Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…Curs of the Humpback Coast

A dungeon by Ryan Lynch, level unspecified
Written for no system in particular
   We’re ending July with a “watery octopus Appendix N Jam entries”, apparently. You know the drill by this point…nifty cover, four pages (this time covering eight keyed rooms), double-column format, bog standard highlighting and writing and everything else. Hey, you can put a lot more words in if you’re going to eschew such uncool things as “stats” or “system-specific rules”.
   Pirates, poor ol’ pirates. Always seem to be having such a great time, until they grab a bit of cursed booty and all become undead and live a cursed existence for all of time. Every. Single. Time. This group went around calling themselves the Curs, had a dog motif, and the cursed item was a sentient undead-causing dagger, it’s sentient because a sea nymph is trapped inside. All good. Hooks are fine, a mix of a panicky shellfish pick, and treasure map, and/or a woman in visions promising your dreams. Sure.
   So what I liked in this was mostly that dagger-and-sea-spirit combo. It’s a lovely mix of good loot, interesting story, and definite trap. The holder can command sea critters and breathe underwater, and I do wish there was an environment here where those powers could gain you other cooler stuff. I like how sea lady is shaping the treasure pile into a face and there’s a whole trap associated with it. I also like one pitiful pirate skeleton who’s jawless and just has a single arm, he’s friendly and talks a lot if his jaw can be found, that’s very classic in a LucasArts way.
   All that, so good. What can be improved though is the usual laundry list of issues. Map’s layout is adequate but as always with dungeon isometrics, it would have been better top-down. I think more size would have helped the whole “two rivals battling for decades over the magic dagger” factional conflict that got set up. More map space would help the whole site breathe with traps and encounter flow. Of course, the biggest improvement would be to WRITE THIS THING FOR A SPECIFIC SYSTEM. It’s a lot easier to adapt from a different system into my own vs. this vagueness. Treasure could stand a little more interest but that would be greedy.
   The best use case on this one is to make yet another pirate lair for your map, as long as you don’t mind the extra homework. I do think the whole lady-in-a-dagger setup is worth using, and if you are, the rest of the lair is adequate enough, I suppose. The best ain’t great but the worst ain’t bad.
   Final Rating? **/***** because it’s just kind of okay. If you’re truly truly desperate for Yet Another Pirate Lair, probably because you’re doing a pirate campaign (you poor soul), then I suppose you could do worse than this.