​Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Lair of the Frost Witch

A dungeon by Andrew Cavanagh, for levels diegetic
Written for Cairn
   When you’ve been doing this gig as long as I have, you’re able to identify danger signs with itch.io adventures. Chief amongst those danger signs, I regret to inform you, is the dreadful word “Cairn 2E”. As in all things, however, there can be mitigating factors. Eight pages for a thirteen-room dungeon? Better ratio. Using a Dyson map? Better than normal dreck. Lots of information loaded onto tables? Better conveyance than normal, too. It’s a dungeon adventure, which is a lot harder to mess up than an outdoor hex-or-point-crawl. Let’s head in cautiously hopeful.
   …and UH OH, BAD SIGNAL…we have a list of possible quests and d4 different potential titular Frost Witches. My usual answer for these things is “it’s all of them”, and there’s some coherence if we do that. A local horrible warlord’s son has been stolen, but the son is actual the witch’s originally and was stolen by the village mayor’s cult, also there’s encroaching ice from her ritual magic staff but there ritual is stopped by holding this icy heart thing and also there’s a noble frozen by the witch who’s really nice but he’s secretly a wight. This is a lot. I ain’t gonna hate on it.
   What I liked first was this merry stew of potential interest all meeting together in a tiny little map, if it was played in a real system you could in fact have fun with it. I liked most of the quests well enough, and there’s potential there for most of them to turn into something a lot more interesting in a fleshed-out region. I like how there’s a player map of the site with in-universe notes of dubious helpfulness, that’s a good artifact. Axe that attacks based on WIL but then keeps you awake with visions of bloodlust is neat. Witch freezing and breaking non-magical weapons that damage her is also a nice defensive ability.
   Alas, the map itself in my “what can be improved” bucket. It’s functional, but the “open site with several side-passages” doesn’t mesh well with the keys, it makes instead for an awkward flow through the site. This isn’t actually a dungeon, functionally, it’s a few lairs co-located with a linked theme. As always when you don’t have a single story/character but a table with multiple options, some of them are also much much more compelling than others, cull those options down. There are also some very Cairn-esque moments of diegetic fuzziness where some rules would be good. The witch has had some kind of trauma causing her to go all trauma, but it’s left iffy as to how that’s done. There’s a mirror that shows the worst memory of a person’s life for…some effect. Storygame fodder, but storygames need more setup.
   Best use case on this one is probably to use this as a lair/adventure in a real system, there are also a few mechanical bits and bobs (like the witchy freeze armor and the warlord’s axe) that can be taken for other games. Not quite the buffalo, usable in all parts, but there’s stuff to pull.
   Final rating? **/***** with a small bonus if you like the themes. It’s workable and not hateful, sometimes that’s all we can ask from these things.