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 those. I will grade these somewhat on a curve given the limitations of the format. Here is part two:

Dance With Danger
Vince R Pinton

This is a pointcrawl for levels 4-6 that takes place in the Realm of the Dead. The party will be transported there where they must re-bind some kind of sun-eating demon bird called Mrepytun that was imprisoned millenia ago. There is no pronunciation guide. I’m not even sure I spelled that right.

There are 8 areas to cross before reaching the tower beneath which the bound Mrpetynu resides. Not including the first area, which is in the land of the living, the party might only cross 3 or 4 of those if they take the most expeditious path. I know that one of the maxims of the OSR is that your map should have loops but let me say something heretical here: loops are overused. If you have a huge dungeon where navigation itself is a puzzle, and where player choices regarding navigation offer meaningfully different ways to approach challenges and tactically engage with the dungeon, go nuts with the loops. But that’s difficult to achieve with 8 areas. All the loops really do is allow the party to skip some of the best content. You might have some completionists at your table but a lot of groups will default to the most efficient path.

So it might seem strange but I’m going to complain about the fact that there are 3 different ways to get to the tower. You can 1) cross a toxic river (although we aren’t told how wide or deep it is, which is important info to adjudicate how the party attempts to cross it), 2) climb a steep cliff and fight some vultures or 3) bargain with a devil for passage through his factory full of robot gnomes. Here’s another heresy – these are all fun situations and I would put them in a line. Sometimes player agency means they can choose where to go. But it also means they can choose how they approach a situation and solve a problem. So even if this adventure were linear from a navigation standpoint, there would still be a lot of room for player choice because these are well-designed, simple but open-ended challenges. 

Besides those three, there are some really fun areas here. We have an interesting little situation where an anteaterfolk might offer some help crossing the river if the party finds her lost friend, currently chilling under the home of a corrupted ogre in magical skull form. And then there’s a cool minigame where you sneak past some hellhounds and a vrock. 

We get two lovely, hand-drawn isometric maps – one of the exterior, resembling a run-down 20th century city, and one of the interior of the tower beneath Repmutyn. Or maybe he’s at the bottom of the tower. In the text he’s floating above the tower but in the map the tower descends rather than ascends, with the demon at the bottom. To further confuse things, room ‘M’ in the text is shown as room ‘W’ on the map. Maybe the author is Australian?

Regardless of whether we’re going up or down, the fun continues inside the tower. Swing across hanging corpses above shark-infested waters. Meet a telepathic elf trapped in a crystal and maybe learn your friends’ true names. Lots of hijinks to get up to. 

There’s also a mechanic where the PCs are sort of astrally projected to the Realm of the Dead, and can be woken up to the real world or return after dancing for one round. The random encounter table takes advantage of this, with three of the six entries involving crossing between worlds. The sixth entry is a countdown clock for Ptunymer breaking free. The table is very well done and used for maximum effect. 

Overall excellent presentation and excellent content. There’s a few places where I would like a bit more information, but space is tight with 4 pages. Even so, it’s a solid short adventure that would stand on its own outside of the game jam. 9/12 stingbats.

Beast Moon
James Melo

For this one we have a 9-room dungeon wherein our band of intrepid gophers have been asked to place a blessed crown that will keep an evil darkness at bay for another year. 

Remember like 5 minutes ago when I was complaining about superfluous loops? Well they’re back. The shortest route through this dungeon goes through four rooms and follows the right hand rule. Since this adventure has a time limit of 2 hours, parties that stumble on this path are not likely to go exploring elsewhere. Otherwise, the loops don’t offer any interesting choices or tactical opportunities. You can crawl through a fissure between rooms 2 and 9 in order to skip room 5, but room 5 is empty anyway. And nowhere is there really a clear choice presented to the players, and no reason to choose one route over the other. 

Part of the problem is that a lot of the rooms are essentially empty. Here’s a breakdown by room:

1. Empty
2. Unguarded treasure
3. Unguarded treasure
4. Encounter
5. Empty
6. Unguarded treasure
7. Empty
8. Unguarded treasure
9. Encounter

I am counting anything that does not include a trap, hazard, monster, NPC, or treasure as empty. In some of these rooms there’s art to admire or corpses to poke but there isn’t really anything in terms of gameplay or real interactivity. Per the dungeon room type table in the Shadowdark core rules, 2/10 rooms would be empty. I would say that in a dungeon with less than 10 rooms, none of them should be empty. 

So there just isn’t a lot to do in here until you get to the final room where the crown must be placed and the ritual performed. In order to close the deal, a PC must perform 1d4+1 DC 12 WIS checks. It’s unclear if they must be successive. While this occurs, random encounter checks go from every three rounds to every one, and a trio of zombies will show up to fight the party. Should the party fail, they will have to contend with a level 4 boss fight. Actually it’s a pretty strong monster for level 4, but I’d probably have it show up at least for the last couple of rounds just to keep things interesting.

