Merchant House of Amketch

Dark Sun Mission #DSM2

by L. Richard Baker III, Bruce Harlick (Editor), Simon Hawke

In the city of Balic, an insidious new threat to the Tyr region has arisen in the shape of a humble beetle. Magically altered to deliver a psionic malady via their bite, the beetles have been used by templars, slavers, raiders, and worse to neutralize the psionic abilities of their captives and render them docile. In desperation, the Veiled Alliance has called upon your characters to track down the source of the sinister beetles and put an end to them. There's only one problem�--the most powerful merchant house of the Tyr region is growing even wealthier from the parasitic trade!

Merchant House of Amketch is designed for four to six characters of 4th to 7th levels. Explore the trade routes and intrigues south of the Estuary of the Forked Tongue, in the heart of the Tyr region! Merchant House of Amketch can be played as a stand-alone adventure or as the sequel to Black Flames.

This module includes "The Gambit," an excerpt of Simon Hawke's book "The Outcast."

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons

112 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the disaster that was Black Flames, it's possible that I came into Merchant House of Amketch with lowered expectations and that's what led to the five-star review. Even if I had come into this in total isolation, though, I wouldn't have rated it less than four stars, and it's written in pretty much exactly the way I think an RPG adventure should be written to deal with the differences between a static storytelling mode like a novel and a dynamic, participatory one.

Let me get the broad overview out of the way first. The PCs are bumming around looking for work, and get hired by the titular House of Amketch as caravan guards after being approached by the Veiled Alliance because something odd is happening. Strange creatures called shaqat beetles have been finding their way into certain individuals' hands, and these beetles have a venom that seems capable of inhibiting psionic powers, so the Alliance wants to know why. Once on the caravan, the follow the caravan to the village of Crimson Obelisk, survive a gith raid, and perhaps discover that the caravan is smuggling shaqat beetles along the way.

In Crimson Obelisk, Bezrak the caravan master reveals himself as an agent of House Shom, captures the guards loyal to House Amketch after drugging them with wine, and enslaves them (or maybe not). On the way back, the caravan master infects the characters with shaqat beetle venom, the caravan runs into gith again, and the PCs are given up to the gith in exchange for safe passage. The PCs escape, travel overland chasing the caravan (or maybe not), interrogate the Bezrak, then go back to Balic looking for the beetles.

In Balic, they learn from a Shom defector that House Shom ships the beetles from Fort Melidor in the west, perhaps dodge templars and assassins and leave the city with the law and possibly assassins at their heels, travel to the fort, then go on to the ruins of Kalidnay where the defiler Tethrides is processing an ancient Kalidnian biological weapon and bonding them to the shaqat beetles, which are harmless by themselves. Battle ensues, and hopefully the PCs manage to destroy the parasites without releasing them into the wider world while defeating House Shom's efforts.

All that makes it sound more linear than it is, and that's where the reason I like Merchant House of Amketch so much comes in. It's incredibly friendly to the PCs going off the rails and doing exactly what the GM least expects, which is pretty much what happens all the time anyway. There are notes for what to do if the PCs bail out of the caravan early, or if they accuse Bezrak of being a smuggler before the caravan arrives, or if they don't chase the caravan at all after escaping capture and just go straight to Balic, or how they can find the necessary info without meeting with the Shom defector, or if they all get captured by the templars in Balic. There's even a note about how to deal with the PCs not being captured by Bezrak at all:

Your players are going to kick and scream over the possibility of being captured at the end of Part Two. Several will probably find ways to avoid getting captured. If some of your PCs escape and some don't, it sets up a very dramatic rescue mission for the free player characters, while giving the imprisoned characters a chance to learn a lot of important information. If all of your PCs manage to stay out of Shom's clutches, you'll have a harder time giving the players the clues they need to solve the mystery of the beetles.

If all of your PCs managed to evade capture, the best scenario for you is to convince the players that the logical next step is to follow the captured caravan wagon and look for a chance to free the Amketch personnel. After all, the beetles are still in Bezrakís possession, and Bezrak is still with the caravan. You can pick up the adventure in progress by skipping to the Pursuit encounter.

A Dark Sun adventure that doesn't just demand the PCs be captured no matter what? Sure, it suggests the GM try to get the PCs to follow the caravan, but later on there's suggestions about how to deal with PCs who just want to hightail it back to Balic and how they can figure out what's going on in that case.

I also really like the biological weapon angle. Despite the way that psionics is so widespread on Athas, one of the weaknesses of a lot of material is that there isn't much attention paid to how it would affect daily life when everyone has their one trick they can do. When a potter can fire their pieces without a kiln using their mind, or when a merchant is preternaturally persuasive, or when a warrior can turn their skin into chitin, or when a judge can read minds. Or even when a judge can set people on fire or a field slave can read minds. The cerebral parasites here feel like something that should exist on Athas as a method of population control, since the sorcerer-kings would need some way to deal with psionics. Magic is easy to suppress because it requires weird components and books and literacy and the populace is always ready for a witch-burning, but a psionic criminal always has their power source nearby without a lobotomy.

