You know how sometimes, in a module, there’s a guard who’ll let you through if you know he likes pizza from that one place? But there’s no way to know? Or there’s a door that opens if you walk around it three times clockwise, but there’s no way to find that out? I call them forsaken easter eggs, and they’re the worst.
Every piece of information in a module is either referee-facing or player-facing. Player-facing information is anything that the player can reasonably find out through interacting with the world in play. Referee-facing information is anything they the player’s can’t reasonably find out through interacting with the world in play.
There’s a place for referee-facing information in modules, and they all sit under one umbrella: Their goal is to make help the referee better run the module. If something is referee facing and doesn’t serve the goal of helping the referee better run the module, what is the information for? Forsaken easter eggs do not help the referee better run the module, but they are referee-facing rather than player-facing. They’re easter eggs, because they’re a secret message, and they’re forsaken, because they’re the one so well hidden that they’ll never be found by the kids on the hunt.
Another Bug Hunt, Tuesday Knight Games
An excellent example of referee-facing information that helps the referee better run the module, is the time-line. The timeline helps the referee understand the overall situation surrounding the module, particularly when it’s complicated. It helps the referee maintain the cohesive world for the players. I think Another Bug Hunt (above) is an exceptional one, which literally displays the two types of information on one page.
Three granite minotaur statues stand around the room. Dust is thick in the air and on all surfaces. To left of the central minotaur statue, there is a square where the dust is less thick. Hidden: The central minotaur statue moves, to allow entry to a secret exit.
This is an example of player-facing information. It is possible for the players to figure out there is a secret door to the next area, even though the information isn’t obvious.
A granite minotaur blocks the entrance, blocking the exit completely. It will move aside if offered a glass of milk.
This is an example of a forsaken easter egg. The glass of milk is entirely referee-facing, and there’s no indication that the glass of milk is going to impact the granite minotaur. It’s a blind guess to get through the exit. The only way for them to find out about the milk otherwise is for the referee to intercede somehow by modifying the module or just telling the players (whether in or out of character), and that is, in my consideration, not good design. It’s easily fixed by adding a clue elsewhere, but also milk is a bad choice here because it’s inherently random. Let’s try to fix it:
A granite minotaur bearing a massive splitting axe blocks the entrance. It blocks the exit completely, but will only attack if attacked. If it is offered a block of wood, it will step away to split the axe.
Simply by adding a clue — the minotaur has a splitting axe, which is a type of axe used only for splitting wood — you’ve improved the quality of the encounter. But we can make it more obvious:
A granite minotaur bearing a massive splitting axe blocks the entrance. It blocks the exit completely, but will only attack if attacked. If it is offered a block of wood, it will step away to split the axe. Hidden: There are wood blocks in the forest in 4B, already felled by the granite minotaur there.
The truth is, making the clue very obvious by adding a second minotaur that’s associated with wood chopping, and having a stack of logs available for the minotaur to chop, isn’t actually too heavy-handed in my opinion. Players are being overloaded with information in a roleplaying game session, and separating clues by room can often itself be a huge barrier. But now we have 3 vectors into solving the problem, all of which are immediately visible to the players. But, there’s another option.
A granite minotaur blocks the entrance, blocking the exit completely. The minotaur misses his mother, desperately. It will abandon its post if reminded of her; it will be driven to anger if she is threatened or aggrieved. Hidden: The minotaur’s mother is the medusa Shallax imprisoned in 4B.
By describing the minotaur’s emotional status and relationships, the description, it transforms it from player-facing to referee-facing, and helps the referee better run the module.
Let’s summarise, then. To prevent forsaken easter eggs, we need to make sure that each piece of description either:
Provides the referee help to better run the module or
Is reasonably learnable by the player characters in-world without the referee interceding.
If you find a piece of description that isn’t reasonably learnable by the player characters in world and doesn’t help the referee better run the module, you can fix that by:
Giving the solution a logical connection to the description as a clue.
Adding an immediate clue inside the description.
Adding analogous clue elsewhere in the dungeon.
Use multiple clues (either of the same type or different types) to make it more obvious.
Redesign the description so that it helps the referee better run the module.
I hope that helps next time you’re designing a module or adventuring location.
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!
Arcane Academia is a 48 page game by Tomas Herbertson, author of the exceptional Celestial Bodies, Orbital Mechanics. It turns out I’d backed the crowdfunding campaign for this, but hadn’t gotten around to looking at it until it was offered for Critique Navidad. Let’s dig in to this GM-less adaptation of the Franchise-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!
