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!