In June 2024 we presented the new Operation Unfathomable Bundle featuring Operation Unfathomable, the gonzo FRPG campaign setting by Jason Sholtis for Old School Revival retro-clones. (This offer also included the version for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games.)
The Sorcerer-King’s son stole a powerful relic, the Nul Rod, and fled into the Unfathomable Underworld, a subterranean wilderness of unsurpassed strangeness and peril. Your fledgling 1st-level adventurers pursue him into a vast and incomparably bizarre cavern-world of civilized fungoids, bat-winged dwarves, two-headed giant ape mummies guarding franchise temples, decapitante soldiers, psychephages, death-ray revolvers, the ruins of the now-extinct Genocide Beetle civilization, the Fizzy Drink of Ocular Autonomy (“causes eyeballs to leave their moorings and levitate freely”), and Shaggath-Ka the Worm Sultan. In most circumstances, fragile beginning characters would be doomed. But explorers with good sense (and a willingness to hide) can hope to gain great treasure and speedy advancement.
“I wrote Operation Unfathomable originally as a one-off adventure and for utility as a convention scenario,” designer Jason Sholtis wrote on the Unfathomable Kickstarter campaign page. “As such, the gloves were off both in terms of danger level for player characters and the campaign-changing potency of the enchanted treasures they might run off with.
“Going against my own advice, I used it to start a campaign. Four years and hundreds of game-hours later, the campaign continues (and is still fun). As every DM knows, there is no substitute for play when it comes to breathing life into a setting. I believe the Underworld of Operation Unfathomable has that lived-in feel precisely because it has been explored extensively at the table and its secrets probed by a number of minds sharper than my own. (I have awesome players.)”
James Maliszewski reviewed Operation Unfathomable on his Grognardia blog: “Operation Unfathomable is perhaps the first OSR ‘dungeon’ I’ve seen (with the possible exception of Michael Curtis’s Stonehell) that truly mines the ‘mythic underworld’ concept for all it’s worth. Imagine Richard Sharpe Shaver’s Lemurian ravings as drawn by Jack Kirby in the throes of a fever dream, and you’re on your way to getting a small sense of what Sholtis presents here. […] Operation Unfathomable is a triumph, an extremely imaginative adventure and setting, attractively presented and chock full of reckless old-school dungeon-delving fun.”
Bryce Lynch at TenFootPole.org: “Gonzo, fanciful, hyper-realistic, it is one of the most imaginative, and fun, things you will ever run. […] This is firmly in the Weird side of the D&D spectrum, with little Magical Ren Faire or pseudo-medieval to be found. There’s little to no game balance present; it’s the brave little tailors vs. The Strange. At heart a straightforward cave crawl looking for the pretext item, it shouts Come At Me Bro at every turn, daring the party, over and over again, to engage. Enticing them. Luring them. Magnificent.”
This Operation Unfathomable Bundle presented the entire line for an unbeatable bargain price, including the complete Operation Unfathomable core campaign book, plus its Player’s Guide and the free maps and character sheet; the Odious Uplands expansion, plus its free Map Pack; the complete conversion for Dungeon Crawl Classics, Completely Unfathomable; and both volumes of Jason Sholtis’s brilliant D12 tables, The Dungeon Dozen Volume 1 [previously in our November 2014 Worldbuilder’s Toolkit 2] and Volume 2.
