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 six:

The Spiral Path of Chaos
Austin Holm

Summarizing the setup would not do this one justice: “A spiral temple of cyclopean stonework falls towards Eris IV. Ranmyaku, Chaos-Papess, rides this decaying orbit into the gas giantʼs core. The World-Makers trapped the Old Ones inside during the Dawn Epoch; now, Ranmyaku’s sacrifice threatens to free them! Rob the Vault! Disrupt the Ritual! Escape the Spiral Path of Chaos!”

What that boils down to is a level 4-6 adventure with a 9-room dungeon. Would be tough to run as anything but a oneshot, but if you have a campaign where this would work, I want in. 

The first room has “Two ornery Pterodactyls, star-saddled for spaceflight”. The vibes are just immaculate throughout. You can see it playing in your head as a beautifully rotoscoped animation with a Blue Öyster Cult soundtrack while you read. All of the rooms have something weird and wonderful going on, like a wizard that has been trapped in an ape’s body and a kraken that clever players will be able to crush with the tunnels themselves. It all leads up to a 2-stage bossfight. 

There’s also a clock that will make sure things get properly desperate as time goes on, causing gravity shifts and frequent spell mishaps. Failure causes monstrous chaos gods to “consume the Eris star system, then slowly conquer the universe.”

My big complaint is that too many obstacles are overcome with simple stat checks. Need to tame those pterodactyls to make a dramatic escape? DC 12 WIS. Would have been cooler if you needed to learn their names or find some pterodactyl chow. Same goes for the big climax where the party needs to manipulate an orb to stabilize the temple – DC 15 INT. I would have liked to see something a little more involved and interactive than a few dice rolls.

But this looks like an absolute blast. 9/12 stingbats.

The Amethyst Throne
Deadly Yuppie

This one is a level 3 adventure in an 8-room dungeon where some princes have gone missing while looking for a throne that grants eternal life. In truth, the throne transfers the sitter’s life force to a demon lord named Caractacus the Pallid. 

Room descriptions are neither terse nor evocative and are written as large blocks of text with no hierarchy of information. Space-efficient, perhaps, but not easy to read or run. One room has snakes with human teeth. You know what’s scarier than snakes with human teeth? Snakes with snake teeth.

There’s an interesting situation going on in here – one prince has found the throne and is currently flipping back and forth between being himself and being possessed by Caractacus. He has some weirdo attendants like frog people and cow centaurs. But the adventure doesn’t really offer any resolutions besides combat. “Prince Cadwin will fight to the death to remain on the throne” and Caractacus “will awaken and attack immediately if disturbed.” The NPCs have some flavorful characteristics but it doesn’t amount to anything gameable.

The 1,000 year old demon lord is level 5. I guess he didn’t spend much of that time getting XP. The layout and art are well done. 6/12 stingbats.

Legacy of the Golden Dawn
Mage vs. Monster

Simple setup here: you’ve got an hour to go into a dragon’s tomb and loot the place. It’s a 7-room dungeon for levels 5-6.

Room keys follow the familiar pattern of a description with bolded words that are followed up with bullet points. Some of them are a bit difficult to parse. For example:

Maybe I’m as dumb as many high school teachers thought, but I don’t understand the relationship between the lodestone, the tapestry and the door here. 

There’s nothing terribly interesting going on in any of the rooms. You’ve got some bones that come to life and a magnetic trap that needs a DC 15 STR to escape. The most interesting puzzle by far is a 400 lbs gold statue with a 5-ft wide pit around it. That’s the kind of thing that will get players thinking and talking.

The final treasure is locked inside of a giant egg. You need to cast either Knock or Lightning Bolt to open it. Screw you if you don’t have either of those spells, I guess. Inside is an “expansive hoard” with no details or values provided. 5/12 stingbats.

Secrets of the Spider Cult
Bailey Irwin

So a silk merchant shows up in town and the next day, everyone that bought his silk has vanished. The party is asked to investigate. For reasons that are not explained, the investigation begins in a nearby spider cave. There is also a spider cult in there. This is a 15-room dungeon for level 2-3.

It’s pretty straightforward but competently executed. Go into the cave, fight a bunch of cultists and spiders, grab the missing villagers and get out. There is a bit of intrigue with some of the NPCs, like a cultist pretending to be a captive and some orcs that have been forced into weaving by a drow woman who will “believe almost anything she is told”. Those will be fun encounters. 

The bossfight looks pretty rad – a giant spider with spider breath and if you attack it in melee you get 1d4 spiders on you. Arachnophobes need not apply, but others should find it challenging and engaging.

It seems a little incomplete in a few places. There’s a large black key in one room, but no clue as to where it goes. There’s also a reference to a room 17 that doesn’t exist. (The author corrected me below. There is a home for the key, and room 17 is a typo for room 15). The adventure also leans a bit too heavily towards combat. Besides that and a few NPCs there isn’t much to do. A bit more HOTTness would have gone a long way. 7/12 stingbats.

