Review 48 - Evil of the Ancients
This marks the last review of a Goodman Games module in this blog series. I have run many others, but I've found that I tend to have less to say about them unless there is something that stands out about the adventure itself, so I've decided to not include them in favor of other adventures that will be a bit more interesting to write about. So without further ado, let's get into Evil of the Ancients for Mutant Crawl Classics.
This is a level three adventure written by Michael Curtis, and I ran it as a Halloween one-shot a couple of years ago using the standard MCC rules with some pre-generated characters. One brief note is that it has some ties to another of Curtis' MCC adventures, Incursion of the Ultradimension, which I have not run. However, these connections are not critical, and it's not necessary for the players to experience one before the other.
The general premise of the adventure is, at its heart, a haunted house story. In this case, the standard ruin of the ancient world that PCs would explore as a matter of course has a couple of important changes-- first, it is "haunted" by a group of interdimensional beings that are not fully part of the material reality, and they can have a profound effect on the PCs minds and perception; these show up as "memory echoes" throughout the adventure site. Second, very soon into the adventure, the party realizes that they are trapped in the bunker and finding an alternate route or repairing the obvious way out become a major factor.
Getting it to the Table
I've already spoken at length about my opinions regarding the Goodman Games "house style" of adventure formatting, so I won't talk about it again here. I couldn't even fit all the links to the blog posts into this bit. As far as actually preparing for the table, there's a new factor that a potential judge would need to consider-- the "memory echoes".
This is where this adventure really stands out from the others. Similar to ghostly apparitions in a classic haunted house story, these are sensory phenomenon that the PCs experience while exploring the ruined facility, and they are in fact the memories of the facility's long-dead staff, being transmitted as a side-effect of the strange entities that partially inhabit this dimension. As written, the module has a procedure that the judge must follow to determine the frequency and severity of the memory echoes as a PC experiences them-- this is detailed in an appendix, and it boils down to regular Willpower saves made in secret, so the judge will need to have this information available to reference without alerting the players. Eventually, if enough of these saves are failed, it can result in the PC losing their mind and turning on their friends, like a good haunted house movie.
Once its determined whether a particular PC will be affected, each location in the lower level of the facility has a list of potential memory echoes added to the location descriptions. They are arranged in ascending order of severity, which ties into the number of failed saves the particular PC has failed. It takes a little bit of legwork on the judge's side of things, but the payoff is pretty great at the table. The module also includes recommendations for how to select and present the echoes to the affected players, so when used properly this is one of the few examples of a module that can scare the players just as much as the PCs. The locations themselves are also packed full of creepy stuff in addition to the usual things you'd expect to find in a post-apocalyptic game-- there's a definite Event Horizon vibe.
What Worked?
- Memory Echoes. This was a very well thought-out mechanic and a great addition to the adventure that really made it stand out compared to the usual MCC offerings.
- Non-linear dungeon. As I've mentioned, many adventures published by Goodman Games tend to be a bunch of set piece encounters strung together, but this one is a lot closer to true open exploration. Once the party descends to the lower level, the map is essentially a ring of corridors with rooms branching off-- there isn't one single path to follow, and players will most likely want to revisit areas as they learn more context about the situation.
What Didn't Work?
- Keycards. This is a common trope seen in post-apocalytpic adventures, where the party needs to find a variety of keycards to gain access to certain areas. While that can be a useful way of gating progress in a larger-scale adventure, in this one it didn't really add much beyond some extra complication for running the game.
Final Thoughts
This is one of my favorite MCC adventures, and reading through it again for this review made me want to run it again, even though Halloween is over. I'll probably convert it to Glowburn & Radscars for the next iteration.
You can get Evil of the Ancients at the Goodman Games web store. Thanks for reading!