I couldn't really find much about Ian Shears, author of Fane of the Fossilmancer. He doesn't seem to have any digital footprint in the TTRPG space aside from credits editing, proofreading and writing in the Dungeon Crawl Classics fanzine, the Gong Farmers Almanac alongside many other contributors. It's also a bit hard to know his age when he submitted the dungeon in 2018. The artwork looks like it could have been drawn by a 14 year old. The contents of the dungeon are so off the wall gonzo, and of course the topic, dinosaurs, make it seem juvenile. None the less, the challenges, puzzles, choices and dangers within seem very deliberately chosen to create a range of challenges and player autonomy and make the author seem mature. The library door puzzle is just the right difficulty in my opinion. It requires runic symbols on statues to be recognized in the nesting ground, then petrified eggs need to be matched to statues with the correct runes.
The concept of fossilmancy itself, using fossilized dinosaur bones as magical components, is awesome. It also means you get to go adventuring in a dungeon with giant fossils as set dressing, even providing a bridge to the terrifying, glowing green ooze vomiting zombie T-Rex. The moment my players were attacked by animated pteranodon fossils while lowering themselves by rope into the first cavern, they knew they were in for a weird time. The first cavern then demonstrates the theme of the dungeon in it's giant glowing ooze river flowing from one side to the other, asking the players to choose their route, following it up or down stream. Exploration of the dungeon reveals a fossilmancy production process, interconnected via the river of ooze, which ends in an impossible number of skele-gels incubating in their vats. The most straight forward combat challenge of the dungeon is here in the vat room. A few skele-gels are activated by intruders, and they can potentially wake up of more skele-gels from their vats in a cascading manner, putting some interesting pressure on the conflict. Instead of hacking and slashing their way through it, the players have to deploy crowd control or come up with some other unconventional solution.
Another reason that I like this dungeon is that it serves as a gateway to another land. Through the Fane of the Fossilmancer, is the underground tropical jungle filled with still living dinosaurs. This is the land that the labs founder, a reptoid, comes from. The dungeon not only gives us a window into this new terrifying faction, the reptoids, it also gives us a doorway to their world. When I added this dungeon to my campaign, I did put a subterranean Lost World here, and it began a campaign arc that lasted many sessions. Gateways like this are not really seen in commercial products because it offers too sweeping a change to the setting without providing any support. I suppose it would be seen as unprofessional by many, but here I think it is a very bold move and packs a whole campaign settings worth of hyperdiegesis.
Fane didn't win any awards in 2018, it didn't even garner an honorable mention. The link to the Google Drive holding all of that years submissions is broken as of writing this post. The only place you can find any mention about it is Anarchy Dice's blog review series of every submission to the contest that year. It's hard to believe, but somehow, after all these years, the fossilmancer lives on.