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zedecksiew · 5 years ago

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Faux Pas

Recently I found this cheat-sheet for creating interesting and consistent monsters pretty fucking useful.

But its writer Beloch Shrike / Nick LS Whelan is a force for good in role-playing games, generally?

He does Blogs On Tape, which turns blogs -- the lifeblood of the DIY / art-punk sub-community -- into podcasts. And his crowd-sourced how-to-contribute post has evergreen advice on what folks can do to make the making of RPGs better.

Remembered I’d bought an adventure module that Nick wrote a while back, but didn’t really look at. So now I am.

In Faux Pas, a village is wracked by a terrible disease: infected people audibly go “pop!” and fly into a murderous rampage; after which they start to manifest terrible mutations of body and mind.

There’s a dungeon, down the village well: a forgotten temple. It’s gotten some new visitors, recently -- the Gilagthrr, basically grey aliens, here to harvest eldritch energies to power their starship.

They are the source of the popping plague. Their refueling activities produce a yellow-ish byproduct that is poisoning the well water -- though they are unaware of its toxicity to local life.

If informed of this they will try to undo any harm done. But communication is difficult:

‘For example, the “hand wave” gesture we regard as friendly is nearly identical to the movement performed by the psionic beings of Suden’Fis when they cause a victim’s brain to disintegrate, so that one will put any Gilagthrr on edge.’

Also the text encourages GMs to call the aliens “demons” -- “barking unholy phrases at one another”, instead of merely speaking -- further obfuscating their provenance.

Faux Pas is neat! It feels thought out.

The “oh it’s aliens” reveal feels like an optional bonus, a reward for player ingenuity; the players could run through the adventure as a dungeon romp with demons.

Or otherwise never get to the bottom of things -- in which case the afflicted village itself has enough horrible, powder-keg-y stuff to occupy PCs, and eventually the terrible Inquisition of “God-most-Censorious” arrives.

These outcomes are allotted for. (If not sketched out in detail.)

I like the module design, and the scrapbook feel of Anxy’s art:

But the star of Faux Pas is the writing.

The body-horror imagery of the popping plague stays with you -- 16-year-old Ogdurn has sprouting insect wings where his leg- and arm-hairs were; Potitus has grown thick webbed flesh around his limbs and neck, “giving him the silhouette of a starfish”.

(One thing conspicuously lacking from Faux Pas is a random table of these mutations, considering player characters run the risk of catching the plague themselves.)

There are some nice turns of phrase: “A bloated, waterlogged mummy, wearing a chain like a scarf ...”

There’s some subtle emotional dread:

‘ One of the houses in town has caught fire. When help arrives on the scene, they find a woman standing outside, clutching her arms tightly. Her name is Daela. This was her house, and it is her fire. Her face is hauntingly tearless as she explains that her three children were better off dead. One of them hadn’t popped yet, “But he would have. Everyone will, sooner or later.” ’

Filing this in my “I wanna run this for folks!” pile.

GET IT HERE.

#reviews #rpgs #beloch shrike #nick ls whelan #body horror

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