Archive Delving - Salt in Wounds

This time, I'm taking a look at Salt in Wounds, which is very nearly the first tabletop related thing I ever crowdfunded. I'm gearing up to run a fantasy module which is entirely different and not at all related, but it got me in the mood to read some more fantasy stuff. I tried breaking my once-a-week pattern, but it wound up being way too long. Skip to the end if you want just the tl;dr review.

Salt in Wounds is a setting about an awful city, built on the exploitation of a gargantuan creature (which if you're familiar with d&d lore is the Tarrasque, or a Tarrasque perhaps). I'm vegetarian and fairly squeamish, but I do have an abiding fondness for this sort of body horror, and an interest in stories that are grounded in the materiality of meat and bone and bodies.

The kickstarter was fraught, in a way that I mostly associate with the early days of the platform, and I mostly tuned out of it. The last update was in 2020, releasing the work into the public domain. The comments allege that contributors were paid poorly, or not at all. Some comments suggest that the text is poorly edited, evidenced by numerous typos. We'll find out, I suppose. The pdf weighs in at 107 pages and boasts seven distinct sections, categories such as "Monsters and Hazards" and "Secrets and Intrigue", with two appendices and an introduction, so I can easily imagine that, amongst all that text, there are some errors. My plan is to go chapter by chapter, kind of like I did for Root (: The RPG), but hopefully it isn't so long.

Introduction

The introduction starts with an inoffensive short story, and then a nice little paragraph explaining the idea of a setting module. That first paragraph does already contain no fewer than two grammatical errors, so it didn't take long to find evidence of those. But I want to stick a little longer with the introduction because it does two things that I want to like, or that I'm sympathetic to at least. First, it suggests that one way to use the text is to simply mine it for inspiration and do what you want with it. I sometimes have mixed feelings about this - it's not as though the text could stop me from doing what I want with it. And I sometimes see people say that they read these kinds of statements as a lack of confidence in their own work. I can appreciate the point - as a commercial product, theoretically the thing that I'm buying is something of quality that I can simply use, and compares well to other products. But also, I fucking hate that way of thinking, and anyways I have yet to read something that made me think to myself "oh, yeah, that's perfect, I would change nothing about this." 

The second thing the introduction does is that it suggests that players might have fun reading the book too. That is, the people who take on the role of the "player characters" as opposed to the player who takes on the role of moderator, or referee, or whatever you like to call them, if you play games with that kind of role. Personally, I think a lot is made of this distinction between kinds of players, but little is gained by it. Related to this suggestion, the text also says that, if the moderator should say something that contradicts what's in the text, don't try to use the text to win that argument - the moderator remains the final arbiter, or whatever. I have similar feelings about this. Yes, the explicit permission of the text is nice to have, if superfluous - but the framing of interpersonal conflict in this way does kind of depress me. The text is written with the assumption that players are going to argue with each other about what's true, and I think that it's correct to assume so - all the time I hear people share stories about how their games devolve into rules minutia or other kinds of arguments that make having fun impossible. But imagine instead a player says something like, "Oh, when I read ahead in the book I was really interested in how it described the liver-witches of the upper sewers. Is it important to you that it's different?" What if everyone just got to play the game, is what I mean, instead of having to worry if they've actually infallibly interpreted the word of the increate, or if the pope is going to come and correct them.

Then the text makes some gestures towards player safety, which are well warranted (although the example on two different ways to describe torture veers a little close to "yikes!" territory), and suggests some steps towards conflict resolution. I think these are nice to have, in a text that (so far) is promising to deal with some heavy topics. Finally, the introduction introduces the setting! 13 heroes set out to defeat this rampaging monster, but could not kill it completely - so in the encampment that became a city, their descendants have become the aristocrats, overseeing a grim and bloody economy. It's a good pitch! The introduction wraps up with a quick overview of the major factions and locations, a slightly odd short list of things deemed general information, a rather lengthy in-fiction piece of informational writing, a timeline, and a map. It's just a little too much for an introduction, and the pieces don't entirely flow nicely into each other, but the hooks are grabby, and I'm definitely interested to know more.

Chapter 1: Life in Salt in Wounds

It looks like each chapter is going to start with a little bit of "fiction" - some little vignette to color the experience. So far, these have been fairly uninspiring. This chapter's fiction goes into detail about breaking someone's nose, which, when paired with the chapter title, does rather paint a picture about what we're getting into.

