The Sylvan Temple is a short, free D&D 5E adventure from Mithgathr Entertainment available from their website. The adventure is presented in a 24-page PDF with no illustrations. The maps are computer-generated and quite nice; they’re particularly old-school in form, which means they are quite clear.

The adventure is fairly basic. After a perfunctory background (evil elves built a tower before being slain by good elves), the adventure describes each of the rooms in the tower. There are 20 encounter areas in all. Boxed text is used to describe each encounter area, often giving the reactions of the inhabitants to the adventurers entering the area.

There is nothing particularly special about the encounters in this adventure and the writing is only adequate; I spotted a number of editing mistakes as I was reading the adventure. The monsters consist of skeletons, zombies and wolf spiders, with statistics straight of Basic D&D. There is no licensing information anywhere.

The most peculiar parts of the adventure are the Encounter Worksheets, which make up a full 16 pages of the product! Each encounter gets two worksheets which list the monsters’ statistics in a most unattractive way. It honestly looks like someone converted some old 80-era typewriter-created forms and then filled them in. To make things worse, each form can handle up to two types of monsters and each encounter is given two pages of these forms… despite no encounter having more than one type of monster. This means a lot of wasted space. They’re horribly unattractive and clunky. The monster statistics are not presented in any other way and these forms leave out important details.

It isn’t a very good adventure, although there are a couple of details – such as a one-way staircase – that are interesting. I do not recommend it.