Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…Earth and Wine

 An adventure by Leonard Schellauf, level not specified.
Written for His Majesty The Worm
I have an aesthetic objection. That “The” really shouldn’t be capitalized. This is an adventure that tests my general rule that specific is more adaptable than general. This thing is written for a very oddball system, with tons of tags like “wounds”, “disfavor”, and “roughhouse checks”. It’s written with this His Majesty The Worm system fully in mind, with things like the random encounter table being called “The Meatgrinder” and having XXI entries. No idea how that’s supposed to work. But I still think I could make this work. Nine pages, fourteen rooms, pretty decent prose for it.
The story is that this is the cellar of a famous vintner/alchemist, now sunken into the underworld and being used as a possible link between two levels of The megadungeon. I don’t think that’s a needed context, but hey, I admire the spirit. It’s a got a mysterious entryway via fountain, it’s got a river into deeper depths, this can be a solo adventure site but its written with a mind for integration. Rumors are a variety, alchemist wants stuff, heir wants wine, etc. All of this could be slotted in most urban crawls. Everything is bespoke and unique, but there’s also some very evocative art for them. Lot of effort put into this one.  

    I’ll start what I liked there with what’s not something I usually grade on, the art. The clay homunculi are pathetic and adorable, the monsters are creepy, the fountain actually shows what’s needed to show for the puzzle aspect…excellent stuff. I also liked the fountain as an entrance, stuffing the carved face’s nose with mint stops the water pouring out and reveals a passage down to the dungeon. There’s even a callback with a door getting unlocked by stuffing a carved mouth with food. Good solid design. Like the personalities of the little clay guys, always nice to have talky stuff in your dungeon. I like that there’s a recipe you can find that makes new homunculi with a super-rare wine as the ingredient.
Obviously as always, what could be improved is adding stairs and water features. The map is…fine, miss having a vertical element but the secret rooms all have reasons, the layout is logical with decent exploratory depth…yeah, this works, but it can be better. A lot of the interaction is on the random encounter table, including the Sword of McGuffin that has a taxidermied lindwyrm holding it. I don’t like driving so much action on a table, particularly with something like that which should have a fixed location on a map. There’s also a newborn wine godlet hungry for wine that’s a little more unfocused than I’d prefer. Could have been a little more developed there. There’s a random wine table that’s flavorful, but I’d love to see some more work adding game mechanics to each type.
I’d say best use case is to have this thing in a built-up city crawl and make it an adventure site to stumble into. It’d take a fair bit of translation effort to convert into a more normal game system, but it’s got the baseline you can work with and I think the juice is worth the squeeze. Inspiring a bit of creative improvisation? That’s cool. The individual bits are all very adaptable, too.
Final Rating? ****/***** which might be the best you can get with this scale. I’m genuinely charmed and surprised by this one, good job Mr. Schellauf.