Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Once Upon a Giant

Stunning AND Useful!

​An adventure by Thomas Lopez, no levels because...
Written for Cairn
  Do you like fairy tales, poetry, and whimsy? Do you love abstracted maps, vague physical design, and “but thou must” quest designs? Are you fond of thirteen artistically laborious pages being used for a point-by-point twenty-key railroad? Boy howdy, you know I am! Once Upon a Giant is a clear labor of love and not at all pretentious, a staggering tour-de-force that leaves the reader breathless and applauding from the beginning lavish praise of Yochai Gal and land acknowledgement of the author’s settler homestead to the “…Land Lived Happily Ever After” coda at the end. Let’s dive right into this lush artistic masterpiece!
  I don’t even know if I should talk about the intricate plot of this work, it is so creative, but to put it only in the most delicate of brush-strokes, this adventure is about a mean giant who has been doing unkind things to the local people but who retreats after his raids to his fortress…which is on top of a giant mushroom! It’s amazing! Naughty players might ask to climb the outside of this mushroom but the adventure wisely declares that’s impossible for anyone but the giant and then provides a helpful rumor about a path through the inside. A fiendish map, elegantly outlain as a node diagram, details how the players are supposed to go up the mushroom and then another details the way through a mushroom forest found on top. That’s right! TWO types of giant fungus. Anyway, then the players go to a town and invade the castle and there’s no maps because those are supposed to be overcome by a friendly bard with a sleep-lute.
  Man, how can I list what I liked without listing just about everything in this whole module. Is it how the maps shut down annoying explorer-type players by being so abstract and simple? Is it how the town and the castle are both portrayed by beautiful public-domain art with simple labels? Is it how the cloud-bestriding giant, spoken up as the single scourge of the whole region, is also statted to be overcome by lucky players even wisely unblessed by such clumsy ideas as “higher levels”? Well shucks, those are all great but what I probably liked the most was the goblin in the middle of the mushroom named “Fun Gus”…after my sides stopped splitting and I finally climbed back on top of the toilet to keep reading, I was amazed to find that this NPC is a wealth of clues if the players “give him something nice”. The clues are very helpful and not at all either too vague or too explicit!
  My goodness, it would be insulting to pretend what can be improved is anything other than: MORE! Give us more of this fairytale delight! But certainly not more outlining the giant’s castle that is the focus of the whole adventure, that certainly doesn’t need details like guard rotations, sleep schedules, or entrances/exits.
  So best use case for Once Upon a Giant is obviously to PLAY IT. Obviously it’s best played in Cairn, but any OSR ultralite niche levelless fantasy system can embrace this module as their own. The author wisely dispenses with any tools, encounters, items, or ideas that would be able to be ripped out of the adventure and used in something else…every bespoke element is perfect where it is.
  Final Rating? */***** and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their April.

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