Double OU

Far to the north stands Fort Enterprise, the northernmost outpost of the Murian Empire in Stonespear Province, on the edge of ‘Upper Mastodonia’, a region only revealed decades ago when the giant glaciers that covered the area retreated. Here was the last sighting of the gallant Prince Eyraen, brave warrior son of Syantides, Sorcerer-King of Mur, who departed with his men to descend via nearby entrance into the Underworld and there below, take revenge upon a minor chaos godling known as Shaggath-Ka. Sadly, he has not returned and is presumed lost. Soldiers under the command of Fort Enterprise’s captain went after the prince, but they too failed to return and are presumed lost. Now it is the turn of the adventurers, for it is hoped that a smaller party, one better suited to stealth (or even diplomacy!), might succeed where the troops failed. Not necessarily to find the probably fallen prince, but to return a great magical artefact that he stole from his father’s treasury before he left for the north. Descending down a thousand feet long ladder, the Player Characters will follow in the prince’s wake, discovering fantastic locations such as the ‘Beetletown Welcome Centre and Dwellings’ and ‘Local Franchise Temple of Nul’, regional church of the Cult of the Mindless God and some truly fantastic encounters on the ‘Encounters & Other Random Weirdness’ event table, like being engulfed in a ‘Mutagenic Cloud’ and have their lips gain tentacles, getting to trade with a Slugman on a business trip, or engage in a metaphysical debate with a Woolly Neanderthal on a spirit quest.

This is the set-up for Operation Unfathomable, a high-level dungeon designed to be played by First Level Player Character. Developed from a convention scenario published in Knockspell #5 and published by the Hydra Cooperative, LLC for use with Swords & Wizardry rather than the usual Labyrinth Lord of other Hydra Cooperative, LLC titles, Operation Unfathomable would be a Judges’ Spotlight Winner in the 2018 Ennie awards and as one of the best dungeon adventures of 2018 made the Reviews from R’lyeh Post-Christmas Dozen 2018. Now Operation Unfathomable has returned and once again, you can explore the Jack Kirby-style weird and gonzo Underworld in the company of Blue or Grey Dwarves, Underworld Otters, Citizen Liches, Woolly Neanderthals, and Underworld Rangers, but this time for use with Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. Plus, the world up above the Underworld of Operation Unfathomable—the Upper Mastodonia or the Odious Uplands—has been developed to provide a sandcrawl that the Player Characters can explore after their excursion below. All of which has been combined into one volume, Completely Unfathomable.

On one level, the Judge could take Completely Unfathomable and just run Operation Unfathomable. However, Completely Unfathomable includes everything in the original version of the scenario and the Operation Unfathomable Players’ Guide. This includes the new Classes—the Blue Dwarf, which specialises in surveying and repairing the tunnels and ancient machinery of the Underworld; the Grey Dwarf, whose hatred of Chaos godlings has transformed him into an explosives-laying anarchist; the Underworld Otter, a magically-uplifted species whose sense of frivolity and fun often gets him into trouble, including picking locks and pockets; the Woolly Neanderthal, from Mastodonia, who can summon the strength to kill giants and carry out great feats and can survive in the wilderness; the Citizen Lich, really, really hard to kill, unrecognised by any god, enthralls the undead, and capable of only learning the spells they knew in life; and the Underworld Ranger, trained and equipped to fight the Primal Chaos found in the Underworld. There is guidance too if the scenario is to be run as a Character Funnel and the complete ‘Operation Unfathomable’ comic strip. There are details as well, where Completely Unfathomable differs from standard Dungeon Crawl Classics. Fortunately, there are only two. One is that many of the campaign’s arcane spellcasters have magics of their own, necessitating a simple table of effects for all of their spells rather than the Judge having to referring to the multiple spell tables in the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook. The other, perhaps more of a fundamental change, is its treatment of Law and Chaos, and the arcane and the divine. It differs from Dungeon Crawl Classics in that Chaos is an intrinsic part of the world rather than an outlook or attitude and that there are no gods. Instead, Clerics are arcane spellcasters who use religious practices and beliefs to cast their spells. This is not say that there are no Patrons in the setting of Completely Unfathomable, as there are, but they are not necessarily divine. The Judge is, of course, entirely free to ignore this.

