I’m part of a group formed to sample the many fruits of the Old School Renaissance tree, called “Elfgame Bootcamp”. When I joined, the game was Electrum Archive, but after the loss of a member due to academic schedule, we cast about for the next system to try. Of those on offer, I lobbied for His Majesty the Worm by Joshua McCrowell, AKA Rise Up Comus, being especially curious about the way its card-based combat functioned. Now, six months and eleven every-other-week-ish sessions later, our campaign is complete, so have the opportunity to tell the story of the guild known as the Syndicatus Veritas, and give a review of the game with the privileged perspective of having actually played it.
Session Zero(es)
HMtW asks for a hefty amount of prep before normal play begins: not only do the players each need to create a character and collectively fill out a document for their newly charted adventuring guild, but everyone also participates in procedurally generating both the city and the dungeon. In practice, this took us two full sessions, perhaps a bit much to ask of a new group.
However, I cannot fault the city and dungeon generation phases, as they proved easily some of the most fun I had in the campaign as a whole. Each card drawn for the city districts provoked laughter and discussion about how to integrate the new location into the gradually coalescing concept of the city: we ended up with one ruled by the Swordwhores, replete with various pleasure districts. Creating the dungeon was a bit less interactive because the levels were more conceptual islands than blocks of a contiguous polity, but still enjoyable.
Drawing up our guild charter was simpler, although it took us a bit to nail down our character concepts. The four of us ended up as follows:
Members of the Guild
Terrin, the Human who walked the path of Cups. A cartographer of aristocratic blood who sought to prove his wild theory about an architectural relationship between the layout of the dungeon and castle on the surface. The commissioner of the expedition, he wielded throwing knives and handled all our mapping and healing.
Olgar, the Greenblooded Orc who walked the path of Pentacles. He grew up in the Orphanarium and his quest was to kill and take the place of the Bag Man that haunts that district. Technically an employee of Terrin rather than a full member of the guild – Terrin got 50% of all delving profits due to being the leader, but paid half of that to Olgar as his salary.
Tsiska Half-the-Sky, the High Elf who walked the path of Swords. An upright and uptight templar of the Temple Militant. Daughter of Celeska Sun-and-Moon, the legendary heroine whose soul somehow cleaved in two to birth both Tsiska and her sister. Her quest was to slay Uxurial, the only monster her mother failed to defeat. My own character.
Kamillia Half-the-Sky, the High Elf who walked the path of Wands. A lascivious drunkard in a nun’s habit, ejected from her order for wanton conduct. The twins were opposites in every way but appearance, and had a dynamic of Kamillia getting into trouble while Tsiska sighed heavily and pulled her out of it. As the disfavored child, she longed to somehow merge with her sister back into the glorious singular person they were supposed to be.
…and of course, there was also our hard-working, fair-ruling game master, who hosted the majority of the sessions and always made everyone tea.
Down Into The Dark
With our team assembled, we ventured into the first level of our dungeon, the Boundless Moat. A series of rocky islands surrounded by a corrosive sea, the standard lamp light flicker economy was replaced with the acidic sea salt air damaging your equipment unless you rubbed it down with oil: so in practice, a lard tax. The wisdom of always carrying several units of lard with you at all times (it also counts as rations, by strict reading it’s a straight upgrade!) became a running joke. The initial three party members (Terrin, Olgar, and Tsiska) found Kamillia eating a recently caught rat here, having attempted to strike out on her own to disastrous result.
Then we fought some kelpies. Actually we spent close to two whole sessions fighting kelpies: first against a singular kelpie, then a second session grinding the rest to fulfill a request. The first fight took particularly long because we were getting used to the fairly complex way combat worked, especially the flow of (somewhat unintuitively named) minor actions in between turns. The really memorable part of all this, though, was an extended in-character theological debate about what happened to the souls of the beasts after we slew them: it somehow was decided that all horses go to hell, so Tsiska used her monster hunting motif to bid lore and determine that kelpies, although anatomically reminiscent of equines, were not proper horses, so the final destination of their souls was a divine mystery left in the presumably loving hands of Mythrys.
After the kelpies, we went to clear out the sirens causing problems for the sailors of the region: this went buttery smooth, as we stuck larded scraps of cloth in our ears to block their otherwise entrancing songs, shutting down their main attack modality. The lord of the dungeon level was two-part: the matron of the sirens and her pet giant sea serpent. Although a lot was going on, this fight went much quicker as we had gotten the hang of the combat system by then. Terrin dealt the final blow with a thrown dagger, and we butchered the serpent for parts.
This started the first city phase, and ultimately the only one we did over the course of the campaign. Most notably, we turned the harvested organs into equipment, Monster Hunter style, and a lucky roll on a random table revealed that Tsiska and Kamillia now owned the title to a mansion from a recently deceased relative, along with a butler who quietly resented them for their childhood misconduct. Although it was a fruitful return, we wished we had more of an action budget to spend while we were there.
Having secured passage by slaying the serpent, we sailed down to the next dungeon layer, the Hell Market. Each point on the map consisted of another bizarrely inhuman merchant selling another type of immaterial thing: colors, patterns, visions, and so on. Olgar traded away the sound of his footsteps, giving him perfect stealth, at least as far as ears were concerned. Yet another specialized light economy substitute came into play here: when we arrived we each handed over a precious memory to light an eldritch lantern, and if it ever burned out, we would lose our identity to the market.
