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Great dungeon variety! This is a true-blue dungeoncrawl and i'm here for it. 

Nice entry! You requested some feedback on discord, so here's my thoughts:

Layout:

• Great vibes, retro feeling.
• Body font needs to be readable, it's too black when compared with the headings (font doesn't have hyphens).

Dungeon:

• Nice map, serviceable. 
• Room 6 should probably connect to 3 to finish the loop. In my opinion, backtracking just wastes table time (our most precious commodity).
• Too many rooms are just straight fights with vengeful spirits. What choices do players make in these instances? One room is okay, but variety is the spice of life. The game shines when players have to think and engage with the game.
• Room 8 could use context for what the ghost servants are doing.
• Like the custom monsters, they all have interesting abilities. Great work!

Thanks! The images are large files, so that's probably contributing to the slow loads. I'll look at updating with more compressed images.

I'm impressed how much you got into this with such a clean well-spaced layout. Excellent work! The content is flavourful and I love the exploded map view of the buildings.

This adventure is super creative and fun. You asked for some feedback on discord, so i have a few notes:

Layout:

• I'd use a more readable font as the body. A028 Medium is a cool Albertus riff (love me some John Carpenter) but it makes for a bit harder reading as a body font. In that vein,. spacing is a bit scattershot. Sometimes lines touch, sometimes there's padding between paragraphs. Set up you file so that the spacing you want is there automatically - trying to do it manually is much harder to get consistent.
• I like the use of coloring, but I'd suggest more contrast between the heading color, and the read-aloud text. I might also add a shaded box for read aloud - the bar alongside is cool but is kind of hard for me to parse.
• I'd also turn on the spellchecker in indesign/affinity, or run your text through a word processor first. Many spelling and grammar mistakes distract the reader.
• I'd love to see more structure for tables. They are also hard to separate from region descriptions in their unformatted state. Also, i think weather table doesn't fit after the eelbucket entry. Later on when I want to roll weather, I won't think to look at the eelbucket town entry to find it!

Magic Items:

• I'd try to format the magic items like Shadowdark does. I think you ran out of space, but that just means we needed to rework the layout so the right formatting could get in.
• I'd try to clarify how long the tea box bonus lasts, unless we're imagining characters eat a pastry as soon as they get mind blasted!
• Sandman's item lore and effects don't line up for me. 

Locations:

• Eelbucket: we get NPCs and their related info in the back, but it would have been better to put their info on the same page together. At minimum we should introduce the NPC's first in detail, then reference them shorthand in the adventure.
• Random encounters: Would like to see a few less 'random animal hunting' entries or 'you stuck your foot in a trap'. One such entry on a table is fine, but in general we want random encounters to have something players to interact with. Try to push yourself on these!
• Unclear where we encounter 'the swamp'. it might be every in-between area, but I don't know for sure.
• hunter cabin: in my opinion, every piece of content must either fill the PCs lives with adventure, or breath life into the world. I think we need some kind of hook for what's going on at the hunter's cabin, or a fleshed out NPC to give the world color. 
• Old Chapel: Very cool location. How will players know how to solve the puzzle? I didn't notice any clues leading up to this location. Puzzles are great, but we need the accompanying clues to have a satisfying piece of gameplay.
• The dirty old water spring: what's this creature? Wyrmbat? We should reference that fact in the entry. 

Dungeons:

• Abbey Dungeon: The locations are all kind of samey. 1d6 imps doing a specific thing (which is a nice detail to include), but no encoutner variety. We know one group of imps wants food. The rest are just chilling, presumably to fight the party.
• Castle Dungeon: Random encounters and how it works first, it's confusing to read those last. Also, is there any clues on what the trick is, or how to navigate? This dungeon is a puzzle, which is cool, but we also need some way to detect the solution other than brute force.

The Good:

• Overall well imagined area. You gave it life, and I think it's great. Its just the details and encounter design that need work.
• The map and travel times are super helpful for a point crawl! Love this. Functional and efficient.
• Many of the random encounters are well structured and interactive.
• Some locations are just nice atmospherics. Love that!
• Abbey Dungeon: Good map, and good detail on keyed locations and what's going on at each. Plenty of detail to riff!
• Castle Dungeon: A puzzle dungeon is a lot of fun, and I think this is a great idea.
• Tea box: Super fun character. I'm sure many a party will get attached to their new pet sentient furniture.

Please don't read this as me being overly negative or hating the adventure. I think you vividly imagine the locations, and more formatting, design and spellchecking will make this a superstar adventure.

This is really cool solo content! I'm not sure which covers you were riffing off, but the scenario is interesting.

A classic dungeon crawl, well assembled. Bravo!

Extremely cool. Love that torchlight reveals the truth in this.

