Flying Dice — Flesh Hill

Having enjoyed Sacrebleu!, I went seeking other work from Tito B.A. Browsing his his catalog, Flesh Hill caught my attention because of its delightfully grisly title. As of writing this review I have read the module, but not played it.

The frontier settlement of Badama is a place built on treachery. Its megalomaniacal founder, Captain Gerrileau, hired singers and poets to spread rumors about a land of opportunity to lure in settlers. Once folk arrive in Badama, they're subject to the violent domination of local authorities and cannot safely leave. Also, at some point, Captain Gerrileau fathered a son who emerged as a half-insect creature. The Captain exposed the child, and used the incident as an excuse to begin brutalizing and enslaving the native peoples of the area. His conquest was aided to completion when the native peoples came under attack from giant ants. With the native population suppressed, the giant ants are now encroaching on Badama's territory, and Captain Gerrileau has resorted to his old tricks to lure adventuring parties to the area to take care of the problem.

Badama is where the adventure starts, and a little over a third of the book's length is dedicated to it as a location for adventure. Eventually play moves to a vast and arid badland the players must navigate, culminating in a delve into the giant anthill dungeon and a confrontation with the ant queen. In each phase of the adventure play is driven by encounter matrices, which I think is neat. For example, while players wander the streets of Badama, the referee rolls d4 to determine a style of building, then d6 to generate some event happening in or around that building which would draw the player's attention. Rolling two dice may be a little less convenient than rolling one, but it's nice to have your random table somewhat sorted. It allows the referee some flexibility they wouldn't have otherwise. For example, if the players have been hanging around a merchant's tent for a long time, and the ref wants a merchant-specific encounter, they can roll on that segment of the matrix.

The matrices do introduce a tricky layout problem: how do you fit the X axis of an encounter matrix onto a page? Most of the matrices use a d4 on the X axis, which mitigates the problem somewhat, but even 4 columns only gives you enough space for 2~4 words per line. It also seems like a lot of tinkering was done to make each table work individually without giving consideration to consistency throughout the book. Font size, formatting, and hyphenation rules change matrix-to-matrix. The resulting pages feel cramped to the point of being difficult to read. This is particularly unfortunate because I think the matrices are a great tool, but one that's hindered by its presentation. The book would have been better served if the matrices were printed on landscape oriented pages.

The content of the matrices—which is really what matters—manage a good balance between the weird and the mundane; the tragic and the banal. The one for Badama's streets, for example, communicates the bleak conditions there without needing to put a starving child on every streetcorner. The bleakness is background radiation among which normal people have found ways to live their lives, as people do. When players are confronted with it directly it's just as often in small things like worm-ridden fruit, tools dropped carelessly from a roof, or distant domestic disputes. The entire community is trapped by despair and apathy. Nobody cares enough about what they're doing to do it right. There are, of course, more direct examples of the powerful abusing the powerless as well. Badama is a place filled with NPCs who deserve a good murderin', but probably can't be killed because they have a ton of institutional power protecting them.

There are four primary keyed locations in Badama around which events swirl. There is the Slave Market, which is a slave market, where predictably despicable things happen. There is the Red House, a sort of multi-faith worship space that has been largely abandoned since the chief priest was beheaded for trying to stop the sorts of things that happen in the Slave Market. Incidentally, The Red House was intentionally built on a burial site used by the native peoples of the area as a means of demeaning them, which puts lie to the idea that Captain Gerrileau ever intended to live peacefully with them. Next location is the Slaughterhouse, where animals become meat and where a secret fight club operates at night. Secret not because it would be frowned on, but because the people who run it are personal enemies of Gerrileau. Finally there is the Graveyard, which has a number of little things for the players to find and learn.

Each of these locations has its own curiosities and dangers to navigate, which eventually direct the players towards the badlands and the ants beyond. Individually they feel a little shallow. In the Red House, players are meant to look for a secret stair into an underground space. There's nothing to explore down there, but if they stay for at least 10 minutes they'll get attacked by ghosts, and if they defeat the ghosts a map of the region will appear on one of their bellies. The environmental details of the location make it more interesting than it sounds, but the structure of it seems a poor vehicle for creating interesting choices for the players to make. The Slave Market and Graveyard suffer from similar issues. Taken together there is enough in the town that players could spend a whole session there, but everything feels like it's pushing the players out of town rather than adding interesting new wrinkles to the situation. The meatiest location is the Slaughterhouse. It has its own hooks for getting the party invited to a secret fight club, and introduces the only organized anti-Gerrileau faction. I particularly like the Cult of Tailo because they aren't anti-Gerrileau on any high minded moral grounds, they just have a personal grudge against him. None the less, this makes them useful allies to cozy up with. The fights the players can bet on or participate in are also good sources of information. Encountering their first giant ant in a controlled environment is a good education, and feels less forced than the graveyard's caretaker just happening to know a lot about the ants. The purpose of these locations is to help players equip themselves with the knowledge they'll need in the latter half of the adventure. This is good adventure design! I only wish the locations felt like they had a bit more of a life of their own.

