Unicorn Meat - First Impressions

I took Throne of Salt off my "blogs I read" tab a while back because I found I was no longer reading most of the posts. I noticed the other day though that the guy finally wrapped Unicorn Meat, a scenario that he's been posting about for a while now. This isn't a full review because I haven't actually played the module. But he specifically says in the release post that people should post what they think of it after reading.

The art in this post is from the book, drawn by Rowan A

 

PREMISE

Unicorn Meat is a module about a factory farm that butchers unicorns for meat and magical spare parts. Since unicorns are driven into a berserk rage by the energy emanating from sexually mature humans, but docile and friendly toward children, the company running the farm enslaved a large population of orphaned, kidnapped and purchased girls, who did the grunt work of hunting down and killing the beasts. 

Fast forward to the present day, and the adults who ran the place have all wandered into the haunted forest surrounding the property and been eaten by mysterious chthonic entities capable of projecting themselves into the dreams of mature humans. The surviving semiferal slave children are trapped on the farm by magical implants that prevent them from escaping, left with nothing but the dwindling supplies left behind by the company and a haunted swamp filled with unicorns for sustenance. You play as these kids.

The basic issue with this book is the same as Nechronica - the most interesting thing about it is also the thing that will prevent people from playing it. Every setting element and mechanic is written to reinforce a core premise that is going to make people uncomfortable, enough that it reduces the chance of the game ever being run. You could run Nechronica without anime children in a post apocalyptic wasteland being bullied by an evil necromancer, but there's no reason to, because without that you don't have a game. You could play Unicorn Meat without the core premise that the players are abandoned prepubescent slave girls trapped on the fucked up farm, but then you'd have to throw out a lot of the survival mechanics and child-gang-violence politics and other elements that make the module more than just another hack and slash. Unicorn Meat includes a concession for players who would like to play as grown ass adults entering the farm as conventional fantasy adventurers, but it clearly wants you to have some balls and play as the kids. I imagine it's not a huge hurdle because ultimately the players are still adventurers killing things and locating treasure, which is an activity that comes naturally to RPG players

THE BOOK

The organization of the book is generally good, with economical descriptive texts and important things bolded or bulleted. There are some concepts with descriptions and mechanics spread across the book that would really have benefited from an executive summary somewhere. The overall workings of the control system and associated pillars, chips, keys and network devices, for example. NPCs appear in the text at the locations where they are most likely to be found, except some who appear earlier or later when they first come up in the narrative description of events on the farm. This is an unsolved question in RPG layout - some people want all the NPCs written up "when they appear", some people want the descriptions in a dedicated NPC dossier at the back of the book. 

 

The PDF is hyperlinked so you can quickly find things referenced in other parts of the text. The files you get when you buy the PDF include separate files for the book in landscape two page spreads and in single column portrait. This is good because I hate trying to read double column layout on a computer screen, and having to scroll up and down to read a single page. 

The most annoying part of the layout is that an entire class subsystem, the "Root magic", is not fully explained in the text. Instead the reader is told to visit a blog and search for a specific set of posts. This is not a huge inconvenience, but it gives the product a maximum shelf life equal to however long the blog stays up. Maybe I'll do the same thing when I write up my Esoteric Enterprises expansion book - just say "go read Throne of Salt's Spook rules". I'm sure the players will love that.

 

I initially dismissed the art in this book as similar to Calarts and other extruded animation products, but on finishing the entire document it's actually quite good. The better pieces are evocative of Keraskoet and other Eurocomics of note.

The character designs are visually distinctive and there are a lot of them. The area map of the farm is similarly charming and the two dungeon maps are serviceable. There's a ton of art I won't spoil here.

 

THE GAMEPLAY

I can't comment on how the module actually plays because I haven't run it. I'll go over a couple things that stand out as particularly good, questionable, or that are obviously missing.

When I think about how interactive an RPG module is, I think about how many "layers" there are between the players entering a situation, and interacting with the most interesting content. Do they have to perform a very unlikely set of interactions in order to see the cool shit? Are there lots of bullshit thou-shalt-nots between them and the best parts of the module? The early Lamentations adventures were particularly bad about this, and unfortunately they had a strong influence on the OSR scene for years after. Thankfully, most of Unicorn Meat does not have this problem. The interplay of the murder-child factions, the monsters, the exploration locations, the magic artifacts and the explorable dungeons are all either immediately accessible to the players, or clearly signposted as interesting places to dig further. There are a few story hooks and optional areas that are only accessible if the players get the right combination of random encounters, based on finding specific items in the procedurally generated swamp (more on that area in a second).

If you do play the module as intended - as a kid on this farm -  then you use a custom class called Carvergirl. You get lots of cool mechanics and flavor details to reinforce life as a feral slave child on the plantation. What you don't get is rules for character advancement. There are descriptions of how your character improves as you level up, but none of how you actually gain experience. Normally in this genre of game, you'd get XP by collecting treasure. Except the text says that "money is worthless on the farm" and very few of the treasures in the game have a cash value that you'd use to determine XP. Given the characters' lifestyle and the themes of the game, this is a case where awarding levels based on hit dice of creatures killed makes complete sense, so if I was writing this that's what I would have done. But instead there's nothing. 

It might be that the characters are never intended to advance in level. A lot of OSR designers think the "level 1 experience" is the only thing that matters, and include progression mechanics for subsequent levels out of a sense of obligation. Lamentations was, again, a repeat offender in this regard. If that's how Unicorn Meat is meant to be played it should be explicitly stated, rather than including skills that advance at levels 4, 7, and other levels the characters will never reach.

