Against the Cult of the Roach God
This blog started in part to track my A Thousand Thousand Islands campaign, which unfortunately quickly fizzled due to scheduling issues. However, I still love the setting of course, so it was with great excitement that I finally received my copy of Reach of the Roach God. This soon became bittersweet, as the day I received my copy it became known that the creators, writer Zedeck Siew and illustrator Mun Kao, were discontinuing the project due to business disagreements. Not only that, but the zines, even the pdfs, are no longer available. This is a huge loss for the OSR, as this setting was doing something different, unique, and important.
Unlike the short zines of A Thousand Thousand islands, Reach of the Roach God is a large 300 page tome. More than setting material, Reach presents a campaign structured around the creeping malevolent influence of roach-folk. As should be obvious, using roaches as the antagonists is brilliant. We’ve all dealt with roaches, and we know them to be horrifying, chaotic evil beings. Similar to the zines, however, is the fact that Reach features lush illustrations and poetic writing on each page. This post is not a review of Reach per se. Rather, I want to think about what this book is doing at the level of scenario design. How is Reach similar to or different from the low-level dungeon- and wilderness-crawls popular in the OSR? What cues does it take from classic scenario design? And where does the -crawl style of gaming clash with the aesthetics of the A Thousand Thousand Islands setting?
Classic Scenario Design: Against the Cult of the Reptile God
Of course, among the thousands of dnd adventures there is a huge variety, from simple 5 room dungeons to sprawling, linear adventure paths. To examine classic scenario design more closely, I’ll take as an example a classic module, N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God by Douglas Niles.
This module offers the key elements of an adventure scenario, particularly for low level characters: a starting town (two, actually), a small wilderness area, and a dungeon, all placed within a larger campaign setting that can be used to locate the next module. In many classic scenarios, the PCs will need to find their own motivation for visiting the dungeon, the most obvious and well-rewarded one being finding treasure before returning to the safety of town to rest and level up. Against the Cult of the Reptile God adds an investigative layer to this: the safe haven town (Hochoch) is separate from the cult town (Orlane), making the latter essentially an adventuring site (with several mini dungeons). In addition, the module adds a time pressure as the activities of the cult ramp up the longer the PCs take to investigate, offering a risk/reward that is not just to do with treasure, but with defeating the BBEG. It is successful as a module because it invites exploration and problem solving, both for the built-in xp-for-gold reasons and for ‘narrative’ reasons.
The Zine Setting: A Thousand Thousand Islands
The ATTI zines are, obviously, a very different sort of product. First of all they are pieces of a setting, not modules. But even beyond that, they differ from the gazetteer-style setting overviews popularized by TSR and other publishers. The latter tend to take an expansive, comprehensive, and omniscient view, providing a zoomed out perspective on both the space of the world (as represented by the big map of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc) and its time (as indicated by the exhaustive histories).
ATTI, by contrast, presents fragments and vignettes, individual locations/regions whose spatial relationship is left undefined, and whose past is presented, when it is, as myth, folklore, and hearsay. A page might be devoted to a particular character, location, or item, without a sense that these descriptions add up to the totality of the larger region introduced. “Adventure” is possible on these islands, but the information presented does not go out of its way to hook PCs cast as “adventurers.” Rather, it seems that the setting and its characters exist on its own terms, at times with problems and dramas that may invite PC intervention, but at other times existing in their own fantastical mundanity.
Together, ATTI has a somewhat desultory feel, but in a good, carefree way: it’s more about hanging out in a fictional world, meeting people, seeing the things they make, learning about their everyday hopes and worries than it is about adventuring per se. The fragmentary character of the islands subvert the typical modes of exploration in dnd, modes that focus the acquisition of that gazetteer-type of objective knowledge that the PCs use to solve problems (problems that typically involve killing monsters and gaining treasure).
When I first read these zines I was a bit flummoxed by this aspect of them. What am I supposed to do with this? I thought. How can I introduce this world? Where is the game-able content? But after some time, it seemed to me that the zines allowed players to make characters to go to this fictional place and just hang out. If adventure was desired, the zines had threads that the GM could pull on to provide something classic. But just as likely, the PCs might be happy exploring the islands in a different mode.
