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

​A dungeon by Revivify Games, mid-level
Written for Vaults of Vaarn
  Let’s make a gentle transition away from sci-fi month back to the more standard fantasy fare with a Vaults of Vaarn joint. I was less than impressed with the last time I encountered this heartbreaker system, but the vaguely Tron-ish synthwave post-apocalypse aesthetic at least isn’t Troika, so it could always be worse. This particular eight-page document is attractively minimalist, with generous margins, tasteful art, and tight language used to convey a fourteen-key mystical temple. It’s almost soothing how pleasantly its conveyed.  Couple this with a pretty but reasonably designed map, and I’m going in filled to the brim with almost childlike hope.
  The plot, such as it is, doesn’t break any new ground but it’s fine enough for a night of D&D. The faa, whatever they were, made a vault of magic thingies in a temple buried underneath the “interior sands” with two mirrored pyramids the only hint to its presence. Fine, good, let’s go loot. Most of the fighting is going to be from the random encounters, which are two different columns for “Lower Levels” and “Higher Levels” and pull from a monster manual I’m not aware of but I hope “d6 Phthalo-Hackals” is a nice surprise. Low levels getting either a d6 or a d4 of monsters while higher nets 2d6 or d6 of the same monster types makes me scratch my head. Anyway, enjoy the semi-linear map with each “progress” branch unlocked by a “relic” found on the other branch, ensuring almost all rooms much be explored. Flavor text is working hard but the contents of each room are pretty simple, just a puzzle or a monster or a helper. The bottomless pit, if fallen into, just teleports characters to a fountain asleep at 1 hp, lame, but at least there’s an NPC handy there. This is essentially a plunder scenario, and the final vault (opened via simple mirror puzzle) has a special grail on top of a pile of explicitly worthless currency. There were…choices being made here.
  This is another one where what I liked is going to make me sound a little shallow. It’s an attractive little product, aesthetically pleasing. I like the idea of some of the gear around the temple/vault, like a reflective butterfly-wing shield or the swords and loot made out of crystal…
  ….but unfortunately, what can be improved is that all of this, like that apparent bottomless pit, is actually in fact shallow. Pretty aesthetics aside, what you have in the end is a trio of forced fights, some very simple key puzzles, and a “secret thing” that’s this mystic fountain thingy. Focusing on sizzle to the exclusion of steak is a common problem, and I’m not sure how to fix this is each case but I think the aforementioned pit is where to start…make falling into the bottomless pit an actual fall into eternity. If a PC falls, that’s the end. It’s a real danger. I think that focus on having real threats instead of mood-setting would improve every single room, and then you can make the fights unforced, even.
  I reckon the best use case for The Temple of Mystic Light is to run it as an adventure site. A few mild ideas like the butterfly-wing reflective shield are worth looking at, but in the end you’re just left slightly singed by the grill and hungry for Angus.
  Final Rating? */***** and kind of mad about it, this is tragic misallocation of talent. 

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