• Bathtub Review: The Sunless Citadel

    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 end of January marks my 100th Bathtub Review (not counting my I Read Reviews, so the number may be closer to 150), so I’m celebrating with an Introductory Extravaganza, where I review a different Dungeons and Dragons starter module every week for a few weeks. Last week I covered the Village of Hommlet (AD&D), this week I’ll cover the Sunless Citadel (D&D 3e) and coming up are the Lost Mine of Phandelver (D&D 5e), The Iron Coral (Into the Odd) and Blancmange and Thistle (Troika!).

    The Sunless Citadel is a 32 page module for D&D 3rd edition, written by Bruce Cordell. In it, the player characters investigate a dungeon whose upper levels are occupied by feuding kobold and goblin tribes, before driving deeper to find a dark evil: An evil tree that grows a single apple each summer and winter, the seeds of which sprout evil blights. It’s a 55 room dungeon that spends no time on the surrounding area at all; of the total page count only 6 are not dungeon key — 3 are introductory, and 3 are a stat block appendix. Compared to both the Village of Hommlet and the Lost Mine of Phandelver, it’s a shockingly self-contained module, more similar in scope to the Iron Coral.

    I skipped the third and fourth editions of Dungeons and Dressing entirely, opting instead to play board games for a decade, and so I’m a little surprised to find that The Sunless Citadel feels very strongly transitional, and not so much of a break from the 1st and 2nd edition modules I’m more familiar with. I assumed that this would suffer from the bloat that I’ve heard was endemic in 3.5e, but the truth is, while it inherits bad habits from the Dragonlance era of 2nd edition, it’s actually got a strong authorial voice and reminds me a lot of the better dungeons of AD&D.

    In terms of layout, maps occupy the inside back and front covers, and interior text is a dense justified two column layout that makes you rely heavily on headings for navigation. That said, main headings are replicated in headers, and are differentiated clearly by font, size, indentation and decoration. I intensely dislike the choice to lay sidebars over the external margin art — the external margin art crowds the rest as is, but this choice makes those columns affected scarcely legible. Aside from this, small things like leading, paragraph spacing and padding make this generally more legible than any 1st or 2nd edition module. It’s a cut above, but still beholden to its past. Interestingly, compared to the Village of Hommlet, the keys are more difficult to read: Beyond differentiating the boxed read aloud text and stat blocks, there is no text flagging or highlighting for points of interest or treasure. Given these keys tend to bloat as the stat blocks are heftier than previous editions and are included in-line (excellent choice for an introductory module), the difficulty identifying key information is a problem. You’ll have to go through this with a few different coloured highlighters on your read through to make it smoother to run. There are only 7 interior art pieces, not too different from what came before and not the incredible over the top art density that has come to characterise modern editions. These are, too, black and white line art of a style more typical of earlier editions, although the realism that came to characterise Dungeons and Dragons is beginning to creep in in place of the less polished, janky stylings of AD&D.

    The introductory pages introduce jack all, to be honest. Even encounter levels — intended to show at a glance whether your party is likely to be destroyed by an encounter — refer to the DMG. Boxed text and sidebars are explained but little else. The faction summaries aren’t terrible, but don’t give you much juice, and make assumptions regarding what will happen: “The adventurers have less luck dealing with the goblins…” The 3 hooks are not interesting enough to warrant existing and don’t impact the modules’ play in any way; you could be generous and say that is because it’s for beginners, but it largely seems lazy. The rumours aren’t given in list form, and while you can gain them “by role playing”, they really don’t give useful information that will impact play or information that will really lure them to the Sunless Citadel itself; while there’s a social contract to go to the dungeon of course, why are these even here if they don’t provide either in-game justification or contribute to the gameplay. There’s at least one genuine mistake: While the tree bears only one fruit, somehow this is supposed to provide the goblins with some kind of industry selling magical fruit and spreading the seeds. This feels like a massive editing mistake, to me? Oakhurst as a village also feels like it exists in greater detail somewhere on the cutting room floor — a conjecture also supported by the existence of a genuinely lovely panoramic map for a town that isn’t described otherwise. In general, it assumes you remember the text far too much — I wondered why saplings were missing in Oakhurst as a mystery hook, when all it meant was that they had turned into blights, obvious in retrospect, but I missed it in the walls of text.

    Check out this map! Genuinely excellent work by Tod Gamble. It’s for a village that isn’t actually detailed at all, Oakhurst.

    Overall the introductory section assumes a deep familiarity with both the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Masters Guide, and doesn’t do anything to tutorialise the referee at all. Does it tutorialise the players, though? Well, it does gradually expose the player characters to the kind of challenges that they should expect, and does so at first in low-risk situations. In the first few areas, there are sign of low risk creatures, there are language puzzles and search puzzles that foreshadow future encounters, and environmental challenges that require conscious decision making. All of these are mirrored deeper into the module, with traps and secret rooms. But, it gets pretty gnarly pretty quickly; I’m not sure if this is a positive or if the very regular hazards will be a negative experience for new players (there are 5 traps in the first 12 rooms). There is, at least, theme behind the traps: There’s an ongoing war between kobold and goblin that the player characters are stumbling into, but it feels like this dungeon is more punishing than the Ruined Moathouse in Village of Hommlet or especially compared to the Goblin Cave in Lost Mine of Phandelver. You’re less likely to have a rollicking good time here; especially as this adventure assumes you’re mapping as you go and that marching order is important. It’s a ten-foot-pole-poking adventure, moreso even than Hommlet was.

    At least until you encounter the kobolds, who you’re supposed to ally with to defeat the goblins that block your way to the deeper druidic grove level. This sounds great in theory, but there’s no simple solution to building reputation with the kobolds, let alone with the goblins, and as factions there is very little to them aside from “squabbling over territory” which isn’t even “squabbling over resources”. There are named kobolds, but they don’t have desires or needs of their own to speak of; the only goblin named is their chief. There’s potential for faction play here, but it’s not set up adequately at all in my opinion, and would be more interesting again if we could incorporate our corrupt druid into the politics, but he’s confined to the grove below. This means that in theory this isn’t a hack and slash dungeon, but in practice it’s likely to be. It’ll take a lot of work to squeeze social play out of it, but it has good bones.

    Overall, the Sunless Citadel isn’t something I’d choose to run as an experienced referee for experienced players. It, more so than the Village of Hommlet, assumes a lot of background knowledge of the game from everyone at the table. What’s more, the dungeon itself isn’t deeply compelling as it stands. However, it has a lot of components that could, if arranged differently, make for some compelling and interesting play. It’s inspiring, that’s for sure. I could see a version of this module that would make some hella interesting memories, but where are the compelling NPCs to meet? Where are the exploitable areas? How can we claim parts of the dungeons and make allies and wage war and play them off against each other?

    It doesn’t tutorialise at all for the referee, but it arguably does for the players, at least in the sense that the level design provides a graduated difficulty curve and lethality so that they can learn to poke things with a long stick; but, given the issues with the design of the module, I think it will also discourage their best impulses.

    That all said, I think, like the Village of Hommlet, it does reflect the expectations for play in 3rd edition: This is skill-roll focused, hazard and encounter-based play. It’s straying from hirelings; now you’re solo heroes. You’re levelling up quickly and facing high level foes by the depths of the dungeon. In this way, the Sunless Citadel is a fascinating insight into the modules that would drive play for over a decade, and potentially, still drive it in in 5th edition.

    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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  • The Idle Cartulary Awards for Excellence in Elfgames 2024

    This is the second year I’ve decided to post Novies, but rather than struggle to create novelty categories every year, I’m going to keep it simple. From 2024 (or so), I’m going to pick my favourite things, judging for innovation and how influential it was to me. However many runners up I want, because spread the love. Let’s go!