Haha well no one's found it on their own, so I wouldn't sweat it. I'll give another clue: using  a phone, you might be able to glean more information from a magic rune on the map, or the ad page. Good luck :)

Thank you for the review! Love that we could go in such different directions with the same starting point. Very fun.  Cutting the cover was a necessity, but I like the look too.

As a fan of nightmare at castle goldgloom, you might enjoy the *secret* hidden in this adventure. Take another look at the ad page, or the map. You may find a road to a familiar face. :) 

Thank you!

Top shelf stuff. Great dungeon design, organized and looks easy to run. 

Thank you! Im workshopping using icons in the dungeon layout to help with legibility. This is my latest version of that. :)

An excellent adventure well presented! Love a dungeon that lives with its key. Makes it a snap to run. Bravo.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. 

No notes, its the perfect little weird adventure. Unionizing, love-making goblins! Sign me up.

Great dungeon! Love the isometric maps to add verticality to the exploration spaces. Map accompanying the section is also a super technology that all modules should adopt~

Excellent work! You packed tons of content and even two short dungeons into eight pages. You also riffed off the weird tales covers excellently. Bravo.

Love the use of fill art for each section. Great effort!

I think the whole thing does need fleshing out - it reads more like your session notes than something someone else can pick up and play. 

Don't get me wrong - there's lots of good ideas in here like a trolley problem, quicksand floors, and weirdo space aliens. I think with a few more passes this would be cookin!

Excellent work! It seems like a blast. I appreciate the randomized element, and the NPCs are all great. Great use of the source material to inspire a weird adventure.

Love this! Packed full of fun ideas. Any party TPK'ing will have a blast on the island between life and death :)

The layout and use of spot art in this is top notch! 

Extremely creative. Loved the idea of using tarot cards to lay out the dungeon. Personally, i think it would have pushed this up another level if the spread was randomized, rather than bespoke. 

Unfortunately, the submission is longer than the maximum eight pages. But this was a beautiful creative endeavour. You should be proud!

Loved this!

The layout is excellent imminently useable. Spot art accentuates the fiction and helps us inhabit the space, too. 

The dungeon itself is vividly imagined - what locals think, who's there, and what impacts the faction are having on the environment are all well thought out. This space is fully realized. Each room has some interesting element for players to engage with.

I'd like to see less 'they immediately attack' monster entries and more chances for the reaction roll to decide if NPCs have something they want to negotiate over. It would have also been helpful to know what each faction's goal is upfront.

Overall this is a killer module and would make any game night its used at a hit.

Not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that date (2023) is when that version of the license was created and not meant to be updated every year. Check the D&D OGL language to confirm, which I think still has the year it was created as its copyrighted year. (2000)

Hey crawlers!

I was curious so I tried to track down the text that appeared in my assigned issues of Weird Tales. I've found a few good resources that show the articles inside the Weird Tales issues, so thought I'd share:

• https://pulpuniversity.com/weird-tales-magazine/
• https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=weirdtales
• https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22weird+tales%22
• https://www.unz.com/print/WeirdTales/

None seem to be complete, so it's a luck roll if yours will be archived. If you find any good archives, post em here!

Keep your torches dry and your blades sharp, 

Taylor

Cheers Austin! Appreciate the kind words.  May your dungeons stay looped.

Taylor

Thanks for engaging with the adventure! I appreciate the insight.

 It's true no explicit hooks direct players to the Kugo basement.  It's just as likely that PCs decide to try to run for it, try to fortify the village, or try to escort villagers out of the area. No advice in the module exists for any of those scenarios, which perhaps lead to this module missing the top 8 in the jam.

I also considered their revenge being more targeted! I was originally inspired by "The Fog" where misty ghosts come back to punish the leaders of a town.  My tastes veer towards over-the-top, so I opted to push it a bit farther.  Restraint might have made for a more interesting story, in this case.

Most of the kugo's are LV7, so a level 1-3 party would need to play smart and retreat to rest, and a level 4-6 party could take the dungeon in one run.

thanks for the kind words, matt :) 

Simple and streamlined! Very easy to apply at the table. Love it.

Thanks for the kind words. No matter the outcome, I feel like this contest is a really cool showcase of the community's creativity!

Beautiful, densly packed dungeon full of evocative encounters. The zombie triceratops with a magic axe? Rolling rock trap that acts like a huge stencil? I really don't have enough good things to say about this adventure. Bravo!

Love the efficient use of space to create the pointcrawl!

Very practical layout! Love the uses of hexes. :)

Love the vertical map, very cool!! Does the teleportation runes in area 5 lead 'off-map'? 

Very dune. I dig it :)

so cool!

thanks! i'm pleased with how this one turned out. beware the wretched puppets 💀