A Pinch of Salt: Churn Rate

Author: Ian Yusem
Artist: Sajan Rai
Reviewer: Dan D.
System: Mothership
Run as Referee

General Disclaimer: I share a couple discord servers with Ian and we've chatted on occasion.

MANHUNT

Manhunt is a alternate ruleset for Mothership where you play as the monsters, found as part of Hull Breach Vol 01. Four new classes are included: the Broodmother (your classic spawn-producing xenomorph), the Leviathan (gigantic ooze), the Anomaly (weird psychic egg-thing), and the Parasite (a puppeteer worm-centipede). I love these, and their art, and in practice they fulfilled their individual niches excellently.

Instead of gaining Stress, Manuhunt PCs gain Wrath - from killing humans, failing stat checks, and watching fellow aliens die. Hitting 10 Wrath triggers a mutation (some useful, some not), and resets the alien back down to 0. It's a nifty way to get around the general lack of tool usage.

CHURN RATE

I'll warn you up-front, I messed this one up big time - I was rusty as a referee, I was running it right from the book with little prep time, and I forgot a major component of the adventure. Some other factors made everything more of a mess, but those were mostly external factors without much bearing on the module itself. The players still said they had fun, though I can't say I agreed - or that it was entirely the module's fault.

First, the good.

The premise is great: the alien PCs have been captured by a corpo VIP to be imprisoned as trophies on her private space station, and they've just broken out of containment.

Layout is excellent: the adventure is two pages on a single spread, keywords are bolded, room contents are bullet lists. The map is clean and easy to read.

Now the bad.

Churn Rate involves engaging with a heavily-fortified location filled with well-equipped and well-coordinated enemies. You're stuck in tight quarters, with no means of exit (sans the one you need to the Executive's head to activate), and if any witnesses or evidence last an in-game minute the station goes into high alert.

My players immediately revealed themselves, and didn't manage to kill anyone - there were enough agents that, even if they had, the survivor would have sounded the alarm. An in-game minute seems a bit much to me - these are the security crew, they're going to have walkie-talkies.

So we ended up in a situation where the no alert stage wasn't even part of the session. Maybe this could have been avoided, but I think the root of the issue is present in the premise - these are security staff - they're going to have walkie-talkies. All it takes is one of them to hit a button and scream "security breach in [room name]!" and your cover is blown, immediate high alert.

While in the high alert state, all agent encounters are replaced by panicked civilians and the Executive you're after gets taken to the fortified saferoom with the guards stationed outside. I made my critical error here, and didn't make the agent -> civilian switch - the players had to fight through a near-constant stream of agents. It'd make sense, right? They know the aliens are here, split the crew between the saferoom guards and the squads hunting down the aliens.

An agent's standard weapon is a 1d100 damage chaingun, and they patrol in groups. I reduced them to one chaingun per pod, revolvers for the rest, out of necessity - even with the increased damage output and health-restoration abilities of the aliens, it strikes me as too much.

This got to be a problem when we factored in the party train. It makes a regular circuit of the station, visiting almost every room on a 2 minute loop. It's filled with partying corpos, security agents, and a mounted cannon, and it was an absolute pain in the ass every single step of the way. As soon as it was introduced, the players were constantly asking "where's the train?" Which wouldn't have been an issue if I had remembered to swap the agents out, but since I hadn't it was a major combat encounter that was eternally around the next corner. Gods be praised they never actually had to fight it.

There are a few other minor issues - the location of windows is somewhat confusingly worded (they're supposed to be between rooms, but they're not marked on the map - and that also makes stealth basically impossible and is even more things to track), certain interactives are mentioned but never linked to anything (ie draining the steam from the sauna - there's no sign of how to do this)

Final Thoughts

While my own mistakes as Warden made for a worse experience, and I've kept that bias in mind while writing this, I don't think Churn Rate is a very good showcase for the Manhunt rules - the small arena and tight security mean that you don't really get the xenomorph experience that Manhunt sells you. A more open adventure - picking off humans in an isolated colony while dealing with increasing security measures while you try and find the MacGuffin - feels like it would be more appropriate as an introduction.

