Dank Dungeons is currently hosting their second Appx. N game jam over on itch.

The jist is that you get a title assigned, based on the fantasy and science fiction literature that inspired Dungeons & Dragons, and then you have four pages to write a ttrpg module of some kind. Some of them have been and will be written for Shadowdark, and I will try to review all of them. I will grade these somewhat on a curve given the limitations of the format. Here are the first four:

Only Fools Wager in Life
Anthony J. Zinni

This module is meant to be used when the PCs save an NPC from death. Death himself comes ‘round and tells the PCs they must investigate a location as retribution for freeing one of his marked. Something there, that is beyond his vision, is stealing souls and must be stopped.

What it amounts to is an infiltration mission. The macguffin is deep under a cult compound where a party is being held. Sneak in, take care of The Thing and get out. There isn’t much in the way of interesting things happening in the compound. A bunch of guests. Some guards/cultists wandering around. There’s a 10% chance of being able to bribe the guards at the door. Shouldn’t that depend more on the bribe and how the PC presents it rather than random chance. 

I’ve ranted about what makes a good lair infiltration before and this ain’t it. Alarm mechanics, order of battle, environmental tools – we don’t really get any of that. You might attribute it to lack of space but the first page is wasted on a  cover image and the background is repeated on the last page. I’d trade either of those for some additional details and intrigue. 

The macguffin is a giant crystal. It has 48 hp – you destroy it by hitting it. I would have also liked to see a more interesting, perhaps multi-step process for dealing with the crystal and wrapping the whole thing up. 

There’s not much here that you couldn’t come up with yourself on the fly. Great map though. 7/12 stingbats. 

Howl of the Pricolici
Devin MacKay

The classic Village With a Problem. The party shows up to find a village beset by wolves being led by some kind of man/wolf hybrid. They must do a little investigation to figure out what’s going on and deal with the problem. 

The bulk of the gameplay here will be talking to villagers trying to suss out what has caused the appearance of the beast and the Not-Werewolf that is apparently called a Pricolici. Clues are scattered around and it probably won’t take long for them to piece it together. 

The whole affair culminates in a final battle with the Pricolici while destroying the cursed corpse of the man who caused its appearance. It’s a nice little situation with good NPCs and well-considered clues. My problem is that there’s really only one way it will play out. There are no red herrings nor are there any big decisions or dilemmas. 

But there’s a fun half of a session here that you could insert into just about any village places in your hexcrawl. There’s a high amount of utility. 8/12 stingbats. 

The Unholy Reliquary 
John Mitchell

We have a simple setup: there’s a dungeon under a hill that is said to house three powerful but dangerous relics. Go get ‘em. 

Three artifacts and three challenges before any of them appear in the central room. Each one is related to the history of the relic. Two of the challenges are a fight and one is a very simple puzzle. Not a huge amount of interactivity here and the combats will be pretty static and certainly not difficult for a level 4-6 party – the more difficult of the two is a single level 8 foe. But at least there’s a chance someone will lose an arm from a flying sword.

Once the challenges are complete you go to the central room and, if the guardian deems you worthy, you may collect one or more of the relics. Your worthiness will be determined based on whether you learned what the relic does, especially their respective curses. This can be gleaned from the challenge rooms.The relics are interesting, but I think you could go even harder on the curses to make players really question whether they will ever use them. Here are two:

THE BELL
Benefit. 1/week, ring the Bell to destroy all chaotic creatures within near.
Curse. All non-chaotic creatures within near must succeed on a DC 15 CON check or be permanently deafened.

THE SWORD
Benefit. 1/week, after hitting a creature, declare the Sword’s power. The target dies instantly.
Curse. All other living creatures within near permanently lose 1 maximum HP.

Most players wouldn’t think twice to use these for a campaign-level boss fight. Which is great. But I think it would be even better if they really had to question whether it was even worth it to use to take down the BBEG. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the author because I can’t even think of what that would be (get in the comments!).

Also this adventure kinda sorta reminds me of the animated short Exordium, and I will use that as an excuse to share it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxR-oKkwJLI 

The relics are pretty cool but there is barely anything to the dungeon. 6/12 stingbats. 

Wolf-Riders of Deyrun Vale
D.T. Nordahl

Witches are possessing wolves (“wolf-riding”) to keep people out of their little valley. There are a few hooks that are simple, but effective – hunt the wolves for money, figure out why the wolves are attacking for some druids, or simply traverse the valley to get to the other side. We also get some simple and clear mechanics for exploring the valley and a pretty decent random encounter table. 

The adventure is presented as a pointcrawl with 6 areas. The areas have a little investigation and a little treasure and some kind of tie to the theme of the adventure – victims of a wolf attack, shrine to the moon goddess, or the field of flowers that give the witches their wolf-riding powers. They’re not bad on their own but they don’t have any connective tissue. The party will just have to wander around in the woods until they happen upon one. I see this a fair bit in pointcrawls and even hexcrawls – there isn’t anything that will propel the party from one location to another. Maybe that’s intentional but I don’t think most players enjoy aimless wandering. 

Only two of the locations give the party a chance to find out what’s really going on. And none of the others have clues that lead to those locations. So while the scenario is pretty open-ended, it doesn’t go out of its way to give players enough information to make a choice about how they will resolve it.

So there’s some good content here but I think the main conflict and the multiple ways to resolve it are a bit hidden. The GM will need to fill in a few blanks but it could definitely be worked into a fun session. Also highly modular – drop it into an empty hex on your map. Could use a proofread. 8/12 Stingbats.