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.

The Temple in the Valley of the Wombat People

The initial purpose of the Temple wasn't even a temple. At first, there was a demon that kidnapped babies, as demons are wont to do. This demon took over, corrupted, a wombat warren. At first, the idea was cramped spaces, having the PCs crawl through dark, narrow tunnels while continually being mocked by the demon. It was a journey through the underworld, from the normal to the supernatural.

The largest issue with the idea is this: I am writing this for a single mission, to be part of a collection of small hooks. It isn't designed or written in a way that furthers OSR play (exploration, faction play, etc).
Then, Grottröj, an OSR convention in Sweden, went digital because of COVID-19. I figured I'd run something and it seemed like a good choice. It was, after all, already written?

There's very little "adventuring" in Grottröj's play, focusing more on the Mythic Underworld and exploration. It didn't quite fit the bill.

I didn't want to give the warren up, though. When rewriting the dungeon, the warren connected to a buried temple. The demon took a less prominent space in it and the wombats themselves became more like Stone Age people. They now had tools and crude weapons.
It still didn't work, for me. The second iteration was a more pronounced Temple, with an incidental warren on the temple grounds. The story had already changed once and now did so again. The wombats used the temple grounds, surrounded by high walls, to farm the earth. That's not very dungeon-like, so the idea I had was that the wombats found the temple and took up religion based on the illustrations and paintings found inside the temple. The temple itself was a prison, think Magneto's prison in the X-Men movies and you're not far off, for the demon. The demon now had a way to influence the real world, through the wombat people. I'm introducing corruption, as both a moral and a visual, theme. Not only is the temple falling apart, but an innocent animal is corrupted (becoming more human-like, I wonder what that says about my view on humanity?). I had an idea of fragile stone floors and crumbling walls. With the demon being a less physical presence in the upper level, still mocking the players, but at times collapsing the floor under them and at other times caressing them, physically, softly.

The temple and its religion were too vague, and so I threw together a basic religion: the Sun erases sin, keeps shadow away, and keeps the forces of evil weak. The god imprisoned the demon in its temple, where the constant glow of the midday sun keeps it weak. But with time, gods disappear and their magic grows weak.
The third iteration had much clearer faction play. The wombats now use the temple and the underground halls for their own reasons. In the Sunrise Hall, beneath the temple building, they grow their crops in the soft glow of a magical sun. They stay away from the Midday Hall, where a harsh midday sun shines down on a golden cage, and they've not breached the doors to the Twilight Hall yet. (There is also a Midnight Hall, where the heretical texts and the tongues that spoke them are kept, but that is locked behind powerful magic and secret passages.) The demon is now its own faction, spreading Decay Spores that infect creatures (much like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus) to do its bidding. Where do these creatures come from? That answer is still missing, at this stage. Another faction, the Ant People, have breached into the underground part of the temple too, and are exploring it as well.

I still kind of like this iteration; there is some promise here, but I need to rework it to a larger location. I'm still working on a very small scale; I want to make it explorable in a single session. I think that limit, self-imposed as it is, ruined my effort.
In the last iteration (fourth, if you're keeping track) I removed the demon (in hindsight a mistake) and made the Sun Religion take on a larger role. The underground farms are no more. Instead, there's a huge fruit tree in the Sunrise Hall, where the wombats perform weird rituals that fire in various ways. I remove the god, in its place is a Sun Construct, sitting on a throne where the prison once was; in its chest a miniature sun.
This is what I ran for a small group at Grottröj. The pitch, unfortunate as it is, was basically this: an anthropologist lived with the Wombat People for many years and has now returned to civilization. His essays and lectures are popular and everyone who's someone wants Wombat People things. The anthropologist himself wants the religious texts that he knows are in the temple (he was never allowed inside).
In the next post, I'll detail what the group did. I will also give you a rundown of what mistakes I made, and what issues there are with the fourth iteration.