The Fires of Orc
knee deep oceans

This one bills itself as a “social deduction” game and is sort of like Mafia or Heads-Up, Seven Up. Plus Shadowdark, and for levels 0-1.. The party has been captured by orcs and is forced to undertake a ritual where they will be transformed into an orc if they step into a green flame. They may also quench the flame BUT one of them is secretly a traitor, and one of them knows who the traitor is.

You start with this procedure:
1. All players close their eyes 
2. GM touches the traitor on the shoulder
3. Traitor sticks up their thumb 
4. GM touches another player 
5. That player opens their eyes 
6. Everyone closes their eyes 

Then there’s an 11-room dungeon that ends with the green flame. The traitor wins if they step in, everyone else wins if they quench the flame with holy water. There is a single vial of holy water in the dungeon, plus an angel that sweats holy water if someone thinks of using that.

The dungeon has a few NPCs and some simple door puzzles. There’s one guy that “wants a warrior’s death” and is “swayed by kindness.” I have no idea what to do with this. There’s no reason to risk fighting him, and no one to enlist his aid to fight against. None of the dungeon really enhances the “social deduction” aspect of the adventure, and the best strategy for the traitor would be to lay low until the very end and then sprint for the green flame. 

So on the one hand, a game jam is a perfectly fine place to take a risk and write an experimental adventure like this. On the other hand, I think you’d have a better time just playing Mafia or Werewolf or whatever. The addition of Shadowdark doesn’t really improve on that type of game. 5/12 stingbats.

Where Saurians Rule
T. M. Lockwood

OK so the party is shipwrecked on an island of talking dinosaurs, their leader, a t-rex, is having a nap. Meanwhile, a rebel pterodactyl is trying to conduct a ritual that will turn her into a sea dragon. It’s a 6-area point crawl for levels 3-4. 

There’s a clock that will tick up by 1 whenever the party enters a new area, or by 3 if they roll a 6 on random encounters. When it reaches 10, the ritual is complete. The t-rex wakes up and the sea dragon is added to the random encounter table.

The individual areas don’t have much going on. Maybe fight some dinos and grab a bit of loot. There isn’t really any way for the players to learn what’s going on, and no decisions to be made about it anyway. Crucially, there isn’t anything for the party to accomplish on the island. They can stop the ritual I guess, but we’re also told the dragon’s plan is to nope out anyways. Nothing they do will help them get off the island and that’s probably going to be their most immediate desire. It would actually work better if the party came to the island on purpose. 5/12 stingbats.

The Memory Matrix
Mark Felps

The ship of an advanced race of aliens crashlands and its inhabitants are killed by a medusa. The artificial intelligence inside needs a brain so it borrows whatever’s around. The ship itself is an 11-room dungeon for level 3.

The central mechanic of this adventure is that every 30 minutes, the brains of every creature in the dungeon including monsters, is swapped. So the players start in control of their own PC but they mind themselves controlling another PC, or an ankheg, or a black pudding or whatever. Sounds like a blast.

The dungeon itself isn’t terribly remarkable. There’s a few things to experiment with and some NPCs whose reactions will depend very much on what brain is in their head, and a very simple puzzle to shut down the AI by pulling a couple of levers. There isn’t much in the way of loot and I think a few more helpings of strange alien artifacts would be welcome. 

So most of the fun here will derive from the mind-swap mechanic, and that’s probably enough. But a better dungeon would have put it over the top. 7/12 stingbats.

Laulu’s Puzzle Box
Leviathanapsu

This dungeon is meant to be a “campaign capstone”. The premise is that a lich has challenged the party to enter her dungeon and recover her phylactery so she can finally be put to rest. The map has six squares of nine squares, and you’re supposed to cut them out and glue them to a Rubik’s Cube. There are rotation rooms where pulling the lever rotates one face of the cube. 

The rooms are minimally keyed with just a sentence or two each. Most of them are the sort of hazard where you roll x or take y damage, or a random number of bad guys. None of them is terribly interesting or will require impactful decisions from the players. 

Basically they’re gonna wander around until they find the phylactery, which is hidden in a coffin guarded by ghosts. That’s just sloppy liching. Besides mapping, there isn’t anything very difficult about this dungeon. The placed enemies are all terribly pedestrian like spiders and rats. There are some more powerful foes on the random encounter tables, but they aren’t given anything cool to do besides stand and fight. 

So it’s all gonna come down to whether your players enjoy wandering around in an illogically laid-out, ever-changing dungeon. I get the feeling they won’t. A neat idea but also a terrible idea. Looks nice. 4/12 stingbats.

Flickering Hope in Fusang
Benjamin L. Eastman

Some aliens have set up a base that’s level 4 and looks an awful lot like a Dyson Logos map. It’s been damaged and is sending out flashing lights as a distress signal. The party has been sent to investigate.