While escaping from a containment facility is fun on paper, it's a trickier genre than those plans would imply. Whole lot of rather boring SCP stories about violence in indiscernible hallways filled with generic security mooks.

A Pinch of Salt: The Drain

 

The Drain

Author: Ian Yusem

Reviewer: Dan D.

System: Mothership

$4.99 pdf 

Run as Referee

 

General Disclaimer: I share a couple discord servers with Ian and we've chatted on occasion.

 

Part 0: The Introduction

I return to this post three quarters of a year after I first drafted it. I had hoped to get a second session of it played, but it was never to be. Say la vee.

Part 1: The Module

The Drain is a 16 page 0-level funnel for Mothership, where the players take the role of prisoners in a Bible-school reform prison tasked with recovering a relic from a collapsing colony habitat in exchange for clearing their remaining sentences. The habitat is presented as a pointcrawl on an inverted cone, which handily makes for a very nice looking map.

Pregen characters, blank sheets, and some mp3 files of creepy radio chatter are provided (alas, I wasn't able to use this last one). Character sheets have art by Evlyn Moreau, module art is Sean McCoy's instantly-recognizable scribble art, and map by Andrew Walter - it's all excellent.

The Vibes are strong here. Prisoners wearing tinsel halos. Horrible fucked-up meat monsters. The feeling of unease when you're driving a country road in mid summer and seeing signs about Jesus opposite houses that you can't ever imagine being new or whole or unrotten.

The writing is what you hope for in a Mothership module - tables, bullet points, bolded key terms.

Part 2: In Play

The opening of the module - unarmed prisoners disgorged from boarding craft into an open battlefield - is effective imagery but it works less well in practice. You're instructed to roll for two gas clouds per stretch of no man's land (three stretches in total), but it's unclear as to whether or not they were to be simultaneous, sequential, or choose 1. I had to fudge the first roll of the session because one of my players would have lost all four of their characters instantly to nerve gas.

I feel the influence of the first stage of Deep Carbon Observatory, but here it's just "You're in a trench, now you're making saves against gas, now you're in another trench, now you're making saves again". One cycle was more than sufficient, and by the third and final I was getting bored with the repetition. Not a good place to be for an opening.

Moving past the battlefield, the players reached an abandoned farmstead, where they found  a remote capable of shaping the nanite-infused soil of the station. Single sentence description, no mechanical interaction.

It swiftly became the highlight of the entire session. In the next encounter (an open field with a sniper up on a billboard) they were building earthworks for cover and raised a tower with a ramp to reach the abandoned VTOL hovering above the field. It was some fantastic tool-based problem solving, the sort of ideal RPG scenario.

The session ended with the players squeezing the surviving prisoners onto the VTOL, and which would allow them to cross the river into the ring. Unfortunately, due to scheduling issues among the players, I was never able to gather folks for the second half (and this post laid fallow nor nine months).

Had I played further, I would likely have started throwing in consequences for the time-cost of using the remote, but even then not too much - folks were having a great time.

As random encounters only occur when moving to a new area, I pre-rolled them and any supply caches earlier in the day, which made things nice and smooth (and was an entertaining enough way of wasting time at work)

Part 3: In Summary

In the time since I've played, The Drain has been expanded to a trilogy (alongside Inferno and Wrath of God). I have not looked into the other two parts (there is so much Mothership stuff out there), but I feel like I would check them out if the mood takes me.

Would I run it again? I would with a revision of the opening sequence - possibly adding some variable or choice for the players. Do you run for the shelled structure, or to the treeline? Something of that nature. But the rest of it was fun, I'd give it a thumbs-up.

