"Butchery Afoot," A Session One (Novelized) Recap

Why am I the only human with this bunch of freaks? Ragnar thought to himself, because only a fool might say something aloud in the presence of so many armed associates. The assassin looked around at the group who was traveling with him in the forest. There were four—four!—reptiloids, an insect man (was it man? did insects have sexes? Ragnar wondered), a furred cat-fox that walked on two legs, and a fairy. He was trying to remember the names that they had told him.

The reddish dragonborn, the guy with big axe, barbaric for sure, not sure of its name. The other dragbonborn, the blue one with leather armor, and all kinds of weapons dangling loosely, that was Kyriee’, although Ragnar wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce the apostrophe, because he’d never learned the draconic tongue. The turtly one—another axe, I mean, how many big axes did a party need?—was one of those holy warriors, and maybe called Xopa; it was weird, like, you could see the abs through its under-shell. The last of the scaly ones was really small, not bulky like the other three, and had patches of what looked like dirty gold or maybe a shiny rash on his skin; he was Grazztttt. The fourth ’t’ was silent, Ragnar remembered that, and if he had to hear one more time about the greatworms that were coming to eat the earth, he was going to cut that little kobold’s throat, it didn’t matter who his dirt gods were or how he served them. The insect had six limbs, was a self-professed card shark named See-Ess Lewis-Hyde, if Ragnar had heard correctly, and surely he had, because the dang thing spoke right inside his head, not like normal. The pixie was called Cassia, was raised by birds, was all into nature, and had some alleged tragic backstory. You want tragic backstory? Ragnar’s backstory, now that was tragedy. The only other mammal was at least quiet, and liked to help people, and that was Sami. Ragnar had seen this foxling throw ice knives and frost and even sprout thorns from the ground, so that was cool, even if the weapon was a crummy old sling that was certainly no ginormous axe.

All this cogitating had made the journey fly by for Ragnar, and now they had arrived in a village, the most boring, generic village he’d probably ever been in. Wait. A. Minute. The door to the butcher’s was open. There was a bunch of red inside, moreso than usual for a meatmonger’s, and there was no movement visible. Strange.

Within moments this party, this great bunch of warriors and worshippers jammed their way heedlessly inside, rather incautiously considering the amount of blood on the walls of the place, blood without any obvious corresponding source. Within seconds, the kobold was licking the gore, and he said, “It’s a mix of two creatures’ fluids. Let us call them A positive and B negative. I cannot tell how long this has been here, but among the tall, fleshy ones, there’s always murder in places like this.”

Ragnar was offended by the short lizard, but he didn’t have time for dudgeon, because he was looking for the cash box. As this search was going on, the kobold’s eyes rolled back in his head and the door slammed.

It was then that the tortle suggested they should interview the villagers about this potential crime scene, but thereupon learned the door was somehow now locked. The paladin slammed its be-shelled body fruitlessly against the wood in a failed bid to escape. The red dragonman tried, too. While all this was going on, the creepy bug guy leaned up against the spattered walls, and Ragnar swore he disappeared. No, wait, there he was … just very hard to pick out, that carapace, or whatever you call it, mostly matching the texture and color of the surface.

The pixie started going on about the vibe of the butcher shop, and someone said, “It’s meat retail, that’s what the vibe is, plus there’s extra blood all over the place!” She was already peering behind the counters, though, and shouted, in her tiny voice, “There’s a grinder back here, but it’s … surprisingly clean.” 

No sooner than this happened the paladin was swaggering (as paladins tend to do) toward the icebox, where presumably the carved and dressed wares were stored in this store. Grazztttt drew his mace and Sami started swinging a sling in a tight circular motion. 

There was meat in the coldroom, but not the normal kind for a merchant. Two human bodies hung from the meathooks in there. Two bodies that were mixed and matched. Two bodies that had pieces from other bodies sewn in.

For being an assassin, Ragnar was remarkably panicky, and looked for a place to hide, almost bumping into Lewis-Hyde. 

All the reptile-folk were fascinated by this development, some of them literally licking their chops, and they crowded into that room, despite the issues that might cause considering their cold-bloodedness. “You got this, buddy,” the kobold said, patting the tortle’s shell, and the paladin sorted out, or rather, pieced together that these two corpses had originally been only two bodies, but certain parts had been removed and swapped and re-assembled. The blue dragonman said he wanted to put the cadavers back into their proper order.

