ZQ1: The Words and Deeds of the Chain of Tlachic

 The Words and Deeds of the Chain of Tlachic, by Joe Young and Vivian Johnson

The pitch: a dungeon-delving campaign frame about a clan of immortal dwarves seeking to reclaim their ancestral fortress after the defeat of the sorceress who conquered it and enslaved them.

Why I backed: I’m a sucker for a high-concept fantasy campaign, and I like the idea of dangerous rogue-like dungeon crawling with characters that rise again back at their forge after they’re slain.  For an immortal, risking death is a fair gambit, and it opens up new possibilities for dungeon design as well.

What I received: A surprisingly long (60 pages), dense-feeling zine with a slippery cover.  The zine has minimal art and layout.  The art is scratchy but some pieces are quite evocative.

How it works: This is a systemless megadungeon of significant scale and ambition.  To fit the zine format, there are no room descriptions.  Instead, each zone map is accompanied by a page or two of information about the most important features and entities in the area, and what may happen when the PCs interact with them.

What I thought: 

It takes a lot of guts to do a megadungeon in a zine!  The Words and Deeds of the Chain of Tlachic both succeeds and fails in its goal.

The premise of this campaign is substantially weirder than advertised.  There are exactly 66 dwarves, they were created by god in his image, they have pupils that take up their entire eyes to help see in the dark, and cloacas in place of genitals.  When they die they rise again at their holy forge.  Excellent.  The dwarves were enslaved by the Red Lady, an evil sorceress, who took over their fortress and turned it into her stronghold.  Now that the heroic forces of good™ have slain the Red Lady and looted the stronghold, the dwarves are free to begin reclaiming the labyrinthine fortress from the various things that now occupy it.  

In general I get the sense that the authors are good DMs.  They talk a bit about the decisions they made in the course of how they laid out the dungeon, what information they included and didn’t include, and it’s thoughtful.  I appreciate the attention to how the elements of the dungeon react to the PCs, and how each zone will spill into and affect the other zones as the balance of power is disrupted.  Many seemingly good accomplishments have radically unexpected consequences.  There are also a lot of good ideas, from items (“Rex the Rope: 10 feet of sentient rope that moves about and acts as a dog”) to situations, characters, and conflicts.  What initially seems like a fairly normcore dungeon crawl soon reveals itself to be anything but.

I was left wanting to run this campaign.  The problem is that doing so would be quite difficult.  There is really not a lot of detail, and some of what’s missing is important.  I don’t have an issue with the decision not to go room-by-room in the dungeon; I actually like this format, and would look to something like Dungeon World as a system that thrives on a looser set of prep material.  

But it’s not just details that are missing.  Many sections are missing even high-level aesthetic/conceptual details that would provide a springboard for improv.  For example, one important entity is described as “a guardian of steel and hate” with no physical description, no art, and no hint of what it can and can’t do.  That’s not enough to go on, even in a quasi-statless system.  Tougher still is the minimalist approach to the high concept itself.  There’s very little explanation of what the dwarves are like, what motivates them, etc.  Are they religious fanatics?  Drones?  Extras from Lord of the Rings?  Do they travel around the dungeon in a pack of 66?  If so, how is the GM supposed handle that?  The lack of detail is thrown into sharp relief by the wonky mass combat system that is presented to handle the dungeon’s “final boss”.  

The lack of an overview up front and the minimalist Microsoft Word layout also don’t do any favors for the zine’s usability. 

Overall, there’s great stuff in here, and the authors have figured out how to get a megadungeon down to approximately zine size.  But this is one that could have really benefited from higher production values and some discussions with an editor about what information would be most helpful to the reader.  As a result, it asks a lot of any GM who wants to run it.

What I’m going to do with it: I think I’m going to keep it and see about getting it to the table.