• Critique Navidad: Depths of Dark Bargain

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    Depths of Dark Bargain is a 10 page module for Cairn and the first for Block, Dodge, Parry by Lars Huijbregts. In it, you explore a labyrinthine, underground cave complex. It’s a small, six-room dungeon, using some unique traversal mechanisms.

    Depths of Dark Bargain doesn’t beat around the bush: 4 rumours and 4 hooks, and then the entrance to the dungeon. I’m not particularly satisfied with the rumours and hooks. The hooks in particular hold no juicy worms. Basically all of these hooks need a second part — not just a clue, but also why the hook draws the player characters into the dungeon. They are halfway there, though — you could play a game with the players by prompting them to finish them, to be honest. “Who cares about this, and why did you choose to venture there for them?”, and this would go from poorly designed to cheekily engaging. The rumours, though, are less redeemable. The two that are true are the kinds of rumours that would cause you to choose not to enter the dungeon at all, and of the two that are false, only one has the potential to impact the player characters actions.

    Between rooms, you roll a variation of the hazard die, and if you find an encounter, you then roll a random area of cavern to have that encounter in. It’s likely you’ll encounter 8 rolls on a fairly thorough exploration of the dungeon, which means there’s a high chance you’ll only encounter 1, possibly 2 of these rooms while travelling in one direction. You can also make choices in some of the rooms that will add to this number, but not by much. The idea of using a hazard die variation in a kind of flux space hack to mimic and small underground cavern is clever, but the math is all wrong here I think. For this to work, we need a 100% chance of at least one random cavern, with the probability decreasing the more caverns you find, and the occurrence there be more concrete: Perhaps it’s always slowly flooding, an encounter occurs, or you find a specific boon or clue? In a small space, the current solution doesn’t have enough punch, although it may work in a larger space. In the context of all of this, there are too many random encounters: The low probability encounters will almost never occur, and really, you want to encounter the NPCs, so again, for punchiness, you need to lean into those more interesting encounters. We’ll come back to the NPCs.

    The rooms themselves are solid, important for such a small space. You could skip everything I’ve just mentioned, and you’d do just fine. I love how skill, time and equipment is worked directly into the text of the challenges (as it should be, given Huijbregts coined it). The key is direct, with highlighted terms being described in detail in the bulleted section. There are some lovely touches, like the very creepy “If spoken into at a conversational volume, there is a 2-in-6 chance that the echo is not a repetition, but a reply.” and “slowly pulsating as if ‘breathing’ in slow motion, exhaling spores”; solid, evocative writing all up. I also really appreciate the sketches that diagram out the shapes and layout of room 5, as it’s important. This is something that was common in the early days of the hobby, but has fallen by the wayside as an aversion to the do-it-yerselfness of the hobby has developed in concert with production values increasing.

    There is a bunch of hyperdiegetic information hidden, particularly in the NPC goals. These NPCs are pretty unlikely to be seen, though — of the 1 or 2 total expected encounters, we’re going to meet any given one of them about 6% of the time. But, they’re amongst the most interesting interactions in the modules! As I said, I’d forefront them a little, but while I like the individual pieces hyperdiegetic information here: “Find proof that the caves are growing and changing shape.”, or “Heal her adventuring partner,who has fallen ill.” for example, I’d love for there to be a moment at the beginning where the players or referee are cued to make decisions regarding these; or that there’s an actual answer to these within the module or surrounds.

    Layout is basic, but functional. It’s easy to navigate and easy to find the information you want. The map is nodal — I think that similar information could’ve been communicated with a more traditional map, though, without as much labeling. The art is public domain and is honestly great.

    Depths of Dark Bargain is a solid night’s play, a beer and pretzels type module that is a lot of fun room-by-room, and is full of interesting characters. It’s compromised by skimping in interconnectivity, low probability of events that should be regular occurring, and in terms of minimising the chance that some cool stuff will be seen, but also in terms of hooks and rumours that don’t contribute to improving the rooms. But, it’s a worthy addition to your campaign, for a small but impactful dungeon detour.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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  • Bathtub Review: The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak is a 22 page module for Knave written by Robin Fjärem. It’s a snowy dungeon crawl inspired by Norse folklore.