    Best Single-location Module: Goblin Mail by Sofia Ramos and Evelyn Moreau

    Goblin Mail is unique. Unlike anything else released this year, immaculate in its vibes, and trying to do something that even other Troika! modules aren’t trying to do. It’s absolutely fantastic and I can’t recommend it enough. Nothing else like it.

    Runners Up:

    Resonant by Amanda P is the best Mothership module to come out this year. My first draft of these awards said “absolutely the best”, however we had two late-year surprises that I’ll talk about in a moment. The art by Tony Tran is transcendent, the layout is immaculate, and the writing nails the capitalistic horror that Mothership is best at.

    Both Dead Weight and When In Rome were late year surprises that almost upended the competition. Both of them do a single-location, are wildly interactive, and feature some very clever game design decisions but fall down in their execution.

    Tomb of the Primate Priest by Joseph R Lewis by contrast, is absolutely tiny, but by being judicious with its choices absolutely nails the idea of a small module. It’s a neat crawl, and the kind of thing we need more of to fill in our hex crawls. Clever stuff, which is really inspiring. I think that small modules are a tough nut to crack, and in many ways Tomb of the Primate Priest is a good exploration of how to crack it. However, that leaves 3 of the top 5 single-location modules being designed for Mothership: Fantasy module writers, you need to start bringing it in 2025!

    Best Multi-location Module: Tiny Fables by Josiah

    I wrote the review for this donkey’s years ago, but it’s still yet to be released beyond backers. This is the best, straight up, Mausritter module, and I’m really excited for everyone to get it in their hands. It’s a cute, interesting, beautiful and easy to run fairytale of a module which bucks Mausritter design trends. Expect a review as soon as it’s publicly released, and keep it on your radar; I can’t give you a link to it at this stage.

    Runners Up:

    Atop the Wailing Dunes by Sofhino absolutely blew me away with its methods of designing a hexcrawl that feels organic and like actually travelling through wilderness. I didn’t understand Pariah until I read this. It’s far from perfect, but I want to see others attempt similar things.

    Crown of Salt by Tania Herrero was a late-year surprise, and revealed Tania as someone to look out for, combining art, layout and writing in creative and exciting ways, just like luminaries such as Luka Rejec. The grim fairytale vibe is a great twist on Mörk Borg, and this is well worth pre-ordering.

    Best Game: Dawn of the Blood Orcs

    Dawn of the Orcs was a late year entry with Critique Navidad, and absolutely blew me away with its rigid structure and parlour larp approach to wizardly bickering.

    Runner Up:

    His Majesty the Worm is the game I’d run if I were to choose one game to run for the rest of my life. It’s all here. You can play from this book for eternity and it’s a beautiful book. The problem is, it doesn’t suit my style of play, which is module-heavy; that’s the main reason it didn’t win best game of the year for me. But if you’re playing a weekly game with the same crew and have for years, this is the game for your table.

    Gonan the Barbarian really surprised me with a unique and fun cartoon structure that I feel needs to be hacked and iterated on. Just a really fun surprise.

    Eco Mofos was a game that released early and I discovered late, and has reawakened my desire to run Cairn-like games again. It just has a pile of neat innovations, a lot of cool flavourful cues for play, and it made me excited to bring to the table. I hope it managed to build an ecosystem enough that it thrives, rather than disappears as many unsupported TTRPG games do, however you could manage well on the procedural generators that feature here.

    Best Blog Post: On people-centred adventure design by Amanda P

    Amanda P — a friend of mine I should note — is just very much on the same wavelength as me regarding what they’re attempting to do with their modules. But this and Social Contracts Must Be Splintered are really influential pieces of writing on how to make the people in your modules interesting and living people in their own right, and how to make your elfgame not just a video game.

    Runners Up:

    Environmental Horror Design by Sean McCoy takes about how to design creepy environments.

    Design the Dungeon with Numbers by Clayton Noteskine talks about the mechanics and psychology of decision making.

    Lifestyle, an under-utilised mechanic by Syd Icarus is about making mechanics conspicuous.

    Zedeck Siew blogged an entire module for Halloween, A Perfect Wife. It’s creepy and excellent.

    Clayton Noteskine wrote a whole series on graphic design and other creative tips including marketing copy, covers, titles and voice.

    Best Episode of a Podcast: Prestige Classes on Dice Exploder by Sam Dunnewold with Sam Roberts

    Making me pick Best Episode is so challenging, and I’m glad I set this restriction. I’m a big fan of Dice Exploder, and I’ve been a guest on the show previously, but there were some strong other contenders this year, with stellar episodes of Bastionland, RTFM, and Yes Indie’d (and of course a special call out to my feature in Stop Hack & Roll) in 2024. But for me, as someone who’s primarily into DIY elf games, this episode of Dice Exploder featuring my friend Sam Roberts was just brimming with the special sauce that makes Dice Exploder great and enthusiasm for the flawed mechanic it discussed and the game as a whole. It was really inspiring for me, and I began designing two games in partial response to it (only one which will come to any fruition, I think). It’s a part of a series on D&D on Dice Exploder, and for me this was the only stand out episode. The difficulty I think is that so many of the mechanics in D&D are either subjects of derision (the Adventuring Day, THAC0), or incredibly basic to everyone’s understanding of the hobby (the d20 roll!), that for me, the guests on these episodes couldn’t help but feel a little less enthused than the usual guests, although Sam Dunnewold is as always a ray of sunshine. I just hope that this series on historical D&D doesn’t preclude other episodes on elfgame mechanics, like mine on Rumour tables, because there is still just so much exciting and interesting stuff out there that merits talking about.

    Best Videogame: The Lost Crown

    Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Every time I play a new metroidvania, I feel like we should persevere with attempts to translate the level design to our megadungeon design, in the same way that Ave Nox attempted to. This game was an absolute pleasure.

    Runners Up:

    Chants of Senaar, which is filled with interesting linguistic puzzles, of the kind that I wish I could wrap my head around how to write, as I think that this particular type of linguistic puzzle is so obviously a perfect kind of puzzle structure for building worlds in modules and settings. I really should (or someone should) write about building linguistic puzzles like these.

    Elden Ring, which I never finished, but the world building and structure is really fascinating and I wrote a number of posts about it including Elden Ring and Overworlds.

    Best Book: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

    The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi was juggled being fascinating study of motherhood and middle age, a mildy spicy ill-advised romance, a swashbuckling pirate adventure, and an epic fantasy, in a way that I didn’t see coming after reading and enjoying Shannon Chakraborty’s previous books. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I can’t get enough of Chakraborty’s medieval Islamic historical fantasies (Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark was also a consideration for my favourites of the year).

    The Theft of Swords by Michael J Sullivan I only finished the other week, but was a very solid and enjoyable fantasy, which builds up a world, politic and characters subtly and enjoyably. This is focused primarily on fantasy heists, and it’s the first in a series (of collected novellas is my impression), and I suspect it may deteriorate into a more epic fantasy over time, but these first two novellas in one volume both bring exceptional lessons for world-building and faction politics.

    Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan, is a huge contrast to the other two: This is a Chinese mythological fantasy, featuring a significant romance plotline, which is absolutely epic in scale and breadth. I couldn’t get enough of this first part of the duology (although I don’t feel so strongly about the sequel, which to be honest doesn’t need to be read as the first finished perfectly well). Strong recommendation if you’re interested in non-western fantasies.

    Other Recommended Pleasures

    I played a lot of Micro Macro Crime City this year; this is an exceptional “board” game to fit around work and parenting, bite-sized in play time, and left pinned as a poster to your wall. In it, you solve crimes by looking for clues on a massive Where’s Wally style poster. We coloured ours in as we went, as well.

