Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Forsaken Abbey of the Dungeon Delvers

​A dungeon level by Nocturnal Peacock, level ranges are for posers
Written for OSE
  Another Jaquays Memorial Jam entry. Basic idea seems to be a four-entry section of a bigger dungeon, a useful enough idea, but of course everything is wildly incongruous and in a hodge-podge of different systems so a megadungeon made of these would be nauseating to attempt. This one’s a pretty standard single page of keys/encounters, single keyed map, bonus map without the keys. I will say if you’re not doing multiple layers on a PDF’d map it’s a real value add to have your map with an unkeyed version for VTT usage, particularly if it’s pretty enough to use directly, which this one is. Twenty rooms are covered in an extremely terse fashion.
  Said map, with vivid but subtle coloring, full of cute little illustrated details, meaninglessly loopy but with interesting features, is the main selling point of the module, it’s a nice little thing. The “abbey” is more implicit than explicit, some words in some places are about “St. Jacquays” and “Cult of the Mad Architect”, which is a touch cringe but okay, mostly it’s a random monster zoo to wander around in. Dire axolotls are wandering around, which is neat I guess, but anyone expecting a coherent story shouldn’t stop here. Fair enough.
  I’ll grant what I liked includes those axolotls (Goal: Food), along with the fact that each monster has a punchy little motivation word along with their statlines. I like the magic shield or the kobold-body-with-a-map stuck between giant mushrooms previously shown to be poisonous, that’s classic D&D. I liked the map’s information density, feels just about perfect to max out information without getting cluttered, the subtle use of color adds a lot. Plus, the water feature adding navigation hazards, there’s decent design….
  …that’s still mostly in the “what can be improved“ bucket. Not unexpectedly for someone self-identifying as a cultist of Jaquays, there’s a lot of looping without really understanding why a dungeon map should have loops, there aren’t a lot of clear reasons for why players would go right or left at a given fork in the road. Part of that is because of the formatting choice to make all the keys hyper-OSE “single line plus single bullet” description. One could argue that contest strictures restricted those keys to a single page but knowing that “shop tables” have fishing equipment and souvenirs, or that the pumpkin heads in a patch have faces that change once a minute does nothing for me as a game-runner, an editing pass and playtesting would tighten a lot of that up and free up more space for those needed details. Cut out unique Coatl-Trolls if you have to and give me ways to let my players make meaningful choices at the table.
  Sad to say the best use case here is just to drop the key page entirely and come up with your own keying and story for the very nice little map. Keep in the fungus trap/puzzle perhaps.
  Final Rating? */***** because we’re rating adventures and not art pieces. Interesting that a product venerating the departed Jaquays shows only a cargo-cult understanding of the actual art of dungeon design.

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