It was then that two rats were noticed, one crushed and one cold, but living. At least half the reptoids started discussing the ingestion of the deceased rodent.

Suddenly the fairy was gone, and in its place was a third rat, “New-York-sized,” whatever that means, squeaking apparently in conversation. In the meanwhile, however, the kobold cleric had begun trying to speak with the creature via other means. “I’m pretty charming with rats,” he noted aloud. In a preternatural show of willpower, the non-wildshaped, non-expired rat resisted Grazztttt’s overtures, which worried the cleric inordinately.

“You, too, shall be devoured by the worms, rat!” he spat.

“Shush, you’re ruining this, I’m trying to have a conversation here!” the pixie yelled, but no one understood her because she was just another squeaking rat, if extra-large.

Kyriee’ asked if he could kill the living rat, and no one asked which one.  

All this talk of rats brought a weird question unbidden to Ragnar’s mind. How could you tell if a rat was male or female?

Cassia tried again, dropping into what she hoped was rodent idiom that would be familiar enough to loosen those rat-lips, “How long you been chillin’ here, bro?” 

The surviving rat looked totally traumatized. You could see it in his little rat face, if you, too, were a rat.

“A devil,” it squealed, “I saw a devil, I saw demons!”

“Hey buddy, why are you so wise?” Grazztttt couldn’t let it go. 

“A demon came into me, made me that way.” 

It kind of sounded like the living rat was bullshitting. The kobold told the rest what he had heard, and somehow the party also learned the information Cassia had extracted, even though she wasn’t telepathic like See-Ess.

The paladin, one of those god-botherers who loved demonic lore, got the cleric to ask the rat if he knew the fiends’ names, even though Grazztttt said, “Demon names are closely held secrets in Gehenna,” for besides his encyclopedic knowledge of the beasts of the soil, he also knew of the nature of the beings of the lower planes.

The maybe just plain-old-York-sized rat revealed the “demons didn’t have a mind of their own, though,” which seemed to be an important clue. It was then that nearly everybody was grabbing at this informative vermin, but when the dust settled, the rodent was stuffed inside the tortle’s shell.

It was just after that the barbaric dragonkind noticed a trail of carnage toward a back entrance, which remarkably not one person–if they were persons here, because let’s admit it is a reasonable categorization question under the circumstances–had registered earlier. There were dead trees and a hole, and before long the lot of them were clambering down the pit to where a pool of murky water lay, its contents unknown, until the kobold set alight the branch Ragnar was holding to make a crude torch, and the pixie had made the water transparent with some minor magic. Sami readied the sling.

There were bones in the water. And there was an eye. Staring at them. Nearly everyone tried to grab the eyeball, which proved to be attached to a withered skull. The reptiles all wanted to possess and/or consume the skeletal contents of the pool.

Ragnar again asked himself, Why am I in this group filled with freaks?

A tunnel continued onward. There was a light at the end. There was also a door, a bit unclear where.

Kyriee’ had a brilliant idea: he checked the passage for traps … and found one, or at least an alarm system made out of rattling bones. 

Sami readied the sling.

* * *

Tune in next time, when the mysterious geography might get sorted out, when we might find what lies at the end of the tunnel, and who or what exactly set the alarm, not to mention who exsanguinated and (re)arranged the nearly forgotten mixed-up corpses in the shop above. 

When we might also answer the questions … [answered later]

Will Kyriee’ trip the trap he found? [no, traps were pretty much avoided, and Kyriee' left the group for the time being]

Will we find out the red dragonborn’s name? [yes, Bron]

Will Grazztttt finally be allowed a delicious meat snack? [we will have to ask Mister]

Will Ragnar realize the value of teammates? [yes, to hide behind when a chain devil came out] 

Will Xopa roll less than a 17? [amazingly, no, against very long odds]

Will rat-Cassia change back forms? [yes]  

Will See-Ess un-camouflage? [yes]  

Will Sami ever launch a slingstone? [no]

Will the party magically split into two? [yes] 

