The Worst Scroll (So Far)

At $9, to describe The Cursed Scroll as overpriced-yet-underwhelming DLC for an overpriced-yet-undrewhelming 5th Edition vapidware trash hack is a massive understatement.

Unlike sayings that Kelsey invents in an attempt to deflect deserved criticism, an actual one is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but in my experience not only can you, more often than not your initial judgement will be at least mostly accurate. All this is to say that, at a glance, the cover doesn’t instill any confidence. 

But then that is the ShadowDerp brand.

Past the atrocious cover you’re immediately hit with a hex map, followed by a very brief description and related albeit uninspired tables. To the discerning gamer this might seem strange, and it is, but there’s a sort of…logic behind it, let’s say, and that’s because Kelsey is doing what people typically do for adventures, which is to put the map at the front of the book.

The first of many issues is that, well, this isn’t an adventure, but merely an overpriced hodgepodge of somewhat related, shallow ideas.

The second is that, great, it’s a bog-standard hex map…but you haven’t gotten to the part of the book where you are offered a pittance of description for some of the locations, which is nearly 40 pages later so have fun scrolling/flipping back and forth.

Kelsey could and honestly should have put the hex map in the relevant section, but then she would have needed to find some other content to eat up a page to avoid ruining her shoddy layout. Art would have been ideal, but given what’s in the rest of the book perhaps this was for the best. Maybe could have devoted some of her budget to some even halfway decent art, but then that would go against the ShallowGrift brand now wouldn’t it?

We’re already off to a bad start but, worry not, it’s only going to get worse.

Much, much worse.

The introduction features a boilerplate shills pitch (ie, “brimming with” yadda yadda) and Kelsey’s attempt at what she considers to be humor (you’ll probably be cursed). It’s the same boring-ass buzzphraes you’ve heard a million times before, and merely amounts to a bunch of hyperbolic bullshit.

For example, curses are allegedly part of the overall theme, so…what does that make you think of? Just forget about ShadowDerp for a moment: if you were to get, say, a pre-Groomer Dragon Magazine or even a hobby blog article that talked about curses, what would you expect to find inside? Personally, I would expect rules or even at the least vague guidelines on curses, something that adds more flavor. Something that draws from mythology or folklore. 

Maybe expanded rules and effects for cursed magic items, a random generator for tasks or conditions require to remove a curse without just having someone cast remove curse on you. Maybe a series of curse spells of increasing level and potency, starting with minor effects and building up the higher level you get. Maybe spells or abilities that give you a chance to curse someone in various ways, but if you fuck up it gets rebounded on you, so there’s a risk involved.

Here? Pffft, no no no. There’s none of that. There aren’t even cursed magic items, which is some of the easist content to pinch out. There aren’t even monsters capable of cursing you, not even the one called a “hexling”. It just has an energy drain touch that transforms you into a hexling. That might sound like a curse, until you read the sentence of description where it’s basically the D&D shadow by another name.

Instead, you get a single curse spell that’s basically the D&D curse spell except it lets you impose different effects such as always losing at gambling. Sucks for you, assuming you gamble at all. There’s also “food tastes of ash”, which sounds bad but you the player don’t have to actually deal with that and it has no mechanical effect whatsoever. 

Worse, the duration is permanent so you can’t even use it as leverage. As in, “You’re covered in hideous boils and warts but I’ll remove it if you do what I say.” There’s not even a break curse/enchantment spell, which you’d think Kelsey would have also plagiarized. Not just because it’s also a stock D&D spell, but because it would make sense.

Or, and I’m aware that this would require some actual creativity and effort, in a shitty zine allegedly “brimming” with material on curses, Kelsey could have, you know, actually tried to half-ass a mechanic or system or brief sidebar on doing something in order to break the curse.

The only one that will likely have some sort of immediate or meaningful impact is “an ally turns into an enemy”, which is odd because you are the target of the curse, but it somehow completely changes someone else’s personality. 

Okay, what about witchcraft?

Well, there’s certainly a class called Witch Class, but the only vaguely witch-like thing about it is a woefully uninspired familiar gimmick.

Then you have “witch spells”, which to be fair occasionally have a witch-like theme. For example, Broomstick is a reskinned Fly: you conjure a broomstick and can fly around. But since this is an incomplete vapidware trash grift, the spell gets all of two sentences to give you most of the bare minimum: there’s no clarification if you can hand it to someone else, if someone else can command it, if you can leave it hovering and do something else, call it to you, etc.

Also, that’s a really lame reskin. If you’re going to put in brooms, then it should be a sort of spell focus that can be enchanted in various ways (such as being able to defend the witch and perform other minor activities). 