The presentation is good with a nice map drawn by the author and a clear layout. But besides the final encounter I think the dungeon is lacking for interactivity and needs a big dose of HOTTness. 6/12 stingbats. 

The Quest for Koschel’s Death
Fenris-77

Pointcrawls seem to be really popular in game jams. In this one, our heroes must tromp around a spooky forest looking for a magic horn that can break the curse of spookiness. They have also been tasked to learn the fate of a knight who went missing in the forest 50 years earlier. His ex-girlfriend wants to commission a song in his honor.

There are 12 keyed locations. Most of them, like 8, have only corpses or things to observe rather than things to interact with. Normally I would complain about this, but the clever structure of the adventure has another type of gameplay in mind, and derives its interactivity in a couple of different ways. 

The first way is that while moving from location to location you roll on a hazard table and see what complication the party will deal with. I like it in concept but the execution here is a bit lacking. There’s not a ton of creativity here – climb over stuff, cross a river, lose a ration. One says “Spend 3 rounds wading through waist-high muck” but in this context rounds don’t really matter (no random encounters, probably no spell effects) so neither does the complication. Once you arrive at the location you roll to see who is there – a ghost knight, a group of living knights on the same quest as the party, or a monstrous stag (the stag is on a counter and only appears the 3rd and 4th time it’s rolled). So you’ll run into the same guys a lot, and it might be trying for the GM to constantly think of new ways to spin these encounters. So again, a little more variety and creativity would have gone a long way.  

The other way that the adventure tackles interactivity is with a novel mechanic where the party’s reward is tied to how much information they gather and how successfully they weave it into a coherent and compelling tale so the aforementioned ex-girlfriend can get her song. So as the PCs meet knights both living and dead, and as they investigate the scenes at each location, they can piece together the story. The interpretation of everything they learn, and how it should all be arranged, will make for some compelling conversations at the table. 

The descriptive writing for each of the locations is excellent – evocative without being purple and overlong. Overall it creates a strong sense of myth and echoes the classic chivalric romances. The author absolutely nails the tone. 

The gameplay here isn’t found in the typical places and it’s a bit unexpected. Set expectations and I think everyone will have a good time. There are a few places where I think it could be juiced up a bit, but I really appreciate the creative and unique approach taken with this adventure and I think, for the most part, the author pulled it off. 9/12 stingbats.

Unclean the Universe
Tyler Betford

This one is a 7-room dungeon for levels 1-3 that takes place in the observatory of a slime-corrupted astromancer. There is a wide gulf between a level 1 and a level 3 PC. Just sayin’. 

Room 2 of the dungeon warrants a close examination. There is 1,800 gp worth of silver treasure in a pool of Lunar Mercury: “A silver, mercury-like liquid metal, its unusually strong surface tension causes it to act as a cohesive mass, nearly solid. Lunar mercury is impossibly cold to the touch, potentially freezing living creatures it touches. Unless immune to cold, a creature touching lunar mercury must pass a DC13 CON check or take 1 point of DEX damage.” So what’s stopping our party from getting a small fortune of unguarded treasure so close to the front door? It’s not really clear how to adjudicate the surface tension – if it were actually behaving as a solid, the treasure would be resting on top, therefore it must be penetrable (worth noting that silver is less dense than regular ol’ earth mercury, so it would indeed float). So can I reach it and grab the treasure, DEX damage be damned? Could I use a shovel and scoop it out?

We have something close to the classic “OSR challenge”, but since this lunar mercury doesn’t behave like anything we could be familiar with, it would be difficult to run unless we were given more information. We don’t even know how wide or deep the pool is. As written it’s not unlikely that the party will grab the loot and immediately head to the tavern for carousing and debauchery. 

Room 3 doesn’t fare much better. There’s a big telescope that the PCs will be able to use without problem after exploring rooms 4, 5 and 6. If you point the telescope in the right spot you get a 1d2 stat bonus that can be used once per person. There are three such spots affecting different stats. Helluva boon considering the only challenges you might face to earn it are two separate encounters with a single level 2 foe. Actually I think one of those is supposed to be level 4 but there’s a typo. Either way, the risk is not remotely equal to the reward.

In the final room, the party can nab the Star Lantern, whose light provides no illumination but grants +1 to all checks and extinguishes if someone rolls a natural run. Pretty neat little item but probably also a little on the powerful side considering the only thing standing in the party’s way is another level 2, 11 hp monster. No sweat for a level 1 party, and a level 3 party would barely notice it.

So we’ve got one hazard that could be interesting but is underdeveloped and lacking necessary. Then we’ve got a few easy combat encounters and way too much in the way of treasure and boons for the risk that this scenario presents. 5/12 stingbats.