La-Mulana: Delve Preparation

 

Around the time that everyone else my age was really getting into flash games I was rummaging around in the dusty basements of the internet for abandonware and freeware, learning the mysteries of the emulator and becoming acquainted with DOSBox and a variety of early console emulators. In these younger and more impressionable years, I sought to make a pilgrimage through what various threads spat on forums across the earlyweb told me were the greats of the past and learn what made them great. 

So I visited and sometimes beat the Zeldas (smashing my face repeatedly into Zelda II before eventual triumph), the Metroids (somehow skipped Super Metroid until much later), Zork, Elite, a bunch of Sokoban-style games, and others before finding my way to some freeware threads in scattered forums. In these old threads I'd first come across games like Dwarf Fortress in its early iterations as well as Liberal Crime Squad, Nox, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (a fixation for another day and one that led me down the Rogue hole), Tibia (see previous parentheticals), and many, many others of varying quality. Amongst the sea of games, two would always come up in the same thread as the examples from Japan of great freeware games: Cave Story and La-Mulana. 

unrelated sick art for different game

Both games were highly praised at the time, and shortly after finding them they would show up with fanmade english translation patches. Of the two, Cave Story was the one that caught me and kept me running the longest, ultimately running through its 2D platforming shooting galleries several times over and burning a copy of the OST onto a disk because that's just how good it is.

"... if Cave Story is the sun, then La-Mulana is the moon, and these two works were mainstays of the Japanese indie world." - Hayato Iketani, freelance gaming journalist

So what is La-Mulana? What's this all about? The game is a 2D platformer in the vein of a Metroidvania. The player takes the role of Lameza Kusugi, an Indiana Jones type archaeologist who receives a letter from his father that prompts him to take up his whip and MSX laptop and journey into the jungles to the site of the ancient ruin of La-Mulana. You take up the job of exploring the massive ruin and solving its fiendish puzzles by scanning ancient tablets and solving riddles with only your wit and persistence. The ultimate goal is to defeat the guardians, huge boss monsters, and solve the riddle of this mysterious labyrinth. There are hidden shops, secret passages, cruel traps, dozens of items and ROMs for your MSX, and a even a few encounterable characters within the dungeon. The original release of La-Mulana had blind/un-guided runs take anywhere from 20-200 hours- and it's 2011 WiiWare and 2012 PC remakes are just as challenging with a few gameplay changes and an complete graphical overhaul.

That original release of La-Mulana remained in the back of my head for years though, drawing me back for further attempts. It would grow in reputation all the time as one of the most fiendishly difficult games out there- not necessarily for its combat but for its riddles and puzzles promising early on in its manual a tantalizing challenge:

"As you defeat Guardians and collect Items, you will run into a single, big riddle. This is the secret of La Mulana! What is La Mulana, and what is Lemeza researching? We hope that you can use your skill and ingenuity to solve that mystery."

Simply put it was the premise and mystery of the game that dug its claws into me, its promise of a giant dungeon filled with traps and riddles, challenges and secrets, and the one big secret of La-Mulana at the very end-but I was never able to get very far with it as a consequence of the punishing difficulty (more on this later) and it would sit untouched for a long, long time leaving its tantalizing screenshots and promise waiting for its time somewhere in my head.

 

Taken directly from the fan translated english patch readme: 

La-Mulana is a freeware free-roaming platformer game designed to look, sound, and play like a classic MSX game. It's heavily influenced by the classic Konami MSX game "The Maze of Galious" and anyone who has played that title will probably recognize the similarities very quickly. You play the whip-wielding Indiana Jones-esque archaeologist Lemeza Kosugi as he investigates the ancient ruins of La-Mulana in an attempt to find its treasure and one-up his father, who is trying to get the same treasure as well.

The game is huge, with many different areas to explore and dozens of items and weapons to find. Each area has a large variety of puzzles and traps (many of them quite fiendish) and you need to solve the puzzles in each area to discover the Ankhs and Ankh Jewels, which allow you to fight the eight Guardians of the ruins. To solve the puzzles you'll need to be able to read the tablets scattered throughout the ruins, which will require a Hand Scanner and translation software for the portable MSX that Lemeza has brought along on the adventure. Your Hand Scanner will also allow you to find items and search the bones of less fortunate adventurers.

La-Mulana is one of the longest freeware games I've played in quite some time--my first playthrough took me 26 hours, and even if you knew exactly what to do for each puzzle in advance I'd  still bet the game would take at least 10-12 hours to complete, not counting the bonus dungeon.

DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

At the risk of making this into a La-Mulana fan blog, I'll do some brief summation of La-Mulana and its development history as best I can without devoting a whole day to it (CRAB lied as easily as he breathed)- the dread shadow of all-consuming LINK ROT lies heavy on even the Japanese web where it concerns La-Mulana, but I'll do my best armed with only a failing search engine and its translation features.

The team that would create La-Mulana first got together as part of a passion project to create Gradius fan games, calling themselves the GR3 Project. On the team, we have Naramura (Takumi Naramura) acting as the director and having a hand in pixel art, illustrations, and music, Samiel (Tomoryu Samejima) who was in charge of enemy and item design as well as working on the music and programming, and duplex (Takayuki Ebihara) who was the head programmer for the group; each member from a different background and working in unrelated fields, but coming together on an MSX fansite that Naramura ran to form the GR3 Project. For those not familiar, the MSX was a hobby 8-bit computer released in 1983 competing for space with the Commodore 64, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, etc. The MSX line saw use up into the 1990s and was mostly popular in Japan- where Konami would develop the first Metal Gear for MSX hardware.

From left to right: Samiel, Naramura, duplex, and future Nigoro member Nakagawa

Their first project was the Gladius doujinshi GR3 which met with some moderate success at the time and was praised for the increased difficulty in the stages. When planning for what their next game would be, the group settled on something like an advanced form of Maze of Galious, a well regarded platformer often compared to The Legend of Zelda and charged players with navigating the enormous Castle Greek and its ten connected worlds to rescue the hero's unborn child from the evil Galious. 

Maze of Galious

Working with the idea of "What if the MSX style had kept developing all these years" the ethos of the La-Mulana project was to go counter to what they viewed as the current trend in gaming of good graphics and easy gameplay and bring the older more challenging style to a new generation. Naramura researched ancient civilizations and famous ruins around the world to get the main style down and the first demo showcasing the first field was released in 2002 with development continuing until the game's full release on June 27th, 2006.

According to Naramura, about halfway through the game's development the team made the significant changes that would solidify the staples of La-Mulana. Naramura was taking to the role of head trap-maker at the time but it was duplex who set a "three-phase" approach to level design. The main idea was that the first and second times a player encountered something new they would probably fail the puzzle or encounter and die, but by the third time they should be able to succeed and feel all the more accomplished after having failed. This sort of dopamine-by-trial gaming would be familiar to any fan of older games or the more modern ones that have taken the same sort of challenge to heart as with any From Software game. 

Still, the main developments to the style of the game came after reflecting at that midpoint in the development where the team felt unsatisfied at having created what they deemed "a cheap Galious knock-off". As Naramura puts it in the original La-Mulana game manual:

    "Naramura wonderd if it might not be possible to incorporate the sense of tension in newer games like Metal Gear into La Mulana. After thinking about it for about an hour (Pretty quick!) we decided to put in the fear of death int La Mulana.
　Let's say you were an archaeologist. You're standing in front of a dark hole that you can't see the bottom of. Would you jump in? In real life, your response would probably be, "Heck no!" After all, you don't know what's dow there. Or say you're in a room filled with corpses and a bunch of switches. Would you just press them haphazardly at random? In this case too, you'd probably never do something so reckless. We wanted to try to incorporate this type of tension--a "Proceed with caution" type of feeling into the game.
　Recently--or actually a lot earlier than that, a lot of games have been set up so that "if you just check everything, the puzzle is easily solved" and "if you screw up, just reload" and a lot of people have been thinking, "are these sorts of games really all that fun?" So what would happen if we took those two trends away from gamers used to easy games?

　With this in mind, we ended up making La Mulana a lot harder than we had been intending when we started the project. We tried to make it so that people wouldn't get hopelessly stuck everywhere, but if you just whack walls at random without thinking you'll die. If you think "Ooh, a treasure!" and run charging toward it without thinking, you'll die. If you just operate a mechanism without thinking about how it works, you may end up not ever being able to get a specific item. If you think "I'm trapped! I'm going to warp out!" and do so, you won't be able to get back into that room from the outside. Once you do finally manage to find your way back in, you may be confronted with an even more obnoxious mechanism to overcome than before. If you make enough big mistakes it will even become quite tough to complete the game.
　To be honest, we have our doubts whether or not people will like a game that has elements like "If you make a mistake there's no going back" and "There's always the tension requiring you to think ahead." But at the same time we have confidence that it makes La Mulana a deeper game for it. Some people may think "this game is a pain!" But we hope you can find enjoyment with a "to keep this from being a pain, I'd better think before acting" sort of playstyle. We think if you use your wits to the fullest, the sense of accomplishment you'll get when you finally finish the game will all the more rewarding."

