My Tuesday night Whitehack game is still pretty strong. We’ve lost a player to IRL events and made that player’s character an NPC. This NPC, Vahza the Justiciar, led the party into the bottled city through a crypt his order has access to. There is a path through the crypt that takes one from the real world into the bottled city. This was us TOTALLY rationalizing a Whitehack dungeon crawl. I think we’re all measuring it against BX and to some degree D&D 5E.
Having stocked puh-lenty of dungeons, I wanted something different. RAW Whitehack doesn’t have much to say here and expects you to lean on the shoulders of OSR giants, I’m good with this. I remembered I backed a zine called Dungeons and Dilemmas by Bloodthorn Press, I hadn’t cracked it open yet and heard a lot of good things about the zine. So I did a first quick notes draft of this crypt. I grabbed an isometric map from Dyson Logos. I knew giants were buried in the tomb and there must be undead roaming around. Maybe some old hazards like crumbling stairs, falling rocks, things like that. Then I read through the Dungeons and Dilemmas zine and sweet Christmas! My final crypt is the aftermath of two guilds at war. They had a couple of skirmishes in those crypts. Those fights awoke the darkness that slept deep in the crypt. The folks that perished in the fighting became servants of that darkness. They roam the crypts, capturing the living and storing them in the crypt’s massive stone coffins. Oftentimes a mummy appears to help terrify prey and to lift the massive lids on coffins where fresh living bodies are trapped. Dungeons and Dilemmas added a thematic container I could use to describe or improv details of the cold, lonely space. There are a few empty rooms used as rest spaces for travelers between the bottle and the real world. The food crumbs, clayware, and small things left behind. The well-worn path through the crypt and the dust and cobweb-covered doors folks stayed away from! The zine is totally actionable.
The party encountered the awakened deathless in the crypts and fought a running battle through the crypt into the bottled city, and only our bounty hunter caught a glimpse of the mummy! Combat has all the same highs and lows as OSR mechanics do. We all have various house rules to address the dice roll whiffs and season our combat experiences, they apply and fit well here. We’ve still got boss mechanics and auction mechanics to experience —both big topics on their own!
Whitehack continues to develop the fictional world as we play. Our alchemist is getting mileage out of the flash-bang spell. Its components are reactive and help determine if the tea he’s about to drink is poisoned! Fantastic!! The slip-gibbet vocations have some high-wire walking talents and are known for knife throwing.
I’m happy where we are. We probably have one or two more sessions in before we end things. Our first two sessions were rough going because of the abstract nature of the mechanics, they say nothing of the setting or world in terms of lore. We stumbled a lot on establishing tone and setting details. Several sessions in, we’ve got a wizard war, illicit trade to and fro the bottle city, smuggler’s guild in-fighting, and taverns with high-wires for funsies! I don’t know yet how I’d start things differently, I would say to you - don’t give up early, fight past the initial inertia!