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shining-skull · 8 days ago

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ADVENTURE REVIEW: OPERATION UNFATHOMABLE

Author/Publisher: Jason Sholtis/Hydra Cooperative System: Swords & Wizardry Level Range: 1-2? Or maybe a bit higher? Nothing is balanced anyways.

THE PITCH

You and your party are press-ganged into searching for a lost prince of an evil empire who has run off into the underworld with a powerful magical artifact seeking glory. You’ll follow his trail into the chaotic underdark to retrieve the artifact and hopefully earn your freedom.

CONTEXT

I bought this years ago and it’s been sitting on my shelf forever. My group just finished our Tunnel Goons campaign “Retro Rascals” and we weren’t ready to go back to straight up ‘vanilla fantasy’ yet. So, as a transition we finally busted out Operation Unfathomable. Was played at my kitchen table using a heavily house ruled OSE. It took us four sessions of about 3-4 hours each to finish. Shorter than expected but in a good way!

PREP TIME

I’ve had this book on my shelf and read it in bits and pieces a lot over the last few years without having played it. The book is well-organized for at-the-table reference, with separate sections for random events, location descriptions, bestiary, magic items, etc.

The process for rolling random encounters is more complex than a lot of modules. The book contains 44 detailed random encounters divided into separate tables for “Underworld Phenomena”, “Competing Parties & Underworld Travelers”, and “Wandering Horrors.” This is a GOOD thing because the encounters are richly-described and contain loads of world-building and gonzo experiences for players. But, I found it best if I pre-rolled a bunch of encounters before we came together at the table since it required a couple of rolls and a fair bit of reading and flipping to sort out what was happening. If I rolled and read the encounters in advance it made things flow much more smoothly at the table.

The map is interesting and has icons built into it to indicate common environmental things like piles of debris and fungus gardens that have their own tables and procedures attached to them. I found it easy to describe the size of caves and general details to players so that they could navigate. The location descriptions are similarly fun and gonzo but can be wordy. It’s usually something I don’t like but it was worth it in the case of Operation Unfathomable because the locations and happenings were so gonzo and creative!

AT THE TABLE

From the start this adventure grabs hold of you and pulls you in with crazy sights, ridiculous creatures, compelling side quests, and deadly encounters! I’ve never played such a bonkers but ultimately coherent and well-conceived dungeon.

It’s a bit wordy and that can slow things down sometimes but it’s absolutely worth the time you’ll take to read ahead and prepare.

Players were constantly engaged with interesting risks and weird and interesting situations. They knew enough to hide or run for their lives from some of the incredibly dangerous wandering monsters. Pushing buttons resulted in enough positive and cool outcomes early on that they were keen to experiment and take risks.

The dungeon map has loads of different ways to travel around, lots of loops, and useful landmarks for players to orient themselves. I printed the way simplified player map that comes with the book and it was useful to get the players started on their exploration. I bookmarked the GM map in the book and it was very useful and well-labeled.

The book is organized in a very effective way so you can flip through at the table and find what you need pretty easily. The pictures and artwork in the book are phenomenal and hilarious: you’ll want to show them to your players to set the tone and have a laugh together!

OLD SCHOOL VIBES

Operation Unfathomable definitely brings the Old School vibes. Players are immediately thrust into action way over their heads and the pressure stays on. Even though the situations are unbalanced and seemingly unfair, players get a hold of a lot of powerful magic items and tools that they can use to more than even the odds: even for a party of first level players!

Not all the encounters are combat-related! In fact, more than often players will have the chance to talk their way out of trouble or just have interesting and fun interactions with the denizens and visitors to the underworld that they will meet.

The setting is the best-realized gonzo-style old school that I’ve played. Law & Chaos factor in as concepts (but not in any high-falootin’ way); psychic mushroom scientists offer mutation inducing fungus spores for players to experiment with; time-travelling humanoid animals seek to prevent the future apocalypse; and a cult of headless remote-controlled worshippers form a political alliance with a 50-foot long chaos godling worm. This barely scratches the surface of the insanity this module contains. But it somehow ‘makes sense’ in the context of the setting. It’s special.

