Mantis-Men: Dev Thoughts
So, after a successful playtest on Black Friday, I realized a couple things:
1. This is definitely a two (or more) session adventure. Our playtest was planned for 3.5 hours, and I felt the pinch in the early point-crawl section. A party could definitely spend a lot of time wandering around in the jungle, especially if they got separated like this group did. I plan to include some guidance about running this as a one-shot, i.e. starting the party right outside the temple.
2. The encounter rolls in the jungle don't pop often enough. I originally had encounter rolls popping on a 1-2 on a d6, then rolling on a d10 for the actual encounter. Going forward, I think the move is either to bump up the d6 to 1-3, or eliminate the d6 entirely. Mork Borg encounters are pretty deadly, generally, and what encounters did pop the party chose to sneak around or ignore. Which is fine! I just think I'd like more encounters than less.
Going forward, I'm hoping to get this laid out with the wonderful art from Kris/ZeroFlee, which you can see on my Bluesky, at some point in early 2026. And because I can't/won't stop, though Glue Trap Games has ALL ON RED and two stretch goals in the pipeline, I've started/finished a module for Luke Gearing's Swyvers. Which I suppose I should play at some point...