Review 38 - Operation Unfathomable
One simultaneous boon and burden of the non-mainstream TTRPG world is that there is a tremendous amount of third party content, and it can often be very difficult to keep track of what's worth picking up and what actually does something very new and different with a game that you're used to. One thing that helps is when you become aware of a publisher who is consistently making stuff that's right up your alley, and then you can filter the noise a bit. This week I'm talking about Operation Unfathomable, a weird underworld adventure released by Hydra Cooperative. This review will focus on the introductory adventure included in the DCC omnibus version of the adventure and setting book for the Odious Uplands, collected in the volume titled Completely Unfathomable.
The adventure and setting were written by Jason Sholtis and converted to DCC Paul Wolfe, with art by Jason Sholtis, Chris Brandt, John Larrey, Stefan Poag, and Karl Stjernberg. Cartography was by Jez Gordon, Jason Sholtis, and Karl Stjernberg. This work has appeared in a few different forms, originally being written for Swords and Wizardry as a standalone adventure and setting guide. They were combined into a single volume and converted to DCC not too long ago, and this is the form in which I found it.
I won't go too much into detail about the setting itself, as I did not actually run any games in the overworld portion of the book, but will rather focus on the level 1 adventure. The general premise is that the PCs have been hired to recover a powerful relic that has been stolen from the Sorcerer-King by his son and taken into the underworld in what is assumed to be a disastrous failure of an expedition. Normally, such a place is far too dangerous for a party of level 1 adventurers; thankfully, the prince's expedition has killed a lot of the really dangerous stuff, leaving a "safe" trail of dead bodies to follow. In practice, this is a great way to introduce a dangerous adventure site with plenty of tantalizing hooks to return to once the party gets a little more powerful.
Getting it to the Table
Right off the bat, I will say that this one took a fair amount of preparation to get ready for game night. Part of that is just that it's a huge adventure area, with a huge number of things to interact with. The page count of the adventure (at least in the omnibus DCC edition) is around 80, including maps and some full-page illustrations. It would be difficult to run this as a one-shot to say the least, unless of course it's a TPK. There is a fair amount of "introduction" as well, which establishes some of the setting information and context of the adventure, but also includes some very helpful advice for judges running the game. The actual order of information as presented was also a bit confusing-- there is a stretch of about 35 pages from the section titled "Start" to the description of the encounter areas, and then you have to flip back to the "Master Encounter Table" which is described as the most important thing to refer to in the judge's advice. Frustratingly, the PDF version did not make this any easier; there is no link in the sidebar index that brings you directly to the "Encounters & Other Random Weirdness" section, which is something that I would have left a bookmark in when playing it at the table.
The encounter procedure itself worked pretty well once I got a handle on how to quickly reference it (in other words, I copied all of the tables out of the PDF and put them in my Google Sheet that I use as a general tracker when running games online). Essentially you've got a master table and then a collection of sub-tables to roll on, which are all influenced by the type of location that the party is currently in. Most of the really fun and interesting moments came from random encounters too-- there is a huge variety of weird and bizarre NPCs to meet or hazards to avoid on their way to the keyed locations. Ultimately, once you come up with a good way to parse the tremendous amount of content that can be found in this adventure, it results in a very fun environment that will fill several sessions worth of play. I think it was just hampered a bit by the challenge of trying to prevent so much information in a logical way.
What Worked?
- Incredibly dense ecosystem of weirdos. There are so many great factions and NPCs that can be encountered in the underworld. Special mention goes to Doctor Ephraim Throntorios, the time-traveling bear in a suit looking for his time-traveling scientist rival. That interaction alone could be an entire adventure.
- "Easy" route into the dangerous area. I can't remember ever seeing a similar setup for an introductory adventure, where there is a patently deadly area that is clearly meant for more powerful parties that is temporarily made navigable by weaker PCs. The premise of the adventure is ripe for adding hooks for further play, with plenty of moments where the party can (and should) say "we should leave this for now and come back later".
- Lots of paths to take. There's a huge amount of verticality, alternate routes, multiple entrances to the overworld, and opportunity for clever use of the map to leverage advantages by a smart party. This could be one of the supporting pillars for a sprawling campaign, which is definitely its intended use in the context of the rest of the book. You could even connect this to other regions without too much effort.
What Didn't Work?
- Incredibly dense ecosystem of weirdos. This was also a good example of where having so many good ideas in a single adventure could easily become intimidating to a new judge and difficult to run. It took me a lot of prep work and thinking before I came up with a way to easily run this at the table, and even then there was a lot of flipping around in the PDF to find the thing I needed, because as I mentioned earlier, the indexing and hyperlinking wasn't ideal.
- Inconvenient/inconsistent layout. Related to the above point, this seemed like it would have benefited from some novel methods of layout rather than just huge chunks of information crammed side by side into the book. A great deal of relevant game info was placed in the nine appendices, and often there was incomplete or conflicting information, particularly when it came to the new magical items introduced in the adventure.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this was a massive beast of an adventure that resulted in some very fun game sessions. I definitely would want to run it again sometime, probably using a different rule set than Dungeon Crawl Classics. That one has some baggage included with it that leans towards a specific style of play that I now think is a bit at odds with the tone of the actual adventure. PCs are very powerful in that system, and players are usually expecting to run through a fairly linear series of big set piece battles, while I feel that a more cautious "true" OSR approach would be a better fit with the idea that you're creeping along in the wake a of a powerful party, avoiding the attention of the really big threats.
You can get the DCC omnibus version Completely Unfathomable at DriveThru RPG. Thanks for reading!