Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Awful Amber Doom

Cartography awards, you won't get.

​An adventure by Aleksandar Kostic and Alex Bates, level 3
Written for ShadowDark
  PULP TIME, MY FRIENDS. IT WILL PROBABLY BE DISAPPOINTING BUT I’M DIGGING THIS COVER. And now they’re taking up precious page space in this eight-page little document to try and sell us on some 1925-1945 issues of Weird Tales? Passion project detected. Generous art spreads in old-timey bright colors too, I’m going to be strict on the adventure itself but I admire these two gentlemen for their enthusiasm and hard work, bravo. This is the “Art of Caustic” guy again, I forget his adventure’s quality but great job on the evocative artwork.
  But what about that content, Mr. Reviewer sir? Well, it’s pretty pulpy too. Ruined city drowned beneath the waves because of its adherence to a bat-themed Great Old One rises out of the water under a full moon at solstice, so it can be looted on a twelve-hour timer. So far, so standard, but there’s also “your enemy, The Corpse Master”, a vampirish necromancer fellow who’s seeking a McGuffin of power (the somewhat incongruously named “Cranberry Goblet”) to grow his power even more. Add in a cursed explorer who turns into a bat-shadow monster in darkness and you’ve got a very active potential adventure. Neat setup. There’s also a new class in the back which is basically an Indianna Jones-flavored thief mod.
  I’ll split what I liked (outside of the aesthetic) into two different parts. First, this module has an excellent presentation, not formatted with a fetishistic eye to within an inch of its life, just built focused on giving the DM what he needs to run the thing at the table (with one glaring exception, we’ll get there). Non-new monsters are given core book page references, treasure is called out by type and page, NPCs and monsters have tactics and motivations clearly defined…it’s just very well conveyed. Secondly, I really like the module’s story focus, it knows exactly the adventure it wants to be and this pulpy race for an artifact while a drowning timer ticks and a shadow monster that hunts based on how cloudy the night sky is…well, come on. I also am fond of the shadowbat thing being vulnerable to magic and porcelain weapons, that’s a cool vulnerability.
  All that said, what can be improved is going to have a biggie, GIVE ME A MAP OF THE CITY, or, if you’re going to insist on making the exploration of the outer ruins theater-of-mind, GIVE ME A PROCEDURE FOR EXPLORATION. So much effort on so many quality encounters but I’m at a complete loss for how to tell if my players bump into the Sunken Ship versus the Bathhouse in the outer precincts. The gorgeous comic-book-style picture of the City Beneath the Sea is lovely but we need a map, or procedures if you’re determined to go Dungeon World on us. There’s a little map for the final ziggurat where the final McGuffin takes place, I know you can do it. A related lapse is the very important ghostly guardian NPC, the Oracle of the Moon…she’s not actually called out to be encountered anywhere. I know these are inevitably the creation of some kind of game jam, but these omissions really are terrible.
  The best use case for this one is almost certainly some kind of pulp one-shot run outdoors at nighttime in the light of a full moon. I may seed this in myself for the solstice moons in my game world. I guess scour the internet for Atlantis maps?
  Final Rating? ***/***** and would have had another star easily with just a little better game running support. Admire the product’s vim and vigor, though.

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Good art, terrible map for players to explore.