TNU Play Report 4: Wasps, Moths, and the Consequences Thereof

This session was a one-pc dungeon-crawl, where we caught Hant’s player up to the point in time that the rest of the party left off. Hant had climbed into an alternative entrance to the nightmare-dungeon — a hole in the tower made by some sort of siege device. From this vantage point he can see the valley and fields below, where there suddenly seem to be a huge quantity of campfires arrayed across the ancient earthworks, each guarded by groups of soldiers. As the assassin observed further, skirmishes break out among these groups.

Hant decides to head inside.

Looking at the staircase he is standing on, the lower section seems impassible without significant effort due to collapsed rocks, but the stairs upwards are in surprisingly good repair. He hears a buzzing, as though by large bees, coming from above. Ascending, he walks into a room that would be recognizable to the other party members, though not yet to him: a small entryway with a statue on a plinth in the middle, depicting a knight holding a shield engraved with a sun half-concealed by the horizon. This iteration of the statue is painted, the armor a deep blue and the sun in colors implying it is rising rather than setting.

The buzzing in fact turns out to be bees. In the next room there are four massive nearly horse-sized wasps placidly dozing on the ceiling, pleasantly buzzed on the smoke from several torches. Also in the room are two figures attempting to carry a huge sack, contents unknown but bulky, further into the dungeon. These beings appear humanoid but with insectile features, their faces in particular resembling the wasps — but with rough approximations of human features painted on, with open mouthed smiles.

These figures do not notice Hant and the wasps do not care, so he follows them to peer into the next room. In addition to the bag carriers, it contains several of these bug-men, all standing around one of the massive wasps. One holds it so that it cannot not take off, and the others stand by with various grooming implements, brushing wiping and cleaning it while it squirms in displeasure at the indignity. Hant spies a flight of stairs to the side of the room, and using his skills of infiltration slips along behind the bag-carriers and into the next floor.

The stairs lead to a room with a painted statue bearing a shield. This iteration of it also has additional ornamentation, a scattering of cut flowers on the plinth and a decorative torc around the neck of the statue. It was at this point that Hant’s player gathers their thoughts on the structure of the building their character is in, realizing that neither this floor nor the previous map spatially to the tower remnants Hant had hoisted himself into. Cautiously, Hant creeps forward, now (correctly) convinced he is in another nightmare. An oddly flickering light comes from the next room.

A suit of armor stands silently in this room, leaning on a massive sword and holding a lantern aloft. The armor is painted the same dark blue as the statue. The lantern’s light seems off in some fashion, casting shadows in a way that does not quite seem to be where it should. The armor faces a closed door, and Hant begins trying to determine if it is a living being. Some quiet observation reveals moths entering and exiting the armor. Hant decides to risk sneaking past, and peers into a familiar room to see two more identical lantern-bearing armors flanking a familiar staircase upwards. He begins concocting a scheme to determine some information about these armor-entities. Returning to the statue room, he takes a severed lizard claw from his possessions and hurls it against the door across the room. Two of the moth-armor entities (the one nearest Hant and one from the staircase) immediately move to investigate.

Hant watches as the two armors discover the claw and examine it by their lantern light. In a tone of disgust one of them says “Runalt,” prompting the other to pour a rivulet of fire upon the claw. It goes up in flames immediately, reminding Hant that the things are in fact made of very flammable paint. He pulls his tinderbox and another claw out of his possessions and begins preparing to ambush one of the armors.

When the armor from the stairway room returns to its post, Hant siezes the opportunity and sneaks up on the lone door guard, igniting the lizard claw and stuffing it into an opening in the helmet of his victim before diving for cover behind the statue Unfortunately for him, while the moths living in the armor are harmed by this fire, the armor itself is not and began to retaliate. It shatters its lantern against the statue, and the flames reach out at ninety degree angles to any surface they coat, disobeying the usual laws of fire as they begin to spread. Hant takes this as a queue to run.

He books it down the stairs and past the startled wasp-riders, causing a wasp to panic and attempt to escape. When he reaches the hole leading to the exterior he conceals himself behind a pile of debris. A mounted wasp-rider flies out in pursuit but does not see him. He laughs bitterly as he readies to drop down and rejoin the rest of the party.

Running a dungeon-crawl for one person is something I genuinely enjoy a lot, and both myself and Hant’s player are pretty long winded, so this one had a lot going on! Huge shoutouts to Almuund’d player for hanging out with us while we rambled endlessly, he’s a goddamn saint. My big task now is to be ready for the party to try to interpret the stuff Hant ran into. I have the shape of a bunch of it in my head: this dungeon as a whole was an experiment in making repetition of the same layout interesting, and also planting the idea of a multitude of armed conflicts from different periods being flattened into one event. My plan for the Occult-Futurists has been that having seen this happen, they want to do something akin to this but broader in scope and scale.

Hant had a truly absurd run of neutral-to-positive reaction roles (I think it is funny that the the wasps in particular would have basically just wanted to see if he had food and then ignored him if he didn’t offer any). He’s being played as a real piece of shit who looks for opportunity to harm first and foremost though — we’ll see how far that gets him.