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Finding Adventures in the Dark

Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Mountain Underground

1/19/2026

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Picture
PictureJust...stop
An adventure by Colm Norrish, level irrelevant
Written for Into the Odd
  Heavens to Betsy. There’s pretense. Then there’s tense. This thing is so pretentious it might actually be post-tentious. How much so? Well, the module uses old public-domain art. Sure. Reasonable. Can even be classy. We characterize this as “ART IN COLLABORATION WITH THE LONG-DEAD”. Holy cow. Look at this formatting, eesh.
   This might just be an Into the Odd thing, I feel like I’ve seen this before. Thirty-six pages is crazy long for most itch.io adventures, especially with only twenty-nine keyed areas. Some of that is explained by the formatting; it’s two-column with generous margins, lots of “collaboration with the dead” art, and stuff like the choice to repeat the entire simple map of each “level” on every single page. Even so, there’s a vague impression of filler, of stretching to bring this free product up to some kind of arbitrary page count goal. Nobody’s printing this so the electrons are free I guess, but this does strike me as a bad goal.
   The plot, or perhaps the impressionistic dreamscape evoking the idea of a plot, involves a ruined mansion, an extradimensional tower beneath it, and a mystical mountain beneath in the middle of a shallow eternal lake inhabited by a faceless woman who grants boons in return for memories. Also, the adventure wants to SAY THINGS about ART. It’s about as interminable as that sounds, with new IttO race and class options based on “tower-dwellers” and “artists” respectively. Ostensibly, there’s a plot hook involving an outsider sculptor’s kidnapped daughter, but don’t worry…we don’t expect heroism, we expect you to explore metaphors while exploring the inner worlds of your characters. This is something very 2013 OSR, from top to bottom. 

PictureBehold: Am Map
​   I’ll try to knock of a dozen years of cynicism and say what I liked here were the production values as a whole. The DIY ethos is alive and well in this little corner of the hobby, and there’s something almost charming about the sincerity here. A few of the individual set-piece rooms are okay, I am fond of the lock room where “anything, including a body part, can be used as a key, but the key is destroyed”. I’m a sucker for traps that disarm like that.
   I could get drowned in details but I think what I’ll suggest for what can be improved here is the much more general “figure out how to make these things gameable”. You have a febrile imagination, dear author, rife with creativity and with a genuinely good eye for matching old public-domain art to RPG situations…but you need to make those situations places where gameplay happens, where players make meaningful choices that effect their outcomes. Fundamentally, all that creativity and production value won’t make for a meaningful experience that actually sticks with the players if they’re not playing the thing. This is just your vacation slides as it is.
   Thus your best use case beyond reading this for interest or “make a mood board” is probably stealing some of the individual rooms/traps/situations for use in other dungeons where real gameplay is actually supported.
   Final Rating? */***** because I’m rating game material here, not art projects. Respect the effort, but it alas won’t play at the table. 

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Sure, it's simple, but it's also reprinted on every mansion-key page.
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