 

This sort of approach of embracing the fantasy of the game and encouraging the player to fear death and consequences and rely on their wit and skill to overcome challenges rings some bells similar to what those in the OSR community seek to emulate in tabletop games. There's a strong vein of the "think before acting" mentality throughout the design of La-Mulana which drives the challenge up for the unprepared and rewards the players who take the time to engage with the fantasy of the game and study their environments.

Huge portions of the game require you to uncover secret histories of the world and piece together their significance to overcome obstacles and progress. This reliance on understanding the dungeon's history reminds me of my takeaways from reading through Grognardia's seminal megadungeon: Dwimmermount, wherein the secrets of the world can be similarly found engraved in walls and hidden throughout the labyrinth. For Dwimmermount, this serves a dual purpose in providing both loot for the players to sell in the forms of architecture and charcoal rubbings, but also to inform on what further secrets can be found in the depths of the dungeon. 

This map from the game manual is strikingly reminiscent of early D&D cutaway maps

The original release was brought to english speakers with its english language fanpatch in January of 2007 where its fame, and infamy, would grow. Even with the patch, there were complaints of poorly translated hints for riddles stopping players from progressing and a good deal of the humor and parodies was lost in translation. Still, La-Mulana was accepted very warmly in both Japan and out in the West.

One of the key things to understand when talking about difficulty in the original game is how health works. The player has a vitality stat and an experience stat. Vitality represents your health and you die at reaching zero. In order to expand your max vitality the player needs to use a Life Jewel, extremely rare and vital for the avid explorer, these collectibles can only be found in the dungeon. Your experience is increased by killing enemies and once the bar is filled so is your health. The third and final way to recover health is to defeat a Guardian, one of the field bosses in the game. Taking these three measures into account, the lack of easy access to healing is a huge factor in the difficulty of the game, usually requiring players to find a relatively safe area of the dungeon to grind out enemies until they fill their experience bar. 

Saving and transportation are also huge contributors to difficulty. In order to save, you need to speak with one of the main characters in the surface village, Elder Xelpud. This degenerate old man is a key source of rumors and hints throughout the game, but his most crucial function is that he saves your game for you- meaning you have to escape the dungeon to save. And the dungeon is big. Very big. It's seperated into fields which are mini interconnected dungeons of their own with 20 screens in each. On one of these you'll find a transfer tablet that, with the help of the Grail item, can be teleported to at will. So with 1 in 20 rooms being able to be teleported to and your only save point being on the surface (which can also be teleported to) the player needs to plan carefully just how far into the dungeon they're willing to venture before trekking back to the surface to meet with Xelpud. 

Cancelled project MSX Kingdom

 

With the release of La-Mulana gaining traction, GR3 Project began work on what they planned to be their farewell game. It was called MSX Kingdom and the idea was that as the player progressed through the game the graphics and mechanics would advance similar to the MSX to MSX2 upgrade and even up to the never-released MSX3. However, duplex began to get bogged down with his day job and GR3 Project ended up dissolving on February 1st, 2007, releasing the La-Mulana Editor as their last product together.

However, on May 12th of the same year, the three would come together once again to form NIGORO, the company they still run to this day (Technically NIGORO is the game development wing of the larger company ASTERIZM which may or may not also just be the same three developers). A note on puns here, NIGORO is "256" in Japanese as an homage to the 8-bit nature of their games. The name La-Mulana comes from reading director Naramura's name (in Japanese characters) bacwards, our protagonist Lameza is from Samiel, and Elder Xeplud is from duplex. 

The new team would go on to make a series of flash games to hone their skills and expand their breadth (these are mostly unplayable due to the death of flash) and some would get success as releases for consoles in the future, such as the slap-battling romantic drama Rose & Camellia. On July 27th, 2009, the team announced that a La-Mulana remake would be coming out to the WiiWare shop in 2012. Teaming up with Nicalis- who also supported the development and release of the Cave Story remake around the same time, they planned to make this the definitive La-Mulana with a series of changes and updates. 

