Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Sweet Escape

​A one-shot by Destiny Howell, illustrated by Ryan Lynch, level 2.
Written for Perils and Princesses
  Whew boy what have I done. The Sweet Escape is for some fresh hell, a game called “Perils & Princesses” where players are apparently candy-loving princesses? And they get railroaded into rescuing a baby bird from a witch’s six-key tower over the course of twenty unevenly illustrated pages? A lot of effort went into this thing to evidently serve as an introductory adventure for the aforementioned TTRPG system, and it is aggressively SYSTEM focused…bad events/random encounters are Wrinkles, status effects are Wear, Woozy, or Befuddled, all fine and good and understandable, but needlessly twee. That’s not really a critique of the adventure, that’s the system though, so let’s grit our teeth and ignore the headache, dive on in.
  Thou Art Lost is combined with Bearing a Load of X (in this case, sweets delivery) to deliver the PCs to near the witch tower. The witch (called Dulcinea because Howell hates me) is experimenting with phoenix chicks and turning them into candy hybrids because why not and one escapes and a golem made out of chocolate is chasing it and I think my pancreas just shut down. Anyway, help the cute talking candy-bird and rescue its siblings and there’s a timer to see when the witch gets back to murd…er, capture the PCs. If at any point the PCs fail the chick resurrects them, which is lame but might be the first thing I’ve read that does play for the intended audience of little girls or adults pretending to be little girls playing princesses.
  Swiftly moving on from THAT distressing thought, what I liked is the line work on most of the art and how the map looks quite nice. There are occasional smart nods here and there to magical powers, like how the tiny bugs outside of the front door know the password if they’re asking. I like the magic item reward, a literal bit of Phoenix Down, a feather that resurrects the holder after 1d20 days, nifty.
  Where do I even start on what can be improved? I could quibble with the dry predictability of the random encounters, the vagueness of the Wrinkle results, or the nauseating repetition of candy motifs, but I think the biggest issue is with the attempt to be “fairy tale” itself. The twee tone and soft outcomes are in fact in opposition to any real fairy tale. The Brothers Grimm, please remember, sanitized their fairy tales. Actual fairy tales drip with menace and danger, and if you spend any time with children you’ll rapidly learn they love that. Whimsy shouldn’t be pushed artificially, it’s something that emerges from the deadly-serious way that children approach the world combined with the magical outlook that comes from being able to talk to animals and trees. This treacle is a gross simulacrum of the actual world of fairy tales, which are really just folk tales with all the inherent moral freight that implies.
  Alack, that means the best use case for this thing is to run it straight with other greying millennials as you all weakly grope towards the dimming memory of lost childhood. Also maybe the tower map is okay to swipe for a generic tower if needed?
  Final Rating? */***** with a suspicious glare and a sternly-worded injunction against ever doing this again. 

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Too much twee. The bitty skulls were too much.