Munkao , 
It's been about 7 weeks since the launch of "Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya"!
I am incredibly grateful and thankful for all the feedback and reviews (will compile them in my Instagram highlights in the coming week).
There is one review I want to share:
@lincodega of Rascal News took a deep dive into the history, culture, Buddhism underlying the adventure. Along with many nice words about the game design!❤️I almost teared up reading it (or maybe I did).
With straightforward maps and a temple-maze that protects Satur, Munkao’s work is both relatable to a wide audience of roleplayers and deeply entrenched in Southeast Asian cultures. The goal isn’t quite as straightforward as the text says, but on every page there are hints at ways to undermine the assignment, to come at the adventure laterally. The slanting bits of information give way to a creative puzzle-solving style of roleplay, allowing both players and game masters to find novel ways to “solve” the problems of a very large hornet’s nest attached to the back of a meditative temple. One of the things I admire about concise, system-agnostic adventures like this is that all the details add up to a much larger world that is greater than the sum of its parts. Seeing the world be built up as you dive deeper into the text, a hornet’s nest of delicate paper layers that create a massive container, is richly satisfying, and Munkao delivers a meal fit for a (Hornet) Queen. It’s much harder to do than one would think, and by carefully leaving clues within the text and adding contradictions and frustrations within the opposing ideologies of the characters, Het Thamsya presents a wonderfully built world that feels like a segment of woven rattan that has been taken out of a much larger basket of stories.
Guardian Automata have been a part of Indian and Southeast Asian legends for millenia, with some records of legendary robots dating back to 400 B.C., assumed to be a cultural artifact diffused from Greek mythos during times of cultural interactions. Integrating these legendary pathways through a Buddhist map, while also using computer programming to interpret ancient understandings, Munkao has developed a fascinating setting that elegantly blends oppositional themes. Making too much noise, or even encountering a creature that would destroy the peace of the temple, wakes the meditative Satur, and creates a situation that results in some failure… but not total failure. While the adventurers are only warned of waking Satur, there are other, more lasting threats that come from cascading failures. By asking players to be quiet and clever as they slide in and out of the Het Thamsya temple, Munkao has created a game that demands roleplay, even as combative encounters are presented. The goal is to sneak, disable, and destroy, using the mantras against the automata and, by extension, their maker.