Of course, the other way to use Completely Unfathomable is have the Player Characters travel to Upper Mastodonia via the massive caravanserais drawn by moustachioed yaks to Fort Enterprise, the heart of government in Stonespear Province. Along the way, they will see herds of mammoths and mastodons, fortified polebarges travelling down river, sabre-toothed apes watching from the forest, and the Chaos Aurora—a scintillating ribbon of light—flickering around Mount Impossible with its doughnut-shaped top. Fort Enterprise, built and governed by a former barbarian-adventurer suffering from middle-age spread, is home to a Wizard’s dormitory, a Tree of Jobs, a beer garden, and docks as well as the all-important Monster Alert Sign which indicates whether Koloko, a giant monster Man-Ape is in the vicinity and whether or not he will attack. It is updated regularly. The Player Characters may find work from the Tree of Jobs, such as putting a stop to Sephilax, the newly appeared Chaos godling before it becomes a real threat or culling the nearby lake of its dangerous kraken population. Of course, once at Fort Enterprise, the Player Characters are likely to find themselves pressganged into going after to Prince Eyraen, an effort fully detailed in Operation Unfathomable. When they return, then they can explore the wilderness spread before Fort Enterprise, that is, if the imperial authorities let them…

Fort Enterprise itself is full of details, NPCs, jobs, and rumours, all of which can be used to nudge the Player Characters to travel and explore. Once they do, they will discover a province pockmarked with generic locations—sites of dead adventurers, fossil sites, fungal blooms, and sabre-toothed ape nests—and named areas. The generic locations are supported with tables used to randomly generate what might be found there, such as the state of the bodies, what killed them, and what might be found there at sites of the dead adventurers or the simple ‘We Search the Fungal Bloom Table’ of the fungal bloom sites. The process is fast and simple, but the Judge may want to develop content of her own here as there are a lot of these sites and the content could easily be exhausted. The named areas of interest, range from the Crab Forest, the Frost Giant Forest, and the Fossil Forest to the Dominion of the Mammoth King, the Underworld Incursion, and the aforementioned Mount Impossible. All begin with a table of encounters—all very nicely detailed—before going on to describe in detail the actual individual areas of interest. Individual areas of interest are relatively small, there being no big dungeon or similarly large location in Upper Mastodonia—only under it—and none amounting to more than ten described rooms.

There are some truly memorable and utterly odd encounters to be had in the Odious Uplands. In the wetlands, the Player Characters might encounter Athohta, the cat-fish god who will talk via the face at the end of her tentacle-tongue and perhaps give aid in the search for and defeat of Sephilax; a tower of enlightenment which was partially buried under stoney debris by the movement of the glaciers, being explored by a rival outfit, which happens to be home to Old man Dinosaur, the ghost of a very old tyrannosaurus rex; Crook-Ah-Ah, Man-Ape Immortal Oracle and Tattooist, who will provide help in defeating Sephilax, but only in the form of tattoos drawn on the Player Characters’ backs; a secret joint invasion by the Science Fungoids and the Nul Cult in a link to the encounters to be had underground in Operation Unfathomable; and the Inn Invisible, an out of time guest house from 1973, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which has been turned into a retreat for the nobility and the wizards of the Murian Empire. Throughout, every location and every NPC, encountered is described in succinct, bullet point fashion, engaging presenting descriptions and details in easy to find on the page and easy to digest fashion. For the NPCs, this includes possible motivations and some samples of what they might say when encountered. These in particular, really help the Judge to portray these NPCs.

In addition to Operation Unfathomable and the Operation Unfathomable Players’ Guide, the campaign includes several thorough appendices. These provide the Judge with background information on chaos, the Underworld, and the Beetle Empire, the Temple of Nul and its cult which encourages members to replace their heads with an aerial-like implant that makes them unsurprisingly easy to control, fully detailed hirelings, and ways of replacing the Player Characters should they die. Full stats and details are given for all of the monsters that appear in the Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands halves of the campaign, from the Two-Headed Ape Mummy, Sabre-Toothed Ape, and the Giant Bardolph (if you were to think William Shakespeare’s Bardolph* cloned using Science Fungoid technology, then you would be weird, but right) to Vat Goons, Moustachioed Yaks, and Worm Soldiers. Numerous items of equipment, devices, and treasures are detailed, starting with the Anti-Chaos Pills the Player characters need to take to survive the Underworld, whilst new spells include Send and Receive Magic Missive, Create Newt-Man, and Hell’s Mandibles. Finally, Athohta the Catfish God, the Mammoth King, Nul the Mindless God, Sephilax, Shaggath-Ka the Worm Sultan, and others are given as Patrons, should the Player Characters want to pledge themselves to these strange, and not always benign beings…

* Bardolph the Beer Hound, Underworld Ranger, provides an ongoing commentary in Operation Unfathomable on his adventures in the Underworld. He has less or little to say about the Odious Uplands.

