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!