Inner City D&D, Year One

Academic joke I first heard in East Africa: What’s the dividing line between sociology and anthropology? Sociologists study those who wear pants. In case it’s not clear, the gag is a dig at how scholars themselves are unaware of their own biases, even with regard to the fundamental structures of their own disciplines. At the turn of the last century, I came up in African history–which incorporates a lot of anthropology and in fact a little sociology (postmodern/pants Africa!)--in the period when there finally was recognition about the academy’s role as a handmaid of empire and some of the hegemonic aspects of the modern state. This self-reflection included a reckoning about how subjectivity in data collection and theory had produced bodies of scholarship that were far from objective. You’ve probably learned this in reading about how “the Other” is created. This bit of throat-clearing is to show that I recognize my own position as a very middle-class outsider and author writing about people who–while sharing a lot of American culture–also have had profoundly different life experiences than me, my students. The data presented from the state is not meant to be definitive, but rather a scrap of information meant to help any reader to gain a grasp on the situation. The essay below is not meant to be a curiosity cabinet for bourgeois enjoyment, and especially not “poverty porn,” even though that is what postmodern nonfiction often is. 

Still, our parking lot

A Dungeons & Dragons club already existed in the inner city high school I started working at during 2022. The students at my workplace consider other parts of Philadelphia to be the “true ‘hood,” not their own area, but it is a Title I school. Officially speaking, roughly three-quarters of the students attending come from low-income families, and some city schools exceed 90% impoverished populations, so the students’ perceptions are more-or-less correct. Prior to my hiring by the school, coincidentally I collected census data in its catchment for more than a month in 2020, enough to get a fairly informed picture of the neighborhood’s access to resources. I had been teaching for some weeks when I went to the first club meeting, to observe how things were done, because I was curious and interested. I also wanted to lend my (some painted) miniatures for use; the club had a few dozen plastic pre-painteds, but mostly used little colored smooth stones to mark PCs and monsters on the battle map. 

The session zero was devoted to character creation. The situation was very chaotic, as many of the classrooms were and are in the school, far more chaotic than I was used to, coming from collegiate instruction, my own high school years being in the distant past. Most of the students had no idea how to create a D&D 5E character. Some of the players had substantial learning disabilities, and couldn’t add dice easily; by the terms set by the state of Pennsylvania, only a quarter of our students are proficient readers and 1/16 are proficient in high-school math. According to our main standardized test, the average reading level for the twelfth-grade classes I teach (which is a little below average for the school) is just under a sixth-grade beginner’s benchmarks. This being said, the inner city kids have often solved the same in-game challenges (ones that did not require skilled literacy or arithmetic) pretty much as rapidly as my largely middle class adult players’ circles–people with graduate degrees and bachelors from Duke, Purdue, and MIT, men who work as lawyers, accountants, government bureaucrats, software engineers, math teachers, and IT.

The club had several 5E PHBs (200,000+ words!), so I went around assisting character construction on that first day. It isn’t unusual for even well-educated RPG beginners to have trouble getting started in fifth edition. The head of the club and I gave pointers on which class each player might enjoy after a short verbal quiz that referenced video-game familiar fantasy archetypes and in-game mechanics: “Does smashing a monster in the face with a hammer sound fun?” The players chose the pre-packaged equipment sets, but only a couple wrote their inventory down on the character sheets. At the peak, four teachers would be in the room, one RPG neophyte and three veterans. (Another neophyte would join later.) One of the first things I observed was a student “vet” from the previous year cheating on the ability rolls (4d6k3x7d1, arrange) for her character. She was the only one who took the initiative to create her own character, and no one else cheated on their rolls, and she would later mock the other students for their “inferior” PCs. She was an nerdy, overweight white (non-Hispanic) senior girl (note: swap sex and definition of senior, and you have me), in a school that is less than 10 or 2 percent white, depending on how you count. The students do not conceptualize “white Hispanic” as the United States government does. Most of the other students participating were Hispanic by their own definition. 