Physically, Completely Unfathomable is very well presented. The writing never lets up on being engaging and intriguing, constantly pulling the reader further into the setting and bringing to life the fantastic artwork which appears through the book. It is cartoonish, but heavy and imposing, adding a weight to the world described in Completely Unfathomable.

Operation Unfathomable is a great adventure, constantly veering between the weird and the baroque, never letting its weirdness tip over into silliness and always presenting the Player Characters with an Underworld that is both lived in and strange, but perfectly normal to those that live and work there. With Completely Unfathomable though, it brings the baroque Science Fantasy of Operation Unfathomable to the surface of the Odious Uplands, which have the rough primal feel of a land that has never felt the touch or influence of mankind, waiting to be explored and its secrets revealed even as explorers from below have begun their operations. The Judge is given a wealth of detail, NPCs, hooks, and more to help get started and then she had everything she needs to run a player driven campaign.

Completely Unfathomable is a very good sandcrawl campaign. It has a primeval brilliance that combines the Science Fantasy of Saturday morning cartoons with the sybaritic loucheness of the Melnibonéan empire in a wild, untamed frontier and supports its with plots, hooks, NPCs, monsters, and more aplenty. For the Dungeon Crawl Classics Judge, Completely Unfathomable is great campaign setting that will provide months and months of memorable Appendix N Swords & Sorcery & Science gaming.

Superbly Subterranean

Book of the Underworld is a sourcebook for 13th Age, the roleplaying game from Pelgrane Press which combines the best elements of both Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition to give high action combat, strong narrative ties, and exciting play. It is a guide to the realms below the Dragon Empire. Not the dungeons, but further below, in the realms known as the Underworld, riddled with twisting tunnels and networks of caverns; home to lost seas, lost races, and lost gods; rife with dark secrets and darker kingdoms; and below that? Here can be found the Gnomish school of wizardry, the Arcane Academy in the Burrowdeep Warrens where the graduates swear to never reveal its location upon pain of a curse that changes from graduation year to graduation year and where all sorts of magic is studied away from the eye of the Archmage—even necromancy! Forge, the Dwarven City of Memorials to the lost ancient civilisation of Underhome which stretched across the Underworld and which the Dwarven King still claims as his—along with much of the Underworld. Drowfort, a magnificently dark fortress sphere suspended by webs amidst a circular cavern, where factions of the Drow dedicated to the Elf Queen, She Who Spins, and both without ever revealing their allegiances co-operate to impose martial law on the Underworld. The Caverns of Lost Time in the Hollow Realm where whole regions of both the Overworld of the Dragon Empire and the Underworld, as well those of previous and lost Ages have been swallowed and preserved. Below that, glimpses of Underkrakens might be caught, seas of chaos writhe and surge, gods repose in their great catacombs, and something stranger still might be found—possibly the great architect of the Living Dungeons which burrow up the Underworld to the Overworld… And he has a beard, wears glasses and Hawaiian shirts, and speaks with a Midwestern accent, that would not be the strangest thing in Book of the Underworld.

The Book of the Underworld is a slim volume of ideas, places, monsters, advice, lists of thirteen things, and more, all designed to take a Game Master’s campaign even deeper underground. It is by no means a definitive guide to the Underworld, but it contains more than enough content and ideas to fuel multiple campaigns. Some locations its fleshes out in detail, such as Forge, Dwarven City of Memorials with its multiple districts and NPCs, or Web City, the stalactite city home to two cults—the Cult of She Who Spins in Darkness and the Cult of He Who Weaves With Joy—and innumerable spiders and drow, a fantasy ’noir setting strung across the ceiling of a great cavern, whereas locations such as the Dark Temples where the darkest of gods hide from the light and the Salt Mines of the Manticore, a sprawling salt mine used in ages past as a prison with one entrance pit in manticores were free to feed on the salty inmates, get just a paragraph or two. Whilst the former are more ready to play and easier for the Game Master to bring to the table, the other locations are more ready for her input and development of her own ideas and content.