Then there’s Cauldron, which lets you…summon a cauldron. Not a specific cauldron. Not your cauldron. Just some random cauldron from somewhere. And what does it do? Can you use it to scry on anything? Produce potions? Food? Food with some added buff effect? Poisons? A huge puff of smoke with various effects, such as putting people to sleep or hallucinations? Tip it over to create a slime/sludge monster from whatever is inside? Create undead?

Anything that a witch would typically utilize it for? 

Pffft, are you crazy? This is ShadowDerp! Obviously it can…repair a single, broken, mundane item that you toss in. It only lasts a round, so I’m guessing you drop it in, and the cauldron just spits it right back out. You can also have a toad hop out and control it for all of three rounds. Wow. Much magic. Such witch. The last option is, and I’m serious: you can put three “item slots” worth of crap in, and then the next time you cast the spell it spits them all out.

I’ll talk more about the spells later, specifically how sparse they are in detail and innovation, but I want to address…this…more or less in order.

As for demons…okay, a Warlock Class patron is stated to be an arch-demon but he just gets a few sentences of description. Then there’s a handful of pages of mostly adventure-specific monsters, none of which are obviously demons. This is what Kelsey considers to be “brimming” with material about “demons, deviltry, curses, the occult, and witchcraft”.

Sigh.

Classes are up first, and while I considered the overwhelming majority of Dungeon World classes to be lazily-and-hastily cobbled together and slapped up on DriveThru for a dollar or more per page, these are lazier still because in Dungeon World you had to at least cook up 20 or so “moves” in addition to 3-4 things you start with. Here? It’s meaningless, uninspired flavor, an uninspired gimmick or two, and then five uninspired “talents”, at least one of which is just boring-ass stat boosts.

The first class is the Knight of St. Ydris Class, and I’m going to say the full title because that’s what Kelsey put even though like the existence of DoubleDark in general, tacking Class at the end of a class’s title serves no purpose.

Anyway, the Knight of St. Ydris Class is apparently a cursed knight that isn’t actually cursed at all, who “walks the path of St. Ydris the Unholy, the Possessed” and “embraces the darkness” in order to…fight evil.

Yawn.

They do this through a “flurry of steel” and “forbidden sorcery”, which isn’t forbidden at all—there’s no drawback or consequences for using any of its abilities—and is merely wizard spells by another name.

You can use all weapons and armor (I’m not sure what hapepns if you wear armor that you “can’t” in ShallowGrift), and three times per day use “demonic possession” to gain…a damage boost for a few rounds, because this is a lazy vapidware trash derivative and that’s the best Kelsey could come up with.

Again, there’s no downside, not even a side effect of being allegedly possessed by a demon (which isn’t mentioned in the two sentence class description). Like invented sexualities and pronouns it’s just an uninspired label that’s there to flimsily and wastefully justify a minor damage boost. It could just as easily be barbarian rage or “grimdark edgy boy smite” or something equally silly.

DarkityDark simps actually defend this crap. They see a fighter with a temporary damage bonus and wizard spells tacked on, and consider that a pinnacle of creativity and game design, something they surely could have never devised on their own, despite the ubiquity of fighters-but-they-can-cast-wizard-spells classes having existed for decades. And maybe that’s it. Maybe they really are so stupid they couldn’t have come up with ShallowGrift-tier content, even though it’s been done to death for decades.

Here’s my theory on Kelsey’s “design” process: she started by taking maybe 1d4 minutes out of the handful of hours it surely must have taken her to slap all this together to idly skim through some Dungeons & Dragons books for, ahem, ”””””inspiration””””” and thought, there needs to be a fighter class but it’s possessed by a demon: whatever shall I do? Then after a few seconds of consideration gave up, shrugged, jotted down a damage bonus, and then proceeded to pat herself on the back and take the rest of the day off.

See, ShadowSimps? It’s not that hard. Or hard at all. It actually sounds so absurdly easy that, so long as you have enough neurons bouncing around in your head that they even occasionally collide, you would still have to go well out of your way to pinch out something even remotely as pathetic.

I asked my wife: how would you handle a class that is essentially a fighter, but possessed by a demon. Her first question was, “What sort of demon?” An excellent question, unless your setting features exactly one type of demon, so I said that it’s really up to her. Her response was that you could pick from several types of demons, and then suggested tying it to various sins, since that’s how demons in Dungeons & Delvers operate.

In the span of like a minute, she was already putting in far more thought, creativity, and effort in a single class concept than Kelsey put into this entire vapidware DLC packette, and ShallowGrift in general. We had a little back and forth about various abilities, such as a knight having a bound lust demon being able to charm people, a gluttony demon being able to devour his enemies, envy being able to magically steal shit, etc.

