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 five:

The Pale Palace
Aeolian Atlas 

The setup for this one is, how shall I put this, extremely contrived. Even for a fantasy adventure where you didn’t get to choose your own title. Actually “The Pale Palace” is probably the easiest title I’ve seen in the whole thing, but we get is this: a shape-shifting genie was trapped by it’s lover in the titular palace, where light passing through waterfalls is used to control it’s form. Different colors mean different forms. Now the lover is dead and there’s gonna be an eclipse where no light will shine and the genie will get free and go on a murderous rampage. Got it? Me neither…

There are 5 rooms and the jist of all this is that the party needs to shine white light on the djinni in the middle so that it shows its true form, and then it will grant them a wish and rest for eternity. The entrance shows white light and is normally routed through waterfalls. You can also change the color of the waterfalls with one crank (which you would never want to do) or room 4 has cranks and a lever whose functions are not described. But all you really need to do is stop the waterfalls completely. The text does not include any mechanism for this. Maybe there’s a way to somehow route the light around the waterfalls or something but the map doesn’t make the layout of all the mirror and waterfalls very clear.

Why in the hell, if you were this genie’s lover and you were trying to help it control it’s shapeshifting, would you have the colored waterfalls at all? Sunlight and moonlight are both white light, so it seems like it would naturally just be its normal form all the time? Unless it goes to a rave? This puzzle is going to be hard for the players to solve because it is not remotely intuitive. In fact it works against logic. And it’s not the kind of puzzle that I think would be interesting from a roleplaying perspective.

Also there’s this eclipse that we’re told takes 3 hours of real time and if it happens it will shroud the palace in darkness and the genie escapes. I have no idea how we’re supposed to use this information. If you told me the eclipse will happen in 3 hours, that would make some sense (although there’s absolutely no way this adventure would last three hours). But I can’t tell when the eclipse is supposed to happen.

The whole thing feels like the a strained attempt to set up a very particular puzzle that isn’t a particularly good puzzle. 4/12 stingbats.

The Tome of Lies
GrumpyDungeonMasterDan

The intro for this level 4-6 adventure goes hard: “The accursed and malevolent book, the Tome of Lies, has come to rest in your hands. Its last defenders have fallen. Pursued by sinister forces, you stand before the remains of a forlorn colossus. On nights of the full moon, the eyes of the colossus gleam with fell light and open the way to the fathomless depths of the Crawling Caverns below. There, in its twisted tunnels, lies the devouring demonwurm Urgoth-Shog. Your last hope at keeping this corrupted codex of deceit from those that would misuse it is to hide it away or find a means for its destruction.”

As cool as this is, it’s creates a potential problem where the adventure begins in medias res so it might be best suited to a one-shot or convention game. Still, I think it could be resolved within 3ish hours. The whole thing is a depthcrawl, which is like a pointcrawl but vertical, I guess. You go down from level to level, rolling on random tables to see what transpires in between and at each point.

The points are decent – some NPCs looking to trade, some fights, some hazards to traverse. Evocative descriptions paint a nice picture of each location and there is a nice variety. I would have liked to see more in the way of decisions and dilemmas.

Since this is likely to be a one shot, a lot of the things along the way will not matter to players. There’s a rat demon that offers the boon of being able to talk to rats and immunity to disease for a year. Won’t really matter in this adventure. Neither will non-magical treasure. So while there are some interesting encounters here, I think many of them would be more interesting in a different context. Whether or not you wake up an ancient viperian lich matters a lot more when you have to live with the consequences.

I’m also a little unsure about how the final encounter you go. It’s kind of implied that you’re supposed to feed the book to the demonwurm but it doesn’t mention how that might go. The wurm also asks to be freed but there is no guidance on how that might be done. It’s really just set up for a big fight. I guess a brave PC could jump into the wurm’s mouth while holding the book. But it feels like the author ran out of room and the climax could really use some fleshing out. 7/12 stingbats.

