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!