    The dungeon itself is a 3 part, 32 area dungeon, pretty huge for such a short zine. The first level of 11 rooms features only 2 encounters (a trap and a monster), although there is some random chance of something interesting occurring there. The second level of 6 areas (not rooms, a lake with islands) at least features an NPC, although nothing is mentioned of what he might know or how he might respond. The final level of 15 locations has a fair few NPCs, a faction and a final boss of sorts — this is good dungeon levell. I’m on board the third level here, it seems like fun, but is still a little anaemic, particularly with regards to the intentions of the inhabitants. I can rely on a reaction roll, but I’d rather just have these characters and factions goals and intentions spelled out for me. It can be done subtly — Mausritter has brief factions down to a fine art — but here we have very little to go on. There are a few key oversights here. It’s not said that the background lore should be known to the players — my assumption is always that it’s not unless it’s stated — which means nowhere in the rumours or by dungeon inhabitants are the player characters cued to do certain important things, like swim through the bioluminescent pool to the spirit world, for example. I could see players getting stuck on these forsaken easter eggs.

    Also like Knave 2, The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak is bookended by a bunch of pretty decent random tables. I love this kind of support, although I’d prefer a little more flagging for their use in the text. The inside front cover is full of random tables that cover the wilderness travel to the temple, the inside back cover covers the spirit realm and magical mushrooms within the dungeon. There are also a bunch of random treasure tables in the text, rather than set treasure in any area. This is fun because you can customise the treasure for your party, but overall the dungeon seems a little soft on financial rewards. We have two sets of random events, a wandering monster table, and a table of both hooks and rumours. Fjärem loves randomness as much as Ben Milton does.

    The quality of the random tables varies a lot. The rumours and hooks are simply uninteresting: There isn’t anything here that would change the behaviour of the players, and nothing that links these hooks or rumours into the world at large. In my opinion, there’s a place for hooks and rumours, but they need to change play for them to have value, whether it be by colouring the players perceptions before they hit the situation at hand, or by giving them information to act on (false or true) when they hit a challenge they wouldn’t other use have had. The random event and wandering monster tables are largely uninspired, too, with the main redeeming factor being that the monsters are all plucked from norse folklore. Luckily, the treasure tables aren’t boring, mostly consisting interesting interactive things. Especially in a game like Knave, interesting inventory is key, and it’s just disappointing the same attention to interactivity wasn’t considered in the other tables.

    Layout is an overstuffed 2-column affair, with minimal padding and leading and narrow margins. It’s a layout designed to fit it into as few pages as possible, and honestly it suffers for it. At 22 pages, everything could use a little more breathing space. Points of interest are bolded in the text, but this is a prose dungeon rather than a bullet-point dungeon, and this highlighting doesn’t overcome the density for me. It works for short areas, but the larger areas suffer from poor readability simply because the text isn’t easily scanned. What different things apply to gets muddled because of the lack of readability as well; after some tackling, it’s evident the multiple random event and monster tables apply only to certain sections of the module, but this isn’t at all clear on first glance, as they’re crammed in with everything else. Interestingly, this fits Ben Milton of Knave’s oeuvre, and a lot of the same things were challenging for me in Knave 2. A little additional white space goes a long way to rendering things more readable, in my opinion.

    Overall, I think this dungeon is a little undercooked. The factions and characters need to be sprinkled throughout the entire dungeon, not just the third level. Those NPCs need a bit more personality — perhaps these are implicit to someone with a stronger sense of Norse mythology than I, but they aren’t to me. The random events and monsters similarly need a little more bite, a little more of a “oh! the arena has changed” every time the dice are rolled. But all the ingredients for an interesting, unique dungeon are here, the three levels have unique and interesting themes that I want to see explored, and the writing at its best is strong. If you’re interested in Norse-folktale dungeons, I’m genuinely not aware of anything else out there that fits the bill, although the Polish (I am assured by my Polish friends not Scandinavian) Beyond Corny Grön would neverrhless supplement this well in terms of the fairytale elements. If you’re willing to put a bit of effort in — give the NPCs some flavour and the factions some goals, add some points of interest and romance to the upper levels — The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak will probably be a memorable few sessions of play, with a very unique theme.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Critique Navidad: Expect Three Visitors

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    Expect Three Visitors is a 36 page GM-less roleplaying game by Alex White. In it, you tell a story inspired by Charles Dickens’ a Christmas Carol. Each player is a client, haunted by a spirit of one of the deadly sins, while they also play one of those spirits for the other player’s clients.

