The Dissident Maze, Part 4: Ootheca

Week 4 of my attempt to play through every Dissident Whispers module (or at least as many as I can get through before my players get bored) brings us to hunting snail eggs in Ootheca written by @junkgolem.

Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter. See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. The short version is that they're jumping into the bodies of alternate dimension versions of themselves. Week 3 had the players attempting to traverse the Canal of Horrors.

The Module

 

Ootheca is a module written by @junkgolem for "the 5th Edition of That Fantasy Roleplaying Game" but is written in a way that makes it very suitable for any fantasy adventure game. In it, the players are tasked to retrieve the egg case (ootheca) of a particular sort of snail, for the holy Spiral Order so they may use it as a new vessel for their god.

The System

Since I am allergic to 5E DnD, and am also in part using this as an excuse to try more systems, I chose to use Macchiato Monsters for this week. It is often recommended as a blend between The Black Hack and The Whitehack, both of which are systems I'd also like to try out during this project at some point. I made stats for the monsters and items in the module for Macchiato Monsters, and I'll include those details at the end in case they're useful to anyone (it's also extremely easy to do on the fly).

One small caveat is that I'm not using Macchiato Monsters' encounter die, instead I'm using the encounter table as written in the actual module.

The Characters

Tenzin is a Member of the Order of Strangling Vines, with Specialist Training allowing him to perform incredible feats with his eagle Dozen. He also knows two spells "Nature Rebels!" and "You Cannot Stand Against Me!" He also has disgustingly good stats for it being 3d6 down the line: 13, 10, 17, 8, 15, 12.

Dillinger is a Repairman with an Awesome Handlebar Mustache (he chose this as a second trait) who has Specialist Training to induce an Adreneline Surge to perform feats of incredible strength of stamina. He also randomly rolled a a Jar of Snail Soup as part of his starting items, which was appropriate for the module.

Gunter is a Monk of the Burning Palm who worships a god of Urban Sprawl. He's able to channel divine power to cast the spells Fleshcrafting and Fortune, and is a bit more durable than the others (a whole second hit die).

Garimir is lost in the tumbling wastes of the interplanar maze (his player was unable to join us this week).

Play Report

We began with the players having already accepted the job to travel to the Cave of Perpetual Starlight in order to retrieve an ootheca of the Abmoor Snails. They received in prepayment vials of glowing blue Snail Mucus, which act as healing potions, and the promise of gold in exchange for the completion of the task.

An actual, real life snail egg sack. Time to add these to the list of things that actually exist but look like weird fantasy otherworldly nonsense.

Jumping to their arrival at the entrance of the cave, they peer down into the dark cavern and collectively realize none of them have any torches or lanterns. A faint glimmer of blue light deeper into the cave gives Gunter the courage to lead the way in. Barely avoiding tripping over stalagmites in the lack of light the others follow him in (leaving Dillinger's loyal Ox outside the cave, there are some fun results on the starting equipment tables).

Suddenly, they hear a shout "Get 'em boys!" and a single figure leaps out of the darkness to attack Gunter. Gunter manages to roll out of the way, while Dillinger and Tenzin realize the man is alone (at about the same time the bandit realizes his companions are missing) and rush forward to tackle him to the ground. They learn his name is Greg, two other men were also supposed to jump out during the ambush, he doesn't know where they went, he doesn't know much about the cave, that he's a vegetarian, and that he'll say whatever he thinks will get them to let him. They confiscate his short sword, a bag of mushroom jerky, and tie his hands behind his back with a belt.

GM Note: As they walked into the cave entrance, I rolled "1d6 Bandits" on the encounter table, and thought "this seems like a good place for Bandits to hide and ambush anyone heading into the cave". Then I rolled a 1 for the number of bandits, and decided to stick with that idea, but assume there had been more bandits that had been (unbeknownst to Greg) sneakily grabbed by the giant spider from deeper in the caves.

Prodding Greg before them, they follow the tunnel until it opens up into a small cave with two exists. It is covered with bio-luminescent moss and contains a large pool of water containing a huge stone hand. It also contains a huge crab that immediately takes issue with their presence and scuttles aggressively towards them claws extended.

He's comin' for you!

Gunter cases Fortune, manipulating probability to grant his companions good fortune, and with this benefit they quickly dispatch the crab. Examining the room carefully reveals a patch of the glowing moss had been scraped away close to the right branch away from this room. Taking this as two good pieces of advice, they travel down the right branch after collecting a few 'wads' of luminescent moss to light their way (and instigating a series of 'wad' jokes that lasted the rest of the session).

Traversing the next tunnel, they find themselves in a cavern large enough that the dim light from their moss wads is unable to fully illuminate the space. Disregarding a flash of blue-green movement at the edge of the cavern, they move carefully through and spot 6 pale bundles of something hanging from the ceiling close to the far wall. Tenzin travels forward to get a better look, and realizes they're person sized bundles of spider silk just soon enough to roll out of the way from the massive spider falling from the ceiling to attack him, slashing at one of the 8 legs on his way out.

Gunter uses his Fleshcrafting to worsen the wound, spraying spider ichor across the cavern, while the spider shoots webs at the group missing everyone but poor Greg. Dillinger runs forward with the carpet he'd been lugging around and tosses it over the spider to try and contain it. Pressing the advantage, the party manages to beat the carpet covered spider to death before it is able to free itself. Using the dead spider as a cushion, the party begins cutting the hanging bundles from the ceiling using well placed arrows.

Halfway through this process, Greg (still adhered to the ground by spider webs) lets out a scream and the party turns to see a large blue-green lizard taking a large bite out of his shoulder. A fierce battle ensues in which Dozen the hawk swoops in to blind the lizard with raking claws, and two deaths are staved off through shattering shields. The party emerges victorious, and even prevents Greg from getting dragged off to his death.

