Review: Canal of Horrors
Note: This review was originally on October 18, 2021 at the collective RPG review blog, Bones of Contention. If you want to read more in-depth criticism and analysis of TTRPGs by the absolute top-notch bloggers in the field, there is no better avenue in which to begin your search.
Canal of Horrors is an adventure for Electric Bastionland by Chris McDowall. Like most adventures in the Dissident Whispers anthology, Canal of Horrors is short and sweet, fitting on a two-page spread. It consists of a map of several boroughs of Bastion (“The only city that matters”), annotated with details about each borough and a simple adventure hook and things that get in the way. In short, it has everything needed to inspire an adventure.
McDowall is often praised for his terse style, both in his advice and his rules. He has a much-lauded ability to cut rules to the core. As Anne of DIY & Dragons said,
“I consider Into the Odd to be something like the Platonic ideal of simple Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules and the writing have been distilled down to their very essence and presented in the tersest, most compact possible way, without sacrificing the elements that are most essential to play. I'm not saying that no one else can write something better than I2TO, but I am saying that you'd be hard pressed to write something shorter. Chris McDowell has seemingly cut out everything but the most necessary elements of D&D, and edited his own writing to be as terse as possible.”
What goes less-often commented on is that McDowall is one of the funniest writers in TTRPGs. While his description of the “Rich Future Bastard Versions of You” pursuing the player-characters cracked me up the most, almost every entry in Canal of Horrors matches the understated comedic tone. It isn’t trying to be funny; it just is. The worldbuilding hits the right mix of absurd and mundane, and the tone remains firmly tongue-in-cheek. Like the rest of the Electric Basionland canon, the droll writing makes Canal of Horrors a pleasant reading experience.
But how does it play? You are in luck. I ran this adventure as an intermezzo between a starting adventure in a Bastionland hospital and You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge (a play report, of sorts, is here). However, my problems with the adventure are best illustrated by the changes I made. In Canal of Horrors, the player characters begin at the docks. There is an abandoned luxury yacht. To get paid, the characters need to take the boat through the canals to the Buyer at the intersection of Mocktown and the Central Bog boroughs. The canal itself is forked like a trident, but it is a straight path to the Buyer. I always pay attention when designers break their own rules, and in Electric Bastionland, McDowall provides the following advice about mapping Bastion: “draw two or more circuits denoting different transport routes, ensuring they cross over each other.” There is no circuitry here, and players don’t really need to make any interesting navigational choices to get from the starting point to the end. Essentially, it is a railroad with five locks between start to end, with each lock having a 50% chance of triggering an encounter. So I flipped the adventure geographically (partially as a necessary way of shoehorning in the Garbage Barge), but also provided multiple routes through this section of the city. My players ended up crossing bridges on foot, taking cable cars, and swimming in the canals as they made their way from a privatized hospital north Mocktown to the Dock to the south. The worldbuilding and writing of the adventure drew me in, but the adventure structure itself is lacking (perhaps to be expected, based on the real estate the adventure covers [several city districts] versus its real estate in the book [two aesthetically pleasing pages]). Like many adventures, it takes some tailoring to make Canal of Horrors as flattering as it can be when you bring it to your gaming table.
Canal of Horrors was included in the Dissident Whispers anthology. Dissident Whispers was produced by the Whisper Collective, in coordination with 90 individual collaborators. It is available in Print & PDF for $30 at Tuesday Knight Games (North America), in PDF for $20 at itch.io or DriveThruRPG. Physical copies outside of North America were previously being distributed by Melsonian Arts Council, but as of time of writing that option is no longer available.
