Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…Beast Riders of the Red Keep

A “zungeon” by Katt Kirsch, level not listed.
Kind of maybe sort of written for OSE?
   I don’t know what you call Artpunk, but this thing’s heart is what I’d call Artpunk. Sure, there’s an attempt to make our bare little eight pages (six after cover/rear) describe an ambitiously large two dozen key dungeon plus a hexcrawl, but the fundamental focus here is on presentation. It’s cool-looking, the aesthetic is very much to my taste, and format is admirably clean. Unfortunately, as that ratio usually portends…our content is a little thin.
   Story is a little bit of a digging project. Our region’s troubles began, as these things do, with a falling star that sickened and mutated the local village (turning them into the Drek-men, pretty solid name). Baron figures he’ll use this clearly dangerous thing for power, specifically by hiring a bunch of alchemists and using it to prolong his life (?) and kill a red dragon (I dig this illustration). Hooks are a little tenuous but we need to play D&D tonight so I guess we’re hexcrawling (?) to the keep (?) where the Barron is dead, the fallen star is apparently an egg that hatched, and the taxidermized dragon is up and walking again. Go ye therefore and loot.
   So what I liked, before the art above and the pretty decent formatting…I like the magic available, with a +2 Sabre joined by a Staff of Striking and a carnelian periapt. Even better look is an NPC with combat stats who’s happy to see the players. Those are already good. I like one room being filled with a dozen live chickens, who alert the guards next door, charming. Dragon present, automatic +1. 

  You know what’s about to come here…WHAT CAN BE IMPROVED IS GIVE ME A REAL MAP. This is a ball-and-stick style map with a 3D isometric layout. I like adding a z-axis, but the abstraction is still pretty miserable, really undercuts what is actually some halfway decent flow. The “hexcrawl” “map” is also not “good”, just a little gauntlet going from Big Town to Bad Keep. Decent magic loot aside, the gold values in this one are awful and should be massively increased, you’re fighting a dragon for heaven’s sake. All bad, but honestly the worst sin here are the abstracted keys…each room has a very tiny one or two line description, and most of the interactability is in the random encounter charts. One of the most important bits of information, that the baron is dead, isn’t revealed until the keys by the way. Uh. No. A little more personality distinction would help the Drek Men too.
   The best use case here is as a quest for your OSEnians, I reckon. The biggest issue is that I’m not sure what level we’re looking at on this one, the Dreks are basically goblins but the dragon is and legit unnerfed dragon (except for being stupid). It could be fairly fun. Lot of homework for that fun though, and not a lot value to extract sans context.
   Final Rating? **/***** pretty much only because of the dragon. If there’d been a less abstracted map and more details given in the keys it could have been a lot better, but as it is we’re mostly just here to admire style.