Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Ruins of The Immortal Warlord

​An adventure site by Pakkanen, level 3.
Written for Shadowdark
  Yes, I know it’s more Shadowdark. There’s been a million of them released, this is my life for now, so dear reader, now it is yours. This one is using eight (‘zine-sized) pages to cover a lake fortress site with eleven keyed locations, with the by-now-standard formatting of a single-column pages with simple descriptions and details in bullet points, d6 rumor and encounter tables, and back pages with bestiary and magic items descriptions. The map, which is isometric, and the couple little illustrations are all by the author, very charming. I don’t know what started the trend of crediting the font but I’m never impressed when that happens. Dear module cobblers: Times New Roman, Arial, or if you’re feeling frisky, Calibri…pick one and just forge ahead.
  Our premise, thin but not emaciated, is that within this lake sits a cute lil’ island fortress owned by a lich who was pretending to be a warlord. Lich/Warlord gets assassinated by a magic blade that petrifies its victims, Warlord Lich curses the assassin and his failed bodyguards to join in him petrification, fortress “becomes abandoned”. Lot of passive voice. Now there’s a bunch of pirates on one half of the fortress, some sahuagin on the other half, and a wyvern roosting on the fortress top. Enter the PCs, holding the “Sheath of Fire Seals”, which is what the aforementioned sword turns into when it is used to rock out its target. All pretty standard stuff, but nothing bad.
  I’m going to start what I liked with that fortress map, coming as it does with both a keye/cutaway GM version and a print-and-handout player version. My usual critique of isometric maps is that while they’re a visually appealing way to convey a 3D space, they can be confusing on scale, and also the players aren’t usually seeing your very busy art piece. In this case, the cartographer/author has done a great job not only showing a scale, but also showing various heights of each portion of the fortress…which couples wonderfully with the players getting their own player map. Not only does that give them the artistic impression, the player map also stops the rather small map from being linear, showing windows and roofs that could potentially be other points of ingress or egress. Massive improvement, and adds a ton of gameplay. Great job.
  I also like the idea of multiple factions, given personalities, goals, and direction…good adventure design. The fact that he Warlich’s guards don’t know he’s a lich and will turn against him if they see him all skeletonized is also a nice touch. The magic petrifying sword is a katana and very cool mechanically, if a touch convoluted. This is the second Shadowdark adventure in a row featuring gunpowder weapons but I think these rules look better to me as a tiny subsystem, your mileage may vary on adding boomsticks to your games but it is at least reasonable and balanced.
  After being this complimentary it’s going to feel a little weird, I know, but what can be improved is “spark more joy”. While I like a lot of the ideas here, everything comes off as dry and cramped, a Lichlord who commanded vast armies, two hostile factions battling over his ruins…all that should be a much bigger place, rather than the dinky little spot that has sahuagin and pirates less than a stone’s throw away from each other. The scale of this whole thing is fine for an adventure site, but your setup and what you see are wildly mismatched in scale. The personalities of the faction NPCs are also a little on the dull side, some spice would go a long way. Take advantage of the sentience of your wyvern, too, weird that it’s okay with invaders to its route.
  Eh, best use case here is still as a workable adventure site. There’s enough here to fill a relaxing evening, sprinkling it on a map or running a one shot wouldn’t make anyone give up the hobby. Pulling the sword (with illustration) out to use elsewhere I could see, and if gunpowder is something you’d like to add to your Shadowdarks, then I think the module’s gun table works pretty good.
  Final rating? **/***** due to the excessive boredom, but the module’s heart is in the right place, you should approve of it for trying.

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