Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Vagabonds and Wastrels #2

​A ‘zine (with dungeon) by Logen Nein, level 3-4.
Written for Heroes of Adventure
  Another one of these, neat. As before, this cute little ‘zine is one ambitious fellow’s attempt to make a Dragon Magazine for the niche AI-driven tradgame system Heroes of Adventure, ten pages outlining in this case a !notEgypt region of deserts, a hex flower with encounter charts, a new magic school (mind magic), a little twenty-room dungeon, jinn and a scarab magic item, some Thri-Kreen with the serial numbers filed off, and a homework assignment in a region map without any details. As before, I’m going to focus on the dungeon, the rest is hit-or-miss again but basically fluff.
  …and once again I’m not going to have much to say about the story of the dungeon, titled The Ashen Halls. It’s a dwarf ruin that’s been taken over by “Forces of Chaos”, a single nod to sandy outer environs the only thing that really matches the faux-Egyptian theme of the issue but that’s fine. Map is once again adorable, maybe even more adorabler than before, with more complexity than the last time Mr. Nein came across my desk. Anyway, it’s a ruin, there are monsters in it, clear out the monsters and loot the treasure, what more are you looking for in your evening?

  Art style aside, what I liked about the map was some decent flow for a single-level minidungeon, the loops are almost obsessive but there’s some good work with portcullises that show rooms before they can be accessed (or else clever players can sequence-break) and secret rooms/passages are well-done. Stairs up and stairs down are briefly described as ending in dead ends but also give the chance to add more level(s) as desired, which is classy. I liked some of the evocative language in the room keying, although the age-old objection “why I am just stumbling in onto the scene” still applies. I like that treasure is often hidden well.
  Which smoothly segues us to what can be improved first, which is give us treasure, loot, artifacts, etc pre-rolled. I know the system you’re writing for has a mania for tables, procedural generation, and so on, but this is a prewritten module, you should give us details on your loot results. Similarly, monster numbers aren’t given but are assumed to be in “number appearing” from the monster manual (or, awkwardly in one case, “2x # appearing”), which is understandable but also BAD. Traps are a little more of an edge case, but I don’t love that they’re also on a d6 table for every time a “T” is encountered on the map. Final improvement, which is another symptom of that somewhat rote dungeon stocking philosophy, is to link risk and reward a little bit more. The rooms tend a little high on just slugging match fights without clever ways of profiting against the monsters or nasty tricks, it’s a bit more hacky than would be ideal.
  I thus figure the best use case is to seed onto a map in a Heroes of Adventure campaign, sandy desert optional. It’s an okay one-shot too, but there’s more homework left on the table than I, at least, would be comfortable with publishing. At least it’s not a blank region map though.
  Final Rating? **/***** feels a trifle kind but by no means unfair. It’s something that’s enjoyable I’m sure but I don’t feel like it’s complete, sadly. 

Here's your homework, have fun soldier.