I don’t think we’ll make a player character class based on those ideas, but a string of various “hellknight” monsters would make for some interesting foes, I think.

What made the whole thing hilarious is that when I asked her what she thought Kelsey did, she replied, “I dunno, like a +1 to damage”.

So close. Sooo fucking close. She just didn’t specify a duration or x times per day, not that she would because she knows that arbitrary x times per day mechanics are retarded. Though, I suppose that’s actually why she should have assumed that it would be restricted in such an absurd manner.

Anyhway, Warlock Class is next, and this is yet another example of how stupid and shortsighted Kelsey is: in DarkoDarkins warlock is also a Wizard Class title intuitively known by all once a Wizard Class reaches 5th-level, so long as he is Chaotic. But it’s cool, because at 7th-level it changes to diabolist (which everyone possibly magically knows).

Warlock Classes can use an arbitrary assortment of weapons. Oddly you can use an arming sword, but not a shortsword. They can also wear mail, as well as use shields, but for some reason the terrible illustration depicts…uh, this:

So, he/she/it isn’t wearing mail, but some dress that all blends together with everything else because it’s ShallowGrift and Kelsey knew her simps obviously aren’t interested in quality. But don’t expect to tie anyone to a tree and drain their blood. At least not for any beneficial purpose: it won’t empower your magic or heal you. None of the patrons care about it, which is odd because you think at least one of them would.

Speaking of patrons, you get one, which you have to serve but the examples couldn’t even be considered minor inconveniences. For example, Willowman might want to drink your nightmares on the dark of the moon. So, okay, I guess you just tell the GM that’s fine, there’s no downside so…have at it (Willow)man.

On the other hand Mudglub might require you to actually engage in the activity of boiling of tooth and bone, despite being a slime monster. So…just keep a pot and some bones and teeth handy for whenever he wants you to do that. Don’t know why: it’s a big hideous slime monster that wants to dissolve everything, so maybe it’s just a feminist thing?

The boons are…more or less mechanically useful, sure, but none are especially interesting. You might learn to use a new weapon (yay), or get +1 to melee damage. Maybe you get Advantage on initiative checks, or +1 to AC. 

There’s maybe one option per patron that even feels vaguely thematically appropriate, such as Mudglub allowing you to turn into slime once per day. Compare this to Dungeons & Delvers, where we gave you three pacts each with thematically distinct Talents to choose from: Why not have it so that the Mudglub pact gives the character some sort of acid attack? Corrosive touch? He wants to dissolve things, after all.

Well, the reason is simple: Kelsey is lazy and stupid, and her throng of simps lazier and stupider still. Who else could conceive of a patron named Kytheros, a largely undescribed “Lord of Time who sees all possible futures”, capable of…granting his servants the ability to force the GM to re-roll a single roll, add your Wisdom modifier to any roll 3/day, a +1 bonus to Armor Class, or boost your Strength, Dexterity, or Wisdom.

Personally I would have provided options such as being able to haste yourself or slow others, stop time, travel back in time, a sort of divination power (you are peering into the future), see visions of the past in an area, hold objects and witness its history (which can be enhanced to perceive the history of creatures), send a creature forward in time, a teleport type power based on freezing time and traversing to a destination, reverse aging, undo various effects by unraveling time on a creature or object, bonus to attack rolls and skill checks because you are peering into the future and seeing what happens, etc.

But, no, no, this is fine: a 1/day re-roll and 3/day tack-your-Wisdom-on-to-something. Perfect. What more could you ask for and honestly expect from her?

You also get a pact boon, which is based on your patron, which are described a few pages later for no reason.

There’s a Witch Class, tucked in almost as an afterthought. It’s basically a Charisma wizard with a shallow familiar mechanic: it can be considered you for the purposes of where a spell is cast from. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not innovative (I know 3rd Edition did this like 24 years ago), but then DoubleDark is just a fifth-of-5th Edition hack with some mechanics from other games clumsily bolted on, and an OSR sign written in crayon with a backwards R nailed to the front.

There are a few tables for “Diabolical mishaps”, but Kelsey has learned nothing from ShallowGrift so every effect is rarely if ever going to be related to what you’re doing. 

For example, you could try to cast Cat’s Eye, which lets you see invisible stuff (no range so I guess it’s all invisible stuff within line of sight), but fail and be…surrounded by salt that you can’t touch or pass through (but anyone else can break it so…eh). Or maybe you try to make your broomstick fly and instead end up turning into a newt because hey remember Monty Python lol? Or you try casting howl, which forces a 5th Edition-esque morale check and roll double trouble which…causes you to lose the ability to cast a random spell until you rest.