A Pinch of Salt: Ekphrastic Beasts

 

• Reviewer: Dan D.
• Author: Janaka Stucky
• Art: Ellie Gille, Jeremy Hush, Joe Keinberger, Nathan Reidt, Arik Roper, Skinner
• System: D&D 5e
• Physical copy received as gift from third party
• Read, unused

Bucking all predictability, I am reviewing a 5e product for this Pinch of Salt. I am a maverick who must be stopped, soon there will be anarchy in the streets, cats and dogs living in harmony, etc etc.

Now, this obviously means there's a rather large bias to get out of the way. I will do my best, and likely fail, at passing by the aspects of 5e that would send me down a rabbit hole of yelling into the void. I am judging on a curve, and I am not going to read the stat blocks. This book is not designed for me, take that as you will.

What I am Looking For

As this is a bestiary, I have a rather concise list of things I am looking for and making judgements upon.

• Image - Does the monster have an interesting/noteworthy/memorable visual appearance (via art or description)?
• Concept - What a monster is and does outside of appearance. If I was telling you about a monster without the book on hand, would my description be cool?
• Connectivity - How does the monster fit in and interact with the world? What is its relationship to the environment, other creatures, and human beings?

The best bestiary entries, I feel, are the ones that provide a scenario that gives context to the encounter with the creature. If the intended interaction is combat, then there needs to be reasons for why, some sort of link between the monster and the surrounding world - "it's an evil monster" is worse connectivity than "its home river has been polluted and it is angry and sick".

An entry can get by with middling image and concept and good connectivity, but the reverse is rarely true, and all three is a welcome break from the trend.

(Now, these three points might seem to lend themselves to a sort of point-scoring system. I do not like point scoring systems, so these will remain the mere impression of one.)

The Opening

The book opens with a sizable forward by the author describing how the book came to be and some of the nature of its contents. While this is a nice touch, I do think that it ran entirely too long for the amount of context it provided.

Most noteworthy is the bit on how the implied setting behind the book took shape as the creatures were being written. I did appreciate these points of tying things together, but I tended to find that they only went one way: entries could directly reference backwards, but never forwards (for example, the Xivvians directly reference their servants the Lamplighters by name, but the Lamplighters do not mention the Xivvians.)

What's In a Name

Ekphrasis is the act of a vivid textual description of visual art. It is a very nice and cromulent word, but for all the focus it gets in the forward it is unfortunately absent from this book - the art carries all the legwork and I found the words to be weak overall. The writeups fall afoul of the bane of bestiaries everywhere, filler. Lots of words spent on how dangerous something is, when that is readily communicated by concept and appearance alone. Many monsters have their writeups truncated even further still by the size of their stat blocks, or by the addition of pencil sketches that eat up a column, or just leaving the column mostly blank.

The art itself is of varied but overall above average quality thanks to Ellie Gille's dark fairy-tale watercolors and Joe Kineberger's chaotic grotty messes, which are standouts. Unfortunately the other pieces give it a more uneven visual quality, especially later on with the Xivvians, where there is a cluster of works by the same artist on the same subject.

 

The Monsters

Arrikath - A cackling demon, and that's about it. There is the mention that some wizards will summon it, but the description does not tell us why they would or what they would get out of it. Few are the wizards who will summon a cackling demon simply for kicks and giggles, they should be looking for something only this demon can provide. It's the core principle of demon summoning.

Azithaenth - The description is good - predatory shadowy monsters that arrived with a rain of meteorite impacts, that have been nearly driven to extinction by organized hunting efforts. Solid concept here, I can imagine a rural township digging up what they think is just a huge chunk of iron and unwittingly releasing one of these. Let down by the art on this one, though, for reasons I cannot describe.

Bellmodeth - A wee demon who hunts down folks who have reneged on their contracts. Not much more than that. Does imply a setting where deals with devils are relatively commonplace, would have been nice to have had something else enforcing that in the book.

