I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

Today is dominated by going to the doctors and getting procedures, so in my time sitting in waiting rooms and twiddling my thumbs while I am poked and prodded and bled, I’m reading His Majesty the Worm, a new release from Exalted Funeral. It seems appropriate, a game about poking, prodding, and bleeding. I received a complementary (digital) copy of this for review purposes, and it seems appropriate that this released during Megadungeon July.

His Majesty the Worm is a 400 page all-in-one megadungeon crawling roleplaying game by Josh McCrowell, using tarot cards as a randomising factor. It espouses itself a procedure focused game, intended to “make the boring parts interesting”. It’s worth looking at if you’re looking for a game with old school sensibilities but that reimagines it with fresh eyes. This book is a monster and it covers character and guild creation, phases of play, sorcery and alchemy on the player side, and dungeon, city and monster creation, and advice for running the game on the referee side, and includes a number of examples of all of these.

Starting with the introduction: Although it is hardly remarkable, it finishes with the principle, “This should be delightful”. I’ve got to say that as the one the final words I saw as I began to wade into a tome such as this, it fills me with optimism. I’ll keep coming back to this phrase throughout the review, because I think the repeated intentional circling back to delight is a defining characteristic that sets it apart from other modern takes on the genre. The visual representation of the procedures that comprise the game as a whole, which begins the rules explanation off, is clearly inspired by the infamous diagram in Blades in the Dark, but are more succinct, useful and compelling. Super neat. It’s obvious a lot of thought went into these four unusual phases — crawl, camp, challenge and city — straight off the bat, and it’s followed up with a summary of “book-keeping” which is incredibly valuable as general refereeing advice. In terms of defining the conversation between referee and players, it breaks it down to four stock phrases to keep returning to, which is a really elegant approach to “referee moves” in my opinion. This should be stolen, frankly, by everyone who comes after. The resolution system is simple and juicy: Draw a minor arcana, add your attribute, and if it’s higher than 14 you succeed. If you draw trump (that is, a card whose suit matches the activity you’re doing — swords for violence for example), it’s a critical hit. If you don’t succeed, you can draw a second card, “pushing fate”, but if you fail after pushing fate it’s a critical failure. The element of pushing your luck combined with the simplicity of the system makes me smile.

There’s a ton of interesting complexity in both the Adventurer and Guild sections. So much that I won’t go over it. I don’t think I can get a solid sense of how it’ll go in play, but it’s obvious it provides a huge amount of potential leverage for drama, especially the motifs and bonds, and almost everything ties into a mechanic neatly and in a way that makes sense. This is a game interested in mechanical interactions as much as it is in roleplaying, and it shows. The guild rules fold in a lot of complexity that’s normally not well organised, such as marching order, in a very neat way. These two chapters are an intricate network of concepts and ideas, that I think I’d have trouble communicating to a table of players unless they were the kind of players to read the book beforehand — and in my experience, the kind of players who read the book are usually looking for a different kind of complexity, one that’s more concrete and consists a lot of lists and interactions.

That said, HMTW does bring some of that complexity in chapters 4 and 5, which details Kith, Kin and Paths which are essentially equivalent to feats or specialisations, as well as later with Sorcery and Alchemy. As I said, character creation here feels as complex than a game like Pathfinder 2e, if not a little more because it’s front-loaded rather than you developing over time an increasing number of individual features or abilities. When you’re creating a character, you’re creating a bomb with many sensitive triggers that create drama in as many different situations as you can, be they combat or exploration or interpersonal situations. This is a huge asset to the game in my opinion, because having a character sheet oriented to creating drama and scaffolding many forms of interaction that aren’t combat (“I get focus if I provide advise to my mentee?”) is really helpful to a huge number of players out there who feel lost when they’re not playing from the menu they see their character sheet as. Also, these chapters really lean into the ambiguity of the setting: There’s a heap of weird and flavourful setting material here, untethered from anything else. The disadvantage of this is that it becomes the referee’s responsibility to integrate these things. I imagine a panicked note taking session after session 0 with photographs of all the character sheets and me trying to intuit some connections between all the players ideas. But the advantage is that there is so much juice to pick and choose from when it comes to characterising your creation.

