Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Pirates of Marwater Cavern

Easily the cutest map style.

A dungeon by Vance Atkins, “low-level”
Written for OSE
  I don’t encounter him a lot, but the indomitable Matt Jackson is another prolific mapmaker in the vein of Dyson Logos, fond of natural caves and cute little equipment illustrations. As with Logos, you can either complain about the simplicity of most of Jackson’s output, or you can be thankful that he pumps out a ton of usable maps for noncommercial community use absolutely free of charge. I’m clearly in the latter camp, as is Mr. Atkins, who uses a little fourteen-room sea cave map here over five pages to give us the endlessly useful gift of a pirate lair. I don’t know how good it’ll be, but I approve of the heart.  
  I don’t know what to tell you about the story of the pirate lair. It’s a pirate lair. So, anyway, there’s this lair, you see. And it’s got pirates in it. And you go to kill them and take their stuff because they’re pirates. I mean there’s some fun side stuff like how the winds always seem to favor them and the caves are a navigation hazard and there’s a nameless (take a drink) sea god shrine here but mostly it’s yo-ho-ho and a bottle of fun.
  Let the reader be clear, this is part of what I liked, it’s a good adventure site. It’s simple, but the lair does have some nice little details, like the pirates keeping a pet nerd for their magic needs, a statue that accepts offerings to fill a grotto below with feelings of euphoria, and a couple of the fun magic items…the Anemoi Basket is a woven basket that can be opened to release winds, and a couple Medusa’s Locks, each a single lock of medusa hair that can be used as a one-time paralysis effect. The fact that the pirates’ ships are low-key the most valuable bits of loot is nice too, although they have a fine pile of cash too. I like that the captain and mate have a little escape cave too, nice use of the map layout there.
  What can be improved first of all would be adding just a little bit of that magic item verve into having a bit more variety for traps/combat encounters, which are all just arrow traps and straight up pirate swordfights. This dryness also applies to the rumor table, which is full of some rather generic whispers by and large. It’s not like any of these are bad at all, just that when I look at an adventure site like this I’m looking for something that’s more valuable that I can come up with off the cuff when rolling on a DMG wilderness encounter.
  Don’t get me wrong though, the best use case here is definitely keeping this in your back pocket for whenever your campaign needs a pirate lair. Which, for me at least, is “any given session” so you better believe I’m adding this to my map.
  Final Rating? ***/***** for its fundamental decency and bang-for-buck value. It’s a very solid little lair and I appreciate it.
  
  P.S., in Actual Play:
  So as usual I write these things a ways in advance. I finished my review of Marwater Cavern and I added it to my rolodex as a potential adventure site. A month or two later, the domain activity roll I made for my current ongoing island-based West Marches campaign yielded an "increased pirate activity" result. The player with the largest active fleet was disturbed by reports of an active new brace of pirates (three sloops' worth, the other one ship I made the Vermin Wake from one of the better Shots in the Dark adventures), so he worked with some of his contacts to investigate and carefully located the two lairs. He opted for the bigger prize and went into Marwater here with a set of new characters (two newcomers to the game, one an old hand who was happy to play his backup character). The adventure went great; the environment was interactive and interesting, the flow of battle was great (thank you random encounter for yanking in multiple rooms), and the loot was lucrative. I generally leave stars where they are but don't let three seem "mid" to you, you should absolutely grab this when looking for a pirate lair.

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