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.
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 Painted Wastelands is a 147 page setting guide for Old School Essentials with art and story by Tim Molloy, writing by Christopher Willett and layout by Minerva McJanda. The Painted Wasteland describes one small region, a relatively desolate one, in a huge world: You have ascended the mundane existence you once belonged to and ended up here.
It first introduces you to the four main metaplots — setting-spanning hooks to draw the player characters into the world — as well as a table of ways to ascend from our world to theirs. There is a list of other places in the world of the Painted Wastelands outside the wasteland itself, which is about 35 hexes, with brief descriptions, but I imagine if this is a huge success, we can expect them to be expanded in the future.
There are a lot of very cool mechanics scattered throughout the Painted Wastelands, and I’ll go through the stand outs here: You get to learn dreamtongue as you level up, which means when you start you speak as a toddler and only understand 50% of what you hear. Travelling is willing yourself from place to place, so distance and time is relative to your experience and level — a very flavourful subsystem in my opinion, replacing typical travel with something that feels dreamlike. Sleeping is deadly, and far more deadly than travel, with encounters more common resting than travelling, which is neat but potentially very disruptive to play, but a flavourful addition nonetheless. There are a lot of unique monsters, about 50, which are all fully illustrated and pretty compelling. There are two unique B/X classes, both super iconic dreamlands classes, one is a cat! The other, the oneiromancer, has an entire unique spell list. There are a bunch of very detailed and complex magical items and tomes! Currency is on an ectoplasmic standard, which means you can cash it in to smoke it in order to gain XP directly. You can also sell things worth currency for XP, which implies to me that the author plays without XP for murder, although there is XP in the monster stat blocks.
There are 3 major factions and 7 minor ones. These factions are each unique and interesting, however it would only take a little work to make them more immediately gameable. I love having an NPC or two for each faction, but even just doing a Blades in the Dark style 1-2 goals with a clock size associated with each would make them much easier to run. You can very easily do this — like the description says things like “preachers are trying to expand their operations into the Painted Wastelands by baptizing as many folks as possible” which are very easily converted to concrete goals, but my forever refrain is that if something is easy to design, the designer should design it please so I can just play your game. My favourite of course are the mandrill librarians: “A crack team of Librarian bounty hunters roam the wastelands to reclaim these books no matter the cost.”
The Hexcrawl itself has 30 odd populated here’s, with 6 small dungeons scattered throughout, and a few larger locations max. The hex map that headlines this section is an absolute beauty, with each hex displaying its point of interest, and matching the colour and style of the rest of the module. The “start here” hex, as far as first impressions go, is a hell of one: “An albino bat demon is trying to rip a painted skull out of a nearby pile of rocks. The skull is screaming in Dreamtongue. “Help! Help! Won’t someone grant me aid?” This quote was the last part, the hook. I wanted to quote the entire paragraph. The Painted Skull, if you rescue it, is the Morte of the Painted Wastelands — your guide, but muttering in nonsense you can barely understand. The answers to common questions cover the second half of the page, helping to get players started in this weird and currently directionless world, and throughout the book purple skulls indicate that the Painted Skull has something to say about that location. Very cool touch!
The Painted Skull has something to say!
Now, there are a lot of hexes and a lot of locations in this book, but what’s most notable about them is their conceptual density. This is weird, Viriconium-y stuff, an entire region of it. This content doesn’t follow a consistent structure, though, for good or ill. One area is a township and marketplace; another is a dungeon under a melting palace; another is a canyon filled with tourists. The fact that they’re all so different from each other is both befitting of the nature of this weird world, but also means there’s inconsistency which means I’m having to work fairly hard to process it. But, on a location-by-location basis, this is very, very good: A village full of alchemists with advertising, a dungeon where one area is “You have sat in the dream couch and you are now a god”, a solarium floating in the sky. That said, you’re probably also getting a sense for the vibe here: Anachronistic and high-concept weird. This mixes robots and wizards and TV shopping networks in a single location. If you or your table aren’t absolutely signed up for this conceptual melange, I could see you bouncing off it hard. The Painted Wasteland is reminiscent of The Dream Shrine, but writ large, and I could see some people struggling with the Dream Shrine at only 1 or 2 sessions.