And being Dark Sun, the cerebral parasites would totally wreck the ecosystem if let out into the wild. That even gets play in the adventure, when Tethrides threatens to release them unless the PCs surrender and they have to make a choice about whether he's bluffing or not, whether the threat of the cerebral parasites uncontrolled is worth letting Shom have exclusive use over them, or whether they can kill Tethrides and sterilize the chamber fast enough to stop them. Now that's a good moral dilemma.

It's true that Merchant House of Amketch doesn't have much in the way of motivation for the PCs to participate beyond the goodness of their hearts, and there's not much reward during the adventure unless the PCs start taking everything that's not nailed down. Despite that, I'm happy giving this five stars, because it's everything I've been looking for in all the other adventures that I've been ripping on since I started my project of reading all the Dark Sun books in order.

[Benjamin]

17/32 in my Dark Sun project. (Next project up might be reading the Unspeakable Oath magazine, cover to cover, which I'm doing for fun now, but backwards, from 25 to 1, because I don't yet have those earlier issues and they are rare and expensive.)

This is another flip book adventure and it may be my favorite adventure so far in the Dark Sun line. They say it's a sequel to Black Flames, but honestly I don't know why: Black Flames was all about the fight between two dragons and how the PCs have to stop some magic, whereas Amketch is all about stopping an evil trading house which has found a new trade good: beetles that magically interfere with psionics. There's no crossover in terms of plot, NPCs, or even location.

So the fact that this doesn't have to do with any pre-existing adventure or novel is a point in its favor. Also in its favor: whereas many other adventures say "The PCs have to do this," the writing here notes that PCs will do what they do. So there's an episode where they are captured, and other adventures would say "this will happen no matter what," this adventure notes "if some of the PCs escape, then they can try to rescue the ones who were captured, and if they all escape, they might miss some clues." (At which point any DM could easily see they would have to improvise some way to get the PCs those clues, by, say putting them into a different episode.)

The story also kind of makes sense this time: this beetle is being bound to some dangerous virus from a ruin, so the supply is limited, but they are dangerous to have out in the open market, since they're being used by evil people. (Though I totally can imagine the PCs saying "no one else should use this dangerous tool--but maybe we should take a few just in case.") Now, that leads to a motivation problem and it's the same problem that all these Dark Sun adventures have: after painting the world as one where heroics are too costly, almost every adventure says "you do this because you're the good guys, right?" I especially felt that lack of motivation around halfway through, where the PCs escape one or other trap, and could walk out of the story--so what's to keep them in it? The adventure points to an easy answer--they were betrayed and should want revenge--but it's another example of these adventures written as if for regular heroes in a world that was sold as being different.

Another point in favor of this adventure is the scale: sure, the PCs will have to destroy this source of danger (or... use it?), but if they fail, the world isn't going to end--it's just going to get a little shittier as bad people gain more power. (The trading house at the root of this evil plan is the House Harkonnen of trading houses, an easy villain.)

This adventure also points to another topic that will become big in Dark Sun: the idea that some people were basically good at genetic engineering and biological warfare, as that's the description used for the parasites that are being harvested from the ruins and bound to the beetles. Now, that's just a little touch of that, and you could easily describe it as being sorcerous meddling if you didn't want that touch of science fiction in your dying earth fantasy.

Now, a moderating point: do I like this more because today (June 28th), there was a special session of the Jan 6th commission, where an assistant made some claims about who knew what, and though the news seems bad for Trump (the House Harkonnen of politics), I worry/wonder what will happen? And by contrast, this fantasy gives me some solace and certainty? Definitely could be. Also I might just be happy to be on the downslope of reading these.

So after Freedom, Road to Urik, Arcane Shadows, Asticlian Gambit, Dragon's Crown, and Black Flame--all of which involved a lot of railroading, often clunky setups, novel tie-ins that prevented meaningful consequences for character action--yeah, this is my favorite adventure. I still wouldn't run it as written--I need something more than action in an adventure, I need something like a theme to help make things coherent.

Also, I flipped through the art book (with the player handouts) first, and so twigged to the idea that there were beetle parasites, and I got somewhat excited about the thought of something like a body-snatchers plotline, so was a little disappointed to have it not be that, but that's just an expectation issue, and might be a good false lead for the PCs. Maybe I'd play it something like covid, with the beetle's psionic-leeching causing a brain fog and potential irritability that makes it seem like people's personalities have changed.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imho one of the more fun adventures put out for Dark Sun, with possibly far-reaching effects for the role of psionics in your campaign. Which leads to many further adventures.