​Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…Invaders of Atlantis

An adventure by Clayton Notestine, level nill
Written for Cairn
   Okay, that’s a darn cool cover. The Appendix N Jam produced some very cool visual artifacts, if nothing else. An LLM somewhere drank half a lake dry making this thing, huge production value for a little four-pager. Format is the usual two-column affair, just eight, uh, keys plus the intro, bestiary, and spellbook. There’s a credited editor, but the editing pass must have been for formatting, not content…the main raider is Poxlin “Feral Beard” Skuggs in one place, Poxlin “The Toxin” Skuggs elsewhere for example, there are multiple issues like that. Overall appearance is nice though, and more readable than some of these products.
   Our story here is the bog-standard “giant Atlantean submarine accidentally crashes into a lighthouse and is being actively looted while the mummy it was transporting attempts to escape”. As will happen. Hooks are thin enough to break with minnows, not just trout…your players are Poxlinite mercenaries, dreamers summoned by the mummy, or treasure hunters bereft of any other affiliation. Going to be some fairly major different approaches from that one, which is nice, but its not much supported via text.
   May Gygax forgive me, there will be multiple examples of what I liked here in a Cairn adventure, of all dang things. First off, the Atlanteans are wildly gonzo…they’re all psychic octopi in fishbowls piloting barnacle-encrusted skeletons. That’s neat. I like that the mummy is voiceless unless his lung-containing canopic jar can be returned to him. I like that there are new unique spells to discover (although they tend to be silly). Loot tables are decently flavorful as well, although of course if you’re playing in a real system then you’re going to need to fill in gold totals. I dig the broad personality notes, should make for positive role-playing. All positive stuff.
   …but be not alarmed, faithful reader, we’re still in Cairn-land, for what can be improved is “everything else”. First of all, the map. My friends, this is a CRIME:

Do Not Under Any Circumstances Do This Thing. There’s a potentially cool dungeon described here, a submersible Greek trireme stuck into a lighthouse being consumed by the tides. But yeah, art is hard. But the abomination that is this ball-and-stick diagram is terrible and obtuse and should not happen. The random encounters are also “events” which are awkward and probably would make more sense in a physical environment but given each circle is a wildly different space, the events are hard to manage. Also, despite the strong personality work on the NPCs, their motivations, or rather plans, are a little ambiguous. I don’t usually complain about a short adventure text but this thing desperately needed one more page.
   Naturally the best use case here is thus to strip this for its deliciously gonzo parts, assuming you’re wanting to run something zany. That Atlantean idea is a hoot and a half, and I like a lot of the rest of the scenario flavor. If you are a person given over to a depraved mind and wish to inflict bad gaming upon your friends, AKA “A Cairn DM”, then I suppose you could run this directly in Cairn.
   Final Rating? **/***** almost entirely because of the quality of the sizzle, not because of the steak. If this thing had half the effort given to substance that was devoted to its style, we’d have us a 5/5 here instead.