I’ll interrupt a moment to talk about sorcery and alchemy, which do not come next, but feel relevant at this point. I like their simplicity and depth. Spells have simple, universal limitations that must be overcome, making them niche at best; most underworld monsters are valuable of being harvested for reagents which can be converted into bombs, oils or potions during camp so long as you set aside room in your inventory for it. They don’t have the depth of flavour that, say, Swyvers magic has, but they’re nevertheless a delight for dungeon-crawling antics. They add to the peculiar complexities at play here in an intriguing way.

The adventurer creation process here is really meant to be collaborative, creating a team together, and developing them as individuals and as a guild as a part of a session 0, and I think your mileage on how successfully this freewheeling together-but-apart process goes will vary significantly depending on the players at your table. It’s a challenge, because everything here is so strong! But it’s really, really player dependent. I am tempted to say that for a first go, most of the people I play with regularly would be best off with some pre-made characters and a pre-made guild, and perhaps running a one-shot, because while the rules aren’t more complex than any other dungeon crawler, they’re not as intuitive to someone who plays a bunch of dungeon crawls, and I could see that being a barrier initially. I’ll come back to this impression again later.

The four phases of the game are split over a number of chapters. In the Crawl phase, the detail here mainly explains to the players how the game works. It’s kind of an extended example of play, punctuated by a lot of small rules covering common edge cases. There are small delights, though: The players can expect a map of the dungeon, albeit without full information (this is followed up thoughtfully in the latter chapters on designing dungeons). The meatgrinder table is an extremely well expanded hazard die. A random doom occurs when you’re completely out of light sources, ending your session in the underworld, and making torch management important and meaningful beyond “everything is harder”. The reaction table is an absurd and detailed three-tiered, seven-pointed star that you can walk around on in two dimensions. It feels initially unwieldy, but is very clever. These dispositions have mechanical effects if they’re strong enough — closer to the points of the star. All of this together brings us a densely populated set of rules, covering everything that a more traditional game like Fifth Edition does, but in a very different way. It sings of the accumulation of house rules, polished for publication.

The Challenge phase — for combat and primarily — is a fairly rigid, zone based system, that you may have seen before in games like 13th Age. It works, and I like this iteration of the system. Small delights here: The fool is powerful but costly, a nice twist on its usual use. Having a hand brings tactical complexity as well as limitation and randomness to your choices. You can banter with Wands, affecting disposition and morale. The referee can play major dooms for big, flashy effects. If you die you will rise from the dead as an NPC. My main criticism of this section is that honestly I find the diagrams of the cards on the table in the example of play a little confusing; it’s probably just the fact that the cards all look similar in the example, though.

The Camp phase is elegantly summarised with a lovely spread. These lovely summaries that pepper the book are all in the back as play aids, but the game is begging for a referees screen, to be honest. The Camp phase is full of other delights, but the key one is that your recovery isn’t interrupted by any random encounters.

I adore the City phase; I love how upkeep — the equivalent of the social standing concept present in many elfgames — becomes a deeply important consideration to survival here: You want to live in luxury if you can afford it, and that gives us our main consideration for how much treasure: A luxurious upkeep is what were aiming for. I love the collaborative myth making concerning your guild, where you tell tales and record them about your deeds. City events and actions are interesting and compelling. Referee prep is built into the city phase, as restocking and refreshing used up events in the meat grinder tables. It’s all very neat in theory, particularly if the players are independent with their choices, as they’ll be eventually.

