Mantis-Men: Monsters and Factions
Like I don’t already have enough to do between my actual job, learning lines for the production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” I’m in, and finishing up the final draft of our Mothership Month 2025 offering “ALL ON RED,” I have barfed out a point-crawl/dungeon for Mork Borg.
Inspired by a zefrank video about praying mantises, and running my partner through A Feast for a Sphinx, I decided to write a little dungeon of Mantis-Men. If you aren’t aware, praying mantises lay a LOT of eggs, and when those eggs all hatch, the baby mantises are thrown into a bloody battle royale. I thought it would be sick if players had to navigate this bloodbath for some reason, and the module I’m tentatively calling “The Mantis Men Breeding Pit Massacre” was born. (Or "Necromantis." The jury is out.)
The hook, if you can call it that is:
The Sceptre of Falkoon is a mystical wand, said to be able to cure blighted crops with a single wave. The village of Marvess, in this ending of things, has been struck with a blight that is starving its populace. The village elder has sent you to find the Sceptre and save the village.
It was last wielded by a great hero named Griv Theobald III, who vanished while investigating a ruin on the edge of the Ivory Jungle.
Go to the Black Ruin and find his body, surely the Sceptre will be nearby.
I’ve never written a point-crawl before, so I started with the monsters. The Mantis-Men, the Mantis-Husk Warriors (humans wearing mantis exoskeletons), the Mantis Queen's dark vizier, and of course the Mantis-Queen herself:
Then I got to work on the factions. I think faction play is hella important, and I wanted to have some fun levers for the players to pull on. So, we've got three factions:
The Mantis-Men and the Ivory Queen: Blindly loyal to their queen, their sole wish is to mate with her and be decapitated. They will protect her at all costs.The Queen wishes to lay enough eggs to march out of the Ivory Jungle and spread across the land. She believes that Thrul’spak’s magic is the key to empowering her Mantis legions.
Thrul’spak and the Mantis-Husk Warriors: The dark sorcerer Thrul’spak has other plans. He has instructed the Mantis-Men and Mantis-Husks to hunt down any surviving White Elephants and bring their heads to feed their oil to the Queen. This mystical oil is fattening the Queen at an alarming rate, at the apex of which Thrul’spak will kill her and transform her carapace into a powerful Orchid Mantle that he can use to control the Mantis-Men himself.
The White Elephants: Hunted near to extinction, the last pod of White Elephants wishes nothing else but to reclaim their ancient temple and burial ground. They can communicate telepathically, and know many secret paths through the Jungle. They hate Mantises and Mantis-Husks with every fiber of their being, and would see the Ivory Queen and her Vizier trampled under foot.
So right off the bat we've got some serious levers to pull on. The vizier wants to turn the queen into a big suit of armor, the elephants want the temple cleared out, the queen wants to send her army of mantises out to eat the world. And the players, well, they gotta get that wand.
We've got one faction that's got a pretty basic goal: eat the world, a faction that's a little backstabby, and a faction that is pretty unequivocally good. I know that's a bit unconventional for Mork Borg, but I want to put the players in a position where their horrible little Mork Borg weirdos have to MAKE THE DECISION to help the elephants or fuck them over, and I want them to feel bad for fucking them over.
I've got a playtest this coming Friday, which I'm psyched about. I'll do a recap after, and then do a little more of a dive into the dungeon and point-crawl designs!
Where IS that wand? Why, the Breeding Pit of course.