Mayhem in the Market

By Graeme Davis
Mondiversi
OSE
Levels 1-5

Rudgen’s Square is a small open space in one of the more modest parts of a city. You can place it in any city or large town in your campaign. Named after a long-forgotten hero whose cracked and weathered statue – now headless – sits on a plinth atop a fountain at its center, the square sees a modest but constant stream of foot traffic, and a few small-time merchants have set up stalls around the edge selling all manner of goods

This 22 page adventure details about four hours in a street market as things happen around the party. It’s two pages of content, padded out, in a museum tour of an adventure. At least it ends with people shitting and puling their guts up in public while zombies attack. It just needed more of that.

Dude claims to be the inventor of the “multi-plot” adventure, for Warhammer, back in 87. I don’t know, it’s just a lot of things going on at once. Maybe. I take it for granted now, but, also, the concept of Romantic Love, right? In any event, our definitions of “a lot of plots going on at once” are a little different.

You are sent to the marketplace to find The Maltese Falcon, or whatever. Slimy junk merchant has it and he wanted like a bajillion million dollars for it. This is the first place the adventure breaks down, and maybe the most critical. Do they just stab the dude and leave? Do they steal it and leave? Or do they hang around for a minute? The entire adventure hinges on the party hanging around for a bit. If they do not hang around the marketplace then the adventure is not going to work. For it relies on, about every fifteen minutes, some kind of event happening in and around the party. There are a number of plotlines, seven or so I believe, and they unfold over the next four hours at about one event every fifteen minutes, related to one of the subplots. A dude smuggling himself out of the city as a poly’d horde. Food poisoning. A Romeo & Juliet lovers tryst. The dude that has the Maltese Falcon has sold a crime lords kid a love potion that actually turns him green. Maybe the answer to DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! Should be Yes if its the crime lords son and you’re a shady merchant? 

Anyway, every fifteen minutes or so some observant person in the party, asking questions about whats going down, is going to be asked to make an intelligence check to get some kind of extra knowledge. I hope they succeed on the roll. A lot. Or else everyone is going to be quite bored tonight during the game.  

The inherent concept here, of having a lot going on, is in fact correct. That should be the default for just about any adventure, and a town and/or social adventure adventure especially. There SHOULD be a lot going on at once. That gives the world a lived in feeling and creates a sense of urgency; you can’t deal with everyone at the same time, right? Faction play in a dungeon. The outdated mind map relationships I like for villages/social encounters. But the problem, gere, is one of passivity. 

In a perfect world, for the party at least, you steal the Jade Skull and/or kill the slimy stallkeeper. And then leave the square. So don’t stick around. So nothing happens after you get the skull. That means that the action must take place between the initial bargaining dialog (“ONE BILLION DOLLARS!”) and the party putting in to motion their inevitable wacky scheme. And during that time they must succeed in a number of intelligence checks to see other trivia going on. And there scheme must take more than four hours to implement, all while they stand in the fucking square, so they can the rest of the plotlines develop. Oh, chick sitting by a statue alone. Dude comes up to her, her obvious lover. They approach the horse merchants. They go off together. Noblemen come in to the square looking for her. They leave. Couple comes back to hide ta the horse merchants. Etc. And this sort of thing unfolds for each of the plots. 

So the entire concept here is for the party to NOT take action. You must be in the square to see whats going on. You must be there at the end for the shit/puke/zombie fest. You must succeed on your rolls to get the context of what is going on. There are these competing passive things going on. It is, obviously, putting interesting things behind skill checks. Don’t do that. Share interesting things. Don’t make the party beg and plead over the course of four hours in order to be able to get the hook from the king. You WANT the party on the adventure and them invested in it. Watching what happens with the check, understanding a bit of the situation and missing other parts, is what is going to make this a fun and zany side-quest that the party is invested in. And then they must stand around, taking four hours to implement their plan, in order to see any of it at all. You want the party invested, so don’t put that shit behind skill checks. And rework the adventure such that the timeline is greatly advanced or something else, in order to handle the “stab and grab”, or some derivation therein, of the party. 

You know the deal, other than that how was the play? Meh. Some decent chaos at the end when people start shitting themselves and vomiting and a bomb goes off killing a bunch of people and then they reanimate and start Brains!’ing. That, alone, as the climax, perhaps deserves some set piece treatment instead of just another paragraph. The rest of the adventure is full of long timeline events that lean toward the prescriptive end of the spectrum as well as long descriptions of “The Stall of Martha Johnson.” And the bombing is pretty random. Some old woman drops off a bomb at the junk dealers, leaving her shopping bag, and then sprinkles poison on food at several food stalls. Which is weird. I thought it was just some kind of rando deus-ex thing, but there is another thread, one event in which a protection racket causes a mess at a food stall. So maybe its a protection thing? But blowing up a stall and killing a bunch of randos? I get that the bandits want revenge for a fake love potion, but, mass murder? That seems a tad excessive, even for an RPG?

Dude might be a fine DM. And he might have invented the “multi-plot adventure.” But this is not a good implementation, either in its form or function. Long backgrounds and trivia. Detailed events to dig through, a set piece end that is not a set piece. And an overall assumption about the length of the time in the market that is almost certainly not accurate. Yeah, we want to play the game tonight, but too much of that, or too blatant, breaks the illusion of agency.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad Publisher! No cookie for you! We need a substantive preview to determine if we want to buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548756/mayhem-in-the-market?1892600