[Review] The Mini Manor by GM Games

Swords & Sorcery (Appreciation Day) compatible tiny dungeon crawl adventure with weird and gore.

"You're naked.

Cut up.

Shackled to a dead guy.

On the other side of the room is a guy cutting the face off a corpse.

Your foot bumps a severed arm.

Go!"

Sounds fun, doesn't it? This gruesome little adventure is designed for one third level character. A nice map with eight room descriptions and a random encounter table should be good for one shorter evening. The adventure might go quite well (I mean not dying) or it can be pretty tough. Some encounters are tougher than others but if there's space for roleplaying and not only rolling dice I think a clever player can get out - alive.

This reminds me a little of Saw movies and Planescape: Torment computer game beginning. I think this could be very neat start for a solo campaign in weird fantasy world, maybe Carcosa even. Or some other pretty dark place.

What I like is that there's this situation presented, go explore and try to survive it. No explanations why, or what next. Usually I'd like to read some thoughts from the author about the background of the adventure and possible future premises after the adventure (my choice should I use those, but its fun to read other's thoughts) but The Mini Manor is so damn inspiring for me in its little form that I didn't long for additional explanations or inspiration. Some of the encounters in this adventure seemed a little random, but I accept it as part of the "weird".

In 21 pages there's a neat little dungeon survival adventure, encounter table, new race, new spell and a spread of new magic items. The new race is pretty cool! Would be neat one-player campaign start to begin exploring weird and horrible world after this dungeon, as a Faceless race.

You should check this out because:

• GM Games and +Tim Shorts do good stuff
• It is free
• Quick, small, new cool race

Avoid, if:

• You don't like horror and gore or get offended by this kind of material

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The Mini Manor by GM Games' +Tim Shorts is a small booklet format adventure available for free at RPGNow.