What really happened? (The Temple... pt 2)

Follow-up from this post.

The group didn't really do too many things. A lot of exploration, a little bit of roleplay, but the temple itself was basically off-limits to them, and this comes down to a huge mistake I made when designing the entries.

The factions

The wombats are basically pacifists with stone spears (and I realize that you could absolutely read them as indigenous-inspired, but they're more inspired by Diane Fossey's Living with Gorillas. Still, for all my talk about trying to be careful about messages, what we have here are an underdeveloped civilization exploited by an industrialized one. Great. fucking. job. Cassie.

Anyway, so the idea was always "how would a new intelligence interpret religious illustrations?" What would they make of it? But I didn't really manage to convey that. The PCs are all sneaking around, there's nobody around (because they infiltrated during the day, didn't they?), so they're not getting this cool "it's like religion in the US, they just don't... get it. But in a kind way." thing. In a spur of the moment thing, I replace the decay spores with floating balls of liquid fire. That the benign creatures use for their baptism rites. Okay.

Oh, and human sacrifice. Great.

Right, so I've lost the way with my wombats completely. This is partly triggered by the players. Don't get me wrong, the fault lies with me, but the group just... wasn't what I expected. Since it's Grottröj you can do FLAILSNAILS and just bring a character over. I got a character with a machine gun. Another character considers killing 14 non-aggressive wombats to "teach them a lesson."

I don't really like that kind of game.

So yeah, their behavior ramped my own ideas up, for ... not great results. Back to the factions.

The second faction is the ants. Nobody runs into the ants.

The Demon is not present. The sun construct doesn't see play.

The Elders (Wombats) don't want to interact with the PCs at all. That's a real issue; you can't have a faction that's completely uninterested in the party. Or maybe you can, but still. Perhaps they could use better motives.

Jacquaying the Dungeon

There are 4 ways to enter the temple catacombs (where the interesting stuff is). However, one of the entries was made impassable by the sun construct. The other three are all located inside the temple itself, so you need to get inside the temple first before you can get to the dungeon. Since the wombats don't like visitors, that means you'll have a hard time doing that.

The biggest issue is, really, that there's no exploration possible if you don't get into the catacombs. I had all kinds of ideas about the temple grounds and the ground floor of the temple, but the group also always got caught by the Wombat Choir (14 individuals, pacifist) when they were heading somewhere (bad luck on the encounter rolls) so they felt blocked by that too.

When we're rewriting the temple (next post in this series), I'll make sure that there are more (and different) ways to enter the catacombs.

Encounter tables

The encounter tables need to be reworked. I like some of the events, but others I'm not a fan of. There needs to be more of the "hell. yeah." things on there. Hole in the Oak, which I'll review sometime... later, has a good encounter table, I think. It's not only "you run into these monsters!" followed by "and now you run into these monsters instead!"

As noted over on False Machine, "beige as fuck" is not fun, and gives nothing. I feel that my Temple might be beige as fuck.

Final Words

I waited too long to write this; most details are gone. The players liked the world, what little they saw of it. The baptism by fire thing creeped them out properly, but overall I wouldn't call this a resounding success. I learned stuff, though, so next time it'll be better. The Demon will return.

In the next post in this series, we'll look at the current layout of the temple (zoomed out) and then we'll start re-working it.