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!