Bezglazzy - Creepy bogie in the woods who steals eyes. I was confused as to whether or not it was a unique monster. Did not have really any good ways of onboarding the thing, it mostly keeps to itself and you're most likely to just stumble upon it in the deep woods. Which is fine and good I suppose.

Bog Hag - Fey of the swamps that turned monstrous after the humans arrived and the trauma of having their homes stolen was internalized as festering hatred and sorrow. Now they lurk at the edges of settlements, devouring unlucky travelers and wayward children.

Böogrú - A minor old god summoned by pagans up in the hills, needs steady blood sacrifice to remain appeased. I like this one - gives off the idea that some cult long ago fucked up royally and now the descendants have to disappear people on the regular to deal with the problem their predecessor's caused. It can tie neatly into "the cult has disbanded, no one is feeding it, it's on the prowl." Good stuff, I can work with it.

Changeling - I feel like this one didn't need a separate entry, as its linked intrinsically to the bog hags. To whit, these changelings come about when a bog hag devours an infant and then gives birth to its changeling double, which is horrifically gross and I approve of it. Everything else is just normal changeling stuff, though.

Chiropterror - I keep calling them chiropractors in my head. Unavoidable I think. Here we get a somewhat anomalous (though more appear later) segment of italicized prose. There is no omniscient narrator description. They're nasty little cave monsters, and I do love me some horrible things in the dark, which makes me wonder why they are here because 5e is not a dying in caves game. But they would be a fine fit for a Jacob Geller video.

Daemdirisi - A unique entity, being an ancient warchief who was resurrected (foolishly) by the tribe's shaman, to predictable results. This is another one where I can see the hooks: the few remaining descendants of that people, the pressing threat of the past haunting the now. You have a good, solid reason to go track it down and fight it. I really like this one.

Death's Head Shrike - Skull-headed bird. Human skull, not bird skull. All birds have bird skulls as their head, except these, which do not. A swarm animal. Nothing to see here. Nothing of note.

Deepsea Wight - Love the art on this one; nasty gelatinous abyssopelagic undead. Mention of the fact that they will drag themselves onto land or on deck wins some huge bonus points for creep factor.

Den Mother - Ents are tree-shepherds, Den Mothers are that for wolves. I love the idea, but it's wasted as a bestiary entry. Would be much more interesting as an NPC.

Disciple of the Morning Star - Necromancer cultists in their tombs filled with terrible goodies. They have apparently been mostly erased from the historical record (entry says that very few institutions keep record of them, and those that do keep it restricted), and that to me says that what they actually did was interesting. We do not get that information, which is a shame.

Dream Serpent - Sleepy dream-hoarding dragon. No real hooks, unfortunately.

Drosyrad - Bog nymph, nothing of note.

Fibroh - This is just a goblin. It's a fairy goblin, a Midsummer Night's Eve type of goblin, but goblins is goblins and this is one of them.

Fire Sentinel - Enormous magmatic giants that burst up from the earth's mantle for the express purpose of "fuck this place in particular". 4/5ths of the page is their stat block, which is the first instance here of an unfortunately common trend in bestiaries, especially 5e ones: including stat blocks for entities that no one in their right mind would fight, because they are instant death.

Foundling - Feral children. Unfortunately, there isn't anything to them beyond that, just ordinary feral children. No strange gods or weird gang rituals or anything of that note. As someone who is also writing about feral children, I must register my disappointment.

Golkih - Fills a kobold niche, I suppose. Weird nasty dog thing, up in the mountains. Nothing of interest.

Grinlene - A variety of vengeful undead, undermined by the fact that there is no telling what causes them to happen. Possibly a drowned woman? So close, we could have had a build-it-yourself whodunnit adventure out of this monster but the text is silent as to the cause and place of death.