TREASURE AND LOOT

I don’t recommend inserting this module into an existing campaign: there’s a good chance that the magic items and loot that your players will find will be game-breaking in your normal campaign.

At the start of the mission players are provided with a stockpile of scrolls, exploding swords, amulets and other magic items to assist them in their quest. As the adventures unfold the party will have access to powerful magic items. In the context of Operation Unfathomable this is a strong positive: the magic items help to balance the scale and give players the chance to actually survive and impact the environment. In addition to physical items, there are loads of opportunities for characters to mutate themselves to gain interesting and OP special abilities and attacks.

The exploding Sword of Demolition +1 was instrumental in ‘softening up’ a chaos godling when it was used as a suppository. Later, the godling was ultimately defeated when the Wooly Nelson, the Wooly Neanderthal player character, climbed into the worm sultan’s behind and used his newfound fungus-induced ability to explode into magical blue flame to finish the job.

WARNING! Early in one of the first sessions my players encountered science fungoids who repaid the party with Antipersonnel Puffball Fungi as a reward for being guinea pigs in their mutating experiments. This wasn’t without risk: one of the PCs erupted with spores and died immediately. However, in hindsight I handed out too many (just enough?) of the Antipersonnel mushrooms as a reward. The players used these to massively turn the tide in numerous encounters with overwhelming numbers of baddies. They are very powerful and maybe should be handed out sparingly.

MONSTERS AND FACTIONS

I don’t think there are any vanilla monsters in this entire module! Every encounter, every NPC, every wandering monster is unique to the setting and the majority are unique in each pre-designed encounter. The sheer overwhelming creativity that Jason Sholtis unleashes in this adventure is unbelievable. There are very few other modules that cram so much creativity and gonzo bliss into so few pages. To me, this is singular Old School D&D genius.

You’ve got noble hybrid animal-fungi creatures from an alternate dimension called Blind Antler Men; headless remote controlled cultists of Null; slugman merchants; worm soldiers, an infant chaos godling named Thrantrix the Ineffable whose body is made of millions of writhing snakes, an immortal red-furred giant grieving its lost mate, mind bats, segmented giant underworld janitors, ancient beetle ghosts, and more . . . so much more.

TRAPS AND PUZZLES

Finding the lost prince and the magical artifact proved a fun challenge. His shenanigans left a trail of corpses that the players were able to follow for a distance and many of the encounters with underworld NPCs provided additional clues and breadcrumbs. The map didn’t have any traps of the traditional variety. However, there are loads of buttons to push, mushrooms to munch, and risk-reward scenarios for players to monkey around with that can provide fantastic and powerful boons or crippling or fatal outcomes for the players.

At the end of the module my surviving player characters were forever changed! One turned into a humanoid mushroom with telepathic communication abilities. Another had his eyes turn golden and gained the ability to detect good/evil and magic at will. One PC and many NPC retainers met all kinds of hilarious and horrible ends as they experimented with the flora, fauna, and artifacts they discovered.

GM CHALLENGES

Like I mentioned earlier, the drawback to having well-detailed and interesting encounters is that there is a lot to read before you can get rolling with some of them. Most sessions I rolled in advance to select the encounters so I’d be better aware of what was going to happen. The session I didn’t I felt rushed and having to read first then describe to players slowed things down. No one complained, but it was harder for me.

Other than that, the module is really easy to play and run. The encounters are absolutely mental, so you need to think on your feet sometimes and make stuff up on the fly, but the gonzo-tone of the adventure makes you feel comfortable doing it: it’s too wacky for you to worry much about breaking anything. For example, after obtaining the Null Rod – the MacGuffin artifact and anti-chaos mega-weapon – the party visited the mouth of the Oracle of the Bottomless Pit. Teaming up with Dr. Thorontius (humanoid bear cosmology professor from the future) the team decided to destroy the Null Rod to prevent his rival and nemesis from using it to alter the space time continuum to create a robot apocalypse in the future. They asked the Oracle if tossing the Null Rod in his mouth (a bottomless pit) would destroy it.

