Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Trial of the Slime Lord

A gauntlet dungeon by Jordan Rudd, level 0.
Written for Shadowdark
  This one might be a first on this feature, we have us a level 0 gauntlet. I’m excited. The general idea for a zeroth-level gauntlet is that you get your campaign players a big fat handful of classless 1hp goobers and have them run through a highly deadly set of challenges, ideally ending the experience with a traumatized set of peasants who decide to take up adventuring, gaining level 1 in a class of choice and a lot of hilarious war stories about promising young proto-heroes who died to ratbite. It’s a very different premise from the “standard dungeon”.
  We have here an eighteen-pager detailing a seventeen-room dungeon, which I know feels like a wordy ratio but here in addition to the Shadowdark A5 paper side standard there are also 5(!) appendices plus generous margins and longish setup. The system itself (as I reviewed) does indeed support level 0’s by default, with rules that aren’t too exotic. The relevant nonstandard bits are that level 0’s have 1hp or CON bonus, whichever is higher, and they’re assumed to be able to use all equipment they pick up via beginner’s luck.
  As you would precisely expect from the title, our story here is that there’s a slime lord who has trails. Basically, cultists dedicated to an off-brand Juiblex kidnap randos and toss them into their dungeon here, welcoming the survivors into the cult if they leave via front door. A touch contrived, but sure, why not fight an evil cult? The victims/PCs start dumped in a room with a single burning torch and the exit is a straight shot immediately to the north, but several puzzles and hints will be needed to uncover a mystic incantation to open the door. Wander around, explore, die a lot, maybe find a very impressive warhammer. 

​  To begin, what I liked was how the information was organized, which sounds like a mild praise but its genuinely very well done here, puzzle dungeons are hard to convey even with puzzles this simple, and there are fun things with printable handouts, items and monsters neatly cross-referenced…very well done. I also liked a couple of the new monsters and the magic hammer. Layout of the map is pretty solid for a single-level dungeon, and I like that there are a couple alternate ways out (hilariously, one is only accessible by goblin or halfling PCs, who will probably then proceed to drown at a DC18 CON). Some people might dislike the jocular tone, but I found the occasional aside like “what happens when you lcik a puddle in a slime dungeon” to be fun. The “random bits of useful loot” table takes the system’s mania for trivial tables and makes it interesting. I like the acid trip slime that gets used to decipher runes. Good art.
  What can be improved is to first look a bit more at your level 0 zero premise. There are things that deal d8 or d10 damage, but the Shadowdark system will only have about 5% of the 0th-level PCs rocking more than 2 hit points, with the vast majority only at 1. Good slime heals for a d4, which is also funny. The contrived premise could have done with slightly better worldbuilding for campaign integration and the puzzles are in the point-and-click “find the doodad” mode by and large, more outside of the box problem-solving should be encouraged upon setup. Rather than indulge in an NPC-generator table, a handful of fleshed out pre-generated NPCs would be appreciated.
  The module does what it sets out to do, best use case here is to dump a hapless pile of fresh level 0 Shadowdarkians down the hatch and watch them fumble around to escape, all the while dying in droves. While it doesn’t take the gauntlet concept anywhere particularly fresh, our writer understood the assignment and turned in something that’ll make an enjoyable night of adventure. Putting it to a secondary use as just a simple low-level dungeon will work fine too.
  Final Rating? ***/***** for being a competent execution of the concept. Neither the meatgrinder nor the wild high-energy acid trip that Dungeon Crawl Classics release, but it’s a well-done module that’ll be a breath of fresh air for groups new to the concept.