Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Wreck of the Void Hatred

​An “expedition” by Richard Ruane, level-unspecified
Written for “OSR Fantasy Games”
  Oh hey, I recognize this art style. I remember the adventure that had it sucked. Christmas non-adventure more accurately? This thing isn’t promising to be much better, designed to be a vertical pamphlet product (so a single page, one-sided) without a map or credited playtesters but with an extra artist credit. Whew boy. There’s also a couple different bespoke fonts being used while the actual flow of information is more than a little confusing thanks to the desire to make something that folds. We are awash upon a veritable sea of red flags. In we go…
  Our story is reasonably standard, just your typical airship-owned-by-a-half-demon-half-god-queen-pirate-gets-smote-by-the-gods-into-the-high-mountainside-and-the-active-fire-elemental-engines-aboard-melt-the-glacier-sending-it-soon-hurtling-into-the-void. Workable, certainly, and a cromulent excuse for a time-sensitive adventure site when the players get involved. Unfortunately, all this very workable information is presented in a nonstandard manner that actively obstructs understanding and use. There’s treasure to gather while fighting ghost-zombies, but the random event table is pretty crummy and the treasure is nearly abstracted. PLUS THERE IS NO MAP.
  Okay. Center thyself, oh ye reviewer, for thy plight is thine own fault. What I liked was the basic setup, it’s dynamic and interesting. Some of the magic items, those are nice…a magic sword of ice that does a ton of extra damage to fire critters, demons, and undead but is hunted by winged sisters, that’s a good mixture of quest item plus useful item. There are PokeBalls of storm mephitis, good, and a heart that heals but curses, nice. Some of the treasures are Bryce-bait with good descriptions, but the gold amounts are pretty chintzy for actual old-school D&D. Still there’s potential there.
  …which, to discuss what can be improved most of all, is all wasted because YOU SHOULD PROVIDE A MAP. Now look, I know it’s a hard situation to map, “crashed 4-deck airship on top of glacier over a bottomless pit” isn’t a search that’s going to lead you to a handy Dyson Logos map to steal. And you can kind of imagine the situation yourself. Unfortunately, your imagined scene isn’t going to be mine, which matters a lot when you have multiple decks with an event that can cause a full-on zombie mass attack, plus a pitch-and-fall table, plus each deck having multiple rooms. I can sketch all of that myself, I guess, but then I’m doing all the work, and so you haven’t given me a helpful product, YOU HAVE GIVEN ME A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT. BAD MODULE, NO COOKIE. Also there are tons of “XdY Loot Things (Zgp each)”, which once again is homework. This is more reasonable in the random encounter table but don’t do that in the keys. The first mate has 1d4 bound nude corpses and 1d6 erotic paintings? Miss me with that crap, bruh, give me a concrete set of numbers.
  Ergo, best use case here is to print it out, fold it neatly into the trifold pattern, and SHOVE IT BACK TO WRITER RICHARD RUANE TO FINISH THE THING. It’s okay as a story prompt, but there’s so much highly bespoke setting assumption riding along with the setup that it’s going to require work to adapt it to your own setting. So, once again, homework.
  Final Rating? */***** with a note that it genuinely could be a three-star product if it was finished by a writer that wanted to make a usable adventure, not an evocative object d’art/story prompt.