Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Homunculi of Hades

A dungeon by Ethan Franks, level ~5
Written for D&D 5E
  There’s a surprising dearth of 5E content on itch. Not sure if it’s because of the artistic inclinations of the community, making them less likely to design for the “mainstream”, or if it’s because the 5E fandom is siloed off into their own marketplaces. This jam, the Appendix N Jam, seems to have brought in some of the mainstream, like Mr. Franks here. He made a tight little module too, only five pages (including cover) for fifteen keyed rooms, which is even more impressive considering the module stats up all the monsters with the Standard Fifth Edition Chungus Statblocks. Our font choices are…interesting, let’s just say, and the tables are formatted a little wonky, but everything is readable. Columns are of an uneven width. Production is pretty solid otherwise, nice to see.
   Our story is pretty much what you expect from that cover. Mr. Hades is your bog standard insane wizard (alchemist flavor), complete with cult of drugged followers, who’s using the squishy and oozy bits of the local townsfolk to make horrors beyond mortal ken in a quest for immortality, yadda, yadda. There’s a nice “starting table” that contains six different initial hooks for a party and suggests different locations to start in, so if you’re bandits looking for loot you’ll be plopped in front of the storage room, while freed cult members start in the guard barracks, etc. It’s a nice idea but I would have rather integrated that a bit more with rumors. Still, it adds spice to an others very standard mad wizard/cult hideout scenario.
   What I liked here was first off the other table on that first page, the Loot Table. Outside a couple peanut butter anachronisms (we’ll come back to this), the loot is cool and creative and magical and weird. Rolling a ‘1’ and getting toenails? That’s solid. I liked the way the adventure marked its maps, too, with a simple set of color-coded icons showing monster locations and items on interest. More adventures really should do this, it helps a lot in the running. A could of the magical items are nice, the Cultist Robe is good light armor with poison/con check protection and under the toilet there’s a bag of holding, which, ew, but also that makes sense. The tone of the writing gave me a chuckle-like-emotion briefly.
   …but what can improved first is eliminating the very anachronistic and tonally off-beat peanut allergy given to the big bad Hades (and his Abomination-Form, if he completes his ritual). Random sources of peanut butter can be found around the module and it’s more or less an insta-kill if it can be introduced to his bloodstream or into his mouth. Which suggests terrible gameplay as your dragonborn paladin holds this guy’s mouth open while the tiefling warlock stuff a sandwich into the BBEG’s face. Ah, 5E. The map is three levels high but linear, which is a real missed opportunity. Despite the complexity of the LOOK, the PLAY of this map won’t have exploration at all. Pity.
   Best use case here is probably to serve up to your extremely non-picky group of D&D 5th Edition players and have a decent night of beer and pretzels. Nothing here is original enough or interesting enough to swipe for use anywhere else. It’s fine, just unmemorable.
   Final Rating? */***** but that’s probably one extra star if you’re one of the suffering abuse victims known as a “5E DM”. Nothing criminal here, so I’ll depart without any ill will. As a bag of holding beneath a toilet goes, it’s not all that full.