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The Wailing Wraith and the Sacred Spring's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Writing: Is the adventure original and fun to read? | #85 | 3.286 | 3.286 |
| Fun: Is the adventure fun to play in an OSR playstyle? | #89 | 3.286 | 3.286 |
| Overall | #92 | 3.190 | 3.190 |
| Usability: Is the adventure easy to use on the fly? | #93 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
This is reminiscent of Winter's Daughter; it stands apart mainly due to the dungeon ecosystem. The healing pool I'm sure will be divisive amongst players, but it helps to reinforce the theme and tone of the adventure.
A solid example of classic dungeon design. It could probably benefit from putting smaller illustrations throughout the dungeon write-up that shows the surrounding rooms.
Love the faerie vibe of your adventure! Interesting choice to use combat rounds throughout—am curious to see how that plays out at the table. Good stuff!
Really well rendered take on a classic tale! Great details, easy to parse, and one of the better/believable uses of a true name.
Kinda feels like a Zelda dungeon, what with all the "key items" floating around. That wraith's wail seems like it could either make an interesting challenge or very frustrating. If the players stumble into the healing spring the first time and happen to use it, they could be stuck in a loop of using the spring and frantically trying to solve the rest of the dungeon in 5 round intervals. Still, interesting idea and nice cover art.
Thanks for the feedback! The Wraith loop you mentioned is actually the point. The players should hopefully figure out pretty quickly that the only way out of the loop is to push their luck seeing how far they can explore each time before having to head back to the Spring, which can become a central hub of sorts. I'm not certain if the 10 round timer is the ideal number of turns for this, but from the furthest point on the map away from the Spring (the Archive), a character can possibly make it back there in 4 rounds.
Great cover art and Pucksfinger is a very evocative name for a town, perfectly suited to a fairy tale.
I like that you included unique rumors for each NPC rather than just one big table and I love how dangerous the aptly named bear's 'hug' ability is.
I think some of the descriptions were maybe too complex, at least for how I would use them at a table, but this booklet has a lot of useful content.
Amazing writing!
Your writing drew me in; this is great! You really pinned down the tone, flavor, and specific mechanics of a fairy tale adventure. (I'm a huge Dolmenwood fan, so of course it reminds me of that. Also reminds me of the Sepulchre of Seven, if you've heard of that one!)
The Healing Pool mechanic is great, and the Greenrook Grimoire is one of my favorite cursed items thus far, especially with the easier method for destroying it also requiring the sacrifice of the healing pool. The characters are wonderful.
The formatting could use work, but the writing is strong enough that I'd never recommend taking a Winter's Daughter bullet-point approach; that could actually ruin it! Mostly just things like breaking up the bigger paragraphs a bit, using column layouts, adding minimaps where needed, and (once the jam is complete) even expanding the page limit to let the current writing breathe a bit more with those tweaks. Usability at the table is the only real stumbling block that I found here. Again, though, I think the writing on display is wonderful, crafted with great care and accuracy. I love the adventure, and want to run it!
And props to the artist, the cover is 100% perfect for the adventure. I aIso agree with GiantBrain that the map should be at the front, forever and always!
Thanks for the feedback, and the compliments! Layout, formatting, and keeping to the page count restriction was something I struggled with, and using columns didn't seem to be helping. For personal reasons I needed to submit my adventure well before the deadline, so I hit a point where I just had to decide I was done messing with it for the time being. After the jam, I will definitely take all the advice I get to heart and make some improvements, starting with moving the map.
That's great to hear! I've kept circling back to this one throughout the day. Also wanted to say that A: putting population limits on the encounter table is super good design and something I wish everyone did (me included), and B: you actually made the banshee's wail a really interesting and terrifying mechanic compared to how it normally works. Forgot to put those two in my first comment!
Really nice descriptions on the npcs, and looks like a fun dungeon delve.
Very nice dungeon crawl. My suggestion would be to move the map up to the front of the book.