That said, every one of these locations is sumptuously illustrated. This is right up there with Ultraviolet Grasslands and Crown of Salt as one of the best illustrated modules I’ve ever seen, and no surprise if you read the story of how this book came to be. The art is as psychedelic as the setting demands, decorations abound in what I suspect is a conlang of the dream speech. The colour choices of Minerva McJanda are bold, port wine and lime green, with a palette of complementary colours, shared with the art palette just enough, but not to the point of redundancy. The choice to exclusively use sans serif and generous spacing stands in contrast to the bright and extreme choices that abound on every page; if the choices has been stronger, it would have rendered a challenging text impossible to read, but it instead grounds it in a simple, modern legibility. I have mountains of admiration for polymaths like Luka Rejec and Tania Herrero, but this shows the strength of a team all dedicated to their individual crafts, working cohesively.
One fascinating and compelling choice that The Painted Wastelands makes is that it’s for Old School Essentials. Luka Rejec attempts for a similar weird, but in bespoke systems. Most of the DIY elfgame weirdness flies down the Troika! funnel, except for the work of Amanda Lee Franck. This takes the approach of lowest common denominator, and to be honest, it works. The thing I like least about Rejec’s work is the Synthetic Dream Machine. Troika! as a system is not for everyone, although there are a few modules for it that deserve to be run. This, anyone can use with no modification. That’s a hell of a selling point. And there are a bunch of modules out there, that you could easily patch into your Painted Wastelands Campaign, like Through Ultan’s Door, and the Dream Shrine, that are often difficult to otherwise incorporate into a broader campaign (at least, until Through Ultan’s Door is complete).
The art, the writing, and the design of the Painted Wastelands is absolutely S-tier, and I recommend it on the grounds of that alone. However, this is not a simple setting, or one easy to run: Gauge your table well, because this is a level of weirdness beyond that of Ultraviolet Grasslands or Troika! It’s an absolute fever-dream, and well outside typical fantasy fare, let alone what is expected of Old School Essentials. And because of the complexity of the locations, this is the kind of book where your players decide where to travel to, and then you call a break while you wrap your head around what to do with a location that’s an alien Bob Dylan at a crossroads. If you want a surrealist acid-trip of a dreamlands setting, that leans harder into dreaminess, the Painted Wastelands is your setting. There’s nowhere better to look than here, and there’s nothing else out there like this at this scale: I can’t imagine you’ll regret having this in your collection, as it’s so beautiful, even if you don’t find the right table to run it.
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!
I just got a gift copy of Dice Forager (or digital) in the mail on Christmas Eve, from my friend Sam Dunnewold, and I’ve woken up before the kids on Christmas morning, so tune in for a bonus issue of Critique Navidad while I bake breakfast croissants. Dice Forager is a 50 page perfect bound colour zine by Sam Dunnewold, host of the exceptional Dice Exploder podcast. It consists some essays, 3 small games, and 4 tiny games. Each of the games (aside from the last 2, which are only half a page each) opens with a 1 page commentary on the game itself, meant to set you up for perspective on the game.
As Sam’s partner states in the introduction, Dice Forager is almost autobiographical, and is certainly a zine about a specific person: Sam Dunnewold. The author’s foreword is laid out like a brief hack of the GM’s advice from Apocalypse World, and encourages you to engage actively and critically in reading (and perhaps playing) the games that follow (I’ll tick off these moves as I go, play along!). The essays that fill the front few pages of the book cover general principles of creation, editing, providing feedback on art and safety. These very short essays really serve to calibrate you to the author’s stance going into the games the make up the majority of the zine. They’re short enough that I don’t think I should recap them, you should read them yourself (Update: Now, you can! Sam has posted them on his blog!): They’re a call for generous and abundant engagement and I do hope that Sam’s thoughts here are reflective of the evolving perspective of the hobby on these topics, because we’d be a better hobby for it.
