Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Bite-Sized Dungeon Crawl #1: Hermitage Of The Harpy Queen

An adventure by Richard Kelly, leveless…
Written for Bite-Sized Dungeon or “system neutral”
   How do you feel about royalty-free public domain black-and-white art? Especially vectorized woodcuts? Well, this a one of those. If you’ve become intimately familiar with the itch.io indie freemium RPG module-cobbler scene (and why would you not?), then you’ll recognize what that means is coming for you. Danger sign numero uno is a couple pages of “generic terms” because we’ve resolutely refused to include stats or numbers or anything like that.  Twenty pages for a thirty-five key hexcrawl is pretty efficient, but the plot is as expected:
   We’re dealing with a misunderstood harpy and the villainous village of prejudiced yokels who all sound like your father when he got embarrassingly political at the dinner table. The harpy, who is cool and nice just like your aunt who let you smoke weed, gives the players quests for retrieve items from various spots in the hexcrawl. Because fetch quests. At least you’ll gain (MODEST) value rewards if you kill the birdlady.
   I cannot adequately describe to you how high the whimsy settings are in this one. ONION KNIGHTS, GOURD OGRES, a VAMPIRIC SUMMER SQUASH, a whole species of mushroom people…but hey, at least if you get past the QUILLGOBLIN GOAT-RIDERS you’ll be able to make your way to the FOLDED PAPER DRAGON and might get a hatchling after killing it. This is the whole thing.
   I’m going meta with what I liked and say “the concept of a hexcrawl with multiple factions”. That’s solid, a game type I like. You don’t need dungeons to play satisfying games of D&D, it’s very fun to meander from hex to hex, encountering new situations and battles, enjoying the weather, figuring out random encounters…great mode of play. Some of the fight-monsters were kind of interesting, too.
   There’s a bit in what can be improved that’s just to my taste, I don’t like whimsy/silliness at this level on a gut level but that’s not an issue for me to tell the author to fix. A more consistent critique that avoids matters of tone is that 90% of these little locations have a whimsical little situation that doesn’t relate to any other hex. Oddly enough, that’s a sign that the module should be longer in this case, with faction tables or charts or mind-maps or something added to show interrelationships between hexes in the crawl. What’s done in A3 should have a chance to impact D8, that’s Hexcrawl 101. Of course, all of this is secondary to my usual improvement rant, which is that you should be specific with your system of choice. Just let me convert, it’s fine, rather than have a cloud of unwieldy tags that make monster entries downright painful to read. Specificity is king.
   Best use case on this one is “whimsigorical hexcrawl in a rules-lite system”, which is a usage that personally gives me hives but if plant-based monsters who are mostly just silly little guys really float you boat, you could do worse. Nothing worth extracting for normal games in monsters or magic or anything.
   Final Rating? */***** because even at its best it ain’t great. More of a mood than a thing of substance.