Operation Unfathomable: Lazy Review

 I've had Operation Unfathomable [OU] on the shelf for a number of years. In our last session my players, desperate for cash,  decided the advert of 20k for recovering a "null rod" on behalf of the mad overking (this is greyhawk, wild coast) was the thing to go for. 

It was a difficult session to run, since they had come from the previous sandbox across the Solnor (which they had, inadvertently, utterly wrecked), and could in theory end up anywhere. I had sort of tried to funnel them by presenting shipping options: Rel Astra, Irongate, Ratik or the Wild Coast. They went to the hardby and from there starting soaking up rumors, that eventually led them to OU. But that meant I had around a dozen modules in my backpack based on where they might end up, meaning I was going to have to fly by the seat of my pants, even though I was sort of familiar with all of them, from having read or run them in years past and kinda flipped through all of them again before the session.

The actual entry and descent was great. Being packed with magic items and rations to last weeks, threatened with doom if they abandon mission and then escorted to a 1000 feet deep hole in the ground to follow previous failed expeditions had them all quite certain that this was a very bad idea.

And then I started to struggle. You see, OU is really verbose. At 110 pages, with custom character classes and player races, it gives an impression of being a campaign unto itself. But it only describes about 42 locations (including 14 in the mini dungeon). 

Incandescent Grottoes describes 57 locations at half that page count. Castle Xyntillan has 20 more pages than OU and has a whopping 298 keyed locations. That's just far too much fluff for 42 keyed locations. Half the book is "read for your pleasure" (but since we organised it unhelpfully, you should read all of it).

Each encounter area is a wall of text and if you haven't thoroughly studied it beforehand, you will struggle. Also, very sparse cross references. You are supposed to learn stuff by reading cover to cover.

Then there's the oddity of its organization. For example, one of the first areas is marked 3a. I go to to area 3 in the book and it lists four sets of dead corpses that I start describing. Halfway through I am realizing  that area 3 actually describes four different areas (a,b,c,d) spread out all across the map. Whoops. But why would you group them like that when they are nowhere near each other on the map?

There's a bunch of unkeyed stuff on the map, they have their own chapter for unkeyed stuff.

The encounter chart references "devil's highway" and hells backroad. And although each get a paragraph elsewhere in the text (no crossreference), they are never shown on the GM map. That's on the player's map.

Also the map is kind of hard to read. And commits a cardinal sin: It has no less than 16 paths leading to unkeyed areas. We do get another map (scale: 1"= 2miles) of the greater underworld, with some names for inspiration if you wanted to develop it yourself. Truth be told, that area was kind of the scale I initially expected OU to have keyed from its page count and pitch, but whatever. 16 paths to unkeyed territory off the map? Why would you do that to a DM?

What enabled me to get my bearings is when I fired up the pdf, because flipping back and forth between keyed and unkeyed areas wasn't working for me. Turns out the PDF map has hyperlinks to everything. That made the PDF immensely more usable at the table than the print book, which is a first for me. Searching through the pdf also alleviated some of the lacking cross reference.

Treasure is ok. I counted around 52k if you haul everything out of there and search every pile of trash. A lot of it isnt easy to find, some of it difficult to extract back home and some of it disproportionate to the encounter (a random encounter with a myrmidon could yield 7.5k) which is all well and good. 25k of it is in the minidungeon, so if you miss out on that, OU is perhaps a bit sparse on treasure all things told. 

I don't think there's enough here for most parties to go from level 1 to 3, but enough to level from 1 to 2. Again, it kinda speaks to it presenting as something much more expansive than it actually is. But for the number of rooms, it does the job.

Alright, let's sum up the grousing: OU is quite small for its page count, presents as a mini-campaign but isn't, its verbosity and weird organisation makes it hard run at the table without thorough prep, and the map has serious faults.

You know, I checked Bryce's review. Surely he would have clocked all this? He hates settings-masquerading-as-modules, hates verbosity and excess backstory, is big on organisation helping the DM run it at the table with minimal prep. So what did he tell us unsuspecting consumers before telling us to spend money on this?

Nothing. He's dropped his pants uncritically because it's creative old school stuff with good art. I mean, LOOK AT THIS SENTENCE:

"The first fifty pages has a brief overview, the faction overview, and an extensive wandering encounter tables with monsters, strange stuff and so on."

Did someone else write this? How could Bryce write such a sentence and not lose his fucking shit? Just the first 50 pages before we get to the actual adventure? Has Bryce ever glossed so egregriously over anything ever? Take a look at this write-up of a random encounter in OU:

"Ootherion, a huge carnivorous ape, set sail from Simos, a prominent city-state in his native dimension (one in which intelligent carnivorous ape society has developed many parallels to Earth’s ancient Greece), and blundered into an interdimensional maelstrom. After piercing the dimensional veil, Ootherion was washed ashore, along with the bodies of his cohorts and the remains of his ship, on the beach of an Underworld sea.

Following a brief period of insane bewilderment and grief-stricken rampaging (during which his reputation as an unbelievable badass was cemented), the ape myrmidon settled into his new career as hired tough guy for a series of Underworld potentates and Chaos godlings. He recently left employment with the Warlords of the Steam Vents during their dispute with the Church of the Fire Fluke and carries a sizable severance package in gems (fist size rubies valued at 7500 gp, secreted in cod-piece purse).

In his travels, Ootherion acquired an only moderately inaccurate map of the Underworld, marked with a route plotted for the possible location of the Grand Pleasure Dome of the slugmen, his final destination.

He has no idea that the “overworld” exists as it just hasn’t yet come up in his dealings with Underworlders.

This proud ape warrior’s hair-trigger sense of personal honor never misses a slight and never lets a challenge go unanswered. He would love to perform one of the epic poems of his culture to any who might indulge him: it’s four hours of rhythmic fist-pounding and chanting in High Apish

Holy epic backstory, batman! Bryce! BRYCE?!? BRYYYYYYYCE. Where are you with this? Did you take a bribe to review this and not call it out? What the fuck happened, man.

Alright, that's the grousing done. I want to mention the good stuff too, with just a little bit of grousing squeezed in.

The content is really fucking good. It's entertaining to read and to run. As good as you are like to find really. If anything, it starts creeping into the territory of being performative (never forget the maxim: The GM should be the straight man to the players shenanigans) with its creativity. But I think it holds the line. 

The art is also amazing. Not just in terms of delivering flavor but also really supports the adventure. Absolute best-in-class.

There is a vision here that calls for expanding this to a proper mega-dungeon, one you could build an actual underworld campaign around. Of course, it would need aggressive editing, but this is what I hoped for when I bought it, and am still hoping for. Come on Stoltis. Your magnum opus is sitting right there in front of you. Make the Rock'n'Roll version of Night Below no one else has had the chops to make and live immortally in the memory of all old schoolers.

And whilst it only has 42 keyed areas, the 20 wandering travellers are super fun and cool as are the 12 wandering horrors. One could argue that OU is more about the encounters than the encounter areas. In a way, that's a pity, because the dungeon's relative smallness means there's a lot of these encounters that are unlikely to ever happen. But having an excess of cool encounters that may not even see play is not something I will criticise a module for. It's the DM's delight: The players had a great time and the DM is sat there knowing there was so much more that could have happened. Mission accomplished.

I will read this 110 page thing cover to cover a few times so I can run this properly for the next session. Really wish I didn't need to though. That's a big buyin for the gaming output.

Nonetheless, I am sure we will have a great time at the table with this when we are actually playing it.

8/10