The first game is Couriers, a Lasers & Feelings hack inspired by the baseline test in Bladerunner 2049. Couriers sets a theme for the zine: These are games that require you to lean into the theme, to really embody your character. The pleasure of Couriers (if pleasure is the right word) is to see the Couriers — they’re the players who are robot cops seeking robots in disguise — slowly embrace or repress their emotions until they either become aberrant themselves or until they’re retired before they do. Mechanically, this is driven by the “emotions” score, which basically represents your robot cop having any feelings, and which is driven up by having things go well, but also the more emotions you have the harder it is to kill. This is a neat gamy Lasers and Feelings spin, that works so long as you don’t think too hard about it, but you could (and I think should have) make it sing more cleanly. You could do this by either dictating what the emotions were —simply because if they’re angry, violent emotions, it shouldn’t translate to less killing in my opinion — or making it a 3-way system like we see in Fight or Fright (I have a review of that upcoming). You can see Sam’s unwritten bias coming into the design there, I suspect, in assuming that the emotions will be passion and art and love and not anger and jealousy and violence. It’s a very melancholy vibe overall, befitting the subject matter, and the aberrant players are well supported in their joint role as game master through a list of missions, that are easy to iterate on. That said, if you’re a table of more than 3 players, there are more aberrant players than couriers, and while I feel like it would thrive with 3, it’s not clear to me how well it would work with a table larger than that; while the right table could make anyone work, I think this is probably best as a referee’s game; this is implied as well by the rule that aberrant players should rotate in as couriers become aberrant.
The baseline test scene is an excellent inspiration for a game in my opinion, but because of its nature, I think the benefits of the structure here are lost: This is a game with a very tight, sub-hour loop, which if it was tackling a different topic, I think would make for an amazing structure for a pick up game. I feel like Couriers desires to be run in a bunch of jobs in a row, each sub-an-hour, and that just ends up being a few hours after all. Would love to see this direction applied to a more pick up and play premise. Overall though, this is a very cool game, and one that has a lot of potential if it were expanded, particularly if the conceptual space was expanded to embrace a recognition of the directions aberrance could take you. If you’re interested in exploring humanisation and dehumanisation in a cyberpunk future, this is good place to start.
The second game is Windfall, a larp set in the town Sam grew up in (also the setting of Northfield, making it perhaps the most designed about game in Minnesota). The concept leverages my having to travel 15 000 kilometres to play the game pretty well: By using the physical space and the locations of the town as cues for gameplay, the pacing on this otherwise fairly predictable journey is pretty fantastic, and as Sam observed the physical space prompts the roleplay in a way that imagined space cannot. Sam brings his concept of calibration into this game, concealing it in in-character phrasing “Did you hear the cops?”. The main drama in the game is held in the secret prompts, which encourages each player to engage with each other in varied and surprising ways. One of the big secrets is tied directly into the characters utilising the hidden calibration tools, and competing over their application, both disguising the admission of discomfort by players (perhaps a mistake?), but also yielding narrative impact from the application of calibration. It’s very neat. Once you’ve taken the plunge and actually “been arrested”, you begin playing a parallel game, reminiscing about what could have been, your incorrect memories contrasting with the actual events occurring as your companions all play. I’m not sure how this split works in practice — do the arrested players hang out separately? This feels like a lovely solution, albeit perhaps impractical in small groups: Perhaps an example of play would go well here, where the activity of play diverges from the expected. All in all, a lovely little game. Practically, though: Even at only 8 pages of rules, it’s kind of too many to play in the way this game wants to be played. You’d kind of need a facilitator, to be sitting in the car and reading out paragraphs then prompting everyone. While I think the format of large scale site-specific larp is really, really clever, I think the rules need to fit on something the size of an index card, or each player be handed a little A6 zine to flick to different pages in as they reach different locations, for this to work. The traditional format of “zine-based game” doesn’t cohere with the game itself, for me. Because of that, it feels far more theoretical to me than the other two games; more of a game to be considered than played, even though theoretically it could be. I do think, though, that a version of this that came in a set of playbooks for each of the characters, that walked them through the rules as it became relevant, would be actually playable. I’d definitely do this in my hometown we’re I ever to venture back, as the walk from Main Beach to the Lighthouse there is almost exactly 4.5 miles, and there are some nice spots to pause on along that route. Overall, this one has a lot of potential, and I’d love to see more of these pseudo-autobiographical games being published.