There’s not a lot going on in the dungeon. A shame since the premise gives you license to do whatever weird stuff you want. There’s a couple decontamination rooms, a kitchen. Several of the rooms have no real interactivity at all. Then you have things like, “DC 15 WIS: Locate secret door.” This bell is probably still ringing from the last time I gave it a whack, but you’ve got to tell the GM where the door is, how it’s opened and how it’s hidden. That way the PC can find it diegetically, rather than the player finding it through a die roll. 

The text refers to beings like “visitors”, “encephelons” and “diminished” without explaining clearly what they are. You can sort of infer that the visitors are the aliens, the encephelons are the brains that control the station and that the visitors become “diminished” when they get poisoned by oxygen. But it never spells that out. The adventure also refers to finding  “Treasure”, with a capital “T” but it never says what that treasure is, not even referencing a core book treasure table. 

The whole thing is a bit bland, a bit confusing and overly abstracted. 4/12 stingbats. 

Fable of the Silver Lanterns
Beau Yarbrough

There’s a lot of beleaguered aliens hanging around lately. These ones crashed their flying saucer in the middle of a 6-area pointcrawl. No level range is given but I’d peg this one at level 1. The setup is that some bandits attacked a town and then a spaceship crashed into the ridge where they’re hiding out. The townspeople have asked the party to hunt down the bandits. No reward is offered. 

The aliens are trying to send a distress signal, and when they accomplish 3 of 5 available tasks, their mothership will take them home. This is never explained to the PCs or, by extension, the players. Now, the players might be familiar enough with the tropes of the genre to piece it together somewhat. But from the PCs’ perspective, they just show up in each area and see some bandits fighting a weird-looking guy with a square head.

And that does describe just about every area. Bandits fighting an alien while an alien tries to accomplish some inscrutable task like turning trees into metal. Actually the most interesting thing that could happen is if the party decides to team up with bandits, destroy the aliens and cash in on their valuable “sky iron”. 

So the whole thing boils down to a few social encounters or combat encounters. Also, minus a million points for giving the party blaster pistols and then taking them away because “When the pistol is taken from the crater or the saucer is taken by the mothership, the pistol stops working.” If you’re gonna give the party in your medieval fantasy rpg some guns, have the guts to see it through. 4/12 stingbats. 

The Baleful Cloud
Ill Hierophant

Ok, looking at the last few reviews it occurs to me that I may be getting burned out on this. Apologies. This next one is a 13-room dungeon for a total party level of 9-10. Let’s call it a level 2-3 adventure.

The setup is that a hired thief cracked open the tomb of an evil pot-smoking sorcerer and the cloud from his “baleful spliff” has enveloped the town. Say it with me now: “The party has been asked to investigate”.

There’s an entire page of somewhat purple backstory. A nice piece of fiction perhaps but space is at a premium here. On top of that there’s an entire page of how to run the dungeon. It tells us “Monster names are self-explanatory.” Perhaps, then, you didn’t need to explain them. Then there’s a page of random tables like traps, townspeople, doors, whatever.

At any rate, that leaves one page for the room keys. Most of the contents are rolled on the aforementioned tables. “There’s a Monster and a Treasure here.” Besides that the rooms are pretty inert. They say things like “Meditation chamber: minds went mad here, wizards smell the psychosphere”, but it doesn’t mean anything in terms of gameplay. Then you fight the boss and it’s over.

Sometimes I criticize dungeons by saying that you could roll on random tables and come up with something similar. In this case, that’s literally what the adventure is asking you to do. And the tables aren’t even that good. The treasure table is just 10gp, 20gp, 30gp or 40gp. The core book tables are much better. Use those instead. Also the white on purplish texture background hurt my eyes to read. 3/12 stingbats.

Shadows Over Laidley Gulch
J. B. Raasch

Some dark shadows from a wizard tower have been invading the town and disappearing townspeople. Go investigate. 6ish rooms, levels 2-3. We have some very clear guidelines for the journey to the tower, which is nice. Designers usually skip those details.

The room descriptions are a bit dry, focusing more on the layout and dimensions of the room rather than drawing attention to the most interactive elements or trying to be evocative. And there isn’t much in any of them. Maybe a bad guy or two. You’ll find the missing townspeople rather quick.y

One room has a magic cabinet, where you can request any mundane item and it appears. Except the item doesn’t leave the room, and there’s no puzzles or obstacles in the room that it might be used for. So it’s just useless and not terribly interesting, either. Sure, if I found this in my own home I’d be ecstatic, but in the terms of this game, it’s essentially moot.

In the final room, a Mage (level 6) is just about to finish a ritual to become a lich. He’s standing in a magic circle with a little black box that will become his phylactery. Smudging the circle or destroying the box wil end the ritutal. So the path through this adventure is 1) do a few small fights 2) do a big fight. There are no decisions to make or mysteries to puzzle out. Very straightforward. 4/12 stingbats.