Now undisturbed, the party pulls down the spider bundles and finds two of Greg's companions (unconscious but still alive) and three dead adventurers (presumably the group sent by the church before our current party got the job). Greg and his companions are disarmed and sent on their way, while the party loots the dead bodies to restock (including an extra shield) and finds a mysterious tome filled with an unreadable language. The book is the Voynich Tome which allows the user to cast a random spell each day. Dillinger claims the book and learns that today's spell is Void Elemental.

Ce n'est pas une porte secrète.

With two exits to the large spider cavern and no guidance between them, the party heads north and finds a dead end containing a corpse and the words "No Secret Door Here!" scrawled across the wall. After lots of searching, attempts as puzzle solving, speaking secret words of opening, and several casts of Void Elemental (to look for voids in an element, clever) they eventually come to the conclusion that the message was telling the truth.

Heading back into the prior room and to the south, they find another cavern, this one mostly flooded with water and covered with glowing, crawling snails. Across the pool they see, attached to the wall, the mystical glowing snail ootheca that is the goal of their quest. Deciding to be careful, Tenzin looks before they leap and notices a small trail of bubbles rising from deeper into the water. Rather than do something clever with this information, Dillinger proceeds to just toss rocks at the source of the bubbles.

Perturbed by the rocks, a massive crab bursts from the water and angrily attacks Dillinger. It grabs  Dillinger in a claw and nearly clamps him in two, dragging him along while chasing the other party members. Tenzin barely survives a deadly claw snap by sacrificing the shield he'd only recently pilfered from a corpse in the other room, while Dillinger pulls a crowbar out of his backpack and manages to crack the crab's claw sufficiently to escape. Gunter uses his Fleshcrafting to Worsen Injuries on the crab's claw and, with a lucky die roll, manages to explode the crab over the entire party.

Lookit this friendly, three eyed guy. I'd probably worship a god that looked like this.

With the pool now giant crab free, Tenzin makes a short swim to retrieve the glowing ootheca. Quest goal in hand, and us running out of time for the night, the party departs victorious (but sadly finds the released bandits have made off with Dillinger's ox which had been left outside the cave).

Thoughts on the Module

Ootheca ended up being a lot of fun. I'll admit that when I first read over it, I had the thought that it seemed to lack any over the top theme, or off the wall feature. Once in play though, it provided a wonderful foundation for some really satisfying, nearly deadly, old fashioned adventuring: crawling through some caves looking for "treasure" (snail eggs).

This module reminded me that not everything needs to be crazy all the time, so long as it provides the tools and prompts for players to make interesting choices and have a good time. Which are things that were provided by this module in spades. Every single encounter I rolled immediately suggested a fun tie in with the location I it was rolled in, which is both much harder than it looks and really good to get out of a module at the table.

My absolute favorite thing in the system is the actual, literal dead end helpfully labeled “No secret door here!”. There's no secret there, there's nothing to find, the message is (presumably) just a note from the last group of adventurers in here. It is also the greatest player trap I have ever seen in an RPG. If you took nothing from this module but this excellent idea, it'd still be well worth it. Watching players spend time, spells, items and effort to try and defeat what is just a stone wall is extremely funny.

One other note, I actually like that the big, faintly vibrating stone hand doesn't have a definitive "meaning" or purpose in the module as written. Having some interesting, mysterious things just exist is a good way to remind players this isn't a video game, and not everything is about them. Sometimes weird stuff just exists. But if you did want it to mean something, it'd be extremely easy to tie that into something else going on in your campaign. This module is practically begging to be dropping into a sandbox or hexcrawl game.

I had a great time running Ootheca, and did almost zero prep other than jotting down some quick monster stats. Being able to pick something up and immediately run it is something I look for in these short form modules., My players had a great time playing it and wanted to finish exploring the handful of rooms they missed, but sadly time limits meant we had to end the session as soon as they found their goal. It's for sure going onto my short list of modules that I can pick up and run in an emergency.

Thoughts on the System

This one is a bit complicated for me. I'll start with what parts of Macchiato Monsters didn't land super well at the table.

I actually found the system pretty difficult to run, at least on this first try. Combat is tricky; everything is determined by single, player facing d20 rolls which not only decide if a player's actions are successful but also resolve monster actions simultaneously. That means you have to establish at the beginning of the round what a monster intends to do, then reflect that in the fiction and narration based on how each subsequent die roll turns out. It's not quite a fully narrative system, because there are still strict rounds and monsters still have limited attacks in each of the rounds, but it requires a lot more narrative description and work on the GM's part to function properly. I found this thread where the author of the game gives some combat examples to be very helpful.

The freeform magic system is very cool, but I found adjudicating HP costs in play to be somewhat tricky. Trying to make spells impactful and interesting, while working within the mechanical framework, and making PCs actually able to cast spells with low HP totals was honestly fairly difficult. Edit: I have since created a sort of flowchart to help price magic in this game, you can find it in my collection of MM resources.

Despite those things working less than ideally at the table, I'm honestly really looking forward to getting another chance to run the system. I think with more practice running combat and working out spells, both would turn into highlights of the system, there's just a learning curve that makes picking it up for a one shot a little awkward.

Ubiquitous incorporation of Risk Dice is really nice, and is one of the reasons I want to play more of the system. Risk Dice are Macchiato Monsters' implementation of usage dice, which abstract tracking consumables into a single die size. For instance, if you have a Δ6 of arrows, after a fight you'd roll a six sided die, and on a 1-3 the die becomes a Δ4. If it were already a Δ4 you're out. The system uses this for everything from rations (roll the risk die of the ration while you camp to see how much HP you restore, to encounter dice (most of the dangerous outcomes are low on the table, so things get riskier over time).

