Review: His Majesty the Worm

My friend moved to New York City for work. A weird time to head South, I suspect most people want to travel in the opposite direction. I’d rather he was still here, but there is one perk from his being away: I can mail books to him. On his last trip back he brought with him a copy of His Majesty the Worm (HMtW), by Josh McCrowell. HMtW is an OSR game designed for dungeon crawling. The expectation for the game is you’ll create a megadungeon that your players will explore over many sessions. Unlike most dungeon crawlers, it borrows very little from D&D. Grab a tarot deck, because this game doesn’t use any dice. Wild!

There is probably no world where His Majesty the Worm is someone’s first game, but the book does all the work of introducing itself to a reader new to RPGs all the same. A little later in the book Josh presents a player’s manifesto, which serves as advice to the players for how to approach the game. I love RPG books that approach teaching their game without making assumptions about the audience and their past experience and competency. The books has the games principles up front, setting expectations for the reader. I have lots of experience playing OSR games, but HMtW is quite different, so I believe these sorts of first principles introductions can still be broadly useful.

Character creation feels far heavier your typical OSR game, there is a bit more to do, and Josh encourages you work through the process during a Session 0.¹ As part of session 0 players will flesh out characters together, narrating snippets of their past to settle on scores for their character’s attributes, and fill out other parts of their character sheet. I kind of hate anything that feels like it’s adjacent to backstory, but at least this time you’re coming up with it together with your friends. I also find more involved character creation can put players at odds with the “your character can die at any time we will make a new quickly” ethos of OSR play. I think part of the social contract when it comes to killing player characters is that if it takes a long ass time to make a character it’s a little impolite to kill them. Josh does provide a new adventurer checklist for players to use to jump back into the game after a character dies, or if a new player joins. I haven’t actually tried making a character, so me imaging how fast or slow it might be is all you get.

Characters have Bonds tying them together, charged when acted upon, those charges spent for benefits in play. Bonds feed into the mechanics for camping. This is a part of Torchbearer that I thought was interesting, but I am not that big a fan of how Torchbearer actually works in play. It’s nice to see other games try and do something meaningful with this activity that feels like it should be a bigger part of play.

Moving past character creation we get to an explanation of the crawl phase of the game, where you go adventuring in dungeons. Josh does a great job of breaking down tropes for the unfamiliar. Another example of building something that’s broadly accessible. There are rules for social encounters, and far more involved rules for combat. There is lots going on with how combat works. It seems like bluffing would be a big part of the game since it’s card based, everyone has a random set of 4 to work with, some cards are played face down, etc. There is advice for playing online, but I suspect the game would be far more fun in person, with physical cards. (I suppose all RPGs are more fun in person.)

Shopping, the scourge of all RPGs, is handled in a nice way in HMTW. You pay for upkeep when you return from the underworld, deciding on an impoverished, common, or luxurious lifestyle. To buy new gear you select anything from gear lists that match each lifestyle, limited only by what you can carry. I love this idea, something easy to steal for other games.

HMtW is a very procedure heavy game. Play is structured into 4 phases: the City phase, the Crawl Phase, the Camp Phase, and the Challenge Phase. During the City phase you’ll make preparations for your dungeon crawling, deal with any events that may be taking place, and perform any downtime actions. The Crawl phase is your typical dungeon crawling session, moving through the dungeon in search of adventure. The Challenge phase is this games name for combat: you’ll fight monsters of the underworld. Finally the Camp phase is where you will rest and recuperate in the dungeon, bonding with your fellow adventurers.

The game’s structured play loop (city, crawl, camp, challenge) will likely feel familiar to those of you who have read Torchbearer. Of course, Torchbearer itself was modelling the play loop of old-school D&D, so there is some about of the snake eating its own tail here. Both camping and downtime in the city are given some mechanical heft uncommon in many OSR games. When I asked Josh if he was inspired by Torchbearer he said not really, he was far more inspired by OSR blogposts. My theory is that a lot of the OSR’s obsession with procedures around the time Brendan wrote his seminal post on the topic is all from people borrowing ideas from Torchbearer, but I have no real evidence to back any of this up.² There is perhaps a layer of distorted inspiration?

We get GM’ing advice at the midway point of this chonky book. Like Apocalypse World, time is spent articulating what the GM is even supposed to do, what doing a good job will look like. It’s funny this feels like an obvious section to include in an RPG, but it is one that is often glossed over. Josh covers most everything a GM will need to know to run the game effectively. It’s a well written GM section. There is practical advice for each phase of play. That’s what I like to see in these sorts of GM guides.

The book ends with some fantastic appendices. I really like the city creation rules and sample districts that are Appendix D of His Majesty the Worm. (Appendix C was Dungeon Denizens. Josh could have swapped those two: a real missed opportunity.) Each Tarot card details a district ready to be used. Another things you can steal for other games. The next appendix is advice on how to create a megadungeon: again, eminently stealable. The book concludes with some dungeon seeds and a sample dungeon to put everything you have learned along the way together. Everyone should include an adventure in their game.

It’s interesting to read a game that is trying to hit the same notes as other OSR dungeon crawling games, but that is coming at it from a totally different place. You can’t carry forward assumptions from other games when it comes to the rules, there is no d20 roll high to fall back on. That said, a carousing table is included so no one will question the game’s OSR bonafides. HMtW isn’t the sort of game I typically play nowadays. I often reach for games with almost no rules, and then struggle to run them all the same. This is a game I do want to run or play, though. It’s so unusual and different. It’s also clearly the option if you want to run a Delicious in the Dungeon game.