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 Point 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 