I’m not going to go through each spell and compare them to each mishap result to see which, if any actually even somewhat match up, but from a quick skim, again, don’t expect a mishap to ever even somewhat align with whatever you were trying to do, because that sort of thing takes effort and Kelsey is just lazily copying the mere idea of a mishap mechanic without applying any creativity or passion, and trying to pass it off as “rules-lite” or “simple”.

Which sums up ShadowDerp in general.

As for the actual spells, for the most part they are D&D spells, sometimes with the names filed off, always with the details filed down, sometimes to less than the bare minimum, all under the pretense of “””””succinctness””””” as opposed to merely Kelsey being unable to adequately write and not really giving a fuck, because her simps don’t expect anything out of her, anyway.

For example, Anathema: it’s a level 5 spell that causes all allies to “revile and abandon” the creature you touch for a day. So, what does this entail, precisely? Will they not approach within a certain distance? Are they willing to harm the affected creature? Like, if you bother to play this post-modern vapidware trash derivative and hit the big bad with this spell, will his minions also stop helping him, even indirectly? Will they turn on him, and help the characters thwart his plans?

Some spells have implications that aren’t elaborated upon. For example, Coven is a level 3 spell that grants access to another level 3 spell that you can’t cast due to one of the uninspired, likely unrelated mishaps. The brief description is that you “call upon the magic you share with your fellow witches”.

Okay, wait: what fellow witches? Nothing about the Witch Class states that are you part of a coven or even know other witches. Also, you “share magic” with others? Does that mean that other witches can call upon your magic, causing you to randomly burn through spell slots? No, of course not, because it’s just meaningless throwaway flavor that only exists because Kelsey thought it was creative and interesting, but like so many other vapidware trash grifters can’t be bothered to create mechanics that actually support the flavor.

Cacklerot is a Level 2 spell that is Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter, renamed and collapsed to one line. Despite the name, there is no rot involved. The target just laughs for awhile.

Monsters, well…they certainly exist. Technically. Barely. It’s the same shallow shit you got in DarkityDarkDark: a name, maybe a sentence fragment vaguely describing it, and a cramped stat block. 

For example, here’s the first set of monsters:

Check out the Bittermold. The name suggests it’s a mold-based creature, the description that maybe it’s slime-based, but it’s actually a member of a family from the upcoming “adventure”. Of course Kelsey can’t be bothered to explain this, and I have no idea why the adventure-specific “monsters” are put here in a general monster section. And this isn’t the only time she does this! A few pages later there’s an entry called Plogrina B:

Reading the entry you have no fucking clue what this is about, except that it’s female. I initially assumed that it might be some sort of named witch or hag, like Jenny Greenteeth or Nelly Longarms or something, but when you get to the adventure you find that she’s of course the leader of the Bittermold family (so stunning and brave and subversive).

So Kelsey wrote a shitty adventure, and then decided to take all the shitty monsters and put them in another section, attempting to pass it off as a general-themed bestiary. In a normal adventure by people that give a fuck, you would put the bare mimimum stats IN the adventure to avoid/reduce page flipping, and then the complete monster descriptions in the back. You certainly wouldn’t try to pass off your adventure-specific monsters as something that can be generally used.

But, no, this is ShadowDerp so they all come first, and the monster section doesn’t clarify any of this, so you’re initially left wondering what the fuck a Plogrina B. is.

Two of the warlock patrons are statted out here, Mudglub and Willowman, and it’s even more retarded than how in some versions of D&D gods get stats, because really anyone could kill these guys. Mudglub only has 48 hit points and an Armor Class of 16. Worse, even though he “seeks the dissolution of all things” he can’t even dissolve anything: all he can do is maybe turn people into slime, or cause them to grow extra eyes or fingers, or lose a random bone.

And I know that sounds bad, but remember this is ShadyShadows so there aren’t any associated penalties, so…I guess note it on your character sheet that you lost a bone if you don’t want to forget about it?

Last and maybe least, we’re finally at the adventure. Hooray for the home stretch.

Kelsey was able to muster up the effort to give us an entire paragraph of backstory. I want to applaud her because it’s the most effort she’s put into any particular part of this, but then she’s an adult and my oldest daughter was working harder than her at writing when she was like ten. Also it’s still underwhelming and cliche, but if we’re grading relatively I suppose it’s impressive that someone like her was able to even manage that much.

I wanted to give a summary, but it’s longer than what’s in the book so I guess I’m just paraphrasing it:

Mudglub popped out of the ground, and drove a bunch of people insane somehow, despite not having the ability to do that so, good for him. Or, maybe he forgot how to do that, or Kelsey forgot that he can’t do that. Who knows? Who cares? What’s…certainly something is that he decided to just stew about in an underground room and that people bothered to feed and protect it, even though they have no incentive to hang around, and nothing is stopping them from leaving.

