"Wyatt! Wyatt!" you holler in alarm "you forgot A Touch of Glamour! How could you! And you love fairies so much! T comes before W in the alphabet, Wyatt!" This is definitely something people would have been clamoring about if I hadn't brought it up, mhmm, I'm sure loads of other people have an alphabetically sorted list of bundle ttrpgs. Anyway, jokes aside, Touch of Glamour will be next week because I don't have time this week to read a whole pbta game, even a small one. But I do have time for an adventure about BEES.
As it says on the itch page, A Warm and Pleasant Hum is an adventure for Trophy Dark, a horror rpg I have a small amount of familiarity with (my friend showed me the character creation once) but thankfully the adventure has some of the basic rules right in it, so I guess you can play it with just this pdf and nothing else? That's cool.
The character creation has some neat stuff - lists of names, character backgrounds and drives that inform the world, some spooky spells. Trophy Dark is a dice pool game, forged in the dark style, and it even has devil's bargains! I won't go too much into the rules here but the dark die system where you risk your body/mind to the dark arts for an extra dice is a neat simplification of pushing yourself. And I like that the game specifies you can't kill monsters -- you can only run, hide, or fend them off.
You're also all probably going to die. Fun!
The adventure uses a five act structure that may be ingrained in Trophy Dark, I'm not sure, but I like it, it reminds me of Annihilation, or Heart: The City Beneath -- going deeper and deeper in to get to your terrible goal that's probably going to mess you up. In this particular case, the goal is to claim the queen of the hive and the production of her magical royal jelly. Yeah, that's going to go well.
I won't summarize the whole adventure, you'll have to buy it (or just read it if you too have the bundle lol) for that, but speaking of Annihilation, this is an excellent bit of nature-horror. The bees can't be avoided or hid from, they're everywhere, and there's a section that goes "How are the players willing to debase themselves when the antennae of a striped guard flick their way? What do they visualize to remain still and calm as a curious bee's monstrous mandibles carefully prise away the pollen coating their limbs?" Yeah, that's the stuff. I love (by which I mean I get the shudders) that the bees aren't inherently hostile, because bees aren't! You just need to not piss them off. But the trepidation that one wrong move could cause them to swarm you seems like it would be really effective horror. Speaking of which, the 'monster' in act 4 is horrible in the best way, big body horror and trypophobia warnings there. It all culminates in a climax designed to bring the tension to an absolute boiling point, urging the exhausted and paranoid party to betray one another.
The adventure, in general, is very well-written, I'm not the kind of person to run stuff where I just read out blocks of text, but I'd make an exception here. It's the absolute opposite of open-ended, it seems like playing it would be more like following a script than a lot of ttrpgs are, but it's a good script and Trophy Dark seems designed for playing this sort of very short, guided spooky story. Great read.