As an extension of this the currency system seems wonderful, although it didn't come up during the one shot, and looks like it manages to pull off a really cool trick. It makes different types of coins matter and makes money take up inventory space, which are two things I love in theory but end up hating logistically and ignoring at the table. Macchiato Monsters uses Risk Dice to represent currency, where you have a different sized bag (Δ4-Δ12) of a particular currency such as copper, gold, or silver. Different things cost different coins so leather armor and trail rations are purchased with copper, but if you want some nice armor you'd need to cough up gold. Getting a temple to raise someone from the dead would require you to scrounge together platinum. Rather than setting specific prices for things, the player just rolls their money bag's risk die to see if the purchase depletes their funds. Sure you can splash gold around to buy some basic supplies, but do you really want to risk getting ripped off and losing your gold? There's more to it, but it seems really fun in practice.

I liked the idea of the randomly rolled starting items (players get one of each die size, and can choose which tables to roll on) but it ended up being awkward in practice. 1 or 2 on many of the tables are often feel bad results, especially if a player spent their d20 there, but also many of the higher results on weapons or armor tables are unusable by level 1 players. I don't hate it, but I might want to tweak it a bit before using it again.

My players enjoyed it overall, but felt a bit mixed on some aspects. One player in particular felt pretty constrained by the magic system costing so much of his HP, but I think that's more a matter of chafing at being a level 1 character than hating how magic worked. In a longer campaign I think they'd end up getting a lot of enjoyment out of the ability to get mechanically stronger in interesting ways. The classless, modular character creation and advancement means it's possible to build whatever sort of archetype you can think of while staying rules light.

Macchiato Monster Stats and Items for Ootheca

Vial of Snail Mucus: Δ6, heals Δ when drunk.

The Voynich Tome (the obscure tome in an unreadable language in room 3): Δ8
Can be used to cast a spell using INT. The spell is randomized each day (I used Maze Rats magic tables). The Risk Die acts as a reagent, but only for casting the book's spell. Restore risk die by sacrificing a point of CON to the book (or another suitable blood sacrifice).



Giant Spider: 4HD, d8 Bite (poison, Con save or paralyzed for 20 minutes), web spray (DEX save or stuck, STR save to get free), Δ10 morale.

Giant Crab: 2HD, d6/d6 Claws, Δ8 Armor, D8 morale. If killed the shell can be crafted into a lightweight Δ8 armor.

Giant Aquatic Lizard: blue green wyvern, nearly invisible under water, 4HD, d8 bite, d6 water cannon (check STR or get knocked back), Δ10 morale.

Bandits: 1HD, d4 Club, Δ4 Morale

Giant Centipede: 1HD, d4 Bite (poison, CON save or disadvantage for 10 minutes), Δ6 morale.

Giant Scorpion: 2HD, d4 Pincer, d6 Sting (poison, CON save or stung body part swells to twice the size for d6*10 minutes, disadvantage when using that body part), Δ8 morale.

Conclusions

Ootheca is a really nice cave crawl module with enough flavor to make it pop, but with a classic feel that would let you drop this into any existing fantasy campaign. It's self sufficient and complete enough that it can be run with zero prep (assuming your system has stats for these enemies, which it probably does) and even comes with a built in hook to tie it into your game.

Get your players to go snail egg hunting!

If you want more like this, go buy Dissident Whispers! There are 57(!!!) other modules in it, they've all got amazing artwork and maps. Plus it supports a great cause! My group is likely taking a couple weeks off from one shots to play a bit of Vampire the Masquerade, but this series will continue!

The Dissident Maze, Part 3: The Canal of Horrors

Week 3 of my attempt to play through every Dissident Whispers module (or at least as many as I can get through before my players get bored) brings us to The Canal of Horrors written by Chris McDowall himself.

Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter. See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. The short version is that they're jumping into the bodies of alternate dimension versions of themselves. Week 2 saw the players exploring Graktil the Citadel the Crawls.

The Module 

The Canal of Horrors is an adventure for Electric Bastionland written by Chris McDowall, in which the players have a chance to pay off their massive debt if they can manage to secure a luxury yacht (that no one owns, we swear!) and get it to a buyer in one piece.

The Characters

Tenzin is a failed Squidbagger who had gotten squid ink tattoos for every single squid he caught (which wasn't many, hence the career being failed). Through sheer happenstance this failed career also includes an animal companion and so Dozen joins us as a small frog.

Dillinger is a failed Vault Cracker, who mostly cracked into empty vaults which he used as living spaces. Looks strung out, with wild hair and an unpleasant wardrobe. He carries a single Breaching Rocket, left over from his vault cracking days.

Garimir is a failed Practicing Chemist wearing a burnt and torn apart lab coat, sporting shock white hair and zero eyebrows due to past (and frequent) chemistry induced incidents.

Gunter is a failed Curiosity Collector whose fashion runs somewhere between college professor and goth. He wears a black tweed jacket covered in pockets, and a large mammoth mask strapped to his head.

The System

We're using Electric Bastionland for this module which is what it was designed for. It's also my favorite system at the moment so it didn't take any arm twisting.

Play Report

The players began at the docks boarding the Silver Hammer to check out their new charge. Garimir and Tenzin went into the lower decks, while Gunter looked over the controls, finding a nameplate which listed The Great Xtenza as the ship's owner, and Dillinger ogled the extremely large gun mounted on the upper deck. In the lower decks, Tenzin found a very flattering portrait of an incredibly buff wizodd named The Great Xtenza and was disappointed there was no hidden safe behind it, while Garimir immediately broke into the locked hold to find a chest filled with black gems, each containing a screaming face. Tenzin primed the ship's engine, letting Gunter start the boat and begin steering out of the docks.

His initial impulse to set sail into the sea was curbed by the sight of an angry, jacked as hell, wizodd sailing towards them on a strange translucent version of the Silver Hammer. Yells about punishing them for stealing his boat reached them across the water; The Great Xtenza was after them! Gunter hit the boost and headed towards the canal entrance while Dillinger sprayed bullets behind to try and provide cover.

Locks! They're like water stairs!

