Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Caverns of the Sacred Flame

Believe it not? Linear.

A dungeon by Francisco Lemos, level not listed
Written for Knave 2E
  Welp, we’ve got the first of I’m sure many, now we’re in the era of Knave Second Edition. I haven’t read the second edition, but apparently it takes the elegant little 6-pager and inflates it with more content to make a complete(?) game, so…maybe these will be more complete adventures? Mr. Lemos here has made a sixteen-page product for a twenty-three-room dungeon with some real-deal art and solid formatting/visual design. In addition to the keys, there are decent tables for rumors, found books, treasures, mutations, and gear. It’s going with an isometric map, but instead of doing the whole confusing bit, Lemos instead breaks it down by section and keys those little bits, which is a welcome change.
  The tale of the dungeon it fairly standard, it’s a former temple to a long-departed chaos god, one dedicated to transformation and mutation. The god is gone but there’s the titular sacred flame at the bottom of the long hole that makes up the central spine of the dungeon, a source of mutations. Mushroom folk (adorable), blindfolded monks, and a mutant sorceress-blob make up something like a faction setup, they all have goals for what its worth.
  So, what I liked here were mostly the artistic decisions. The sketches aren’t all to my taste, but they’re well-done and are designed (mostly) to enhance to game by showing players “this is what you see”. The very detailed isometric map being broken up into sections helps a lot in the running of it. I like the mutation table. There’s also some decent work on the books (all have beneficial knowledge to overcome certain challenges) and treasures. I like the golem being made of bricks with a withered mummy inside.
  Once you dig down a bit, though, what can be improved is please make a less linear map. Despite the isometric design, the whole affair is a stem-and-branch design that only barely makes use of the third dimension, which is a real pity. The lack of any provided scale is also extremely detrimental to the play of the dungeon in any system that doesn’t operate on puppies and rainbows for the distance measurements. Factions are a good idea even in a dungeon this tiny, but a bit more effort could be spent of their rival goals. Polite and friendly conversation between both sides should not be the easy solution. Numbers being undefined in the keys are a frequent issue too, along with random encounters not being location-relevant. There’s a whole side-quest involving bandits and a lost mushroom child and rescuers that lurkers in the encounter table and could be completely nonsensical based on where its positioned.
  I’m going to guess the best use case here is “place as a Knave one-shot”, but it’s not nearly precise enough to be used in more concrete systems without a lot of effort. A few bits are worth extraction, though, like the aforementioned golem and the mutation table.
  Final rating? **/***** because it’s a great object d’art, unfortunately with some real gaps for running as a full up adventure. Cute mushroom guys though.

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