The Book of the Underworld does require access to a number of supplements for 13th Age. In addition to the core rulebook, the Game Master will need the 13th Age Bestiary, 13th Age Bestiary 2, and 13 True Ways, whilst 13th Age Glorantha, Book of Ages, Book of Demons, and others will all be useful. It divides the Underworld into three layers. These are in descending order of depth, the Underland, the Hollow Realm, and the Deeps, which correspond roughly to the three tiers of play in 13th Age—Adventurer, Champion, and Epic. As with other supplements for 13th Age, it ties in the thirteen Icons and their relationships with the Underworld, which of course can be used to spur the Player Characters into descending below either on their behalf or to stop their plans. It throws in too, several fallen, vanished, and refused Icons, such as the Explorer from the Book of Ages or the Gold King—a former Dwarf King turned undead from 13th Age Bestiary 2. It introduces the Calling, the alien desire which subverts an existing icon relationship and compels an adventurer to travel further into the Underworld…

The supplement also discusses the roles which the underworld can take in a campaign, from a source of evil or monsters to a realm which is either hidden, prosaic, or weird, if not a mixture of all three, as well as using as the setting for a quick delve or a longer sojourn across an entire tier of play. Rather than suggesting that the Game Master map out each and every tunnel or cavern, it gives guidelines on how to use travel montages and include the players’ input and descriptions to detail and enhance the various locations their characters come across to make it interesting and involving, but shies away from focusing upon the day-to-day tracking of resources such as food, water, and sources of light. It adds a few treasures, such as the Drow Poesy, made of flowers plucked from Hell and the Bezoar of the Caves, former magical items belonging to adventurers chewed up and spat out by carnivorous caves, as well as numerous new monsters, but the latter tend to be specific to their locations.

The two races to receive the most attention in Book of the Underworld are the Dwarves and the Drow. Both are well handled and nuanced, but the interpretations of the Drow are the more interesting, if only because they are not portrayed as the out and out villains they often are in other settings, but rather accorded multiple interpretations which the Game Master can pick and choose from. Also known as the Silver Folk, they are primarily divided between those loyal to the Elf Queen and those loyal to the Cult of She Who Spins in Darkness. The realm of the Silverfolk lies below and extends beyond the Queen’s Wood. Numerous options for obtaining access are given, such as via ancient fairy mounds or sigils spun by spiders, and the Silver Folk might be divided into family clans of extreme specialists, whether that is of duellists, torturers, mushroom farmers, spider herders, artists who paint living portraits, and more; operate as the Elf Queen’s secret police; be exiles from the Queen’s Wood above; or reside in cavern dens as drug-addled fiends and hedonists, or laboratories where alchemy is practised as an art. The other Drow locations detailed in the Book of the Underworld, Drowfort and Web City, are located below in the Hollow Realm and are likewise accorded options of their own from which the Game Master can choose—as with much of the supplement.

Elsewhere, the Book of the Underworld provides lists of ways to get into the Underworld—including via the Abyss for Player Characters who want to make their delvings all the more challenging and for the Game Master who wants to make use of the Book of Demons, an explanation of how druidic earthworks work—above and below ground, the Grand Dismal Swamp—complete with Troglodytes and Fungaloid monsters, and not one, but four kingdoms of the Mechanical Sun! There really is a lot for the Game Master to play with in the pages of the Book of the Underworld. Plus it need not be just for 13th Age. The ideas and settings in this supplement would work equally as well in a lot of other fantasy roleplaying games too.

Physically, the Book of the Underworld is well written, but not always well illustrated as the artwork varies widely. It presents a wealth of ideas and options as well as particular locations, some already developed, others awaiting development upon the part of the Game Master, that she can bring to her campaign. Or indeed, actually turn into a campaign! The Book of the Underworld literally adds depth to 13th Age and content that a Game Master can mine for scenario after scenario and campaign after campaign.

Weirdness and Wonder

The Hydra Cooperative, LLC is best known for its artfully curated and themed trilogy of scenarios set in the Hill Cantons, a world of Slavic myth, Moorcockian extradimensional intrusions, and Vancian swindlers and petty bureaucrats. They are Fever-Dreaming Marlinko: A City Adventure Supplement for Labyrinth Lord, Slumbering Ursine Dunes, and Misty Isles of the Eld. Although set in the same world, each of a quite singular nature and very different to each other in tone and feel. The latest release from The Hydra Cooperative, LLC is yet again, another scenario of a singular nature. Published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Operation Unfathomable is an adventure unlike any other, in an underworld unlike any other, and unlike any other adventure, it is one-part sandbox, one-part high Level scenario for First Level characters.