Remake promotional art

Of these, the most significant was to be the graphics overhaul (excellent trailer here), doing away with the MSX style and adopting more of a SNES styling. Naramura also took this as an opportunity to overhaul the bosses completely, adding new mechanics incorporating player feedback to make new challenges to overcome. Along with the graphics update came a full engine rewrite to match and some map changes, leading to four major changes for how the game feels to play:

1. A healing spring was added on the surface enabling easy healing that didn't require grinding out a few enemies in the dungeon
2. You can now save at any transfer tablet and not just with Elder Xelpud
3. I can't confirm this but I'm pretty sure your basic attacks are slightly faster and this is a huge change to the feel of combat
4. Xelpud provides a new ROM that allows him to email you throughout the game. Although optional, his emails serve to not only flesh out Xelpud and the world but also provide additional hints and direction for players
   

NIGORO and Nicalis would release the remake in Japan through the WiiWare shop on June 21st 2011, however due to poor sales Nicalis would part with NIGORO, leaving the future of an English edition in jeopardy. Luckily, Playism partnered with NIGORO to bring an English release to North American and European servers on September 20th, 2012 and NIGORO brought La-Mulana back to the PC with a release on July 12th, 2012 (with the best trailer for the game here)followed by a GOG and Steam release shortly later.

This PC version brought another few improvements, namely a revamped Time Attack and boss rush mode as well as USB gamepad support and Japanese, English, Spanish, and Russian language support. The next release would be far down the line in March of 2020 bundled with the game's sequel, La-Mulana 2 for the Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. One last edition worth mentioning is the La-Mulana EX (or Extra) releases for the PS Vita from 2014-2015 which made slight gameplay changes and included a monster bestiary. 

And have I mentioned the music? Each field that you explore comes with its own fantastical arrangement that really sets the mood for your dungeon crawl and will worm their ways into your waking world. Whether we're talking about the original SCC releases, the remake releases, or the Journey remixes, the sheer level of quality in the musical compositions is overwhelming. 

The accomplishments of this three-man dev group are astonishing, despite some rocky developments here and there along the way, La-Mulana a true monolith in the Metroidvania genre and the indie scene at large- and its mysteries are still waiting to be uncovered. 

Now, I'll talk about La-Mulana 2 eventually, but first- what was the goal of this post? I wanted to highlight a wonderful game, but also it served to prepare me for my dive back into La-Mulana (PC release) to finally beat the game. In all my attempts over the years through the various versions the furthest I've gotten (or so I'm told) is about half way. And so throughout the years between delves and the research for this post I've dodged spoilers and guides for the game to preserve the mysteries as fresh as they can be to keep this next attempt at cracking the mystery of La-Mulana as true to intent and form as possible. I might leave some notes or journals documenting progress here or there, so keep an eye out.

 Go check it out for yourself, the mystery of La-Mulana is waiting.

Let's Eat: The Bloom

COLDWATER, WASHINGTON, DAY

Sweeping mountain vistas and deep conifer woods surround the town of Coldwater which rests on the banks of Coldwater lake. The small town is dotted with dated buildings and small-town shops flocking with tourists. In the town center, the preparations for the annual blueberry festival are well under way as townsfolk bustle about, giving one another a smile and cheerful hello. 

COLDWATER, WASHINGTON, SIX DAYS LATER

The quiescent mountain town is exchanged for a horror. Flames lick out from flamethrowers- the guttering  flames accompanied by the occasional burst of gunfire as well equipped hazmat teams sweep through the surrounds. A dated diner is unrecognizable under a heft of black mycelia and fungal growth- tortured moans coming from within as a team approaches, weapons at the ready. 

Camera pans straight down horizontally beneath the town, thick black mycelial cords run from the town surface to a cathedral sized cavern far below, where fungal-crusted residents stand rooted around a descent into the pulsing, blue bioluminescent glow of the mycelial heart- a single blue capped mushroom juts from the heaving mass of growth. 

Sounds of metal on rock in the distance and of something swinging through the air- a large claw sweeps through scene and deftly clips the mushroom away from the mass before tactical chatter and gunfire reveal the approaching cleanup teams in the caverns- the scene is engulfed in flames.

INT. DUNGEON. BANQUET HALL. 

CRAB sits at the head of a fungi-laden banquet table, a covered silver tray in front of him- thick black mycelial cords run from the tray throughout the room, rooting through the hall and sprouting glowing blue mushrooms. Fish-men in bowties idly wander the room- their eyes crusted by fungi and growths visible pushing up from beneath their scales. CRAB pulls the conspicuous silver lever next to his chair. 

Grating gears and the screech of metal fills the room but is rapidly overcome with a shrieking wail from thousands of voices as a cage in the ceiling opens and a chained ball of clacking skulls and searching shadowy tendrils is lowered above the table. Clinking his glass with a fork, the screaming quiets to a murmur and CRAB lifts the covering on the silver tray, revealing the blue, squirming mass of the heart of a nascent fungal bloom.

