Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…They Dug Too Deep

A one-page-dungeon by Felipe Tuller, screw levels.
Written for System Agnostic
  One of the most tragic falls in the TTRPG hobby is what happened to the One Page Dungeon Contest. On paper, this should be the best thing ever, right? I mean, I’m the Fall of Whitecliff guy, a regional adventure made up of one-pagers. I’m also the Adventure Site Contest guy, focused on making high-quality hex entries for use in peoples’ campaigns. OPDs are great for that kind of thing, right? Well, they can be. They should be. Unfortunately, the One Page Dungeon Contest isn’t that anymore…instead it’s now an art contest, where entrants bait the impressionable judges with increasingly elaborate spreads and formatting and isometric maps and colors and the one thing I most want out of an OPD, usability at the table, gets left in the dust. This product is from that benighted ground. Eighteen rooms, isometric map, you know the deal.
  As you’d expect from the title here, the story of They Dug Too Deep is that there were dwarves, the dwarves did what dwarves do and dug too deep, and now they’re all dead and there’s a monster wandering around. The monster is of the classic “wizard summoned me and I killed him” variety, represented as a wandering encounter check so it is technically possible to poke around all over and never meet the fellow.
  First off, let me mention what I liked most of all in the form of Miguel Melo’s illustrations, both the shadow critter and in all the little map rooms. Great stuff there, simple and evocative and exactly the kind of thing you like to blow up big and scare your players with. Give this man your commissions. I did also like the succinct backstory, just a couple sentences and gives everyone everything they need to know. A magic dwarf axe that only is +1 when the user is drunk on dwarven ale is fun. The fact that the bad monster regenerates is delivered to players by the message “IT COMES BACK” scrawled in dwarven blood, that’s good stuff.
  Alas, what can be improved here is going to have to be in the broad “make this dang thing for actual play” category. The pretty isometric map can’t be used at the table, and without embedded layers it’s hard to extract for VTT even. Stuff like mosquito-bats and amethyst animated statues are probably workable with your system of choice’s monster manual, but the tentpole monster needs mechanics as the centerpiece of the dungeon. Treasure is attempted, but it’s extremely light and kind of random. Hard to sus out flow looking directly at the map but there’s not any exploratory potential really, and the secret door to the wizard’s study might be the single most pointless secret door I’ve seen all year. Pretty but useless.
  Taking a moment, a pet peeve…I profoundly dislike the rails-and-elevators of Industrial Revolution-era coal mining appearing in pseudo medieval settings. Dynamite being here is even worse. That’s World of Warcraftism and it grates on my nerves in standard D&D. Your own mileage may vary.
  All this means that the best use case for this dungeon is to submit it to an art-focused One Page Dungeon contest. If you use it as a one-shot you’ll be okay too, just mismatched.
  Final Rating? */***** with less wrath, more sorrow. There’s some real talent here getting misapplied. 

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