Archive Delving - Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Adventure Calls took a break for April, so I thought I'd fill the time with another Archive Delve. Today I'll be talking about the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park rpg supplement!

I want to specify there because the rpg supplement is secondary to the original Mystery Flesh Pit National Park internet phenomenon. The artist and writer, Trevor Roberts, was "officially involved" in the making of the supplement, which is cool! He describes that involvement as specifically being the illustration of the book. That corresponds to the credits at the beginning of the book. The credit for "game development" goes to Christopher Robin Negelein, with whose work I am otherwise unfamiliar. The original pitch on the kickstarter was that the project would be written for the Cypher system, which I know nothing about. That would probably be why I haven't heard of Negelein before - he's quoted in Polygon as saying that nearly half of all third party content for the system was written by him at one point. The campaign did also include a (met) stretch goal to write a 5e version - that's still forthcoming. I decided not to wait, since I'm not very interested in running this in 5e anyways.

The Drivethru page advertises the supplement as "Cosmic Horror Meets Bureaucratic Satire" - personally, my bigger takeaway from my exposure to the original viral images was more on the body horror & strange fleshy stuff side, but A: that's probably more about my preferences (hello HEART: The City Beneath) than it is representative of the actual object and B: it sure does seem like there is a market for the cosmic horror bureaucratic satire stuff. Other than that, there's not a whole lot of "pitch." The kickstarter lists some things you can expect to do, like visit during the heyday, or try to survive the 2007 catastrophe, but the heat seems to me to be more on "this will be replicating and expanding upon stuff you liked!" rather than trying to attract new people. I haven't seen a whole lot of writing about it after the Cypher pdf came out in October last year, but the top comment on reddit says "Feels like it [the supplement] captures it [the feeling of the original stuff, presumably]." I'm excited about a fun adventure scenario (especially if I can drop it into a game I will actually play, which I'm sorry to say will not be Monte Cook's Cypher System), so that's what I'll be reading for. If the satire is funny, even better.

The Cypher pdf is 191 pages. Chapter 1 opens with a narrative that has no clear organization and sometimes takes nonsequitous detours. That's followed by two timelines of events, one tracking the national park and the other the mining initiative. The very last text of the chapter is a sidebar on "Who's in charge," a question I had believed was already answered repeatedly by the text, only to introduce additional complications that do not ever appear elsewhere in the text.

Chapter 2 is an introduction to the Cypher system. All I can say about it is that it does not seem like it is for me. Chapter 3 has character creation rules. Since I am not learning Cypher, there is not much for me here, but I did note that while there is "no definitive list of skills," the text provides you with a list of 44 items (ranging from "philosophy" to "jumping") that it suggests could be a "good starting point."

Character creation rules remind me that I did know something about Cypher/Numenara, namely that character creation is supposed to culminate in a sentence of the type "I am a/n adjective noun who verbs." The nouns are functionally the system's character classes, and so are limited and carry mechanical weight. Mystery Flesh Pit gives us a choice of six - Security Agent, Park Ranger, Park Guide, Engineer, Marketeer, or Person in Black. Adjectives and verbs, it turns out, also have implications for game mechanics, and detailing these takes up another 20+ pages. Then there are abilities (about another 10 pages), and equipment. Then we get into Chapter 4 which is how to play the game in detail. Then we get into Chapter 5 with new optional rules for the specifics of the Mystery Flesh Pit. These include: mutations from the Permian Basin Superorganism (the mysterious flesh into which the pit descends), "Spiral Mode",  which appears to be a way of pushing the game into a doom spiral, optional rules for characters becoming obsessed with bureaucracy (narrativized as an attempt to keep cosmic horror at bay by following all the rules), and thoughts on replacing the special tech that characters are assumed to have with special abilities.

I've been skimming pretty hard at this point, but Chapter 5 nearly took me out of the book altogether; there's a sidebar whose entire purpose is to punish players who complain about a frustrating subsystem. Very clearly, I'm not the intended reader of this book! Let's power through to get to the end, where hopefully they've been keeping the good stuff. 