The referee’s section really revolves for me around the creation rules for the city and the underworld. The referee’s principles that come that are solid, and draw from a pretty excellent reading list. If you’re not already an experienced runner of dungeons in the style of modern blogosphere informed elf games, this will be a solid class for you (or for your interested friend). While the bestiary frontloads making your own monsters, it nevertheless includes a bestiary as well as a bunch of templates that serve as a middle ground. I really appreciate this support — I love making a unique monster, but I also love easy prep.

City creation is interesting. As a general rule, I prefer my cities, dungeons, et cetera to be created for me. I don’t see a lot of utility in a unique city just for my table; I can make that alone. I want the specifics that an author can provide. The process of city creation here is a lot of fun though. So much fun. And it has a lot of specifics and universals to it. The utility is that the city can expand to suit your needs with this system; and it’s expansible theoretically to a full deck of cards worth of districts. What I don’t like about it, though, is that the city — at least in the form it is presented — is largely defined by mechanics rather than people. You go to the Gambol to hide out, but you don’t know Black Caval, who’ll put you up in his sewer-court for a gift and a promise. Given the amount of time spent elucidating these potential districts, I’d have loved that additional characterisation to be an additional touch. But I get the impression this is intentional: The hope is that the players hang out on the city, exercising their city actions in transit isolation from the referee, while the referee takes notes and restocks the underground and any city events that have been expended. Good design, perhaps. But not what I want out of a city; maybe, though, it suits this game perfectly.

The underworld creation section is good procedure for any dungeon creator, even if you aren’t choosing to play this game. Interestingly, for a megadungeon, the very accessible number of 5 levels is suggested. The bulk of this, though, like the bulk of the city creation section is the Dungeon Seeds, which I believe have been released as a standalone product, although I’m not sure exactly how closely what I’m reviewing here reflects on that. You’re provided 21 potential dungeon levels, each of which are very juicy, as well as following that with an equal number of ways to make rooms interesting, example interesting traps, and an entire tutorial dungeon called the Tomb of Golden Ghosts to walk you through the process.

His Majesty the Worm has an anti-canon setting; a rough outline and a bunch of tools for the referee and her players to build upon. It is, in many ways, an excellent example of this approach. There is a lot of detail here, and to some degree the players choices in what they’re interested in or what they recall from their Kith, or their Paths or whatever are going to guide the referee in the building of the world outside of their knowledge, resulting in a feedback loop that should be positive with a sufficiently engaged table. McCrowell’s writing is lovely, bouncing from a very casual voice in rules explanation that is charming and welcoming, to a gothic aesthetic dripping with moss and grit for the details of the city and underworld. The title, His Majesty the Worm, adequately communicates in my opinion the kind of dusk and mud fantasy this book prefers, and it doesn’t stray far from that aesthetic except in the service of making the moment to moment play filled with interesting choices.

The layout here is pretty gorgeous. I have the digital version (the postage on the print version, which was available I believe from today, being sadly prohibitive to me), and it’s stylish, easy to read and locate information in, and the art despite coming from a huge variety of sources is well curated and never disappointing. My only criticism is that I find the script text used in some areas difficult to read; this is all flavour text, anyway, and the use of the book doesn’t suffer from the choice. In the other hand the wavering, seemingly custom font used for the titling is gorgeous and mood-setting. I’ve seen pictures of the print version, and given this is the kind of book you’re likely to be flicking through, it looks to be a beautiful and practical investment if you’re planning on running it.

Would you run it, is the question? My overall impression of His Majesty The Worm is one of complexity. This is intended to be Your Game if you choose to run it, but, unlike most games that aspire to be Your One Game, this actually feels like it has the juice to sustain long term play without buying lots of other supplements. For that reason alone — return on investment — His Majesty the Worm deserves to supplant Pathfinder or Fifth Edition as your weekly beer and pretzels game. It has the mechanical complexity to sustain a huge amount of play in the same way those games do; but it also requires the same kind of prolonged and gradual learning. The anticanon setting supports minimal prep, the underworld supports night infinite dungeons, and so could see this developing into a dramatic and exciting campaign that could run for years, if you had buy in from your table. It’s an impressively well put together game, and it shows that McCrowell has been playing this and playtesting this for years (I can’t remember how many years, but I’d hazard I’ve heard him talking about it on twitter for at least 7). It’s not quite the same timeline as Break! But it’s an equally impressive work of design. There are so many light touches — the rumour mill, for example — that attempt to bring home the goal of being a delight to play.

