As it says on the tin, the Adventure Tone of this one is Derring-Do rather than hijinks, and I’d say it delivered. The party resorted to fighting a lot more in this one, though great excitement was had when the Dungeoneer character managed to use her Hire ability exactly as described in the example in the rules. The whole group seemed to derive great satisfaction from the rules playing out as in the example.
The players’ attitudes towards the setting seem to run the gamut from Enthusiastic to Wildly Enthusiastic. We’re still stumbling on the rules here and there, and there were one or two places in the map that I had a little trouble parsing: the cliff in area 4 could be more obvious, as could the connection between the hole in area 6 that I at first read as a underground pond and its outlet in 9, but on the whole it was smooth enough. I clipped the map from the pdf and used that as the map in Roll20, which worked find as long as I was a little careful to use fog-of-war to conceal the illustrations of the creatures on the map until the party properly met them.
The adventure is straight-up “There’s rats in the basement of the tavern”, but hey, it’s a classic. Particularly if you have new players they’re not likely to roll their eyes at the cliche, and there are twists on the tried-and-true formula that make the adventure more than just there are some big rats, go kill ’em. I was somewhat surprised that this time around the party spent very little time talking to the colorful NPCs hanging out at Wally’s. In the first adventure they did, the Curse of the Chicken-Foot Witch, they must have spent an hour or more just blabbing with them, but here they were straight to business… maybe they were feeling the time-pinch of the Subterranean Pits and Lairs LLC bulldozers ready to level the place at dawn.
Scouter, provided by Uncle Al’s Discount Orphans as an Underling to the PC Brigitta the Bugbear, a Dungeoneer, in our new Land of Eem Campaign.
This is the first art I’ve drawn that’s more than a doodle in the margins of notes in… a decade? More? Posting it before I have time to make myself crazy trying to fix it…
The Land of Eem’s corporate dystopia is a bit odd to me, in that it’s kind of capitalism without consumption. There are frequent mentions of corporate overlords, and many if not most of the NPCs in the adventures I’ve looked at so far have a bit in their description about their attitudes towards corporations and the corporate overlords… but there are relatively few corporations named and they’re clustered in the resource extraction and transportation industries: Subterranean Pits and Lairs LLC, Krog & Sons Inc., Mucklands Trading Co. Hasty Hippogruff Shipping Co., Oilmonger Plastic Factory. Factories dot the landscape and turn the sky of the Used T’Be Forest black… but don’t seem to be selling much of anything to anyone. To be fair, you can infer that the 400 products on the mundane items list ranging from fake poop to chemistry sets to gnomish tea sets are produced and sold somewhere, but I think we can expand on that a bit. So here are some companies to add to the list:
Employment
Uncle Al’s Discount Orphans – “Why pay full price?” Providers torch-bearers and linkboys for your next dungeon expedition, as well as apprentices in bulk. This is where your Dungeoneer gets their underlings or crew.
Rugrats R Us – “Ask about our bulk rates!” The more commodified corporate competition to Uncle Al’s, with outlets all over. Wannamuckers uses Uncle Al’s kids in their stockrooms – Grumbles uses Rugrats R Us. That’s why their prices are lower.
Alger & Alger – Success Guaranteed!* *guarantees not guaranteed The upscale alternative, suitable for raising the next generation of corporate overlords.
Department Stores
Needless Markups – Designer fashions at eye-popping prices: Hermies scarves, Grouch bags, La Kwa, it’s all here and it all costs an arm and a leg. Exhaust your coin purse on a 1-3 here, but narratively people recognize and are impressed (or outraged) by the brand.
Wannamuckers – the established “respectable” department store. Genteel, but not too genteel. Their holiday light show is a thing of legend, and families will travel from all over the Mucklands (or at least all over the Used T’Be Forest) to see it during the holiday season.
Mucky’s – mid-tier “value”-oriented. Their Thanksgrumbling Day Parade is a highlight of the season, featuring giant balloons of corporate mascots like Fizzy Wizard, Uncle Al, as well as fading stars willing to standing and pretend to sing while being carted down the street on floats. If the PCs manage to win over Chara the Chicken-Foot Witch in the introductory adventure, next Thanksgrumbling she probably ends up dancing on one of the floats.
Grumbles – Discount/budget items of dodgy provenance. Only exhaust a coin purse on a 1 here, but any success with a twist is probably the item breaking if not trouble with the law over it having been reported stolen.
“Does Mucky’s tell Grumbles?”
Supermarkets
Slop & Shop – From Factory Farm to Table. Aisle after aisle of groceries, but somehow whatever aisle you’re trying to shop in, there’s a clerk unloading a pallet onto the shelves, blocking traffic.
Wholly Foods – For the Whole You. Wholly sustainable, wholly organic, wholly overpriced. Kombucha section larger than the actual food section.
Oil
Bog Standard Oil – We Care* About The Environment! (*care does does not imply actual caring, some exclusions apply, void where prohibited)
Brutish Petroleum – Finders Keepers!
Insurance
KafCo – “You die, you win!”, and for their Health Insurance division: “We take the Care out of Health Care!” The premier insurance company for all of the Mucklands. Sorry, you need to fill out Form 22 to file a claim, but the only way to get a copy of Form 22 is to apply for one with Form 22.