    Cavern Shuffle: Maze of the Minotaur is a new solo card game that I only got in the last few weeks, and I’ve been playing it when left alone over the break. I’ve never gotten into solo games before, but it’s an absolute pleasure of a solitaire-like, and it feels like you’re crawling through a dungeon despite the familiarity of the mechanics. Oh, and I just really enjoy the art by Bodie H.

    This is the year we started building Lego, which we discovered through building with our kids that are of that age. We’ve been slowly building up our Animal Crossing village (the set that persuaded us to invest in it for ourselves and not just for the kids), and are pretty excited for the new releases next year.

    Drawing in spare moments was my hobby this year. I didn’t nail it consistently, but I bought notebooks and pens to leaves everywhere I could, and got to sketching dungeon maps and trees and hills and little folk after the style of Ed Emberley (who, sadly, I can’t find many books of

    My year in brief

    Every Oscars or Grammies has a montage of what happened that year. I’m not all over everything in this hobby, but here’s my milestones for this year:

    Things to look forward to next year: I’ll be releasing Sharky, an underwater dungeon module for Zinequest in February, Lightfingers, a small mansion heist module in the second half of the year. Sharky has been written, playtested and the art is rolling in, and Lightfingers is for playtesting early next year. I’m excited by both of them.

    Idle Cartulary

  • The Zungeon Manifesto: Demystifying Dungeon Creation

    I have a really large earring collection; I have perhaps as many earrings as I have TTRPGs, and I mainly buy them from local craft markets, not jewellers. They’re all made from resin or clay, or cut from wood or acrylic, by hand or with homestyle equipment, in peoples’ basements or garages, not outsourced to a factory overseas or to a shop where people print 3d-print their ideas. It’s a craft movement, like zines once were.

    Zines in TTRPGs in 2024 has come to mean “A5, highly produced booklet”, but that isn’t what zines have traditionally been. They were like earrings: local craft. I think that we should be embracing local craft in TTRPGs. The easiest way, is to make a dungeon. Let me explain how you can make a zine dungeon in the classic sense of the word: A zungeon.

    For more information about these zines and more inspiration, check out send back my stamps, invisible histories, and the State Library of Queensland.

    In 2025, anyone can make a zungeon

    The first step is how to demystify dungeons. If you ask someone who does this a lot, you’ll get lots of specific advice. Ignore it all. This is how to get your first draft, as quickly as possible.

    1. Go here and generate a dungeon. I suggest this dungeon generator because it’s not random, but rather based on the platonic ideal as calculated by Marcia B. Sadly the original dungeon generator is gone, but you can still make one based on Marcia’s blog. Other generators aren’t as useful in my opinion, because they’re too big. Start small, and only increase the size of the container when your idea overflows.
    2. Choose a theme, then mix it with another theme. “Mermaid Vampire” “Slime waterfall”. If you get something boring like “cucumber demon” just do it again to get “cucumber demon jazz”. If you can’t think of any themes, draw cards and use those (tarot, Magic, Dixit).
    3. Create two monsters or NPCs (or groups) to inhabit your dungeon, riffing off the theme. Give them a goal and a method of achieving it. If you want stats, just take them from a similar stat block and tweak.
    4. Put the NPCs in their designated rooms, and then describe all of the rooms, all riffing off the theme.
    5. Pick a party level (X), and put Xd6 x 200 silver pieces and Xd6 x 100 gold pieces worth of treasure in the dungeon. Also layer the theme on the treasure, if it makes sense.
    6. Roll 1d6, and on a 6 add a magical item. Riff off theme too.
    7. If you don’t feel 6 rooms is enough, do it all again, with a new theme. Have the faction in the second section conflict with the first. Rinse and repeat until you feel like it’s big enough. I’d estimate one of these would last a session or two.

    This process lowers the bar of entry to making a dungeon. You’ve already made enough to run for your friends, and it’s been less than an hour.

    Stop there, if you want.

    Listen to the dungeons’ heart

    Or, if want to publish or share this dungeon? This is how to build it into something you’re excited to share. Primary principle: Listen to its’ heart from this point forward.

    Do any of the rooms make promises that aren’t fulfilled? Add a room, an item, an NPC. Follow the trail of the world you’ve built. You’ll find it feeds back into itself. Revise it according to what it wants.

    Does the slime waterfall need a source? Add a room. What lives there? Add a character.

    Read Juicy Hooks and add either hooks or rumours. Like, 1-2 per 6 rooms, probably just 1 will be enough. Again, listen to your dungeon’s heart: What would lure someone into it?

    The slime, if collected at its’ source, heals vampirism? What’s the source? Who lives there?

    Add events and encounters. Like, 1-2 per 6 rooms, probably just 1 will be enough. Still listen to your dungeons’ heart: What happens when time passes there?

    The dungeon slowly fills with slime. You can only stop it by making the infant Vampire Queen stop crying. Until then, the blood slimes will move twice as fast.

    Now we play it with our friends, and fix our mistakes (vampire queen too deadly? Blood slimes not deadly enough? Slime rises too quickly? Hook not compelling enough?

    Now it’s a loop; repeat this process until you’re excited to show it off.

    Stop there, if you want.

    Give it an Zungeon identity

    Or, make it beautiful. How? “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body”

    Yes, you do. You have some kind of asset: Collage skills and old comic books, stick figures and a long meeting at work, watercolours and an interest in splatters, colourful doodles that you do for mindfulness, the ability to sew, you mapped on grid paper as a child, you have an eight year old nephew who loves to draw the X-men: Use your assets to give your dungeon an identity. Make a cover, and then make one of these things special, too: Art, headings or maps. Don’t try to look like everyone else. Don’t try to look professional. Give your zungeon identity. Get glitter and glue on your hands and cut paper. Be messy and DIY. Be surprising. Stick it all together into the notepad you write into, take photos with your phone, and combine it into a pdf.

    Go back and look at those cool DIY zines: You’re making a zungeon. Craft, art, and play combine. Have fun. Just do it. Apply the same improvisational skills that you apply to play to your zungeon.

    That means that even if you insist you have no skills that you can apply — which I don’t believe — you can support one of the many artists who put their art out for free on to their patrons, like Evelyn or Amanda (artists — if you have one of these, comment, and I’ll add a list at the end of this). Draw a map, using a mapping program like Dungeon Scrawl. If you do it like this — all digital — then make a google doc and print it at work. Then mark it up in the margins. Let loose. Your children’s crayons. Ha! I tricked you into making a zungeon anyway!

    Now, share it on itch.io. At the very least make it Pay What You Want. Tell people about it. You know what, use the hashtag #zungeon, why not? If you send me a download code, I promise to put it in my review list. Actually, if I get more than 2 or 3, I’ll review zungeons in addition to my usual reviews.

    Creating a dungeon is easy, and even publishing one is attainable, particularly if you unshackle yourself from what it should be, and let yourself make a zungeon.

    Idle Cartulary

    Addition: A lot of people suggested making this a jam, so we can all be inspired by each other’s zungeons. So, here’s the zungeon jam. Join and share!

    Addition 2: Stuck on themes? Try this Zungeon theme generator. Stuck on treasure? Try making a punnet.

    Addition 3: The are 2 other 2025 manifestos that support and interact with this one, the 1E Manifesto and Year of the Beta, and Seedling wrote What Is A Zine? Check them out if you’re having trouble sharing your zungeon.

    Addition 4: I’ve had some questions about interpreting the output from the dungeon generator, because it uses some terminology from early editions. “Empty” doesn’t mean empty, it means no treasure, monsters, or traps — Chris can help if you’re not sure what to put here! “Interactive” means there’s something there interesting — a puzzle, a magic fountain, a lever that releases the slime. “Treasure” specifically means fungible treasure — treasure not exchangeable for cash can be as plentiful as you wish.

    Addition 5: If you’re looking to post your zines in the US, Jacob Hurst has a solution for you!

    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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  • Critique Navidad: Triangle Agency

    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!

