Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Halls of Viridian Mist

​A dungeon level by Attronarch, levels 3-5.
Written for Swords and Wizardry
  Interesting. In a year and a half of these reviews, this may well be the first Swords and Wizardry (OD&D) adventure I’ve bumped into. Aimed at an average party level of 4, this is also hyper-advanced for itch.io, so I’m curious to see how this jam dungeon level functions. One page of text, one page of map, sixteen keys for a pretty big area…this will certainly be an exercise to map:

  So not any deep story for this very messy mass of caves. Made to be a section of a hypothetical massive megadungeon, these halls are cloaked in a sight-reducing, choking mist. The initial entry is a garbage chute in the middle, with alternate egress found in a caved-in door, an icy river, a broken elevator, and “more caverns” beyond a ghoulish ziggurat. So, dump your players here and they’re kind of trapped. The “big bad” of the area is a demon squiggling along the wider tunnels, a hungry monster of hate treated like an ally by the other power in the section, a pack of ghouls commanded by a ghast and an agarat. Spice in a starving and lost rival adventurer party, a trio of lost minotaurs, and a single mad cultist who serves as a mobile shrieker and you’ve got all there is for monsters. Treasure is all over the place and a few traps exist mostly to add interest. Interesting that about half the real estate is unkeyed, that’s a curious design choice.
  I’m not mad about it though, what I liked here is mostly encapsulated in those factions, coupled with a very active random encounter table. There’s not a proper order of battle but it’s only a page long…you can study this enough to run the whole thing, it’s okay, and everyone sentient has motivations. I like some of the little details like the hidden corpse in a magical stealth robe covering a ton of cash. Properly massive gold hauls are present, enough to let even level 5 parties to take note…but the semi-trap entrance of the thing makes me think that hauling that copper won’t be easy.
  It may be personal, but what can be improved to start with might be a little mapping help. I use a mapper for right angle regions and the secret ramps indicate that might be the intent, but it’s an awkward map for player mapping. A single line more on the ways to negotiate with the various factions wouldn’t go amiss. There was clearly a limit placed on this as a jam submission, but the best improvement would probably be adding a single page more for these big interesting map regions and just a little more environment information. It’s the opposite problem from last week’s crapshoot, actually, a little under-stuffed as a whole.
  I’m still saying best use case is to dump your players in here and see what comes from it. You can be completely confident they’ll have solid time in this, get good loot if they’re careful, and get completely wrecked if they aren’t.
  Final Rating? ***/***** although it could easily gain a star with another page and a focus-driven editing pass. So far reasonable outcomes from this little jam.