Macchiato Monsters - References, House Rules, Hacks

Collected resources for Macchiato Monsters

By no means is this intended to be comprehensive, just stuff I've come across and found useful (and a couple things of my own).

Play Aids and Advice

Spell Cost Reference Sheet (this one is mine!). I found that trying to create prices to spells on the fly was a bit taxing, so I wrote up a flowchart to get a rough cost as a starting point. Partly inspired by Blades in the Dark magnitude tables.

Combat Example by the author of Macchiato Monsters. Very helpful for getting an understanding how how it's supposed to play out.

Settings and Item Tables

UVG Equipment Tables and Rules by aincumis

Post Human Orbital Structures - really cool alternate setting, equipment tables thing by 

House Rules and Hacks

 Inverted Risk Dice (personal house rule)

Risk dice step down in size when the highest three values are rolled, not the lowest.

Rationale is that for consumables it makes more sense (I just ate a ton of these rabbits, that's why there are less of them), and it also spreads out the feel bads. Currently it's a double feel bad when you both roll low (and get very little benefit) and also now your thing is running out.

Downside, slightly more mental overhead since the numbers to watch for are different for each die size.

 Monster Dice (personal house rule/hack)

Replace monster's Morale Die with an all purpose Monster Die. If they try to do something in their nature, roll the skill die. 

1-3 are degrees of failure, and the die steps down until they get a chance to rest.

4+ are degrees of success.

If a monsters is particularly skilled at something, roll with advantage.

If they're bad at something or it's out of their nature, roll with disadvantage.

This can be used for everything from sneaking and ambushes, to resisting magical effects. It mostly felt weird to me that the advice for these things in the book was to just invent a stat for them on the fly, and roll under that. Risk Dice are used for everything else, why not also this?

The Dissident Maze, Part 5: Flails Akimbo

I know I said it was going to be a few weeks before the next installment, but scheduling issues with our Vamp game lead to me learning on Sunday night that I'd be running a one shot Monday night.

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

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. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were hunting for Snail Eggs in Ootheca, this week they're fighting for their lives in Flails Akimbo!

The Module

The full art and layout for this module is worth seeing, go buy the book!

 

Flails Akmibo is an adventure for MÖRK BORG written by Pablo Dapena (with art by Michael Harmon, layout by Matthew Johnson, Rolland and Pablo, and editing by Flora Van Den Berg). It's an over the top, hyperviolence send up of Guns Akimbo. I'd actually had the pleasure of playing through this module when a friend ran it, so I had a pretty good handle on it going in (part of what contributed to me picking it as a last minute thing).

The System

MÖRK BORG is the recently Ennie award winning Art Punk created by Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr. 

Play Report

I started off by telling them they were almost certain to die during this, so to be prepared for that. When I played in this, I personally died 3 times, so I felt pretty confident in this warning.

 

Tenzin, Gunter and Dillinger awake with spinning heads and hurting hands in small stone cells (Garimir couldn't make it this week). They look down, and each realize that weapons have been crudely nailed to their hands! Tenzin has warhammers, Dillinger has knives, and Gunter has a zweihänder fixed to each hand (lots of damage, but combat rolls are penalized due to the difficulty).

They immediately come to the conclusion that this is some sort of battle royale thing, and Gunter loudly yells that he can't wait to kill Dillinger before the booming announcer voice even has a chance to introduce today's game of DEATH GALORE.

Finding their cages unlocked, they all run out and through the only door into the next room. Two cagefighters, and a handful of terrified looking prisoners were waiting in the room, and leap to attack the players as soon as the announcer's monologue was finished.

One cagefighter runs with spinning axes towards the zweihänder wielding Gunter, and this is where the first hints of how absurdly lucky my players would get in this module appeared. Gunter gets a critical success on defense, giving a free attack, which hits, and one shots the cagefighter.

