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

​An adventure by Nate Treme, level nill.
Written for no system
  One-page dungeon time, this time cranking up the color and the gonzo settings all the way up to “phantasmagorical”. Just looking at the thing puts me in the mood for hyper-fast midi music, high on the beeps, low on the bloops. The single page has eleven keys for a linear series of nine hills leading up to a big bad evil guy. There’s a surprisingly dense set of text blocks here describing the weird journeys, light on mechanics and verisimilitude, heavy…nay, zaftig on strange loony creatures and scenes. I don’t know if Nate Treme is the same as Fever Black Mountain’s Nate Treme, but if so, you’d be hard pressed to imagine a higher contrast pair of products. Colorful cartoon world, both in presentation and content.
  Premise is your basic star-jelly-from-beyond-space-lands-on-mountain-and-magically-inflicts-have-of-clouds-upon-the-lower-world-plunging-them-into-centuries-of-darkness, PCs have climbed up out of the mists and must climb every hill having wacky adventures until they reach the big bad, who polymorphs them into pigeons but is made of jelly and thus “easy to defeat even by pigeons”. Along the way parties meet two mountains that are inhabited by annoyed earth spirits, a mystic cow sage offering her milk (uh…), a couple secretish bonus cities, a demon-heated licorice volcano, and random encounters of things like jelly hawks, sponge ogres, shock boars, and ancient landmines. Do you know how to run any of those extemporaneously? You better hope you’re playing Lasers & Feelings, because any system with more crunch than that is going to be sweating.
  I’m going come out and state again that I do not enjoy gonzo, so what I liked is going to be pretty sparse here. Assuming you buy into the gonzo, this is in fact a fine premise for a one-shot, terrible scope for adding to a campaign but this is a good night of wacky fun if your table likes those. The art/map is really cute and engaging, I like how the linear (with two branches) succession of ascending hills is shown. There’s an attempt at some mild backtracking interactions, which is good…in fact, there’s a general attempt to make encounters interactive, with roughly half having a nonviolent resolution, admirable.
  It’s evident first then that what can be improved is to give us some mechanics. What is a slug farther and how does he do his farming? What’s with the bats of the City of Mog? What are chalk goblins?
The people want to know, Treme. Treasure and climbing procures wouldn’t go amiss, either. I know it flies in the face of the one-pager format, but this is probably better two pages, honestly. It feels like a quibble, but this is also something where the format should be reversed; the keys descend top-to-bottom, while the hills ascend bottom-to-top. If you are going to do a single-pager, don’t be afraid of shaking up the formatting standard slightly to better convey information.  
  The best use case here is to use it for that which I personally shall never use anything…a gonzo silly one-shot in an ultralight improv TTRPG system. I know, some of you broke out in hives over that, but for thems that like such things, you can do worse. Sadly, every single solitary part of this creation is so gosh darned weird that there’s nothing to extract for broad use or inspiration.
  Final Rating? */***** but maybe one extra star could be granted for those of you who have a much much much higher tolerance for lolrandom humor in your games.

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