Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Terror Crow of Pipwick Church

​A village adventure by Pointless Monument Games, level diagetic
Written for Cairn
  In honor of this stupid pointless game system, I’m going to write a small deathtrap dungeon called “Diagenes’ Cairn”, where everything is a pale and sad simulacrum of reality and if the player characters do survive the gold they plunder turns to ash in their hands. So needless to say I’m a touch ill-disposed towards Cairn adventures, this little one-pager is thus starting off on the back foot. It’s an outdoor woodsy adventure, which is the Cairn motif I do in fact enjoy, so maybe it’ll be decent.
  The story is told somewhat randomly in the single big landscape-layout page…there’s an old abandoned church, its being used as a roost by a gigantic crow, bucolic local rubes find the big bird’s predations objectionable, players go on a quest to solve this because that’s what we have to do or else we don’t play tonight. Oh, and I guess a local wizard wants giant bird eyes, so that’s your quest item if you’re in the “gather 10 bristle boar spleens” RPG quest design mindset. Unobjectionable. The whole thing is less set up as a key-and-location, more of a situation to deal with as the players see fit.
  So sure, what I liked is that there’s not a massive railroad setup here, just a set of clues, rumors, events, and then a consequence list, that’s decent design with its heart in the right place. I like that fighting the big bird in the church has a couple of quest-friendly results, notably eggs in the nest leading to possible flying-mount-training, and that the church needs to be re-consecrated due to bloodshed but the last priest of that particular god died two centuries ago, that have some potential. The author knows that ringing the ancient church bell is inevitable for a set-piece bossfight, good instinct. “What if we demolish the dungeon while it’s out hunting?” is also answered, so good thought. Map is pretty.
  What can be improved, though, is to playtest and think through what happens with your light railroad-free investigation when the players don’t put 2-and-2 together. Very tenuous clues mean that the DM will be going full GUMSHOE and just saying “so you put this together and go here” by the end of it. The non-consecration “potential consequences” things are also barely hooks, not particularly quest-spawning or even all that interesting. Basically, this needs to either be bigger to be fleshed out into a full-fledged investigatory adventure or condensed down into a two-line hex key entry. This is a Wilderland hex, basically. Said pretty map is sadly not very useful.
  So, tragically, we have an awkward best use case in either making this a little hex quest in a sprawling proper campaign, or else a rather thin 90-minute mystery one-shot. Nothing original is here worth stealing as a creative bit, alas.
  Final Rating? */***** but not a particularly angry one, its sins are more in scope of imagination than in any active issues. 

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