Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Plunderers of the Jeweled Coast

​An adventure by mucilage, levels 2+
Written for Shadowdark
  Oh man, I love this cover. The fake old used sticker and barcode, the old-school trade dress, the visual design…every part of this screams “old gem of a module” except for the quirky author name/punctuation. I know its Shadowdark but thanks to the jam that produced it the actual product is an admirably tight four pages for a five-point overland adventure leading to a six-room dungeonlet. The interior is nicely set up too, with art and maps that inspire as well as clear, readable text in all cases. Prose is clear and flavorful, format is simple but helpful…content aside, this mysterious pseudonymous writer certainly knows how to present a product.
   The story itself? Classic. Drunk brags about giant ruby found on a map, gets assassinated by the pirate captain featured on the cover, and once the cutscene is over and players regain control of their characters they’re given leave to go ye therefore to the ancient elven ruins hot on the heels of the pirates. Chase through a pointcrawl, crawl through a point chase (er, minidungeon), then have a nice final battle. “Elf” flavor isn’t very strong but we’re loaded with “jungle ruins” so I exercise the power granted unto me by The Reviewing Community and declare it good enough.
   If it’s not clear by now, what I liked quite a lot here even after presentation is the flavor, this sucker makes me wish I was running something cutlass-adjacent. There are some nice details, too, like how in-dungeon dangers are all either telegraphed (pirate leg stumps next to a guillotine trap) or avoidable by being friendly (just don’t take the elderly basilisk’s key), that’s good stuff. I like the final groin-kick of the giant ruby being load-baring, dumping the whole final chamber out onto a cliff when its grabbed. There’s very nice rumors and clues in the point-crawl too as everyone struggles along the coast towards the hidden shrine. I’m very excited about the magebane shackles as a magic item, they grant +1 AC but make the wearer mute. That’s darn good game design.
   Can’t say there aren’t things under the “what can be improved” category though, of course. The point-crawl is a nice idea with cool flavorful points of interest, but most of them lack a, well, point, plus it is rather unclear how players choose forks or branches. The name of the hidden shrine is given away in a cool encounter on a side path, but that doesn’t seem to matter at all. My old enemy, random numbers on the encounter tables where you should just have a number, rears its ugly head with “1d6 pirate ships” of all darn things. I’m not fond of the pirate captain being at the final room’s door trying to pick the lock no matter how long your group takes, but that’s my usual hate for en media res in a freeform adventure. The backstory of the cursed queen in the hidden shrine is likewise irrelevant and not even discoverable in the course of normal play. In some respects, I’ll bet a lot of these issues stem from the tight page count, a better version of this adventure probably exists with a couple more pages of text.
   Quibbles aside, best use case is to use this as a classic “treasure map reward” in an ongoing campaign, cutscene with the murdered Billy Bones or no. Those magebane shackles are absolutely going to see action in my game(s), so that’s worth the price of admission alone.
   Final Rating? ***/***** with another star easily added the writer could go back and fill in a little bit more. Despite it not fitting my current campaign, I might be using this myself, possibly as a DREAD scenario or something else along those lines. Good job.