Hàskis - A column of ash with a burning skull on it. Would be a nothing of note entry, were it not for the fact that the text proposes the "legends" that they are either trolls that got dunked in magma and have been perpetually burning ever sense, or engineered hunting dogs for fire giant sorcerers. Both of these are great, except for how they are couched in "legends say", thus making the interesting part suspect in its veracity. Combine the two concepts and you have a killer monster idea, but hiding behind "legend says" implicitly tells the audience that these theories are not the case.

Horyx - Beast-headed men, warriors from afar. Could have said where they are from, or why they are here, but there is nothing.

Iwsii - Fey oracles. I like the design and the art, but they would be rather clumsy to fit into adventures.

Keyhoarder - Another creature that should be an NPC. A fey that loves gathering secrets. If the secret is locked away, they will steal the key. The write-up does say that one can and likely should make deals with them to get places, but continues on to spend half the page on a stat block instead of fleshing out the magic merchant aspect.

Kithrui Ghaisha - Possibly my favorite monster in the book. I really like this one for its clarity of concept - a big nasty demon that is drawn to sites of catastrophe and loss, feeding on all that bad mojo and then using the deaths of everyone who fails to kill it to keep on going. This is good! Actionable monster with roots in the world.

Kythys & Mhaothon - Gods with statblocks. Hard pass from me, don't truck with that. Another entry no one would fight.

Lamplighter - Overwhelmed by their concept. Protohuman sorcerers who astral-projected into the void, were seen and consumed by Spooky Alien Forces, now acting as servants and beacons in the world. Great for flavor, but I feel like I need some serious elbow grease to find a place to put them.

Murúch - Basically a siren or mermaid that disguises itself as a large fish, gets hauled up by the fishermen, and starts eating people. Likely a monster one hears about in retrospect and then specifically goes out to hunt, which is good.

Nagaraja - Enormous primordial serpents. There is no reason to fight this, or interact with it at all.

Plague Knight - Undead fascist crusaders. Ended up undead because they were playing around with occult powers and blew themselves up, which is funny. The plague aspect seems tacked on, though, it's got nothing really to do with the backstory.

Răzbuna - A nifty concept. Horrible monster caused when you kill a wolfpack leader, would tie in very nicely with the Den Mothers, and also gets a bonus for being a monster that feels like it has some real folkloric feet to stand on. I could imagine hearing this in a book of traditional stories from somewhere in the real world.

Reanimaggot - Pretty typical shambling undead, but the name is fun and they're nice and gross.

Rüu Gisin - Frog knights, but with no real way to interact. They're just the size of normal frogs and their only listed behavior is "protecting their home", which is hardly anything unique among the animal kingdom.

Scroll Keeper - I am a sucker for libraries at the center of the multiverse, but these guys are ill-served. The random table of scrolls have potentially fun titles like "Scroll of Political Discourse" and "Scroll of Mechanical Physics", but all they give is like a +2 to a skill.

Sea Shepherd - Like an ent, but a giant, and for the ocean. No reason to fight them. More an aspect of landscape than anything else.

Sel'gorach - Unique monster, duchess of hell, love the art (possibly my favorite of the book), the description tells us nothing of value. The big scary dangerous demon is big, scary, dangerous, and a demon. Also she cannot fly.

Spider Queen - What it says on the tin. Only real difference is that it looks mostly like a human, most of the time.

Strix - Bonus points for giving Lilith the proper screech owl rep she deserves. Doesn't really have anything to do, though.

Thounquis - Killer concept - island civilization ruled by necromancers, whose beaches are patrolled by these corpse-amalgamation monsters. Yes please, I love it, I would like to know more. The art is a let down, though, it's just kinda a multiheaded zombie in the black cloak. The concept carries it, without the island of the necromancers it would be quite dull.

Thoz'gorin - Centauroid battle demons. Nothing of note

Tomb of the Ancients - An inanimate object with stats. Brief mentions of horrible treasures of the old gods within, none of which are actually provided. A shame, because the text sets them up as loci for weird events and leftover arcane knowledge and terrible entropic/mutagenic effects.