Reaching the first lock and finding it unattended, Tenzin leapt out to operate the controls. He opened the first gates and Gunter quickly moved the Silver Hammer into the lock, then Tenzin closed the gates behind and started the pumping process. A tense moment passed until the water level raised enough that they could once again keep an eye on the approach of the angry wizodd. As soon as the level was clear Tenzin began opening the second gates while Dillinger opened fire first with the mounted gun and then with his breaching rocket at the pursuing ship.

Neither was effective, as the Great Xtenza appeared to age the rocket into rusty uselessness before it reached him. Rather than wait for the locks to cycle all the way through to pursue the thieves, the Great Xtenza instead seemed to rewind time briefly, as a translucent version of the lock opened for him and he sailed through the closed gates: hijacking the party's passage through the gate from a few minutes ago.

Hatching a plan Tenzin hid, waited for the Great Xtenza to pass through the second gates, and leapt onto the future (past?) version of the Silver Hammer to try and take out the wizodd. A highly skeptical rest of the party slowed their ship down to give this a chance to work.

Although Tenzin successfully got onto the ship, when attempting to bash the Great Xtenza in the back of the head with his squidhook he failed to do any lasting harm. Xtenza, furious at the insult, lifted Tenzin high over his head and slammed him down onto the controls of the boat, cracking bones and knocking him out. It seemed as though Tenzin were lost for sure, but due to the excretion Xtenza had to make a CHA save to not lose focus. He failed and warped back to the beginning of the day, once again proving that my players are total luck sacks.

The translucent boat blinked out of existence with its pilot, and the rest of the party was able to collect their wayward squidbagger, slap him awake, and continue on their way.

Reaching a fork, they took a left towards Mocktown and passed through another lock without incident, before deciding to pull to the side and try to ask for directions. They met a Mock Constrictor, who insisted they would only give directions to a friend. Who is a friend? Why, someone who has accepted the friendly gift of a Snake Heart!

Gunter immediately agreed, and found himself with snake eyes, a split tongue, a taste for live prey, a desire to encourage poor decision making (okay, maybe this one wasn't a change), and most importantly: directions for how to proceed.

Following the instructions, they got back to the main canal, and continued through the next lock peacefully. At the lock after that, however, just as they were leaving a large man with hooves and elk antlers ran towards their boat yelling about how strong he was and indicating he wanted to "hang out".

I was going to try and put a picture of an elk mutant here, but all the image results for "half elk half man" were things I didn't want to put in my blog.

Rather than speeding away the players decided to engage with him to try and talk him down. As this party is not known for their soothing words, this only enraged him and he reached out to grab the boat to try and lift it to prove how strong he was. The party objected to this, and a fight broke out. Dillinger was taken out of the fight after he was picked up and impaled on the man's antlers, and Tenzin was launched into the water after a failed attempt to push the Elk-Mutant off the boat. Gunter eventually landed the KO with his antique pistol which exploded in his hands on the final shot.

As the Elk Mutant collapsed and started bleeding out, his elk features and overgrown muscles dissolved away and instead appears onto the one to defeat him: Gunter. The party dumped the ex-elk-mutant off the boat, recovered their injured and dunked companions, and carried on down the water way (now with one member sporting both snake features, and oversized elk muscles and antlers).

It was smooth sailing until, just as they were passing through the final lock before their destination, they heard a familiar angry shouting coming from the extremely buff Great Xtenza. Once again on their tail, he followed them through the lock to try and punish the thieving party. This time, as he approached, he vomited out Rich Future Bastard Versions of the party (technically these are one of the other pursuer options besides the Great Xtenza, but I couldn't resist using them here).

Future Dillinger has saws in place of both hands and jaw, future Garimir was half man half chrome skeleton, future Gunter had been split into three pale triplicates of himself, and future Tenzin was nowhere to be seen. The party agreed that they had probably finally gotten sick of Tenzin, and offed him themselves at some point in the future.

An epic battle ensued as the Great Xtenza pulled his Silver Hammer alongside the party's. Dillinger on the mounted gun managed to take out the Gunter triplet that was manning the opposed ship's gun, with the help of a salvo of the screaming black gems  they had found in the hold at the and forgotten about until now (Gunter the Curiosity Collector recognized them as containing a wrath, which emerges to attack everything around it when the crystal is broken: weird spirit grenades). A combination of machine fun, knives, squidhook, antlers and many more of the black gems made short work of the Rich Future Bastards, leaving the Great Xtenza standing alone.

Realizing he was at risk of a loss he shouted that he had already gotten revenge on them in the past, and warped away in a cloud of temporal dust. Out of this cloud tumbled a single lackey, who had just enough time to realize he was alone with zero backup before the party descended on him.

Now in the clear, the party disposed of their future selves (Dillinger kept his doppelganger's saws as keepsakes), tied the now blood spattered Silver Hammer up at a dock, and went to report to their debt holders. In exchange for the Silver Hammer they managed to clear their debt, and the Silver Key which had been taken as collateral was returned to them, allowing the party to depart back to the Interplanar Maze.

Thoughts on the Module

The Canal of Horrors was an absolute blast, both for myself and my players. There are three different pursuers that can be chasing the PCs, and all three sound hilarious and fun (enough so that I cheated and used two of them in my game). There are so many good ideas packed into this module it's a little silly. I honestly think that you could run the same group through this twice and it would be just as fun the second time (especially if you randomized the destination). I want to see every single encounter on every table happen at the table, which is an impressive feat.

If you've never played or run Electric Bastionland, I think that this module would be a great introduction. It's emblematic of the whole system and "setting" in how it's extremely strange, and downright bizarre in places, but never so much that you feel unmoored. The mundanity of bringing a boat through a canal, and dealing with the routine of having to work the locks, keeps the whole thing grounded even as you're running from time wizards or fighting strong man elk mutants.

One thing I really want to highlight is how the encounter die is tied to actual diegetic locations. Rather than an arbitrary "every 10 minutes" or "every X rooms" it's literally a roll to see what's going on at each of the canal's locks. It's a great idea, and something I'd love to see more modules pick up.