Developed from a convention scenario published in Knockspell #5 and designed for use with Swords & Wizardry rather than the usual Labyrinth Lord of other Hydra Cooperative, LLC titles, the set-up for Operation Unfathomable is quite simple. The player characters are at Fort Enterprise in Stonespear Province, the northernmost outpost of the Murian Empire where they are conscripted by the local government for a mission of the utmost importance. Recently, the gallant Prince Eyraen, brave warrior son of Syantides, Sorcerer-King of Mur, led a band of men through a nearby entrance to the Underworld and descended into its depths to find and take revenge upon a minor chaos godling known as Shaggath-Ka. He has not returned and is presumed lost. Soldiers under the command of Fort Enterprise’s captain went after the prince, but they too failed to return and are presumed lost. Now it is the turn of the adventurers, for it is hoped that a smaller party, one better suited to stealth (or even diplomacy!), might succeed where the troops failed. Not necessarily to find the probably fallen prince, but to return a great magical artefact that he stole from his father’s treasury before he left for the north.

So that is that, then. On a mission they cannot refuse and equipped with the odd magical item or two, and forewarned by a map of the prince’s progress recovered from the depth, the player characters have to descend—quite literally down a thousand foot ladder—into the Underworld and go chasing after a McGuffin. And to be fair, as far as the plot is concerned, that really is all there is to Operation Unfathomable. Yet there is a whole lot more to the scenario than this all too simple plot and it all comes down to one simple idea: the journey is better than the destination.

This journey is built around two, rich, meaty strands. The most obvious of the two consists of the Underworld’s encounter areas. There are barely more than twenty of these, such as a ‘Beetletown Welcome Centre and Dwellings’, long abandoned outpost of the extinct Beetle Empire with its wheezing beetle statue and strange hamster ghosts; ‘Science Fungoid Experimental’, manned by the joyfully happy Science Fungoids; and ‘Local Franchise Temple of Nul’, regional church of the Cult of the Mindless God, whose priests transform its most willing worshippers into loyal, headless antenna-necked soldiers. Each one of these locations is detailed and interesting, but where Operation Unfathomable really comes alive is with the other strand—the ‘Encounters & Other Random Weirdness’ on the ‘Master Event Table’. From this one table, a total of some forty-four entries are further divided into three sub-categories/tables, ‘Underworld Phenomena’, ‘Competing Parties & Underworld Travellers’, and ‘Wandering Horrors’. So for example, a party of adventurers might have to run lest they be engulfed in ‘Mutagenic Cloud’ and have their lips gain tentacles, they grow a Moustache of Chaos, or their blood becomes flammable; get to trade with a Slugman on a business trip, or engage in a metaphysical debate with a Woolly Neanderthal on a spirit quest; and take pity on Flaming Hounds or be boggled by the rope tricks of the Cave Swallows. The Game Master is expected to throw these encounters at her players and their characters with some regularity in order to drive the story of their Underworld excursion onwards.

Intrinsic to the setting is the fight between Law and Chaos, this being more apparent in the Underworld as it is closer to the seething mass of mindless Chaos to be found at the centre of the planet. One of the new Classes, the Underworld Ranger, is tightly involved with the ongoing conflict between the two. Similarly, the need for player and player character maturity is also intrinsic to the scenario. The set-up for Operation Unfathomable is that the low level party is following in the wake of a high level party, and although the latter is still missing, presumed lost, it has cleared many of the more dangerous threats along the route marked on the players’ map. This does not mean that the player characters can wander along in the wake of the previous party’s progress, heedless of all possible danger. They will face both high-level and low-level threats, the author making no effort to create a dungeon full of balanced encounters. This gives the limited section of the Underworld described in Operation Unfathomable a naturalistic feel and consequently, the adventurers will need to know what fights to pick and what fights to avoid. This is offset though, by the number of encounters in which the monsters and persons encountered will want to engage in and encourage conversation with them. Not all of them to the player characters’ advantage, of course, but whatever their intentions, this is supported by some great NPCs for the Game Master to portray.

