Bears Fruit Dungeon Review

 Woah, what's this, top hat? A post about an OSR game? We thought you'd totally abandoned the Old School Renaissance for Delta Green.

My internet friend Jojiro wrote a solo module called Bears Fruit and people thought it was pretty cool. I also thought it was pretty cool and decided to review it since no one else had. Also my blog was in some desperate need of some Spears-related content. You can find Joji's blog, Dungeon Antology, in the sidebar of this one! There's some cool stuff there.

Bears Fruit is written for B/X but I ran it in Begone, FOE! a lightweight dungeoncrawling game written by another internet friend mellonbread of The Crypt of Belle and Mred. I gathered up a crew of Australians (along with some friends from other places) just recently trapped by a lockdown that meant they had plenty of time to do stupid things like play roleplaying games. Three of them had played in previous versions of Begone, FOE! and the rest of them were completely new.

We had a party consisting of a multilingual Magic User (Cain Wright) with Light and Detect Magic, a sword and board Fighter (Sir Black), a Cleric of a bat goddess with a holy smacking-bat (Bartholomew), a dancing Fighter (Sasha) who was light on her feet, and a magical Thief (Matild Benedek) with Read Languages.

Bears Fruit starts you with 2d6 GP while Begone, FOE! starts you with 10d6 coins. Anyone who chose "Chaotic Carousing" turned their lost 8d6 GP into XP. Matild spent her money hiring scouts while Bartholomew donated it all to the church. Everyone else blasted away their money in a wild ride. Sasha burnt down the town market and Cain made a fool of himself. Sir Black arrived late and just showed up at the dungeon entrance. In retrospect, rolling three carousing events was a bad idea. The player who burnt down the market was also annoyed that the market just burnt down with no choice in the matter. She had played Esoteric Enterprises but was new to the "fantasy milieu" of Begone, FOE!'s implied setting and had no idea what to grab from the burning wreck. Cain's player remarked that the result of his carousing was now purely beneficial, as there were no local merchants to buy from.

Matild hired two fighters for cheap, Lazlo and Bognar, while Bartholomew persuaded one of the church's clerics, Robin, to come with. At the dungeon entrance, Cain puzzled over the four basins. I decided to put all four of them there except for The Snake-Tailed Tortoise which was filled with concrete because it would've been hellish to resolve with five players. They heard bear noises coming from the dungeon chamber ahead and crawled in once they heard them receding. Finding nothing, they pressed on and stumbled upon the Ant Queen and her four giant ant guards. I rolled "guarded" for their reaction roll, so they would only attack if the party got too close to the eggs, which were blocking the way out of the chamber. Matild rolled decently on another reaction roll to befriend one of the guard ants by feeding him some of her rations. (I realized later that it should've been a she, but what's gender to ants). The party named him "Kitty" and decided to go the other way round the loop.

They found the ants' midden and dug out a cauldron from it. They resolved to drag it out of the dungeon on their way out. Next up was the honeypot ant room. Kitty showed them how to "milk" the honeypots, but the party rolled a "1" on their reaction roll and the ants started screaming. They expected Kitty to leap to their defense and slaughter the intruders, but he just waddled around, confused. Fortunately for the party, this room was far away enough from any other ants that none came to rescue them. In a team effort, Sasha and Cain squeezed all the honey out of one ant into a flask. As they were hanging around, an orchard bear wandered in! With six attacks per round from the party, it didn't stand much of a chance. Sasha skinned it and wore its pelt like a cape.

In the next room, they found a teleportation circle. As a Magic-User with the Linguistics skill, Cain could tell that the magic circle was easily repairable, just a single dungeon turn. He sent out Sir Black to investigate the room to the north while the rest of the party stood guard. Sir Black watched four giant ants zombify a fifth ant but remained hidden thanks to his SKILL and Stealth. Then he and Lazlo headed east to the MEGA CHAMBER OF THE ANTEATER.

I really wished I'd had a special music track queued up for this guy. There were 42 ants on the ceiling trying to repair a hole and one zombie ant patrolling the anteater. In the time it took the two of them to count all the ants the zombie ant noticed them! They still hadn't fought an ant yet, but could only assume the zombie ants would be even tougher (ironically, they're weaker). Lazlo scrambled through the tunnel to warn the others while Sir Black waited at the mouth to lure the ant. Once he was sure it would follow him into the tunnel, he dived in. We finally got a chance to use Begone, FOE!'s chase rules and he easily beat out the zombie ant. Everyone with a non-zero BODY and a weapon stood outside the tunnel. First they saw the green glow light up the mouth, and then the ant itself! It only had 1 HP, so it died rather anticlimactically on the first attack.