This all takes place in what Kelsey calls a keep but to say it looks nothing like one is a vast understatement. It’s a gamey Gygaxian dungeon at its worst and laziest, a haphazard collection of random, unrelated distractions shoehorned into a jumbled network of seemingly randomly generated paths and rooms that no one would ever construct because there’s no benefit to doing so, except to make it incredibly easy to seal you in, and it would take an obscene amount of time and resources to do so.

Rooms are, as expected, sparsely described in sentence fragments and bullet lists:

It looks like she took a page from the Nu-SR school of thought, where you don’t bother describing rooms, partially because you’re too much of a lazy hack to come up with anything even remotely interesting, partially because the intended audience of hobby tourists are too disinterested to care and it’s just a waste of time and space. You know, like Deep Carbon Observatory and Red and Pleasant Land.

The entire thing suffers from…I’m not sure if it has a term, but it’s where you have a dungeon environment that is oddly static. As if it and its contents just…exist, unchanging even though they should be.

Monsters will be in rooms and it’s like they all just got there, or were magically spawned because the characters arrived and triggered the tabletop equivalent of a game script. Objects and treasure will be found in rooms, and it would make sense were the dungeon inhabited by unintelligent creatures, but here there are magic items and effects that should have been taken or tampered with, at least by the not-keep’s original inhabitants.

That magic bowl with ashes and bones that can conjure a skeleton to serve you? It’s just been left there, even though anyone could have gone in there at any time and activated it, and you think that if the Bittermolds were fighting against some evil halflings they would want all the help they can get, but…naaah. Then the players can’t find it and fiddle with it and tell Kelsey how amazing she and no don’t question the fact that no one bothered to interact with a bowl left in an entire room devoid of other features for who knows how long.

Another overall issue that I’m not sure has a term is that most of the rooms have some bizarre gimmick that makes no fucking sense, not just in the overall context but in any context. It’s as if Kelsey just randomly determined items, effects, etc, and put them wherever. Worse, they aren’t even interesting and are seemingly there merely to distract and amaze incompetent, moronic hobby tourists.

For example, there’s a possibly magical organ tucked away in a random hidden room, and another room has a magical compass in the floor that tells you where a given direction is when asked, because Kelsey doesn’t understand how a compass works. It would be like looking at a map with a compass rose drawn on it, and asking which way is North: the compass would already indicate that.

What’s more amusing is that you don’t even need a compass rose to clearly indicate that, and Kelsey already knows due to the map that’s in the fucking PDF:

And on that note, might as well talk about some of the rooms.

In the first room, there’s a statue that opens a hidden passage to what looks like a cave. So, what: the Bittermolds decided to undergo a massive excavation project to place their entire not-keep underground? Why? That defeats the purpose of a keep in the first place. This adventure is already a massive lazy cliche, so why not just say it’s a catacombs or something? At least then you could maybe justify the layout to some extent. 

Or have it so that the Bittermolds found a cavern complex that was essentially dug by Mudglub slithering through the ground. Hell, you could even say that the halflings lived here first, but the Bittermolds showed up and are desecrating their holy hobbit holes or whatever. Give them a reason to hate each other.

The second room is a memorial chamber, because apparently the Bittermolds wanted to have visitors walk through the front door, see a random statue, and then go straight into a “memorial hall”. There are “dozens” of undescribed, unnamed stone busts in “deep wall niches”, and one has a stone in its mouth that somehow prevents any sound from escaping. If you remove it the statue starts to “bellow the jaunty Bittermold family anthem” (which isn’t described).

So…I guess the Bittermolds have access to magic that can do that, and decided that it would be a good idea to just have a statue constantly singing, as there’s no way to turn it off or even change the song. It would be like if you went to someone’s house, and they had a single song constantly blasting on repeat. I doubt Kelsey has any friends or leaves her apartment, so maybe this is just something she thinks rich people do?

There’s a hidden room called the Pipe Organ Vault, though no idea how you open the passage. There might be Bittermolds in here, though no idea why. Despite the rest of the not-keep slowly melting away, the organ still functions…somehow. The organ only does two things: if you play a “grave/unholy dirge” you get XP and some nonsense metagame currency but if you play a “pleasant/holy ode” it triggers a poison gas trap.

Some very obvious questions!

Where did the magic pipe organ come from? Why did the Bittermolds install it in a hidden room, and one that was so close to the entrance of their not-keep? Why did they bother also installing a magic poison gas trap, which can only be triggered if the pipe organ somehow detects a song that it deems is either pleasant and/or holy? That implies that the pipe organ could somehow sense this all along and does something in response, and the Bittermolds somehow rigged it to the trap.