CRAB

Hearken to me, ye DAMNED, we're eating The Bloom tonight!

TITLE CARD

CRAB

Published in February of last year, written by Josh Domanski and the Goblin Archives, The Bloom comes to us as- well at least to my knowledge- the third major adventure from Goblin Archives for the Liminal Horror system and the second such adventure jointly written by the authors. This tasty morsel is- of the three so far- my personal favorite and is dripping with gameable sandbox content in a small Twin Peaks style town up in the mountains. Once again, we have art provided to us by Zach Hazard Vaupen this time just for the monsters and NPC portraits from Josh Clark. While not as ever present as the phenomenal art Zach did for the illustrious The Mall adventure- what is there is more than enough to get the neurons firing. As for Josh's portraits, I found them particularly helpful in framing in my head who it was I was portraying- kudos.

DAMNED

[HOWLING OF WIND FROM A BLIGHTED PEAK]

CRAB

Yes the layout by Josh Domanski is particularly readable and flows smoothly; and I'm always one to praise the addition of linked pages in a PDF as being crucial for a GM to keep the pace up. 

Hazy spores cloud the room in a blue-bathed fog as CRAB drinks deeply from a glass filled with hazy amber liquid.

CRAB

Did you know you can make wine from mushrooms? And not just plump helmets. Anyways...

 Right right, the setting. Go read the blurb on their site, but the bottom line is we're adventuring in a Twin Peaks inspired town that has something going horribly wrong with it- and the doom clock to keep things evolving before disaster. As their itch page highlights, this isn't just Twin Peaks- it's "What if Twin Peaks had a The Last Of Us arc?" And that's pretty on point- as the monster of the week is a fungal growth of an Armillaria ostayae variant that infects animal and human hosts- turning them into walking, hunting, zombie-like fungus vectors. 

The DAMNED lash out at creeping mycelia with shadowy tendrils. CRAB puts down the glass and grabs the central mycelia cluster in one claw before devouring it whole. The infected fish-man hosts around the room grow more and more agitated as CRAB wipes the last remains away before hefting a shotgun from beneath the table and loading it.

CRAB

Now, let's do something a little different and roll into the actual play with director's commentary. This time I had the pleasure of actually running this before I reviewed it, and so while I get some cleaning done around the house- please enjoy the show.

Slow zoom to a descending screen on the back wall. A projector whirs to life and the movie begins to play as shotgun blasts fill the room- splattering gore and blue mushroom on the corner of the screen.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

H & R

H & R are our players and their characters, so let's roll with it. R had planned a two week camping trip up into Coldwater with a group of friends but totaled his car and was in the hospital for a week before being able to make it. R on the other hand missed the evite and so got the invitation late but takes the opportunity to treat the camping trip as a time for a writer's retreat. With some minimal camping gear (assuming their friends had the rest to cover them) they drive up into Coldwater.

CRAB-COMMENTARY

The adventure provides a series of archetypes for character backgrounds and some recommendations for how to start the game. My table was drawn down to two players for this session and I knew we only had time for a one-shot, which the module also has considerations for. Deciding to completely ignore those recommendations, we rolled up our party and set them off to join their friends at Coldwater Camp with nothing but the player-facing maps in hand. By no means do you need to runt his adventure with the players being part of the camping group- but it seemed like a good way to draw them into the mystery. Also, I had the Twin Peaks OST cycling through for most of this session.

DAY ONE

Exhausted from the drive, H & R check the map and see a diner in town, so they pull in to get some coffee and food. There, they meet Kass who is more than happy to chat compared to the cold reception from the other locals. In short order, the group mentions they're here to go camping with their friends and the whole room goes quiet. Stumbling over her words, Kass asks the group to wait and have a conversation with the Sheriff, who she calls on the landline.

Sheriff Hank pulls up and greets the party before inviting them to have a conversation back at the Sheriff's office. Once there, he informs them that three days ago a group of campers went missing at Coldwater Camp, their tents destroyed possibly from a bear and no sign of them to be found otherwise. 

The sheriff assures the party that their friends probably weren't there for the attack and should turn up any day now but invites them to go chat with the deputy at the campground if they want to. First up, the two leave and get a room at the only hotel in town, a run-down two story motel called the Lakeview Resort. Up in their room, they find a pamphlet for a strange new age religious service at the Church of Celestial Science in town. H says it looks fishy, but in short order the two first make their way to the campground where they spot their friends' two cars in the parking lot and the deputy, Gerald. 