Transdimensional Dragon - It has an ability called "Pure Witness of Quantum Revelation", which is rad, but again we must ask in what circumstances would anyone both want to fight this and reach any outcome that isn't false vacuum collapse localized entirely within your kitchen.

Unholy Creeper - Carnivorous plants on desecrated ground. Would honestly be better served as part of the writeup of potential hazards in desecrated ground.

Xivvians - My least favorite part of the book. A subsection of extradimensional flesh monsters that are following the Lamplighters to our world, fair enough. But the section just goes on for so long, with so many different varieties, and the art swiftly gets repetitive on top of being a step down from the other pieces. There's very little differentiation between the monsters, and the descriptions are rarely on the same page as the picture (a shift from the entire rest of the book). lots of talk of stuff no character will ever see, learn, or use. Artifacts mentioned, no list given. Overstays its welcome. All the names and forms blur together.

Ysherosz - So, so close. A "kingmaker" demon that is attracted to those who value power over all else. Let down by the fact that it possesses the victim, rather than a more engaging conflict point of someone making more and more heinous acts to please it. Making it an unvarnished possession makes it too smooth and neat.

Zhizhutu - A human head, but with spider legs.

All told, there are 16 aberrations, 5 beasts, 1 construct, 2 dragons, 9 fey, 7 fiends, 3 giants, 6 humanoids (which is silly, since they include the frog knights as humanoid), 6 monstrosities, 2 plants, and 7 undead.

Best in Show: Bog Hag, Böogrú, Daemdirisi, Den Mother/Răzbuna, Kithrui Ghaisa - I could plug these into a map with basically no elbow grease and it would work. All of these have strong enough hooks that I could make a scenario out of them with hardly any work on my part, and that's gold star material.

Final Thoughts

I'm saddened somewhat. The desire to make good art is here, and in many places shines through brilliantly, but it is hamstrung and stymied at every point by its attempts to fit in with a format that does not serve its strengths and multiplies its weaknesses. It falls short of its goals because of the mold it's been forced into, which is a major problem for an art book.

I'd like to get an answer from the author, or anyone else who is in-tune with the design philosophies of the 5e sphere - what is the motivation behind including stats for what should be instant-kill entities, or those that there would otherwise be no reason to fight? Is there an expectation that players will regularly be in an appropriate power range to fight these? Is it an obligation to keep with the 5e format? I legitimately don't understand. I get why it was made for 5e, but I don't get why that must entail making the exact same mistakes. The forward has a section addressing things like alignment issues, but alignment is still in the stat block. Saying that something is a problem and then doing it anyway doesn't solve the problem.

A cautionary lesson, I suppose.

A Pinch of Salt: The Words and Deeds of the Chain of Tlachic

 

The Words and Deeds of the Chain of Tlachic

Joe Young & Vivian Johnson

System agnostic

Physical copy received as gift from third party

Read, unplayed

**

I'd not heard of Chain of Tlachic before receiving it, and I haven't heard anyone mention it since. It opens with the following phrase:

"THIS BOOK IS VULNERABLE, DISPOSABLE, AND CURSED."  

It's part of a longer exhortation to take a pen to the book and write over what is already in it, and what will come to be the defining feature of this adventure. We'll get to that in a bit.

Chain of Tlachic is a 55 page megadungeon. Or, rather, it is what I am here and now calling a micromega dungeon - an environment that gives the impression of grand scope and scale but is nice and compact in practice. A megadungeon that it is conceivable to read and use with busy adults in 2-3 hour bites.

(A personal aside: I adore these sorts of dungeons, when compared to their larger counterparts.)

 Each of the 17 areas of the dungeon consists of a two-page spread, containing:

• Artwork of the area
  
• Single-paragraph description of the area
• The primary threat of the area, including the tactical difficulty and numbers
• Dynamic elements found in the area
• Potential developments / responses to player actions in the area
• Connections with other areas

The book hinges on those last three points. In lieu of providing any mechanics or traditional room keys, Chain of Tlachic puts its primary focus on the relationships between factions, monsters, places, and things, and how they effect one another. Nothing stays the same; actions taken here will have influence there. Returning to an area will reveal a place different from when you first came through. It's not a new concept, but it is very refreshing to have a book that sheds mostly anything that could get in the way.

