Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya, Part 0
This year I started running a game with some colleagues at my workplace. The group had played a bit together before (D&D 5E) but they were open to trying a new game. I gave a few options, and the winning choice was Kala Mandala, by the extraordinarily talented illustrator and game designer Munkao. I was happy they went for this as I had been waiting for a chance to run his first adventure for this system - Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya.
The system
Kala Mandala is a hack of Cairn, making some very clever and satisfying adjusments which breathe a specifically Southeast Asian folk history and culture into games.
I won't go into detail about Kala Mandala here (maybe once we finish this adventure I will post something longer), except to say that everyone around the table was genuinely delighted by the system as they discovered it. No one but me had read the system (or Cairn) but by the end of the character building process they were bonded with their characters and invested in their world. We probably took about 30-40 min for 3 players to build a character and get acquainted with the key differences between this game and 5E D&D.
The PC's
My players all rolled randomly for their characters and were stoked with the outcomes, except that they were all way too excited to play as animal folk (in Kala Mandala you play humans or humanoid animal folk) so I let them reroll if they rolled human! The fruits of this rolling were...
- Thaep Hok: A pig folk meddler; former paige to a travelling exorcist, with some specific and flavourful skills in healing and thieving. Among his possessions are a betelnut set, a conch shell, and an impressive ring which Thaep Hok has dubbed the 'Ring of Porcine Protection'.
- Mo Che: A bearcat folk meddler; former runner for a band of highway robbers with a focus on strange thieving skills. He is possesed of a guardian spirit in the form of a magically warm shawl, and armed with a sai.
- Ran Mogum: A buffalo folk meddler; former trainee caravan guard, with some idiosyncratic fighting and healing skills. His inventory includes a moth spirit which guides him towards light, and a book of stars and constellations.
Every player was excited to play and already doing voices etc by the time we finished character creation.
Kala Mandala gives you a nice plug-and-play context/ reason for adventuring (or 'meddling' as it's referred to in this system). The players are members of the Bawan Meddling Guild and this adventure has them on an assigment at Het Thamsya, which I'll go into in the next post...