    Triangle Agency is a 300-odd page roleplaying game by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland, with a bunch of art directors and layout designers on board including Ryan Kingdom, Ben Mansky and Michael Shillingberg. In it, you play paranormal investigators in a corporate setting, seeking to apprehend distortions of reality known as anomalies, minimise loose ends however you see fit. In this pursuit, you are allowed to use anomalous abilities, but only in the line of duty. This game contains sections that only the “General Manager” may read, as well as sections not even the General Manager may read, until certain things occur in play. What this means is, given I’m not playing the game in its’ entirety, that there’s risk of spoilers in this review, if you’re going to be a player, as I’m going to review this both from the “Agent” and “General Manager” perspective, although I’ll do my best to talk about the impact of the “Playwalled Documents” without spoilers, as they’re secret from everyone at the table. You’ve been warned.

    I’m going to start with the two most striking things about this book: The voice, and the layout. Triangle Agency is addressed as you, in character. It’s a rulebook disguised as a corporate onboarding manual. To me, whose experience with this genre is limited to the X-Files and Control, it feels intensely inspired by the voice of the corporate documents in Control with a dash of classic corporate comedy RPG Paranoia: Sectioned are censored, interdimensional intrusions being indicated by <> tags, and by the cheerful corporate demeanor disguising both the reality that me, the reader exists in, as well as the reality that the agent you’re playing exists in: “You get to pretend you are not living the stresses of your current moment and instead are enjoying a refreshing beverage at the imaginary table of your choice; the Agency is happy you’re happy. Win-win!” This tongue in cheek humour lays it on thicker than the source material, however, it also reflects the animal layer of fourth wall breakage occurring here (fifth wall?), so it works. I wish I could list jokes, but explaining why something is funny ruins it. Just trust me that you’ll enjoy reading this; the only challenge is making play live up to the book itself.

    Triangle Agency occurs in phases: Morning Meetings, where you play your daily lives until a briefing occurs, the investigation, where you identify leads to find the Anomaly and its’ Domain, then the Encounter, where you capture it, or in extreme circumstances, neutralise it. Going through this, you’ll be awarded commendations or demerits according to your performance. The resolution mechanism is to roll 6 4-sided dice, looking for 3s. A 3 is a success, and you can either alter the recent past, or use your abilities in a safe way. If you don’t roll any 3s, you follow the failure instructions of your ability, or an inconvenient consequence occurs. Whenever a dice doesn’t show a 3, means the General Manager gets an additional chaos, which they spend to make actions against you. Luckily you can spend your Quality Assurances to turn your not-3s into 3s! If you spend them all, though, future rolls mean one of your 3s won’t count! Oh and 3 sets of 3 is a crit, with a bunch of special powers that you can choose from. Overall, this is a really thematic, neat system, and I love that you’re just kind of normal people, who are asking your corporation to overrule reality in specific ways to assist you in your role; if you’re not using your powers, then failure is assumed. You don’t have any skills to speak of, you’re not trained. You’re completely mundane apart from your connection with Triangle Agency. The only mechanical addition is that your agency provides you with a score after every mission: Commendations allow you to get cool stuff, and demerits affect your company standing, although that the latter means is concealed being the playwall.

    The layout is designed to reflect the in-world’s authorial perspective, with eerily cheerful corporate graphics, bold colours and sans serif fonts, and jarring sidebars and interjections, with this combined with generous spacing, bold and clear headings and section tagging, and use of colour, numbers and judicious fonts for highlighting resulting in a really, really compelling read. The art, when it appears, is full page, bold impressionistic stuff, the kind of stuff you see on the walls of faceless corporations in movies, eerie and faceless and intimidating. It’s fantastic. The General Manager’s section becomes less coherent in its layout choices, and sadly, much less easy to read. It fit does this for reasons that make sense in the text, and i’ve you get there, the game starts breaking its own rules. I don’t love the commentary in these sections, although it’s still a striking choice, and I understand where it’s coming from. But also, I want to play the game, and it’s not helping me do that successfully anymore.

    What’s interesting about the incoherence of the General Manager’s section, though, is that it reveals why there’s three layers of rules here: In Triangle Agency, the General Manager is as much of a player as the other players, and they are being manipulated by someone else. The designer, perhaps? Slowly, as you move through the General Manager’s section, you learn how to run the game, use chaos points, how using those points impacts the world, but also, the onboarding manual you’re reading slowly breaks down, crashes, and starts to be changed and manipulated by outside forces. By the time you know how to run and design a mission, the ways the Agents can retire are revealed to you, and you can access certain places in the Playwalled area if it occurs. The major issue for me with Triangle Agency, is that for me there’s just too much here, and it’ll be hard to track. But also, that too much — is it really going to matter in play? Probably not, to be honest. There’s so much jargon here — if you remove an Anomaly’s Focus, they become a Hollow, for example. I learnt that around page 150, as the General Manager. It’s just a lot of setting, and it’s interspersed with the rules in an interesting and compelling way that also makes me feel very overwhelmed trying to read through it as a General Manager.

    So, what does this Playwall achieve, then? So far, it’s just been used as a joke, or to move things that would usually be just in the rules, so as a gimmick. Is it more than that? I guess it is…kind of? To answer this question, you have to have realised I skipped over character creation. Creating your mundane character involves picking the anomaly that changed you, the reality you came from, some relationships, and your agency competency. These give you a bunch of special abilities that you can use, with their own specific rules. They’re all very cool, and thematic. I’m not going to talk much about them, though, except to say that I’m pretty excited to use some of these powers. Throughout these powers, primarily, are references to things you can do that are Playwalled. Basically, rolling certain results will cause unexpected consequences. Some of these unexpected consequences have further progressions — for example, if 3 people choose one option in C6, V1 is triggered. Like in a legacy game or a choose your own adventure book, kind of? Some of them are anomalous items, that you can only find if you reach certain ranks or have certain qualities. Some of them break the fourth wall. A bunch of them allow you to unlock new sets of rules that don’t exist until you become aware of certain things; however, only you, the character, are allowed to know this fact, and you can’t share it, even with the General Manager. They’re intentionally difficult to read, I think: You’re not supposed to do what I’m doing. And I think that’s the key: What these do, from a game design perspective, is to add in story and layer in the Too Much I mentioned earlier so that you’re discovering things without the load of Knowing falling entirely on the General Manager; bringing all the players a sense of the unknown. It also brings that sense of the voice of the authors that is in the book and is so attractive, into the game proper. It’s a clever but big mechanic, and I feel like the core mechanical structure of the game is in contrast to the complexity of what lies behind the playwall. It is possible this is intentional: Storing the complexity off screen, acting as a tutorial system of sorts. But I feel like the welcoming basic rules are undetermined by the complexity that collects in the General Manager’s and Playwall sections.

    The competing needs of these sections results in what I consider poor information design. It’s difficult to navigate the PDF (I’m told there’ll be a better hyperlinked version which will help), it loads slowly because of its’ graphic intensity, the nature of the Playwall means that it’s hard to find the right page without spoiling yourself. The navigational choices are designed to work on paper, not in digital. This is intended to be a book. Buy it in print, if you can. But. But, it’s also hard to find things without search. Wait, so commendations can buy requisitions. Where is that? It’s not in the contents page, so I don’t know. What’s standing? I don’t know. It’s not in any contents page, and what’s more, the book constantly uses the term understanding, so I can’t even search for it efficiency in digital. Wait, actually the place where I discovered standing exists is the place where it’s defined, and I just thought that the Standing table was a throwaway joke, rather? These issues recur, and in combination with the layout swerves it takes that I’ve mentioned, just make this game very, very difficult to understand for someone like me. I feel like I need to take notes to run it.