The "mark up this book" notice from the beginning comes back here - practically, it's the easiest way to keep track of what changes have been effected. In doing so, each copy of the book will, over the course of play, become a unique artifact. The book is the notes, and this is explicitly intentional.

(And let us always praise two page spreads. Less page turning = less problems.)

**

The framework of a Chain of Tlachic campaign is that the players are dwarves - constructed servants of the god Tlachic - attempting to reclaim the depths beneath their fortress from the Red Lady. If a dwarf dies, they are reborn in the Stronghold at the top of the map. This is a simple set up, and sufficient for dealing both with why players are in the dungeon and the inevitable deaths and reshuffled schedules that come with any campaign. It would be possible, I suppose, to play through this module using normal, non-dwarf characters. I wouldn't recommend it - something feels like it would be lost.

The book-as-notes-as-artifact approach requires either a physical copy or a print-out the pdf. It would run fine enough without engaging with that element, or to mark up the pdf, but I feel that would miss something.  Maybe that's just me wanting to be in line with the spirit of the thing.

**

On to the less novel and appealing - Spelling and grammar mistakes are common throughout, and the art can often get muddy and difficult to parse. Encouraging readers to mark up the book means these are solvable problems (they would have been solvable problems regardless, but it's nice to have authors who are vibing on the same wavelength), but that doesn't stop them from existing in the first place. 

More pressingly, the four artifacts that have a major effect on the final conflict with the Red Lady are only brought up as such in that final segment of the book - not when the items actually appear in the dungeon. There are likely other such missing connections in the book, less important and less noticeable, but this is a pretty critical oversight for a dungeon so focused on those connections. Sure it's fixable, and would be whether or not I had direction to draw in the book, but I'd rather not have to fix something central to the adventure.

**

To wrap this up (since I feel like I have hit the point of going in circles should I keep going) what I like best about the Chain of Tlachic is that it is rough around the edges. It is the sort of awkward amateur work that is the lifeblood of a healthy artistic scene, and I'll recycle a quote from Noah Caldwell-Gervais:

"Most players are willing to forgive anything a game actually does if they’re enamored with what a game wants to do”

Sounds about right for this.

A Pinch of Salt: Lair of the Lamb

 

Lair of the Lamb

Reviwer: Dan D.

Author: Arnold K

System: GLOG

Free pdf

Run as Referee (using home rules)

**

Up front I think I should note that Arnold is literally the reason I am part of this scene at all - Goblin Punch was my introduction to the OSR and it was Arnold's comments on my own blog that got me properly involved in the G+ scene back in the day.

Right then, that's out of the way.

Part 1: The Module

Lair of the Lamb is a free 51 page pdf containing a 46-room dungeon and the core rules for Arnold's revised Goblin Laws of Gaming. I will be focusing primarily on the first half of the dungeon itself - while I am fond of the GLOG and its infectious spread around the blogosphere I didn't use it while running the Lair, and I likewise did not use the expanded second floor with the ghouls.

Lair of the Lamb is a funnel and teaching dungeon - every player gets a handful of level 0 peasants who die in one hit. Everyone wakes up in a pitch black room with no possessions. There's a monster in here with you. Get out if you can. Dungeoncrawling is reduced to its core elements: light management, risk assessment, using the tools at one's disposal, creative solutions. Since tools are so rare, squeezing every possible use out of them is necessary. Since challenges are open ended, those unusual uses are rewarded.

(An example of an open-ended challenge: a sarcophagus with a false bottom. There's a room below filled with treasure, but it's a 10 foot drop. The edges of the sarcophagus are sharp enough to slice ropes.)

