Ghoultunnel

Another artpunk auteur appears, an adorer of alliterations and achiever of angst-ridden art! Lazy Litch crowdfunded and delivered this exquisite grimdark wavecrawl setting generator in a beautiful gold-colour imprinted hardcover, spelling gloom, doom and hexploration. 144 pages provide us with evocative black-and-white illustrations depicting a strange and grim world, with tables and rules for generating this OSR campaign setting, and plentiful of deranging, fascinating and most entertaining ideas of how to populate this shattered world.

We enter an apocalyptic world, flooded and imbued with weirdness. The gods are dead, reality itself is broken, strange constructs and arcane parasites scourge what is left. Isolated communities cling to islands trapped in geomatrically shaped micro-climates in fragmented seas. Some dare to trade across the sea, fewer dare to explore. Tyrants rise to shape the world according to their will, yet their quests for renewal and glory will bring the world only faster to its inevitable end.

Player characters will fight for their survival, where resources like metal, wood, food and sweet water are rare. They will want to acquire a ship and to explore unknown shores, find riches on nearly inaccessible magical islands, and perhaps come to some understanding of their weird surroundings, learn how to use unique crafts and constructs. They even might explore the abyssal depths of the seas. Perhaps they even will find out about the origin of the great catastrophe, and about the doom this broken world awaits.

Introductionary adventure

The player characters start their adventure ship-wrecked on the icy island of Enceladus. Their tasks are to find warmth and shelter, food and water, and to build a raft in order to leave. Their stay on the island is complicated by the presence of a weird construct hunting intruders and by a mysterious, inaccessible tower. The adventure comes with what the author and artist thinks is a map. However, it lacks a scale. Distances between locations on the island are given only by walking time. This is not a map, it’s a point crawl! For narrative game masters this may be sufficient, for an OSR referee it’s not. Keep in mind that the players will want to return regularly to this island, which is relatively easy to access once the construct has been dealt with, as the island shelters an immense treasure: a large lake fed by hot springs! As we learned from the foreword, fresh water has replaced gold pieces as the standard currency. Later in the book, we will learn that 1 daily ration of water equals 1 gp in worth (I will comment on the implications of such an economy further down).

The adventure is structured as a puzzle: There is only one specific way to overcome the obstacles to find wood and rope required for building the raft. No other way to assemble this puzzle will work. This is a poor way to design an adventure. Skip it, DMs, and MAKE UP your own.

Creating player character personae

First, we receive some teaching concerning running an OSR game and character death – the kind of advice a narrative gamer would give after reading some OSR primers. Also, we receive a list of defined XP awards for specific achievements, like discovering a new island, building a large ship (yet there are no rules for ship-building in this book!) or toppling a tyrant. This is great, as these are well-definded feats to be accomplished (unlike story XP in 2E, for instance, or milestones in 5E, which subjugate players to the DM’s tyrannic rule and deprive players off reedom and adventureous spirit).

Then, you can roll up your character’s background, which will be linked to some useful skill or item. As this is the first table in the book, I will point out a minor recurring design flaw here: On some tables, you roll only once, and you read all the entries in the entire line (as in this table here). Other times, you are supposed to roll once per column and combine the results (this is the generator principle from Yoon-Suin that inspired the author). The reader has no way of knowing in which way to use a table, except by reading several entries to come to an interpretation of which type of table that is. Not a big problem, but two types of graphic design for the tables could easily have solved it.

Next, you pick a character class from OSE (or similar OSR system) and create the character as usual, or you choose one of the following Wind Wraith specific classes:

Sea-Elves: In analogy to the elf class, but has the best survival skills in a sea-based setting.

Entomologist: Sort of a magic-user mutated by self-experiments, has power to control large insects (similar to familiars). Entomologist advance like elves on the XP tables, and probably have spells-per-day as a magic-user (this part is missing from the class table). A large list of arcane insects is provided. I like these insect-mutants very much, this class is a great idea!

Wind mages: An integral part of the setting, often to be met on the generator tables in the book. These are magic-users specialised in wind spells, obviously. The rules for this class are hidden far to the rear of the book (p. 129), for some reason.

World generation

This world is shattered and its seas are separated by boundaries (e.g. arcane webs, invisible walls, walls of fog) which are difficult to cross. The „World Map“ consists of mere 4 by 5 hexagonal spaces, on which we are to define, depending on our campaign needs, one to seven seas, each consisting of 1 to 5 world map hexes. No scale is provided!

The author suggests that different DMs could run each one their own neighbouring sea. Excellent! This is some Advanced OSR advice here, in compliance with the spirit of the 1E DMG!

Next, for each sea, we will have to draw 2 trade winds and 2 ocean currents. These don’t need to satisfy any real-world plausibility, as we are in weird reality-shattered world here. However, in an example we see that the ocean currents are meant to intersect. They don’t unite and separate, they literally cross each other. No thought is given to what turbulent phenomena happen at this intersection, this is just two naval trade roads crossing, and that’s it. And no, a current should not double a ship’s speed, it should add or subtract a fixed value to the ship’s speed. Well ….