    You create a client — the person you imagine will experience the visions. And you create a spirit — the ghost who will visit the player to your left. You discuss the key temptation that your spirit will be offering to the player to the left. You each have a blind hand of 3 to 4 cards. When it is your turn, frame a scene for the person on your left based on the suit. The nature of the scene will be determined by the phase of play, which each of the players goes through in turn, but in that scene, your client will be played by one of the other players, not by you. That’s the whole of the rules! I don’t think this is a lot, but if it does seem complicated, most of the text is an example of play, for each phase and suit, based on A Christmas Carol, for the purposes of illustration.

    You will notice I breezed over a few things, though: There’s no system for helping you create either your spirit or your client: You’re expect to “be inspired by A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and the only prompt you get from the game is your sin, which you discuss with your neighbour who plays your spirit. Similarly, you have no prompts for the nature of your scenes, except for the sin prompt; there’s a decent chance that all four of your prompts will be identical by suit, as it’s determined by chance.

    This month, I’ve read a lot of prompt-based games, and my repeated refrain is that they provide not enough support for players, and expect too much design work of them. See my review of Dead After Dinner for the main discussion, but also Hwaet! and The Cog That Remains. For me, this provides perhaps the least support out of all of these: I must create two characters with little to support it but the concept of a sin and my familiarity with the subject matter, and then I’m given a vague prompt to combine with the subject matter, and have to hope that the fact that different players are interpreting my character through different lenses in different scenes is enough to bring the game to fruition. It’s just not enough for me, I’m afraid.

    But I can see the design intent here, and I suspect in this specific case, someone else might have a very different experience. The support provided me here just doesn’t work for me: It’s the huge number of examples of play. By telling me what others have chosen to do, you’re in fact locking my brain out of options; I’m looking for the remaining items in the list, but those items given aren’t an option. Reframe those lists as “Choose these, or create your own…” and suddenly it’s more supportive. The same goes for the extended example of play. Simply switch perspectives, and ask the questions that these are the answers to, and ask me to answer three of them to establish a scene, and I have a game to play, I am not floundering just asked to create a scene. A lot of work went into these examples of play, but for me and the people I play with, the chosen, open-ended structure isn’t inspiring of the emotional journey the author is expecting, but rather causes us to freeze. This game can scaffold its players so much better, just by changing its perspective — by reframing the same content. Make it easier for players to engage with the content by considering the text. If they don’t need to feel the fear of a plunge, don’t make them feel it.

    This is a clever, heartfelt game to play at this time of year. It’s a perfect antidote to the superficiality and chintziness of the season. But I just can’t bring it to any of my tables, because it requires more of me and my friends than we are able to bring. I just wish the kind of people interested in making this kind of game, were also considerate of people who don’t have a lot of energy or capacity to participate in these without scaffolding, and who want to just do the play, without the work. If this exploration of perspectives, temptation and flaws, and complex character exploration with your friends, is compelling Christmas fare to you, and you and your friends feel confident to create all of this from close to scratch and a few examples, Expect Three Visitors is a perfect Christmas game for you.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Critique Navidad: Bare Threads

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    Bare Threads is a trifold pamphlet game by Axiom Delver. It’s a game in which you use a Cat’s Cradle to help to communicate the complexity of difficult conversations.

    The basics of the game are that you engage in conversation with the other player, with each exchange in the conversation being a new position in the progression through the figures in the list. When you complete an exchange, shorten the string and continue. The example given is two ambassadors who are negotiating a treaty while also dealing with romantic tension.

    Bare Threads is the third prompt-based game I’ve read this month as part of Critique Navidad (see Dead After Dinner, Hwæt! and The Cog That Remains) and I’ve spoken at length by this point on the weaknesses of the format. Suffice to say, Bare Threads doesn’t consist any support at all for what you’ll be playing: It comes across as more of an SRD than a game. It cites Star-crossed as inspiration, and I see the connection, but Star-crossed contains settings and characters and a set context for play, right there in the title.

    In many ways Bare Threads reminds me of The Fishing Minigame, which is both praise and condemnation. It is a fantastic concept, and one that actually makes the experience of a fraught conversation feel fraught. That’s exceptional! What a cool achievement! However, is it a whole game? No, it’s not enough. Maybe it could be enough if it had chosen a specific situation. Specificity makes for better art. But in the other direction, it could’ve been an exceptional module for MOSAIC-STRICT, rather than trying to stand alone as a game.