Dillinger rushes the other cagefighter, managing to get behind him and slashing through the tendons in the back of his feet. Tenzin, meanwhile, avoids the fray and tries to figure out where the hell the announcer's voice is coming from. Seeing this as a sign of weakness the small band of prisoners try and swarm him, but Tenzin spins into a whirlwind of smashing hammers (using the special "Thou twirl me fair round, dearest, fair round. Like a breaking wheel, fair round round round" move included in this module) driving them off and narrowly avoiding falling into the huge open pit in the middle of the room.

Gunter finishes off the wounded cagefighter, Tenzin kills two of the prisoners attacking him with another spinning attack, and Dillinger shoves the remaining live prisoner down into the pit. Dillinger briefly considers going full Hunger Games by shoving Gunter into the pit, but is interrupted as Tenzin hears some "booing" sounds coming from the bottom of the pit where one of the prisoners had landed.

With some difficulty due to their weapon hands, they quickly splice together a rope out of the clothing of the dead, and lower Tenzin down into the pit to see what's going on. Dangling from the end of the rope, Tenzin finds a three fancily dressed, and very drunk, nobles halfheartedly punching and stabbing the body of the dead prisoner, complaining that they paid good money for this and it's bullshit that this guy is already dead. As Tenzin drops in among them though, they excitedly turn to him and declare joy at the prospect of a "meat pinata" and rush in. He releases the rope, and unleashes another cyclone of hammers upon the nobles. Hearing the commotion, Dillinger takes a high risk leap into the pit, managing to land on and messily crush one of the dilettantes, sending the other two fleeing in fear. 

While Gunter more carefully and safely climbs down into the pit, Tenzin and Dillinger chase down and finish off the two remaining nobles. Through a door and up a set of stairs, the players find themselves in a narrow hallway populated by spear wielding nobles, after bringing destruction down upon them they find they can see into areas of "The Stage" through small slits in the walls. This, along with interrogating the lone noble they spared, allows them to realize these are the "spectator booths" through which the slaughter can be witnessed (and participated in by poking spears through slits). While looking through one of these slits, they see a group of three cagefighters dash through a door after hearing the announcer call for someone to go deal with the PCs.

Rounding a corner, and pushing their noble captive ahead of them, a huge armored man wearing a leather pig mask bursts through a door at the far end of the hallway, as the announcer introduces SNOUTFACE and promises a spectacular fight, even if it's a shame their paying audience can't see it.

The captive noble is shoved into Snoutface's path, bravely soaking a massive mace attack to protect the players. Then Tenzin rolls past Snoutface's feet, coming up behind the gladiator and smashing his warhammers directly into the back of his head (a critical hit, dealing almost all of Snoutface's HP, and damaging his armor). Gunter quickly follows up with his zweihänders and finishes off poor Snoutface before he managed to do anything more than kill a single noble.

As Tenzin retrieves the leather pig mask as a trophy, Dillinger passes through the door Snoutface has entered through. He finds a storage area with an armored, locked door, and a portcullis leading to a large amphitheater. In this room he can hear some very loud panicked breathing coming from behind a set of shelves storing hammers and nails. As the other two join him, the portcullis begins to open, and the three cagefighters they had seen before arrive in the amphitheater and rush towards the PCs.

Tenzin, however, simply steps forward and tosses the bloody pig mask of the arena champion onto the ground striking FEAR into the hearts of these three men. Two immediately break and run, while the last collapses the ground begging for his life.

GM Note: Tossing down the mask of the defeated arena champion, someone the cage fighters would fear, was a clever idea and I decided to simply roll morale checks for the three men. ALL THREE FAILED! After rooms of nothing but successful combat checks (by this point, the PCs had taken a grand total of 2 damage, and that was to the guy who started with NINE HEALTH) this was the final nail in the coffin for any hope I had of demonstrating how lethal this game was. At this point, I had no choice but to bow my head and accept that my players were simply too lucky to be killed.

The players then tore down the shelves, revealing the poorly hidden announcer (a man with a megaphone sewn to his mouth), then made their way through a door to find the "Bacchanalian Chamber" the secret room containing the hidden master of this blood arena the Grand Duchess Rottundha. Cowering with her are all the remaining nobles that had fled from the players approach, and Tenzin fell upon them in a tornado of whirling hammers.

