Camp Followers: Social Realist Dungeonsploitation

Weenix

This is a dungeon crawling game where you play as Camp Followers, civilians who accompany a party of NPC Adventurers on a dungeon expedition. You can play it with the system and dungeons you already have. I'm using OSE Advanced Fantasy for mine and I'll try to offer examples any time I say to grab something off the internet. The social dynamic between the Followers and the Adventurers fits any setting from the bronze age to the early modern period, or their fantasy equivalents.

 

Riverboat Gambler: Encounters in Hogman's Plain

Tap the arquebus on the soft sand with enough force that the ball falls down the barrel. After a couple shots the bore will be fouled enough to require the ram, but if the next volley doesn't break the charging Mantids there won't be need for another.

  

Strike the earth 

Shovel the soft mud aside. By nightfall the sand will crawl and the camp must be completely encircled by the little canal to protect you. Damp earth is a portent of danger where you're from. An incipient flood, already too late to stop. On the plain it's a luxury. Perhaps you could rest a moment until it closes over your head. The water is dark. The water is black. 

 

Strike the earth

 

Your payday is cornered in its burrow. A fortified tunnel system with a trapped entrance, suicide to take by frontal assault. You stand on the outcrop over the grave and press your ear to the stone. Pound once, twice with a clenched fist. Brush aside the sand. Draw an X with your charcoal stick. Work fast with the pick, leave time for killing before the sun comes up. Brush the grit from your beard.

 

Strike the earth

 

These ones have ears. You don't have to stretch them out and work two at a time to take the heads.

 

Strike the earth 

 

You wanted to be a cheesemaker.

 

Strike the earth

 

Aim low to skip the ball off the ground. In the dunes the sand swallows the shot but on rock the bullets track flat surfaces. Into the ankles of the laughing men, beneath their manskin shields with metal plates sewn into the fabric.

 

Strike the earth 

Can the Hammerer punish a man if that man is an inert lump of clay? How many blows will it take?

Strike the earth 

The hyena shovels the scrimshaw bone into its mouth. The Caster sees this and lifts a finger to stop it but all the creature has to do is bite down. The cracking sound comes from somewhere inside your body. Inside your head.

 

If it's your leg they won't take you with them.

Strike the earth.

Against Surprise?

I've been thinking about surprise attacks in RPGs. Rather than making up caricatures and laundering my opinions through imaginary critics, I'll go straight to listing some games and how they handle the subject.

Minidungeon: The Unquiet Tomb

In the distance, shimmering in heat haze so thick they may have been a mere illusion, a lounge of bright white lizards skated across the Plain. Their skin regulated the diffusion of heat and moisture, allowing the particles only to move one way and thereby letting them control their internal temperature in the lethal heat. By day they jogged across the dunes, legs thrashing like pistons driven by the strange energy of glowing crystals. By moonlight they climbed rock formations to sleep out of reach of the night creatures, and it was not uncommon for travelers on the plain seeking similar shelter to surprise such lizards and send them leaping out of rock fissures at top speed. Like the corpse leaping from the grave as the necromancer cast his staff in, soul returned to the place it once called home but thinking only of ruin and the necessity of flight.

The green men who called the Plain home showed the first adventurers how the skin of such a creature could be made into a heavy cloak that would protect the wearer from the heat, or a half-shelter or a tent to rest inside during the day. The adventurers built vast reeking meatcamps and slaughtered the lizards in the thousands to make garments that would permit their further expansion into the deserts of the frontier. The camps tinted the river red and blue and iridescent shades as the menu of creatures disassembled for parts expanded and the effluent from that biological pillage flowed ankle then knee deep. 

Coxinha stomped toward the jagged cliffs at the edge of the plain, wrapped in such a cloak. Her eyes were shielded by protective goggles made from the eyecaps of a Rhagodessa and smeared with a thin layer of smoke colored oil to dim the sun and stop them fogging. The cloak was wrapped around her face below the goggles to stop the superheated air from scorching her lungs. It cooled the air but the feeling of suffocation went nowhere. Slow death in a jar. A capsule confined to the airless void of space.

She couldn't see the ranger up ahead. His cloak was bright white like hers but never seemed to shimmer. Never gave up his position. Ahead of where she thought he was, the entrance. Low tide in the desert pulled the dunes away from the mouth of the cave. A tunnel without ornament but clearly artificial. Unplundered.

Against Torches

You ever tell someone you don’t like [food], and they tell you “no you just haven’t had GOOD [food]”? So you go to the restaurant they tell you and order the thing they tell you and, surprise surprise, you still don’t like it? 

That’s me with tracking torches. For years I’ve considered it a waste of time. And whenever I tell anyone this they say “torches are good, you just have to make tracking light matter!”

OSE Encounter Activities Test Drive: Fumigation of the Escheated Wizard Tower

After the death of the Monarch, the assets of his supporters were seized and redistributed to benefit the victims of his tyranny. The tower of the wizard Cloudkill, one of the Old King’s archmages from the College of Wands, was given to a pair of mutants who fought alongside the rebels. The retired partisans hired mercenaries to clear the “squatters” out of their dream home. The magical monsters are more than the hired guns can handle.

OSE Encounter Activities Test Drive: Shadowdance of the Lizard Corsairs

Walter Martishius

Lizard pirates sail to a secluded cove and hatch a sinister plan at an ancient temple. The local wildlife doesn’t cooperate.

OSE Play Report: Temple of the Lizard God

I've had this one in my drafts for a month or two. This is a game I played in (as the Wizard) rather than ran.

The town council of Elgard Valley was concerned about lizardmen sneaking around the ruined temple outside of town. They hired four adventurers to check the place out.

• Faldo the Fighter
• Robert the Wizard
• Seva the Cleric
• Varik the Dwarf

The adventurers negotiated partial payment up front and investigated local rumors about the temple. They heard it was dedicated to prehistoric gods, that clerics weren't allowed inside, that it was a portal for prehistoric spirits, and it was full of jade jewelry.