Thoughts on the System

I absolutely love Electric Bastionland, but I also knew that going in. I've been running a group through the Anomalous Subsurface Environment (transplanted into the Deep Country) using the system, and it's been great. Hard to list all the things I love about it, but I'll try to hit some high points.

• Combat: The combat is super fast, very flexible, and extremely decisive without being instantly lethal. The most likely outcome for things going badly is getting knocked out, at which point you're down and bleeding out, but as long as the rest of your party wins the fight or drags you away, you're going to be okay (albeit with a lessened strength). Combat has real consequences and stakes, but also characters are unlikely to die quickly. It strikes a great balance for me.
• Combat, addendum:  Electric Bastionland (and Into the Odd before it) has completely ruined any system that includes to hit rolls for me. Removing them is brilliant, and makes combat so much more exciting and impactful.
• Failed Careers: These provide an initial impulse for a character to know their place in the world and have something to build off of, without constraining them or forcing them down a specific path. Just by existing they paint an incredible picture of Bastion without having to read 'deep lore'. They're similar to the excellent backgrounds of Troika! in that they pull so much more weight than seems reasonable for the word count (the art is also consistently excellent).
• Hit Protection: Sidesteps the never ending debate over what HP means by explicitly defining it as Hit Protection, your ability to not get hit. Refreshing more or less immediately while out of combat, while actual STR loss requiring resources or a lots of time to heal, also means the game isn't bogged down by the constant resource management of healing spells and potions.

There's more, but this isn't really supposed to be a full fledged review of Electric Bastionland, so I'll end here and just say the system is great and everyone should play it.

Conclusion

The Canal of Horrors was a huge success at my table, both me and my players had a great time with it. It's absurdly dense with great ideas while being light enough to run with zero prep. It plays very nicely in the framework of Electric Bastionland, and is honestly good enough that I can see myself running it a couple more times with other groups.

If this sounded like a good time (and it was!) go buy Dissident Whispers! There are 57(!!!) other modules in it, and you'll also get to see the excellent art and maps that accompany most of the modules. Plus it supports a great cause!

The Dissident Maze, Part 2: Graktil the Citadel that Crawls

Week 2 of my attempt to play through every Dissident Whispers module (or at least as many as I can get through before my players get bored) brings us to GRAKTIL THE CITADEL THAT CRAWLS by Horatio Hellsing.

Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter. See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. The short version is that they're jumping into the bodies of alternate dimension versions of themselves.

The Module 

Graktil the Citadel that Crawls is a massive, castle sized scorpion. It was killed, then reanimated (after the players arrive) by a crew of crafty goblins to use as a mobile battle fortress.

The Characters

Tenzin appears in this world as a cleric of the Sand and Wind, accompanied by Dozen, his desert hawk.

Dillinger is a short, ugly thief with a knack for spellcasting sporting some enchanted Sneaky Boots.

Garimir is a clean cut, well dressed wizard carrying a mystical wand and a Book of Infinite Lore.

Frauline Gunter is a cleric of Life and Death, wearing a distinctive half black half white dress, and carrying a Magnetic Mace.

The System

For this module I decided to use a system I've been wanting to try out for a while, Jared Sinclair's 6E. It's a rules light fantasy adventure PbtA game, with some distinctly OSR ideas sprinkled in. It is something like a cross between Dungeon World and World of Dungeons, but that's probably an uncharitable description.

Play Report

The players arrive in their alternate dimension selves as they are in the middle of receiving a mission briefing by a large, bearded mage with a huge hat. Apparently there is some strong source of magical energy out in the desert, likely a mystical artifact, that is disrupting his important magical work. He has hired the party to go and solve the problem, preferably by retrieving the artifact, but would settle for it being destroyed. Armed with a silver compass enchanted to point them towards the source of the magic, they head off into the desert surrounding the city.

After traveling for several hours, they see a huge object on the horizon. Tenzin and his trusty hawk Dozen travel ahead of the group to scout and discover the object is the eponymous massive, and dead, scorpion. Goblin work crews swarm across it, and it is surrounded by patrolling groups of guards.

Picture this, but the size of a large castle! GRAKTIL!

After Tenzin returns to the party to share what he learned, they take a few moments to hatch a cunning plan. Both Garimir and Dillinger cast Tenser's Floating Disk then pile a bunch of sand on top of each. Voila! Portable sand camouflage!

Using their sand umbrellas they approach the giant scorpion fortress, and decide to avoid the main entrance in the head due to the concentration of guards in that area. Instead, they plan to clamber in through the left claw, where several goblin construction crews are busy at work reinforcing and plating the entire thing with metal, turning into a huge battering ram.

Garimir casts Spider Climb, growing gross spider hair things out of his hands and feet, and clambers up the side of the claw while dodging work crews. He drops a rope back down, and they all manage to tumble through a maintenance hatch in the claw before any goblins notice.

Gross spider hair! In your fingers! Why Spiderman, why?

Unfortunately, immediately after dropping into the claw and finding the area choked with metal scraps and construction equipment, the goblin work crew on the exterior of the claw climbs in behind them and began closing up the entrance. The way out is blocked by a second goblin work crew, so the party hide themselves among the metal and scraps to wait for an opportunity to move further in. After a short wait a higher ranking goblin engineer entered the room and began berating the goblin work crew which the party used as a distraction to begin their assault. Some magic missiles, arrows, and macing later (plus Gunter accidentally casting Hold Person on herself) the goblins were dead, and the party moved deeper into Graktil.

At this point they felt Graktil lurch forward and begin to move; it wasn't just a massive dead scorpion, it was an undead one. Realizing that it was only an hour or two from the city, they now had a ticking clock with which to accomplish their goals. GM note: this would have been a great time to start an actual clock (a la BitD) to add some nice pressure and tension to the game.

After carefully sneaking out of the left claw, through the head, and into the abdomen the party found themselves in the middle of what appeared to be an entire goblin town! The abdomen was hollowed out to create a living space for the goblins, and it was packed full of goblins, zomblins (zombie goblins!), undead scorpions of unusual size, and awful mutated coyotes.

