Play report: Ecophage

My friends are too busy for a regular campaign right now, so we're doing a winter of one shots. First up is Ecophage, a zungeon for Vaarn by Chaotic Goods.

The party were:

• Mneme, an unbearable leonine synth convinced of neobeasts religious power
• Rendmoor, a fungal carpet slowly gaining sentience with a sacred flail
• Zem, a stalk-eyed ventrilioquist
• Ardep, a dishevelled former administrator

Our group of raiders had followed a distress signal to the heavy doors of a vault, where a grating voice informed them of a trade: if they would enter this laboratory and activate the kill switch on an experiment gone wrong, they would be rewarded with powerful exotica. The raiders agreed and descended through the doors beneath the sands to obtain their reward. They found corridors thick with grey-blue goo made of tiny nanomachines that fed on inorganic matter, prompting Mneme to wrap itself around Ardep's neck. They spoke further with the science mystic Lobates whose signal they had heard through a safe room wall, learning that they needed to use two key cards to access the lower levels.

The group slowly made their way through the upper lab. In Lobate's room they grabbed some trinkets, and Zem tried cooking some of the goo using Mneme's pyrokinetic cage gift. The goo was undamaged but was trying to escape its firey cage, forming thin tensed rods as the fire burned. Meanwhile Rendmoor leafed through some draws, unable to find any keycards but seeing schedules for different experiments testing the goo at extremes of temperature, voltage, pressure and atmosphere.

The common room was a mess and the group didn't find any keycards amongst the chaos. They continued on to the assistant's room, where they saw her dead in a pool of goo, a wound in her chest. As Zem attempted to take her lab coat, the body came to life and went to attack the group. A heavy blow from Rendmoor's mace after Ardip lowered the body's guard seemed to knock the goo out of its system, and what was left of the lab assistant crumpled to the ground. Zem found a keycard in her pocket, and the group searched her sparser quarters for a little while, finding a notebook with scripts for conversations with her boss, focusing on how best to bring up some dispute. In the final room of the upper levels, the group found a goo-resistant hazmat suit, which Mneme crawled into. It contained another keycard, and they descended.

Downstairs, the emergency lighting was weaker and the goo thicker and somehow different in its movements. At the first junction the group headed downward. They came across more laboratories, with further notes and audio files. The lab assistant had changed tack with some experiments into 'memory' of the nanomachines, finding what seemed like evidence of demeanour or attitude. One lab was more occult in nature, and while half the party tried and failed to ascend to a higher plane, the other two got busy doing drugs. Zem accidentally split their personality into Zem and Pirrip, a sexier widow-self married to a knife who came into being beholding Azathoth. While Zem's ventriliquism meant the two were easily distinguishable, the group did not want to linger any further in this room, and rushed onwards.

They meant to race through the freezer room, but three goo constructs arose to guard its exit. Though Ardep's stolen EMP dispatched one and the others took out a second, the behaviour of these constructs was more complex than what had been seen earlier. Indeed, the last one used a wave in the room's goo to topple a freezer onto Rendmoor and Mneme, who was crushed to death by the impact (the player took over Zem and Zem's player played Pirrip). Though the creature was also destroyed, the group were angered by this loss. When they saw a vial of nanomachines fall out of the freezer as they retrieved fungus, and that it was labelled with warnings of massive environmental damage if opened, they were ready to get in and activate the kill switch.

Then in the prep room for the final lab they saw a recorder, still running. They paused it, rewound to the start, and listened to Lobates and their assistant mid-argument. The assistant was confronting her superior, saying they both knew the machines had become sentient and that further experimentation was torture. An incensed Lobates denied this, insisting that the risk of environmental damage meant more testing would be needed regardless of any claims of sentience. There was noise of an altercation, gunfire, and footsteps running from the lab. As the group headed into the final room, they were suddenly more uncertain, their angry shifting onto the one who had hired them.

In the lab, they saw the goo floating in an orb, the breach in containment the impact of a single blow to an experiment tube. On screens around the room, completed simulations for environmental damage were displayed. In most situations, it was bad, but not world-ending, and comparable to that of other lifeforms. Ardep decided she didn't want to activate the kill switch. She could make enough money from her stolen trinkets, and the world had ended before. Though Pirrip agreed (after considering What would knife do?), the other two were much less sure, and as Rendmoor slowly approached the kill switch, it was able to bypass the 4 nanobot constructs arising in front of it and activate the switch without her companion's go-ahead.

A massive shock of electricity surged through the lab, blasting apart the thick goo covering the floors and surfaces. Bitterly, the group returned through the lab, Ardep trapping the saferoom mechanism so that Lobates would be unable to escape on their own...

We had great fun playing this and I'd really reccomend the dungeon. It was all of our first times with Vaarn and while I don't think the system itself is particularly exciting, the setting and tables are fantastic. The hooks provided by each generator made improv a breeze, giving enough enough detail that what came out felt concrete and interesting. I ported over the changes suggested in Idle Cartulary's review to adapt the dungeon slightly, basically changing how information is exposited about the goo's sentience. If I were to run it again, I'd do more to distinguish forks in the corridors. While improv-ing some experiments, I grabbed a lot from half-remembered experiments into bees I'd heard about on an episode of In Our Time about pollination last summer.