Review 32 - Jungle Incursion into the Lair of the Batmen
Get your radiation suits on and pick up your stop sign shields, because we're venturing back into the post-apocalypse realm for this week's review! Jungle Incursion into the Lair of the Batmen was written for Mutant Crawl Classics by Ian McGarty, with art by Dan Smith, Timothy Burns, Ian McGarty, and J.E. Shields.
The general premise of this adventure is that there is a new type of predator in the area that have taken up residence in an abandoned scientific facility from the time of the ancients, and wildlife and villagers are being hunted by them. This particular adventure does not have specific hooks written out for the GM, but rather just presents the situation with no additional background or introduction. I ran this as a one shot for the playtest, so the "why are we here" question was not as important, but for someone hoping to connect this to a larger campaign, some additional story building will be necessary.
While this was written for Mutant Crawl Classics, I actually took the opportunity to run this with my new hack that I've recently released, called Glowburn and Radscars. This game combines the rules-light sensibility of Cairn with the themes and character mechanics of Mutant Crawl Classics, and my primary goal for it was to make a system that could easily convert adventures written for systems like MCC or Gamma World to a more streamlined rule system. If you're interested in taking a look at it, it's currently available as pay-what-you-want on my itch page. The conversion principles were directly inspired by the method detailed on the Cairn website, and I have discussed them in previous blog posts.
Getting it to the Table
When I said that the adventure has no introduction, I really meant it. We get about one paragraph of detail about the night flyers and what's been happening to the villagers, and then we are immediately thrown into the area key.
I do have to say that the layout of this one was a bit confusing-- each area is numbered, but there are no corresponding numbers on the map which appears after the first page of keyed locations. The area outside the facility was fairly easy to match up to the locations because they were labeled on the map, but the facility itself was very difficult because none of the rooms were labeled at all. Instead, the area key had a cutout of the map next to each area, illustrating what it was detailing. This was a good idea in theory, but in practice it's not very convenient to use because you would need to visually match the piece to its corresponding location on the map.
One bit of prep work that I had to do in order to make this easier to run was to essentially open up an image editor and manually add numbers to the map, so that I could quickly refer to the correct area rather than doing a memory game shape match each time. While this wasn't a huge time investment, it feels like it would have been easy enough for the map to have been labeled in a useful way in the first place.
The format of each area key was a bit clumsy as well. At first glance, you can see that there are bullet points separating the details, but each bullet point has a small paragraph after it-- essentially the bullet points are just extra bits added to normal text. It breaks things up visually a bit, but it doesn't really serve the purpose that bullet points are meant to in adventure layout. There was still a lot of text to sift the relevant details out of, though monsters were listed in bold and important objects/items were italicized. Another point against it was the fact that no stat blocks were provided in the area keys for either monsters or items-- instead, everything was tucked into the appendices in the back.
These appendices are actually twice as long as the adventure itself-- we have a bestiary detailing all of the foes that can be encountered, followed by a catalog of the artifacts to be found, and finally a write up of a new patron AI which includes tables for Invoke Patron and three new wetware programs. Glowburn and Radscars does not use AI patrons or wetware, so I did not include those in the playtest.
All in all, there was a fair amount of prep work that went into getting this ready for the table. Because I was converting it to a new system anyway, this wasn't a deal breaker for me, but I would definitely not call it "ready to play."
What Worked?
- Situation! This is essentially a site-based adventure, with little to no mucking around with backstory and scripted events and a plot arc that the GM was meant to follow. The adventure locations are relatively concise despite the odd bullet points, so in seven pages counting the full page map, you have a pretty good-sized facility to explore and interact with.
- Stuff to play with! There was quite a bit of interactivity in this adventure, both in the room features and in the number of artifacts to be found. Special mention goes to the "Snacks and Drinks" section and to Gloop, the semi-intelligent blob of ancient processed foods who may become friendly if fed.
What Didn't Work?
- Unlabeled map. This was the kicker for me, made more egregious by the fact that extra effort was made with the mini map pieces to make the map usable, when that time could have been spent on just adding numbers to the regular map.
- Necessary info in the appendices. Always a no-no for me, though in my case because I was converting the monsters and items anyway, I had them in a separate document for quick reference. Anyone playing it with MCC would be wise to find a good way to view them on demand rather than having to flip to the back each time.
- The title is kind of a mouthful. You could just call it "Incursion into the Lair of the Batmen" and that would be ok. "The Lair of the Batmen" would be better. Edit!
Final Thoughts
Despite the problems that I had with its layout, this was actually a very fun adventure to run! Personal style and tastes will of course vary, but I find that a simple location-based premise is often going to give you the best bang for your buck, because you can just let the players have fun exploring it. A good one will have plenty of detail about the interactivity of the things you can find in the rooms. One other thing that could have improved this adventure would have been a good random encounter table-- the adventure does at one point call out the fact that breaking down doors is going to be noisy and will attract attention, but it fails to include any consequences for attracting attention.
You can get Jungle Incursion into the Lair of the Batmen at the Goodman Games web store, and you can find Glowburn and Radscars on my itch page. Thanks for reading!