Picture this, but the size a person. Undead Scorpions of Unusual Size!

Using their enchanted silver compass to triangulate, they figured their ultimate goal must be inside the massive sting hanging above the rest of Graktil. This meant they needed to either clamber up the massive scaffolding and ladder construction in the middle of the abdomen goblin town to get onto the scorpion's back (then hope there was a way up to the tail from there) or make their way through the goblin town to the other side of the abdomen to climb through the tiny, cramped tunnels that lead into the tail (and hope that those lead where they wanted).

Choosing the former option, Dozen the hawk bravely sacrificed himself (or, according to Tenzin, safely escaped) to distract as many of the enemies within the abdomen as possible to create an opportunity for the party to make their way to the scaffolding. It mostly worked, with an (un-distracted) undead scorpion of unusual size briefly menacing them before Dillinger managed to dispatch it into a single roundhouse kick, allowing them to scamper up the ladders to the topside of Graktil.

Up on the (strangely) sparsely populated topside, the party could see the lights of the city quickly approaching, they had to move fast! From this vantage point, they could see that the massive tail and sting was held in place by a huge set of scaffolding and supports. Deciding to use that as a ladder to make their way up to the sting, they moved stealthily across the back of Graktil attempting to avoid the few guards patrolling the chitinous back. An oversized mutant coyote, ridden by a particularly large goblin chatting with another guard, caught wind of them (literally smelled them) which forced the party to change tactics.

Abandoning subtlety Garimir ignited the remains of the ritual structure (used to reanimate the massive scorpion) bringing it crashing down onto the coyote. The oversized goblin rolled free, but was taken down with a tag team effort by Gunter and Dillinger (the latter of which temporarily died in this fight before I remembered how shields worked) while Tenzin eliminated the second guard with a well placed arrow.

The party quickly climbed up the supports to the sting, and were lucky enough to make it up before any other goblins came to investigate. After a tight squeeze through some gaps in the undead scorpion's exoskeleton, the party found themselves in the hallowed out sting. From their hiding space (partially embedded in the undead flesh) they observed the Exomancer, the goblin mastermind behind this entire endeavor, piloting Graktil with a strange steering wheel shaped artifact. She stood atop a dais in front of a pool of scorpion venom, surrounded by an undead hoard of zomblins and scorpions under her control. Their target!

Gunter cast an Undead Ward surrounding the party, holding the undead army at bay, while the rest of the party unleashed a salvo of ranged attacks. Although the exomancer had been protected by an invisible mystical barrier, Gunter's initial magic missile (with a roll of 12+) managed to batter it down opening the way for the arrows and throwing daggers to take down the goblin necromancer before she had a chance to respond.

Time for celebration! Except the artifact tumbled from her lifeless grasp and began to roll towards the huge pool of venom. Dillinger, with some quick thinking and quicker casting, managed to catch it with a hasty Tenser's Disk and floated it safely back to the party.

Tenzin called upon the powers of the desert, and summoned a thick fog to cover their escape off the side of Graktil (which was now reeling wildly, no longer under the control of the artifact) and they made a dash back to the city. A pleased arch mage accepted the artifact, handed over their payment, and the party retrieved the Key with which they made their way back into the inter-planar maze to be greeted by an incredulous Orphone, surprised that they'd managed to once again succeed without any casualties.

Before them were three doors to their next adventure, showing images of a Spider, a Snail and a Boat.

Thoughts on the Module

Graktil the Citadel that Crawls was a big hit with my players. They loved the themes and ideas, specifically saying it felt incredibly unique.

For my own part, I the module was very cool and I liked it a a lot, but struggled to run it well in places. The areas within Graktil are large and often complicated, making it difficult for me to describe well to the players on the fly. Several times I had to stop, and clarify what the situation was because my players had misunderstood my initial description. This is not so much a criticism of the module, because each area is well described, but it would be very beneficial for a GM to make notes ahead of time detailing how each area should be described. The larger sections, in particular the abdomen, would also do well with a bit of fleshing out by the GM during prep. I did approximately zero prep beyond reading over the module, so I'm largely to blame for this.

Overall I love the bones of the module, and it provides a rich source for some really fun and strange adventures. An enterprising party might even be able to commandeer the artifact and Graktil itself for their own ends, which is likely a whole campaign in the making. Graktil is an incredibly cool set piece, and even if it takes a bit of prep to really get it to shine, it's rad enough to be worth adding to your campaign (or at least to run as a one shot like I did).

Thoughts on the System 

6E is something I'd had my eye on for a while as I've been moving from a long period of running Dungeon World, then Forged in the Dark games, to much more rules light "OSR-adjacent" games like Mothership and Electric Bastionland. 6E looked like a nice blend of the strengths of PbtA, with the rules light nature and flexibility of something like Into the Odd.

In play though, I ended up not loving it. There are a few idiosyncrasies in the system that rubbed me the wrong way, for instance I don't love the wording of the Cast A Spell move which ended up feeling somewhat repetitive in use. This is partly on me, and I should have been more creative in interpreting what happens when "the spell affects its intended target" isn't selected, but I think the move could use some tweaking for how often it came up.

The 'quantum equipment' system works reasonably well, and I like it in theory (I'm a huge fan of it in Blades in the Dark) but it ended up feeling strange with Armor and Shields. Is it fine for a player to declare they'd had heavy armor on the whole time? This is certainly implied by the rules, especially since the game encourages you to not worry about mundane equipment and get on with the game, but since heavy armor makes it harder to move around quickly and quietly it feels strange to be able to claim, in retrospect, that you were wearing it the whole time. This gets doubly weird with the shield sundering rules: can a player always absorb a blow so long as they have a hand free and an equipment bubble unfilled?

