Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Vault of Caul Doran

A dungeon by Logen Nein, level 3 or 4.
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  One-page dungeon day, calloo, callay, we get to review a single-pager. I’m genuinely pleased, twelve rooms means you can’t mess around or waste time with frippery, and this at least isn’t a weirdo art project. Logen Nein here is also giving us a treat with “not Shadowdark”, in this case an adventure for Heroes of Adventure nominally. Despite some unique monsters nothing forces use with the system, but I appreciate the adventure-site scale built for level 4’s, not the thousandth first-level adventure. I’m positive going in…
  …and then details immediately make me worried. It’s “Crafted with the Heroes of Adventure Referees Guide procedures”, which can be fine, but also practically often is terrible when adventure writers don’t realize how much effort they need to put into those table roll results. There unfortunately is a bit of “I used story dice on a random dungeon map” here, with the interestingly stringy spider-map being ostensibly the tomb of a powerful necromancer but also containing weirdo aberrations, giant spiders, golems, and drakes. Couple with the fact that the necromancer is only present as a random encounter and that the last two rooms end with “…” that beg for “insert McGuffin here”, and the final product comes out slightly doughy and underbaked.
  Poking through this dumpling, what I liked was the stringy map, actually…as completely linear as it is, the long lines are neat and the side-room with drakes does mention a second difficult egress. I love room 4, as a particular thing, a high dome that shows half the world in magnificent detail. That’s an exploration treasure in and of itself, that could be used for financial gain, to uncover geographic secrets, possibly depending on the details even spawn more adventures/quests. Great room. I also love the little in-universe blurb by a scholar about the horror that was Caul Doran, a fine example of flavor text/scene setting that doesn’t drone on long.
  The rest all needs thought on what can be improved. There’s a list of three “hooks” that all just need but two words (name, key location) to be made specific and thus actually useful. More specificity in some of the room names rather than “hexagonal room” also would go a long way; if you’re writing a one-page dungeon, you need to use every single word to convey flavor and interest, so these room titles are being wasted. I really like the tight little complex (11) and natural cavern (12) at the end of the dungeon, but these are where the descriptions completely give up on giving anything, where the flow of the dungeon should make this the climax. Bums me out…
  The aggressively generic lack of those proper nouns alas means the best use case is “steal bits”. I’d use this map as an adventure site in a heartbeat, and room 4 is a good idea that is definitely worth the steal. Sadly, running it as it is will require a lot of homework.
  Final rating? */***** in a very frustrated way, this could have easily been three stars with just another twenty minutes of creative work…or, of course, a single playtest. 

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