​Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…Burial Mound of Ilya the Cunning

A dungeon by Sandbox Plots, low level
Written for Shadowdark
   Have I written much about my selection process for Crapshoot Monday? It’s about as slapdash as it can be. Itch.io has an abysmal search function, but you can poke and prod it into submission with effort, eventually getting it to show you (mostly) free products, mostly physical. About half of all such products are creations even more miserable than the average adventure, one-to-six page “complete TTRPG systems”. I’m kind of curious to try month of crapshoots on those games, but I suspect I’d regret it. Anyway, after hitting the first random free or PWYW adventure and downloading it, I look for “more like this” at the bottom of the webpage and so I snaffle up the other freebies in there. Believe it or not, I weed out the lowest 20% after that, the outright disasters and headaches. Anyway, that’s how I usually pick these up.
   Or, in this case, the free adventure’s creator can just tag me on Twitter and say “hit me”.
   Opening up our download, we already have good signs. While written for Shadowdark, it eschews Arcane Library’s distinctive house style for a very simple three-page, double-column document with Times New Roman-esque normal fonts, simple .docx formatting, a tiny Dyson Map (thirteen keys). Nothing special, nothing weird, just…”here’s a site for adventuring in”. Cool. Spelling is a little wonky in places, which I think is an EASL thing.
   The story…is something we have to explore kind of like the players have to explore the site, buried and hidden in the keys. Sussing things out by slow examination, this appears to be the burial mound of the eponymous Ilya the Cunning, a great hunter and lover of books, along with his wise Nastya the Wise, who really loved mushrooms. Unlike the usual corporeal undead, in this case both dead people are meandering around down there as ghosts, stirred up by the invasion of a wolfpack and some centipedes. Both ghosts are able to fight if you steal their stuff, but they also give away loot for clearing out infestations. Also there was a great bow won by Ilya and being held by a bronze statue? No stats given to the bow, but there’s a story about winning it from a god of the hunt.
   Frankly, what I liked here is “most of it”. Map ain’t bad. Couple entryways, one with obvious wolf den danger, other with ambush-jellies, main hub has a statue puzzle to go right or left but there’s a side-step, you have pool of blessing, shrine to mess with, the only traps are sprung by players being greedy, monsters are simplistic but reasonable for low-level, and the bronze statue being a relentless eternal hunter of the bow’s thief is neat.
   What can be improved most here is less about what’s present, but more about what ain’t. The Cunning Bow is a fine idea but it isn’t hinted at or focused on, so we’re a little lost at how to run it. A lot of the best ideas are interesting hints, but require more effort to really flesh out. As is frequently an issue with tombs, there’s a static aspect to the whole place, a sense that this tomb is waiting for player interaction. As always, a third dimension would help both site dynamism and give more exploratory potential.
   None of that is lethal. Best use case for this one is to plop it down on your hexmap and let your players bump into it for a fun hour or two of delving. That’s what I did. Nothing here really screams to be pulled out of context and reused elsewhere. The unfortunate need to do extra work to properly seed the place into the map and to make rumors for the artifact-bow and the god of the hunt and everything else.
   Final Rating? ***/***** with a whole star added if you don’t mind adding in those preparatory bits yourself. Sorry author, I know you told me to savage this thing but I rather liked it. 

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