. . . that’s not an answer the module provides!

I decided that since the center of the earth is a source of raw Chaos the Null Rod would eventually nullify all the Chaos there, ultimately upsetting the balance between Law and Chaos that sustains our reality and slowly but surely destroying the world. He then gave a hint to a Chaos Battery (found in Odious Uplands, the sequel to Operation Unfathomable and our next adventure!) that could reverse the polarity of the Null Rod and render it vulnerable to physical destruction.

Well, you decide for yourself if that was a good ruling or not. My players bought it and I found a link to our next module. If you could handle that level of ad-lib then this module will be easy for you.

PARTY OUTCOME

There aren’t many reviews of Operation Unfathomable online, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. My players entered the underworld with 3 level one PCs: Fartwolf the Fighter, Wooly Nelson the Wooly Neanderthal (a class unique to this module), and Eggy Weiner the Thief. In the first session, Eggy experimented with science fungoid spores and turned into a humanoid mushroom man. We used the stats of the Mycelian from Carcass Crawler #3. However, he got captured in a failed raid on the throne room of Shaggath-Ka, the local Chaos Godling, and the player rolled up a new character: Dorox Thundershield the Blue Dwarf who soon got a fungal brain infection and had his intelligence reduced significantly. Don’t eat strange mushrooms, kids!!

In the second session the party discovered and defeated Shaggath-Ka the Worm Sultan with the help of Antipersonnel Puffballs, a motley crew of suicide mission-sworn retired Paladins, and a host of weird magical abilities and mutations they had gained. Big win and unexpected! Amazing what exploding neanderthal enemas can accomplish! His conniving worm-son, Shaggankh, was grateful to the party for expediting his father’s demise and his coronation as worm sultan and allowed them to leave with their lives as a reward.

In session three the party continued their search for the Null Rod or some evidence of the absent prince’s whereabouts. They explored deep into the map and discovered a lot of the lore and history of the underworld. They also met some interesting NPCs, had a bunch of battles and whittled away at their supply of retainers and magic items.

In the fourth and final session the party found the corpse of the lost prince, retrieved the Null Rod from a micro-sized civilization of Nanuits living in a frozen cave and beat a fast retreat to the surface. Some very lucky rolls and their remaining Antipersonnel Puffballs made handy work of the small Imperial strikeforce awaiting their return at the surface and the Citizen Lich Sorcerer leading the brigade who had designs to take the party prisoner and steal the rod back for the Empire.

The players are now free and clear in the untamed wilds of Upper Mastadonia and ready to begin exploring the hexcrawl sequel to Operation Unfathomable – The Odious Uplands!

It’s worth noting that they are mostly almost at 3rd level now. There is not a lot of gold and riches to plunder in the underworld. I gave 500 bonus milestone XP when they killed the Chaos Godling and when they completed the module to compensate and celebrate those pretty cool achievements. That may be sacrilegious to some so know that there’s not a lot to support leveling up if you’re strictly XP for Gold style.

I expected this adventure to take way longer than it did. However, I’m really happy with how it went and glad that the players made it through so much wacky content in our four, three-and-a-half hour sessions. Very successful!

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m so happy we played this. It’s goofy and fun and full of amazing memorable encounters. It’s a pretty beefy module with a lot of words and amazing artwork that you’ll be absolutely dying to share with your players when they encounter some new transdimensional monstrosity. It’s not as easy as some of the OSE-style dungeon modules to run but it’s worth the extra effort to read & roll ahead.

NOTE: We used the DCC module “Frozen in Time” as a funnel before playing Operation Unfathomable and it was a pitch perfect match in terms of tropes and themes. Definitely recommended: it’s a really good module itself and the text-heavy DCC module experience kinda prepared me to run Operation Unfathomable right after. Recommended.

#dnd #osr #ttrpg #dungeons and dragons #ose #old school essentials

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