Both of these can be fixed by saying equipment is always in their pack, not being worn, meaning they'd have to declare they have it then take the time to equip it, but that feels counter to the spirit of "don't worry about the equipment until you need it" which the game pushes (also you'd lose the hilarious mental image of a player pulling out 6 shield in quick succession to survive an onslaught). As a side note, BitD avoids this problem by making your level of loadout the thing that impacts your grace, it's how much you're carrying not what specifically you've got with you.

Those issues aside, which are relatively minor and could be easily solved with some minor hacking (which the author very, very explicitly encourages), my main issue is largely that I think I no longer think in a PbtA way when approaching this sort of RPG adventure. My own GMing preferences and styles don't mesh with this sort of framework quite as well as they used to. I've gotten used to adjudicating things on a fairly micro scale, mostly with words and only occasionally with dice, and 6E (or PbtA generally) usually feels like it wants each roll to resolve things on a more macro level.

I think 6E will work very well for people who like Dungeon World and want to move to something a bit looser and more flexible, or for people who like PbtA and are looking for a rules light fantasy adventure game. Honestly, me bouncing off of 6E has more to do with me than with it, so take all my criticisms with a large grain of salt.

My players all enjoyed the system, particularly for a one shot, but mostly agreed they'd want something with more mechanical teeth to it for a longer campaign. This group tends to enjoy a bit more mechanical crunch than is my own preference though.

Summary

Graktil the Citadel that Crawls is a really cool module jam packed with great ideas, but I'd recommend giving it a deep read and doing some prep before running it to really make it sing.

Add a giant, undead scorpion citadel to your campaign. You won't regret it.

The system worked well for this one shot, but I'm not likely to visit this system again... it's not you 6E, it's me.

Come back next week to see more of my players dimension hopping their way through all of Dissident Whispers as they try to navigate the Canal of Horrors, an Electric Bastionland adventure by Chris McDowall himself (or at least, that's the current front runner in the poll I sent them to choose between Spider, Snail and Boat). Also go buy Dissident Whispers. If you thought this was cool there are 57 more adventures where it came from! Also rad as hell artwork for the giant, undead scorpion!

The Dissident Maze, Part 1: Crumbling Carmine Ruins

Background

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be a part of Dissident Whispers, a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matters. The final result is an incredible piece of RPG writing, artwork, and layout mastery. I strongly recommend picking it up, aside from the good cause the final product is amazing, and has something of use for everyone with adventures for 10 different systems, plus a host of system agnostic ones.

Check out this excellent write up by Matthew Getch for a more detailed explanation of what Dissident Whispers is, how it worked, and what it was like to be a part of.

Dissident Whispers includes 58(!) individual modules, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try and run as many as possible with not only the same group, but the same party.

Setup

My group has revived an old party of adventurers they'd played in the past (during a lengthy Dungeon World campaign) which had two important features:

1) A Special Key that let them travel from one door, to any other door they'd previously visited.

2) A powerful mage (Orphone of the Three Visions) who specializes in dimensional magic, who they'd stranded in inter-planar space (it wasn't their fault, they swear!)

The Characters

As they were during the prior campaign, in the words of their players.

Gunter Fritzka - Bard and Part Time Wizard
Nihilistic / Solipsist. He believes everything everyone does is a performance of some sort, so why not be honest about it for a profession? Very fun at parties, but not a great friend. Somewhat unreliable. Goes way back with Garimir.

Garimir - Druid, Voted Most Likely To Sell Soul To A Chaos God

Studious, interested in all things occult or dark. Always in search of knowledge and power. Shapeshifter and animal communicator.

Dillinger - Thief and Purveyor of Poisons and Poor Ideas

Young (for a dwarf) and reckless, obsessed with shiny objects, prefers not thinking about actions and dealing with the consequences later.

Tenzin - Anarchy Ranger accompanied by Dozen, his Giant Eagle Bro

Quick & Wise/Clever, Best Bros w/ Giant Fuck-You Eagle, Refuses to use or recognize the value of money, "Civilization is a Mistake", Will fight for the oppressed against authority pretty much regardless of consequences, Nature has his back fo real, Tea-Totaler, No fun at parties

The Rules

1) They will be jumping into the bodies of alternate dimension versions of themselves. They'll retain all their own memories, but also have access to the knowledge and memories of their alternate selves.

2) New characters will be rolled up for whatever system is most appropriate to the module (or whatever system I decide I want to run that week). Minor modifications will be allowed to stay true to whatever essential nature they feel is important to their characters.

3) The Key is hidden somewhere within each module (usually in the most important or significant part). In order to escape each world, they must find the Key and use it on a door.

4) As long as at least one character survives and escapes, they will all "respawn" back in the planar maze.

5) In a sort of inverted version of The One, they stand to improve the lives and power of all versions of themselves by improving the lives of the alternate selves they inhabit. They'll do this primarily by not dying, and secondarily by completing quests or objectives important the their alt selves. What this means is I can bribe them to engage with whatever part of the module I think is most fun or interesting.

The Session:

The Start: Fleeing for their lives from some failed endeavor, they tried to use the key to escape only to find it had deposited them into a strange waiting room, floating in a vast plane of nothing. Orphone (the wizard they'd wronged, and shamelessly stolen from here) informed them through disembodied voice that she'd hacked their key, and would be sending them through an inter-planar maze in pursuit of some vague research project.

After some chatting back and forth, and an explanation of The Rules, they stepped through the single door offered to them: emblazoned with an outline of a mouse.

I decided to start with one of the adventures from Dissident Whispers that I wrote myself. The Crumbling Carmine Ruins, a Mausritter adventure inspired by the Redwall Novels.

I won't share any more of the excellent artwork and layout, but it's all extremely good! Buy it to see!

Adventure: The Crumbling Carmine Ruins
System: Mausritter
Bonus Objectives:
 1) Recover the Sword of the Warrior
 2) Retrieve all Rose-Pink Pearls

Notes/Errata: I wrote this adventure, there are a handful of things I'd change now that I've had more playtests, along with one actual rules goof.

