[Free RPG Day 2025] Scry, Scry My Little Eye

Now in its eighteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2025 took place on Saturday, June 21st. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

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Scry, Scry My Little Eye is a scenario for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It is published by Loke BattleMats and a tester, not to say a taster, for the publisher’s Dungeon Designer Cards. It is designed to be played with four Player Characters, each of Second Level, and completed in a single session, two at most. The set-up is simple. A powerful Mage offers the Player Characters a job. This is to test a dungeon that he has designed and built. All the Player Characters have to do is survive, locate ten Runes that have been hidden around the dungeon, they will be rewarded with a 1000gp for their efforts. The mage, Sazovar, explains that he will monitoring their progress and in return promises no fatalities, even in the if it would appear that the entire party has been killed. What it means is that as far as they are concerned, the Player Characters are being paid to practise their dunegeoneering skills. What it actually means is slightly creepier...

Sazovar has designed the dungeon to be watched. However, not just by himself, but by his friends and colleagues too, and to keep the tension and excitement high, he is quite happy to change things in the dungeon and thus keep the hired adventurers on their toes. This is represented by the key feature dungeon, which itself consists of several connected rooms across two maps included in the centre of the adventure. This feature consists of the Dungeon Designer Cards. These are double-sided. The front depicts a piece of dungeon furniture or dressing, such as a chest, desk, storage shelves, broken floor, pool of water, and so on. Flip them over, and they present the Dungeon Master with a set of four choices. So, the ‘Pool of Water’, “A broken section of floor has filled up with brackish foul smelling water.” The choices on the back consist of a ‘Deep Dive’, ‘Acid’, ‘Damp Coins’, and ‘Watery Dead’. The Dungeon Master can chose one or roll for one, and in the case of ‘Pool of Water’, the ‘Deep Dive’ is a narrow, deep pool containing a glinting Clue; the ‘Acid’ will inflict damage to anything or anyone which falls in; the pool contains ‘Damp Coins’, but the water stinks; and in ‘Watery Dead’, there is a Ghoul hiding just under the surface of the water! The clues in the case of Sazovar’s test dungeon all give the Player Characters a Rune which they need to complete the dungeon and gain Sazovar’s reward. There is a total of sixteen Dungeon Designer Cards, each measuring roughly fifteen-by-twenty feet.

The scenario begins with ‘5E in 5 Minutes’, a very quick guide to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, followed by an explanation of the scenario’s adventure, the hook to get the Player Characters involved, how the Dungeon Designer Cards work, an explanation of the background for the Dungeon Master. All of this is easy to read and prepare, and there is advice too, on how to run the dungeon. In this case, it means adding audience interaction, adjusting the difficulty as necessary, and so on. There are suggestions to, as how to use the scenario once the Player Characters have through it once. There is scope here, of course, for the Player Characters to replay the dungeon with the different options on Dungeon Designer Cards, ones they have not previously encountered, or for Sazovar to populate it with tougher challenges.

The Dungeon Master is supported, not just with maps she can use and the Dungeon Designer Cards she can cut out, but also tokens for the monsters and the Player Characters. The latter also have their own character sheets and consist of a Half-Orc Barbarian, a Halfling Bard, a Human Wizard, and a Half-Elf Rogue. These are all fully fledged characters with some background as well as their stats.

Physically, Scry, Scry My Little Eye is well presented. The artwork is decent, but the maps are very good. This should no surprise given the publisher. One nice touch is that references to monsters, items—magic or not, and clues are colour-coded to make them easier to spot.

Scry, Scry My Little Eye is an easy dungeon to run with very little preparation since the Dungeon Designer Cards do the dungeon design and dressing. It can be run as a one-shot, a convention scenario, or run as part of a campaign, perhaps with the Player Characters becoming dungeon scouts and surveyors to find wilder and more extravagant encounters to implement in their patron’s dungeon, and even expanding the size of test dungeons with further maps from Loke Battle Mats.