Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya review based on actual play
Tldr; This is really fun, play it!
System used: Brighter Worlds (a whimsical fantasy system based on Into the Odd and Cairn). Party: Four level 2 PCs, no hirelings. Time to complete: About five hours.
What is this? Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya is an adventure written by Munkao for either Into the Odd or Cairn, though it will take little work to run it in other OSR systems. It’s set in Kala Mandala, “a fantasy world centred on Southeast Asia.” The setting isn’t detailed much in the module and it would be easy enough to locate the temple practically anywhere and say it was built by missionaries from another land. You could also reskin it or just lift particular useful parts from the adventure, like the automata, to drop into your game.
Munkao was one-half of the duo behind the Thousand Thousand Island setting, detailed in zines and the Reach Of The Roach God book. This is Munkao’s first solo venture since he and Zedeck Siew split ways. It turns out Munkao is an excellent module writer in his own right. This is perhaps my favorite OSR module that I have run yet, besting Winter’s Daughter.
The premise: There’s a monk in a temple who has been meditating for almost a decade. His meditation is almost complete, but a huge wasp nest has taken over part of the temple. The other monks are worried the huge hornets will disturb the monk’s meditation. The problem is, the temple is guarded by automata that are programmed to protect the monk. The PCs’ mission: Get the monk out of the temple without waking him up.
The great: Someone posted to Reddit recently asking for “toys” for the dungeon. The automata is this adventure are a splendid example of such a thing. It gives the PCs something to “do” besides fight monsters. The automata serve as puzzle, monster, and asset. The PCs can fight them, study them, and re-program them to their own ends using “command slips.” The necessary slips can be found scattered throughout the temple. I think the players had a huge sense of shared accomplishment when they first got a hulking “Tarantuton” working on their side.
Other cool things:
- A meditating monk that you must not wake is a much more fun macguffin than a random magical item or bit of treasure.
- Awesome art
- Meaningful in-world consequences for the PCs decisions and actions (For example, whether the PCs help the wasp larva they discover could have a long term consequence for the PCs)
- Competing factions of wasps
- The half-wasps are creepy as heck!
Room for improvement: I feel like the motivations of the NPCs here could use more fleshing out. For example, the wasp workers want to “restore the glory of the swarm,” but I wasn’t sure what that really meant. What were the glory days like? In play, it worked out OK to basically keep this vague. I also wasn’t sure what Waji wanted, other than to be a wasp. If the other wasps want glory, wouldn’t he also? I didn’t have a lot of ideas for how to portray him or the queen. In contrast, the worker captain is described:
Worldly and well travelled and desperate to show it. Peppers her speech with human languages.
I could really have more like this for the other NPCs.
Similarly, there’s a sentient automata the PCs can find called “The Bookworm.” I wish there was a bit more about its motivations, its wants and doesn’t wants.
Those aren’t huge gripes though, given how good the module is overall and how little the lack of clarity around motivations ended up mattering.
