Jackpot: A List of Gems in the Muck

  In my Crapshoot Monday, I’m always looking hopefully in the itch.io sewers for adventures of some redeeming value. There are some adventures I’ve been positive on:
*Brigands of Bristleback Burrow 
*Fortress on the Wild Frontier 
*At the River’s Edge (less for the direct adventure, more how useful it is). 
*Petra Serpentis 
  …if you see four or more stars, you know I think it’s worth at least trying to play with. But the above list are hypothetically good. I have in fact played some of these adventures at my table. They were fun. Players had a good time. These aren’t four-star “good stuff” that I loved reviewing, these are mostly three-star modules that nonetheless worked well enough for hasty inclusion in my game. Without further ado:

The Forgotten Isle of the Hydra Cult 
  Less of a full adventure site, more of a cute little lair, this worked great as a quick little location for a map, racing against a rival pirate-aligned wizard (The Corpse Master). I plumped it up quite a bit with that last bit an actual hydra, but it was a cute little Indianna Jones affair to play in as part of a session.
  Honorable mention to Ill-Gotten Gains, another adventure from the same collection, that is also seeded on the map, just hasn’t been hit yet.

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The Pirates of Marwater Cavern 
  As you may know, I run an archipelago campaign, and needless to say pirates are a common roll. Needing a quick lair, I grabbed this excellent one and it played really well, sometimes a big open chamber entrance can lead to a bad exploration but this was a wonderful “delve” that had a lot of subtle details enabling careful exploration (the main chamber is loud with an echoing waterfall, lit by a skylight) and there was a great mix of traps, negotiation, and pirate fighting for the whole thing. Were I to run it again, I’d have added a touch more magic and maybe some kind of non-humanoid monster for extra spice, but for a low-level pirate lair it’s a top performer. 

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Transit Precinct 45 
  Different strokes entirely, this scifi adventure was perfect for my ongoing Stars Without Number FTL campaign. I had rolled an asteroid mining system with a prisoner who had, per rumor, once bested the players’ main villain. Perfect spot for this little jailbreak scenario on a broken-down satellite station. The players planned very carefully with multiple contingencies and faked a “hyper-diphtheria” outbreak in a supply run to worm their way on board, coupling that with a rock throw to take out the prison station’s comms mast. The adventure had all the information needed to support this, packed in just eight flavorful and whitespace-heavy A4 pages. I was extremely impressed with how well it ran and everyone had a great time, even after everything broke down and they had to shoot their way out with their prisoner. I’d go back and add another star if I believed in such things. Surprised by how well it ran.

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The Awful Amber Doom 
  This one is more style than substance, but the style is so wonderful and fit so well with my ongoing campaign that I just had to salt it in. Lost sunken city rising from the depths on the night of a full moon, race against time with a vampiric necromancer also seeking a pulp artifact, shadowy avatar of a batlike Great Old One…this fit so well for a session, although it definitely needed seeding beforehand (using the Hydra Cult location for a secret map to the location of the sunken city, plus divination answers with the fairly high-level wizard investigating). It’s built way too low level in the Shadowdark original for its themes, but it was a good level 8 adventure upon conversion, helped by my own preexisting tables. The evocative art helped too during their expedition. As you can tell, then, this will be a qualified recommendation, because some work needs to be done to fully flesh it out, but it was an entertaining pulp inspiration and that’s its own value. 

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