The chapter then plunges right into race, which is also saying something it seems to me about what's most important to life in the city. A couple sentences stand out - "Salt in Wounds is home to a dizzying array of peoples and it’s commonly said within the city that it’s home to every sentient race on the planet...even those that haven’t been born yet." That got my attention! The follow-up, eye-catching line for me was "Of particular note are normally monstrous races which have a recognized legal status within Salt in Wounds. Countless thousands have eked out a place in the human-dominated society in roles that they would be completely unable to capitalize upon in any other civilized city." This is also interesting to me; I'm noting, of course, the term "monstrous races" which I think has finally fallen out of style, but also the gesture towards understanding race and racism as things which exist in the whole (fictional) world. The particular lens of "sure, everyone's welcome in our horrible city, provided that they don't mind jobs that might destroy them body and soul" is a framing that is eerily familiar to me, and kind of a nice refresher from the more mundane evil "we just want to kill all non-whites non-humans." 

The actual details are an interesting read, although not particularly gameable, and also they immediately undercut some of the stuff that intro paragraph was trying so hard to build! We're told that, for example, there just aren't any Elves among the permanent residents of the city, because they find the whole affair "distasteful." There's a definition of "Half-Elves" as people with elf and human ancestry, but also requiring "noticeable phenotypic features of each." Humans remain the most populous / "largest minority" in the city, and apparently there are several ethnicities, but apparently ethnicity is less of a class distinction than one's "saltiness" (representing how accustomed you are to the city). Hey, what are the markers of "salt"? Oh, "accent, manner of dress," etc? Like an ethnicity? I don't mean to harp on it overlong, but it's irksome to me - it's a failure of understanding about race and class, which compounds into a failure to make an interesting world. It's also notable to me that only humans get to be sorted into "ethnicities," while other "races" get no such language, even as the text notes that "half-orc" as a category might include individuals from a huge variety of ancestry. Bah humbug.

Other pieces from this section which jumped out: the average human is 6 ft tall in this setting, which is kind of nuts; the half-orc section is particularly awful; most of the gnomes in the setting are related to a single progenitor alchemist, but in the most boring way possible; halfling slavery/racism sounds like a major social issue; ghouls have attained citizenship, and make up most of the raw-meat waste disposal of the city; duergar have amassed power in the city, but with no notes about what that means yet; etc. In short, absolutely nothing to suggest that race (and racism) are not primary determinants of class. There are two new entries, or new to me - the Agogi, large lizard-like humanoids who believe in a kind of communitarianism, and the Mites, which are just horrible little fey goblins apparently.

Next up is a section on festivals and holidays. The city's unique calendar is explained, and we learn that there are hundreds of different celebrations (including block parties...?) before the text outlines three major ones. They're all kind of cute, but again, not really very gameable.

An economy section! This section briefly goes into the different parts of the Tarrasque, and what kinds of businesses use them. Meat is the biggest business, and we get some fun details about the different cuts (tongue is the most valuable, apparently). Bone from the Tarrasque replaces the need for steel, and high-grade bone is even more special. The scales are used to make concrete (kind of boring). The rest apparently gets used for alchemy - hopefully we get more exciting information in a more specialized section. The last note is that, as an independent city with low taxes, it's become a major banking and trading city, which I think is a fun addition. 

The next section is about how the industry has ruined the water supply, as the Tarrasque's blood has seeped deep into the water table. I assume this must also make fresh produce impossible to grow... Apparently, the corruption even inches upstream, due to the magical properties of the blood, so the new aqueduct will last only a few decades. I think this is an interesting twist on the climate disaster, ported into fantasy. So, water has become its own industry, and one guild has a practical monopoly on it (via that aqueduct that they own), although some alternatives are mentioned. All of this slaps - easy to make into compelling details of play. There's also a sidebar on "water dens", which fails to be as interesting to me as the other stuff.

The water section is separated by a full-page sidebar on food specialties, which are mostly very cool! Just out of place. I'll mention here that there continue to be typos (or just simply incorrect words), throughout, and the layout is occasionally difficult to read, or just weirdly organized (as it is here).

Next is a section on the mindset, which hits both poles. This is mostly boring or repetitive. The last sentence, though, sells it - "Even as mutation plagues sweep through much of the city, most salted people are smugly proud that even the poorest among them don’t go hungry." This is great! Especially after just learning that some people are so poor that they can't afford water.

