Zungeon Zunday: Crypt of the Void Singer

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.

Crypt of the Void Singer is a 12 page zungeon for Shadowdark, by Ghostwood Hotel. In it, you travel into a cave system beneath a collapsed shrine, to rescue a lost novice.

We start with a page of NPCs — this is a cool way to incorporate rumours, make them personal, and get across the back lore in a few different perspectives to the players. Each of these 4 characters give me strong vibes, and if you’re a character actor of a referee you’ll have a ball with them. This is a 9 room dungeon, with the keys being on the longer side — half a page or so on average. These rooms lean heavily on the music theme, which I adore, and the monsters are all bespoke and weird. There are empty rooms here, but nothing is boring at all, and it’s all pretty compelling in a wide variety of different ways.

There is a list of factions later in the module — I think this could’ve been briefer, as I don’t think everyone here is really a faction that interacts meaningfully with each other. But for a small dungeon, there are still 6 or 7 characters with agendas that conflict — and that’s absolute fire — but I also like how they incorporate Shadowdark’s alignments into these agendas.

Layout for Crypt of the Void Singer is pretty appealing to me — it’s a monotype font, used textures, subtle shadows and public domain art — so it feels super ziney, particularly the exceptional cover. It’s a 2 column layout, using clear highlights. It would need a tweak were it any longer, but for a module this size, I dig it a lot.

Overall, there’s a lot to like about Crypt of the Void Singer. I think more thought could be put into exactly how the factions interact, because there’s a lot going on here, but what you’re going to get is some weird and compelling rooms, and a lot of NPC chaos, and if that’s what you’re after, I’d drop this into your campaign, especially if you’re going to run Western Reaches, which Crypt of the Void Singer really matches in terms of vibes.

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