hey ursidae, this is cool stuff.
visually: very clean design, fun font choices that don't run into legibility issues, nice texture and color. all the off white and green-grays are very much my cup of tea. some other notes:
- ah-ha. a worm rougelite. (wormlite?) i like the spawn room. room of offering is classico too. the placement of the path of death feels a bit odd to me considering it's a few degrees more treacherous than five and seven with not too much in terms of pay-off. i feel like if i died in there to the 0hp tile i'd probably just head straight to the crushing ceiling or flesh eating worm pool for my gems instead.
- "ort village" and "hulgir" got nice mouthfeel. very appendix n.
- as far as i can tell the rumor table is just flavor, and rumor 5 seems to outweigh all the rest in terms of mechanical importance. they also all seem true, which weakens their status as rumors and places them more in "loading screen tip" territory, y'know? having some rumors in here that are bad advice could lead players astray in a fun way.
- also just spitballing here, but it could be cool if the rumor table influenced the dungeon in some way, considering you only get one rumor. this could add some variety to the zine, since everyone's worm dungeon would be a little different depending on the rumor they got.
- back to visual design here, but the way the text frames the map is very nice.
- a few pedantic text notes:
- the worm pool refers to the worm chamber as the northern chamber, i'd recommend making these consistent for clarity
- the flesh-eating worm pool is very similarly named to the worm pool. if this was an instance of the flesh-eating worm pool serving a similar purpose to the worm pool in-world but being corrupted in some aspect, i could see it working as flavor, but there's no real implication of this in the text itself. also "thick sludgy" for the water is kinda just "thick" twice, right?
- with tense: in "the statues creak, a dull light flutters, as if something doesn't happen as intended" should be "as if something didn't happen as intended." and "the tall worm-headed figure will start barking out gibberish and attacks" reads as if the figure is barking out two things: gibberish and attacks, (rather than barking out gibberish and then attacking)
- if i'm reading this right, it seems like the "correct" way to defeat the worm-thing is to destroy the statues rather than kill it, but doesn't it only drop loot if killed? how would players recover loot from a collapsed dungeon? is the intended idea here that it's a trade-off between killing the worm-thing the proper way and getting no treasure or killing it directly and getting treasure at the cost of potentially turning into a worm thing yourself? if that's the case:
- i like the loot table but i wish there was a little more sauce to the entries. you definitely have the space for it!
- the hero's sword doesn't really feel like it's unique to this dungeon. a poison sword is all well and good, but it doesn't feel grounded in the setting, y'know? some ways to accomplish this could be:
- the previous hero felled by the worm-thing had a poison sword and tried to stop the worms from taking over by stabbing himself with it. obviously it didn't work, but there's a split of worms in the dungeon-- some old and weathered, some young and born sick from his influence.
- there's remnants of his path in the dungeon: the undead have poison in what's left of their blood, there's acid streaks on the floors, the four damaged worm statues are melted down, etc etc.
is the worm helm an actual worm helmet, or is it just a dead worm worn as a hat? the former implies a cult constructed it, the latter feels like it should run a risk greater than negative charisma-- can't be healthy to inhale that dead worm air.
the worm egg and worm urn are the best of the bunch! these rule, and i think the implication that a player could end up forming their own worm dungeon just by using these is great.
- the hero's sword doesn't really feel like it's unique to this dungeon. a poison sword is all well and good, but it doesn't feel grounded in the setting, y'know? some ways to accomplish this could be:
- hard not to think of ken russel's lair of the white worm with that finale. excellent pulp.
had a lot of fun reading through this! looking forward to seeing more of your work in the future