Then, we move on to the „Sea Map“, which consists of 12 by 18 hexes to be filled. Again, no explicit scale is given for the map, and here our problems start. How does a hex on the world map translate into hexes on the sea map? No teaching what-so-ever is provided by the lazy Lazy Litch. Luckily, St. Gygax has illuminated us by providing his holy scripture, the DMG. Basically, we can fit as many sea map hexes as we wish into the (unscaled) world map hex. For instance, we could define a world map hex to contain six sea map hexes along a border and 11 hexes across, which would nicely fit onto the double page sea map. Or we could have smaller seas, e.g. 5 hexes per border, 9 hexes across a sea hex. MAKE IT UP! But how big is a sea of one to 5 world map hexes? How big is one sea map hex? The author provides us with the information that a ship can cross a number of hexes per day equal to its speed value, modified by wind and currents. We can work with that! Ships (later in the book) have speed values between 1 and 10, most player ships will have a speed between 2 and 6. Though the author, in true narrative gamer fashion, refuses to define time and space, we can assume the speeds to be given in knots, i.e. nautical miles per hour. Thus, a sea map hex would measure 24 nautical miles across. You can easily do the math for your world map hex now. However, we may ask why the world map consists of hexes at all? Is this some fetishised OSR thing, everything has to be a hex map (except when it’s an artisitic point-crawl island depiction). It would have been so much easier to have Traveller-style subsector tiles arranged on the world map. The rectangular sea map would then correspond to a sea subsector nice and neat, no hex conversion required.

Before we finally fill the sea hexes, we determine general features of the sea: Its archetypical name („The Solitary Singularity Sea“), its Leviathan (a giant hermit crab), its impending cataclysm (everything gets sucked into the singularity and crushed). We won’t hear about the cataclysm again, because each sea will spawn a tyrant who brings his own cataclysm. So we have two world-affecting cataclysms waiting per sea. That’s life! This is a per-line-table on page 22, comprising 9 sea archetypes, but we are going to customize our seas by using the next table (seven pages later, consisting of 20 lines or results, so we could generate a variety of 180 seas in total).

We generate it’s name, again(?!), („The Riptide Rift“, so we get the Singularity Rift Sea or something like that), the leviathan („The Murderous Mud Mutant“, so we know now it’s a Mud Mutant Crab) and nature (frequent earthquakes and tsunamis).

Now, we are going to fill the sea map!

First, as an option, we may mark sea depths per hex. A nice overview table defines the sea depth zones, surprisingly even stating the depth in feet, how to access them and what can be encountered, down to the Hadopelagic aka. the Chilling Underworld, where, somewhere, the Wind Wraith slumbers!

Island distribution: We are told to distribute either 15, 25 or 35 islands on a sea, depending on whether we want islands distribution to be sparse, medium or dense. Now a sea spans 1-5 world map hexes, so I guess density is per world map hex, not per sea. Yet, as discussed above, we don’t know how many sea map hexes per world map hex the author-artist had in mind. Artists and mathematics! In the end, we can only MAKE UP how many islands we want to distribute.

We know that there has to be a trade hub island and its trade network to further islands, following the trade winds and currents. Also, there will be another, unconnected trade network belonging to the tyrant. The tyrant will control his home base island, a prison island and some subjugated islands forming his network. When we have established all trading islands, we can just mark unknown islands for exploration on our map. There may even be some floating islands!

The tyrant

There is a 8-line table for the type of soldiers (e.g. „Algae Assassins“) the tyrant will align under his banner, and their stats (Nice! Stats!). This is followed by a a true generator-type table for a d30 and 3 columns to combine to parts of a tyrant title („The Geometric Steward“) and to find out his agenda (e.g. enslave people to work on connecting all islands to one big continent).

What follows are examples of fully fleshed out tyrants, and we will see that there is much more about them than the generator-table told us so far. The first one is the Wind Wraith himself, an additional hidden tyrant to be placed in one of the seas. I am not going to spoil his secret in this review, but his background is crucial for understanding the setting. Then, we have descriptions of the Static Empress, the Trident Queen and the Carrion King. I totally love them! The Static Queen experiments in order to understand and transcend reality, while her Volt Knights conquer the sea. The Trident Queen is a mad benevolent sea-elven ruler, micro-controlling and missmanaging her expanding realm into starvation – imaging Mao’s China or present-day North Korea under a beloved Queen caring for her people and protecting them from harmful malcontents! The Carrion King wants to save the world by raising a dead god. All his efforts are directed to finding and assembling the huge divine body parts.

For each fleshed-out tyrant there is a „timeline of events“ in eight stages, detailing their advance in quest and conquering, their growing army, and the general effects on the population. The timelines lack a proper time scale, except for the Carrion King who will conquer one island every 1d4+1 weeks. So the stages are just narrative guidelines for telling the advancing agenda (luckily not in „clock“ form). Or we could wargame the tyrant’s advance, but there is not much supportive material in the book for that. No problem, referee, MAKE IT UP!

