Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Rise of the Blood Olms

​A starting adventure by Yochai Gal, level null.
Written for Cairn 2E
  Get excited everyone, we have us a teaching adventure. While theoretically these things are helpful tutorial levels for starry-eyed young game masters just looking to start out, in practice they tend to be overwhelmingly condescending affairs, both smug and simple. This dozen-page booklet describes an eleven-room dungeon designed to headline the new and even-more-plagiarized grab-bag of mechanics called Cairn 2E, written by the deeply sad-looking niche itch.io microcelebrity Yochai Gal. Although there’s an astonishing 4-person-team credited in layout, art, and editing for this A5 single-column .docx conversion. Format is bog standard, it’s fine.
  Despite my generally negative impression of Cairn adventures in the feature, the thing I have liked in it is that most of the adventures I’ve encountered have a woodsy/nature theme, bucolic and rural. I dig it. This…doesn’t have that. The story here is that a scholastic consortium sent a team of scholars to investigate a location expected to tie into the Roots, basically the Underdark with the serial numbers filed off. Team instead finds the tiny cave loop, messes things up being Captain Planet Villains, and get attacked by cannibal mutant blood olms for their troubles. “You are hired to recover the team” as is bog standard for these things and then after a few pages of condescending advice and background that barely matter we’re off to the races.
   I will say, what I liked first were the two main illustrations, cover and back, plus the nicely illustrated map. Ari-Matti Toivonen, good job. I like the one cave room laced with methane from vents/decaying tube worms that is a clear fire hazard, good naturalistic danger room there.

​   Beyond that, what can be improved hits a lot of my standard points. The map, charmingly illustrated as it is, doesn’t have much interest to it…the two different entrances barely matter in this loop, which is a linear map just looped because of a cargo-cult reading of The Alexandrian’s “Jaquaysing” article, no real exploratory choices exist. Rooms also are a series of monster fights or situations, unconnected to one another. I’d complain about a river spirit offering concrete boons for conceptual gifts but that’s story gaming for ya. For a module called “rise of the blood olms”, there’s a real issue with the titular blood olms being just three dudes in a corner cave, statted like closet trolls. The extremely abbreviated scope here clashes with what the backstory wants, making the whole place bigger wouldn’t matter for a procedure-light system like this and it’d offer a lot more depth.
  The best use case for Rise of the Blood Olms is probably as a one-shot, it is aggressively unwilling to be used to springboard into anything like a long campaign. Learning how to play from this would be rather difficult, but outside of B1 most modules fail on that measure to be fair.
  Final Rating? */***** ultimately it is a decent-looking module that has very little substance, lacking much in creativity or even interest. 

Good art tho.