The party decided that they should leave the dungeon. So they packed up their stuff and hauled the cauldron out of the dungeon and back to town. Sir Black offered to see if anyone was willing to buy the cauldron. It turned out that three potential magic-user hirelings were willing to. He bought the cauldron from Cain for 9 gp and sold it to the magic-users for 10 gp. Then everyone went to bed at the inn except for Matild.

 She went to check out the new traveling merchant, Aro'd Niy. Joji, you gave us a pronunciation guide for Xiao Quan, but not this guy? Whyyyyyyyy. After finding his prices too high, she stalked after him and tried to cut his coin-purse. However, he was a 6th level adventurer and caught her in the act. Rather than call the guards, he just stormed off to his tent. Meanwhile, Matild cut her own coin-purse and presented this as evidence to the guards. The reaction roll wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible, so two guards agreed to accompany her to the confrontation. It went sour and initiative was rolled. Even though he had 2 SKILL, Matild beat him and lunged out with her rapier. The guards held their actions but the merchant struck back. Now that he'd actually attacked Matild, the guards tried to spear him. Somehow, the three of them took him down. In retrospect, I'd given him 2 HEART and he never used his Soul Dice. I should've just given him 3 BODY and 3 SKILL instead. I'm not sure whether this is a failure because the 6th level dude died to three level ones, or a success for the exact same reason. Either way, we rolled up his treasure table out of B/X. Matild found a wealth of copper pieces, a potion, and a paired set of elvish chain shirt and shield. Still not enough to get her to level two, though.

But in the middle of the night they were awoken by growls and shouts. Five bears had attacked the town and the guards were trying to fight them off! Everyone crawled out of the window, weapons drawn, and ran towards the bears. In the first round, I learned that I hate variable-damage multi-attack and also that bears are very deadly. They killed all but two of the guards, one of which was severely injured. Cain cast Light on one of the bears' eyelids, sending it running off. I forget the exact details, but the martial members of the party killed the rest of the bears and went to sleep.

The next morning, they set out with Lazlo and Bognar and went right for the Ant Queen's chamber. Kitty was waiting for them and Matild fed him another one of her rations. In the Ant Queen's chamber, Sir Black carefully approached the queen in attempt to squeeze past her into the exit tunnel. But her guards hissed and chittered at him. The party stepped back, thought for a while, and decided they need to kill the Ant Queen. It was a bloodbath.

The Ant Queen blasted out psychic screams that no one had the MIND to save against, not even Cain or Matild. He rolled an unlucky 5 damage from the blast, but Bartholomew tossed a Soul Die his way to make him pass the save. Somehow Cain managed to charge in and stab the Ant Queen to death, which triggered an even worse psychic scream. It didn't do any damage, but it did alert every ant in the hive, including Kitty. Lazlo and Bognar were decapitated by the guard ants before the party could kill them off. Then the four ants plus their zombie friend crawled out of the tunnel to the next room. The zombie took down Cain, meanwhile, everyone tried to retreat. Unfortunately, Kitty was blocking their way out. No reaction roll could overcome pheromones and psychic signals. 

Sasha and Matild tried to fight their way past Kitty, but once the rest of the party fell before the ant horde, they tried to rush past him. It was a SKILL test vs Kitty's attack roll. Sasha rolled with Advantage because she had the Acrobatics skill and successfully tumbled past. Matild also made it through, but not before Kitty took a bite out of her. Then it was time for fleeing rolls. Sasha fled, but Matild didn't even have enough things to drop to beat the ants' roll. Four ants mobbed her as she tried to scramble through the tunnel. Predictably, a cascading series of rolls on the Getting Hit table led to her death.

Sasha escaped with ~700 XP and everyone decided they were basically done. They'd had fun, but in the words of Cain's player "I'm not sure there's anything interesting waiting for us in there." I showed him the actual dungeon files. He was surprised to see it was originally a completely solo affair, thinking it was a one-on-one type thing. He also said it'd probably be quite fun to play by yourself and in retrospect, the super gamey beginning made sense. 

As for my comments, I think the treasure distribution of the module is really off on the first floor and that giant ants are a really boring monster. I ended up giving the Ant Queen a d4 recharge time on her psychic scream because being able to do that each turn felt really brutal. Also, the lower floors were completely inaccessible because the party only had 30 feet of rope between them and there was only 30' left by the previous scouting expedition. Even if the rope had extended the full 60', they'd still be eating 3d6 fall damage.

I also learned some stuff about running Begone, FOE! So all in all, good experience, but I can't recommend Bears Fruit as a regular module. It's worth looking at for the cool fucked up shit with the bear orchard or as a solo exercise, though.