1) All the swords should be Heavy and deal 1d10 damage.

2) Only "precise" or "targeted" attacks on the Dermestid Swarms should be impaired, as written I think it's a little too punishing.

3) Making the Rat King a Detachment was probablya bit much, possibly better handled with high armor and HP. Basically, be generous with what sorts of things the PCs can come up with to actually deal damage.

The Alternate Characters:

This session had Tenzin, Gunter and Dillinger joining as mousey adventures, each sporting a odd assortment of weapons and items. Tenzin was, of course, accompanied by Dozen who appeared as a Dragonfly in this world.

Play Report:

Their alternate selves had followed rumors of ruins supposedly containing treasure, and made their way to a hillside which had recently experienced a rock slide exposing red sandstone blocks and a huge wooden gate. The party made their way up the hill, widened a hole in the massive rotted wooden doors, and climbed inside after sending Dozen the Dragonfly to scout ahead.

Inside, some clever navigation by Gunter lead the party towards the entrance of the central structure, where they ran into group of Voles clearing space. After determining that the Voles seemed friendly, they had a nice chat and handed over some pips in exchange for cloth to use as masks in preparation for spores the Voles warned them about.

Inside they found a Great Hall in which the floor had rotted through and was potentially very hazardous to cross. Dozen easily retrieved a Clamshell Case (containing a single Pearl) from a precarious position overhanging a drop, then carried a length of thread across the hall to act as a guide rope. Dillinger made the first attempt, trying to get across quickly with the thread as a fail safe. Well, he failed, and the thread did not keep him safe. The floor collapsed, sending him tumbling down into the darkness, unable to grasp onto the thread in time. Thinking quickly, Gunter shot him with an arrow with more thread attached. Dillinger managed to stay conscious after being shot, grasped the thread, and was pulled to safety by the other mice.

To avoid this happening again, they burned time (and torches) stringing several more threads across the hall so they could slowly and carefully make their way across (several encounter die rolls with no encounters, lucky bastards).

Through a door on the other side of the room they discovered a Kitchen, mostly ramshackle and rotted to bits, with an awful, pervasive stench. Dillinger, unswayed by his recent brush with death, immediately located the source of the smell as coming from a cast iron cauldron and opened it without hesitation. Inside he found a second Pearl, along with a Dermestid Swarm which immediately swarmed onto him. The mice managed to kill sufficient bugs to chase them off, but not before Dillinger lost more STR to the flesh eating beetles and collapsed to the ground.

The other mice helped Dillinger recover before heading further into the structure, finding an area with small spartan living cells populated by strange mouse shaped fungal creatures apparently pantomiming chores and habits of the mice that once lived here. They donned their cloth masks to try and pass through, but noticed two of the Fungal Echoes have Pearls embedded in them. After a brief scuffle, they got through the area unscathed and two Pearls richer.

Down a flight of stairs, they arrived in a Cellar storing mostly long rotted supplies, along with a few bottles of Elderberry Cordial which appear intact (one of which Tenzin immediately helped himself to). Against one wall the mice found a huge tapestry of a warrior mouse in battle with a cat. Gunter, figuring it must be worth a pretty penny, began to pull it down from the wall and unwittingly revealed a hidden Statuary and spotted massive Rat King within coming to investigate the noise. (I won't embed an image of the real thing, but google the phrase if you're curious. The artwork for it in the module is absolutely incredible.)

Thinking fast, Tenzin and Dillinger pulled a length of thread across the entrance to trip up the Rat King, while Gunter prepared to toss a torch at the tapestry once the Rat King was tangled up in it. Surprising everyone, the plan actually went off without a hitch and between fire and well placed attacks they managed to subdue the tangled creatures without any injury to themselves (other than the loss of a very valuable tapestry).

Inside the newly revealed Statuary, Dillinger found the remaining two Pearls within the Rat King's nest, while Gunter messed around with the statues eventually finding the secret trigger (hinted at by the now burned tapestry) to open the hidden Warrior's Tomb.

Inside they find the sarcophagus of the warrior mouse, and wary from recent experience (I ran them through the Tomb of Black Sand prior to starting this) examined everything closely before opening it. Lucky they did as the Warrior's Sword was disguised within the stone carving on the sarcophagus lid.

After carefully lifting the lid, they revealed a skeletal mouse clutching a sword identical to the one they found hidden in the lid. Wisely (and disappointingly to me) they ignored the sword, believing it must be a trap, and retrieved the Key from around the skeleton's neck allowing them to escape back into the Maze.

Orphone congratulates them on their success, while expressing surprise that none of them died.

We end the session with three potential doors to pass through for next week: Scorpion, Crab and Cauldron.

Thoughts on the Module

I wrote the module, so it feels pretty weird to give my thoughts on it. After playing it, I'm happy with how it turned out overall, although there are certainly some things I would change (particularly not making big errors with the weapon cards). It was directly inspired by Redwall, but I think it strikes a nice balance of having bits in there for people to recognize who are in the know, without being so reliant on that as to make no sense to someone else.

Honestly I'd love someone else to play this and let me know what it looks like to a fresh set of eyes.

Thoughts on the System

I really really enjoy Mausritter. It takes fantastic base game Into the Odd and adds several really, fun really clever things on top. The physical inventory system of moving around cards is very fun, and tactile (even if a bit tricky to pull off online). The inclusion of GLOG magic as physical items is also really good although it didn't come up in this game.

I highly recommend picking the system up and giving it a shot. Being small, mousy adventurers adds a really nice flair and framing to the standard "go out and collect treasure" type of game.

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Overall it went great, Mausritter is a wonderful system and fast enough to make characters that it didn't burn up any game time. They also managed to all survive, and complete both bonus objectives, due in equal parts to luck and skill. If this adventure sounded fun please pick up a copy of Dissident Whispers for yourself where you'll find it among 57 others.

Join me next week for the next planar hopping adventure!