 CRAB-COMMENTARY

There's a neat voidcrawl procedure to use an overloaded encounter die and generate encounters between travel spots. I'm not highlighting it here when it happens, but it serves to add flavor and additional hints and clues throughout the investigation, and at night brings in some real fun horrors.

A short, bored, man, Gerald shows the two up to the tent sites where some loose caution tape marks the torn apart sites of their friends. Gerald reiterates that they'll probably turn up any day now and then leaves without much further ado- but not before letting slip that he hopes this doesn't turn out like The Incident from last year. The group examines the sites and spend some time identifying whose sites were which, making note of several bullet casings and discovering a folder with a pamphlet from the Church of Celestial Science and a map of the region with the Hines farm circled.

Seeing nightfall approaching, the two decide to check out this Church next but are stopped by the park ranger, Sam. She's disheveled and doesn't look to have had much sleep, but tries her best to answer their questions- but then goes into her theory of a bigfoot attack being responsible. Unsure of how to interpret that but deciding she might be a crackpot, the group leaves amicably after making plans to meet with Sam at dawn for an update and then make their way to the Church- but not before something large and heavy bolts into the woods nearby- spooking the two would-be campers.

CRAB-COMMENTARY

I really dig how the NPCs are framed in the module, with a simple print of desires, secrets, and social bullet points I was able to run them all with a simple glance as they came up- of course this was after reading the whole module twice-over before running it. 

The bigfoot theory was a great red herring and the players weren't sure if it really was a sasquatch attack or not until they find more clues in the next few days.

At the Church covered in modern symbols and gold filigree, the group are about to walk into the atrium to speak with Thomas, the Church's central figure in town- but R spots a photo printout from a CCTV camera in the diner of H & R walking in this morning. Spooked, he pulls H out and the two drive off to the Gorge- the town's local dive bar- to talk the investigation over.

Spinning their wheels for a bit, eventually the Sheriff comes in and the two invite him over for a drink to talk. Hank calms their inquiries about why the state rangers weren't involved yet by saying he'd called them and they should be down- but again their friends should be back any day now. When H brings up The Incident, the Sheriff firmly rebuffs them and says to leave town business alone. Their chat is interrupted as two out of place and clean cut looking people walk into the bar and the Sheriff says his goodbyes before taking the new pair into a back room.

The group heads back to the hotel for the night but get sidetracked investigating a strange glowing blue mushroom in the stairwell that spores when R touches it. Shortly later though, they hit the sack and are plagued with vague nightmares of something watching them from the woods as they examined the campground that morning.

DAY TWO

Noting their similar weird dreams and how tired they were, the group first makes a trip to the diner again and have a chat with Kass and some local fishermen claiming they'd caught a furred trout in the lake. Kass is convinced into talking about The Incident that left 23 dead last year- but she doesn't know much more. She does let some gossip about JJ, the only remaining son of the Hines family who came back after the incident to run the farm.

CRAB-COMMENTARY

 "The Incident" or "The Coldwater Lake Incident" is a reference to The Bureau and is left unfilled in- meaning the details are vague. Something happened, a lot of people died, GM fill in the blanks. For this session, it was never really explained but did hang as a cloud over the town. There's a few other things never really explained- Haru and her whole schtick, or what happened to Gabby at the firewatch tower. These are left vague in the module for the GM to fill in as necessary, which I appreciate.

The next stop is the campground again, the pair meets Sam at her cabin and examine her bigfoot plaster mold and her dozens of cryptozoological drawings before she shows them to the signs of a bloodless scuffle at the hiking trails. Warning them of rain coming in that night, they part.

Stopping in at the hardware store, the pair buys some high powered walkie talkies and tune them into the ranger frequency, the police frequency, and the firewatch tower frequency. On their way out, they run into a buck deer, casually standing in the parking lot. Completely docile, it makes no response to them even after H gives it a kiss on the nose. Unsettled, the pair watch the buck wander off further into town before they decide to check out the firewatch tower they've been hearing about. 

Hiking up and examining all the graffiti, the pair finds the tower abandoned recently and the small room tossed as though it had been searched. A map in the middle of the room has a few locales circled with notes, but the group is most interested in the Hines farm and the illegible note about the Pickman Lodge in the hills above town. H finds a walkman and some cassette tapes and decides to listen to them as the pair head back to their car- determined to check out the farm.