I know my 7th-grade rolls weren't exactly honest, but sheesh

I asked the club sponsor–who had secured school funding for the PHBs, a few hardback WotC adventures, and dice enough for all–how he dealt with downtime and absences and such, as I was already quite familiar with student attendance and communication woes. Essentially, the club ran on the openest of open table policies. “I just put the party at the beginning of the dungeon, and when they’re finished, everyone appears at the entrance to the next dungeon. PCs come and go without any in-world consideration.” Downtime was neither role-played nor proceduralized. 

The second meeting saw new students show up, including my most troublesome student from my first period class, a kid (who looked angelic but) who tried to disrupt every single classroom activity. Just that morning he had provoked both of the powderkeg girls in the class (who had been ignoring me, but minding their own business at least), who both outweighed him and one of whom had just returned from a fight suspension. He kept staring, whistling, and smack-talking them, no matter how I tried to redirect him, not even quitting when one promised he would “accidentally” fall down the stairs between classes. His appearance was a huge disappointment that day, as I had hoped the club would be a refuge from my regular students, whose casual viciousness and complete disregard for middle-class social mores wore my psyche down every day. Yes, I know, looking for solace by playing a game about pretend killing pretend people is pretty silly. All the new players had to roll characters, and some of the session zero attenders missed this meeting, so the club waited until the third session to actually start an adventure.

The club director had given a short adventure he’d written to one of the seniors, who had promised to DM. We rolled out the wet-erase map and its markers, and I distributed minis–one teacher had chosen a thri-kreen based on my mini selection and another had rolled a fairy, which I had painted in the meanwhile. Despite the accessories available, the whole session was run by the novice DM as “theater of the mind.” There was no combat, anyway, in the 75 minutes. The DM asked everyone to roll initiative at the very beginning, and then ignored those results for the rest of the day. All the rolling for the session was in the form of checks and a couple saves. Lots of checks. I observed and took notes during play.

Admit it, you would pick the insect-man, too

When the mini is almost as big as the brush

Three teachers were players, including the guy who had penned the mini-module. If you’ve ever been to a country where people don’t queue, or really, most bars in my experience, that’s what it was like. Every loud person shoved their way into the conversation about the make-believe, and the quieter ones did not gain much access. Two of the teachers were just as boisterous as most of the kids. In all there were eight PCs, seven non-human, which was quite the load for a first-time DM. Almost every time he revealed a new bit of scenery, three or four people shouted “I grab/devour/lick it!” and the free-for-all then moved on whenever the next shiny was described. The one reserved teacher said it reminded him of his own high school years’ sessions, but he’s a generous soul. 

The set-up involved a butcher shop with a big, bloody mess, which included an exit the referee forgot to mention until much later. The action mostly revolved around inspecting the sinister scenery and a conversation with a rat (read the "novelization" here). The DM fudged a save for the rat during its interrogation, so that it might not divulge some information, which annoyed the author of the adventure. The final moments of the day were spent arguing over which PC got to possess the found skeleton in the tunnel underneath the building. It was nearly impossible to get the players to deploy their characters as a team, rather than a collection of individuals. This can be difficult in my adult, middle-class parties, too. I blame some of this on general American individualistic culture, but some on the structure of 5E, and its individual initiative. Attempts to work PCs in tandem are often made impossible by the rules-as-written, because someone has to go at each designated slot in the order. The problem could be solved by readied actions (à la the “peasant railgun”), but those can’t include any sort of readied movement.   

During the next play session, three new students arrived and some old ones didn’t show. Due to the mayhem of the first true play session, an executive decision was made to divide the adventurers into two tables with more manageable numbers for the DMs. The club sponsor ran the “heroic” table, which usually included two or three teacher PCs, a quiet girl whose faun liked to throw cream pies as a non-injuring weapon, and a second boy from my first period who wanted to run a (fantasy) chivalrous knight (who was pretty foul-mouthed, as nearly all the students are). A sweet, quiet girl with green eyes, who had rolled a druid with a green cloak and green eyes, and should’ve joined that table, never showed up again. Three of the four other teachers DMed at the heroic table over the course of the next six months. When things got rowdy at one table, the other one usually lost focus. I am neither a con person, nor a FLGS player, so I was not used to the extra levels of session noise and distraction. The students who favored harsh make-believe interrogations and harvesting pretend monster trophies became the “Head Collectors, Inc.,” and stayed at the student-DMed table. I mostly observed the Head Collectors. For a few weeks I painted like a fiend in the evenings to have monsters and PCs ready for the table.

