Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya, Part 1
I started running the first of Munkao's adventures for a small group of folk from my workplace. This series of posts are kind of a play report with some reflections on what I learned from running the game. See Part 0 for a brief intro to system and PC's. We play shortish (around 90-120 min) sessions, fuelled by Tunnocks fine adventuring supplies.
The hook and the quest
A small temple among countless others in the mighty Lanshin College of a Thousand Paths, Het Thamsya is dedicated to the Automata Path. The (mis)guiding principle: Life is suffering, so lifeless automata are the solution. The temple's founder, Satur, has been alone on a retreat within Het Thamsya for almost a decade, in search of deep automata secrets. His meditation is weeks away from completion, and any interruption could compromise it.
I clunkily roleplayed the acting temple Abbot, Sumgan, who explains the predicament...
Weeks ago, a giant wasps nest at the rear of the temple, previously unnoticed by the monks of Het Thamsya, started growing abnormally large. It now towers above the roof of the temple, but cannot be removed without disturbing Satur. The monks are worried.
To complicate things further, Satur has programmed automata to prevent anyone from entering the temple while he is meditating.
The PC's were given a vaguely remembered map, some advice about automata commands and an anxious plea from Sumgan: Please help! Save Satur by carrying him out of the temple without waking him!
The adventure begins!
The players approached the temple with caution, avoiding the main entrance in favour of scouting around the temple grounds for more info or a way in. Starting in the Eastern gardens, they didn't make it all the way around before Mo Che decided to scale the giant wasps nest for a better view, using his sai as pitons. I didn't check the area description properly (it's at the back of the module) or else they would have been swarmed by worker wasps. But the way we ran it, the PC's scaled the nest by giving me a good account of their strategy (send up the little guy with a rope, find an anchor point etc), and succeeding in saving rolls (mostly STR as I remember).
But I rolled plenty of encounter dice to account for the disturbance using the first encounter table (p9) in the book (again, probably wrong but it worked in this instance). So their entrance to Het Thamsya (and the end of our Session 1) ended up with an encounter with 2 Half-Wasp while still climbing the nest. Mo Che got walloped quite bad, Thaep Hok lost his cleaver to stop himself falling, and they all ended up crashing through the rafters of the temple courtyard and drawing the attention of 4 Tortonon Automata!
We had role-playing, problem solving, slapstick and some combat. The adventure was dangerous enough to plant seeds of fear/ tension, and the session ended on a cliff-hanger as the automata began chanting in voices like clockwork vocoders
"STEPS NO IN - STEPS NO IN - STEPS NO IN..."
Great fun!