It would be hard to come up with some better tyrant by using the generator. I would definitely use the pre-made tyrants in my campaign milieu, they are brilliantly conceived!

There is also a 20-line table (or is it a generator?) for describing the tyrant’s stronghold.

Island generation

As stated above, there is a number of key islands linked to the trading networks, to resources, but also bases for rival crews. The other islands will be weird!

Now we get to plenty of pages for generating these islands: morphology, geology, unique weather patterns (each island being enclosed in a geometrical membrane, e.g. d20-formed, containing the local weather), types of artificial islands, magical geology, resources, enchantments, structures on the island and their state of repair, traps and enchantments, and their seclusive or freakish population. These tables so far seem to be intended for unconnected islands to be explored, and the results will be strange, the islands hard to access, and the inhabitants hostile or otherwise problematic. Not all entries on the tables will easily combine, so just ignore results which don’t combine – or make the combination extra-weird.

Sample random island: Morphology and Geology: huge (18 square miles), spiral shape, tall volcanic peak & volcanic island, pink shell sand, tropical rainforest. Weather, common: endless drizzle; uncommon: drought; rare: sickly necrotic mist. Magical geology: lava river, spawns 1 fire elemental per month. Resources, common: fresh fruit; uncommon: giant beehives; rare: healing berry bush (for healing potions). Enchantment: The island is invisible until you make physical contact with it.

You can also create levitating or moving islands and deep sea dwellings.

Then we have a table titled „Traders, Guilds & Shops“ – they could be on islands connected to the trade hub. Moving islands – 10 entries. A fish table detailing what fish one can catch („Purple Ghoul Herring“) and how much rations to get per day – this number is rather low. Is this table for player characters fishing? Per fisherman? Otherwise fishing could not sustain an island population. Anyway, we don’t know the population number of our trading hub or of associated islands. Numbers are only provided for the more outlandish island dwellers.

Trade hubs, their goods and services, ruler, guardian, current crisis are detailed in the follwing tables. Even taverns and some NPC realtions are explored. Faction and NPC generators are provided. There is a sheet for penning down a NPC relation net.

Sample random faction: The Cult of Gunpowder. Hideout: The Tower of Salt. Goal: ideologically opposed to healing magic, will sabotage its use. Rich in knowledge, in need of lifestock. Secret weapon: a bard whose song causes mutiny and discord. State: in decline, can’t find new members. Structure: monarchic (royal bloodline). Leader: Horrified about wrong path, has left and founded a new, more extreme organisation.

However, the D&D tradition of providing population sizes and militia numbers, crucial for any OSR game leaning onto its wargaming roots, are missing. We must MAKE THEM UP!

The economy

There are no price lists for goods, so you need to rely on other game publications to shop our items. 1 g.p. in other settings equals one daily ration of food or water, the latter also being the preferred currency. So instead of carrying a purse with coins (which are really cumbersome in 1e), we now have to roll huge water barrels before us when we go to the market. Probably the trade hubs will introduce a certificate of ownership inscribed on a sea shell, while the inhabitants will store their water reserves in a well-protected communal storage facility. However, no such considerations are to be found in this book.

Also, by not including price lists, some good opportunities to describe the setting have been wasted. In the class descriptions we can read which materials the class will rely on. Sea elves for instance use armour made of coral, shell, cartilage, bone or driftwood. What types of armour are then available to sea elves, are there drawbacks with certain materials, does it affect the price?

Further, there are no trading rules. As soon as the player characters are in possession of a ship, there are basically three things they can decide to do: exploration (we have rules for that in this book), warfare and piracy (see naval combat, below) and trade. How does availability affect the price for goods bought in bulk? Classic Traveller has trading rules, many other RPG systems have trading rules, even 2E Al-Qadim has trading rules. Wind Wraith doesn’t. Sigh. We will have to MAKE THEM UP as this setting cannot be run without.

Now let us shift our attention to the ships (which come without a price, of course). The ship templates do have a cargo capacity value (yay!) ranging from 1 to 6. What does this number mean? We have to MAKE IT UP (nay!), as there is no explanation in the book. Cargo capacity could be the number of weekly food and water rations for a maximum crew, for instance. Thus, a brig having a cargo value of 3 and a crew maximum of 40 men (they/them) would be able to carry 840 daily rations of food and an equal amount of water, which amounts to a value of 1680 g.p. Loading food and water for 1 week for an ideal crew of 20 men would take 280 „g.p.“ of available space and leave you free to load 1400 water rations as loot or trade currency.

No religion

So, the gods are dead. There may be some weird sects, but we can be certain that no greater temple will be offering services like Raise Dead or Remove Curse. That will make adventuring extremely perilous, massively affecting game balance. Healing magic is mentioned, though.

What about player character clerics, how are they affected by the lack of gods? Can they only access to spells up to 2^nd level, for instance? Again, we need to MAKE UP a lot of world building content ourselves.

In part 2 of this review we shall talk ships, navigation and encounters.