Alas, no pie 

The second play session involved an underground exploration of tunnels filled with traps and creatures that spoke with New York accents (not the DM’s normal one). Every trap was apparently the same, the roll cheater (who always scooped up her dice before they came to a stop, announcing a result of 15+ every time) “disarmed” every trap with an identical explanation of discharging it with her weapon. She seized the one magic sword that was available and threatened the other PCs with it. (Her character class: paladin.) She claimed the wolf pet that the DM offered, even though there was a druid in the party. Another new girl had her character (an aasimar) fight back. The party met a talkative imp (well-run by the DM) and dismembered a lot of lesser monsters, squabbling over the body parts as prizes. One of the treasures found was a book of dad jokes.

Balance, schmalance

The original GM missed the third and final session of the mini-adventure. An honor-roll student, the kid who had been quietly playing a red dragonborn barbarian, took over the referee’s chair. He did not even understand the most basic concepts of the game, not even the d20 as attack/save/check. Suffice to say the fights vs. the chain demon and lesser beholder went very raggedly. There were two moments of high hilarity from my perspective. One body search query got this response, “Uh, he just has … another tray of meat and eyeballs.” After the victory over the creatures, the module closed with the heretofore barely described villagers awarding the PCs with statues for solving the butcher/demon problem. The girl who didn’t take any shit from the other asked for a statue spitting on the cheating girl’s monument, but that was the last time she showed up at the club.

Neither of the student DMs were prepared or present for the following play session, but I had come equipped with a module, and ran my first session for the kids. I had spun a short horror-fantasy adventure out of Ash Law’s killer doll scenario in “The Trajectory of Fear – or How to Use Horror Tropes Effectively in Your Game.” By the end of the year, I had run the Head Collectors through twenty sessions comprising four adventures, three (including the first) recycling premises my online groups had run through, and one pre-written, “The Waking of Willowby Hall.” The heroic table dwindled to two players, and then one, and ours finally absorbed the foul-mouthed knight, after he completed his last quest, which aged him substantially. The final session of the school year would force all the PCs to flee a T-Rex through a teleportal, which I hoped would work as an in-world explanation for the students taking their characters to new tables. I gave them their PCs' miniatures as parting gifts. During the final battle, I demanded that the cheater roll a saving throw without touching the die. Of course it came up '20.'

How to wrap up a campaign when out of time

So long Xopa, Sami, Ragnar, and Kyriee' of the Eight Fingers

 

Re-Imagining (Origins, Part 2)

The older man turns to OSR. He doesn’t hold with those sorts of grognards who regard Gygax (or, less often, Arneson) as an infallible prophet, and that the creator’s words and tales of his actions should be put under hermeneutical scrutiny to suss out the “true” D&D, although sometimes he likes to read their investigations. (He was just making it up as he went along, guys, with some poor choices for gameability.) The older man doesn’t believe that 1E is the game perfected, or that B/X should be precisely cloned with its many nonsensical elements replicated into perpetuity (a soldier’s monthly wage pays for only a week’s-worth of food?!). He still thinks 5E got some things right. He prefers “Re-Imagining” for the ‘R’. 

His main group is treated to GLOG and LotFP and OSE Advanced rulesets, adventures that last half-a-dozen episodes or so, while the lawyer runs a short Traveler campaign and the best friend eventually delivers a Pirate Borg weekend. The inner city kids face the tables of DCC, and then an OSE Advanced (hack), that has Beyond the Wall-ish lifepaths. Child relatives get to play OSE, Beyond the Wall, and Cairn, and the old man gifts Mausritter to the younger niece (the older niece receives Ten Candles and Alice is Missing). The older man forms a broad collection of players from various online playing groups to run a DCC tour of new-ish praised OSR modules. Answering an online plea, he forms a local group (who so far only plays online) whose refereeing is eventually taken over by another player who runs Dragonbane. He treats co-workers to G.R.A.V.E. He lends one of his co-workers Neo-Classical Geek Revival and in return is loaned Swords and Wizardry White Box. The other teacher enthuses about the OD&D rules. The older man hosts a Mothership module for his spring break. In those couple years the older man purchases and downloads a psychotic number of systems, at least seventy by the last count. His financial situation is as comfortable as it has ever been, despite the post-pandemic instability. He buys way too many miniatures for a person who plays face-to-face fewer than twenty-five times per year. He pays for Kickstarters and Backerkits, and orders bourgeois OSR product from Spearwitch and Exalted Funeral.

