Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Hounds of Hendenburgh

​A dungeon by Liam Pádraig Ó Cuilleanáin, leveless.
Written for Cairn or Pirate Borg or “system agnostic”
  I have no idea how to pronounce the author’s last name, so I’ll die a critic.
  There’s a certain list of red flags I’ve accumulated reviewing itch.io adventures, among them the usually-exclusive tags of “made for a Cairn jam”, “Borglike”, and “system agnostic”. This twenty-four-pager manages to flap all three at once, impressive. Worrying. It’s advertising itself as a bog-standard “rustic village on the edge of a mystic wood with problems solved by delving in a dungeon”, which of course is how the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford made its publisher many thousands of American dollars. Less scope than Brandonsford, though, the “dungeon” is only nine rooms and there aren’t a lot of keys in the hexcrawl either, an efficient group could knock this out in a single session. But despite this version being marked systemless, it’s clearly a Cairn adventure, so I’m sure the Cairnies can milk a six-month, five-session campaign out of this thing.
  The plot is probably what you imagined the second you see the booklet. Ghost hounds plague a village and its requisite gloomy forest because the Bog Standard Local Bandit Gang broke into the Bog Standard Evil Baron’s Lost Tomb, with a lot of side drama going on with the local villagers and a semi-orthogonal coven of hags off doing Witcher Things. A lot of effort has been poured into personalities, relationships, and motivations which isn’t my cup o’ tea but I’m sure that’s crack for the average Cairnamaniac.
  There’s the occasional aesthetic flourish here that rises to “what I like” level, it’s not an unattractive product, with tasteful illustrations and solid formatting. I like that there are multiple methods to solve the hound-haunting issue, with one of them being “unleash the undead tyrant ghost on some distant land instead of around here”, that’s good. It’s tiny, but the nine-room tomb’s map is a perfectly workable shape with a little exploratory interest, and has an unmarked player version in the back, which is always welcome. The three hags are nice and gross too.
  What can be improved is pretty much all other aspects here and can be summed up “please add more adventure”. The tomb is a good example…the map is fine but the encounters are shallow, no thrill to be found in either rewards (a sword that eats a core memory on hit that needs to be recharged in brain matter, whee) or in fights (sword is wielded by a skeleton, yawn). At least the undead are assumed to be potential fights, there are stats given for inhabitants of a bear cave, the hags’ cottage, and the bandit tower but it’s pretty clear from the setup that players are instead supposed to chit-chat with the local threats and understand their wants and needs. That’s not bad, but adding tactics and interesting terrain and perhaps even spells make adventurous play a lot more interesting. Nary a swash nor a buckle is allowed for in this thing beyond smacking ghost dogs.
  Eh, the best use case is to ignore the system neutral claims and read it in the original Cairn, doing diegetic dealings under a slightly scribbly moon. There’s not much beyond the okay map worth stealing here and even that is only after you’ve exhausted your Dyson/Matt Jackson stockpile.
  Final Rating? */***** yawning and tired, not at all mad about it. Well-meaning enough product just lacking any originality or spark. 

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