The Whole Hole: A Gadabout’s Guide to Mutha Oith is intended to be a series of supplemental
books expanding on the Mutha Oith setting from Andy Hopp’s tongue-in-cheek
post-post-apocalyptic Low Life role-playing
game. Volume 01: Keister Island (V01KI) deals, not surprisingly, with the
continent of Keister Island, also the starting setting for the plot point
campaign found in the core book Low Life:
Rise of the Lowly.
Let me
start of by saying that just physically this is a beautiful book. At 222 pages,
the book is chock-full of wonderful drawings and cool maps; only a small number
of pages don’t sport any artwork whatsoever. V01KI is a perfect example of how having the same person both write
and illustrate makes the resulting product more than just a sum of its parts.
Personally I’m not convinced yet by the new, smaller format, but it admittedly does
make the book easy to carry around and use around the table.
There is a lot more flavor text in V01KI as compared to Rise of the Lowly and I’m glad to say
Hopp’s writing is just as funny and whimsical as his artwork. The book is
presented as written by a famous explorer and we view the world through his
eyes: this really does a lot to flesh out the setting and gives it a great deal
more depth, even when it sometimes turns into a historical yarn which doesn’t provide
the game master (or Boss as (s)he’s called in Low Life) with immenintly gameable material. The book is a blast to
read, period.
To get the
most out of V01KI it is advisable to
own a copy of the core rulebook Rise of
the Lowly, as V01KI doesn’t
rehash already established races, creatures and arcane backgrounds to name a
few, and since every idea penned by Hopp is unlike those of any other
role-playing game you might know, readers without prior knowledge of the
setting will probably have a hard time keeping up.
V01KI starts with a general introduction to the
island, dwelling briefly on its many diverse wilderness and fluminous areas
before moving on to two locations which feature prominently in Rise of the Lowly: the Garden of
Smellemental Glee and the Bitchin’ City of Floom. Ninety pages of the book deal
with Floom alone, and I must say it does wonders to make the locale come to
life. Running the Rise of the Lowly
campaign with the help of V01KI
suddenly becomes a breeze, as you now have some sixty detailed points of
interest and colorful NPCs to populate the city with. If you plan on running
the plot point campaign, I would recommend V01KI
for this chapter alone. In this part the book also cleverly provides the Boss
with dozens of ideas for possible adventures, often in the form of a short hook
when describing a particular locale or character, which is a good thing as V01KI sadly doesn’t feature any
ready-made adventures.
It should
also be noted that in many places the descriptions are necessarily brief and will
require quite some work from the Boss to make them work in a on-going campaign.
The other twenty-odd towns of Keister Island get a total of twenty-five pages
among them. Also some interesting adventure locales are hinted at, such as the
Temple of Smellemental Evil, but you will have to make the place up from
scratch if the players actually want to venture there. Of course this is an
understandable restriction due to space constraints unless Andy Hopp wanted to produce
a tome the size of a phone book, but prospective Bosses should keep in mind not
everything in V01KI can be played
straight from the box, so to speak.
The rest of
the book deals with new rules and game-mechanical features and additions. Like Rise of the Lowly, V01KI is intended to run on the Savage Worlds rules so this mean
very little in the way of pages filled with stat blocks. Some new Edges and
Hindrances are introduced; setting rules such as Body Buddies and the hilarious
Gubertinct; new equipment; an expanded bestiary featuring a few doozies such as
the Lichenthrope, the Sphincs and Some Kind of Weird Worm-like Thing With Teeth
On Its Face; and three new playable races. Of these last the Funguys are by far
the superior addition; the other two, Flews and Snells, I found to lack mechanical
uniqueness compared to the existing races and miss a certain iconic quality
that made the races from Rise of the
Lowly such instant classics. Some of the new critters such as Shmurves or
Blor Porples might have made more interesting player races.
Priced at
$29.95, I fully recommend Vol. 01 Keister
Island. It has charm by the bucketfulls and is still one of the most unique
role-playing settings out there, even six years after the original publication
of Rise of the Lowly. It won’t win over
anyone who did not care for Low Life
to begin with (game masters who are of the opinion locations, groups or
creatures based on the theme of butts or poo have no place at their gaming
table need not apply), but below the surface layer of often nonsensical and
adolescent (though family friendly) humor lies a rich and satisfying world just
waiting to be explored and used as the backdrop for awe-inspiring, glorious
adventures, courtesy of the mad brilliant mind of Andy Hopp. Oh, and watch out
for Throbbance the Grope, that guy really is a muthagooser.