Worse, it only does something useful if the players find the hidden passage and then for some reason decide to play an “evil” song. Because that’s what you do in a dungeon, right? Make lots of noise. Really I think it’ll just be one of those nut-punching traps, where you just take damage and move on, except “old school” games had teeth and so, unlike ShallowGrift, sleeping off hit point damage wasn’t necessarily one nap away.

It would have been more interesting to employ another trope, where the organ is just normal, because not everything needs some uninspired lolsorandom magical gimmick, and playing it opens a hidden passage or disarms a trap. Or, if you’re going to make it magical, make it do something interesting. If it’s an “evil” organ, make it summon a demon or grant some other unholy power (besides just +1 to damage, please).

You could even put different sheet music around the not-keep, which summons different demons when played on it. Or do it like Myst, where you need multiple pages to summon it. This could be a completely unrelated, optional sideplot, where the characters get a neat item or boon if they manage to pull it off.

Such a fucking waste.

In area 4 there’s a “howler camp”. Howlers are one of the factions that inhibit the not-keep, and despite the events kicking off “long ago” and their leader wanting to “dissolve” the Bittermolds (I don’t know why dissolving is capitalized in the PDF) they are still stewing about doing fuckall, frozen in stasis until the PCs show up, because all this has been going on for a long time and you’d think someone would have wiped out or chased the other group off by now.

Or that the not-keep would be sludge already (or at least part of it).

The pillars in here also have a lolsorandom magical gimmick, upping your Charisma by 1 and summoning a handful of renamed D&D shadows if you read the undescribed demonic inscriptions because yeah that makes sense.

For the fifth room you gotta circle back near the start. This is the room with the floor compass I mentioned earlier. To reiterate, its lolsorandom magical gimmick is that if you ask it a direction, part of it glows to tell you which way that direction is because of course you couldn’t just write that on a wall, not that you would need to, partially because if every home I’ve lived in I know which way is North, mostly because I’ve never actually need to know which way was which.

But then this is a dungeon that is not governed by anything that even attempts to resemble reason. Again, rooms have just batshit random gimmicks that only exist because Kelsey wants you to ooh and aah at her dumb shit that has no bearing on the adventure and tell her how smart and interesting she is. I’m getting flashbacks of Keep on the Shadowfell, which had an equally bizarre layout but I don’t recall so much pointless magical shit strewn about in order to hopefully maintain the focus of your goldfish-brained players.

The whole thing is similarly retarded: no one would go through all this trouble to excavate this much ground, build halls and rooms, just to fill them with stupid nonsense like a magic fucking floor that glows when you ask it a direction, even though it’s a FUCKING COMPASS and you could just SEE the direction by looking at it.

Room six is the “ashes chamber”, because the Bittermolds decided to build an entire room just to contain a bowl filled with ashes and teeth, along with a blue pearl. Removing the pearl causes the ashes and teeth to transform into a skeleton that serves the pearl holder. Oh good, another magical gimmick: isn’t Kelsey just so fucking creative and clever?

I’d question why and how the Bittermolds did this, why none of them just carries the pearl on them all the time, which you think they’d do because, hey, free skeleton. But even if they all completely forget about it in their special ash chamber specifically constructed to contain it for no reason (it’s not like the chamber recharges the skeleton or whatever), surely after all this time the bowl would be damaged by Mudglub’s magical bullshit, or the Howlers would have found it. 

But I guess despite all this happened a long time ago, it’s perfectly fine, the Bittermolds and Howlers just… never bothered checking it out, apparently.

Oh, someone also decided to sew a key into one of the banners, because that’s what you do, right? Hide keys in curtains or whatever? A really convenient place, especially if you need it in a hurry, or at all: just…carefully unstitch everything, sew it back up when done, and hope no one notices the stitching, catches you in the act, or moves it and feels the weight or hears it clatter against anything.

You know what would have made more sense? Hide it under a fucking stone. You know what would have been more interesting, besides playing any other adventure? Have the pointless magical floor compass point to it. Or, fuck, have it so that if you say an item, the compass points to where that item is. So, you could set it up where you need the key but the Bittermolds hid it, so you go to the compass, say “key” and it tells you which direction. Or even some other hidden item.

Yet another missed opportunity among so many.

Room seven was deliberately constructed but is filled with holes and contains some slime monsters and lolsorandom magic items, which are generated from a table in the back (I’ll get to that later).

Room eight has two fountains. You need to pour water from one into a corpse to cough up a gem, because you were totally going to do that, right? It’s just so obvious, after all. There’s a bas-relief showing a guy swallowing a gem, something the Bittermolds felt they should illustrate for…some reason, but I think that players who see that and think it means anything would just cut the corpse open, if anything.

