Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Elysium

A horror dungeon by K. Heath, for levels unknown…
…because written for no system in particular.
   Whaaaat am I doing? This sucker is huge, forty pages long, written system-agnostic, and horror (which is not my cuppa). I guess I’m just a sucker for scifi…this is my least-favorite flavor of scifi, post-apocalyptic, but hey, it’s got the promise of a six-level, fifteen(ish) room per level, complex exploration, that’s pretty neat. Margins are generous and the font, while flavorful, is clear, so it’s not all that bad. The levels are supposed to be randomly generated from a 3d12 roll for a dozen different map sections and the monsters/traps/items are all prerolled too, which makes me nervous that there’s not even a coherent story to the location…
   …which boy howdy is incorrect. There will be many critiques to level against Elysium, but “incomplete story” sure as heck ain’t one of them. There’s a lot going on. There was a nuclear war and everything is going to crap. You’re all a bunch of explorers (six pregens provided) trying to figure out the source of transmissions/power from Elysium Corp’s massive field of spikes and arrays supplying everyone in the society personalized individual prophecies from tabernacles, little boxes sold to encourage the population. Also once the facility is breached it becomes clear that they went HARD onto the mad science trying to “find god”, first scanning the heavens, then looting all the relics of Earth’s religions, then pushing test subject to find a deity within, then turning them into brains-in-robots, then uploading them to a massive evil computer core that might as well be a minor deity. Er, also, they made a lot of horror monsters along the way.
   Have fun kids.
   So while horror is not to my personal taste, what I liked was how well-executed a lot of the horror is. The monsters are gross and scary, the atmosphere is haunting, every level has a different theme, which is cool. The simple system implied, with the health-and-sanity tracks, works pretty well for a focused horror three-shot. I like how the military vet pregen has two states, sober with +2 INT and a max sanity at 60%, or drunk with -2 INT but max sanity at 120%. The backstory/setup really is about perfect in terms of amount of detail vs. leaving things vague.
    …but I’m going to also have a lot in what can be improved. First of all, those procedurally generated maps/traps. I get it, the initial idea seems to be giving them a new layout every time they leave and return, but that’s both a huge hassle in terms of GM overhead and, even worse, means that the maps and traps and encounters have to be rather generic. The maps aren’t a lot to explore and the whole thing becomes a little too small. Ninety-ish rooms, sure, but the vast majority are boring and empty. Everything flavorful noted above has to get drained so it can function as well in level 1 as in level 6. Bummer.
   Best use case here is probably to run it as a slightly edgy horror one-shot if you like slightly edgy horror. Scifi maps are rare, so there’s some utility in that page full of tech-tileset geomorph maps, simple as they are. Art is detailed enough to be used in other techno-horror settings.
   Final Rating? ***/***** with an extra bump if you really dig the vibe and don’t mind the extra homework. Pity about the vagueness letting some of the really vivid ideas down.

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