Maze Rats One-Shot - FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE

I initially planned to post the adventure I ran alongside the session report, but given my inability to properly numerize my notes and maps, I'll get around to re-doing the dungeon in a more digitally-palatable format later-on.

See?

Yesterday, I ran Maze Rats with a band of merry strangers who kindly took up on my offer to run a one-shot, mostly hailing from Discord OSR Servers. Since that was already taking me out of my comfort zone, I decided to go all-in and write down the adventure from scratch instead of running a module, which turned out to be a great exercise. The adventure itself is called Fleshgod Apocalypse (due to my discovery at the time of writing it) and will get its own post when I figure out a good way to put it all into a PDF.

The Adventurers

• Icy Tea played The Toad, a sleazy blackmailer armed with the "Wearying Tar" spell

• Sotto played Fred, a stoner housebreaker with burn scars, and an excellent tracker (Briarborn)

• CarlosH played Jim, a shadowjack armed with a crossbow

• And Fridgeghoul played Taatcher of the Roofrunners' Guild

Taatcher, by Fridgeghoul

What Happened?

 • After a rendevezvous near a giant black hole where the town of Ashfield should have been, the party short of Jim and Taatcher, whose players arrived later, headed for the Temple of Ooo, hoping to find some explanation for the disappearance of the entire town, and hopefuly, to kill monsters and steal their stuff.

• Inside the Temple's first room, they fought and killed a strange red silk monster looking like a mix between a grasshopper and a snail, which The Toad soberly called "The Spider Until Determined Otherwise". It bled pink technicolor blood and dissolved into a puddle of it after a short, but dangerous fight. They were joined by Jim around that time, too.

• The next few corridors led to some important decisions: to make a map, to take a few turns at random, to end back where they started and to stop trying to make a map. Whether I am terrible at giving direction or my tricky map design worked as intended is unclear to me.

They took the door out of area 2 into the corridors.

• Jim, who had arrived from another direction, suggested the party check out the cave area he noticed near the west side of the temple. There, they found a small passage leading to a field of wild blue flowers with soothing and relaxing properties - Fred was glad to collect a bunch of these - and at that point, I rolled an interesting result on the random encounters table: Rival + Other Monster (here, a Purple Priest that remained in the temple despite most of the others having fled from it). 

• Silas Onymous is an adventurer I rolled a while ago - a flamboyantly dressed rude ex-secret police coward. In other words, the perfect rival for the PCs. I gave him two thugs and started talking to myself in silly voices: he had captured the priest and was now interrogating/torturing him for information, of which he didn't get any. Jim, being a Shadowjack, decided to sneak up on him and help his friends keep quiet to follow Silas and let him handle the busy work.

• Following the Rival Party through a few caves, the group discovered an entrance into the gardens behind the Temple, in which eerie-looking women clad in animal skins were frolicking and prancing around, almost looking more like animals than people. Silas hit one of his men for a dumb comment and it turned out to freak the "women" out - they turned their attention to the Rival Party and lunged at them, screaming in hysteria. Silas managed to get back inside the cave while his men got torn apart.

• I had a lot of fun playing Silas who had encountered the party in the past and stolen their stuff. I put myself in the shoes of a terrible "lawful evil" Thief PC who'd end up back against the wall and hated by his fellow PC after doing something stupid. It somehow worked because the party tried to use Silas as bait for the women instead of just stabbing him, which gave him a small window of opportunity to escape, which he used. And then he threw some firecrackers at the women to send them in berserk mode again while the party was crossing the area.

• I'm not too happy about how I handled that next bit: the harpy-women, who turned out to be raptors under a strange illusion spell that convinced both those who looked and the raptor themselves that they were in fact, pretty ladies in animal skins, tried to butcher the PC while they desperately crowbar'd the doors to get out. I wasn't sure how to go about this as the absence of a map on the players' side meant I didn't feel like it'd be fair if I gave the women the advantage, mobility-wise, despite them being written in my notes as quite fast. In practice, the players got a few rounds to figure out a solution, which for Fred involved nearly getting gutted but managing to get through a door, and for the other two to lose two crowbars and use the Wearying Tar spell to take care of most of the opposition. At this point, Taatcher joined the adventure and some Referee-encouraged metagaming allowed the party to get out of this terrible situation.

