Archive Delving - Mouth Brood

In light of upcoming ZineQuest '24, I thought it would be fun to dig through some of my more zine-like treasures. So up today is Mouth Brood, from Amanda Lee Franck and Games Omnivorous. I splurged for the physical copy of this little module for reasons I don't quite remember, although it probably has to do with the Annihilation-esque vibe it gives off, and the delightful illustration of fungi on the cover. Technically outside of my goal of going through my crowdfunding pile, but it's too cool to pass up. Let's delve!

The page count is fairly small - 35 pages, with fully 20 of them given over to the bestiary and some of those remaining 15 for full-page illustrations, and finally a map. Now, last time I managed to write just about as much for a 21 page game as I did for a 100+ page game, but I am excited to discover how much I can write about this zine, which is perhaps less of a "game" and more of a "module". I love reading modules - but as I've mentioned before, I very rarely run them. Coming up with settings and situations is one of my favorite parts of playing. I'm sure I have more to say about the OSR more broadly, which it appears to me is an influence on Mouth Brood, but let's not get bogged down in that today.

The distinction between mechanics and flavor is very slight here, which is perfectly to my tastes. Here's some "game text" offered in the front cover under "Recommendations for using this book" -

Read through the bestiary and try to memorize some of the creatures and how they behave. Print out spreads "undergrowth", "canopy" and "emergent", and set them up as a screen.

Instructions for a process! But probably most people wouldn't call the above "rules" or "mechanics".

The first page of text runs us through the fundamental scenario - this is "as system-agnostic adventure in an ecological pressure cooker." The players will be exploring a biosphere that's home to "specialized creatures in a cannibal world." At the bottom of the page, there are some details about the logistics of the dome enclosure, things like what it looks like from the outside, the temperature inside, what happens at night on the glacier (oh yeah, this is also kind of The Thing). The middle, and majority, of the page is given to explaining the process of the hexcrawl - the hexes on the map are 60 ft across, careful traversal takes 5 minutes, that sort of thing. At this point, I'm in. Some of this middle process isn't entirely my style (one of the directions is to roll for a new encounter for every 15 minutes of game time, and I simply do not really care for strict timekeeping of this sort), but I'm intrigued by the idea of a hexcrawl of scientific discovery in a horrible arctic dome.

The second page gives us a reason to be here - the explorers have a contract to collect live specimens, and are promised bonus payouts for going above and beyond. This is perfect. There are four positions on the team, which come with an "advantage" and some specialized gear. This is also great, and it makes me curious how I'd adapt these into "rules text" of whatever system I chose to run this in - Mothership is probably the obvious pick, although I think this could make a really cool Urban / Modern / Fantasy adventure. The gear is particularly welcome, since the objective of this module is a little outside what I think most 'systems" are set up for. I don't see a lot of adhesive radio tags or animal cages in the equipment sections of the systems I've been reading (maybe a problem with the systems I've been reading). Of the four team roles, the odd duck is the bio-mathematician, which I love as a role, but fits just a little strangely for me into the "systems tech" position, which is what the text suggests their assignment is.

We get three pages detailing the various hexes, 7 per layer. This is an aspect that I think is very neat - the interior is apparently so dense with vegetation that exploration goes vertically too, and there's the intimation that what happens at one "layer" of a hex might influence what is happening (or what you can see) on the other layers. There are a few gestures to this, but that aspect doesn't pay off in a huge way. The random encounters are, for the most part, just a list to roll on to see what creature from the bestiary shows up this time. I think that's enough, for this set up, although I kind of wish there was a little more variety. The hexes themselves are doing most of the heavy lifting, and there are some great and fun surprises hidden among them. And then that's it!

The rest of the zine is the bestiary (with one final thing at the end, that I do want to talk about). I don't have much to say about these as "mechanical" pieces of the game - like, we're not assessing whether or not these are an appropriate challenge rating for a party of level 2 or anything like that. Indeed, of the 20 creatures, just five of them have any "stats". For the most part, the focus here is on the interactions of the animals in their ecosystem. That part is great - getting a sense for the weird way that life in the biodome goes on, and how the players threaten and are threatened by that equilibrium is what makes this an exciting module to run.