Chapter 6 is the GM section. This starts off with a bestiary, meaning we finally get to see some of the gross horror stuff promised by the premise! Even better, creatures come with an "interaction" section, detailing how to use the creature outside of your simple turn-based combat, a "use" section, with thoughts on why or how the GM might want to use the creature, and an "Incursion" section, with a specific nasty effect the GM can activate. Uses especially remind me of an OSR-style approach to dungeon filling; they're thoughts like "standing around can be dangerous" or "think carefully about where you choose to stand." Some of them are a little "gotcha!"-y for my tastes, and some are kind of half baked. One creature's use is to demonstrate that "dangers come suddenly and fast," which is not terribly interesting. It's also a little difficult sometimes to dig out how big some of these creatures are - usually there's a number in the text, but the illustrations, while very fun, are usually contextless. A picture of a fairly regular worm is more eyecatching than the text that says it's 6 meters long. In classic RPG fashion, there are some things rendered as enemies that simply shouldn't be - my team of park rangers is not going to destroy the 500-meter diameter mollusk, or solve a terrain-altering "Geo-Bioquake" by whittling down the 140 hp superorganism tentacle. But on the whole, these are pretty fun.

Environmental hazards also get written up with a pseudo-bestiary; they don't have hit points but do have levels (for determining numbers for dice rolls against them) and rules for intrusions. I like these pretty well, although there are only a few of them. The entries for "summer exhalation season" and hypoxia do a good job of making me interested in thinking about the passage of time and how that might relate to different kinds of dangers.

In the locations section, several sites and features inside the pit are detailed in single paragraphs. These are usually evocative and fun, but for almost all of them I'd want more detail.

The chapter closes with a list of "magic items," the special technology of the setting. These range from the truly game-changing to the comically useless. Based on how they were talked about in the character creation section, I had expected them to be kind of bigger deals, but they seem fairly ancillary to the experience here. In Chapter 7 for GM tips, the text suggests that they should be handed out pretty liberally, and that "[i]t is more important that the player have access to Prototypes than adhere to a strict “reality” of coexistence with bizarre creatures underground in Texas." My instincts run the other way - the edge that I think Mystery Flesh Pit has over the other competitors in this field is that it's drawing from real world biology and design. It seems like a shame to cut against that just for some funny items.

Chapter 8 is the adventures! The text suggests three basic modes of playing in the park - as employees, going about their jobs guiding visitors and keeping people safe, as part of the extraction efforts, or as mutated monster people, fleeing from the authorities. Then it details how to play a one shot set in a pivotal moment of park history from each of those three modes.

The park ranger mode has players search for a missing bus full of tourists. Each of the ten tourists gets a full writeup, a little backstory and how to use them. This is a cool and fun resource, and I think it's great to have something that pushes against this being another tradgame combat simulator - dealing with tourists is the job! There's not a huge amount of mechanical support for what doing that looks like in game terms, but the fictional support is cool. Then it becomes a tradgame combat simulator to protect the tourists from pit creatures as you run away. Fine! The subcontractor mode is very similar, except that the tourists have already been mutated into horrible creatures, so the job is just to recover their transport. The mutant mode has the players be those mutated creatures who have to escape, probably stealing the transport of the team that came down to investigate. It's all pretty cute but nothing here really catches my eye. They all seems like very serviceable convention game scenarios.

And that's it! It is unfortunately much more of a "here's a version of the Cypher game system" than I was expecting. The bestiary is easily the most interesting part to me, and I wish there were just a little more to it - we get a lot of arthropodan parasites, which I appreciate (especially in terms of verisimilitude to real life parasites), but the weirder, cosmic horror stuff doesn't really shine through. I was hoping for a lot more in the locations, too, since Roberts' illustrations for the original website are so striking.