Newspapers
The setting does have the Thurf Tribune, mentioned as the prime source of daily news in the Mucklands in the campaign setting book, and that the High Magistrate shut down the Bogtown Gazette, but I feel there’s room for more, particularly a yellow-journalism style “If It Bleeds, It Leads” style, as well as possibly a Village Voice-esque counter-culture journal
The Muckraker – All The News That Fits In Print!
Mucklands Today – News Barely Used!
Pilot Press – What is Truth? Specializes in long-form think-pieces that provide little-to-no new information (“thumbsuckers”, in the parlance) “What the Rise of Corporate Power Says About Society”, or “The Meaning of the Dungeon Era”. Loudly decries the corporate ownership of papers like the Thurf Tribune, while hoovering up donations from non-profits established by wealthy “philanthropists” running those same corporations, e.g. the Krog Institute for Public Understanding and the Orfong Foundation for Journalistic Excellence.
The elevator pitch is Muppets meet Lord of the Rings, with a dash of Mad Max dystopia thrown in. You had me at Muppets. I mean, it’s not actually a licensed Muppets game, but its tone and visuals are heavily Jim Henson inspired, and the visuals are a big part of it since it’s a setting that was created for a series of graphic novels (Rickety Stitch and the Gelatinous Goo) and some middle-grade stories (Dungeoneer Adventures)
You can get a Quick Start Guide at their website, and there are a bunch of actual plays and reviews on YouTube. The setting The Mucklands was a more-or-less vanilla fantasy setting many years ago, before the Gloom King defeated the heroes and plunged the land into, well, gloom. Now magic has faded and become increasingly rare, while the land has entered The Dungeon Age, a satirical industrial age: “A time chaotically run by rival corporations locked in a never-ending quest to out-do one another in business and expansion. All the while, average folk toil away in mines, factories, and dungeons, eking out a meager existence.”
We played on New Year’s Day, starting with a session zero at 1:00 PM and running until about dinner time, and then picking up at around 8:00 PM and running one of the published adventures “The Curse of the Chicken-Foot Witch” until about 11:00 PM. The players adored the setting, but the rules and character creation definitely took them some getting used to. And since it was my first-time GMing it, there was a lot of consulting the rules that probably will become second-nature once we’ve got some more sessions under our belts.
The game rules are something of a cross between Old School Renaissance play, e.g. explicit wilderness movement turns and procedures, heavily driven by random encounters, and something more like Powered by the Apocalypse with what amount to “play-books” for the various classes and a largely uniform resolution procedure that has you rolling 1d12 against a table:
Roll
Result
1-2
Complete failure, and something bad
3-5
Failure, but… a silver lining
6-8
Success, but… a complication
9-11
Success
12
Complete Success, and something good
Shout out to Blaze Sanecki, who created the dynamic Roll 20 character sheet for Land of Eem, because that was a huge help in play. In particular, the macros for rolling that showed the quality of success were a real time-saver.
As you might imagine, this involves a lot of improv on the part of the GM and the players, and the game makes no bones about using the improv “Yes, and…” principle. Many of the characters abilities involve inventing details of the setting on the spot and making them canon, usually circumscribed by making it a once every session ability and possibly requiring a roll as well. Almost all the signature abilities are once every session, or once each combat, or something. Diegetic, these rules ain’t, and that’s probably our biggest sticking-point with them. Granted it was only the first session, but I had to frequently remind the players (and myself) that they had already used the ability that session so they’d have to spend a “Quest Point” to do it again… and then there’s the “Each Session” restriction, which differs from “Once Every Session” in that you can’t spend a Quest Point to use an Each Session ability again before the end of the session. Got that? I didn’t think so. There are definitely players that this sort of game is not suited to, either because they really want to think in character and meta-currencies like Quest Points are hard to wrap the character’s head around, or they don’t want to be put on the spot to invent details. I know from past experience with Dungeon Crawl Classics that certain of my players hate having to come up with what their “Mighty Deed of Arms” attempt is and basically ignore it, only going for extra damage every time. If they ever play Land of Eem, I expect they’ll either pick abilities that don’t have that improv component, or make some random table they can roll on so they don’t have to choose. I lean a little that way myself as a player, but I flatter myself that as a GM I’m comfortable, even good at, making up stuff like that on the fly. Land of Eem definitely scratches my make-it-up-as-you-go itch, so far without triggering my “this isn’t role-playing, this is pretending to be the writers room of a TV show” aversion.
Look forward to some future posts on our play, and some resources for the setting, like additional corporations and NPCs for the players to interact with. Maybe even some art, since I’m finding myself inspired by the cartoony style of the illustrations by Ben Costa (one of the co-creators) and the others. For now I’m all in on Land of Eem, and even have the deluxe boxed set on its way from Exalted Funeral. Kind of wish I knew that it immediately gives you the PDFs of everything when you order it, before I dropped a chunk of change at DriveThruRPG to get the PDFs so we could play, but that’s real capitalism, boys and girls: I earn money, I give money to other people who give me goods and services in exchange, making us both better off according to our own preferences.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 