Today we’re looking at House of the Wasp by Joseph R. Lewis. In this adventure for level 5 parties, our intrepid crawlers will infiltrate a 29 room dungeon full of animal-themed martial arts clans where a masterwork weapon called the Parasite Spear waits for anyone brave and skilled enough to reach the end and seize it.
The setup is a little thin – show up at the dungeon and loot it. We only get a few sentences about each of the 3 clans but those looking for a rich backstory will be left wanting. The rather simple hooks will be enough for many tables but some GMs may want to build out the lore a bit for players that need motivation beyond “get loot and party”. Although one rumor might result in the party putting the torch to each room they come across so that’s certainly a unique approach to dungeon crawling (or maybe not depending on your players).
The map takes an interesting approach. It’s laid out almost like a hex crawl with each room being an individual hex, although pathways between them are limited. On the one hand it would make drawing a map as you go, either by the GM or the players, very easy. On the other hand we are robbed of a sense of scale. Each room is the same size, so there’s no telling how many ninjas you can nuke with a single fireball, and the distance between them is unknown. Ruling on such things will be somewhat at the whims of the GM.
Once we get to the actual room keys, things start getting rad. HOTTness (hazards, obstacles, tricks and traps) abounds. In one room there is a pond full of carp wearing golden collars that will surely get the party up to some fishing hijinks. In another they must snatch the magical seed from a tree without touching the perfectly maintained sand below. A gleaming black mask stands on a plinth amidst poisonous black barbs. They are not only interesting but also enticing. There’s a reason why the PCs will want to interact with them. They are the kinds of open-ended challenges that will get your players thinking and scheming and debating. It’s been said before, but the game is a conversation, and a well-designed dungeon sparks interesting conversations. The rooms in House of the Wasp feel carefully tuned for this.
Even the rooms that don’t have these sorts of challenges always have something interesting to find. There are rewards for curiosity and punishments for carelessness. Simple things, but too often I see punishment for curiosity and indifference to carelessness.
House of the Wasp does something I rarely see – there are opportunities for diegetic advancement everywhere. Master smiths teaching secret techniques, ancient runes detailing powerful martial skills, and an instructor of insect languages provide chances for PCs to gain in power and ability outside the normal leveling process and through engaging with the fiction of the game. This idea has gained a lot of traction in TTRPG system and adventure design in the last few years, but you still don’t see it explicitly written into many dungeons. More of this, please.
These opportunities are not all without risk, and failure to learn in some cases results in permanent stat damage. This is something else I love – consequences that live beyond the dungeon. This is the flip side of the diegetic advancement coin. Maybe you lose a finger. Maybe a wasp stings your tongue and you have permanent lisp. These things build your character more richly than prewritten backstories and also provide hooks for further adventures when you try to find a cure for the partial deafness you suffered in an unfortunate zither accident.
And although the real treasure may be the permanent disfigurement we found along the way, the literal treasure is pretty good, too. The adventure has very strong themes overall, and the treasure enhances it. It’s a really good example of why “roll on the core book treasure tables” doesn’t pass muster. Finding things like smoke pellets and frog-summoning whistles are immersive when they fit the vibe, are novel, and provide opportunities for creative problem solving.
While each room was certainly crafted with care, each room also feels a bit like an island, and what happens in one doesn’t impact any other, with some exceptions. And while each individual room feels dynamic, the dungeon as a whole does not. It doesn’t respond to the party’s actions and there are no escalations or timers. So it’s not quite an infiltration scenario, although the setup lends itself to that idea. And although the collection of somewhat disparate rooms might lend itself to funhouse dungeons, it’s not one of those either. Much better verisimilitude and a more unified theme than any of those. House of the Wasp is somewhere in between.
But despite that, the dungeon has some nice interconnectedness and there are occasions where finding or learning something in one room will help the party face the challenges of another – primarily related to the various teachers found dwelling in the mansion. Each requires a gift that can be found elsewhere in the dungeon. This gives a little propellant to the exploration and will reward players that are paying attention and taking notes.
A couple other nits to pick: Lack of details in a few crucial places: there is a stockpile of rare weapons that are featherlight, give +1 hit/damage, and are each worth 250 gp. That’s a tremendous find, even at level 5. But we aren’t told how many weapons. In a game where gear slots are limited and gold=xp this is crucially important. Remember kids: it’s on the designer to include an appropriate amount of treasure in the adventure, not on the GM.
Also, several combat encounters are a bit undertuned. Which is to say, the bad guys need to be tougher. And there should be more of them. Although combat is not meant to be the primary mode of gameplay here, when it does happen it will mostly be a cakewalk for a level 5 party.
The layout of the entire thing isn’t breaking new ground but it’s absolutely dialed-in. Everything is communicated clearly, obvious interactions are detailed and given mechanics where necessary. This would qualify as a minimum prep adventure. And the map I sort of complained about earlier is actually helpful in this regard. If you’ve got 30 minutes before your buddies start showing up and you don’t have anything ready, this adventure will come to your rescue.
In some ways House of the Wasp is not a traditional dungeon crawl – navigation/mapping is a bit different from the norm and it isn’t quite what I expected from an incursion into a fortress full of samurai and ninjas. But it crams so many interesting gameplay opportunities – the training and the open-ended challenges – into such an approachable package that it’s absolutely worth your attention.
On a scale of 2-12, House of the Wasp gets 9 stingbats.
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