Next up is crime. The sidebar on example crimes comes before the paragraph explaining the unique punishments, some of which are pretty horrible. Using magic to create water is illegal (and carries a pretty nasty punishment). Conspiring to break the Tarrasque free is illegal, although the punishment is not uniquely awful among these other crimes.

The text breezes through a quick section on coins (which are apparently minted in the city? I wonder where they get the metal) and language/slang, before hitting the final section - Morality. Here, the text breaks character to say that all of the stuff happening here is awful! It's interesting to see the text uncomplicatedly call out the evils of genocide and slavery, where earlier it was pretty blasé about them. It's also not quite enough for me to change my mind on the racism thing - other races are still presented as monoliths, and orcs and half-orcs are still not done well by the text. But on the whole, this section is interesting! Particularly as a challenge to the whole idea of D&D morality. The text notes that just about everyone in the city is perfectly fine with slavery, torture, and the suffering of others - but are they metaphysically evil? Would it be Good to go around slaying the citizenry? The text declares otherwise - - it considers the people in power Evil, but decides that the people just living here remain, mostly, Neutral. 

All in all - this section is too long, and filled with too many unimportant and uninteresting diversions. But there are some great pieces hidden within.

Chapter 2: Districts and Places

A detailing of the major locations of interest! First up is the fortress, which I wish were called something besides "Salzinwuun." We get it! It's the name of the city. The biggest details here are the various gates used to transport people in and material out, which is fine but only occasionally exciting.

The Tail Stones is the impoverished district, and is broadly bog standard - you've got the good bar, the criminal bar, the labor guild, etc. Sage's Row is the alchemy district, and is more fun - there's a "field" (a destroyed section of the city) that's been turned into an unregulated testing ground, you might have to contend with noxious air pollution, an alchemy bar, and a church university. Next up is Beast Crown, the rich district, which borders Tail Stones. There's an opera house with a bone organ, that's neat! The most famous water den is here, and even this one is quite boring to me. The Throat is the major mercantile district. I would have taken this opportunity to have filled up a list with fun and interesting shops, but unfortunately this section is pretty lackluster.

Lastly, some locations outside the city. The horrible swamp of course piques my interest, but there are also tunnels underneath the city, a blend of duergar sepulcher and ankheg burrows, which sound like a fun spot to adventure in. There's also the set-up for what sounds like a haunted/abandoned alchemy lab (why is it outside the city?), a moving camp of the remaining stone giants, ex-slaves, heretical druids, and other malcontents, an unhallowed mass grave where undead roam and witches and necromancers sometimes journey to, an extravagant manor enchanted to grow all sorts of luxury produce, and a few other weirdnesses outside the city.

One final sidebar on the wider world, and that's it for chapter 2! It's nice and short, but it's not terribly dense with stuff I like. I also can't believe that the map isn't reprinted in this chapter!

Chapter 3: People and Factions

I didn't even mention it last time, but the short stories continue to be boring! So unless I call one out, just assume that they're not impactful.

The first factions we're learning about are the "13 Meridians". I don't know how meridian was chosen as the title, because it just makes me think about maps every time - as "peak" or "apex" it's not very resonant for me. The other detail the intro sets up here is that the spires of their manor houses are apparently used as house sigils. I can't imagine a less exciting sigil, and also there's no way I'm keeping separate in my head 13 different towers, and also what did they use before they built these houses, which the text suggests are fairly recent/only a few decades old! Bah humbug.

Well, each house has just got to have a reigning philosophy and style, you know the deal. Maybe when we get to the "secrets" chapter these will be a little more useful, but as it is there are very few hooks here. There just are not really 13 niches to be carved out. There are hints to me of the guilds of Planescape here, but those at least are social institutions that have to have outreach into the wider culture. 

But now we get some other factions. There are the "Enders" who we heard of earlier, and we get the kind of fun detail that most citizens don't actually think are real - but no leaders are named for us. Maybe they'll show up later. The section on the Process Guild finally gets into some of the stuff I came into this looking for - details on what is going on inside the Tarrasque. We get references to "dog-sized pseudo organs" and the order that different guilds get access to the raw material, and some other details, all of which I am hungry for!