    The issue here is one I’ve seen a lot this month: one of the pitch. I knew about Dawn of the Orcs, but the game is so much better than its pitch which went over my head simply because it doesn’t feel pitched at parlour larpers. Xeno shouldn’t have been a pamphlet game, and even then might have been better a module for another system than its own game. Wulfwald isn’t just “the setting OD&D should’ve had”, but its own whole unique thing in competition with completely different company. I’m seeing games repeatedly that both pitch themselves poorly from a marketing perspective, but also in their internal production goals. I don’t know if this is blindness to the market, or something else, but it means clever seeds often don’t come to fruit, and if they do, they’re not finding their audiences.

    For me, Bare Threads doesn’t come to fruit, but there’s a version of Bare Threads that’s an essential part of any game that involves difficult conversations, that is brought out whenever politics or intrigue comes into play. That version of Bare Threads will linger in my mind for a long time to come.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Critique Navidad: Crown of Saint Ormus

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    Crown of Saint Ormus is a 17 page module for Mork Börg by Markus M. In it, you raid the tomb of a dead saint, at the behest of a rich but cruel merchant. Said tomb is a small dungeon, only 6 rooms.

    First up, I love the hard frame right there in the blurb for a small module like this. Cut right to the chase! This module is effectively a room to a page, my favourite choice for information design in modules. Prose paragraphs for description, with a pleasantly floral voice, which packs a few descriptions I quite like, “On a chair by a desk in the middle of the room sits a robed figure, The Forgotten Philosopher, his desiccated skin stretched taut across his bones.” or “The remains of a regal carpet lies before the archway, its colours faded and its fabric tattered, eaten by mice and cockroaches in centuries past.”. It has a lingering horror vibe, not as extreme as most Mork Börg stuff, but one that’s meditative and slow-paced.

    One issue I have here is the lack of clues I’m finding for the easter eggs hidden throughout the module. Things like the fact that the “Philosopher will trade this for a vial of blood” or “Saint Ormus cannot be harmed as long as any skeletal worshipers remain” are good, actionable pieces of information, if it’s likely the player characters will find out. In that specific case, we can potentially assume the Philosopher will tell them if he doesn’t attack — but, what does the Philosopher want with the blood? What dire thing will happen if it’s given to him, either in his action or form, or in direct impact to the player character who gives the blood? For an easter egg like this to become valuable, it needs both a way to find out, and a consequence for applying the discovery; otherwise it’s just a forsaken easter egg, and we don’t need these in our modules.

    Crown of Saint Ormus uses the Explorer template, not unchanged, but minimally so, and you know what? It works. With the Isle being a low- art module and one inspiration for the template, Crown of Saint Ormus is basically the best use case for that. There’s a humility to this layout, and while that humility precludes flashiness, the changes are excellent. A minimap sits in a banner at the top of most pages, giving you visual indications of where you are. The sidebar is scarcely touched, which lends it a spacious feeling. By deferring most of the design work to a master who gives it out for free, this manages to be largely immune to criticism. I’ll find some though: The random tables are misaligned, making it harder to see what number aligns with which item. There is minimal text highlighting (just for proper nouns), which means it’s hard to scan the paragraph text for important information It’s a 6 page module, though, you could argue it’s a smart choice rather than a flaw.

    Small dungeons like this raise the question to me of whether you can make a small space that is meaningfully explorable: Certainly, this is a lovely little dungeon, and a fun few hours of play no doubt, if a little grim. But what we have is merely a weird place sitting in a weird wilderness. The questions it raises about Saint Ormus and the dead within the tomb aren’t answered (and intentionally so, I think). There are no spatial puzzles occurring, no meaningful loops or symmetrical spaces implying secrets. You can’t learn about the dungeon, from the dungeon. Is that a flaw in a small dungeon? I’m not sure. I’d love to see a small dungeon that successfully makes its space meaningful through time and geography rather than just through description.

    But that is a complaint for a hypothetical module. It’s not one of Crown of Saint Ormus, which is a good small dungeon, that will make a very atmospheric night with your team, and will be plenty of fun. I’d recommend picking it up, so long as lingering horror is your table’s vibe, and you’re not here looking for complexity or puzzles.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Critique Navidad: Foul Play

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    Foul Play is a 13 page game by Hendrik Ten Naple, with art by Em Acosta. In it, you play geese making life hell for unsuspecting humans. You’re going to need a lot of six-sided dice for this game, I warn you.

