Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Unseen Vaults of the Optic Experiment

Don't worry, real map is legible.

​A dungeon by Johan Nohr, level 3.
Written for “Mörk Börg”
  I was really prepared to hate this thing. Ugly trade dress, twenty pages for just eleven rooms, and of course Mörk Börg itself, which is usually a sign of poor-quality cash-grabs. But I was deceived, because Mr. Nohr here didn’t actually write a Mörk Börg adventure…he wrote a B/X adventure and playtested it at a con, which automatically puts this into the top 1% of all itch.io products. Much of the page space is dedicated to full-page illustrations of the various monsters, and when the keys actually show up everything is organized cleanly, clear and succinct with all the classic bullets and bolding you’d hope for. Nice. There are two maps, one the author’s original map with all kinds of illustrations and goofy stuff while the other (placed first in the module) is just a clean map for usability.
  The story of the dungeon is that outside-of-reality critters have captured and blinded an “observer” (it’s a Beholder but obviously the author doesn’t want to get Pinkertons), which made Magic Stuff Happen in this rando noble family’s tomb. It’s not a very tombish map but there’s a secret section, loops, and a mild vertical element…story of the session will be poking around in the dark with blurry vision (author says to emphasize the magic effects messing with sight but recommends against it having a mechanical effect), trying to get to the beholder, then maybe poking the aliens.
  What I liked was that this guy clearly knew he was writing for something that gets played at the table; he does things like describe how the secret doors are opened (but not detected, hope you have an elf), what sights and smells assault the senses open entry to a room, and how monsters react. I have no gut judgement on how level 3 Bork Murgs play but the encounters are challenging but not insanely lethal for level 3 Basics. The few interactive beings in the tomb are all acknowledged as being possibly helpful, although in all cases unreliable/dangerous allies. I’ve gone back-and-forth on it but I think the beholder-crap cesspit is a good idea, there’s treasure in the acidic poop which for Morgleblurk is probably a requirement.
  Of course, none of that means that the “what can be improved” section should be blank. First of all, despite what is technically a living environment, there’s the Tomb Problem here, with the environment as essentially static. And no, a casual suggestion at the end that “maybe a rival adventuring party would be cool” does not a time pressure make. The oft-seen problem of rooms containing “1dX [monster]” also rears its ugly head once again, including at the final room(!). Will the final encounter with the psionic alien beings from outside of time and space be against an overwhelming six, or a single solitary one? I dunno, YOU NEED TO TELL ME. It’s also a bit of a slugfest, expecting quite a few knock-down drag-out fights for such tiny little rooms, more work on challenges that *aren’t* combat wouldn’t go amiss…because as well-crafted as this is, the ultimate gameplay of it can be a little dull.
  Those quibbles aside, the best use case for this module is doubtlessly to play it as a one-shot for Mörk Börg at a con. Being an average B/X adventure makes this easily the single best Mörk Börg adventure ever created. Unfortunately I don’t know what I’d have to steal from it, content-wise, it’s pretty self-contained.
  Final rating? **/***** making it literally twice as good as any other Mörk Börg I’ve ever seen. 

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