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 four:

The Chimes of Undoing
A Hobgoblin 

This adventure bills itself as “a drama crawl for low levels”. Today is the day we learn what a drama crawl is, I guess. The setup is that a bell out in the desert must be rung every year to keep evil at bay, and the party is hired to escort the caravan of the bellringer across the trackless silver sand. It’s an escort mission… pointcrawl? Not really in the sense that the locations are completely linear. It’s really just a scene-based adventure with some extra bits to spice things up.

There are four locations. You roll a random encounter between each on and an event at each one. Most of the encounters are combat or hazards and most of the events are what we’d call a “social encounter”. So the gameplay is gonna alternate between talking and fighting. Maybe that’s your jam, but it doesn’t really interact with Shadowdark as a game system very much. You could run this in just about any system you want and it’s going to play out the same way.

There are two NPCs in the caravan – Yalla, who has volunteered to ring the bell, and Ash, a knight who is also escorting Yalla. They each have a clock triggered by various events along the journey, and the clock’s state at the end of the adventure will determine their actions. When you finally get to the bell, Yalla might ring it or he might run away. Ash might try to force the issue or might not. Whoever rings the bell gets turned to sand.

The adventure does a fine job of setting up some interpersonal drama and conflict I guess. It’s very navel-gazy and emo but the final scene at the bell could be very compelling. The internal conflict I’m having is that, while I think this is well-made for what it is, it’s not a good Shadowdark adventure. But if you’re looking for a mopey change of pace from dungeon crawling, put on Duster’s Stratosphere and let ‘er rip. 6/12 stingbats.

Lair of the Wurdulac
LaffRaff

I’m struggling to describe this one. And to understand it. Let’s start with the explaining what a Wurdulac is because the adventure doesn’t do a great job – according to Wikipedia it is “a type of ‘Russian vampire’ that must consume the blood of its loved ones and convert its whole family.”

In the context of this adventure, some NPC from the party’s past returns, hangs out in some nearby ruins and starts acting strange. It relies on the players to come up with who this person was, what their relationship was like, why they’re in the ruins, etc. So that aspect is a collaborative storytelling exercise, almost falling into the “write sad things on index cards” genre. That extends to the 6-room dungeon where the Wurdulac dwells.

The dungeon is sort of a journey through the PCs’ past relationship with the Wurdulac. Some of this stuff is going to be really difficult to describe, like “Murals and busts of heroes smashing their past deeds. Frieze of faltering relationships.” And you get keys like this:

Here and elsewhere there are conditions like “enchanted”, “bitter guilt and heart crushing regret”, and “shaken” that are not defined and aren’t really intuitive for the GM to rule on. There’s going to be a lot of times where the GM is telling the players what their characters feel, and I think it’s unlikely that the improvised memories and experiences of their PCs are going to be enough to generate real emotions.

From a more mechanical standpoint some things are difficult to parse. There’s a trap in room 5 that I can’t quite figure out and the monsters, things like “Obtrusive Thoughts” and “Persistant Nags”, have abilities that don’t make sense or would be difficult to rule.

You’re gonna need player buy-in for a type of adventure they are probably not used to. You’re gonna need lots of it. I suspect that a lot of players would have trouble connecting with it and that a lot of GMs would have trouble running it. There’s a playtest scheduled on YouTube scheduled for Aug 8, so I’ll keep an eye out for that. I appreciate that the author is taking an unique approach to the monster and taking risks with the adventure design. The whole thing is very conceptual and I don’t think I’ve ever run anything like it, so I can’t really say how well it would work. I checked with a storygaming buddy of mine and he was a bit dubious, although he admitted that with the right players you might be successful. 5/12 stingbats.

Cutthroats of the Astral Sea
Micah Abresch

This entry has a pretty specific use case – it is an encounter that meant to be used as an attack a party’s permanent base while they are away on adventures. A group intelligent giant rats have orchestrated a heist and the players will take the roles of the crew back at the base in order to defend against it.

It’s pretty simple. One group of rats loads up their ship while another group moves through the base setting traps and harrassing its occupants. It’s not going to take an entire session but would be a fun 30-60 minutes of gameplay. A lot of the value comes from the art and the way it conveys the tone of the adventure. It’s got a punk/graffiti vibe that dovetails nicely with the individual rats themselves – a colorful group (literally and figuratively) with names like Fresh Paint, New Shoes and HAM! (a Ponyo reference?). They each have unique abilities and will lend more than enough personality to an otherwise straightforward encounter.

The biggest weakness is that does rely a bit on the author’s Aetherdark rules. And even though it contains a summary of the rules that apply to the encounter specifically, your campaign may not be set up for it. Some of the mechanics of the adventure rely on “cargo” as a discrete unit in way that’s pretty specific. And the players may not have defined the crew of their base in a way that makes them playable in this scenario. You might need to do some work to adapt this to your campaign.

So we get some fun rats, an outline of their tactics and some guidance on running the whole thing. There’s not a lot to it, but what’s here is done well. It fills an underserved niche, and does it with panache. The rats will be a blast for the GM to run and it’s a great way for parties with a home base to get some gameplay out if it. 8/12 stingbats.

