Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Temple of Hypnos

A dungeon by Álvaro Rubianes Pérez-Uhía, levelless.
Written for “OSR”
  Well, I got excited for a moment when I saw this title. Olle Skogen’s “Temple of Hypnos” was an excellent entry from No Artpunk I, later released as a stand-alone module. This…is not that. This is a one-page dungeon (plus an addition page for map) that details a simple nine-room complex. The one admirable bit of unusual design is that this is designed to be a small section of a larger dungeon/megadungeon, bumped into as an apparent side room with a secret door leading to the rest of the complex, which in turn has few other exits to tie into the rest of said bigger dungeon. It was made as part of a Jaquays memorial jam so perhaps there’s a bit of Thracia in there with the side-cavern thought. 
  There’s certainly a theme present here that’s suggested by the Greek god Hypnos. Place was a shrine to Hypnos that got invaded by random Vikings, magic sleep dust got tossed into the fire and put everyone asleep, now it’s a sleep zone in stasis basically until the magic fire is put out. Initial room is filled with pink mist that makes people sleepy, waking up from sleep reveals the secret door into the rest of the complex. Everything is fuzzy and dreamlike, not really because of the flavorful prose, but because absolutely none of the dungeon comes with any stats or mechanics.
  TRIGGER WARNING, TERRIBLE DESIGN: IF PLAYERS DIE IN THE COMPLEX THE DM IS DIRECTED TO HAVE THEM WAKE UP IN ROOM ONE, IT WAS ALL A DREAM.
  Blinding myself to that mortal sin, what I liked was the basic scenario setup, it’s a perfect reason for living occupants to be in stasis when a site gets stumbled on, and (although the author declines to detail it) there’s a nice explosive bit of potential if the PCs put out the sleep fire and wake up the two battling sides in mid-invasion, that’s good stuff. I also like the multiple connection to “the rest of the dungeon”, that’s someone trying to make an adventure site as something encountered in a big dungeon campaign, not bad. Finally, the best find in the complex is a bucket-helmeted fighter next to a fountain with memory-erasing water. Free henchman, or replacement PC, nice.
  That it for the unalloyed good. What can be improved first, second, and third is specificity, in names, stats, spells, treasure amounts, lock difficulties, magic sleep mist mechanics, secret door detection, etc etc. There’s potential here, but with everything set up so vaguely, if I were to try to run this I’d have to put in more prep time than the author did. The sons of Hypnos as random encounters are a potentially interesting idea, but once again the boon/neutral/bane results of various Oneiros aren’t detailed so it’s a lot of effort to dump on the suffering DM’s lap. Magic items suffer the same trouble. Just…give one more page with all the numbers filled in for a specific system and we can work with this. Also get rid of “it was all a dream”.
  The best use case for this would be as intended, a sublevel in a megadungeon, but that’s a lot of work for a pretty mild benefit.
  Final Rating? */***** but it could have gained two stars even if it was just given the work of specifics.

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