Archive Delving - Boletus, City of Rot and Revenge

Welcome back to another Archive Delve! Today I'm looking at Boletus, a weird fantasy adventure / setting rpg, by Andrew of Prey Species (who also runs a cool blog)!

Boletus is just about the newest addition to my archive, funding earlier this year and released earlier this month. The pitch is eye-catching - "NSR style, system neutral TTRPG setting for people who want to play a campaign centered on one big city, with depth to explore and revisit over multiple sessions. Inspired by Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a flooded garden level apartment, and the horrors of corporate capitalism." I'm a big fan of VanderMeer's Annihilation (and I like the other two books in the series, though I haven't read the most recent one), and I liked Perdido Street Station ok (maybe a little less than the average reader). In addition to a suspicion that we were probably getting similar things out of cool fantasy books, I picked this one up on my interest in anti-capitalist fantasy and the strength of the mushroom & rot imagery! And the book happily delivers on these.

It's pretty sizeable - although generously spaced, the pdf is 108 pages long. It's divided into sections; a short introduction, a few bespoke procedures, then the "content" - districts, people and places, factions, and a final dungeon crawl, before closing out with a small number of appendices.

The introduction goes into a few more of the game's inspirations, including some that aren't as eye-catching as the "big name" stuff in the kickstarter pitch, and then provides several paragraphs of Boletus' history. I think this is the right move (and I've previously complained about writers putting their history sections later in the text), and helps set the context for everything else. The broad strokes of the history are compelling to me - this was once the site of a community of mushroom folk, but they were killed and their land colonized, and ultimately used as the launchpad for a campaign to colonize the entire continent. Immediately recognizable! The more specific details, though, land a little flat for me. The city goes through the whole industrial revolution, only to wind up in the hands of an antiques merchant and his dynasty. The corporation he creates has a rival in a merc company that, after harrying the city, becomes a bank. I think the trouble for me isn't so much about the different tonal registers the text is trying to navigate, but more that this kind of undercuts the ethos I was expecting. The first half of this history reads like it's jumping out of our world, and makes me imagine the world operates under a kind of materialist logic, but the second half is more fantasy/fantastical, a world where plucky bourgeoise small business owners can outplay the entrenched powers-that-be, and where guerillas trade in their asymmetric tactics and start loaning out their war loot. I think these are fun ideas for factions, but they don't feel very integral to what's going on. It's also interesting that our antagonistic factions are only the inheritors of the colonial legacy, but ultimately there isn't enough for me to want to use them as-is.

Before any of that, though, the introduction first makes a declaration: "There is nothing the players can do to stop the systems at place." The best, the text says, players can hope for is to "put out some of the fires" and maybe "save some of the people they love." I think this is cool! I like this kind of "ticking clock" setup. This is one of the ways the text feels very Perdido Street Station to me - ultimately, there's no saving the day. Things are already in motion. Even if you could somehow stop them, there's no going back.

The last thing I'll lump in here is the section on procedures, just because it's so short. I'm not very devoted to either the O or NSR, and I suspect that's a big reason why I'm not very interested in the city crawl or depths crawl roll. I can see some of the joy in leaving the exact happenings of the city up to chance - but I'm not interested in factions progressing their goals this way, or getting lost and winding up somewhere you weren't trying to go.

The next section is on the various districts of the city, 8 of them. Each gets its own short paragraph, describing the district's basic deal and aesthetic, and a bespoke 1d6 encounter table. I think they're pretty good, although I'd want a little more detail to be totally confident in describing them for players at the table. The next section is on "people and places" and I would have loved a quick review of which people and sublocations are contained within each district here.

The people and places section is pretty aptly named, although it kind of masks that each entry is a place and a person. I think this works for me - it's easier for me to remember the basic deals of a bunch of people than places, and I think the focus of this section really is more on the people than the places. Each of the 14 entries also has a three act structure, describing how you'll meet the character and learn about them, get a glimpse of their conflict and coming doom, and then finally see that doom enacted. These also work for me on the whole! I think it would have been a neat structure to apply to the districts at large, too (although some of that comes through in the factions, later). 

