Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Cricket Creek Hollow

​A “micro campaign” by Taylor Milley, low level
Written for ShadowDark (emotionally)
  Oops. I try hard, here at Crapshoot Monday, to deliver a free adventure review each and every week. Despite the advertising, this black-background little art project is barely an adventure, more of a…something else. Hard to say what it is, eight pages, kind of a setting, but very weird. Although it claims to be written for ShadowDark, it’s got very little to do with the system…which, given it was apparently released in early 2023, means it was a cynical cash grab. Except it’s PWYW. I don’t know, it’s got little artsy stuff and it’s very confused. This thing tries hard, going from a poetic history blurb, to a village description, then a…bestiary? Then a hexcrawl that talks about stuff, and little classified ads for the village’s shops…I don’t get it.
  The setting, as it is, is the bog standard “ruin-haunted abandoned borderland region with a single point of light village, its economy entirely based on adventurer plunder”. Which, while it lacks verisimilitude, also manages to be trite and insipid. Ruins on the hexmap are invited to be “whatever your favorite other modules are”, thanks. Weird thing.
  Reaching a bit, what I liked was the hexmap, it’s simplistic but perfectly functional for a campaign. I like that there’s this random stag that watches over the region and gives luck bonuses if spotted. I like the in-universe establishment ads, discretely in the back of the document.
  …what can be improved is everything else. Again. The hexcrawl is a thin premise and adding actual ruin descriptions, at least in a Wilderlands of High Fantasy length, are needed to make it legit, I can always replace a light description with my own adventure sites but give us a default. Making the ideas like the Luck Stag and rival adventure sponsors more gameable wouldn’t take an exceptional amount of effort but as it is these thin ideas just don’t have the umph. Couple that with the bestiary being so light…I think the formatting was why these ideas don’t get fleshed out, when you’re having to laboriously draw everything out in MS Paint, you’re going to be having a hard time writing long descriptions. Of course a fundamental improvement for a hexcrawl product would be picking a system that has a wilderness procedure worth a darn.
  The best use case for this might be…use the little ads for the adventure shops? The hexcrawl is just so so think I wouldn’t want to use it straight for love or money.
  Final Rating? */***** and that’s only because I save zero for only the actively repugnant nightmares.

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