Module recommendation: Escape from the Astral Spellhold
on January 23, 2025
The Adventure
This is a roughly OSR-agnostic puzzle dungeon that fits into my standard 3-hour session. The premise is the party are robbing an archmage (or for some other reason have found themselves in his apartment) and need to figure out how to escape his extradimensional abode before he returns home and incinerates them. The focus on puzzles makes this appropriate for a wide range of levels, though you might have to scale the power of some of the threats up in order to keep the pressure on solving those puzzles if you run it at higher levels. It has some strong horror and esoteric elements that are creative but at the same time generically dark fantasy in a way to make it an easy fit into most games, though the puzzles do reference real-world astrology/astronomy. The module is small, very low prep and comes with a quickly-digestible spoiler of solutions so it's perfect as a grab-and-go adventure. The layout makes quickly finding and referencing the various elements of each room very easy, and the players won't need too much in the way of cartography so you could easily run this when space is at a premium. The adventure comes with some rumours, a table of random books and another of carousing for a little added utility. The physical version has a very stiff cardstock cover which makes it surprisingly durable for a zine. If you are intent on running it you can start the module with a cold open in the waiting room rather than roleplay through how the PCs end up there, alternatively you can keep the module around until your players invariably try to steal something from a wizard (as all parties eventually do).
System Considerations
I've run Escape from the Astral Spellhold in Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. In DCC you can run the adventure straight, ultimately the bombastic power level of a DCC party only helps them so far in solving the puzzles. Definitely go hog wild making the archmage for your game, though. Give him multiple d30 casting actions per round, steal some spells from 3rd-party sources and cross your fingers for a wizard duel if the PCs don't escape in time. In Shadowdark, assuming you want to lean in to those real-time mechanics, you'll either want to decide the archmage left all the lights off when he left his apartment or (and this is what I did) set a 150 minute timer for his return and use the Time Passes procedure as normal, sans torches.
Content Warnings
This is what the kids would call grimdark. Astral Spellhold has some mature content you may wish to edit out depending on your audience, including body horror and maybe some sorta-implied off-screen sexual assault.