Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Forgotten Halls of Brassfire

​A dungeon by Brynjar Már Pálsson, levels 1-3
Written for Shadowdark
  It’s rare, but it happens. You’re fishing in a little stock pond, mostly snagging little baitfish, nothing substantial. Then, suddenly, something big hits your line. You struggle a minute, and bring up…okay, nothing to write home about in the grand scheme of things, but this thing is big enough to actually fillet. That’s my experience with this adventure, a Shadowdark product that has twenty-three pages, detailing a dungeon of twenty-five rooms. Again, this isn’t anything record-setting, but it’s substantial enough I actually had to read a couple things twice. Like seeing a dog walk, it’s so remarkable to see at all you don’t even think at first to see if it’s doing it well.
  The story of the dungeon is pretty involved, thickly populated as these things tend to be. Ancient empire had a brass industry and horrible cursed time machine, seal up the device with the dwarven slaves still in the complex, dwarf slaves become crazed blind mutants “cragbairn”, sahuagin (pronounced like “Samhain”) settle caves nearby, local bumbling villagers fall into the area in a well-making accident. Also there’s a hungry chul. Enter heroes.

​    You can see this thing. What I like first of all has be this map, that chasm is great with multiple iffy bridges, multiple entrance points, and despite being split up into “zones” there’s still a decent back-and-forth flow. I like the magic items, there’s a +1 trident that helps in underwater combat, a +0 sword that gives fighters a feat, a great brass helmet that gives bonuses to mace/hammer attacks but attracts lightning, and my favorite, a sentient wand that hates being used at all and curses on a casting fumble. Good thinking. Mutant dwarves using pocket-rats as sling ammunition is fun. I like the chul as a nasty much-more-dangerous monster for the area that menaces everything else in the dungeon.
  This is leading to a common comment on what can be improved, this tightly packed monster zoo has “factions” sitting on top of each other extremely tightly. There’s also too much work on making the human-hunting sahuagin and the blood-cultist cragbairn into sympathetic people to work with, heck, even the chul has tadpoles its caring for. The density of everything adds to this difficulty as well, widening the spaces of the map would make actual faction play a lot more interesting. There’s also a lot of complex backstory with four ancient dwarven kings, a lot of in-universe information is conveyed pretty naturalistically but the reward for paying attention is…a trap that amputates your hand?
  This all means for me personally the best use case is going to be “steal the magic items and maybe the map”. I like both those elements a lot, sadly the main thing isn’t handy for me. If you’d like to blow the minds of Shadowdarkians, though, this thing practically classes as a megadungeon among the itch field, so that’s a use for those poor souls.
  Final Rating? **/***** with a bit of disappointment, there’s a reach that’s exceeding the grasp. Some worthwhile ideas here though.