Final Round
At this point, we knew that the campaign needed to wrap up soon due to impending schedule changes, so the GM had prepared enough hooks to provide the possibility of three quest completions. First, Kamillia found hers by swindling a demon auctioneer out of the Phoenix Rod, capable of fusing and rebirthing living things. Next, Olgar was approached by the Collectors, a cabal of masked supernatural entities who promised to let him become the new Bag Man. He took the deal, leaving the party as the skin on his face sloughed off to reveal a golden mask beneath.
Not long afterward, Tsiska learned that she had already found Uxurial: every oversized, kleptomaniac rat bearing a nostalgic-yet-unrecognizable face was part of the creature’s hivemind. With lamentation she realized that her mother would have known who that face belonged to. At this point, Kamillia revealed the true purpose of her recent acquisition, and admitted her secret wish. Although hesitant at first, Tsiska saw no other way to resolve her own quest, so she grasped the rod along with her sister, and flames engulfed them both. A new figured emerged, visible at first only in outline:
Celeska, Sun-and-Moon
she whose golden hair shone with light, whose eyes were black save for twinkling constellations, whose hands held both wand and blade, and whose floating feet did not touch the sullied earth
Celeska now knew that the faces belonged to her long-dead lover, and chose to spare the creature that held that last remnant. Instead, she swept Terrin up into a princess carry and burst through a stained glass window to face down their traitor comrade. After his offer to join him in service to the Collectors was refused, he opened a portal to the next dungeon level and leapt through.
At this point, we entered the final battle in an interstitial realm of swirling psychedelic colors. Olgar played the Collectors (the GM delegated the use of the major arcana to his player for this purpose) while Celeska was played jointly by myself and Kamillia’s player – she took the better of both our stats, had all our skills and equipment, and only had the action capacity of a single character but got to draw upon both our hands. Following a battle that ran the session into overtime, Terrin once again dealt the final blow, despite feeling a bit out of place as the only normal person left in the group. Olgar and his masters dissolved into the abyss, and we passed into the next level for whatever new adventure awaited there.
Retrospective Review
To sum up my experience as a whole: His Majesty the Worm is an excellent game, and my entire group agrees. We have no regrets spending the last half of the year with it, and went out on a high note. One player remarked that a revised second edition could potentially be their ideal system – there were only a few rough edges.
As already stated, I adored the city creation phase, no notes. Dungeon creation was also fun although not quite as exciting as the city. Making a character was fundamentally simple but involved a fair amount of flipping through the book to figure out what you started out with. Still much less work than was placed upon the GM, who bore a rather weighty burden in prepping the numerous things necessary to get the ball rolling.
The basic action rules were easy to use and met with general approval: deciding whether to push and draw another card was a nice bit of theater. On the other hand, what fell under each attribute was a subject of debate on multiple occasions: for example, Cups seemed to map mostly to intelligence, but also included animal handling despite other social/emotional skills being under Wands. The path of Cups was also a bit odd, feeling like a grab-bag of abilities, especially due to the inclusion of (once again) animal handling. That said, I actually love that there’s a non-magic scholar core class, and the ability to make alchemical potions out of monster bits is excellent, almost enough to justify the class on its own.
Combat was vastly more fun than your average TTRPG usually manages – a low bar, honestly, but one HMtW clears with room to spare. Drawing and spending cards gave it an element of input-randomized strategy that kept everyone engaged, and flipping over a riposte felt great. However, we did find that even minor fights took a while to resolve due to the need to do the entire set up each time, and initiative struck us as oddly balanced: I’m not sure what the math works out to, but in practice we just all put our lowest card into it every round, since it saved our high cards for taking actions, let us go first, and defense only mattered if you got targeted that round, which wasn’t always the case. It also would have been nice if there was more of a function to Wands cards if you weren’t a caster: you only had a meaningful chance of succeeding at shouting an enemy down if they were already losing, so it couldn’t be used to buff allies or debuff enemies the way we expected, making Wands cards useless in combat (outside of one’s own turn) for everyone but Kamillia. The human ability to call out your house’s motto to rally comrades was really neat and we wished there was a more generalized version of that idea.
The city phase was great fun, but we got the impression we didn’t take breaks when adventuring as often as the designer expected, because we barely got to interface with it. Even if we had stuck our heads topside more often, it’s hard to imagine we would ever have used some of the more fun, purely flavorful options like getting a tattoo and a nickname, given how much of an opportunity cost that would involve. We were so attached to our city that we considered going a second round on it before returning to the dungeon to get more use out of it, but the rules penalize this option due to cost of living and fame decay. Fame surprised us: it never actually came up, but also seemed very hard to maintain, rapidly diminishing even for a party that accomplished many mighty deeds. Money, on the other hand, we were always flush with: we were never taxed because we only hauled up non-coin valuables. Strangely, there were few guidelines for how much such things were worth, even loot standbys like gems.
Some miscellanea: the camp phase worked just fine, no issues there. Bonds were fun, I liked the different kinds of relationships you could have with one another. I enjoyed the idea of talents as rent-to-own, but noticed a tendency to hold on to our experience points and forget to actually spend them, so characters barely advanced. The spread of playable kith and kin was much more interesting than expected once we got down into the details (that orcs become dragons as the last part of their life cycle stood out, and we built two whole characters around the way fay reproduction works) but we never managed to get any of our arête talents, as we mostly forgot about the fairly specific triggers for attaining them – as much as “make someone you’ve kissed cry” is a fantastic behavior to mechanically reward.
All of that aside, my thanks to Josh McCrowell and everyone else involved in making His Majesty the Worm, for giving us such a memorable campaign.
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