Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Chains of the Mist-Wrought Thrall

An adventure by Andrew Wight, level 2
Written for DCC
  Let me begin by registering my personal dislike of the cover “art” here. As I always say when I come upon charming, skillful art in these, I am not an art critic, so nobody gets points for good illustrations. Similarly, I won’t dock any stars for this cover. I just find it unsightly is all.
   If that doesn’t matter, then, what does? Well, four pages here describe a temple with eleven rooms, which is a decent density in general. Only one page is devoted to actual keys, with the rest devoted to backstory, hook, adventure conclusion, and a very confusing schedule delivered via prose. Now, sometimes adventures go a little too far with their bullet points and tables, but when there’s a schedule? One that’s so important it serves as the entire wandering monster/interactability for the whole dungeon? Yeah, help a brother out with a schedule table. Please.
   The reason this schedule matters is that the local cult’s acolytes are obsessive about following a careful ritualistic schedule that accounts for every single hour, even following it after death. Unless the party does something adventure-y like murder one of them, loots, or otherwise be normal, these acolytes wander around completely ignoring even invaders, that’s a nice thought. Oh, and what does this cult want? Why to turn a 30ft-high chained purple giant made out of mist into a god to cloak the whole of the world in dense eternal mist, of course. If mist-guy is freed, he goes on a rampage of course. The hook is that the cult kidnapped a couple villagers to, uh, cook for them. Not a euphemism, they’re just cooking staff. Whatever, it gives us a quest from the locals and that’s all the excuse we need.
   So what I liked here were the peripherals. I love a good flavorful treasure table, and this one has one of those. Generally treasure is pretty decent, all the skeletal cultists have flavorful items on their persons. I’m particularly fond of the classic bit of shenanigans/boon-for-bane with the mist-monster-guy’s chains being anchored by big ol’ diamonds. Want to get the biggest pieces of loot in this entire dungeon? Well, that’s a big flashing warning sign that you’re about to get a rampaging monster if you mess with it. Great encounter design. The idea that the cultists are so punctual that they keep their rigorous schedule even in death is neat. There’s also a nice little wrinkle where if your PCs destroy the temple the Friendly Local Village will pay out the maximized reward but that represents all their life savings, so they become resentful and dour…good long-term development.
   Normally that much positive means there’s less of what can be improved but unfortunately that’s not the case here. There’s…a lot wrong with the presentation. As mentioned above, improvement #1 would be giving better schedule information, but there’s also a lot of wasted space in awkwardly-conveyed personality notes for cultists that won’t be interacted with by most parties beyond “insert sword here”. The map is also a little…wonky.  First of all, we’re missing two key doors…notably, the entryway door and the door to the final boss room. That means I can’t evaluate the flow. There’s a nice secret room finable by good mapping, but beyond that there’s not a lot of interest in the exploration of the building. As always, consider a y-axis.
   So the best use case here is tricky to determine. There’s a lot I like, but also a lot of challenge to using it, particularly with the gaps in the mapping. Pull out the mist thrall and his chains, plus the treasure, and you’ll have value in a more comprehensible adventures. Effort to figure out the document can make this a fun adventure on the whole, I just don’t know if I can tell you that the juice is worth the squeeze.
   Final Rating? **/***** and a few tut-tuts, this could have been up to three stars with a playtest, which would have done wonders for the information gaps.