Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Hidden Shrine of the Salmon-Men

​A dungeon by Matt Wuertzer, level 2.
Written for Shadowdark
  Cozy time. Trifolds, heartbreakers, and art pieces are all well and good, but the bread and butter of Crapshoot Monday is found in slightly over-formatted black-and-white three-pagers, where some brave hopeful uses traditional key writing to outline eight rooms filled with a few traps, a few enemies, and geographical feature or two, and at least one new semi-magical item. That’s this, and I couldn’t be more comfortable.
  In The Hidden Shrine of the Salmon-Men, we have an ancient shrine to a minor river deity, now inhabited by murlocks. Fishing has been bad lately apparently and local fishermen are offering a pittance to investigate the little shrine. Turns out the little dungeonlet has a mutant-making magical effect that has made all these murlocks, excuse me, “salmon-men”, and the fix is in a different room with a little fish icon. There is a pleasing mixture of these aforementioned mutants, prisoners from a previous adventuring party, and various other dungeon denizens that make naturalistic sense. This isn’t rocket surgery…go up into the hills, bonk the mutants, mess with the magic, and wander away with thematic loot.
  If it wasn’t clear from above, what I liked on this one is quite a lot. There are multiple hidden/hard-to-reach caches of treasure that reward investigation, with the best stuff hidden while the obvious loot is dry. NPC interaction is high, with a table of names that please my dad-joke soul (“Gillbert, Perchival, Finley, etc”) implying that the players will talk to the fishmen as well as the prisoners. A lot of the encounters (gelatinous cubes, hungry bear) have telegraphing and possible solutions are suggested by the setup. The unique treasure of Dwarven Firewater (can heal, but might impair badly), water-walking spear, and Salmon-Scale Mail (has powers but also cursed to only eat seafood) are decent and memorable. Cute map is pretty linear but that’s no sin for something this size, good line work.
  Really, not much of what can be improved is found here beyond the main room’s puzzle being pretty hard to understand and rather aggressively punishing (CON save or take 1d4 CON damage, if reduced to zero turn into a fishman). Couple with it being during the climactic battle with a big ol’ mass of fishmen, some telegraphing wouldn’t go amiss. Might be nicer to have something about the unnamed river deity too, ideally fitting with the puzzle(s). The teeny random encounter table (d4) is a little random, could be improved. Anything else improving it would be “learn how to make a proper dungeon with at least a couple dozen rooms”, and that’s not going to happen in 2024.
  There’s a best use case that’s obvious here, and that’s simply making this little adventure site into something that’s on your own campaign map and, mutatis mutandis, that’s precisely what I’m going to be doing. Swiping the bits is pretty profitable too, just a handy little 3-pager entirely.
  Final Rating? ***/***** just not big enough for a higher rating. This is a fine little product and made me check to see if the writer made anything else, take that as an endorsement.

---