Rolling Thunder
Sean Mohnkern

The setup for this one is that a buncha dwarves were mining, as is their wont, and accidentally uncovered some kind of evil entity (*surprised pikachu*) and now the party needs to kill it or rebury it so the dwarves can have their souls back. This is to be accomplished via a 9-room dungeon for levels 2-3.

It’s a mine. The individual rooms are nothing to write home about – giant spider in one room, then we have a gray ooze in a puddle, a poison gas cloud. You know the drill. There is one completely novel feature that I’ve never seen before – randomly generating the depth of a lake, which is “5d6 ft deep”. You know it would save room to just write “20 ft deep”.

You can use all the extra space to drop some hints to the central puzzle of the dungeon, which is a bit obscure. In order to open the door to the boss fight, the party must move a minecart to occupy the same space as a spectral minecraft that moves on its own through the dungeon every 3 rounds. The party is shown the spectral minecraft moving through the locked door but that’s about the only hint they get. Otherwise they will probably rely on trial and error, which isn’t really a fun way to solve a puzzle.

Then you can either bury the evil tentacled entity or kill it. You get treasure from killing it but it doesn’t say where the treasure comes from so I assume the loot pops out of the monster like you might see in *Diablo 2*, the greatest video game ever made. Otherwise there’s maybe 1 or 2 xp in the entire dungeon. But I do actually like the puzzle even it needs more hints, and the final battle where the party might just be frantically piling dirt on top of the monster could be fun. 6/12 stingbats.

The Lurking Quiet
eyesforteeth

This is a level 1 adventure in a 13-room barrow mound. The setup is that a priest that was making a pilgrimage to the mound and did not return. It has minimal keying and a Dyson Logos a map. Rooms like “10. The Sealing. The western stele depicts Saint Terragnis placing an obelisk to seal away the cowering forces of chaos deep below ground. Stairs up to room 8.” You might consider it sort of a minimum viable dungeon. The kind of thing you would whip up in the hours before your session.

But it’s not bad. The party is being stalked by a Strangler that uses hit and run tactics, and that will provide the bulk of the fun. Otherwise there is a bit of loot to collect but interactivity is pretty light. The author gave the location a nice history but it’s not very relevant to the PCs. Very old school in presentation and content, but perhaps not in a good way. 5/12 stingbats.

Gemini Spires
The Department of Unusual Observations

I’m just gonna copy/paste the setup here: “Two immense towers house rival machine minds who wage war through flesh and steel. Neither realizes they are the divided halves of the same ancient intelligence.” So we’ve got a level 3-4 adventure where the party will explore the two towers. But we don’t really get any hooks so you’ll need provide your own motivations for the party.

Presentation is excellent, with an interesting and clear layout and great artwork. The towers get bespoke side-elevation maps and there are nice portraits of all the NPCs/monsters.

There are two towers to explore, one themed around order and another themed around chaos. The towers themselves are what I would call a “museum dungeon”. There are things to look at, but not really things to touch. For example: “THE GENESIS MIST. Darkness without walls stretches in every direction obscured by a thick, curling fog. The Manifestor. A small brass mechanical device sits on the center of the room on a table. Speaking a noun causes it to manifest somewhere in the fog for one minute before the creation returns to mist.”

This is kind of a neat idea but not really useful or interesting from a gameplay perspective. In the context of this adventure there’s no way to use this room to your advantage to solve puzzles or overcome obstacles. So for this, and most of the other rooms, the GM will give a description, the players will go “Huh. Neat”. And then you move on. But the amount of HOTTness is near zero.

There is no treasure in the towers, instead the PCs can get “upgrades”. The upgrades are earned by doing very basic things – saying “hi” to a monk or eating an unguarded fruit. The upgrades are bonkers. “Quantum Module. One round per day, take 3 consecutive turns.” or “Living Shadow. Your shadow can scout ahead for you.” or “Mimic. Touch a creature. Gain one of its abilities for one hour.” You know, the kinds of things a GM will immediately regret. And the PCs have to do essentially nothing to get them.

There are some creative ideas here, but I don’t think they will translate to fun gameplay. 5/12 stingbats.

