The Foot of Blue Mountain

Murex Canyon Play Report & Review

The Play Report

See "The Review" section for the review, duh.

Our Cast of N'er-Do-Wells:

We start our tale in the High Mountain Herder Camp, Hex 22. The party gathers a rumor (the rumor being that there is a cyclops who can tell the future to the southeast) and they set off, looking for adventure.

They head southeast, encountering a Crystalline Serpent stalking someone camping inside the center of a large gear[^1]. The party is of two minds; Grenn the Cutpurse wanders over to talk to the lucky camper while the rest of the party goes to talk to the serpent. From the text:

Elemental spirits of the land; great serpents of razor sharp crystal, rainbow light streams from their unfurled hoods. 1-in-12 have twice the heads and attacks.

Grenn has a conversation with the camper, a cyborg cyclops named Mu, who tells him that she will read his future if he brings her the corpse of a particularly strong creature.

Outside, the diplomatic mission to the Crystalline Serpent devolve into combat once the entourage realizes the Crystalline Serpent doesn't speak English. Oops! Combat goes on for a few rounds ineffectively until the party decides to make a break for it. They run off into the next hex.

The next in-game day is mostly uneventful, running around through empty hexes, seeing things, deciding not to investigate them. They descend from the Rusted Highlands and camp at the foot of the slope for the night.

They pass through hex 12 and collect some stinky berries. Ew!

While settling down to camp, they spot a large white tower on the horizon (Hex 30). They decide to make 2 separate camps and watch the tower for any visitors or inhabitants. At first, they decide to camp without fire, but the cold from the desert threatens to Deprive them and they decide to light up anyway. Storygamer attempts to eat a ration, gets a "Partial Success", and chokes on the ration.

At some point during the previous day, Grenn the Cutpurse has forged a copy of Galagzlo's Heirloom of a fallen comrade (a drawing of his late wife). Grenn attempts to replace the original with his copy under pretenses of "cuddling for warmth". His attempts are noticed by Galagzlo, who actually just lets him take it. "It's a much better drawing anyway."

While they are cuddling after this, a large mechanical leg crushes their camp instantly b y cover of night, killing both Grenn, Galagzlo, and Basil Romanov instantly. Whoops.

Sib Ib and Storygamer, now the only survivors, flee from the mechanical beast the leg was attached to and into the white tower. They find a dog along the way who is instilled with a terrible purpose. Inside the tower is an old Windows XP Desktop with the pipes screensaver playing. Someone jiggles the "pointing stick" (everyone calls it the nipple, let's be real) and the screen opens to reveal the cover of the System Shock 2 game photoshopped to resemble the Chad meme. He introduces himself as Clay through some old speakers and asks if they wish to help him with his "Logistical Continuation Plan".

They beat the fuck out of the computer.

Returning outside the white tower they spend the rest of the day traveling to the dungeon. The world takes place in 1-Shot-City, where puzzles to get into the dungeon don't exist, so they enter without incident. They explore the entrance, a section of the hallway with a skeleton wearing some sun-goggles and a dog tag beside some tally marks (forty, in case you were wondering), A large drone hanger holding 600 drones (this is a surprise tool that will help us later) and a catwalk that overlooks a large natural cave. They also phase through a room with a deactivated turret in it because the referee misread the map. Whoops. Finally, they reach a room with a hatch in it that leads down to the second floor. In the hatch, they get ambushed by a Scorpion, which they quickly defeated by throwing The Dog at. They end the session in a pit of thankfully chargeless naked wires and cables.

Several real-life watches pass. I eat my rations and attend my training. Before the session, I fix the map, adding in the room I missed and some notes about it.

Session 2 starts with a much smaller group, just Sib Ib, Hob Tantalum, and The Dog (now hireling-ified).

They push through the wires and into a large room with a pool. After making several seemingly random d6 rolls while investigating an adjacent room, a creature darts from the water and constricts the dog, pulling it into the pool. The snake creature is then promptly chopped to bits 1 round later. The Dog lives

They head south and encounter a large cobweb which they torch down with their torch like the torchers they are. They enter into a generator room with 40 power cells. These are big and full of power. They use the power cells to restart the generator and things are up and moving again! Hell yeah, we don't have to use torches anymore. So much for being torchers.

The party backtracks and heads into a large railyard room, with a train elevator, a long tunnel, and a human elevator. They take the human elevator and head back to the entrance. Shortcut unlocked!

They explore another offshooting path and come to a large computer which calls itself THE GODHEAD and asks to be connected to the internet. The characters do not know what this is. After some tutelage, THE GODHEAD sends them to a room in the dungeon to recollect the Ethernet cable alongside a guard of 20 drones from the DRONE ROOM. They head there, passing through the turret room (which is deactivated by the AI as they pass through) and a catwalk network that arcs over a large pile of metal scrap. One of the pieces of this junction is broken[^2]. They pass into the room THE GODHEAD told them to go and start searching for the ethernet cable. Who knows what that thing looks like?

Over time, the batteries in the drones run out of juice (turns out being powered off for hundreds/thousands of years really does a number on battery charge) and they fly away, leaving only 5 when the group attempts to escape the room. The fight goes pretty well; Hob gets a scar and is promptly knocked out by a swarm of drones while The Dog and Sib Ib clean up the rest. After the fight, they flee back into the metal scrap room, sprint through the turret room, and down into the hatch room again, closing the hatch behind them to stop any drones from coming[^3]. The attentive reader will realize they're heading to the same place that they started the session.

