Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Lost Chapel of the Dragon God

The String Theory joke is just for me.

​A dungeon section by Tobias Adam, level 3ish I think?.
Written for OSE
  A mystery is herein solved; looks like the reason my filter caught a new glut of itch.io free adventures for Actual Real TTRPG Systems is that there was a Jaquays memorial game jam. As an objective anthropologist, I do not frequent whatever dark corners brew these things, but it appears as if some of the idea is to make dungeon pieces that link to others. It’s certainly an idea, but I’ll be evaluating these as independent dungeons, because trying to evaluate the whole mess would be exhausting and I’m sure they’re not very compatible. In this one, at least, we have a deceptively one-page entry that this madman put out in 17”x11”. Whoa. It’s a fourteen-room-dungeon with two different random encounter tables, amazing how much doubling the size of your page will let you put in an OPD.
  The location is a chapel, evidently lost, dedicated to a dragon god of sorts evidently but no details there. It’s not highly thematically linked together but there are a few “factions” that’ll enable dynamic play, there’s a one-eared ogre who’s hunting a fae ear-stealing gnome, being hunted in turn by lizardmen who are annoyed by cattle rustling. The map is highly interlinked and stuff like an earless annoyed hoblin and a fire beetle swarm that works like a trap all works together. Shockingly dynamic for such a tiny little zone.
   What I liked first and foremost is this little map, it is awesome for its scale, less Jaquaysed more Calabi–Yau’d…such interconnection. The interactions are all very organic between areas, too, and that weird ear collector fellow trades knowledge of secret doors for fresh ears, that’s just a perfect mixture of weird, macabre, and gameable. Treasure is pretty decent, too…only ~3.5k in gold, but a lot of magic items with them all being either well-hidden or obvious but dangerous to take, solid design. I like the way that both the sentient monsters and the treasure also build to a larger world…there’s a danged treasure map, that’s so refreshing to see. The fire beetle nest under a chasm-with-a-bridge with a treasure chest across the gap is also a great set-piece. Oh, and random encounters have numbers, not “dX of monster”.
   With all those praises, what can be improved? Well for one thing this might seem churlish after my previous praise, but the dungeon is a bit overstuffed. It’s good stuff, but it’s a LOT of good stuff to be stuffed into a couple 25x20 grids. It’s also clearly not written for OSE originally…the gold-to-magic ratio is a hint, but there’s also a DEX check called for which is nonstandard practice. The lack of stats for things like rats, ogres, or fire beetles is annoying but defensible, but I’d bet a lot of money that “ear collector” isn’t in the OSE core bestiary, give us stats brother. A little more of an eye on usability would go a long way.
  I’m going to say the best use case for this is as a sublevel, as intended. In a much bigger dungeon this little complex knot becomes a little less stuffy. The use of it as an independent dungeon is definitely defensible, though.
  Final Rating? ***/***** is the best I can do here but I’d love to see what the author could do with a bigger dungeon, stuffing things less and letting it all breathe more. Good going.

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