    This is a game of slapstick, so basically if you want to do something a goose could do, do it, and if it’s weird, roll a d6 pool with the usual success ranges. Your geese have knacks, but more importantly they have spite which you can expend to succeed at difficult tasks. Items are on sticky notes on the table, and you can pick them up and use them to achieve your goal (you’re a goose: you have a beak, not inventory). Spite also doubles as currency for resistance (so yes, this goose game appears Forged in the Dark), and when you’re out of spite you go back to nature.

    I love that the game comes with a location, but that you can also write your own. This is a pick up game, I shouldn’t be doing prep. I think making your own based on your workplace with your colleagues would be a joy though. All games should come with a location.

    Em Acosta’s art is perfect for the game, the layout is an irreverent use of the Explorer Template that lanes the sidebar for bold headings and for hand-scratched notes on play or examples. It’s spacious and easy to read. As a book, it is nigh on perfect for its goals, but…I wish it wasn’t a book.

    I’d adore a version of Foul Play that was a deck of cards, because it feels like the biggest barrier to playing this is the bucket of dice, despite there being a certain pleasure to throwing fistfuls. I feel like in a different format, this would be a perfect game to keep in your bag for an odd occasion. I don’t think it would suffer for being redesigned to fit in a deck of cards — there are plenty of games that replicate this math in a card deck — and if they added a location or two that’s an excellent value proposition. The character sheets are cards already, basically.

    As is though, Foul Play is quick, simple, goofy fun. I don’t have a lot to say because it’s not a deep game, it’s aiming for hijinks, and succeeds. This is Honey Heist but better and for a new generation. It’s a great way to spend an evening with your friends.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Dungeon Regular: Secret of the Towers

    A new episode of Dungeon Regular is available! It’s embedded below, on Spotify or in your favourite podcast app.

    Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

    Dungeon Regular is a show about modules, adventures and dungeons. I’m Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary and I’m reading through Dungeon magazine, one module at a time, picking a few favourite things in that adventure module, and talking about them. On this episode I talk about Threshold of Evil, in Issue #10, March 1988! You can find my famous Bathtub Reviews at my blog, https://playfulvoid.game.blog/, you can buy my supplements for elfgames and Mothership at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/, check out my game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/advanced-fantasy-dungeons and you can support Dungeon Regular on Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/idlecartulary.
    1. Threshold of Evil
    2. Secrets of the Towers
    3. Monsterquest
    4. They Also Serve
    5. The Artisan’s Tomb

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Critique Navidad: Xeno

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    Xeno is a trifold pamphlet game (so, 1 page) by Caligaes where the players play aliens dispatched to achieve missions on earth, and the referee plays their human enemies.

    Xeno has a traditional resolution structure, tweaked with a little alien weirdness (3d4 is your basic dice roll!). The real flavour is that there are four types of alien, and four different objectives, with four different human nemeses. It’s some neat, serviceable rules, but the big problem with pamphlet games is that you have to compromise on something, as I spoke about in depth in my most recent reviews of What Child is This? and Trouble in Paradisa. You have to make compromises for the sake of space, and my overwhelming sense as time goes on is that the compromises made to make this pamphlet as opposed to a short zine are rarely to the benefit of the game itself. In the case of Xeno, the compromise comes in the form of lack of support for actual missions, and for me, a forever referee, that’s nigh unforgivable. A lot of games rely on genre familiarity to get you over the jump of lack of support. But the truth is, I have only one reference for the genre that Xeno occupies, and that’s the (excellent) video game Carrion. And what I do not have any memory of in Carrion is the level design. I don’t think I could satisfyingly run Xeno, sadly, based on this pamphlet. A game with such a fun, unique premise needs more support in terms of missions than four paragraphs of general ideas.

    Xeno attempts to overcome this barrier m in two ways. The first is the Victimary, a second trifold pamphlet that details the anti-alien military unit, Z-Com, and brings a bunch of new nemesis and victims to the table, as well as vulnerabilities for the Xenos. The Victimary is good. I don’t have much else to say. It deserves to be a part of the core. The second is Hens & Chicks, an introductory module. This one is thirty six a5 pages. Look at this map!

