Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Crypt of Crimson Ice

A one-page dungeon by Francisco Lemos, low-level.
Written system neutral
  “Crimson Ice” is a nice evocative pair of words, conjuring the grim vision of frozen blood. Nice title.
  We’re back in our happy space, reviewing a densely-formatted one-page-dungeon put up by an artist with genuine talent but a questionable eye for table usability. Lemos is a familiar name, I forget his module’s name but I remember cute mushroom-men and a very detailed isometric map. There’s a dearth of adorability in the illustrations on this one but the isometric Is very detailed again. As is dismayingly common, there are no numbers in the keys, just arrows pointing to a given spot. It’s a workable way to convey a dungeon, just a little ham-handed.
  Our dungeon’s story is pretty much the bog standard, there’s a crypt underneath a church rumored to contain vast riches, players go in there, whoops…deranged cultist is feeding adventurers to a gross fallen elder thing from beyond the stars. All completely normal stuff, you fight it and wonder where all the loot is but I guess the world is saved or whatever.
  I’ll start what I liked first with one charming little wrinkle, the front crypt has a dead decapitated corpse of a local hero in it, his undead talking head is lodged in a skull-wall elsewhere and has useful information. The art style is gross and visceral, works very well for the “show to the players” use for art in a dungeon module. Layout is more linear than first impression, but with enough depth (and a secret second entrance) to make exploration interesting given the site’s small size…
  …but what can be improved is yep, you got it, STOP RELYING ON THE ISOMETRIC MAP. It’s the usual litany of complaint about an isometrically mapped dungeon, in that as pretty as everything is its hard to convey to players and it generates a lot more visual complexity than it has in game-practical terms. Generic system-neutral is biting us again, having a specific system that isn’t what I’m running this in still makes conversion easier than whatever the heck these stats and dangers are supposed to be. The random encounter isn’t terrible, but having the sub-boss as part of the wandering table makes for some weird pacing if the cult priest guy is encountered in the first room and killed…or never rolled at all. Another call for specificity in that. The handwave about the final bossfight with the elder god thingy also begs for some instruction. Even for a One-Page Dungeon, there’s room for more details there.
  The best use case here is to use this as an adventure site for a generally sprawling campaign, seeded in if there’s a call for cosmic horror forces added in. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of homework required to make this usable in any system weightier than DREAD.
  Final Rating? */***** with a genuine nod towards the artistic skill exhibited in the presentation. If only the steak matched the sizzle.