Wally’s Waffles and Rats!

Last night my online group finished their second Land of Eem adventure: Wally’s Waffles and Rats!, from the Land of Eem: Adventures in the Mucklands anthology

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.