Necrology of the Unhumans
Connor McCloskey

This is a 0-level gauntlet where you wake up as a sort of frankensteined hodgepodge of body parts and your goal is to escape. Seems familiar…

The layout is a very nice isometric map with the very minimal keys written directly on it. That makes it easy to run but really restricts the amount of detail in each area. The party’s journey through the 10 rooms will mostly be spent grabbing gear and avoiding or fighting the dungeon’s other residents, two nuns and a priest. They are a colorful group, with unique special abilities that inform the tactics used to fight them – “At the end of her turn she whistles an eerie tune. At the top of her next turn another severed hand skitters into the fight (shut her up!)” The stock art used to depict them is very well-chosen.

But otherwise there isn’t a lot going on here. Walk through the dungeon, arm yourselves, stab the bad guys until you, or they, are dead. I’m simplifying that a bit because winning those battles will not be easy, and imagine most of the fun here will be derived from strategizing. And in order to exit you need to make a DC 18 check or get the keys from the aforementioned bad guys. So stealth ceases to be an option at that point, meaning the crawl will probably devolve into a big fight. The vibes are cool with this one, but it doesn’t offer enough besides the three villains. 6/12 stingbats.

What Shines in the Darkness
GiantBrain

This one’s a zero-level gauntlet. The setup is that a spaceship has crashed near the town, and it’s engine is leaking little organisms called inklings that eat up light. The pilot of this ship is not Ryan Gosling. The PCs must then go and investigate, I guess. Not really clear what they’re supposed to do.

More accurately, this is the first four pages of a gauntlet. We get the background, the NPCs and monsters, and random encounters. And that’s kind of it. There’s no way to resolve the situation. You just wander for an undetermined amount of time to the crash site, and then hang out there for a while and fight some stuff. And then eventually the inklings come back and destroy what’s left of the ship. The idea of repairing the ship is mentioned, but no mechanics are given on how that may be accomplished, how long it will take and what will happen afterwards. But there are no locations described anywhere, or specific encounters, or anything to lend any kind of structure to this adventure.

When exposed to direct light, the inklings “instantly heal to full HP and split into two indentical inklings”. So you’re going to be adventuring in the dark or you will have an infinite amount of enemies to deal with. Fun. Also the touch of the inklings may transmit a feeling, like “longing for home” or a glimpse, like “The spark of revolution. A crack in the cage. The push for freedom.” What the GM or the player is supposed to do with this is unexplained. Maybe we’re supposed to feel bad for the inklings? But there’s no way to help them, or rather, the way to help them would have been to stay home.

I get that there are some pretty severe space constraints in this jam, but this is incomplete. 4/12 stingbats.

The Incandescent Horror
Path & Stride Games

This is a level 5 adventure were we got some cultists holed up in a 7-room dungeon to worship a strange incandescent creature that is actually an ancient construct that absorbs light and flames. The same civilization that created it also left a mess of black ichor everywhere that is highly flammable and also causes mutations.

There’s a lot of neat stuff packed in here – proof again that you can create something complete and worthwhile with very limited space. There are some fun dungeon-specific mechanics: torch duration is halved and all of the monsters have a number of mutations from the core book. Random encounters are solid – things like a group of duergar miners and an angel on a rescue quest will add some emergent gameplay.

The rooms themselves have a nice variety of interactions, some environmental hazards, an interesting NPC in the form of a blinded explorer posing as a cultist, and some weird stuff to experiment with that might open the well of many worlds. It’s deadly playground, as it should be. The eponymous Incandescent Horror will be a terrifying foe but there are some things the party can find in the dungeon that will give them an edge.

It all comes with a very lovely hand-drawn isometric map. Layout is ok – the faux-distressed look hampers readability in a few places.

Rumors could be a little stronger and we don’t have any compelling reasons for the party to go here, so that’s left up to you. And I would have probably foregone the full-paged cover to flesh out the cult and NPCa a bit more. But it’s about as good as any other sub 10-room dungeon I’ve ever read. 9/12 stingbats.