"The Master is in trouble! An evil sorcerer has captured him! We must save him!" Oh, sure, you've seen this plot before. But this time it's different. This time you're the Master's pets.
Another Fine Mess is an adventure for Animal Companions, a not-yet-released Fudge sourcebook from Grey Ghost Press. In addition to the adventure and characters, it includes "all the rules you need to know," a five-page summary of Fudge rules.
Were this written for typical humanoid PCs, it would be a forgettable dungeon crawl: a fine way to spend a gaming session, but hardly a campaign highlight. But with the animal PCs -- a raccoon, a peregrine falcon, a ferret, two dogs, a cat, an owl and a horse -- it becomes something different. Not necessarily superior, but certainly much more challenging and entertaining. After all, what's simple for human hands to accomplish can present a formidable challenge to even the smartest cat. The adventure recommends that the Master's influence allow the animals to speak to each other, which allows them to brainstorm without an added language barrier.
It all starts when the Master, a mage in the service of the Free Rangers of Amberland, leaves camp to apprehend a man who has been doing bad things with magic. An hour or so later, Shadow the cat gets a distress call from the Master. Isabelle the bloodhound picks up his scent trail, and the search and rescue is on.
While logical, the scent trail makes the adventure too linear. The animals don't have to work to find the Master, and they aren't likely to go down an alternate path just to see what else might be around. (OK, so Reek Havoc the ferret did during my playtest. He's an exception.) The challenges come in the form of the encounters on the way.
Most of the encounters are monsters created by the evil sorcerer. Some are hostile, some neutral or potentially friendly. With the hostile creatures, Midnight the horse has the potential to make any combat extremely short, with a 9 damage factor to trample. Nothing in the game can survive a direct hit. He's a big horse with steel shoes, so it's as logical as the scent trail, but the net result was a few lucky rolls ending most of the combats, before any PC got hurt. Combat was so skewed in favor of the PCs that I began to wonder if the dice were loaded. Had it been part of an ongoing campaign, I'd probably have cheated in the monsters' favor, or at least made them more resistant to damage.
The biggest challenges to the animals would be trivial to a group of humans. For example, a locked door. These situations are where Another Fine Mess did its best job pointing out the animals' weaknesses. There are ways around all of these situations, but the bulk of the party's time was spent on them.
There are adventures seeds at the end for extending the game into a campaign. There are also suggestions for converting it into other systems or for more traditional PCs. These notes do admit that the adventure is very linear as it stands.
The conversion notes also point up the level of detail in the adventure. The cave system is described far better for the GM than the animals would care about. The type of cave system, the different stone formations, the elevations and interplay between the different chambers -- all are described very well. The animals would notice almost none of it, but humans and their ilk would.
The character sheets are a delight. The character descriptions give the players plenty of material to work from, and their Gifts and Faults are both appropriate and easy to understand. Each also has a woodcut of the animal, except Barney the dog. His picture is a photograph.
Also, each has the Master listed under Gifts, but each has a different description of him from the animal's point of view. Example: the ferret thinks of the Master as "person with pockets," while the owl (who believes himself the Master's apprentice) describes him as "Homo Sapiens Thaumaturgist." If this is the kind of quality we can expect from Animal Companions when it ships, that will be a must-buy.
The character sheets also point up an all-too-typical situation: most of the characters are male. It has less impact because they are animals, and at least the Master is not also a damsel in distress, but it's still odd. The Master picked up most of his companions during his travels. Did he sort them first?
Weak insinuations of sexism aside, it was a fun way to spend an evening for both players and GM. The biggest drawback was that I had a full complement of eight players. There wasn't enough for all of them to do. Reducing their numbers would have helped. The cat could easily be an NPC, relegated to the role of plot hook. The falcon could have been left behind also. A minimum complement would probably include the horse for combat ability, one of the dogs for tracking the Master, and the raccoon for his nimble paws. A strictly non-combat team could also work.
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