The people themselves are colorful and there are some real gems. I caught one very on-the-nose reference to Perdido, via Boletus' wizard-tailor. That character also has what's almost a throw-away detail, that they were killed and are having to relearn muscle memory after inhabiting their clone body, which is just exactly the kind of thing I wish more fantasy settings were doing. I also suspect that the necromancer, Misfortune, is a reference to Harrow, from the Locked Tomb series, but I've mostly expunged those books from my memory. Other standouts to me are the satyr who runs an illegal urban farm and the professor who made a deal with a devil and has to feed that devil grad students. Great stuff.

The factions section provides more detailed write-ups of our two major antagonists and their leaders (or the leaders that players are most likely to see). These I think I would have wanted to come up sooner - I've already been reading a lot about them, but this section goes some of the way to making me more interested in using them. The text has three other factions, though, too. Two of these remaining factions, the Squid Cult and the Mezzos and Tenors, have gotten a few scattered appearances across the districts and events of our cast, but even with their write-ups wind up feeling pretty ancillary to what's going on here. They are both pretty fun, though. The last faction to talk about is the mushroom people themselves, the Grey Caps. It's nice to get a little more information on what's going on with them, but their entry seems to me to be deliberately sparse in detail, to preserve the surprise for what's coming later, the dungeon crawl beneath the city.

The other thing here is that each faction has a three-act structure, similar to the ones for the characters last section. The trick here is that these are counting down to the way the faction changes the entire city (for the worse). Some of these events set up games pretty readily - others seem more like background color. I'd probably punch some of them up / include some explicit ways for players to get involved. The Grey Caps in particular suffer from this approach, or maybe the Militant Bankers, who are just being used, like ants colonized by fungus - why are their factions on different "breakthrough" timers? The bankers' central character gets a little paragraph explaining he's hoping to leverage his place in the new mushroomitized world to secure a position of power, but his faction's plan doesn't have anything to say about this.

I'll also make a little carve-out here to talk about capitalism & colonialism again - I think it's to my liking that the game doesn't do much beyond say "here is the history, and here are the people who have benefited from power due to that history" and then stops. By which I mean we're not picking up quests from anarchists to blow up the corporation. We meet some cool people, whose lives are in the process of being destroyed by the status quo, and then play to find out what happens. That's enough, for me. The thing that remains not quite perfect is that our antagonist factions simply do not have the juice for me, either in their earlier history or in their write-ups and plans here.

Last up is the "dungeon," made up of various strange spaces underneath the city. There's a delightful map, giving you an overview of the space. There are a few regions to the dungeon, each with a small description, an encounter table, some more specific "locations" to help you imagine differentiated areas within the region, and often a requirement for how to discover the exits (predominantly, by making a certain number of depths crawl rolls).

A lot of the stuff in here is exactly my kind of stuff. The city of rats who tend to the trash in the city above! A "portal" that grows a new you out of mushrooms at the desired location! A desert of powdered bone! Usually, just enough detail to make me excited to visit a place, and not so much that I feel bogged down by a desire to "get it right." I think it could use just a little more stuff to push it over the edge from "great inspiration" to "a dungeon I'm excited to use" - that city of rats, for example, doesn't have anything except a few paragraphs describing why it's down here. The underground sea doesn't even have an explanation (although it does have the usual encounters and locations).

The conclusion is the Machine, an enormous tuning fork made of mithril, and powered by the dreams of people the mushrooms have kidnapped (including a young girl who was hinted at all the way back in the introduction's section on history, but has not appeared since). This part also makes me pretty stoked - they've been sending messages into deep space / the far realms and have just recently gotten a reply! This will be bad for everyone. The end.

Except of course for the appendices. These are quick, to the point where I don't know that I'd have exiled them to the back of the book. There's a small list of cool & weird treasures, a list of fungal alterations that players might become afflicted with, and finally a list of character hooks, paired with tarot cards. The character hooks are honestly the thing (and technique) I'm most excited to steal - I think they work great as random draws or options to choose from to get my friends excited about the game.

And with that, we wrap up Boletus: City of Rot and Revenge! There's a bunch of stuff in here that really hooks me! The inevitable interplanar fungal doom hanging over the city is very cool, and there's a lot of great work put into the characters populating the city that I'd be excited to steal. There's just enough stuff that I'd want to change before running it that I'd want to think best about how to do so - the procedure for dungeon crawling, and exactly what is up with the central factions are the two big standouts for me. But it's a fun read, and I'd love to bring my favorite pieces of it to my table!