The New Template: Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur

Introductory dungeon by Kelsey Dione(?), levels 1-3.
Written for the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide.
  Okay, I need to see what the deal is here. The glut of Shadowdark adventures from “game jams” are generally somewhat bland, generally decently built, and clearly being formatted following a very strict template: Meaningless factions outlined, tiny random encounter table, semi-helpful rumor table, well-illustrated single-level map following the Cult of Loops, and descriptions followed by bullets in a single-column that really encourages A6/’zine printout format. It’s not an awful template, but what’s remarkable is how slavish these writers are in following this mysterious template. It’s also notable how I’ve seen ZERO “out of the box” adventures…nobody’s looking outdoors, wilderness, city…all of it is down in the dungeon and you’re going to LIKE IT, scrub. So, let’s look at the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide’s sample adventure, I think the credit/blame is usually laid on the introduction for systems like these.
  In the Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, I first took a look at the map…AND I’VE BEEN CHEATED:
 
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  This isn’t a nine-room hole in the ground, this is, barely, a proper dungeon, with twenty-seven keyed areas, enough for some real exploratory gameplay. It’s more linear than it looks at first glance, with most of the looping accomplished by those secret passages, but there’s still some reasonable interest with both the layouts of individual rooms and with how the branches work. The traditional “designed to take up a single sheet of graph paper” shape of the entire complex makes sense, most of us do that, but the lack of verticality is a bummer. Labyrinths of minotaurs are traditionally equipped with mazes, but the one in the lower left is rather perfunctory. I didn’t detect a mapper role in my skim of the rules, but mazes are mostly for groups that use player mappers. It’s a functional map for scale I think…BUT IT HAS NO SCALE GIVEN. I’m assuming 1 square=5ft, but that’s not sure. Not highly naturalistic.
  My annoyance with the formatting in Shadowdark is mostly for its lack of efficiency. There’s definitely something to be said about overly fetishizing terseness, but this is something that feels…off. Some tables (like the NPC names/appearances/behaviors tables) look clearly padded to fill out a whole page, while some other descriptions feel slightly truncated do to the 40-point font in a single column. It’s not terrible, but a flagship adventure written for a seven-figure RPG system is held to high standards.
   I suppose I should talk flavor. The titular citadel is a lonely sandstone edifice in the distant scrubland, open to the sky in the center, with three entrances besides the roof-to-courtyard middle climb. It was once used by a Mad Max cult that worshipped a bull god, until the last king turned himself into a minotaur and killed most of his followers, with the rest of his men turned into beastmen who now hide in increasingly paranoid isolation. Minimalistic descriptions try and keep this flavor, at times successfully, the Scarlet Minotaur himself is nice and terrifying. There is a completely out of left field “faction” of ettercaps also present trying to loot the place, with no connection to the rest of the flavor and no presence on the map outside of random encounter tables after the first four rooms. A lot of the “completely disconnected from the rest of the world” thing I’ve been seeing in third-party Shadowdark modules is seen here, as the thing is almost completely devoid of greater context. Gogogo, we’re here to dungeon crawl, set us at the site and let’s get into the content.
  All that said, let’s look at the content itself. It’s fine. Not a ton of static monsters, which is a good thing with the monster-heavy random encounter table and the decently frequent rate. There aren’t a lot of traditional traps but there are fun and flavorful dynamic things like pillars that inflict nasty status effects and scattered magical motion-detecting bull statues that just charge in a straight line down a hallway, smashing luckless explorers. There’s decent telegraphing of the worst things, like the aforementioned pillars having a dead ettercap in the middle with wounds caused by their effects and one room with a smashed bull statue with its emerald-power-gem shattered, indicating how to deactivate them while also showing the danger. There’s a hidden checklist being ticked with “interactive room, monster room, portent room, treasure” repeated almost by rote nine times. The secret door areas being detectable by good mapping is nice, that’s the real exploration/discovery content available. Looks good on stream, I’m sure.
  Treasure feels weird, like anything with the semi-arbitrary “XP for finding significant treasure” handwave system. There are enough magic items to make for spice, while the cash bits lack the wow factor of a true gold=XP system. Most of the treasure is lackadaisically semi-hidden, although the “main hoard” is in a fantastically nasty rotting blood-choked pool of water hidden amidst countless bones, which is good placement, very tricky to extract…this also includes the only really flavorful bit of acquired loot, a bottle that holds a sorcerer’s soul. There’s potential in THAT, at least.
  As any decent system contains a reaction table, there is lip service given to talking/negotiation with the sentient monsters encountered within the dungeon, although both ettercaps and beastmen are also written to be slimy complete scumbags, craven and fairly useless/unreliable. There’s the faintest nod to ecology given in the beastmen eating rats and centipedes but we’re in the Common Dungeon Problem zone with a couple dozen human-sized beings living out eons within a few hundred square feet of territory, that’s certainly not a unique conceit but it starts breaking believability a bit if you examine their slightly thin motivations. The Scarlet Minotaur’s original identity being discoverable but not usable is a little bit of a missed opportunity.
  I’m not reviewing the whole Shadowdark system here, but I think I can generalize some lessons from the Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. There is some solid workmanship here in the room-by-room construction of the dungeon, a pleasing blend of combats, traps, and “stuff to mess with”, all in a space that rewards exploration somewhat. It’s only when I look at the (regularly spaced, good) treasure that I start to have pause…there’s an almost rote placement here, and there’s no “wow” factor to anything…which, coupled with the lack of explicit 1gp=1XP (or 1sp, or 5, or whatever) rules, means the entire exercise lacks goals. A 5th Edition adventure here would make it explicit, “kill the Scarlet Minotaur”, maybe with side-quests. A B/X adventure here would have it implicit, “this dangerous place has wealth to plunder, let’s sneak around to steal it”, maybe with side-quests (bounties). This middle-ground Shadowdark doesn’t have either, handing over a very intrinsically enjoyable little dungeon crawl utterly bereft of larger context, meaning, or long-form campaign hooks. There’s nothing mechanically wrong with this example adventure, but there’s also nothing here that makes me want to play a continuing campaign.
  All that said, is there value here? Sure. Playing it directly you’ll probably have a fun time. There all lots of little bits and pieces that I’m happy swiping too, from the slightly videogamey bull statues, to the magic curse/blessing sacrificing locations, to a few of the set-piece trap rooms. It is well made, and the mechanical solidity of this template dungeon is reflected in the imitators’ slightly above-par cobbling. I suspect a genuinely good campaign could be played using this, you’ll just have to add a lot of context and meaning.
  *** on this one, what should be average quality for a dungeon adventure. I just wish its imitators took away twenty-seven rooms as a minimum, not the high bar.  This might be literally the best it can be for the target market, though.
  The adventure, as part of the free quick start ruleset, can be found here.

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I don't like this, but THIS is where it's at for the system's main audience.