With some experimentation, H & R discover that when listening to the cassette tapes, you can see a hazy cloud whenever people lie. They discuss good ways to employ this but are distracted when they spot Deputy Gerald on the main road, walking backwards into the woods with no car in sight. He makes no recognition of the two and keeps walking and the pair decide to get out of the area and move to the Hines farm next.

The farm is sickly and the crop is doing poorly. First thing that catches the pair's attention though is the front door of the farm house is already swung open and banging in the wind with JJ's car in the driveway. They check the barn in the back and the chicken coop but find both empty. Shouting around for JJ, they get no response. Uncertainly, they enter the house and find an unfinished meal in the dining room covered in fungi. Upstairs they examine a shrine in the master bedroom to the 23 who died in the Coldwater Lake Incident- but curiously note the additional 20 names on the memorial. 

Hearing something from the other room upstairs, they find the guest room blocked by a fallen dresser and push past it to discover a fleshy fungal chimera hybrid of the Hines family goats, some chickens, and their milk cow in the middle of absorbing what looks to be JJ. The chimera cries out with all its voices and the group books it out of the house and speed off back to the hotel to collect themselves. 

Rationally, they order a few pizzas from the Occult Pizza down the road and go over the case again. When they see the mushroom pizza covered in fungus H immediately goes to throw it in the dumpster. The rain started pouring and the sun set, he spots an odd lump in the parking lot and catches a human leg as part of it with his cellphone light before the whole mass shudders and moves off into the woods. 

Back in their room, the pair both reflect on some other odd moments- each thinking they're hallucinating as R had experienced a brief episode where he thought his skin was glowing blue- but refused to tell H about it as he suspected it might be the mushroom spores he inhaled. H meanwhile had been having brief episodes where he saw thick veiny cords under his skin- and again didn't bring it up. 

CRAB-COMMENTARY

These hallucinations were my solution to rolls on the dire omen table- an option on the overloaded encounter die that corresponded to the next Fallout the members would experience.

Remembering that the blueberry festival was today, the two head up the road to check it out and find it still in full swing despite the rain. They spot the sheriff getting yelled at by what they presume was the mayor, and offer to get him a beer at the Gorge. Back there, they discuss what little they've found and the flesh chimera with the Sheriff. He seems concerned and tells them to visit the assistant Sarah at the department in the morning and to keep him informed on their investigation before again being interrupted by the clean-cut pair coming in and taking the sheriff into the back room. 

Shortly later, a shotgun blast rings out from just outside and the pair duck under the table as the Sheriff bolts to the front door. He comes back in to let the bar know that it was just someone trying to spook a mountain lion he saw near his porch- which only further confuses the pair who decide to try and get some sleep- but not before noting a strange glowing blue-fungus covered mass in an alleyway nearby. 

DAY 3

Nightmares plagued their sleep again. Once more they roll into the diner where they gossip with Kass, who informs them the clean-cut couple are the newcomers in town, Brett and Angela, who bought out the entire Pickman Lodge as their personal residence just after the Coldwater Lake Incident. The gossip is interrupted as the fishermen from yesterday come in and show off their furred trout. Talking about fishing for awhile, H asks to see it and picks it up before - to his horror - he realizes the fur on the trout is mycelial strands. Furiously washing his hands in the sink, they get back in their car and spot a column of black smoke- visible even in the rain- coming from the Camp.

First, they check in at the Sheriff's office where the assistant informs them they were to be granted access to the armory as necessary- so they pick up two stab-vests and a shotgun before heading off to the camp. 

CRAB-COMMENTARY

Right about here is where how late it was in the night led to me moving the story along a bit to get us to a conclusion before sunrise.

At the camp, the pair find the whole place to be covered in fungus and mycelia- the trees rotten and the smoke coming from Sam's cabin. They briefly try to search for her- only to find her and five others covered in fungus, rooted to the ground in a circle in the campsites. At this point, they decided it was probably best to flee the town. 

Running back to their car, they find the engine flooded and make the choice to swap the battery out to the '72 White Chevy Bronco in the lot which had its keys in the ignition. Just as they were about to finish the swap, they find out what happened to the other campers. 

Barreling out of the mycelial growth behind them- a monster of fungus and melded human flesh- the Flesh Hydra makes its first full appearance. H gets a few lucky shots in with the shotgun and keeps it at bay until R finishes the battery swap and the pair flee the campground. As they try and flee the town, however, they find the routes east and west are both flooded. They decided to head for high ground and make for the Pickman Lodge.

