Review: The Breeding Pools

Today we are looking at The Breeding Pools by Nick Campbell aka Cri aka Made by Idle Hands. At least I think it’s by Nick. He didn’t put his name on it anywhere but I downloaded it from his itch.io so that’s what we’re going with. Regardless of authorship it's a 12-room dungeon for "low" levels in an abbreviated 2-page format.

Here’s the setup: “The floor collapses under foot, revealing a strange series of caverns. Find a way out.” Sometimes that’s all you need. By way of background, “Cultist geckofolk trapped Princess Pinchy in the pools & caves when she was young so they could harvest her eggs. They feed the eggs to snakes for a ritual to summon their god.” In case you ever thought you needed pages of backstory and history, I find these two sentences pretty compelling. I love the weirdness of it. No orcs or bandits here.

With a oneish-page dungeon like this, you need to be economical with words. A lot of the interactions are implied rather than spelled out, but we get enough to work with. The small details matter. Stuff like “Geckofolk rolled rubbish & feces into a giant ball as wide as the corridors to stop Princess Pinchy. The ball is not solid & can be used to mask scent.” or the geckofolk’s advantage on stealing with their sticky fingers plus their ability to travel through small holes in the walls should lead to some fun, emergent gameplay without 3 bullet points explaining how. 

In case you weren’t able to deduce this from context clues, Princess Pinchy is a giant crab. The central conflict is for the PCs to be able to get past her and move the very rocks that are blocking their exit. OR they can try and negotiate with her for help. A simple obstacle with somewhat obvious solutions. At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I think it works in the adventure’s favor to have a very clear objective and clear paths to that objective. It’s not as open-ended as some but in return you get something that’s very focused for a one-shot or something that’s meant to fill one session of a campaign where the GM didn’t have time to prep.

That being said, I would have liked to have a few additional ways for the PCs to move the rocks and escape besides getting the crab to do it or rolling high on a STR check. There is a decent chance the PCs will kill Princess Pinchy before trying to talk to her. After all, parlay isn’t usually the first tactic that comes to mind when dealing with a giant crab. So building in a few more tools to that end would give the party more options in dealing with the obstacle.  

Due to the format, there’s some details you’ll have to fill in yourself. Climbing into the shell in area 7 causes madness but you’ll need to pull a random table for that from your favorite sourcebook. And in a few places it is strangely reticent about how many geckofolk are present. 

I grade these one and two-pagers on a bit of a curve, but The Breeding Pools doesn't give up much to adventures with 3x as many pages. And it cedes zero ground in creativity. It's short, but certainly sweet, and another showcase that you don’t need a high page count to have a memorable night of shenanigans at the table. 

On a scale of 2-12, The Breeding Pools gets 8 stingbats.

https://madebyidlehands.itch.io/the-breeding-pools-for-shadowdark