Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Battlefield

An adventure by Goatmans Goblet, level moot
Written for Rakehell (Knave)
  It’s the best reviewing season of the year, Adventure Site Judging Time. Love it. So, of course, we need a good solid disciplined diet of Crapshoot Mondays mixed in, lest we float away in gustatory delight. This one is…unique, though. Twenty-two pages of single-column high-effort writing attempting to convey a battlefield as a dungeon, ending with a heartfelt plea to “please be nice, this is experimental” at the end. It’s hard to hate on that and there’s definitely ambition here. Successful? Well, let’s see…
   First, the scenario. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’s river battle scenes were great, weren’t they? Great battle scenes, wonderful setup, great acting on all parts…a highlight in a film full of highlights. Well, this module looked at the scenario and asked “what if we could make this setup a into something gameable?” Two armies, poised on either side of a crucial river bridge. Evenly matched, just grinding each other down over a long battle. Lot of cynicism and the main drive in the scenario is “loot stuff while helping your side win”. The setting is pike-and-shot except there’s also field artillery (and the designer says “make it spells if you don’t like that”). It’s a real attempt being made to make the battlefield into a dungeon-esque thing.
   Simple as it looks, the battlefield’s map is what I liked. Each terrain zone is distinctive and interesting, with different implications if the PCs want to ambush or hide or maneuver, and also it’s an isometric that the players are able to see. All objections I have with isometrics vanish if your players are given a vision of what’s there. They can be strategic, they can scheme…it’s great.  
   Sadly, everything else gets piled into the what can be improved bracket. While the terrain is solid, the progress of the battle is extremely random, swinging on d12 rolls for a lot of the events and with a somewhat abstracted method of determining how the armies (lots vs lots) will eventually be defeated. If your players liked the bridge-blow-up scene from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly then that’s an option too, but they’re supposed to then be hounded by their own side wherever they go. There are also some very nasty events where a giant, a wyrm, or something similar comes out and completely wrecks both sides’ days. A little more thought for how to resolve all the wacky results would have gone a long way. None of these are fundamental issues, but the module needs a lot more baking before its ready to serve.
   Best use cases are thus reserved for “plunder for parts”, for all that the idea has merit. I like the giant monsters, I like the event tables, I like the terrain, I just would have to do a whale of a lot of work to hammer them all together into a serviceable adventure being run at the table. Plus, despite the designer’s breezy assurances, I don’t think you actually could use this in a traditional medieval fantasy milieu. Everything about the battlefield screams “age of gunpowder”, and even pike and shot is a little early to be honest. Just accept it’s a Civil War or Napoleonic scenario.
   Final Rating? */***** with an encouraging word or three to the author. It’s not usable as-is, but there is potential here that I’d hate to dismiss out of hand. Playtest and polish and republish, then this thing could really be something special.