    Phew, ok. Triangle Agency is so incredibly complicated. Firstly, it’s beautiful. It’s a work of art, both in terms of writing, in layout, in art choices. Just remarkable. It’s on par with Tim Hutching’s work in terms of creating something of absolute beauty and compelling form. However, the compromises made to create that beauty and form — just as I maintain with Thousand Year Old Vampire — oftentimes compromise the capacity for it to be used as a game. Is this worth it? Well, I think so, at least for some people. My brain simply can’t process this as something to play. I sat with this game for almost 3 hours, went away, stewed on it, and came back. It’s incomprehensible to me. I simply could not run it, because huge swathes of the General Managers section are quite literally unreadable to me without the kind of focus I never have available in my life. It sacrifices usability — and for someone with a brain like mine, accessibility — to achieve its’ artistic vision. If you have a brain that struggles with visual complexity, noise, and focus, I recommend you consider that carefully before picking this up.

    But! More buts! The game design here is also top notch. The systems reflect the world and themes extremely well. The Playwall introduces a bunch of mysteries and twists and a soft sense of player vs. player, as well as bringing the General Manager and the rest of the players into the same team, at the mercy of the author. It’s doing a bunch of interesting things, clever intuitive, and smart extensions of its inspirations. They’re just buried in a challenging text, and right now in my life, I’m not looking for a text to struggle with. And they’re trying to alleviate that struggle, for example, with the Vault, the additional book that features 12 anomalies that you can just use with Triangle Agency. That’s a lot of additional content that you could just play through until you’ve gotten the hang of it. You don’t even need get all the way through the General Manager’s section to run it! You can ignore all of those building the adventure bits until you get the hang of it!

    Triangle Agency is a complicated masterpiece. Is it for me? No, I don’t think so. In terms of the way it’s organised and displayed, it’s actively hostile to me and people like me. But I can recognise the care and thought, and the joy and love of the games and properties that inspired it, which radiate off every page here. I could definitely play in this, because someone would be dealing with the incoherence for me, interpreting it for me. But the load placed on me as General Manager is way too much for me to take on; it would be like going back to 5th edition. Shudder. If you’re willing to take on that load to bring something as massive, messy and magnificent as this to the table, or you have a friend who is foolish enough to, and you love the genres and referents here, gosh, Triangle Agency is a hell of a game. And, to be honest, this is one book that could sit on your shelf as a conversation piece, as it’s striking, weird and gorgeous enough, that you might rope people into playing with you just based on the cover and layout. I’d definitely consider Triangle Agency, but consider carefully what you want out of a roleplaying game first.

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    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: The Village of Hommlet

    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 end of January marks my 100th Bathtub Review (not counting my I Read Reviews or Critique Navidad, so the number may be closer to 150 reviews in total), so I’m celebrating with an Introductory Extravaganza, where I review a different Dungeons and Dragons starter module every week for a few weeks. I’m going to cover The Village of Homlet (AD&D), Sunless Citadel (D&D 3e) and Lost Mine of Phandelver (D&D 5e). Why am I skipping 2e and 4e? Well, 2e didn’t have a definitive introductory module (in my opinion, please argue elsewhere), and I just don’t really think I’ll have much productive to say about the house style for 4e. And, I thought it would be more interesting to tag on The Iron Coral for Into the Odd and Blancmange and Thistle for Troika! We’ll go in chronological order, so first up is the Village of Hommlet.

    The Village of Hommlet is a 21 page module for AD&D (1st edition) by E Gary Gygax, with art and maps by the Daves Trampier and Sutherland. It’s explicitly an introductory scenario designed for new players to AD&D, and is supposed to tie into the first megadungeon for AD&D, The Temple of Elemental Evil.

    The layout, as with most of these late 70s TSR products, is abysmal. They’re printing in as few pages as possible, so we’ve got no margins, small type with minimal padding, packed into a two column layout, with pretty unclear highlighting and flagging of relevant information. It packs over 100 locations into those 21 pages, in addition to the multiple pages devoted to maps, introductions, and random encounter tables. Certainly, if you’re looking for quantity in as few pages as possible, the Village of Hommlet delivers. For me, though, the negatives of packing so many words into so few pages outweighs any positives associated with print cost, minimising page-turning, or ease of access. The cramped, low-padding layout makes it physically challenging to read and blurs the text, and the the lack of white space and art breaking up proceedings makes it hard to identify where information is on the page and where it is in the module altogether. Even modern day adherents to this style — either out of misguided belief it’s actually easy to read or out of a sense of devotion to the aesthetic — typically correct these issues to some degree. The information design is also challenging. The maps are all placed at the back of the module, rather than accompanying their keys. I suppose the intent is for them to be torn out and read in tandem, but as is it’s pretty difficult to know what you’re supposed to read and where to find it. But of course it’s no surprise that something published 5 years after the original 3 little books suffers in terms of graphic and information design. Let’s get onto the positives.

    While for the most part I find Gygax’ writing opaque and boring, he has a gift for iconic, easy to visualise characters, and also occasionally drops dry humour in, as with the infamous Bree-yark joke in B2. Here, it’s in the potential religious sayings of Saint Cuthbert: “Foolishness can be beaten” or “Preach quietly but have a large cudgel handy” are options at the oracle. The Dungeon Master’s information section is actually quite generous, explaining exactly how things are laid out, how to differentiate information in the key, and how to modify the starting scenario for a more experienced table. The degree of support could be improved, though, there’s a clear assumption that while the players may be new to AD&D, the referee is exposed to alot of jargon without explanation. It encourages improvisation, although I always rail against the expectation here that the referee should memorise the entire module before play as an unrealistic one. I do like the advice that if anything happens to impede or harm more level representatives of factions, their leaders are likely to hear about it and that will impact future interactions with members of that faction.

    Hommlet itself is an interesting and politically complex place, hamstrung by Gygax’ florid style and a lack of explanation. There are three primary factions, and most members of those factions in the village report back via courier. Named characters are all fairly evocative and easy to play, although take some extraction on behalf of the referee. The connections are there, but not spelled out, which either will result in mistakes being made because I have trouble “memorising everything in advance” or at best, serendipitous events as everything slots neatly into place.

    I like the factions in Hommlet, as all three major ones are religions, and it gives strong small town, petty protestant interactions vibes, particularly between the druids and the cult of St Cuthbert. Grounding the factions in real situation is appealing to me, as I have a decent grasp of how they’d interact at a town level, and I suspect the Cult of Elemental Evil is supposed to give freemasonry vibes in the sense that the lower levels are innocents in it to get away from their families. The major issue here is I am not clearly presented with these factions’ goals — indeed by design, as the Cult of Elemental Evil is intended to lie largely in a future module, and at least one representative from each other faction is prominently Off Dealing With Them. It’s pretty clear we’re not expected as referee to be juggling these factions activities in the background, here, and that characters in them rather than agents are simply club-members, but I’d have like further guidance in any case.

    One major misstep is the fact that very little leads player characters to the primary adventuring location (“the Ruined Moathouse”) from the village itself. While the module is incredibly dense and difficult to read, so I admit I may have missed something, even searching it digitally came up blank and there are no rumour tables or a wilderness to explore. I don’t think the Village of Hommlet needs those things necessarily, however something is needed to point the player characters in the direction of the adventuring location. Part of the issue here, I think, is that Gygax doesn’t want to tie things too solidly to the second module in the series, which means unless the player characters are systematically robbing the village, they’re unlikely to be lured in the direction of the moathouse or the cult of Elemental Evil.

    Which brings me to the more significant flaws in the design, here, which tie into the epic character arc in AD&D leading to high level play, very slowly. What the Village of Hommlet needs is more obvious machinations and signs leading to the cult of Elemental Evil; we need to be able to use this as a base for our campaign, while also slowly stumbling upon creepy and weird situations. We need everyone to be seeding us intentionally with rumours reflecting the three factions perspectives. And then we want them to send us to the moathouse, leading to our first major encounter with the cult that comes later. The problem is that leaving the cult entirely to a future module cuts this natural flow short.