The Ancient Army Awakens
Pakkanen

An ancient army of sleeping terracota soldiers waits. Wake them up before the bad guys do for gold and glory. That means making your way through an 8-room dungeon for PCs of level 8 and finding a magic horn that can control the army

There’s this trap in room 2: “2 terracotta soldier hordes. They have thermal vision & both hordes awaken, surround the party & attack if they sense heat above 35°C (95°F) crossing the center-line of the room.” This is almost a cool trap. I mean, it would be if it were telegraphed. I would love to see what methods the players use to lower or hide their body temp. But from their perspective, the soldiers might as well just automatically come alive when they cross the room. The text does mention a few “cold-blooded lizards” in the room. But the logical leap from “lizards exist” to “we need to lower our body temp or these statues are gonna attack us” is not one the players are likely to make.

The adventure has a clock where each round, a horde of terracotta soldiers is awakened in the final room and there’s a chance of waking 2d4 terracotta soldiers near the PCs and there’s a 4:6 chance of waking an angry archmage. The soldiers are only level 1 and will be dispatched easily but each individual horde is level 12. There are 30 such hordes in the final room and by the time the party arrives there probably 15 will be awake, at least.

This sets up the final encounter, where the bad guys have the horn and are blowing it randomly, sending different orders to the hordes each round. The text states that the bad guys, consisting of 12 soldiers and their lieutenant (a reaver), are fighting the hordes off. This is where things get a little fuzzy. Apparently, holding the horn doesn’t prevent you from getting attacked, and a group of level 2 soldiers would probably not be able to hold their own against an equal or greater number of level 12 hordes for more than, what, a single round? So then I guess the party has to battle through the hordes and take control of the horn. Hopefully they found the notebook in room 7 that explains how the horn is used, but that’s not a given considering it’s a bit out of the way.

On the one hand, I appreciate putting the PCs against an overwhelming foe and seeing what clever strategies they can devise to beat the odds. On the other hand I think it’s pretty inevitable that your party gets dogpiled by the terracotta soldiers. It’s very difficult to create a challenging high-level adventure, but I don’t think a huge number of high-level enemies is the way. Still, it’s an interesting scenario that just needs some tweaking. Nerf the terracotta hordes a bit, and make the rival bad guys stronger. 6/12 stingbats.

 

The Corpseless Coffin
Doomed Zone

This one is a 10-room dungeon for levels 1-2 that is meant to be an annex to whatever larger dungeon you’re running. It is accessed through a magical coffin that opens into a sort of pocket dimension that is the domain of a forgotten god of death.

The dungeon is patrolled by spectral sentinels that can only be harmed when their funerary panopoly is destroyed. When the first sentinel is encountered, the panopoly is in the same room, but in future encounters it’s located in a different room. So there’s a simple but effective bit of telegraphing that will train observant players how to deal with this foe.

There are also a couple of NPCs, each with a different bit of useful information, that despise eachother and will fight on sight. And a puzzle that involves lighting a bunch of braziers to open a door, Zelda-style. Other than that there’s not much to it. The whole thing is competently executed if a bit dry, and not particularly memorable. Also it’s 8 pages long so despite having twice as many pages as other entries, it seems to offer less. 5/12 stingbats.

Time’s Needle
Caravan Cult

This is adventure is a 3rd level dungeon inside a huge shiny pyramid in the desert. The pyramid is sort of unstuck in time and the theme of time travel is peristant throughout.

One of the random encounters is “Time Passes (pg 82) 1d8 hours” and I’m not clear on how to rule that. I know how time passes normally works, but in this case I think the intent is that time outside the dungeon is passing faster than within? It won’t really matter and the players probably won’t even notice unless a massive amount of time passes. Or if time is passing within the dungeon I guess the party is just frozen in place for a few hours, watching their torches burn down. So it’s kind of a neat idea about playing with the passage of time in theory but it doesn’t really work mechanically.

There’s also a random encounter that shifts time between eras. This is really cool – each room description includes a change that occurs if this effect is rolled. A beautiful reservoir of cool water occupied by a pair of sirens becomes a toxic pool fouled with giant leeches. An astral silkworm becomes a butterfly. Treasure turns to sand. Great stuff, and it would be really fun to narrate the shift happening.

None of the rooms here are wasted and there’s something interesting to do in every one, and the place feels properly weird and otherworldly. Unfortunately there’s some information missing in a few places that hampers things a bit. Room 7 is the ol’ infinite stairwell, but it doesn’t explicitly tell us how to get to the rooms above. A plaque reads: “We must look to our past to understand our future”, so maybe they want the party to walk up backwards but it doesn’t actually say that. The tower’s creator, the sorceress Yasha-Gok, is trapped inside a prism. Can it be broken? Can she be freed? A magic sword called “Time’s Needle” connects the past and present. What happens when the party yoinks it? For the umpteenth time, YES the GM can improv this stuff BUT I want to know what the designer has in mind. Very nice side-elevation map. 8/12 stingbats.