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Matt Dietrich1 year ago (2 edits)

I like the illustrations here! I think there's room for improvement in a few areas to make the content usable for me. 

The village of Ucksol has short descriptions of districts but no tangible points of interest or NPCs. The town crier is mentioned but doesn't have a name, personality, or anything to interact with. I think a potential target when including a town could be at least 3 specific points of interest and 3 NPCs with clear interaction possibilities.

The actual hunt adventure hook felt underutilized, despite being the name of the adventure. In the text, it seems to be filler - the characters see the boar after wandering around in the forest and then follow it to the dungeon. I would love to see even some simple landmarks in the forest with tracks/clues that the players could follow/investigate. I'm imagining a small pointcrawl from the town through the forest to the dungeon (or to some alternate landmarks).

The dungeon itself seems to be linear, with minimal opportunities for interaction. I would love to see some branching paths/loops to allow the players to make choices and explore. If I understand the riddle correctly, the solution is crumpled on the floor in the room directly before. Having a more interesting dungeon layout would let the characters earn the answer through exploration and play. Instead of labelling the exit explicitly, you could make it an alternate entrance that clever players can find by searching. It would also be fun to have more traps/toys/factions to interact with. Most of what I saw in the dungeon is picking up items and encountering standard monsters.

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Dungeon Monkey1 year ago (3 edits)

Hi Matt,

Thank you for writing that extensive reply. I appreciate the time you took and hopefully it will allow me to address some of the issues in next versions or new adventures. Some things you mention I did on purpose. My main goal was to design something that would only take three hours to play and would introduce people to either Shadowdark RPG or the Gauntlet version of the game. I actually have a whole map of Ucksol, including multiple points of interest, hooks for adventures, I even have menus with all kinds of food and drinks based mainly on goat, goat cheese and goat milk and mushrooms. But as I wanted to keep this adventure to be a short introductory and fun dungeon crawl, I decided to leave all of this out. If my Ucksol plans are far enough to present, I might upload it as a supplement.

I agree with the actaul boar hunt. During the playtest, people seem to do okay. It is a nice and slow way for both the DM and party members to get into their (probably shortlived) character roles and play around with DC checks like setting traps, finding tracks etc. We had quite some fun just improvising but now that the eight page Game Jam limit is off, I will see if I can add some more flavour to it.

I was hoping the exploring, and picking up items and interacting with the fairy would be a nice way to add story to the dungeon crawling aspect of this adventure. In the three play tests we had so far it did, but I understand this might not work for everybody.

Thank you once again for the effort of writing feedback. Means a lot to me. I hope you can still enjoy the adventure :)

Happy crawling,


- Dimme

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