The older man joins OSR Discord servers and plays (mostly one-shots) with people who write blogs and publish modules, and plenty of nobodies like himself. He gets to play an FKR and Maze Travellers of the Unknown and The Vanilla Game on the lighter end of the OSR spectrum; OD&Dish (run by Gus L., with Arnold K as a co-player), OSE, Shadowdark, and Conan: Hyborian Age in the middle; and the somewhat baroque Dragonbane and DCC. By pure happenstance, he answers a Roll20 advertisement to join a weekly open table Castle Xyntillan campaign (OSE Advanced), run by a delightful Swedish-Kiwi GM for strangers, and is the only player who is there at the first and final (forty-seventh) sessions. His “main” is a cleric that has 4 hp at level four. The game is so good, he even plays one session quietly from the lobby of a Seoul hotel, starting at 7:00 am local, since that only minorly disrupts his real-life travels. He knows that he must run Xyntillan from the other side of the screen, and does, having equaled his mentor in sessions as of this posting.   

The older man begins compiling a heartbreaker, alas.

Review: SlaughterGrid

“SlaughterGrid” seems to be the work of a man (Rafael Chandler) going through a bad break-up or divorce. It is not a pleasant piece of art to consume, unlike Shoot Out the Lights or Rumours, but I guess those had both sides contributing and are a different medium, besides. The adventure is ugly through and through, with constant gross-outs and a misogynist’s scene-setting, although the reader is perhaps tipped to this by a full-page list of inspirational thrash metal songs right after the table of contents and credits. Why review a twelve-year-old problematic module that already has a funny and informative review by Retired Adventurer? At the heart of the adventure is a bit of TTRPG genius that makes it worth running if certain nonsense is removed, especially for players transitioning to the lethality of OSR play from the nigh-invincibility of PCs in, say, fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Secondarily, there are also interesting puzzles for perceptive players, and a highly interactive if a bit overly combat-oriented dungeon.

The cover does not lie, and I bought it on the strength of the title and the TenFootPole review. I did not use the hexcrawl that surrounds the dungeon the two times I ran the module, so there is no commentary here on that portion of the adventure. For system, I deployed Lamentations of the Flame Princess with a couple tweaks to run “SlaughterGrid” online, and used another appropriate system, Dungeon Crawl Classics, to play the game in person. The module is written “in OSRIC.” The layout is fairly close to contemporary OSR models (though a little less compact, and without map close-ups) with bullet points, flavor tables, and tidy spreads, though the most important table stretches awkwardly over a few pages. I reduced this mutations roll to a single page with truncated descriptions, so that it might hang on my GM screen. There are several nifty new risk-reward magic items, too, and unusual treasure formats, even very unusual. A few fiddly rules subsystems are included for letting thieves roll all their own dice, lifting very heavy objects, and tricking monsters. Almost every room includes a description of the smells (or rather, stenches), not just sounds and sights. 

The backstory is nonsensical, at least as an explanation for the dungeon’s structure. The dungeon itself is supposed to be a buried portion of a huge war construct, the three levels corresponding more-or-less to the womb, and lower digestive and excretory systems. We will not detain ourselves with arguing whether ancient magicians would design such a machine with (semi-)functioning organs, or why most of that which should be vertical is horizontal; the disbelief can be suspended here. We will be irritated by the lore that the machine was piloted by genocidal halflings, even though nothing inside is scaled to hobbits, and that this history has no impact on the exploration whatsoever.

