Another PWYW drivethru adventure, this one being specifically meant for Dolmenwood and even suggest a hex for it (#1107 I believe).
Its a pretty straightforward concept, there is a house where its always cold and covered in frost. Digging into it, its got a banshee haunting it, lamenting her lost (but not perhaps dead) child after soldiers killed her and ransacked the place in the past.
The first thing, it it is a bit light in terms of content to do. Its got a garden to dig around in, some rooms to pilfer like common thieves and one banshee to either fight or put her soul to rest by trying to find her daughter (and some minor stuff). There are also 4 ghouls you can stab. Given there are only 5 areas (6 if you count the surrounding region), that is actually a normal amount of rooms with treasure, rooms with traps, and rooms with monsters (2 of each).
The problem is its a bit shallow in terms of areas and should probably be at least doubled (even if its just more empty rooms). The ghouls are literally just lazing around in a kitchen, for 900 years.
Which is a good segue, this has the classic fantasy problem of going WAAAY to hard on the passage of time to establish a mystery. 90 years is fine for a small shack in the woods to obscure into mystery in the preindustrial era. Shave a 0 off.
900 years means those ghouls (former soldiers) who killed the banshee in life are related to no existing polity. No one wants their bodies, no descendant would even feel even a little guilt as to their actions. But its its 90 years ago then some dottering old Knight might want his father's corpse back and might feel the need to make amends. (Also they are just chilling in the kitchen like a classic monster closet).
Even with frost and magic keeping the house in stasis, 900 years means it should have a RADICALLY different architecture and furnishings compared to Dolmenwood norms. It should look like Iron age or maybe a classical era villa. 90 years is fine, it can still look like a normal house at that point. Even with stasis, nothing keeps people out other than fear of the supernatural. In 900 years you need some kind of barrier or other deterrent to keep people away from looting the place or maybe just burning it down by accident. Given that weather still affects it, even in the freezing temperatures 900 years would destroy a simple cottage.
Three paragraphs to say, "please stop making everything hundreds or thousands of years old, it doesn't actually add wonder or grandeur if you do it all the time and it really strains the suspension of disbelief"
So some clues how to find the Banshee's missing elven daughter would be helpful. At 900 years it would be impossible to do (they could be in different planes at that point), but at 90 years it might be doable.
The hooks are good, being hired to a settle land ownership dispute and/or an alchemist wanting to find potentially extinct plants in an ancient magically frozen garden. The second one really does make use of the 900 year plot point, but then fumbles in the execution with "Effects up to Referee’s discretion." as there is a term for that kind of game design.
The names of the Elves are pretty good and add a fairy tile vibe, it has a solid C+ to B frame and could be an OK little addition to a hex pretty easily.
So how would I take this and clean it up a bit?
1.) Shave off a zero for the years, its been 90 years.
2.) Add a bit of an environmental deterrent, putting this on a marshy clearing would be ideal. No one wants to go into an always cold marsh to step onto a frozen haunted cottage.
3.) A few outbuildings with red herrings and omens.
4.) Remove the Monster Closet of the Ghouls in the kitchen, perhaps make them cursed undead who rise from the marsh to lazily re-enact their final day over and over again in a grim mockery of life, able to be distracted only be encountering living beings to kill. You can throw a few missing adventurers or meddlesome kids (and their dog) who failed over the years and add some more hooks based on this. Could be a thing to put in the outbuildings suggested above.
5.) Clues to the location of the daughter, maybe she is the illegitimate child of some other figure (either a human to make them half elven or some other elf). It doesn't need to be someone important, just some sort of clue of where to look and what they might be doing now (including being dead for 90 years and the banshee just doesn't know they died the next day).