The creatures are all weird though some are weirder than others, mostly gross, though some are very gross, and run the gamut from "woah, interesting!" to "why is this here." There's something a little disappointing to me in how some of the creatures sacrifice the grounded ecological thrust of the rest of the book. Some of the creatures defy ecological sense - like the amphibian which seems to subsist off of eating its own young, or the fish which apparently breed so quickly and in such numbers that it causes the water level to rise several feet. These are evocative and weird, but they fit oddly in the puzzle. The amphibian, for example, is taken out of the food chain, so it becomes its own little end point - it doesn't make a very interesting thread in the web, and by itself it's a kind of one note joke.

There are plenty of creatures (and plants!) that work great, though. Some do leave questions unanswered, but we're in a kind of fantastical mode, so most of them work (with rare exceptions that didn't for me, as above). There are hooks and dangers in here that point towards the inspirations but always feel fresh and interesting. The example I'm thinking of is a parasite that many of the creatures carry, and will kill the host fairly quickly. It's a sci fi classic with its own twist on the style - what if the chestburter from Alien but scores of two foot long horseshoe crabs - but because this is a game, there are plenty of opportunities for the players to intervene. If they're lucky or clever, they might get to see the parasite in action, and take precautions, or race against the clock to discover a cure via observation and experimentation. There are tools in their hands and in the book to make it so we can play to find out what happens, instead of just acting out the scripts we already know. Other highlights: the plant that sprays acid, whose acid sacs can be harvested (if you're careful); the eusocial beetles, who will try to communicate with humans; the fractal octopus.

The apex predator of the dome is some hideous jungle cat, whose unchecked dominance and growth has, in the end, sown the seeds of its destruction - one of its ever-growing teeth has curved up and pierced its own skull. This isn't as damning as it might be for more mundane earthly creatures - it also has a mouth on its stomach. This predator is the major threat to the players - even if they've figured out everything else in the ecosystem, this is the thing that will try to kill them. I think this set up works well - the notion that most of the time, players will be using their wits and curiosity to discover what's going on, but that sometimes they'll be directly threatened by violence, fits nicely with what I imagine for an ecological horror adventure. The irony of the monster being pierced by its own tooth works well for me, but the overall design , the two-mouthed horror, isn't as exciting to me as some of the other weirdoes of the biosphere. The other little snag my mind hitches on is that surely you couldn't ever have only exactly one of these - do they reproduce parthenogenetically? There are juveniles of the species in the dome so the question is kind of relevant - did one of the parents pass away? Was there a breeding population at one time? In this instance, the fiction holds up enough and is engaging enough that I don't need those answers (although I can imagine my friends asking them, since they're nerds about this kind of stuff too).

The very final text of the book is Games Omnivorous' manifesto, 9 rules (and one "lost" tenth rule) - the first 9 veer between interesting incitement ("All books are adventures") to playing on the publisher's name ("The adventures must include saprophagy or osteophagy"), to the logistical ("The adventures must have less than 6,666 words" and "can only be in two colors"). The final one reads tongue in cheek, and like it's in that playful punning mode - "The adventures cannot have good taste." It's the one that got lodged in my mind though. What would it mean to be a tasteful adventure? I'm still wondering.

Final word: this is a very cool little booklet, and I'm glad I got the physical thing! I didn't talk at all about the print quality or anything like that, but having the illustrations and map to flip through is wonderful. It's an interesting read, and the interlocking bestiary is awfully cool. I'm not immediately jumping at the chance to run it, but with the right group and right mood, I think it would be very fun to use in play.

Alright, another one shelved in the archive! With 11 paragraphs, we acquire another 60 points! I can't rate it on drivethrurpg, unfortunately, because I bought it through Games Omnivorous' own website, so no bonus 3. Last saturday, we suffered another raid from the romans - but they fare even worse than last time, and are handily routed. Thanks to some bad math last time, I overspent for that fourth medal! The total cost was 55 points, but the fourth medal on its own only cost 20. Correcting the math (a different kind of bookkeeping) and adding today's 60 points brings us up to 146! Let's spend 25 and 30 on a fifth and sixth level, leaving us with 91 points. That pizza feels closer than ever.