The third game is Space Fam Mini. Of the three games included, this is the only one that feels strongly like an indie story game, in terms of its structure, pacing and mechanics. You create characters defined by their fears, you draw a ship together and then embellish and mark it up as you go through your scenes, As you go, you might gain beliefs, guilt, or camaraderie. Beliefs move your space fam towards endgame, camaraderie helps succeed on jobs, and guilt propels you towards your end. You play through a menu of scenes, like a simplified Firebrands-like game, until you’re out of scenes or your beliefs outweigh your fears. Perhaps there’s joy in building this crew and ship and world from scratch, but honestly, I think Space Fam Mini would be best if it leant right into its inspirations, rather than be coy about them. Be more like Arcane Academia, for example: Reclaim it. Give us a ship blueprint already, to mark up. Make those scenes detailed, more evocative. Make it feel real. Give us pregenerated characters, not just a menu of sparks. The prompts are hefty — they need to be for the ideal table of 5 — but they could be absolute fire. You know what property this is inspired by, if you’re choosing this game as a game to play. Lean into it. I don’t think games benefit from “it’s a little bit like this and a little bit like that”. I want more “it’s this, my bespoke universe of space cowboys and found family, make it your own”. You know we will make it our own, we do that with canon-infested properties like Star Wars. We can do it with your bespoke little world, I just want to see it. You might be familiar with Space Fam (not mini), which was also published this year — the reason Sam says he chose to publish this as well, was because “This version has something to say, even if I think that thing contains a lie.Which is better? I don’t know.” Now, while Sam has for reasons I understand chosen to avoid the most obvious comparison to Space Fam (and for good reason), the untruth it tells is the basically the mechanism by which the game ends. It’s not really a game about those other mentioned inspirations, in my opinion, although you could twist it to be. The Space Fam becomes superheroes for the oppressed, is the story. Now, this is a Hollywood falsehood, and it’s true that it doesn’t speak to the reality of activism or of end stage capitalism, but I don’t think there’s need to be embarrassed about the desire for simplicity that this ending displays. It does provide a neat bow for your experience, which is not something I dislike, but it does ring falsely if it were intended to reflect reality, but unlike stories, reality is rarely a satisfying or coherent narrative experience. I don’t think this game suffers for the potentially saccharine ending, although again, it does reflect Sam’s biases that he thinks it does. Without that, we simply need someone to make sci-fi Stewpot, instead of this game.
The fourth game is This Heart Within Me Burns, an exploration of what it’s like to have one of your family change due to illness. This is a Descended From The Queen game, 5 pages including all the card prompts, of which there are 28. The twist is that the “Queen” — here a close companion plagued with a chronic illness-like terminal curse — is played by someone at the table, and that the game is focused on what happens to everyone in that characters lives when they are finally healed. I have written extensively recently about prompts in prompt-based games, and I stand by my stance that they need to be concrete: These are not, and I wish they spoke more about was the curse was, what the world around the adventurers is like, and who the Empty Goddess who drives the gameplay is. But, unlike most prompts, to me, someone who has been very unwell, and gone through hospitalisation and near death and the chronic illness that comes with successful medical treatment, these prompts scream lived experience. But the goal of fantasy in this case, to me, is to make things more powerful through using metaphor and magnification to make more powerful the message. I think that it would do a better job of showing what it was like to be the person in hospital, not the one visiting, as Sam says is part of the intent, if it used the fantasy as a magnifying glass to make the truths here more visible, a little more. I think this is a fascinating game, that doesn’t go far enough to achieve its goals.
The last three games are experiments, basically. I’m not going to go much further than that. Two of them are available on Sam’s itch.io page: I’ll you guess which two. Experience them for yourself, if the first 4 games appealed to you. Layout here is elegant, simple and uses colour well. It’s no-art. You’ll never get lost in this book, but the layout’s goal is to get out of the way: It succeeds.
Dice Forager reminds me of the stuff being put out at the dawn of the itch.io TTRPG community back in 2018 or so. Personal, witty, and clever. But also (and by intent, I think) experimental, incomplete, half-thoughts or older drafts. These are yearnings published as games, but all of them will get you thinking if you’re into game design, and I personally think we need more essays, self-reflections (shout out to the Disc 2 Jam) and half-finished games out there. If you wish you’d been around in the era of Anti-sisyphus and Games for the Missing and Found, you can get a taste of that here. Be under no preconceptions, though: You’re picking up, if not unfinished work, work that reaches about half-way to you, that aims to get you to reach back in your own designs. The goal is as much to make you think about what games can be and say and how they do that, rather than provide you a product or content. This isn’t what I look for in my regular gaming life, but rather appeals to me as someone who thinks about games too much; if that’s not you, Dice Forager may not be for you. If it is, pick it up (either print or digital) and see what you discover.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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