Rounding out Operation Unfathomable is a set of seven appendices. In turn, these describe the Chaos at the heart of the world and short histories of both the Underworld and the Beetle Empire; give a description of the Cult of the Mindless God, a quartet of hirelings, and the means to bring new player characters into play; a whole new Class in the form of the Underworld Ranger, descriptions of monsters, treasures, and spells; and a set of ten pre-generated adventurers (or alternatively, a rival adventuring party). The Underworld Ranger is a member of an organisation dedicated to fighting Chaos in the Underworld who equips him with light-intensifying goggles, an anti-Chaos shortsword, and eventually a Zaracanth Industries ZR-1 ‘Dissuader’ sidearm which shoots a ball of electricity and which must be wound up between shots! The monsters range from the Two-Headed Ape Mummy and the Firebomb Beetle to the Worm Soldier and Worm Surgeon, and include the Blind Antler Man, Chaos Flies, and Bat-Winged Dwarves. Items like the Zaracanth Industries ZR-1 ‘Dissuader’ sidearm and the Science Fungoid’s Death-Ray Revolver have a Science Fantasy feel to them, but most of the Underworld’s treasures simply have a weird feel to them, like the Potion of Advantageous Decapitation which grants the imbiber’s head the ability to separate and float of on its own or the Fizzy Drink of Ocular Autonomy which lets the imbiber’s eyeballs to float off for a while… For the most part, the spells have a fairly workmanlike aspect suited to casting in the Underworld.

Now it should be pointed out that some of the content from the appendices is included in a separate book, the Operation Unfathomable Player’s Guide. This gives the Underworld Ranger Class and its associated equipment as well as the various spells from Operation Unfathomable. It also includes some background for Operation Unfathomable along with the party map and some facts and tips, which are of course, thoroughly useful. It opens with an entertaining cartoon strip which depicts just a little of the oddness to the be found in the Underworld, but its primary new content consists of three new Classes not to be found in the pages of Operation Unfathomable. These Classes are the Underworld Otter, a Fighter or Thief with limited weapon use, oily fur which protects them against oozes, jellies, and the like, and an embarrassing sense of frivolity; the Woolly Neandertal, hairy Fighters with great Strength, but limited vocabulary; and the Citizen Lich, a Wizard who attempted to transform himself in a full Lich, but failed and instead became a minor Lich who is still undead and so is hard to kill, but can be Turned by a Cleric. Raise himself to high enough a Level once again and a Citizen Lich can eventually become a full Lich.

It seems odd not to have three of the Classes from the Operation Unfathomable Player’s Guide in Operation Unfathomable. Nevertheless, these four Classes all suit the setting, the Underworld Ranger Class adding a Science Fantasy element, the Underworld Otter and the Woolly Neandertal adding a primal element, and the Citizen Lich adding a baroque, civilised feel.

Outside of the map of the route taken by the Prince and his entourage, Operation Unfathomable is relatively limited sandbox. There are few places that a wandering party of player characters might actually go, but they are included on the Game Master’s map, even if descriptions of them are not. This is the problem if the adventurers go off piste as it leaves the Game Master to develop these locations on her own. There is certainly the feel that more needs to be written about this region of the Underworld, though the next supplement in the series will be Odious Uplands, which details the region above the Underworld.

Physically, Operation Unfathomable is a striking volume. The writing is engaging—particularly the colourful commentary from Bardolph the Beer Hound, Underworld Ranger, which runs throughout the book, but also each the many encounters and the various locations. The map of the Underworld is both fantastic and fussy, perhaps a bit too fiddley to handle easily at the table. What strikes the reader first about Operation Unfathomble though, is its artwork, somewhat cartoonish, but heavy and imposing, capturing the grandeur of this section of the Underworld.

Operation Unfathomable does a superb job of describing a fantastical environment of the world below as various factions attempt to take control of the area. At times it feels baroque, at times simply natural, but never, ever far from the weird, whether that is in the descriptions of the locations or of the many encounters. And although the scenario’s tone threatens to tip into out and out silliness, it never quite does. The scenario’s plot feels fresh and clever, which when combined with an underground environment detailed as never before, serves to give Operation Unfathomable a singular feel. Imagine Quentin Tarantino got together with Ralph Bakshi to make a Saturday morning cartoon in which the dirty half dozen were sent down a dungeon on a McGuffin hunt and the network refused to broadcast it because it was too weird, and that captures the feel of Operation Unfathomable.