    Caligaes, you should be writing modules. And Hens & Chicks is a hell of a module. In it, you’re breaking into a Z-Com facility, where humans are experimenting with Xeno genetics. It’s Carrion: The Module! It’s full of good refereeing advice, the art is stellar, and there is a lot going on. Not only is a lot going on, but the layout is wild, bringing strong Mork Börg vibes, and diverging wildly from the aesthetics of the two pamphlets. That layout isn’t immensely navigable, however, and given the weirdness and unfamiliarity of the perspective of the module, that’s a fairly significant problem for me. But irregardless, it’s wild to me that this is bonus content: This should be core.

    That’s the problem with these two expansions to me, especially when packaged with the core, is that…well, they’re the game, really. Hens and Chicks should’ve been the headline, front ended with both sets of rules, and supported with an appendix or final chapter that talked about how to turn it into a campaign if you choose. As is, the core pamphlet is incomplete, and if you’re anything like me, you might just disregard the other “additional” content not realising it’s really essential content to the experience.

    The other thought to me is one of missed opportunity: In Hull Breach, which is 2 years old now, Mothership got a set of alien-forward rules: Manhunt. I think Xeno’s aliens are more interesting and unique than the ones in Manhunt, but it raises the question of why, when then best part of Xeno is the bonus module hidden in the downloads list, why it wasn’t just developed for Manhunt. I feel like it would get so much more mileage and far more eyeballs on. It’s sad that something this interesting can get lost, simply because of a missed pitch.

    Because, while Xeno is incomplete on its own, and a cursory glance will likely make you look straight past it, in combination with the Victimary and Hens & Chicks, it’s a strong contender for a novelty multi shot. If it was reformatted, it would be a hell of a lot stronger, but really, I think it would benefit from a a re-release and adaptation to Mothership, so some cool, alien ideas can reach a wider audience.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Critique Navidad: The Cog That Remains

    This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

    The Cog That Remains is a 28 page solo journaling game by Seamus Conneely, about being a mechanic that maintains mecha in a Gundam-y world.

    This is a Wretched & Alone game, so you’ve got tokens, dice, a deck of cards and a jenga tower, which in basically every Wretched & Alone game is way too much for me; a grab-bag of props that feels like you couldn’t make up your mind. In this it feels perfect, reflecting the way a mechanics’ workshop is messy. For me, this is a goldilocks concept for the system. That’s nice for me, because now I can say “I don’t like Wretched & Alone games, because they have too much going on, except for the Cog That Remains”. For those not familiar, in this case the jenga tower is the mecha, and when it falls your pilot is killed in battle. On a mission, you roll a die, which determines how many cards you draw from a standard deck of cards, and those cards determine the prompts for your journal entries, and if it makes sense, instruct you to pull from your tower, bringing you closer to the end of the game. When your pilot dies: Write a eulogy. Get a new pilot. Play again.

    I complained in earlier reviews of prompt-based games during Critique Navidad (Dead After Dinner and Hwæt!) that they don’t give me enough world-building and meat to want to play them. The prompts are often intended to be sparks, but are so vague as to not spark anything in me. This is a huge contrast to the more traditional games I’ve reviewed for Critique Navidad, which have leant hard into worldbuilding and lore. The first set of prompts in the Cog That Remains are pretty anaemic — these are the ones that help you create your mechanic — where they are the perfect moment to make them dynamic and evocative and help you build your very specific world. This reliance on my prior knowledge of Gundam is a huge flaw here and reliance on prior knowledge of genre is a huge flaw in prompt-driven games in general. Think about the specificity of Fiasco: The structure and mechanics beget the genre, not the fact that I’ve seen a Cohen Brothers movie. The card prompts are better, but still generic: They should be written like a Gundam episode, they should feature characters and impacts, in my opinion.

    I think there’s a huge amount of unfulfilled potential in the “Veteran mechanic” section for campaign play, too, as your player gets wearier and wiser, to speak about the hopelessness of war, and to speak to the subtext in Gundam around how pilots are disposable resources and are often child soldiers. There’s something to be said in that context of aging past your dying peers, or the dynamics between mechanics who live until old age and the pilots who die young. But nothing here leans into those themes. To some degree it speaks to the increasing disposability of indie TTRPGs in the age of itch.io, where someone with resources can make a beautiful, complete product in a few weeks, but when it takes only a few weeks, the deeper consideration of the meaning of the text just isn’t there. Are we making products, here, or art? I think we should be making art, and to do that a little more introspection is required.