Makes more sense than magical fountain whatever that for some reason makes corpses hack up gemstones. No idea how the Bittermolds enchanted that, or why. You’d think that they could just hide the gemstone in a somewhat normal spot, especially given that sooner or later the corpse is going to be reduced to a skeleton.

The other fountain has dead mutant catfish inside and obviously, that’s something you wanna drink. No, seriously: since this is a vapidware trash adventure of course the fountain filled with dead fish, signaling that it’s unsafe? Oh it actually heals you but causes a boring-ass mutation that doesn’t impact you at all. Hooray for Kelsey subverting expectations! Isn’t she oh sooo smart?

Room nine has some Howlers just sitting around doing fuckall. There are some notes about what they want, and you can talk to them if you want, but no notes about personality or whatever that might entail. If you just so happen to search the base of the stairs you can find a charm person scroll that one of the Bittermolds tucked there, because I guess Kelsey thinks rich people play by Castlevania rules. I am seriously expecting a room where you can find an edible pork chop or chicken stuffed in the wall.

No, wait, too obvious. This is Kelsey, so it would probably be hidden in the ass of a mutant catfish effigy made from hair and toenails, which craps it out if you happen to say a specific word while talking to it.

Room ten has some skeletons in the walls that no one bothered to take out, and shoot at you if you go through one specific hall, which would be great except there are a number of other routes you can go to bypass them completely.

Room twelve is quite large—because why not—constructed solely to store an iron chest that must be magical, because when you open it you find 20 meteorite chunks though I’m not sure how you could see them since the chest pulls in light itself. Also there’s a “starry void on interior lid” that I’m sure Kelsey thought was interesting but does nothing. The chunks also do nothing until you take them out, with a random chance that you instantly die.

So…do all meteorite chunks in ShallowGrift do this, or did the Bittermolds find magic meteorites, build a magic chest to contain them, and then build a giant room in their not-keep to contain the chest?  Really smart of the Bittermolds, you know? Really economic to build an entire vast chamber to contain a magical chest with magic rocks. The room isn’t even hidden: the door is in plain sight, featuring a phrase that I’m sure Kelsey thought was intimidating—Betrayal is imminent—but it’s entirely unrelated to what happens if you force the door or play with the magic rocks.

Oh, there’s a trap of sorts: an undescribed “demonic spirit” tries to possess a character, who flips out and attacks everyone. You can either exorcise it or knock the character unconscious, after which the spirit apparently just gives up and leaves. It doesn’t even grant the possessed character any interesting abilities. 

Would have been cool to lean more into this, maybe have a meteorite underground. Maybe the impact would have drawn Mudglub to it, and maybe it wants to consume it. Hell, could have done The Blob and have Mudglub inside the meteorite. But, nope, it’s merely an unrelated lolsorandom gimmick there for its own sake.

Area thirteen is like half cave, half…not-keep for some reason. The Bittermold installed an “acid quicksand” trap. I just…I have no idea why they left the room like this, or put the trap in. There’s a tiny stalactite carved with an X that you can hit for some nonsense metagame currency, because I guess the Bittermolds can also carve X’s into stalactites so they do that.

In area 14 there’s a pool with a gold catfish for some reason. You can give it gold to ask questions about the not-keep, which given that the Bittermolds built the place I have no idea how it got here, why it’s even here, or why no one has given it to Mudglub or eaten it. Well, okay, I do: it’s to lazily spoonfeed what little pointless backstory there is to the characters, because Kelsy thought that was the most realistic and logical and certainly “creative” way to do so.

Skipping ahead a bit, room 17’s lolsorandom magic gimmick is that it’s a time flux chamber because why the fuck not at this point? Normally I’d wonder if the Bittermolds somehow built this specific pointless effect in here, or if they just happened to stumble upon it while digging their not-keep in the ground, but it’s just a madlibs dungeon, after all: fill in the blanks with whatever, with no concern for rhyme or reason.

In any case, touching it causes you to randomly become younger or older, because that’s all Kelsey could come up with.

Room 18 is massive and empty except for a gelatinous cube with a statue floating inside, because that’s what rich people do amirite? Build excessively large chambers underground to store their gelatinous cube and I have no idea how it feeds but it somehow grew too large to escape and simultaneously hasn’t starved.

If you kill it, which shouldn’t be hard because it’s ShallowGift, be sure to inspect the statue for an amulet which is both worthless at 30 gp but also gives you advantage on Dex saves 1/day because in a not-keep filled with demonic crap that’s precisely what I’d expect an amulet to do, instead of, say, preventing you from being possessed by a demon (which could be used to get into the magic meteor room without being possessed), or being resistant to possession, or fire or something like that.

