Play Report: Rumbling Forest (Session 1)
This is a play report for the second session of my ongoing Mangayaw campaign. See my review of Varanus Lair for the first session. This time we started in on The Rumbling Forest by Goobernuts, who is also the creator of Mangayaw.
The Rumbling Forest is a small hexcrawl with several cave dungeons around a village plagued by both Spanish interlopers and an impending natural disaster of earthquakes and a raging boar hoard. I briefly reviewed the adventure when it was first released, and you can also check out a more in-depth review on Playful Void. So, I'm going to focus this post on how our first session of the adventure went rather than reviewing the whole adventure.
We started the session with a sea voyage from their home island of Tapagul-an down to the north end of Cebu. I've connected it to their village by making Datu Harigi, the leader of Barangay Tindigan, the village in trouble in the adventure, the cousin of Datu Malakas, the leader of their home village. They know about Datu Harigi's recent collaboration with the Spanish and aren't happy about it, but you can't say no to family requesting aid either.
I placed The Rumbling Forest on Cebu because I've set our campaign in the early years after the Spanish arrived in the Philippines, in which their activities were limited to Cebu and other nearby areas in the Visayas. Conveniently, it was also a one-day sea journey from home for the party based on the Philippines hex map I made for the campaign. This gave us the chance to try out the sea travel rules from Mangayaw, which I really like. It's a solid adaption of the Cairn 2e wilderness exploration procedure with specifics for travel by sea. They traveled in nice weather, which you would normally prefer, but in this case meant the wind wasn't strong enough to sail, and they all gained Fatigue from paddling through the journey. Along the way they ran into a rice-trading boat out of Palawan, which I used to seed some rumors for Lorn Song of the Bachelor down in Sarawak on Borneo as a potential future adventure.
I'll note that rice boat was my interpretation of the 6 result on the exploration die roll:
Discovery: The party finds food, treasure, or other useful resources. The Mangaawit can instead choose to reveal the primary feature of the area.
This is a tricky one to interpret sometimes, particularly in open water. But, the discovery of a rumor for an adventure I hope to run next in our campaign seemed like a good option.
By the end of the first day they made it to the mouth of the river that would lead them to Barangay Tindigan. They chose to make camp and rest for the night before traveling up river given the fatigue from the sea journey and knowing it would be several more hours upriver. At this point, I switched from following the exploration procedures in Mangayaw to using the specific procedures in the adventure for encounters. This calls for a roll on the 2d6 encounter table in each hex, with about half the entries being strange occurrences rather dangerous encounters. As a result, they heard Conquistadors hunting along the river in the nearby jungle. Two of the party snuck around to watch them on their respective watches and learned they seemed to be hunting boar, but ultimately they chose not to pick a fight, and the night continued without event. They purposefully chose not to wake the one member of the party they knew would have started a fight immediately, and she was pretty mad the next morning.
The next day they started the journey upriver. While it isn't explicitly stated in the adventure, I took the description of the the water flowing down into the crack in the earth (Point H on the map below) to mean that it was downriver of the village and fort (Points A and B), so the party encountered the 30 ft. wide 50 ft. deep crack with a waterfall first. I feel like this might be backward from the intended flow of the adventure starting at Barangay Tindigan, but I think it still worked well overall to start things with forest exploration before getting the context of the situation at the village.
While they peered into the crack and saw a group of boar on a sandbar and blood in the water, they decided trying to get in there without more information—and without rope—would probably be a bad idea. Continuing upriver, they were then attacked by a boar warrior and a group of regular boar, which immediately attacked. As always, combat in Into The Odd based games shines in its swift and impactful combat. In just a few rounds one player was bleeding out after being gored by the boar warrior, and while the others ultimately brought that one and one of the regular boar down, the strongest member of the party had her arm ripped off as the result of a scar roll (the increased willpower is a small consolation to her). Taking a few hours to recover, they then encountered a group of macaques jeering at them from the trees. The binturong-folk character (my wife in her first and only TTRPG session) climbed up to give them some fish, which they accepted and told the story of some woodcutters who had gotten in trouble nearby for angering the Kamagong Diwata, a spirit of the trees.
They saved that information for later and continued on to the village. There they met the key NPCs (Dohong the cook and Datu Harigi) and also spent time around the village chatting and learning rumors. In the process they learned about the burial cave and the boar skull cave, rounding out their information about the three cave dungeons downriver of the village. They also heard rumors about the boars learning magic to attack humans, the angry tree spirits, and how they would need to lay down their weapons in the burial cave. They agreed to help Datu Harigi solve the problem of the boars causing trouble in the forest, with the caveat that they would discuss the situation with the Spanish after that.
They ended the session by going to check out the woodcutter camp they'd hear about. Along the way they encountered an earthquake (from doubles on the encounter roll) and also barely missed being run over by the boar hoard. I'm interested to see how the earthquakes progress, as after five doubles rolls the real disaster of the boar hoard destroying everything in their wake will be triggered.
At the camp they found more macaques and learned the three woodcutters had been turned into trees by the Kamagong Diwata, who resided in a kamagong tree nearby. They traveled to that tree and spoke with the diwata. She advised them to deal with the boars first, as she did not want Barangay Tindigan to be destroyed by the boar hoard, but made them swear to return to discuss how to deal with the Spanish causing trouble by demanding too much wood from the forest.
This last encounter with the diwata was especially fun as a pure social encounter with how Mangayaw lets you handle that all through conversation. It was also a great time for the filipina player in the group to shine, as she knew the right things to say and how to act to be deferential to a diwata. A good reminder of why games like this rooted in real world culture are so important.
We'll be picking up again in a few weeks, when they plan to go check out the caves they've heard about and see if they can find a