By John Earegood
One page dungeon contest 2022
No system or level given.
Premise: Enter the lair of Dr. Demonara if you dare.
What do we get here?
A single page gives us 12ish keyed locations.
Usability/formatting
An evil dude's lair is a decent enough premise even if we are lacking any hooks here, you should be able to come up with some from the implications of the evil stuff the Doctor is up to.
The map has a decent amount of loops but I am afraid that is where the praise ends. There are far too many traps in this dungeon, to the exclusion of other content, and the traps themselves are not interesting just stuff that does DX damage. If you want a full trap dungeon you have to make them really interesting problems for players to solve not just save or damage stuff.
Combat, faction play, interesting treasure and room interactivity are all missing here. As a frame work I suppose this is fine and the writing is not terrible there is just nothing evocative to draw you in.
Portability
As long as you have evil people I think you can drop this lair into a world fairly easily.
Recommendation
You would have to drop so much effort into making this worth running that you might as well start over on your own. The map might be worth salvaging otherwise not worth it.
PWYW for the whole collection on gumroad or stump up cash on drivethru.
https://spielknights.gumroad.com/l/2022opdc
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/410915/One-Page-Dungeon-Compendium-2022-Edition
After 84 one page dungeons I am finally done with reviewing all the 2022 entrants. There was good, there was bad and there was stuff that wasn't even an adventure.
For the low, low price of free you can filter out a few gems. I would recommend printing out and saving the gems for when you need them. You should also seek out more work by any designers of adventures you like.
As I have mentioned in a few entries I think the judges over value art compared to actual adventures people will be excited to run, so it is worth looking beyond the entrants that placed as there are some better adventures in there than the winners.
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