    The moathouse, however, is an excellent early level adventuring location, at least after the style of early Dungeons and Dragons; you’re coming across a fairly random selection of monsters with little thematic consistency, but aimed at the correct level, with enough gold available to level up. Both levels are fairly large (17 and 18 rooms), and the dungeon level loops pleasingly and is full of surprises. I’d prefer more cohesive theming, but it’s an unreasonable expectation in the context of pre-1980 modules. You’ve definitely got a decent number of sessions and at least 2 levels in this module.

    Overall, Village of Hommlet feels to me like an undercooked Against the Cult of the Reptile God. If I were to choose one, it wouldn’t be the Village of Hommlet; but the Village of Hommlet has so much potential that I want to see a modern take on it, which leverages the politics of the various religions, how one of those three religions has been co-opted by evil, and leads into a small, low key outpost for a greater evil. This is good stuff! I just wish this module actually had it all in there, at my fingertips, instead of it all being inferred and expected for me to generate it in prep.

    More interestingly, the Village of Hommlet has a lot to say about what AD&D is: You’re supposed to be based out of a village or town, venturing into the nearby wilderness to pillage dungeons filled with uncomplicatedly evil foes. named characters in town are either fellow adventurers with ulterior motives to join you as henchmen, or else they’re representatives of factions playing politics with the lives of the locals. Aside from that, the town is filled with unnamed services. This is a very familiar structure, repeated elsewhere in AD&D and commonly repeated in the decades since. The Village of Hommlet sets that expectation clearly for the rest of the edition, but it relies heavily on the oral traditions of Dungeons and Dragons to actually provide onboarding, particularly for referees, which is interesting only 5 years into the existence of the hobby.

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    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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  • The Ugg-Tecture of Language

    Many years ago a game called Ugg-tect went out of print. It is my favourite game I never played, and has entered mythical status in my personal canon. In it, you are cavemen who can only provide directions for building a building by making “ugh” sounds and hitting your friends with an inflatable club.

    The problem with languages in elfgames like D&D is that they are binary. So much of the fun in elfgames comes from plans failing. In reality, I can be bad at French, but in elfgames, I can’t be bad at Elvish, so it’s not a vector for fun, or memorable success. How can I be bad at Elvish in my game? Here’s an untested system.

    Everyone speaks human, called common because humans always insist on centring themselves. You can immediately tell where someone is from by their accent in common. But, if you attempt to speak in someone’s native tongue, you gain a bonus to your reaction roll (usually +1). If you’re not human, you get your native language too, in a dialect (“wood elf”, say). You get language slots equal to 4 plus your Intelligence and Charisma bonuses.

    Every language has four levels of fluency: Simple, daily, confident and fluent. If you speak fluently, you suffer no penalty. But for the others, you must instead mime half, one third and one quarter of the words (respectively) you attempt to say to someone in that language. For each language slot you spend on a language (including common and your native language if you have one), you move up one level: Nothing to Simple, to Daily, to Confident, to Fluent.

    If your intelligence and charisma are 13, and you’re elvish, you might only speak daily Common. It then pays to seek out elvish speakers for complex communication. Or you could choose to be confident in both elvish and common and mime every fourth word in your sentences; everything has a little risk. But if you’re talking to elves, they’re inclined to react well to you.

    Bonus: Related languages. Goblin and orc are like the Spanish and Portuguese: Similar enough to be understood, different enough to be dangerous. You can speak a related language at a level lower than the language you know, but they’re probably pretty strongly opinionated about the similarities between your languages: You take a penalty to reaction rolls if you’re using a related language.

    Anyway, this is the kind of silly language system I want in my games. It feels a bit more like being in a cosmopolitan country where you’re the fool who can’t speak the local tongue, but you’re doing your best. I’d be generous with earning new slots, I think, to compensate for the tomfoolery getting old. But it is present enough that it makes considering language fun.

    Let me know if you try it, or a variation.

    Addendum: One alternative to replacing words with mime (raised by Josh McRowell as being from alternative caveman game, Poetry for Neanderthals, which is in print) involve: providing each level of language with a syllable count. At simple, you can speak only in one syllable words, and daily you can use one or two syllable words, and confident you can use up to three syllable words, and at fluent you can use any number of syllables you wish. However, if you use a word that doesn’t fit your syllable limit, make a reaction roll: You may have made a terrible mistake! This may be more practical in play, than my original idea, but retains the meat of it.

    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: Fight or Fright

    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!

    Fight of Fright is a 30 page game by Alex Marinkovich-Josey with art by Grace Elsenheimer. In it, a group of trick-or-treaters is given the powers of the costumes they wear, to defeat evil terrors, although they risk losing themselves to their costumes.

    You create your characters by picking a kid, a costume and some props, and noting the actions and abilities they provide you. Then, as a group, answer some questions to learn how you’re all linked together. You have 4 dice between 3 linked pools — low numbers fall from your Fight or Fright pool into your Plight pool, making you vulnerable to the power of evil. This mechanic is a neat, catch-all mechanic clearly inspired by Lasers & Feelings, but I love the added pool that functions as both hit points, as a kind of panic saving throw, and also as a pacing mechanism. You move dice between pools using in-game actions, but you roll your pools to fight like your costume or act out of the fear of being a kid, and when you do that it works just like a Forged in the Dark game. And you eat candy to replenish your powers! The rest of the book is refereeing advice — it describes the kind of foes you might encounter (magically animated decorations or other kids taken by the Thrall), describes 3 types of scenes and how to run them, and a few trick or treating locations. The layout is simple, but good. There’s a little line art, but nothing overwhelming. There are no pleasant surprises, but nothing critical that makes the game harder to run.

    The basic rules and character generation here is pretty great for a halloween game. My issue to this is mainly from the referee side, and I have seen this issue time and time again in this post month. Realistically, this is a one-shot game: You’re not playing this long term. It’s a novelty game! And given it says in its text “Running the game…can be a daunting process” it’s frustrating to me that there’s still the expectation that the referee improvises the majority of the adventure, based on a few short suggestions. This should come with a built in module, illustrating how the framework that’s given should work — that way you don’t have to say “I know this is daunting”, which comes across as patronising in my opinion, but rather it comes across as “this is daunting, but we’ll help you”. Don’t make me do your design for you; I refer back to my review of Dead After Dinner. This is a game to play with kids: We already have an exemplar in the form of Mausritter. Kids modules don’t need to be huge, sprawling affairs, but don’t expect referees to spin them up from thin air either.

    Fight or Fright is almost the perfect Halloween one-shot, it just doesn’t give you enough to run straight out of the box. If it had an extra section with an example of a night out, or had a few extra modules, this would be a fun little game to pull out once a year with the kids. As is, if you don’t mind improvising an adventure — or you have a Halloween themed module from another system to run — this is a really fun 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.

  • Critique Navidad: He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More!

    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!

    He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More is a 60 page game by Tom McRedy about the climactic invasion of Normandy in 1944. Wrap your head around this: It’s a WWII hex-crawl based on Wolves Upon The Coast. Right now, having not yet read this book, my mind is reeling: What the hell am I getting myself in for? Let’s dive in and find out what an OSR WWII battle-simulator looks like.

    As the title suggest, in this you play paratroopers, dropped behind enemy lines. Your paratrooper is randomly generated, and are, as soldiers, largely similarly equipped. You can imagine in a WW2 game, a lot of attention is placed on equipment lists, but while they take up space, they are all unique and flavourful, and they are what will set you apart in the absence of classes and spells and what not. The rules are simple, OSR-style rules, roll under your stat, using a number of 6-sided dice equal to the difficulty. Rules for save are always the same, on a 20-sided dice, over a certain number. You want to avoid these, as they’re difficult. It’s hard to hit someone with an attack, as you have to roll greater than 20 on a 20-sided dice, meaning this game is all about stacking modifiers. While gunfire rules are a little more complicated to reflect automatic fire, that complexity is reflected in clever rules about jamming, ricochet and overpenetration. Overall, while this 20 page rulebook is dense, the rules are exactly what you need to run a WW2 game, and no more. This is intended to be a gritty, messy crawl, with fragile people dropping into fearful situations with no recourse.

