​Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…A Sliver of Evidence

A lair by Karly Andersen, for levels diegetic
Written for Cairn
   More Cairn, now with even tinier dungeons…oh boy. Remember what I said about page count to room ratios? Well, this time, we’ve got a nine-room dungeon in an eighteen-page project, very colorful, rife with illustrations and quirkiness and odd little stories. It’s all written very conversational single-column, headers are bright and clear, and the editor is also credited as emotional support. You know what we’re getting. Heck, taking a single look at the twee art style, we all know what we’re getting:

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   The story here is that a town was suspicious of a random druid lady off in the woods whose house occasionally fills with screams. Councilman Dude arrests Druid Lady, looks for a sliver of evidence linking…well, any crimes at all to this lady. Party aids out of the goodness of their hearts because they otherwise won’t be playing tonight. Explore the druid lair (which is really just a weird house), get into wacky trouble, realize she’s actually a werewolf (nice variety who chains herself into a cell every month), get back to town before she transforms and slaughters/turns d6/d4 townies, or her werewolf family finds her and slaughters considerably more people while capturing her, because while she’s Nice Werewolf, the others aren’t. Fair enough, so far, so Twilight.
    There are details that rise to what I liked level, namely that the husks of a giant caterpillar can be used as a gross version of the Reincarnate spell and how the wolf idol interacts when prayed to. Otherwise, meh.
   What can be improved first is the map, as you might expect given size. Isometric and top-down are both provided but neither one is very needed. Nothing about it screams “druid lives here”, it’s just a collection of several weird disconnected rooms to bumble from with no particular exploration direction. The thin excuse does give your little RPG players excuses to be loot-goblins. Magic items and spells and monsters are all pretty standard, except for a horrifying giant invisible caterpillar who is addicted to a sauna. It’s all very 2014 in how contemporary everyone is being. I like the threat of a full moon slaughter and all but it’s an obscured timer, which is the worst kind of timer.
   Your best use case here is to run this for a table full of Carin 2E players, they deserve this and even worse for being Cairn 2E players. Not a lot useful to extract even devoid of context, you can steal the magic items and spells but they’re just plagiarized and simplified versions of D&D items and spells anyway, so that’s a little pointless. Definitely don’t use the map, there’s not any exploration there.
   Final Rating? */***** and a migraine from the twee illustration style. It’s not very good, but at least it’s not absurdly long.