Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Melting Skulls of the Conquering Dunes

Not lazy at all...

​A dungeon by Mathew Morris, levels 2-3
Written for Heartseeker
  You thought “any OSR ultralite niche levelless fantasy system” was part of the April Fool’s japery, didn’t you? Naw, here’s something for Heartseeker, which is basically that but with levels. A self-declared one-page dungeon that clearly takes two pages to describe eleven…uh…”locations”, the Melting Skulls of the Conquering Dunes is about retrieving some crystal skulls from a !egyptian tomb in the eponymous Conquering Dunes. A new horrifying trend is herein noted; the map is a very evocative ancient tomb image with an 11-node diagram being called a map. Never change, itch.io…because every time you change, you discover a new terrible innovation.  
  Plot is fine. Patron wants elongated crystal skulls from tomb to melt, tomb map location was bought from a local bedowin [sic], gives cash for retrieval, tomb has revelation that aliens once visited, hidden chamber has crystal skulls with chrome flooring, alien monster summoned as final boss fight after looting. We’re now in 2024, so adventure writers can actually have Indiana Jones PART FOUR as a formative experience, heaven help us. Okay combo of genres, even if the desert is very lightly flavored.
  What I liked here is the light flavoring stuff…nice to see dead earlier adventurers showing danger nearby, nice to forecast threats with a jackal-headed god statue, and nice to have at least the idea of hidden treasure with a pair of golden keys needed to clear a door found in a side-path. Nice hint about looking down rather than up to encourage basement-wandering. A mild false tomb has a glass skull in a sarcophagus if you want to fool a playerbase made of infants and toddlers. It has its heart in the right place (so tip to those aforementioned seekers).
  There’s a whole lot of what can be improved on this one. Clearly I’d rather have an actual map, even if it’s scribbled in crayon on a napkin, but even more fundamentally the diagram-map shown is horribly linear…even worse than it looks, actually, because all the branches shown are written to be mandatory. My dearest bugaboo once more rears its ugly head at the entrance, with “d2” guardians blocking the way, make up your mind and give us 1 or 2, adventure. The random encounters are fine in some cases, like a d4 of tomb guardians, but there’s also…a mummy-filled sarcophagus? Randomly encountered? If that thing is literally hopping nosily up and down the hallway I’d love it, but no, it seems like we’re talking about bumbling into a room. Treasure should be given values if the “and other OSR games” part of the booklet’s selling copy is legit. It’d also be nice if a summoned super-advanced alien monster final boss had a little more pizzazz that “claw, claw, regenerate d4 HP per round”. Give him tech, or spells, or at least a diplomatic agenda...
  Meh, I don’t really have a best use case that comes to mind here. The dungeon is dull, the pieces aren’t compelling, and the premise is a mixture of one of Roland Emmerich’s best movies with one of Steven Spielberg’s worst. I guess I’d use the nice art in the back-map-thing and the front cover.
  Final rating? */***** sorry, you meant well but this is a linear hack.

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