They head down the hatch to reveal a sea of live wires this time, barring passage. Whoops! They decide to head back up. It's a good thing they decided to do that, because the drones had tried to cut them off via another entrance to that level and were now off their trail.

They cut back through the catwalk room overlooking the large lake, seeing the drones descend at start to search that level for them, and head into the drone room. Remember how many drones there were in that room? Way more than 6 or 7, dear reader. Way more.

We end the session there, like the chapter cliffhanger to a particularly well-made pulp story.

The Review

Context for How I Ran It

I reckon it's good to give some context with respect to how I ran it so other people can decide to what extent my review is worthwhile to them.

I volunteered to run Murex Canyon as a pickup game with like 20 minutes to prep. I'd read the situation a month or two beforehand and remembered liking it well enough so I figured what the hell, I've been running new stuff like this fairly often recently, I'll give it a shot. I didn't read between the session times and basically just read each thing as I came to it during the session.

There were a few times where this bit me in the ass. The dungeon map was a little tricky and I stumbled over a few rooms here and there, missed some details. The hexcrawl was also a bit difficult to use in such an impromptu manner since the way the regions are split up means I had to flip back and forth between the regions, which have all the weather and encounter tables, and the overall map so I could tell where the party was headed and look for landmarks they might see.

If I had more time to familiarize myself with the module, it probably wouldn't have been so rough. I expect that problem would happen with just about anything bigger than a pamphlet.

Writing

The funny thing about this module is that I'm actually working on a very similar project that I hope to release early next year. There's a lot to like in here and Stella has a very brisk writing style that gets from point A to B quickly and eloquently. There are a few points where things aren't as clear as I might have written them (the drones, for example, didn't explicitly say they were able to be controlled by THE GODHEAD) but usually this sort of ambiguity happens in a place where the fun choice or fun ruling is obvious and easy to make. In cases where it isn't, I think a solid read-through and some massaging to fit it into your own purpose wouldn't be bad at all. Stella frames the whole thing nicely and leaves room for changes without compromising the structure of the thing.

Overall I think Stella's prose is functional and spartan. When you've got Jarret Crader on the editing side too, you're bound to get something worth your time.

The Hexcrawl

The hexcrawl is pretty solid. There are a little over a dozen POIs and weather/encounter tables for each region. The booklet contains the B/X guidelines for surprise and encounter distance and a custom encounter chance roll, which is always helpful to have. I was originally planning to put the PCs very close to the dungeon, but due to my poor-skim of the module in the moments before the session began I actually put them in maybe the farthest possible point from the dungeon, Hex 20. Lol.

I think the hexcrawl itself is really solid. Stella has a very solid grasp of good, interesting things to put into a hexcrawl that give a sense of context and history of the place they're in. Of the ones we encountered, the berry bushes in Hex 12 were the weakest element, but sometimes you need stuff like that to break up the pacing for crazy shit. And there's also a lot you can do with stinky berries that didn't come up in the context of a one/two-shot.

I've written about how I dislike empty empty hexes before but I think they work pretty well in this case. There's rarely 3 or even 2 hexes between POIs and it feels dense because of the way the Rusted Highlands funnels player movement.

The Dungeon

Once again, the contents of the rooms are pretty clearly explained and elucidated. It would've been a little helpful to have more descriptions about the transitional areas between the nodes in the pointcrawl dungeon or even like the physical layout of the rooms themselves to create a better sense of space (this is something that I struggled with while running). I think if I'd done a more thorough read of the dungeon closer to the time of play this wouldn't have happened. It's loopy, it's goopy, and there's a whole second dungeon for goo-tasting individuals who like to step into portals. Great stuff conceptually.d

The Design

I'm kinda the Weenie Hut Jr. OSR Referee in the sense that I don't really like killing characters and I err on the side of going too easy on players instead of too hard. That being said, I think there's that I would have tweaked on a more thorough prep and read through.

The Oxlacahn in Room 16 struck me as a little weak; here's the description and its stats in Cairn and B/X:

... a massive amphibious predator with translucent skin and a long serpentine body. It prefers to drag its prey underwater first.

BX: HD 3; Atk 1x Bite (1d6); AC as Shield (agile); MV 20' or 50' Swim; ML 9 Cairn: HP 5, 12 STR, 16 DEX, 13 WIL, Bite (1d6).

While it's certainly possible that this was a poor ruling on my part (I certainly don't have a lot of practice running Cairn) The Oxlacahn died in like 1 round of combat, which was a bit underwhelming. It seems like it's meant to be a pretty grody encounter where you're diving in the water after your nabbed comrade, but it didn't play like that at all. They basically killed it the round after it nabbed someone and the creature barely had time to do any lasting damage. When I've done these similar things in the past, I've given the creature a little more staying power to force the caught creature to stay underwater a little longer.

The emperor scorpion in Room 14 was a pretty cool encounter, definitely a standout moment for me in terms of cool design. When it's encountered, the party is probably going to be on a ladder, so the struggle of the combat is how do you take out this scorpion while on the ladder. My party had an attack dog to drop on it, but it's a hairy situation to be in without that!

Conclusion

It's pretty good. I wouldn't recommend it if you're 2 hours out from your session with high-level characters and need something right now, but if you want something wholly unique to slot into some dangerous corner of the world and are willing to put in the work to understand and internalize it I think it's a great module. There's a streak of creative joy in the module that I really admire in the hobby. The first session was some of the best time I've had with a published module in a while.