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

​A squarecrawl by Golden Achiever, for level 1.
Written for 100 Million B.C.
   There really should be more caveman adventures. There’s a lot of entertainment to be had playacting as a hooting pack of cavemans, thumping and bumping your way through a land filled with prehistoric animals, wielding thighbones and sharp rocks, inventing rope and fire, communicating primarily via grunts. It’s not a very serious prospect, but everyone needs a funny break every now and then. This is a little trifold crawl with less than a dozen keyed “hexes” (actually squares), perfect for a one-shot. Written with just enough Land Before Time-speak (bigmouth, man-eater, tree-grabber, etc) for flavor, the prose otherwise gets out of the way and just lets the humor emerge naturally. 
   Our scenario is just good clean disaster from a “caveman crisis” table. River dry. Need water back. Go plateau, fix river. Don’t die to sky-things (pterodactyls) or land-things (t-rexes) or water-things (giant frogs I think). Negotiate with the friendly local cannibals. Figure out how to move the wounded dying brontosaurus to unblock the river. Usual caveman stuff, just another day in the Stone Age. 
   I’m going to state for the record that what I liked on this one was the theme, hard to go wrong on that one for me. I liked the key descriptions too, well done understanding how a hexcrawl one-shot works. The personalities of your own tribe and the locals are well-conveyed, which is important, because as droll as it is to hit a dinosaur with club, it’s even more fun to cave-talk at other hairy hominids. Squarecrawl map is simple but it looks pretty decent. Weather table looks good.
   I’m less impressed with random encounter table, that’s part of what can be improved to add more interactive bits. The map’s orientation is a little bit unclear, I think I’ve groked it but if you told me the whole region is the plateau then I’d also believe you there. Simplicity of wording might be going too far in the monster behavior bit, we’re at “they attack” level when clever cavemen really ought to have more levers to overcome their monster challenge. This is particularly egregious with the brontosaur blockage, need to know how to unplug things a bit more. 
   Am talk more simple. Best use case am use for one shot. Make cave mans. Go bonk monster. Have fun. There’s not a lot to extract from the little trifold that’s broadly usable outside of its intended context, but that’s hard to critique very much when it seems written for a system built around that game type. 
   Final Rating? **/***** and a resounding hearty OOK. I won’t over-rating something this insubstantial but it’s a fun little notion. Good job Golden Achiever.