Dwarves and a marvellous sword and sorcery premise, its a marvellous contender in my book! and my book isn't the book of grudges! Longer room descriptions but well within manageable prep, especially being a no-nonsense 9 room layout. Interesting and unusual mapping style that lends well to theatre of the mind (I assume most tables play knave theatre of the mind rather than a grid) and It has given me endless inspiration for designing my own dwarf hold for my ongoing campaign.
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War Dwarf Salad's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Writing: Is the adventure original and fun to read? | #26 | 4.062 | 4.062 |
| Fun: Is the adventure fun to play in an OSR playstyle? | #39 | 3.812 | 3.812 |
| Overall | #39 | 3.854 | 3.854 |
| Usability: Is the adventure easy to use on the fly? | #43 | 3.688 | 3.688 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
I'm another voice that wants to compliment you on that awesome mapping style! And the helpful mini-maps too! I know that we're all limited by page count for the jam, but it would be really helpful to have more detailed descriptions for what sorts of spells the wizards can throw around. Or whether the dwarves have any magic on their side they can use to help in a fight.
You have some of my favorite maps in the entire jam. Just beautiful little works of art! I'm glad you provided a clip of each room with their description too, I think this really makes the module easier to run on the fly. Lovely layout and well written!
I absolutely love the map you provided and it was a nice touch to include cropped images of each portion next to their descriptions. The corner images on each page are beautiful and I thought you picked a great image for the cover.
I liked the intricate relationships, backstory, and the character descriptions were all great. A nice addition would be stat blocks, to save the GM having to create their own.
You presented an interesting story, but I think the introduction could be simplified, there a lot of names and concepts for readers to keep track of:
Goldgreaves (dwarves, graybeards, dwarven soldiers), Princess Ciswin, red wizards (mages), Scarlet Spires (halls and tower, living quarters and fortifications), General Gripfast, Greybeard Graspfast, old King's Quarters, Throne Room, the most dangerous of spells (dungeon dimension, demons, convoluted ritual, giant betentacled monsters), the valley(?), headmaster Kanae, Death Wizard sentries, Marlow (school's ambassador).
Instead of multiple paragraphs maybe each topic in the introduction could have a separate bullet or heading for quick reference.
I like the dungeon design, its very usable. The flooded grate creating a waterfall across three levels makes it feel connected and alive.
If I ran this I would try and come up with a way to actively engage the players into the throne room scene, it would take some serious tweaking, but possibly placing them in the throne room after the dungeon delve - explaining how it played out.
Beautiful colourful dungeon design! Made me wanna snack on some dwarf salad 😉 haha 😂 & great that you zoom into parts of the map in the following pages.
Ps: Noticed your hand sketch of the dungeon. Really neat!
The Dungeons In Between has a dope three dimensionality that's hard to convey in a static image. This makes it easier to wrap your head around as an interconnected space. Splitting the salient portions up on the subsequent pages to illustrate the exact position of the party is quite effective.





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