    The rest of the game is the 40-page referee’s guide. The surprise for me is how dense this game is: You’re playing on a timeline, that goes from 3am to midnight. There are 9 major objectives scattered across the map, 3 settlements, and 4 exits all detailed. There are 11 targets of opportunity: Things that you can achieve that will help your side out, but aren’t primary targets. Just loads of encounters and things to do. You hit the ground in a random place, you could lose your stuff in the air or injure yourself in the landing, or get hit as you parachute to the ground. Then, you still have to find each other when you get there; once you’ve regrouped, you have to find a senior officer who’ll give you new orders. Until then, you’re seeking whatever the nearest objective to your drop site is, and trying to recover vital supply drops. At midnight, the invasion ends, and you compare the player’s achievements with the objectives they achieved, giving them a point score, which is bolstered by gaining decorations and medals, which occur for specific actions, as well as claiming trophies and the like.

    The referee meanwhile is tracking what’s going on throughout the battlefield: Reinforcements are arriving and advancing to assist you, but you don’t know where they are or what they are. Aerial bombardment has no contact with you, but is proceeding to destroy strongpoints, following a certain route that the paratroopers do not appear to have knowledge of. The German counter-attacks are also occurring at specific times and in specific places, matching the timeline provided at the start, which details the allied movements primarily. To do this, the referee needs a working knowledge of the geography of Normandy, of the German presence there, stats, a random encounter table, reaction rolls, and hex fills.

    The referee really leans into the FKR style of play, placing the majority of mechanics and rulings in the hands of the referee. I don’t disagree with this: It feels very appropriate for the topic. But the issue is, the players kind of already have to be super familiar with how to interact with this war-torn world to figure out how to win. An example is that, if you access a radio, you can call in naval fire support to destroy a target; you need to choose which ship is best for your aims, as well. This is all in the referee list, but I’m pretty certain my players, unless told this was a pretty sensible option for large objectives, would be looking for explosives to replicate what they see in modern action movies, by default. They wouldn’t even consider this option.

    All I have to say about He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More is: Wow. I have so many thoughts. This is an absolutely unique work, drawing on a bunch of sources that I don’t think I’ve seen concretely in the OSR realm before. It draws tournament play concepts from the early hobby in a way that I’ve talked about in Dungeon Regular needed to make a comeback (although I wonder if in this case the inspiration is actually war games). It takes the sprawling grand campaign structure of Wolves Upon the Coast, and rather than try to replicate its’ scale, it gives it strict borders and time-constraints. This is a really, really impressive piece of work. I have read the author’s Shot & Splinters, and I planned to review it some time ago, but in my esteem it needs more of the grandeur of Wolves Upon the Coast to work. This however, embraces the constrained nature of its’ subject matter, and revels in it.

    But there are problems, and these are problems that come with the subject matter, but also which I think are eminently solvable. The two major problems are firstly, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t think the players would naturally choose a lot of the options given to them, even though to an expert in historical warfare they’d be intuitive. The first thought is providing them with a “moves” list, but I think that’s a blunt force solution: Rather I think this needs to come with a printed briefing handout, talking through what the paratroopers actually know when they drop, talking about the resources at their disposal and the resources they need to find when they’re in the field. Without something like this, I think anyone not well-versed in WWII history will bounce off this very hard, even if they were interested in playing it. The second problem is the sheer load placed on the referee here. I see this problem in Wolves Upon the Coast as well, and there it’s largely in response to Gearing’s seeming allergy to considering information design and layout in the construction of a complex system. Same goes here. There are two separate timelines in two separate places; put them together for me, the referee. Don’t make me do it myself. Suggest a way to track troop movements on the map, don’t just leave it to people on Discord to sort out. The keying is left up to chance for a reason: This is a game that’s intended to be replayed, I suspect, for high scores. But it doesn’t make it easy to play off the book, because information design and layout is not high on the author’s priority list: It’s hard to find the hex fill you’re after, or the random encounter details you need, or the stat block that’s relevant to the place in question. If my players stumble upon the village of Chef du Pont in D7, I have to go to the town maps document before I discover there’s no town maps, then I search the document for what consists a company of landsers and a landser mortar squad, before finding that landser isn’t defined and having to google it to find it means german soldier, then scrolling to page 23 because it’s not linked to find what a company is which is a lot of things listed in paragraph, with no link to stat blocks, and with reference to the previously defined platoon, which is also listed in paragraph, and I have to refer to. The mortar squad I assume refers to the light mortar squad and not the mortar platoon, and then I go back to infantry profiles on page 22 to find their stats. So I’m talking in this case, 10 people in a squad, times 3 plus 1 for a platoon, and a horse drawn wagon, times 3 plus 1 for a company, plus a machine gun squad, and a headquarters with another 11 people. And I don’t know that they’re going to arrive at Chef du Pont, necessarily. So I’m going to have to do all that math on the fly, and run the game. There’s a better way to lay this all out, so that I can actually run this game. There’s a visual design solution to all of this, involving laying these lists out in a visual grid so I can tick them off as I go, for example. But I don’t want to do that myself, because I’m here to play the game. It’s not the player’s job to design a game for the designer.

    There’s also layout solutions. This is effectively a word documented exported as a PDF, and it has the readability of one. But with section headings, and sidebars, and references, this becomes a whole different ballgame, and something you could literally pick up and play in a long evening. I could see a revised version of this, given to an inventive visual designer interested in information design as well as layout, that would see regular play at plenty of tables, because it fits this unique, non-campaign, but still learning from session to session, semi-competitive slot that almost nothing else in the modern hobby fits in. It’s really unique, roguelike OSR gameplay. But it needs a developmental edit, a proof edit for clarity by someone who doesn’t speak WW2 jargon, and a solid visual and information design revision to achieve that level of ease.

    If someone thought it worth polishing and spending money on, He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More could be the kind of game that inspires many, many other constrained, tournament-style games for a new generation. I’d love to see it do that, or I’d love to see someone take this and run with the concepts to apply them to something else, to make slick, tournament-style old-school games with a modern twist. But right now, it simply makes a promise that it can’t quite fulfil. That promise is super exciting to me, and I’m honestly crushed to see so much potential wasted to the cult of minimalism in TTRPGs.

    That all said, if you’re into WW2 enough to want to run He Ain’t Never Gonna Jump No More (which I am), and you have the time (which I don’t), and you’re willing to solve those design issues yourself, it’s probably only as much work as it would take to run any WOTC adventure book, to be honest, so disregard everything that I just said except for the solutions. This is a damned remarkable game, under all of these problems, and it would be sad if people otherwise interested thought it wasn’t. I love to see these unique games, and He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More certainly stands out of the crowd.

    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: Tea and Toadstools

    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!

    Tea and Toadstools is a 9 page solo journalling game based on the Carta system, by the monomynous Anya. In it, you play a hedgehog in a twill vest who just wants to be left alone, even though the rest of the forest has other ideas. Well, in my case it was a blue dress and apron, because Mrs Rabbit.

    To play Tea and Toadstools, you wander around a board you make out of playing cards, flipping the cards. Whenever you flip a card, you look at the prompt list, and are encouraged to journal if you wish, what happens to hedgehog; each card also has you gain or lose a resource. If you reach your goal card before you run out of resources, you have a good day. If you run out of resources before you get to the goal card, you have a bad day, but you can try again tomorrow. If you’re anything like me, you’re like: “Oh, this is cool. Great”. Luckily, I’m on a day off today, so I get to pull out my playing cards (sadly not the Haakum Playful Animals deck, which I’d kill for) and give it a go. What did I find?

