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

Thrill as you explore the dungeon.

​An adventure by EM Hundis, levels 2-4
Written for Shadowdark
  I’m seriously not trying for a theme, but it’s another four-page Shadowdark island crawl adventure we just bumped into here. This time, it’s not with a dungeon portion at all, rather a little island (no scale given) abstracted point-crawl. It’s written in more or less the Shadowdark standard format; double column, That One Font, flavor in the front, monsters and factions to the back. It’s all a good setup and although the prose isn’t very evocative, it’s at least windowpane. We could complain about the AMOUNT and the CLARITY of what’s written, but at least as module writing goes, it’s fine.
   So I’m at least able to grok the initial setup. Our initial railroad is “so you’re shipwrecked”…but after that the idea, at least, is pretty solid. Island has an old ruined city with the titular Living Artifact at its center, an item of great power that in game terms only causes heartache. Three factions control various places on the island, each has different distinctive flavors and suggest different final boss confrontations. The most cultish of the factions does own a boat to leave the island. Um, on a little northern islet so I’m not sure how you get to it. Also the final boss of the barbarian faction shows up by default in several places. Basically, the initial setup is clear but I’m not sure how its all supposed to end unless you just automatically ally with the Tainted. Introduction scene is very nice though.
   So what I liked then is the setup stuff. The adventure isn’t really set up to be a hexcrawl or pointcrawl, it wants to be a diplomacy adventure dealing with faction rivalries both internal and external, and it does a decent job at that. I like the scenario as a whole, it’s ripe for one to three nights’ adventure depending on how focused or chatty the players are feeling. On the random encounter table, there are “knifebeak furywings”. That’s a great name for a good scary random encounter.
   Alert readers will predict the first of what can be improved: BETTER MAPS PLEASE. The island has no scale given at all. There is zero map (or even geographic description) for the ruined city, which apparently is just loaded with lagoons and canals. Finally, the Deep Sanctum, home of the nightmarish corrupting Living Artifact is…a map of a circle. This is terrible. Really, all the confusion is caused by this refusal to give us any physical distances or details, a concrete pair of map pages would do wonders. Generally, the whole thing is just underbaked…give us more dungeon space, a ruined-city-crawl, maybe little side-sites. The story wants a much bigger product than what we got, so the answer is either give a bigger module, or go with a different adventure scenario. Some stories are novels, some are flash fiction, but it’s a bad idea to try to stuff the former into the latter.
   Which means regretfully our best use case is probably just to do a ton of homework and expand it to its proper length, or else use a couple enemy or artifact ideas to add to another area. Pity but it would require a very particular set of magic tea partiers to run out of the box.
   Final Rating? */***** but it’s close to a second star. I’d love to see an expansion.  

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