The other reason I bring this up is everything in this module will instantly kill a first level character. We're talking multiple D6s, D8s and D10s of damage versus a D6 of starting HP. I understand this is supposed to reflect the fragility of the children and the dangerous life they lead, but that's hard to square with the number of boss fights and random encounters with savage beasts the module throws at you. The rules thankfully offer several suggestions to extend the lifespan of the player characters, like bonus HP at chargen or using a "death and dismemberment" table. The text says the rate of healing should only be 1 per night, which ordinarily I would hate since it means a single adventure can lead to days of doing nothing, but is clearly meant to push players toward the doctor NPC for more efficient healing - and therefore into several mechanical and story hooks around the meat economy and the various factions.

(I personally do not like games about hyperfragile Level 1 characters, because they make the players so overcautious that the adventure takes years to get anywhere. The key is to make the characters vulnerable without making them so weak that the players feel like they can't do anything).

Speaking of monsters, some of them, especially the creatures in the swamp, are in dire need of "motivations" or other descriptions of how they interact with the players. Since the swamp is supposed to be full of dangerous shit it's reasonable to assume that anything not described as docile or friendly defaults to trying to kill you. But is a Ghostface intelligent? A Nucklavee? Both have humanoid characteristics but get no indication of whether they can communicate with the players. Anything to open up a broader menu of interactions than just another animal that attacks on sight. The monsters themselves are quite interesting, with a good variety of creatures that blend interesting designs with varied mechanics. Aside from the aforementioned issue with every attack being enough to oneshot a player, meaning the special mechanics and effects-on-hit are likely irrelevant.

The core of the module is the unicorn farm, with various buildings claimed and fortified by different factions of children. There's lots of stuff to explore and people to interact with, places to break into and fight over, objects to loot et al. Several areas have roll tables to tell you what's happening when you visit, or descriptive text that tells you outright what changes on a day by day basis. 

Beyond the farm is the swamp. Exploring the swamp uses playing cards. You draw a certain number of cards for each day of adventuring, and the suit and face of the card determines the encounters you find. There are certain locations you can revisit at will once you discover them, and encounters that can only show up once. I think this is a better approach than a hex crawl with lots of empty space, and tedious "wilderness travel" to move between the actual interesting points. The main downside is that, based on my experience with Castle Gargantua, players do not like abstract exploration systems. They want to choose where to go and have landmarks to navigate based on, rather than being at the total mercy of RNG.

The adventure has a resource management layer that's important to both the premise and gameplay without being particularly complicated. Food is used to keep your character alive, but is also currency for buying other things. There's a unicorn butchery minigame where each beast you kill can yield a plethora of parts, which can either be used as consumable items or sold at a higher value than normal food. It's a bit like cartridges in Metro, where your most important consumable resource is also your money. Like in Red Markets (a game I otherwise enjoyed) I can see the resource management layer really lending itself to XCOM style snowball effects. A good kill rewards you with resources that help you get more kills. A bad hunt could knock you out of the game permanently. Some people like this about XCOM, but it's the reason I basically never play strategy games.

The book suggests that, if you bring a group of adult characters to explore the farm, you can use children from the farm as replacement characters if any of them die. I think you could also invert this and start the game as the girls, who suffer abuse at the hands of the various creatures and more powerful children, before inevitably getting killed off. Then you switch to a group of adult characters who go into the farm and clean the place out. It provides the players with catharsis, which is then ultimately hollow because their "solution" to the problem is probably just killing more kids.

INTERESTING COINCIDENCES 

There is a strong LISA influence on this product, particularly LISA the Joyful - the DLC where you play as Brad Armstrong's homicidal adopted daughter. The premise is sort of inverted - a world of female children rather than middle aged men - but in practice the setting is quite similar. Swap meat chunks for nudie mags and you're there. A lot of minor descriptive text is taken directly from LISA or the game's OST.

This design from Unicorn Meat, "Stitch", is visually an obvious riff on Lisa, the character for which the LISA trilogy is named. Like Buzzo said, she would have loved it here. 

I have stolen huge amounts of content from the LISA trilogy and its various fangames (particularly The Pointless, which I directly adapted to Delta Green) for my own work, and I've used the OST (and especially the various fanmusic) as backing tracks in RPGs for almost a decade now.

The implied setting of Unicorn Meat is a place called the Commonwealth, a country that overthrew the monarchy a while ago and now has various megacorporations committing atrocities in far flung colonial lands. The implied setting is not super important to the module, but provides some interesting background. I mention it because I also put a country called the Commonwealth with colonial development corporations in both ANGUISHEDWIRES and Manor of the Giant Arminius. I named mine after the country from New Sun and I suspect the one in Unicorn Meat is named after the same thing. If so it's funny that we both did that, since the Commonwealth (or "Autarchy" as it's sometimes called) in the book is an absolute monarchy rather than any representative form of government.

I also toyed with a factory farm for chop shopping magical creatures in one of my Esoteric Enterprises custom areas. That one was based on Rupture Farms from the Oddworld games, whereas Unicorn Meat's child gangs and tribes of ancient monument builders are probably taken from Pathologic.

 

Despite the mechanical usability concerns and the premise acting as a filter, I might actually run Unicorn Meat. I rarely run published modules because I enjoy creating my own content, and it takes more work for me to read and master someone else's material than it does to write my own. But my current WIP dungeon is not going to be finished any time soon because I made the scope too expansive. If I do run this game, I'll need to hand recruit players, rather than putting out an open call in my usual hangouts.