His constant use of the spin attack finally almost came back to bite him as he managed to donk himself in the head. Fortunately, for him, his absurdly good HP roll meant he was pretty much fine. The rest of the players joined, and they made short work of the Dutchess and the remaining nobles. From the corpses, they retrieved the key to their freedom, and left the bloody arena injured but very much unkilled.

Thoughts on the Module

Well, first of all, my players had an absolutely fantastic time. After we finished they couldn't stop gushing about how fun it was, although they admitted it was likely in part to how absolutely unstoppable they were. Gunter's player did express some sadness that they hadn't died, after I'd hyped up how unforgivably deadly the module was. They loved being put in an awful, probably unwinnable situation and being able to let loose and damn the consequences in a bid for revenge.

This module is jam packed with horrible, hilarious, and fun things. The setup is perfect for putting players into the right frame of mind to play MÖRK BORG. You start off in a cell with weapons nailed to your hands, you're probably not getting out of here! Might as well go down swinging! The announcer provides a really fun excuse to give dumb, booming voice narration to everything the players do, and a vehicle to try to goad them into poor decision making.

I can't say that my players' experience will be the common one, my own experience playing in it had 5+ deaths among 3 players. However, from a player perspective, everything was so over the top, bloody, and gruesome that dying never felt bad. No matter if you defy the odds and escape alive, or die half a dozen times trying this module is a fantastic introduction to MÖRK BORG and I can't recommend it enough.

Thoughts on the System

I'm not going to have many original thoughts on MÖRK BORG, people much more eloquent than me have already waxed poetic about the incredible layout, the heavy metal influences, the fantastically disturbing artwork, and more. 

 

The mechanics are light, but very functional. Character creation is extremely fast, a thing you need in a (usually) very lethal game. All the rolls are player facing (players roll both to attack and defend) and against generally fixed difficulties which is a thing I really enjoy. It always puts the ball in the players' courts, and means the game runs very fast and easily. Being able to quickly tweak the target numbers based on whatever goofball thing the players were describing let me mechanically show the impact of their ideas, which is not something I always want in a game (see Chris McDowall's blog post about handling variable difficulty in a game with fixed rolls) but it worked really well for this group. 

The main thing running the game made me realize though, is how brilliant the "Calendar of Nechrubel" and the Miseries are. For those unfamiliar during a game of MÖRK BORG each dawn the GM rolls a die (size chosen based on the intended length of the campaign) and on a 1 a Misery is activated. When the 7th Misery occurs, well, I'll let the book express itself:

The table you roll the other miseries on is the coolest looking random table I've ever seen in an rpg.

 

When I first read this my reaction was, "Woah, extremely metal and cool. Sounds kind of annoying to use at the table though, since you'd get a weird anticlimax end to your campaign, right?" However, reflecting on Flails Akimbo I've realized this does something very important.

Since the world is going to end, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES AND GO DOWN SWINGING. Players enter the game knowing that their characters will assuredly die and the entire world is going to end, and there's nothing they can do about it! They're already in an awful situation, so there's no need to be precious with their characters, instead they should play them like you'd drive a stolen car. 

 

Flails Akimbo does this on a smaller scale, it puts the players in an awful, essentially unwinnable situation. They're going to die so they might as well try to strike back and take everyone else down with them. And hell, if they manage not to die? That makes a story worth telling.

Final Thoughts

Both the system and the module are great but I won't retread what I've said above. If you were looking for a way to get players introduced to the nihilistic, black metal violence of MÖRK BORG I can't imagine a better vehicle than Flails Akimbo.

 

My RPG schedule is still a bit up in the air, so I'm not sure when the next time we'll be playing a Dissident Whispers module is, but keep an eye out for our next adventure (where we'll return to my players voting on the next module). If this sounded great, and it was, go buy Dissident Whispers! It's got fifty seven more modules in there, including five (!!!) other MÖRK BORG modules. It even has a MB module written by Johan Nohr himself, and other amazing layout work by him can be found in a couple other places in the book.

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!