Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Water Hoard Honeypot

Cute.

​A one-page dungeon by Jamie Douglas, levelless
Written for Vault of Vaarn
  We wander to many familiar places in our Crapshoot Mondays, a billion ShadowDarks, a host of Morg Borgs, a fleet of Motherships. Most of these systems have modules all over the place, regularly topping the charts in DriveThru. Some, though, are itch.io-specific systems, weird and artistic and heartbreaking…most notable, the ugly little postapocalyptic system that couldn’t, Vaults of Vaarn. The grotty little one-pager I find here is a nine-key dungeon made for all (both) people who play Vaarn, complete with silly little illustrations and a classic unusable map. It’s like wearing an old pair of sweatpants, both comfortable and yet somehow debauched.
  Simple enough premise, the titular Water Hoard Honeypot is using the water-scarce setting to set up a location where bandits lure victims into an ancient machine that extracts water from biomass. There are between 3 and 14 bandits(!) thanks to the 1d6 and 2d4 key numbers called out, and an extremely avoidable adorable chained critter if the players feel like fighting, plus a couple one-way proto-traps, a one-way chute down and an antigravity tunnel that tosses the victims back outside the dungeon. Also there’s quicksand, approve. Your loot is water or “probably some equipment”.
  Clearly what I liked was the goofy little closet monster’s illustration. The trap with quicksand is nice along with there being bodies deep within in for loot if inspiration hits the players (it won’t, but nobody has played Vaarn anyway so that’s fine). I like the setting as caves under ancient water-extracting windtraps, nice for a Gamma World.
  That said, even with all that what can be improved touches this content. The quicksand “probably” has bodies…NO, BAD WRITER, TELL ME WHAT IT IS OR IT AIN’T. The cute monster is just sitting off by itself from the main bad guy cave, avoidable and frankly the least likely bit to get interaction in the entire little complex. The ancient machinery vibe is unevenly conveyed, with the whole “push big obvious lever” method of stopping the dangerous final fight with robots in the water kind of out of left field. I don’t have to tell you about the issues of “dX bad guys” in a delve this tiny. Finally, the distress beacon in the end makes sense if that’s the hook that drew the PCs in but there’s no way to interact with it beyond smashing. At least the loop in the map does make a little bit of tactical sense, but there’s nothing telling players which direction holds what for purposes of offering meaningful choices to them.
  The best use case for this thing is to steal the cute little monster and use it in a more compelling location. Using this as a one-shot would be okay, just a little, um, dry.
  Final Rating? */***** without being upset, just kind of sleepy about it.

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