The Marrow Miners are also in here. They've been showing up all over the previous chapters, but we're only now learning who they are - apparently, the idea is that this guild was formed by a failed God-Butcher, won a contract with the 12th house, and now gets to assist in the Tarrasque business as subcontractors, under/alongside the God-Butchers. I'm a little curious about this development - if it's so lucrative, why are there not dozens of guilds competing for these contracts? But the actual institution itself makes for a neat dynamic. This is another section that's got a fun, exciting thing to bring to your game, buried under a lot of other text that says and does very little.

The God-Butchers, their counterparts, are finally explained as well. There are some juicy details here, like how, technically, the Binder-Lords of the 13 houses are responsible (legally, says the text - is there a city charter?) for keeping their binding secure, this duty has really fallen to the God-Butchers. There are other details here that I wish had been expounded upon in other places, like that the 13 houses are engaged in politicking and throwing extravagant parties - what kind of politics are there to do in the city? What parties? But this is about the God-Butchers. There's also a hint that the "12th Meridian Crisis" involved the God-Butchers, so my guess is that the butcher assigned to the 12th house tried to set the Tarrasque free.

All in all, the text is a little weird about these guys, noting how huge and muscular they are, and how clever they must be to survive in a city as evil and tricky as this. The ceremony for becoming a master is, though, pretty phenomenal - it involves the Tarrasque being allowed to regain consciousness so that it can recognize the aspiring master (marking them for vengeance if it ever breaks free), and then the aspirant must venture inside the jaws of the creature to hack off its tongue for the ceremonial feast. This level of detail is awesome - even if the players never get to do it themselves, it makes for an exciting goal or dramatic scene, and has big implications for characterizing the people in the world.

Wrapping up: There's a guild that's trying to regulate magical/alchemical work in the city, which sounds like a cool hook but doesn't yet have a lot of interesting stuff to bait it. There's a cute gay guy who works as the council's bookkeeper and lives with his boyfriend while he completes his apprenticeship. I thought it was cute, that's all. The "Blood Merchants" faction apparently counts everyone who's bought a license to sell merchandise in the city, so the text notes that they aren't really organized at all. It's a stretch to call them a faction at all, and kind of a waste of the evocative title Blood Merchant. The final section here is about crime. None of the criminal gangs sound that fun or interesting. Potentially interesting is that gang wars are cleared with the militia ahead of time. The very last "criminal" organization is The Circle of Release, who is mentioned early on as a group that wants to set the Tarrasque free. Apparently they do ecoterrorism! That's kind of neat. They actually do get a leader named (although the text notes that she and her followers were all killed), so this makes me think that earlier faction, the Enders, maybe aren't as important. Ah well.

Chapter 4: Religion

This is the shortest chapter so far, and it's awfully short! It goes over the unique deities to the setting. I don't usually have a lot of use for this kind of stuff where it diverges from factions. Quick hits: The Monad is a religion devoted to a kind of secular materialism. The most interesting thing to me about this religion is that Salt-in-Wounds is apparently the "center" of the church in some ways, due to its status as a free city. Macinfex is the god/demigod of butchers, and so has plentiful worshippers in the city. Septum Soletirmus is the god of wealth, and the rich people and hypercapitalists worship him. Renesec is the god of change, and so the church cares for people suffering from mutations (and encourages people to take on mutations). There's a final paragraph explaining that Salt-in-Wounds is a melting pot city, so people of every faith can be found.

There's very little I'm inclined to use here! The hints of stuff I am interested in I think could have been wrapped nicely into the factions chapter.

Chapter 5: History

This chapter is another fairly short one, only five pages, and is just long columns of text, explaining the history of the city in detail. The "12th Meridian Crisis" is finally explained, but it was apparently an accident. There's some tragic details in here about the stone giants, and some boring stuff about the wider setting outside of the city.

I think I'd kind of prefer this kind of thing much earlier! Personally, having the timeline of events is more useful as context to understanding the factions than vice versa. The risk though is that most of the information here is just not relevant. Most of this stuff could probably just have lived in the faction chapter.

Chapter 6: Secrets and Intrigue

This is a fairly long, dense chapter, and we're reminded at the top (in big red warning text, not paragraph text) that the general populace (and thus player characters) do not have access to this information.

It's kind of all over the place! There are some "obvious" secrets, and some kind of random ones, and some that really recontextualize what we heard in the factions chapter. Splitting info up like this makes referencing stuff to bring to your game kind of annoying. The text declares that someone from the 12th house is working with an ancient alchemist to make an army of mutants! But who that 12th house usurper-to-be is all the way back in chapter 3, and even there she didn't get a lot of information. Other "secrets" are kind of neat, but it's on you to do anything with them: for example, the 3rd house apparently has extradimensional storehouses full of water and other essentials. That's interesting, and I could make a hook out of that! But that's the extent of their appearance in the secrets section.