The Contradictions of the Late OSR: Reach of the Roach God
As mentioned above, Reach of the Roach God is styled as not just an adventure but as a campaign. It includes three adventure sites, two chapters of other locales/peoples, two chapters of bestiaries, and a final chapter that brings it all together with some cavern generators. Aspects of Reach adhere to the norms of classic modules. The adventure sites are each a series of interconnected dungeons, and each has the theme of a roach entity or cult slowly infiltrating a society and causing chaos. Each adventure has a timer of things that happen as the PCs investigate/explore, usually keyed to the random encounters. The first adventure site simply adds more roach incursions the more encounters the PCs have, the second asks the GM to keep track of roving guardians that move about a temple complex, while the third has five factions each with their own clocks. These are interesting mechanics that all drive the PCs further into the underground world and further into confrontation with the roach god’s minions. It’s an adventure.
However, in other aspects, Reach’s presentation prevents or even subverts its qualities of adventure. Superficially, the layout employs the fragmentary, deliberate style of the zines: single NPCs take up as much as a whole page and information is spread out in a way that would require (for me at least) some utilitarian prep to effectively bring this to the table. Material that is important for the GM to know up front might appear in the middle of a section, and related bits of information are spread out and in different areas. For example Chapter 2, “Spider Mountain Temple” starts on p. 51, but waits until p. 70 to give the GM an important and useful rundown of recent events, including the incursions of the roach god. The map of the entire site only appears 6 pages later, while the source of the incursion, Odoyoq’s Agent, is only introduced on the last page of the chapter (p. 110), and only briefly. This kind of jaunty storytelling works for the zines, but here frustrates usability. Similarly, Chapter 3, “City of Peace,” contains five factions, each with their own agendas and clocks, but this information is spread out throughout the chapter instead of presented together, meaning that the GM will have to collate these agendas together in a reference to efficiently keep track of their progress. Especially in this chapter, the roach threat doesn’t necessarily seem more important or take up more space than all the other interesting elements. The bestiary chapters are evocative and interesting but contain creatures not referenced in any of the preceding chapters (unless I missed something). Finally, the last chapter creates a fun but convoluted mechanic for connecting the various sites together and adjoining more caverns with more roaches. Anti-cannon worldbuilding and random dungeon generation are both hallmarks of the OSR, but if/when I run this I’ll probably just label the included example map.
But those are all review-style nitpicks. Reach subverts the classic adventure conventions in more interesting ways too, whether intentionally or not. Namely, there are many characters, locations, and situations among these pages that seem to invite the more slowed-down hanging out we see in the ATTI zines. For example, we meet characters like Dee Wee Shree, a batfolk ascetic who conjures a “underwear-model ogre” to have trysts with a girl that he likes. Even NPCs that connect more directly to the roach “plot” invite slower interaction; for example, Manya, an axious cat with “fur like a storm cloud, voice low like discouraging thunder.” These npcs take up a whole page, half of which is a beautiful and intricate illustration. Further, Siew’s writing presents information in a clipped and fragmentary way, for example through a quote. The text seems to invite the GM-reader, and by implication the game, to slow down when interacting with these characters, to flesh them out through play and extended interaction, to perhaps get distracted. Siew provides plenty of more examples of this dynamic: other bat folk that have Karen energy, a girl that is as “annoying as a cat stealing a fish from your plate,” etc. Even the roach antagonists sometimes let the veil drop, like “Pa Ippodo” who has “the grace of your fanciest girlboss wearing a mermaid swim-tail.”
In sum, in Reach, the norms of adventure writing and the style of ATTI clash, at least in part. It is both a big, damn adventure and a place to hang out, and these things are in some tension. I could see this tension be annoying for GM’s trying to prepare to run it, but also might result in interesting things that happen during play as the players engage with the material and become attached to particular characters or places. In other words, if there is always a chance that PCs will get “distracted” from the “main story” by a random npc, that chance is greater here, where the npcs are so evocative. It is an interesting thought experiment to imagine Reach presented in the OSE house style: all the maps together in one place, followed by random encounter tables, followed by faction details. Npcs taking up one or two lines instead of a whole page. Instead we get a sprawl of rich-but-dense description and vivid, detailed illustration. It feels like, and is, an indulgent pleasure of a book.