Bringing this back to Megadungeon July, and comparing to the two megadungeons I’ve already reviewed, I think His Majesty the Worm actually has its own strong thesis regarding what a megadungeon is: It thinks a megadungeon has to be developed at the table, the way Castle Greyhawk was, your game and dungeon and table all integrated and interdependent. You can’t be provided a megadungeon, although you can be provided better tools to create your own, says His Majesty the Worm. In a world full of products for consumption, this is a fairly remarkable thesis. And to that end, I realise that indeed this is a megadungeon after the style of Castle Greyhawk indeed: Political strife above, danger and treasure below. No predetermined narrative, but also no utter randomness. Your megadungeon is to make sense, but it is mythical, a place for fun, an arena full of treasure that you risk delving into.

The main barrier for me actually playing His Majesty the Worm is that this is just simply not a one-shot game, and so giving it a go isn’t easily on the table. How will I know if this is for us? There are so many rules, there is a lot of prep and pre reading to do. So many of its innovations are not intuitive, and you need a table willing to bring completely fresh eyes and open minds to an old style of play. That’s a big investment, or it appears to be, right off the bat. But, it comes with a tutorial dungeon, and you could pregenerate characters easily despite it not being ideal play, so with a little effort you could run a trial in the mini-dungeon to test the waters. I just wish there was a little more support for weaning us into this challenging and complex game right out of the metaphorical box. I don’t need a His Majesty the Worm starter set, but it is complex enough to benefit from a starter of some kind.

But I want to try it. I said somewhere earlier, His Majesty the Worm just sings “I’m accumulation of house rules over years, polished for publication”, and this is a time-honoured tradition in this hobby. This ain’t an elegant but simple dungeon-crawler like the currently populists Knave and Cairn. This is a maximalist game, more akin in its approach to Errant or my own Advanced Fantasy Dungeons. But, for what it’s worth, it has a lot of strengths for particularly its specific direction into megadungeon play, over and above what those two games have to offer (although in their defence, they win over in plenty of other ways, such as overland travel and domain play). There’s a strong sales pitch, in my opinion, for complex maximalist games. I have more players looking for a regular table bounce off light games because they don’t offer sufficient scaffolding, despite their being my personal preference.

I’ve been reading Pathfinder Remastered lately — I’m really enjoying it — and to be honest the rules and prep overhead here feels roughly similar. There are a lot of particulars that will require flicking through the book looking for solutions, and enough generalities that we can probably wing it in the short term. We have an index, which will help with that if the editors have excelled at their work. I think certainly, this at least equals the complexity seen in most Forged in the Dark games, if you’re looking for a benchmark, and for me people are more likely to go for the pitch “dungeon crawling based in a fantasy metropolis” over “emo thieves with ghosts”, “post apocalyptic melancholy” or “doomed armies against undead legions”, despite their all being absolutely slapping pitches. For a campaign, particularly one that may be infinite (as much as it’s unlikely, people often think they will be playing forever), a familiar comfort is often an easier sell. So His Majesty the Worm: With mechanical depth, familiar themes, friendly stylings, and beautiful presentation, is a strong sell. As you may suspect, I love a good module, and so His Majesty the Worm may not be for me — at least not until my kids are old enough that I can run a regular table at home again. But if you’re just in it to get your friends around the table, His Majesty the Worm is a hell of a game in a small but generous package, that will bring a lot of drama.

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