I expect my players, and many players, might get stuck on the question of why this settlement is worth risking life and limb to save. Even if Gerrileau and his slavers were ousted from power, the hoodwinked settlers don't strike me as being particularly opposed to the slavery they've been benefiting from. In fact the module even notes that its introduction "appeased" them at a time when they were suffering from labor shortages. The closing notes of the module offer an answer: that once free from the predatory attacks of the ants, the last free native peoples may form an alliance with the party. In essence, if the party cures smallpox they can find allies to help them push out Columbus. I really wish this angle had been woven into the module much earlier. I had the distinct impression up until that last page that there was no significant surviving native population with which the party could ally themselves. Perhaps one of the fighters in the Slaughterhouse could have been someone who snuck into the city, and was trying to earn enough local currency to buy a friend's freedom. Maybe the ghosts under the Red House could have been more talkative. The party needs some contact with a native faction so that the players can conceptualize helping them as an option, even if the faction they encounter is too scattered to help them at the moment.

A final note before moving on from Badama: Tito's self-insert hireling & gravestone are a cute signature on his work. I fully endorse them. (Although 30 sp a day for a maceman's service? It's highway robbery is what it is!)

Depending on how much information gathering the party did, the wastes beyond Badama will be more or less difficult to navigate and survive. Even in the best of circumstances, treading a straight line for 50 miles through a featureless wasteland sounds nearly impossible. To complicate things, the base of the ant hill is down in a crater, so it won't be visible on the horizon until the party is quite close. This stretch of the game will depend largely on how an individual referee manages overland exploration. Do they enjoy orienteering mini games, or do they let the party zip straight across? It's a section of play that could take multiple hours, or less than a minute, depending on where a group's interests are. All the module offers by way of content here is hex map and a matrix of 24 random encounters, which is all it really needs. As before, the encounters are good, and I think this is the only place in the module where the party can encounter free native peoples: a group of 3-8 travelers.

The Ant Hill is not a traditionally mapped dungeon. Instead there's a navigational mini game in which players make a 2d10 roll that determines both how they move, and whether they encounter any notable chambers or foes. On the one hand this is sensible. Exploring an anthill using traditional means would be tediously labyrinthine. Obfuscating the process with a bit of random chance is good! On the other hand, completely randomizing navigation doesn't sit well with me. Play seems to devolve to the party rolling dice, the referee quietly noting their position, then telling them to roll dice again with a few breaks in the action for encounters. There's nothing stopping players from coming up with clever plans for how to bypass or speed up the navigational mini game, and it wouldn't be hard for a good referee to leverage this system to accommodate that. However, even in the absence of clever plans, I feel that the game ought to be offering choices to the players about whatever their current activity is. This need not be elaborate. Perhaps there could be two lists of clues: one that points towards the queen, and one which doesn't. Before each navigation roll, the referee reads a clue from each list. If the party follows the good clues they roll 2d10 as normal, but if they follow one of the bad clues they roll 2d8. Progress is made on a roll of 10+, so the penalty for bad choices is not onerous. I'm sure there are many options even better than this, but it's important that players have something to think about and learn from during any phase of play.

As an odd note, using the navigational minigame as-written, it's nearly impossible for the party to leave. The bottom 4 results of the 2d10 roll (10% chance of occurring) all cause the party to ascend. This low chance makes sense, since players wishing to get to the bottom of the dungeon don't want to accidentally go up, and would only do it if they got really lost. If players said they wanted to leave the dungeon, my instinct would be to reverse the table so the odds were weighted in the direction they wanted to travel. However, the book says "Those trying to ascend will roll 2d10+1." Which means only the bottom 3 results of the table (6% chance of occurring) can lead to the exit. Presumably there's a mistake here somewhere, either in the way the information is written or the way I'm reading it, but it's a very odd little tidbit.

Once at the bottom of the hill players can confront the ant queen and her bodyguard—Gerrileau's half-insect son. Even if fought separately they're both tough foes relative to other encounters in the adventure. I almost wonder if any party that could defeat them wouldn't be equally capable of simply taking over Badama by force. Sadly, fighting seems to be the only real option since the queen has her mind set on killing or subjugating all human life in the region. It would be nice if her description gave us a little more insight into her motivation. If the referee knew why the ant queen wanted to kill all humans they'd have some basis from which they could respond if the party attempted to negotiate. It doesn't need to be much: perhaps she's afraid the humans will destroy her if she doesn't destroy them first, perhaps she views the humans as competition for resources, or maybe she just wants revenge for all the ants who've been squished under human feet.

I do like that if the party defeat her they can discover a discarded bit of a god's body in her belly. Something that fell from the sky to make this crater, and which set events in motion when she ate it. There's a little table to determine what godbit she ate, with stuff like a toenail the players can use as a scimitar, or a kidney stone that protects the bearer from dangers.

This adventure improves on many of the things I quibbled over in my Sacrebleu! review. The information design is improved. The public domain art is used to better effect. The ant hill is a more interesting location to explore than Sacrebleu!'s goblin fortress. Flesh Hill is more ambitious. It has its own flaws, but in most respects is a marked improvement over the author's earlier work. I confess I don't find giant ants very compelling as antagonists, especially when compared to goblins with the memories of WW1 French soldiers. Perhaps I would feel differently if I'd ever been to the Argentenian Patagonia on which the module's setting is based. According to the New Zealand Deprartment of Conservation, the ants there are "one of the world’s most problematic ant species." I've only ever lived places where ants are cute and harmless. None the less, this is by a wide margin one of the better modules I've read for Bones of Contention.

Flesh Hill was created by Tito B.A. It's available as a PDF from DriveThruRPG for $0.75, discounted from $2.00. According to the book's launch announcement on Reddit, all profits from its sale go towards fighting children's cancer. I was not able to get in touch with Tito to confirm if this is still the case, or what charity the funds would be directed towards.

Update (July 11, 2022): In a post on his own blog, Tito B.A. clarified that the donation drive did happen when the book launched, but is not presently ongoing.