The first level map has an excellent layout, and its mirroring yet partial destruction provides clues to hidden benefits (one at the GM’s option). The second level, which is a bit confusing in illustration (some walls, underpasses, and shores are not clearly distinguished) is a small loop inside a larger loop, with a few dead-end spurs, with two connections to the floor above and a single one descending. The final layer won’t produce many different paths, but it is fairly small. There are fifty-six rooms, plus the nineteen hexes for the surrounding crawl. The whole is a bit of a monster zoo, with several creatures just waiting for the party to show up and “complete their scenes.” The space is a rather crowded locale, with few empty rooms, and “random” encounter tables (one of these references a level 4 table when no table or level 4 exists) are explicitly for empty rooms, rather than wandering monsters. Gygaxian naturalism is rare. There are a few “gotcha” traps with no real local signposting of their danger (slightly more forgivable considering the conceit of the dungeon, see below). There’s a talky monster or two and graffiti that reveal some of what the party is in store for.

The Re-Birthers about to find a whole mess of eggs

The bestiary is a mix of many small humanoid bands, common dungeon vermin, a few undead, a couple monsters of misogynist genesis, and plenty of slimes. The author has changed a “known fact” or two about most of the standard critters, such as frost-breathing orcs, or slimes that toss fireballs, or otyughs-doppelgangers of a different hit die. The whole list (statblocks are included at the end of the module) has the feel of a DM tired of his players knowing every last thing about Monster Manual entries. The first level and third level creatures are almost entirely attack-on-sight sorts, though the middle level includes some reaction-roll types, but it seems implicit that most monsters are meant to be fought (or, more likely, ambushed). I mean, you don’t often parley with or trick slimes, undead, or shit monsters.

The central, fantastic gimmick of the dungeon is that anyone killed will be rebirthed–with a mutation from a d100 table–in the hall that corresponds to the ovary and fallopian tube. The PC’s body and equipment will remain where it fell, the character emerging nude and different. Most of the mutations are disgusting (e.g., “When injured, you exude thick bluish oil that reeks of rotting fish”) and some debilitating (e.g., sunshine now sets the PC’s skin on fire). Several add something to the explorer’s repertoire (e.g., removable eyes that still see up to 100’ away). Some are very irritating to adjudicate (e.g., “you can inhale spirits, such as ghosts and ghasts; however, you must murder an innocent person in order to release the spirit once you've inhaled it. After you kill your innocent victim, the ghost leaves your body and is exiled to another plane. If you don't kill an innocent person, the undead spirit that you've inhaled takes over your body after 24 hours.”). Suffice to say, a PC that dies more than a few times will likely be unrecognizable and even unplayable after the adventure. Still, this works as a not-quite-as-harsh-as-death learning tool to be cautious while dungeon-crawling, and avoids the problem of how to quickly replace a killed PC inside the dungeon.

The secondary innovations that make the dungeon worthwhile are the (monster) aurumeretrix and the (treasure) flatworm eggs. The latter have a lot of discoverable properties and can function as exploration tools and weapons for players who are willing to experiment. There’s also a scene that provides a clue to the eggs’ utility.  The former are the reason why every gold treasure in the dungeon is wrapped in some kind of container. These dangerous monsters appear whenever enough exposed gold is accumulated, and then try to slaughter the party. This is an interesting challenge to add to gp-as-xp dungeon-crawling. Unfortunately, they are repeatedly called “gold whores” in the text, even while they have no resemblance to women. (I used “aurumeretrix” to refer to the creatures in play once they had become familiar, which mostly hides the misogyny behind the Latin.)

The monster zoo, absurd history, implausible ecology, and over-the-top gross-outs (who am I kidding, I play D&D partly for the gross-outs) are all forgivable sins, but there is one blunder that necessitates at least a partial re-write: the ignoring of the reincarnation rules for everybody but the PCs. Throughout the dungeon there are dying and dead who are not brought back by the “ovum.” There are a couple who do follow the rules, like a grotesquely deformed magic-user who has perished multiple times within the dungeon, and in a nice bit of anthropology, has come to be worshipped as a god’s avatar by some of the denizens. There is another inhabitant who survived for a while by committing suicide and cannibalizing his former bodies. But there are many that have no mutations and have not been rebirthed: the skeleton in room 4 and corpse in room 6; maybe the orc being tortured in room 8; the victims of the slave pit in room 24; the dead magic-user in room 25; the members of the “Brazen Bulls,” which may be the three very recently dead adventurers in room 35; the corpses in room 38; the remains of the gnome thief in room 39; the dead and dying elfs in room 42; the butchered cleric in room 51. The bite of the undead draugur–an uncommon monster inside which prevents reincarnation–could explain a few, but not all of these cases. It is unclear whether humanoids are affected, but there are no corpses from the otyugh-humanoid war. 