Finding the lodge empty, they take shelter from the rain and search the place, finding rooms filled with lab equipment and survival gear as well as one locked door with something scratching on it. They also find a strange red rotary phone connected to data and telephone cables in the dining room- R spends awhile talking to the person on the other side and getting assurances that help is on the way. 

CRAB-COMMENTARY

 The phone is an artifact being used by Brett and Angela- Bureau agents. They use it to redirect outgoing calls from town into the phone which tells sweet lies. Per the module, Brett and Angela have been there for a year monitoring the area after the Incident, but have been sending falsified reports for the last week. The module leaves this open to question as to why. I decided to run it because they were seduced by the phone's comforting lies and thought they could keep the situation in town handled without further Bureau help which might try to reposess the phone. 

After waiting long enough to come to the conclusion the voice on the phone lied about help, Brett and Angela pull up and there's a tense stand off with guns drawn on both sides before diplomacy reveals them both on the same side. Brett and Angela fill in that their research and samples led them to believe this was all caused by a fungal mass growth using the caves beneath town to grow (the party had been hearing about these caves from NPCs for awhile) and that there should be a central mass they can destroy to impede its growth. The agents deputize the investigators and make a plan. Brett and Angela search the Hines farm for a suspected cave entrance and the party goes to find some ammonium nitrate at the Station to detonate on the fungus. 

Driving off in the dark and the rain, R is keenly aware of the Flesh Hydra following the party, keeping pace with the car just behind them. It keeps just away as they pull into the Station, a convenience store/gas station, and R fills the tank up while H goes in to find some explosives. He finds a flamethrower for sale and immediately purchases it, before the shopkeep informs him of the explosive barrels that JJ was supposed to pick up are just out front. 

R sees another car pull in and the man get out of his car is slammed into a bloody smear on the ground and dragged into the dark by the Flesh Hydra. R decides it best to go inside now and help H. He distracts the shopkeep while H grabs two pony-kegs of ammonium nitrate and throws them in the car and honks the horn to get R back in and they speed off towards the Hines farm. 

At the farm they meet with Brett and Angela and are shown to the hidden cave entrance in the cellar of the Hines farmhouse. The new party dons gas masks and heads into the caves, with R & H hauling the kegs and Brett and Angela leading the way. 

Some cave navigation later, the group runs into a gas-masked Sheriff Hank and have a tense negotiation about what he was doing there before deciding to tentatively team up. They head further down into the caves following the thickest strands of mycelia into a huge cathedral like cave with a pit leading into the fungal heart of darkness. 

Brett, Angela, and the Sheriff fight off a group of fungal-hosts and mycelial strands that seperate the party and R&H run forward to hurl their explosives into the pit. They're stopped at the last minute though as the Flesh Hydra pulls itself out of the pit and attacks. 

R's shoulder is dislocated and he's hauled up onto the back of the Hydra- still clutching the keg while H's foot gets mangled from another attack but successfully fires a few blasts from his shotgun.With some deft maneuvering, R is able to escape and roll off the Hydra while using the lighter he bought at character creation to partially detonate his keg- blowing the Hydra back into the hole. 

The other half of the party keeps up the assault but Angela goes down as the hosts continue their assault. R & H throw the last powder keg in and on top of the reforming Flesh Hydra- spraying the flamethrower in on top and detonating the mass- barely escaping the blast. The detonation confuses the remaining hosts which are put down in short order as the whole group flees the now collapsing cavern and into the morning sun.

By noon, the Bureau has arrived and begins cleanup through the town. The investigators are given some token monetary compensation and sworn to secrecy and sent on their way with an unassuming gray business card bearing only a phone number to call for work. The pair vow to never eat mushrooms again as the session ends. 

CRAB-COMMENTARY

Things had to wrap up fast towards the end as we'd already been playing for six hours or so- but all in all this was a delight to run. The module presented an intriguing investigative puzzlebox for the investigators to untangle and the town's vibe and detailed NPCs were perfect.

INT. DUNGEON. BANQUET HALL.

Flesh and fungus smears the tables and halls all around. CRAB sits at the table, covered in mycelia and fungus. With a breath in- the growths slink and retreat under his shell. His eyes glow faintly blue. The DAMNED retract back up into the ceiling with a whimper.

END TITLES

Shadow - CHROMATICS plays.

The camera sweeps back and flits between different rooms in the dungeon. Bodies and gore cover the halls amidst smashed mushrooms and furniture. Fish men in gas masks with bloody mops and buckets are at work cleaning the mess. As the last panning shot ends, a mass of flesh and mycelia rolls with a schlop into the shadows. 

Zach Hazard Vaupen