The Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats - Part 1

First Thoughts.

The Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats (physical) by Duck and Crow Press.

There is a digital edition available on itch.io.

I’ll get it out of the way up front, I love this. It’s weird, gross, lethal, and knows exactly what it is.

If I had to find an issue, my biggest complaint would be that there are more than one billion bats! There is a cave chamber of one million bats, another of one billion bats, and then 8 bat clouds.

In fairness, “The Cursed Cave of a Bit More Than One Billion Bats” doesn’t have the same gravitas. After a billion, what is another million and change? Especially when they are rushing you, squeaking, and biting?

What Is It?

It comes as a staple-bound zine, in a card stock cover that acts as a map, and some notes. The introduction tells you what it is up front:

Bloodbath Dungeons are designed to be one-shots or tournament adventures. They are brutal on purpose.

The fold out has both an isometric map of the cave system, which highlights the vertical passages that the party can climb down, as well as a point crawl version. This is the first time I’ve seen this in an adventure, and I hope I see more of it!

Structure

• 3 pages lay out an outline of the adventure, give some d6 rumor tables, and explain some rules for traversing the cave.
• 5 pages covering the chambers of the cave, each one has 2-3 bullet points of description and then GM info on those points.
• 6 pages cover the magic items, spells, and monsters found within the cave.
• The last page covers scoring the adventure! You get points for the amount of treasure recovered and how much of the cave you explore.

The Adventure

There is a cave full of bats, treasure, and a curse. Go in there, get treasure, and get out. If you want, try and end the curse.

It’s simple and to the point, befitting the premise. Within that simplicity hides plenty of narrative; the small town contains NPCs with conflicting desires,

Befitting of a horror film, there is a local who warns the characters off, going so far as to offer them money to just leave. I imagine him as an old cranky man.

It’s easy to envision how this might work outside the confines of a tournament, where there is more time to interact with the denizens of the cave, there are the rough outlines of several factions within the cave.

Mechanics

It’s a system neutral OSR game, on the inside fold out flap of the cover is a helpful chat for converting the adventure for a variety of OSR game systems.

For example:

A character trained in climbing makes a Standard Climbing Check, failure is a fail (Standard Save to avoid).

From the inside flap, there is this handy conversion chart.

Combining these two and it’s pretty simple to convert the adventure on the fly, or so I hope having committed to running it later today using light-weight hack of His Majesty the Worm. In the parlance of HMtW an easy check would have favor and difficult disfavor, “trained in climbing” would become a relevant motif.

Light

Like many OSR games and adventures light is important, poor lighting leads to greater risk. Interestingly too much light will enrage the bats leading to greater danger so players much strike a careful balance. I am stealing this for my games going forward!

The Curse

The adventure states that each NPC has their own incorrect theory about the curse, but doesn’t provide a table, or example. I’m torn on this, on the one hand it’s understandable given the short nature of the adventure, and how the curse is more of a background element.

When I run it, I’ll ask each player what their character knows/believes about the curse, giving them plenty of conflicting information to “discuss” as they descend further and further into the cave. Under the Scoring section you double all points if you resolve the curse,

Final Thoughts

I like it a lot, nothing strikes me as lacking and there are plenty of enticing bits that could easily be built upon for a larger adventure.

There are several neat mechanics, striking a balance of light for example, that I will be incorporating to future games!