The full ramifications of the mutation-rebirth device are fascinating and horrifying, but not explored by most of the module. The magic can function as a perpetual-calorie machine to feed the creatures trapped underground (in room 20, but not really considered in other situations). An entire underground economy could be constructed out of the renewable resource remains, sinew and bone and certain mutations (explored a little in room 23’s armory), a sicko recycling scheme. It would seem that warfare, slavery (slightly part of the set up), and religious belief would be deeply altered by the main premise. From a player’s perspective, this makes humanoid enemies–if they come back–a complex challenge. It also makes for a heavy workload for refereeing, keeping track of bodies and equipment and mutations for all casualties, as well as the location and movements of the reborn. It also makes pre-prepping the module a long process, if the logic of the “ovum” is pursued to the end, the resulting SlaughterGrid societies fully worked out inside the dungeon. But a cool exercise.      

To reduce the sexist elements, I excised the vagina-breast-penis boss monster among other things, and replaced it with retired PCs formerly run by the players in the current adventure. These replacement villains, of course, had been mutated to almost unrecognizability in their conquest of the dungeon, and some of their (sometimes partly-eaten) corpses lay as signposts to various traps, their old unusual magic items as hints to the coming climax, easter eggs for the retentive. The madness inspired by the dungeon’s mental costs explained the former heroes’ heel turns. I rewrote several rooms’ spoor to foreshadow and account for the new social structure determined by the powers of the “ovum.” I reduced the number of humanoids, because they would be recycled by any successful party attacks. Almost any dead body had a “clone” alive and unwell in the dungeon.

Is it worth it? Should you purchase the module, as a training ground for OC-to-OSR play? Or is the misogyny too steep to reward the writer, and should you just borrow the central premise and make your own dungeon? The pdf is apparently PWYW now at DriveThru, $6.66 suggested price, nyuk nyuk (what I paid). The adventuring parties spent seven or eight sessions within, and that’s with some of the module abridged. If my calculations are correct, that works out to at least 150 human-hours of entertainment (and this is not including the lonely “fun” of prep, or writing this review), so in a utilitarian sense it cost less than 5 cents per hour of amusement. 

The gameplay produced many genuine moments of scatalogical hilarity and unusual problem-solving. Does the following fit your gaming crew’s preferences? A disliked NPC was “impregnated” with gold and dispatched that way. The humor of someone killing themselves on a trap less than a minute after their first re-birth. “Shit for the Shit God.” “These mushrooms are wicked!” “Now it is your time, slime–I tell you because I gotta rhyme.” Musical ladders. “It’s a – floor mimic!” Slipping in a shit trench moments after delivering an impassioned speech in the worst Irish accent you’ve ever heard. The not-quite-effectual guano bomb. Hiro the slug hero. “Now he’s got scabs everywhere!” “What’s with your belly–are there eggs in it?” “Could you try to poo out the eggs inside you?” The long scrotal tether. “Maybe you’ll come back with three boobs.” “I hope your mouth and asshole get swapped.” “As the resident expert on the fairer sex … in a ‘womb’ I would not screw with that pink stuff.” “You’re naked, and inside-out.” … “You know, the small intestine can be pretty fuckin’ long,” Grayfield said, his organs on the outside illustrating just what he was saying. There seemed to be a sphincter in the wall, and the Father pointed this out. “So you’re a sphincter expert, too?” “As a priest, I need to know these things.” … Daerman had big grey wings. “You will now address me as ‘The Dark Knight’,” he demanded, as he flew very slowly. … Volunteering for sphincter-duty. “I’m gonna become a militant feminist.” “On the plus side, a baby without a mouth is quiet.” “I’ve never referenced an onion bank.” “I would have a lot of respect for this monster if he looted us.” “Meet me at the sac!” “This is actually a shithole.” “Can we get pooped out the asshole to escape?”

Live. Shit. Die. Repeat.