    I’ve written about a bunch of prompt-based games this month, so I won’t harp on about the fact that I want more specificity in my prompts. This game ain’t bad on that criteria, but it’s not excellent by any stretch. I’d love the other animals in the forest to be characterised a little more: What’s Dr Raccoon like? To me, perhaps as a result of not being North American, most of these forest animals have pretty similar stereotypical characterisations, so I have trouble embodying them for the purposes of this game, especially when I need sink my teeth into the events. I’d also really love for gaining or losing resources to be a choice in each prompt: That would put a lot more meat on these bones. Rather than simply losing 2 resources when the crows steal your laundry, make it a choice: Expend 2 resources to get your laundry back, or lose no resources to sacrifice your laundry, and it’ll come back to haunt you later. I feel like adding a second currency than resources, and having the outcome be in the balance of those resources might make the ending more satisfying: Rather than simply not being happy that day, you always find your goal eventually: But at what cost, Mrs Hedgehog, at what cost to your beautiful home?

    This concept of constructing a random board, of never knowing which parts of the deck will show up until they do, is a really clever system full of replayability, and I can see why the author adapted it, but despite it saying that you could choose to play this as a board game, the most significant flaw is that all of the cards are flipped, meaning that while it feels like you’re travelling around hedgehog’s forest, you, the resident of the forest, have no idea what that forest is until you stumble upon it. I feel like it would benefit from some predictability; perhaps that’s a literal map of the forest that the cards are played over, as a second layer of prompts; perhaps that the cards are themed differently — currently the themes are “The Path”, “Botheration”, “Helping Paw”, and “Community”, which I don’t find very helpful at all. I wrote in my review of Foul Play earlier in the month, that a lot of these smaller, card-based games would benefit greatly from having a deck of cards associated with them, simply because it would bring so much more to the table. In this case, simply building your board out of a maze on the back of the cards, like the board game Labyrinth, would add so much to the feeling of exploration. Similarly, somehow being provided some foresight into the spaces around you on the backs of the cards — like them being themed to reflect parts of the forest by suit, but each suit meaning something in terms of likelihood of gaining or losing resource — would add a lot.

    This game has an absurdly cute cover by Ghostcandle, as you can see above, and the interiors are equally cute, filled with forest animals and swirling decorations. These illustrations bring the atmosphere necessary to such a game, although I do feel like a more spacious layout would make it feel less like studying and more like playing. I often struggle with journalling games because they feel like this, and so it’s better for me personally, when they lean away from the wall of text layouts. That said, it’s clear and easy to navigate through, it has useful diagrams for play, and nobody is going to struggle to figure out what’s going on.

    I think for me, Tea and Toadstools is in tension between “I love this theme, and it just sings it both in terms of prompts, choice of system, and art and layout” and “But, if we’d made the prompts more specific, changed the resource mechanism, and added backs to the cards, it would be the best solo game I’ve ever played”. I strongly encourage people who like Peter Rabbit, slightly grumpy coziness and enjoy journalling games, because those specific changes I want aren’t things that are even slightly common in the solo game sphere that I have seen. But wow, does Tea and Toadstools come close to being a solo journalling game I’d actually recommend to someone new to roleplaying games, which has never, ever happened before. It’s so close. I can see the game I want right there on the horizon.

    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: Crank It Up

    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!

    Crank It Up! Is a 6 page game by Patrick Dubuc. In it you’ve been poisoned in your sleep, and the only way to stay alive is to keep your adrenaline pumping. You have to avenge yourself before it’s too late. It’s a Breathless game, but to be honest with the proliferation of SRDs these days, I’m not sure what that means.

    You have two sets of “hit points”, Stress and Adrenaline. Once your stress is maxed out at 5, anything dangerous will kill you. Once your adrenaline is reduced to 1, anything you do can cause stress. The things you do are skill tests. You roll a die of a specific size, and if you roll 5 or more, you succeed, but below that, you have mixed success. If you roll over 12, though, your success is off the charts. The size of this dice goes down as you use that skill a second time, so when you start you’re superhuman, but by the end, you’ve got no strength at all. To reset this skill deterioration, you can catch your breath, at the cost of a new complication being added to the situation, and your adrenaline decreasing. To avoid this, you can use items, which can be used in lieu of skills if they’re low. You have 7 skills, but most of them are small dice to begin with, so you’re going to have to catch your breath pretty often if you don’t spend a lot of time looting. So, you can always loot, which will provide you with some kind of item, probably.

    That’s basically all of the rules; the overall feeling is that this is an action movie (as I haven’t seen Crank, the actual movie upon which this is based), in the style of John Wick or The Raid, where the protagonist is improvising their way through an environment on their way to a specific goal. Honestly, this whole system feels absolutely perfect for making up your own action movie collaboratively, and the adrenaline and stress systems do reflect that “I’m gonna die unless I keep doing ever-more extreme things” dynamic that I believe Crank is about. I do feel a little bit like the actual Crank-iness of this game should be optional, like the optional “heart attack” rule is, and the aim here should be a slightly more generic John Wick, with more options, or they should lean harder into it (by doing things like make the heart attack rule compulsory, and make the scenes more concretely Crank-y). But the rules are damned solid given the theme. I’m impressed that it managed to feel so perfectly action movie, without any of the usual combat crutches we see in roleplaying games: Everyone, this is evidence you can make combat feel fun without it being grid-based and slow.

    However, this is designed as a multiplayer game, which to me, poses a problem: None of the movies that I imagine this system helping replicate the feel of, feature multiple protagonists for any significant part of their runtime. It feels like this should be a two-player game, one for the antagonist and one for the protagonist, to me. I can definitely see it being a two-player game where both players play both protagonist and antagonists, in a dual-stream movie, exchanging roles and scenes — in fact this manner of play would be entirely compatible with the game as it stands. But with 3 or 4 protagonists, I could see it getting messy and held up very quickly, the amount of improvisations and magically appearing loot items starting to strain credulity very, very quickly. But you know what? Even though it says it’s for more than 2 people, you can still just play it with two people. It’ll be great.

    To add icing to this violent cake, the back half of the book is referee assistance; it’s not quite a module for the game, but it effectively is: A series of the kind of scenes you’d find in this kind of movie, in combination with tables for creating characters and weapons and events, and a free expansion which includes a bunch of characters for your game, which together render it very, very easy to run. The one objection you could point at this would be that what they provide you is 9 scenes, after which your movie is over and you’ll never play Crank It Up again, but honestly the structure of the scenes, while not explained at all, is intuitive enough that you could just watch a movie (I see John Wick 3 is on Netflix right now) and transcribe its’ scenes onto a piece of scrap paper.

    What this game isn’t, is a game of explorational agency: You’re on rails, just like the protagonist of an action movie is, following the path provided by the clues to arrive at your destination. Any mystery solving is purely cursory, mood-building or world-building. This is not a game for thinkers, this is for a short burst of explosive imagination. But, I could see this game adapted to make a more exploratory, high-agency play possible.

    Overall, Crank It Up is feels really innovative to me, although that might be my lack of background in Breathless and its progenitor, 2400. The way it makes roleplaying game violence fun in a new way, by handing two very specific kinds of limited narrative control to the players, but asking them to relinquish other kinds of agency in exchange, makes for a really satisfying feeling that totally fits in with the theme. I know there are piles of these small, indie games with clever innovations lost to obscurity on on itch.io, but for now, Crank It Up is the game I know about, and I think it’s pretty cool. If you and your friends want to enjoy a night of reckless violence, Crank It Up is a pretty good way to spend it.

    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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