Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Tragic Curse of Grimhill Fort

​A dungeon by Aleksandar Kostić (edited by Alex Bates), level 1.
Written for Shadowdark.
  A terrible storm is brewing – you must find shelter from
this accursed weather, and quickly! Veldmark, the nearest
town, is over ten leagues away, so your only choice is the
ruined fort on a nearby hill. As you approach, a faint cry
echoes from deep within the decrepit structure. The hair on
the back of your neck stands up in warning, but perhaps
it was just the wind. Perhaps. Gathering up your courage,
you enter the halls of the Grimhill fort.
  Hey, it’s One Of These Adventures…sketchy ruin beside the road, But Thou Must railroad tracks in the form of an oncoming storm, I’m pretty sure late Dungeon magazine had one of these every 5-6 issues. Mr. “Art of Caustic” here uses his eight pages languidly to key a dozen-room fort/cave/tower ruin with an understated story and a well-formatted isometric map. Writing is fine, efficient and decently formatted. It’s a good enough idea and I’m fine with the adventure site scope, just no need to include the little railroad at the front. Even in a one-shot.
  I want to run a sidebar on this map. It’s an interesting thing to talk about, a nice-looking well-executed little map with some wonky choices made in a few places. The line work is very good, I really like how well-illustrated the tower, the cave-pool, and the ladders are…but this is the Cult of the Loop taken to an extreme without any consideration to making the dungeon geometry generate meaningful choices in playing the game. Three entrances/exits on three different elevation levels only matter if there’s some trade-off made between entries, which, spoiler, there ain’t. No, there isn’t any environmental or gameplay difference between those colorful levels, either. I could complain about the pointless stock-art pointy hands but they wouldn’t really be worth mentioning if they were on a more meaningful map. I’ve praised the combination of an isometric GM map/player map pairing, handing the players something with this illustration would be so much better.
  All that aside, the ruins are filled with the Usual Suspects as people explore. Bandits with a couple leader minibosses, wolves in the cave, undead in the tower, traplike things, giant rats, it’s the expected elements here…the “tragic curse” isn’t really brought to the forefront but there’s a sad ghost and a wight that can be neutralized/set to rest if a pair of figurines are brought together. Your reward for this is the storm stops and the sky immediately turns blue. Whoa.
  What I liked is obviously a lot with the look of the thing. I like the clarity of the formatting. I like the map’s look. I like the evocative and moody writing at times. I like the attempts are giving a little personality to the bandits…
  ….but what can be improved is consistently found in the mirror image of those nice-looking elements. The formatting is good, but the content is often generic. The map is cute, but usability is low and the site’s gameplay potential is lacking. The writing is trying hard, but having flowers “smell like sorrow” is a bit much for example. The bandits have little stories, but there’s not a lot of ways to interact with them. I didn’t mention the treasure before this, but it’s the Shadowdark Norm of “fine but lacks pizzazz”, improving the treasure with some hiding/more traps/gameplay interaction would go a long way to improving this thing.
  I’m being a little dour, the best use case on this one probably is seeding it on the map as a moody little adventure site, people will probably still have fun despite the generic elements and the awkwardness of not having a player version of the isometric map. I need a new rating that somehow summarizes “Just enough talent being shown to make me feel disappointment.”
  That’s going to have to be summarized by Final Rating? **/*****

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