returns early”. The main solution to the drawer-puzzle is a brass cuckoo in a clock, plus the hint of a headless goose meandering upstairs. That’s more or less it.
  I’m having an issue saying what I liked without qualifiers, unfortunately. The illustrations, as I mentioned, are cute…the maps are at least well-drawn, very filled-in with details. There’s some merit to the basic idea of a magical drawer that has different contents based on different opening knobs…I wouldn’t have gone exactly the way the author did with it, but it’s a decent idea.
  Alas, what can be improved won’t be as much as you might think, probably as an artifact of how thin the premise is. You might expect me to scream about the cosmopolitanism of the setting, but along with the restauranter being a stylish and friendly half-orc (!!!!!) these are just 5E-isms, there’s no more point in complaining about them or encouraging their abandonment than in trying to prevent the sunrise. What can be done is of course adding more *incident*, not just in terms of more traps, but in terms of possible physical threats to overcome, wandering guard/cook/policeman to be evaded, a confrontation with the secret agent…let this quest have *adventure*. That can be done to improve this product even within the nightmarish postmodern anachronism stew that is its context.
  Best use case then is to steal and adapt the one okay idea in the magical drawer I guess? Even with the most banal 5E group I can’t see playing this as it is to be enjoyable. Thus your “parts” use case, but that’s not worth the hassle of unzipping the highly compressed file stack this sucker came in.
  Final Rating? */***** at the very kindest, even by the dismal standards of 5E dreck. 

---