It’s mostly in standard room/key format, which is not the best for something like this.

What follows is an assault on the gnomes estate. The investigation is handled in bullet points, which is fairly terse … and nice. The hook is a fisherman finding the body of one and figuring it out, then contacting the party for a cut of the loot. Evil gnome cleric animats bird skeletons, sticks some fire traps on them, and sends them off to attack ships from his pirate ship. The core of this one isn’t bad, but it suffers from the implementation. In trying to see if Lance had an ties to Hoard/Rise I see he’s an english professor … It’s as if you took a long and rambling and not very good 18th century novel and added stats. Most of this is searching for the map and doing quests to get the pieces with the actual treasure locale being mostly glossed over. Tons of bandits and ½ orc bandits and orc bandits, and a lot of “Pirate Ghost” encounters for the big bads. Lods and lods of text on history and backstory and little to help the DM run the actual game. There’s this aggressive “overview” and appeal to genericism. This reminds me a lot of Hoard of the Dragon Queen/Rise, in terms of writing style. A search for pirate treasure map (and the treasure!) in a spanish/ren type setting.