And what not-keep is complete without a prison cell. How about a few 15 by 15 foot rooms with one tiny cell in each, spaced like 20 feet apart? Yeah, don’t keep that somewhere else, like in another building entirely with a locked door in case the prisoners escape the cell. Nope, put it smack deep in your not-keep which barely has doors so that if the prisoners escape they have free reign to go wherever, and I just realized that the not-keep lacks bedrooms, a bathroom, and kitchen. 

I’m not surprised, because this is post-modern vapidware trash and the “dungeon” is but a flimsy backdrop to bear witness to what Kelsy considers creativity. 

In room 20 there’s a skeleton that’s just been left here. Apparently Mudglub didn’t want it. If you touch it a ghost appears who doesn’t seem to care that he is dead, not that the adventure tells you how he died. He speaks all languages, which is more impressive than it sounds because ShallowGrift is based on 5th Edition so there are barely any languages, anyway.

The only thing to do is talk to the ghost and maybe he tells you about an illusory wall that the Bittermolds somehow installed in the cave part of the not-keep.

A few rooms later you can confront Mudglub if you want, though I don’t know why. There’s no reward for defeating him, no treasure to be found. Nothing in the sparse adventure description indicates why the characters should even be here, or give a fuck about anything going on.

Also, it states that Mudglub needs a steady diet of material to dissolve, so how is he still alive? What are the Bittermolds feeding it? It can’t be Howlers, because this all started a “long time ago” so you’d think that even if this was going on for, say, a year they’d be fresh out of halflings to feed it, and it would start eating the Bittermolds (of which there are thirty of them still alive at this point). Seriously, the best thing to do is just seal up both entrances to the not-keep and wait until Mudglub starves. 

Which might take awhile since ShallowGrift doesn’t have rules for starvation.

Now, if you go waaay past this you can find Plogrina, who is like on the other side of the map from Mudglub, even though she is obsessed with pleasing it. You can ally with the Bittermolds against the Howlers, but why would you? Why would  you ally with either of them?

Just imagine: you go into an underground dungeon. It’s a series of excessively large rooms connected by excessively long passages, strewn about with no rhyme or reason. You find some halflings, you find some humans, and maybe learn that they serve a giant blob thing called Mudglub. You ask why and are told, I duinno, that it drove them insane and wants to dissolve everything, and oh by the by would you mind helping us kill that other faction? We’ve been down here a “long time” and hate each other for no reason, but gosh darnit just can’t be bothered to do anything about it ourselves.

I’ve heard people say that in megadungeons you need multiple factions. You don’t, but if you’re going to include them, you should at least try to make one of them seem worth allying or dealing with. Here? Neither are fleshed out, neither have motivations that characters could even begin to relate to, unless maybe someone is playing a Warlock Class and has the Mudglub patron. It’s like, flip a coin if you want and slaughter the other side, though I’m not sure how that benefits you.

Oh, I find it amusing that, after telling you how many Bittermolds, howlers, and catfish there are (about 30 of each, somehow), that Kelsey clarifies that it’s possible to wipe a faction out. I would have just assumed that this was possible given the finite number, but Kelsey knows her intended audience and this is the sort of clarification they’d need, as opposed to, say, giving the characters any incentive for helping anyone.

Seriously: you can just come here, grab some random loot and leave. There’s no reason to risk your lives killing Mudglub or anything. Just walk away from the dungeon, and then from whatever moronic GM subjected you to this crap.

One last thing that I might as well mention: at the very back is a d20 table of “diabolical treasures”, each with its very own sentence fragment to just vaguely describe its completely arbitrary and unrelated effect.

For example, there’s a carved bone, which ignites once a day for 1d4 rounds (but wait, this is a light source: doesn’t that conflict with ShallowGrift’s retarded torch gimmick?). How does it ignite? What’s the damage? Light radius? Do you have to be holding it? Can you put it somewhere and activate it? Does it hurt you if held? Can you ignite it and then throw it?

In a normal game where the author actually gives a shit these questions would be answered.

There’s also a shrunken head, which opens a gate to hell, but only once. So, hopefully you the GM know what that entails. You know, opening a portal to hell and all.

As with the dungeon rooms, it’s like Kelsey took random objects and gave them random effects. Or maybe you’re intended to roll once for the item, and then again for the feature? It’s not specified, but wouldn’t make any more sense because you could end up with a dried rose that is heavy as an anvil when not carried, or a ring of daisies that rolls away when not held.

Whatever the case, none of these are interesting or innovative, though a few are useful. Well…maybe. A demon might owe you a favor, though I suppose that depends on what sort of demon it is, and how you can even collect on it. Anyway, the whole thing is just random objects with random effects, something Kelsey whipped up to slap on the ass-end of her ass fanzine to take up space.