    All of that said, you know what’s cool? Mecha. You know what’s fun? Pretending to a mecha mechanic, a new perspective on the genre. The mechanics (of the game, that is) here are spot on for the messiness of patching up a giant robot, the tower is analogous to a giant robot in a more literal, physical way than in other games of the same ilk. The Cog That Remains is a pretty cool game if you’re willing to bring your own deep knowledge of Mobile Suit Gundam to the party.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Bathtub Review: Stalls of the Blood Queen

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Stalls of the Blood Queen is a 5 page module for Mausritter by the prolific Matthew Morris with art by Alex Demaceno in trifold format, to match the Mausritter house style to some degree. It’s a location-based module, where you investigate a stable that has been colonised by a vampire bat queen and her followers. It’s obviously intended as an homage to Diogo Nogueira’s Halls of the Blood King, but honestly it has the potential to be more than just a one-off joke.

    Stalls of the Blood Queen is a 7 location dungeon with a very small town and surrounds. When I say 7, 1 of those is repeated 10 times. The town probably doesn’t need to be there: It’s an excuse for a rumours table, with no characters attached to it, and the rumours aren’t juicy or sharp, and neither provide reasons to explore the stable, reflect the locals in interesting ways, or provide or preference interesting options once you’re in the dungeon. I quite like, however, the innocuous encounters that effectively serve as foreshadowing of what is to come when you enter the barn. These are my favourite kind of random encounters, and if you’re going to only have a few, you should in my opinion make them omen-like foreshadowing rather than pointless combats.

    The blurb on the back cover, I think, is intended to double as the role of the village, providing a hook and hard framing the events and the why the player characters want to go into this barn at all. Because of the order that you read it in, though, it doesn’t quite work as intended. I’m reading digitally, but even if I had this zine in my hands, I don’t ever read the back page immediately before reading the module itself, and I might skip it altogether; it’s something I use when I buy a book. This doesn’t encourage you to consider it differently through it’s layout, although I think it could by framing it differently (or even by simply titling it). One other way to do this is to make it more explicitly a hard frame: Have it in the voice of the mayor of Willownest, for example, or framed as a conversation, rather than have it fit the expected format of a blurb. A clever idea when it comes to maximising page use in a small package, but not well executed, in the same way that the back cover inclusion of a token for “blood sucked” is neat, except I’d have to cut out half of the “Silver items” table to use it (in the module’s defence, it comes with a separate sheet of cut-out tokens in digital).

    If you were running this in a densely populated hex crawl —which is the intent — the unique creatures here would be stellar, giving you interesting opportunities have emergent interactions with the hexes around them and wanderers into this hex, because they have drives like “a good meal”, and “collect servants”. I’d rather be given a little more juice there, “a good meal, cold blooded or feathered” for example would be better, but it has potential for non-combat interaction: The players characters may not be the meal or the servant, and they’re likely to be friends, allies or innocents. It’s part of the “Adventure Continues Jam“, which populates a hex crawl on a collaborative community basis, but due to the nature of that jam, you can’t really predict what other contributors are going to make, so you can’t write responsive or interactive content. This was the issue with the previous Mausritter collaborative project, Tomb of a Thousand Doors. Lots of good content, but no connectivity. Given the lack of connectivity, in isolation, though, the creatures in Stalls of the Blood Queen are all combat only creatures, which doesn’t in my opinion or experience lean into Mausritter’s strengths. I’d want at least one example of a fun interaction to be present in the module, ideally.

    The dungeon itself, is flavourful and interesting, its descriptions are beautiful (“Scratching of claws reverberates from the recesses above, dark ledges hide what stalks”), but the reliance on the real-world structure of a stable causes problems. Given it’s a dilapidated stable, I’d probably prefer if it leant into that dilapidation, to make it less linear and more interesting a space to explore. As is, because of the central aisle, it isn’t looped in a way that’s interesting, or that you can explore in alternative ways like “climb” or “sneak” without diverging from the apparent intent in a way that likely won’t be satisfying. In a module that feels quite hostile, I’d love to see more support for ways other than combat to solve these encounters.

