The product description describes Blood in the Chocolate as "A psycho-sexual romp that pits characters not just against their enemies, but against their own twisting, melting, inflating, or poisoned bodies." It is also, obviously, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory turned into a crazy colonial-era dungeon crawl. And, moreso than any other adventure I've read, you get what it says on the tin. The dungeon hews to the plot of the 1979 film pretty closely. The Oompah-Loompahs have been reimagined as mutated cocoa-bean pygmies and the enigmatic (trademarked) Willy Wonka has been swapped out with a more sinister capitalist conquistadora, but by and large, if it's a scene in the movie, it receives a DnD-ification in Blood in the Chocolate. The result is a very recognizable factory, if less suitable for children. Blood In The Chocolate delights in turning your childhood nostalgia into twisty horror.

Most indie RPG authors seem content to rehash and emulate corporate products. But Blood In The Chocolate is unabashedly weird, and passionate, and kinky, and gruesome. If you follow Kiel Chenier's blog, you might correctly conclude that some of the horrors about to befall your adventurers are author appeal, but they are presented in a very clinical, body-horror sort of fashion, and mostly arise from the source material.

The editing is, unsurprisingly, better than any corporate product's. This is especially true of the PDF, which is clean and well-organized and well-hyperlinked. There's no filler: every line of text is useful to the adventure and Chenier never waxes purple. Just concise, vivid description. The illustrations are also marvellous-- beyond what you'd generally even see in a corporate retail book.

Lucia de Castillo is a singular villainess: ruthless but intelligent, stylish but irredeemable. Like the hit film was driven almost entirely by Gene Wilder's performance, I think that the success of the adventure very much depends on the DM's ability to portray her. Luckily, there's a full two-page psychological profile outlining her personality, desires and weaknesses, as well as a section explaining, quite neatly, how she managed to open a crazed chocolate factory long before chocolate should rightly have been discovered. Still, my sole negative note for this adventure is that it is an intimidating role for a novice DM-- but those with a few good adventures under their belts should have no trouble.