• Fred was given some medication by The Toad ("take this, it will help you! Although do not ever take more than one per day, or you will die!") which in the world of Maze Rats is pretty damn strong, and the now crowbar-less "Crowbar Gang of Ashfield" went back at the entrance for another look at the various rooms they had missed.

• Taatcher drank the pink blood of the snail monster-thing, and got an echo-y voice from it (Into the Odd's I Eat The Stuff table is great like that) and used it a few minutes later when a sprinting, muscular, naked horse-headed man came rushing at the party. He somehow successfuly(?) convinced the creature that he was Ooo, the Bloated God, and asked him to help the party find treasure.

• The Horse-Headed Man, who spoke of strange witchcraft such as "DNA engineering" and "Credit Cards" said he had no use for gold coins, and would gladly help the party - he led the group down a hole into a secret area under the temple, where he met with another of his kind. The two of them then led the party to a dangerous-looking Indiana Jones-style altar cave, where some kind of spaceship seemed to have materialized and crushed most cultists, with two turret sentries guarding the perimeter. The horse-headed failed to convince "the stupid mammals" to serve as a distraction, vaguely explained their complex situation (they were arrested by the Space Police for smoking pot which is illegal under Federation Law, and were trying to escape Space Prison by crashing a spaceship in this dimension) and eventually got shoved into the turrets' perimeter by the group and promptly died in a hail of bullets.

• Then Taatcher decided it might be a good idea to stick his hand out and see what it did - and got a hole in his hand.

We stopped about then since our time was running short and obligations had to be met.

I think I can safely say a good time was had by all, and I hope to further continue my exploration of running games with various people from the Internet.

Awesome Art by Fridgeghoul

Additional Post-Game Thoughts

 • I described the countryside and forest as snowy, yet the party was following a trail. Since we were going straight to the dungeon for convenience's sake, this being a one-shot, it didn't cause a problem - and I think the players didn't notice, either. This is the kind of blunders I need to work on to avoid in the future.

• Danger Rolls usually fail. Rolling 10+ on 2d6 is rare, even with a +1 or +2 bonus. I love this, because it's a way of mechanically enforcing the notion that you only roll for difficult things. If you start throwing useless or "medium difficulty" rolls for things all the time with this system, your players are going to get pissed off and the characters are going to be failing a lot.

• Danger Rolls usually fail. I just realized that this means you can modulate when to use them to establish the level of competency of adventurers depending on the genre and tone you're going with. With french RPG Naheulbeuk, in which adventurers are depicted as blundering idiots and often unlucky bastards, Maze Rats would fit like a glove - just make adventurer rolls for more tasks than usual, and the results are bound to be hilarious. On the other hand, were I to run Traveller using a mix of TC and Maze Rats rules, I'd probably roll even less often than in a Fantasy setting, considering the level of expertise characters in the Classic Traveller Ur-Setting are expected to have.

• I'm still unsure about my own stance on mapping and orientation-based challenges in adventure fantasy games. On the one hand, I love logistical challenges and understand the point of having empty rooms, strict time and book-keeping, and so on, but on the other hand, I'm ready to skip anything that gets bothersome and tedious at the table. I've tried the usage dice for light sources for a short while, and it turned out to be boring more than anything else, at least to me. I like to tie random encounter rolls to entering rooms, making noise and 10 IRL minutes passing by, as this allows me to forego counting exact distances in exploration turns, so I might try loading the encounter dice ala "Hazard Dice" or "Luck Dice" in the future to take into account resource depletion.

D6 Adventure Roll

1 - Roll a Random Encounter

2 - 5 - Nothing

6 - Torch goes out, Lantern needs refilling, Stomachs growl, Mouths dry, etc.

Something like that, but I'd like it to feel more naturalistic while staying dead simple.

• Nobody died! In Maze Rats, where you start with 4HP and die at 0HP, with damage being the difference between the to-hit score and armor class. This is good. It means that the system is transparent or explicit enough to encourage the proper attitude towards danger. There is more room for dumb luck here than in Into the Odd where HP depletion is inevitable, and I gladly embrace this coupled with the notion that the HP system here is as deadly as OD&D (and stays in that range with the short HP progression).