Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Reaping at Beltine

​An adventure by Taylor Seely-Wright, level omitted.
Written for Shadowdark
  Shadowdark again, I know. This one’s a little different, trying for a splattergore horror vibe. The adventure’s eight pages are littered with black-and-white AI art trying to tell the tale of a cursed town, keying both the town map and a thirteen-room basement dungeon while also trying to lay out a scenario and keep a pretty novel set of monsters forward. Clearly the product of a page limit, its working hard by reskinning book monsters and compressing descriptions, but that limitation seems to have helped, not hindered, in this case. Most of the time.
  Stop me if you’ve heard this one…there’s this town Beltine, right? And it’s a simple farming village, happy and prosperous, but it has a dark secret. The secret of the town’s prosperity is that underneath its church lies a magic music box, which was stolen from the local vineyard-owning family five years ago when the jealous villagers murdered the whole family and burned down their house. The family got the music box from a magical living puppet, who kicks off the adventure by returning to the region and then turning the burned family’s corpses into manikins and then animating them. But then the returned family cursed to a horrific existence of eternal torment and agony for some reason opt to carry out their vengeance upon the town that killed them, which somehow surprises said living puppet. Oops. Happens I guess.
  What I liked is going to be a somewhat nuanced evaluation here, because I’m going to freely admit that grindhouse horror is not my genre of choice. That being said, there’s some good design going on here. As a pretty open zombie horror scenario, there’s the essential timeline, basically a high-level description, night-by-night, of what happens if the PCs do nothing (whole village is slaughtered sans children). The dungeon, while over-fond of the gross, has decent crawling fundamentals and a pretty nice map for the scale, I’m particularly fond of a rusty lever that allows the PCs to accidentally trap themselves away from the main entrance (there’s a secret second egress, solid). The reskinning is good, focusing on visceral new descriptions for what are mechanically normal monsters (like a pile of body parts that acts like a roper). Music box that grants a system-specific “luck token” is a decent magic item.
  Still, what can be improved is probably “add a little more”. There’s just barely not enough to run this comfortably, a few crucial details missing…there’s a list of prominent villagers, for example, but instead of giving personality traits, their families names’ are given. The thin initial hook given for the PCs to be here is that The Merchant wants guards for a wine shipment, but that’s not been detailed with concrete rewards, day three of the horror scenario you want to know why the PCs are staying. Finally, the actual solution is…unclear. Will killing all of the reanimated Wronged Family fix things? Is there a McGuffin of Fixing? Do the zombie manikin puppet villagers just fall apart at some point? A village-under-siege scenario needs more details to enable the much broader set of player solutions the party will inevitably come up with. Not a LOT more is needed to really improve things, but what’s here now unfortunately just isn’t enough.
  So then the best use case is probably to strip it down for the classic Halloween one-shot (or Beltane, if your group is high on that sort of pretention). The suffering DM will need to do some work to give it focus in the one-shot framework, but it’s not very easy to drop into a big campaign, and the details are so odd that I don’t know how much content mining there is here.
  Final Rating? **/***** because it does what it does okay, but it lacks flexibility for anything more. If the theme and the AI art really float your boat probably worth checking out though?

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Useful map? No details though.