Room descriptions are minimalist - things of note in bold, NPCs in red, treasure in green, bullet points. Good, easily readable formatting. Each page has the relevant subsection of the map up in the corner. Precisely as much description as the room warrants (a supply closet, for example, is described only as "Broom, Gong, and Hammer"), but nonetheless is evocative in that short space - "A throne of sheep bones and unfired clay", "A golden sensory deprivation helmet", "A mural of a crab being groomed on a woman's lap", "[The Lamb] reeks of blood and ammonia", and so on. Single sentences, nothing fancy, more than enough to work with. I could add additional details as I saw fit or let them pass on by without issue.

The art is minimal - some public domain images, a drawing of the Lamb by Warren D, and some illustrations of classes by Evlyn Moreau. Precisely what is needed for this sort of thing.

The Lamb itself is the highlight, of course- an excellent setpiece monster, disgusting and unsettling and terrifyingly dangerous (if you're not super lucky with encounter rolls like we were). It's the primary, and potentially only, monster encounter in the entire dungeon - the only other ones are either sequestered on the second floor or won't appear until the Lamb is killed.

It's like a xenomorph - a big, flabby, piss-smelling, skull-headed abomination-unto-Nuggan xenomorph. And, of course, another prime teaching tool for OSR gameplay: Monsters are dangerous, monsters have traits that can be used to your advantage: (fear of fire, fear of injury, identifiable smell), combat can and often should be avoided, combat can be stacked in your favor.

Part 2: Running It

For the actual playthrough I ran the dungeon with five players (including fellow BoC member Ava) over two sessions, each ~2 hours long, which turned out to be enough to clear out the main floor of the Lair. Each player controlled two characters, with two additional peasants as backup for a group (for a bit of additional flavor I recommended that each pair of characters had some sort of pre-existing connection. Mostly sibling pairs)

Thanks to some merciful random encounter rolls and some clever work on the players' parts, they avoided a total slaughter. Drinking goat blood to slake the initial dehydration gave them an early edge, and one player consorting with the demon DAVOK gave them one very handy fireball during their first major encounter with the Lamb.

Several of the players had played in the Lair before, and that enhanced the experience, I think - it's so open ended that prior knowledge opens up new and creative avenues as according to the situation. I don't think people completely new to it would have dabbled in DAVOK's obviously bad news treasure chest - and they even went as far as to use the six second prophecy fruit to check for a trap!

High point was late in session 2, when a character was bitten by a poisonous snake. Instead of save vs death, I did the "gradual infection with spreading patch of gross color" trick, and the PC managed to survive by slicing her arm off in a trapped coffin before the poison had progressed past her elbow.

They managed to trap the Lamb under fallen masonry for long enough to clear out the last thing they wanted to investigate and escape - they didn't kill it, so they never encounter the Little Lambs or the priests, but by the end 10/12 of the party managed to survive and they had recovered both DAVOK and the necromancy tome.

Perhaps most praiseworthy is that Lair of the Lamb got me to actually keep track of time and light in a dungeon, and I actually found it fun - that has never happened, in all my years of playing. Not once, until now, and unlikely to happen again anytime soon, I think. But it happened, all the same.

I ended the second session with the survivors opening up the door to reveal a sky dominated by a gas giant and its moons, orbital infrastructure like a silver spiderweb across the sky. Because the great thing about starting off underground, is that you can put whatever you want on the surface.

All told, I think the Lair is the kind of dungeon we only get every couple years - one that's been intentionally designed to be the best dungeon it can be, rather than a collection of stone rooms and random table contents. Superficially, the former might look like the latter, but practically there is vast gulf between them. And even beyond that, it's free, it has rules in it, it can get people started with something to read the pdf on, some scrap paper, a few pencils and one set of dice. That's prime RPGs for me: free and wild and weird and raw.

Highest recommendation, without qualification. There will be something in here worth reading and learning from, no matter your circumstances.