Zungeon Zunday: The Unquiet Flesh

In 2025 I’m reviewing zungeon zines. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques, just like Bathtub Reviews, but they’ll be a little briefer. The goal here is a little different: I want to spotlight what a craft-based, just-do-it approach to module writing can do.

The Unquiet Flesh is an 8 page zungeon for Old School essentials, by Katt Kirsch, with art by Brandon Yu. In it, you delve in a tomb filled with undead, hoping to prevent their advance.

Kirsch is making a habit of releasing some gorgeous, thoughtful dungeons every month — this is I think the fourth — and this one in addition contains commentary which I really appreciate. This series of zungeons is a really statement: That it’s possible to throw together some really good looking modules, even with a collaborator for art, in a short period of time. Kirsch picks a colour palette and a free font, commissions an artists for a cover and a few pieces of spot art, and gets these out there quick smart. It’s really remarkable.

It opens with 12 rumours. These are flavourful, but a lot of them — the treasures, deadliness, just the basics of the dungeon — could be in a brief hook. I think in a project of this size, fewer and punchier rumours are better, following the principles laid out here. Most of the content here is good — it just belongs in the dungeon, where the lore is an excellent thing to fill empty rooms with, or it needs to be delivered en mass as a reason to attend the dungeon in the first place. Then, the actual rumours are things about the dungeon, that help our characters or hinder them through their knowledge. This is an efficient way to make small dungeons repeatable — second round you’re looking for different aspects. The random encounter table is short and sweet, and the method you use it changes to preference the deadlier and more floor themes monsters and you go deeper. Nest. It also uses modifications of monsters straight from the book, which is smart for a short module.

The dungeon itself packs a hell of a punch — 30 locations in so few pages. The map is clever and colour codes its entries and exits (this carries over to the key as well), although some looping between floors would make the dungeon more explorable — it’s not linear, but there’s only one way to move between each level. I like the brief descriptions, and the rooms slap, but in order to maximise usefulness, I’d like to see a little more consideration into the ordering of the clauses: “A draft from the northern wall’s hasty brickwork gently stirs dust. Carpet scraps blanket the floor. Along the west wall, a rolled-up rug conceals ...” could better be rendered as “A draft from the northern wall’s hasty brickwork gently stirs dust. Carpet scraps blanket the floor, and along the west wall sits a rolled-up rug. It conceals…”, for example, and those little changes make for a more useable text, where I don’t need to reframe the text I’m reading on the fly.

The strengths of this dungeon make me wonder about easy ways to add depth to a dungeon of this kind. This isn’t a puzzle dungeon, and they’re hard to write with such brief keys — the traps here are 2-sentence affairs. I wonder if one way to bring more puzzle solving and interactivity would be to use Sean McCoy’s writing rooms in pairs to add more keys and locks to the process of delving into the space. It does this a little — you can see it in the room I quoted above — but really the only thing this needs is a bit more complexity at a macro level, and pairing odd rooms more to introduce puzzle like elements would likely help to do so.

Overall, the Unquiet Flesh is a banger high level adventure. It’s high level enough, that you could either leave it floating there as something to loom over your campaign, and slowly seed the Carrathians as villains throughout your slow crawl to level 10, or use the included pregens to use this as a really fun high impact, 2-or-3 shot. As with Kirsch’s previous zungeons, The Unquiet Flesh is worth checking out, and I can’t wait to see what develops over the next 8 months of zungeon writing.

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