Standouts: The awful swamp was created by that mad druid from before - but he merged into a huge fungal entity, and is crawling back to the city, presumably to take it over; the 10th house knows how to make magical truth serum from Tarrasque juice; the 13th house lord is plotting a total overthrow of the aristocracy; the leader of the Marrow Miners suspects the Tarrasque is pregnant, and wants to abduct a baby in order to experiment and learn how to kill the Tarrasque permanently; evil alchemists have transformed humans into worm-like creatures, from which they can harvest Tarrasque facsimiles; the suffering of the Tarrasque has created a spirit, which seeks to ascend to true godhood.

There are more fun hints of intrigue and grand plots, but as a rule they serve predominantly as sparks for GMs to build around or up to. There are also a handful of real duds!

Chapter 7: Monsters and Hazards

This chapter begins by referencing some creatures you can find in the standard D&D monster manual, before launching into a good ten or so pages of new ones. I have basically zero interest in discerning whether or not these are "mechanically" balanced - I'm more looking to see if they're doing anything that I'd want to bring with me to another system.

The ecology of the more "standard" creatures is good already though - the idea that ankhegs burrow up from the ground to eat at the Tarrasque (and so have to be purged by burrowing tunnels) is cool, as are the huge swarms of stirges.

The worm-related monsters are the standouts here, so it's kind of disappointing to me that things like "people becoming hosts to sapient worm colonies" hasn't appeared in the text before. The alchemical monsters are not terribly interesting. Keeping the focus on the ecology helps make the biological monsters better, but besides the worms there isn't anything here that I'm itching to use in my own games. Special shout-out to the red leeches, who have the only sidebar that is both appropriate to the page it's on and contains information I wanted to know.

Appendices

We're approaching the end! There are three appendices - an adventure starter, dubbed Gothmork's Grub House, a "wider world" setting, and random encounters.

The set-up of the Grub House adventure is great (if a little long as-written) - some poor goblin tried to make a living off of the carrion grubs, and discovered that brewing them into a drink had a mild hallucinogenic effect. Curiously, giving it back to the grubs turns them into fully sapient worms, and now they've begun whispering prophecies of greatness to him. The actual hooks to get players interested in this mess are again mostly left to GM devising. The text goes so far as to offer up some general circumstances, but doesn't bother to craft a scenario. I appreciate the flexibility, but I wish there were something a little more exciting to spark things off. There's a little grid-map of the establishment, and some description of the worm-pools in the basement, and that's that.

Next up is the setting, Synoma. I have absolutely nothing nice to say about it, so I won't say very much. The only thing I want to talk about broadly is one of the kinds of moves it makes, to render conventions about D&D (both textual, like character classes, and social, like "min-maxing") into part of the world building, and I think this is a mistake (granted, a mistake that seems pretty common, so maybe the problem is with me). The result is a world that simply does not cohere, and that I have no interest in learning more about.

Finally, the random encounters. These are pretty good at establishing color to differentiate the districts of the city, and they set up some neat little scenes, but they don't go anywhere - there aren't really any ties or hooks back into the bigger issues at the crux of the setting. Without that wider focus, pointing back to something to grab the players' attention and drive what happens next, I don't think that they accomplish the thing I want random encounters to accomplish; they don't help guide the game in surprising directions, they can only offer a little diversion.

Final Words

That's the setting! The tl;dr review: I'm glad I read it, and there's just enough in here to make me want to mine it for useful and interesting pieces, that I can alchemize into the stuff I would like. But like the Tarrasque, it's a little too bloated, and there's a lot of waste (not only text but also frustrating layout and typos) to dig through. There are some (much shorter) little supplements that I might read through and make a little post for later, since it looks like they cover alchemy and mutations, the stuff I was most excited for.

Whew, that's my most heroic archival effort to date! 5 for reading + (5*43) paragraphs brings us to 220 points! 43 paragraphs! Sorry if you read the whole thing. This time there is a product I could review on drivethrurpg, but the website won't let me! Bah humbug. Anyway, the roman legions are once again handily defeated, and at 311 points, I think I can safely buy a few more levels. Up to level 8, then, with 236 points remaining.