Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Last Voyage of the Shadow

A dungeon by Matt Wuertzer, level ~4.
Written for Shadowdark
  Here’s your reward for getting a positive review in Crapshoot Monday: You get another review. If it’s free on itch.io, at least. In the Last Voyage of the Shadow, we witness the author vastly expanding his scope, taking 33% more pages (up to four) to describe 50% more rooms (twelve). The setting isn’t anything astonishingly fresh, just adventuring in the ship (barge, actually) of a failed Shackleton Expedition. It’s written about as well as last time, formatted neatly, same offset bullet points and clean tables and workmanlike but flavorful descriptions. It’s fine.
  The story is that this captain took the barge(?) Shadow north on a mission of exploration, found a mysterious cursed orb, got himself locked into the ice, and then everyone died after the usual cannibalism and madness. Players who explore Ernest Shackleton’s Bad Day Out start with a siren fight if they go into the lower hold’s hole, then poke around looking at nonreactive frozen corpses…until the captain’s cabin where he’s clutching the Bad Pearl of Badness. Touching the pearl animates all the corpses as undead, a very nice shock if they haven’t come up yet as one of the d4 results on that random encounter table. Setting warning: This ship has gunpowder, cannons, and the captain owns a flintlock pistol…which for about half of you means you’re more on board, the other half will immediately check out. YMMV.
  What I liked is at least the idea of that set-piece…spend most of the night after the initial siren fight just poking around the freezing spooky ship, gaining piecemeal bits of information, then come upon the captain and wham, frantic frozen zombie swarm fight. Good idea, even if the encounter table might spoil it. I like the chance for a hilarious “oh crap” moment with the gunpowder in the hold too, there’s a chance to set it off…which in turn has a chance to crack the ice and send the boat hurtling to the depths. Love that scene.
  Obviously then the first of what can be improved is taking a look at that random encounter table. Any set of players with more genre savviness than a midsized turtle will of course know all those corpses are going to wake up at some point, but it’s still a bummer to have zombies moving before the big huzzah. The ship/barge is also a little too…predictable, something twisted and damaged by being trapped in the ice could be riven and damaged in ways that allow for more up-down movement than just “hold or upper deck”. That could also help in making naturalistic traps too, pits and spikes and whatnot. The cursed pearl is underwhelming too, and unfortunately, it’s the only magic item. The biggest grounds for improvement might be a weakness of the Shadowdark RPG System, but give us adventure bits for reaching the ship. As it is this remote arctic expedition starts with just “you arrive at boat”…let’s make the getting there an adventure. If Shadowdark can even enable that gameplay.
  The highly specific setup means that the best use case is going to be playing this straight, unfortunately just as a one-shot. There might be a little mining of the gunpowder thing or the set-piece idea, but those are pretty darn broad. Cannon and gunpowder rules look…sane, at least, but I leave it to the Shadowdark aficionado to decide if this is the supplement he wants for boomstick inclusion.
  Final Rating? **/*****, competent but not inspired.

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