    Layout and art-wise, this is good stuff. It feels very Mork Börg, with its striking pink-and-burgundy palette and its colour shifted art. Alex Demasceco’s art is gorgeous, and there’s a lot of it — 2 or more items per page. The layout is very legible, with striking but strong headings, simple font choices that don’t crowd the eye, and smart use of white space despite the density of text and the page count. My only criticism is that the isometric map is not functional at all — it might as well not be there in its current form, as you can’t actually see ways around the map. In a different map format, perhaps the issues I have around the design of the dungeon would not be present.

    Honestly, thematically, I don’t know how we haven’t had any previous bat-themed Mausritter modules, given that bats are effectively sky mice. There’s a really neat line here drawn between the mouse-born cultists, who wish to sprout wings and “ascend to bathood”, who are effectively the Renfeilds to the Blood Queen’s Dracula, the fruit bats themselves, who have begun the process of ascension, and are the “Dracula’s wife” equivalents (although in this case, less seductive), and the vampire bats themselves, fully “sired” bats. It’s at once incredibly obvious, but also very elegant and I love it. It’s a kind of simple puzzle, that once the players figure it out, will make them realise the system made sense all along, and will make them anticipate what comes next.

    In this way, it’s kind of begging for a sequel, and this one location isn’t quite enough. You want, when you’re using theme in this elegant way, to carry it forward, and then subvert it, see where you can take these analogies and where you can manipulate them in interesting ways. This is where the Ravenloft urge came from (regardless of how you feel about the end result 40 years later), and I honestly think it’s pretty exciting to consider what a Mausritter demiplane of dread might look like, if you leant into these thematic directions and then started to subvert and surprise your players with what you find. This is a far more interesting direction for Matthew Morris to take this, in my opinion.

    This obviation of complexity feels like a symptom of the eternal striving for brevity that is characteristic of the Mausritter line and community. This is such a cool concept, and a very cool module, but it’s begging for more exploration. I think most Mausritter authors would respond to this with something along the lines of “It provides a chance for the referee to make the module their own”, but I have two objections to that response: Firstly, I purchase modules primarily so that I don’t have to do this, because I work, have 2 children, and have a long-term chronic illness, all of which make doing extensive prep challenging. It’s the value proposition of a module for me, that I don’t have to make it my own, that’s something I do by choice. But secondly, and more importantly, I consider module design to some degree an art, and I think that art benefits from its’ creators digging deeper and expanding on their work in ways that are interesting and thematic. The fact that I see so many people doing this is heartening, and it’s how I can keep up reading modules still, coming up on my 100th Bathtub Review. Now, there’s absolutely a place for a one-off, location based module; and there’s a place for these community driven projects like Tomb of a Thousand Doors and Hull Breach that I think are exploring a fascinating and important direction for our hobby. It’s just that Stalls of the Blood Queen, specifically, is clever twists the themes of Mausritter in interesting ways, and would benefit from letting the mind and creative eye wander and explore those themes more thoroughly, rather than regarding itself as a one-off joke module.

    Stalls of the Blood Queen is a banger of a little Mausritter module, which, like most of my recent Mausritter reviews, requires a fair bit of improvisation on behalf of the referee. Usually, they’re punchy enough that I’d throw them on the table for use with my kids anyway — Stalls of the Blood Queen might be a bit too gory for my kids ages, though, so it’s unlikely to see play at my table. If you play Mausritter with an adult table, though, this is a striking change, it’s gorgeous, and it’s interesting. More than anything else, though, I’d love to see Matthew Morris and Alex Demasceno work together to expand this into a Ravenloft-esque Mausritter hexcrawl (“Ritterloft”, you can have that one Matthew Morris, if you’d like), because as a starting point, this is really compelling starting point to a unique take on Mausritter. If a one-off horror location appeals to you, or you don’t mind writing your own Ritterloft, Stalls of the Blood Queen is an excellent choice.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

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Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

Dungeon Regular is a show about modules, adventures and dungeons. I’m Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary and I’m reading through Dungeon magazine, one module at a time, picking a few favourite things in that adventure module, and talking about them. On this episode I talk about Threshold of Evil, in Issue #10, March 1988! You can find my famous Bathtub Reviews at my blog, https://playfulvoid.game.blog/, you can buy my supplements for elfgames and Mothership at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/, check out my game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/advanced-fantasy-dungeons and you can support Dungeon Regular on Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/idlecartulary.
  1. Threshold of Evil
  2. Secrets of the Towers
  3. Monsterquest
  4. They Also Serve
  5. The Artisan’s Tomb

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