Somehow I hadn’t even read Nate Treme’s Tunnel Goons RPG prior to this week, and it is a lovely little rules-light engine that has produced some excellent hacks and content over the years. Here’s a whole bunch of Tunnel Goon hacks from a 2019 Tunnel Goons Game Jam (including the original RPG).
My introduction was via Ray Otus’s “Lords of Mars“, where the system has been hacked to play Barsoomian adventures.
Cover art by Juan Ocha
We just played our second session as a team of Tharks trying to find out who’s behind the violation of our incubators and the slaughtering of our unhatched.
It was a routine patrol of our incubators, but the third of five had been cut open, the eggs violated and many were eaten by some predator. But the incubator hadn’t been opened by some wild animal, the hide covering had obviously been cleanly sliced open by a sharp tool – and leading from the incubator there were two sets of tracks… a recent set of tracks of something massive and bestial; and worse, a set of green martian tracks that were much older. Our enemies had found our incubators and violated them!
First we had to deal with the wild animal to keep the eggs safe before we could track down who had opened the incubator. A couple of haad from the incubator we found a massive sinkhole / cave where the waters used to run – home to a white ape that had devoured our unborn!
(This was our first experience with the combat system – right away up against the apex predator of the setting!)
We defeated the white ape, and are now trying to board a Red Martian airship that is hovering above yet another of our violated incubators (we can’t tell if it is Helium-aligned, or a straggler / raider from what’s left of Zodanga). As our second episode ended, the large airship was levelling its main gun at us as we approached on a stolen small airskiff.
Barsoomian Map by Ray Otis