Review - Probable Claws
Came For The Pun, Stayed For The Giant Fish
Probable Claws is a 16-page adventure for Shadowdark by Jordy Milano of [Normal Press Co.] (https://normalpressco.itch.io/). This is the second Normal Press Co. adventure I've reviewed after Cold Blows the Wind. Here, players will find a half-sunken port office and lighthouse to explore and, quite possibly, die inside of while searching for sunken treasure.
What's It About?
The adventure is set on a section of the coast succumbing to rising sea levels. In a formerly bustling port, only a storehouse and lighthouse remain poking above the waves. There are some vague rumors that treasure might be found here. Entering the location, players will find treacherous terrain to explore and a variety of nautical monsters, including swarms of shrimp, a ghostly mass of brine, and a gigantic fish that can swallow you whole. There is a vague sense of a possible story about a lost harbormaster who could be haunting the place, but it's primarily a location to explore and fight in.
What About The Ideas?
There's some good stuff here! To start with the most obvious to my own tastes, I love giant creatures that can swallow PCs and give them the chance to fight back out. The Maelstrom Trout is just an excellent monster. But that's not all. The creatures in general are really good here with abilities that would make them fun to play in a fight. The shrimp can lay eggs to hatch out Alien-style from PCs! The Brine Mime is a shifting weirdo with lots of spells to work with.
The creatures tie in very well with the location, and I also love the sunken city as a location generally. There's lots of good opportunities for environmental hazards and exploration challenges in a place like this, and those opportunities are used well.
There's also a spread of pirate NPCs that all have fun gimmicks going on: a guy who can talk to shrimp, a guy with a crab arm that can hold you in a vice grip, a guy who spits rum at you. Top-shelf weird little dudes.
How About The Execution?
This is where the adventure falters a bit. The things it does well are very good, but there's a number of points I'd change or add to if I were to run this.
To cover the good first:
1 - The monsters are well designed and seem like they would make for interesting combats
2 - The location has good environmental hazards and obstacles
3 - The random encounters are good and have more going on that just "a monster appears"
4 - The layout is solid and easy to follow and reference while also being interesting visually
But, to cover the problems:
1 - It's not really clear why anyone would come here or why they would stay here once they arrived. There's no hooks, and the few rumors that mention treasure are all false. There's not much treasure in any of the rooms, or indications you might find it, and while there's a table of random sunken treasure, it seems you wouldn't get more than a few hundred gp out of it. I don't know Shadowdark and if that treasure is appropriate, but it seems low to me. So, if I were running this, I feel I would need to add in more to lure players in and give them a reason to explore this place.
2 - Related to the point above. While this is organized largely like a "Door D&D" adventure, which would be more focused on exploration and treasure collection, the content is really more appropriate to a "Fight D&D" adventure, in which the focus is on interesting monsters and fight scenes. But, if that's the case, it seems to be missing the interesting battlefield locations you'd want for that type of thing. It ultimately feels like it's one type of adventure trying to be another, and it would be improved by leaning more into one of those.
3 - This is almost certainly a Shadowdark-specific thing, but I don't like that the exploration challenges and hazards are reduced to skill checks in most cases. I'd rather see more open ended OSR Style Challenges to give everyone at the table more to play with in how they move around this dangerous space. It's easy enough to convert this if I were to run this in Cairn or something else without skills, but even for Shadowdark I think you could trust the Referee to figure out the DCs and skills that are appropriate for how players want to address the obstacles.
4 - It's not always clear how to get between locations on the map. This can just be handled with rulings in most cases without much trouble, but I personally would have liked more information in the location descriptions about how they relate to eachother and how to move between them.
Art?
It's Good! I like the art of the sea creature best. See some of it here!
Summary!
Despite my criticisms, there's no reason not to grab this. While it would require a bit more prep for me personally, it's not unreasonable, and the stuff that's there and good would be worth it to do that bit of extra work for.