Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…A Crumb in Winter

​An adventure by Gwen C. Katz, level 3
Written for D&D 5E
  Welcome back to Crapshoot Monday, friends! I hope your Christmases were all wonderful, filled with laughter, fellowship, and gratitude. I hope you’re looking forward to the new year, and those of you working on your Adventure Sites…hurry it up, you have just a few days left until January 1st. I thought about looking for something particularly wonderful among my itch.io reviews, a bright light of game design, but another Christmas-tagged adventure bumped up into my queue, so why not go again? This is probably a mistake…
   …but hey, the palette is pleasant at least. This is a sixteen-page 5E adventure, of all things, so outside of some hilariously bloated statblocks we’re going with simple double-column text explaining everything at extreme length, written with generous helpings of whitespace and probably far too much italic read-aloud. It’s a clean, friendly presentation though, so that’s a pleasant contrast to what we had last week.
   And goodness gracious me, we couldn’t ask for a bigger tonal contrast in our stories, either. This adventure is twee. How twee? Well, this is an example of your in-module art:

​   I think my pancreas is screaming from the sweetness. Our cozy setup is a Beast Market on a snowy plain, where intelligent talking animals buy, sell, and trade. The best shop is that of the field mice family, the Crumbs, who run a pastry shop with magical petits fours, each giving a magical effect (like Reduce, Spider Climb, Fly, etc). The littlest and cutest Crumb, little Billy Crumb, gets himself lost, avoids wolves, hides in a cave, and now its up to your party to save him. The wolves drive the PCs into the cave, which has a series of challenges overcome by magic from the pastries. Finally everyone fights a roper in the end. Simple, cute, in-and-out with holiday cheer.
   Beyond the tonal relief, what I liked here were those spells chosen via pastry, coupled with the fact that the mouse-sized versions only last a round while big people-sized once have the normal spell durations. The resultant cave navigation puzzles are childishly simple, but hey, it’s something. The monsters are nicely challenging for level 3, good for a one-shot. In general, the scope and scale of this is exactly what you want for a holiday one-shot. I also like that its not doing to thing so many of these try to do, shoehorning in Santa Claus or otherwise making it on-the-nose. Just snow and cozy vibes, I can dig it.
   What can be improved, though, are all along the lines of “make this a better adventure.” While the charming flavor is off the chain there are a lot of rails beneath the snow here, and there are no real points where choices can be made outside of the typical tactical choices in combat and the occasional “do we go through the tunnel that requires reduce or the tunnels that require water breathing”, and even those aren’t truly at risk because the module tells you if your players screw up and waste magic treats, they’ll find replacement ones in a pile elsewhere (always at the number = players). Much better would be to have certain of these helpful items scattered around but otherwise let you players use ropes, their own magic, halflings, and/or their own clever outside-the-box solutions to the navigation challenges. Again, good idea, but bad execution. All the combats are likewise only grindy beatstick fights. You won’t spoil your cozy feelings by adding some real gameplay as well.
   Thus our best use case is “play at a family gathering with very small children”. Which, let us be honest, is in fact the best use case for 5E anyway. I can’t see stealing many bits from this unless you run a game with a very high level of twee whimsy normally. If so, hey, mice selling tiny petits fours with magical effects are a great addition.
   Final Rating? **/***** probably only because of my eggnog-glutted state of contented torpor. It’s not much of an adventure but it is a cozy little thing built to purpose.