It’s interesting what Herbertson’s ordering choices says about the subject matter and about the priorities of the design. We open with two pages on safety and principles. This is a game about the complexities of relationships and the wonder of magic through childlike eyes, it says: To enjoy this, we need to care for the people at the table playing. I think this shows a strong awareness of the sensitivity of the subject matter: The majority of people coming to this, are coming to it through the works of a certain bigot, and most people have very complicated feelings about that property. Starting with safety firstly acknowledges that the players reading this book know what they’re getting themselves in for genre and theme-wise, but secondly acknowledges that they’re entering emotionally fraught territory where childhood nostalgia and attachment might meet modern day danger and trauma.
The approach to the rules is systematic, but in a way I personally find challenging. It takes a “define terms and then how to use them” approach, which I know is ideal for many people’s brains, but is not ideal for me at all. I prefer terms to be parcelled out as the rules are given, as I find it challenging to hold terms in my head untethered to any specific use cases. But there are only 13 items to remember; it’s not a huge ask I think for most people. The main issue for me, as that it proceeds to character creation — which makes sense, that’s the order you play the game in — but it means I’m going to forget those meanings by the time we get to playing the game. I can’t help but think that for me, this would be improved by play aids, given how we progress, rather than the open-ended system of index cards that Arcane Academia uses.
I love the character creation, though. Your traits give you relational questions to the players around you, as well as points in attributes to provide you strengths and weaknesses, and once all of that is done (probably ten minutes), you describe the character you’ve created in a single sentence. Neat, flavourful, well supported. Excellent. Then you create the reference deck, effectively the school you’re learning magic in, consisting locations, instructors and peers. A small cast and set to work with. I’d like as much support here as the player character creation is given, as in my experience people know who they want to play, but have more trouble articulating the people in the world around them and the places they’re in, when creating this kind of shared world.
The gameplay is proceduralised through the in-world daily timetable, making this a slice-of-life game by default. This is a neat way of aligning things, placing the players in a mixed stance of metagame, authorial and in-character at all times. This procedure is effectively three separate sets of 5 minigames with different themes, separated by debriefing time and free play. At the end of the day you debrief, you build more references from your experiences of the day, and you repeat.
It’s difficult to talk about Arcane Academia without talking about the minigames that drive so much of the play, but the constraint of Critique Navidad is that my time is somewhat limited. In terms of minigames, some are a lot of fun, and I’m excited to try them: Herbal Lore involves real-world cooking, but describing the experience as if it were a potions class. Clash of Wills is a very fun boasting competition. Mystery Investigation explores the rumours in a flavourful, adventuresome way. These minigames just work. I think most of them do, even if some struggle to extend themselves beyond the format that Firebrands set for minigame-based TTRPGs almost 10 years ago.
But, some of them, despite being excellent ideas, I think I and my friends would struggle to play in practice. A good example of this is Theory and Application, where one player has to wing a magical lecture on some topic, and the others have to ask questions on it while passing each other notes, with the goal of creating a rumour which can be added to the reference deck at the end of the day. With such minimal support for an entire lecture, and an unclear amount of time for the “timer” to go off in (I’d go for 10 minutes based on other minigames, but it isn’t stated), I think we’d fumble this game, despite a startling amount of verisimilitude for the experience of being a student in a boring lecture, and the interaction between lecturer and student in these circumstances.
This system as a whole is a cool, self-perpetuating campaign system, which can continue as long as you choose. But, I think there would be a benefit to including support for breaks between years, or time skips, or ending a campaign. The rules here, while robust, feel like they fall short on the promise of one of a year-long adventure, simply by the daily structure of the procedure. Now, I will freely admit, there are no restrictions in these rules on time skipping, or anything I’ve mentioned. It’s just implied by the framing of the school day, that it’s all over one day, continuing in an unending loop. If a round takes 1–4 hours, as is implied, that feels feasible that you might spread it over a week or semester or year, and you could bend the implications to do so. I’d love a little support in doing so, though.
The layout here is simple, but clear. The art by Annie Johnson-Glick is not centre stage, but rather the games are. I like how headings have preserved space here, although I do wish minigames opened on a consistent spot in the spread, and art was used to break up the gaps a little, just for ease of navigation. Lots of small touches are really useful, like icons unique to each game marking those headings.
Overall, this is a joyful game, which would be a lot of fun to play if your table has fond memories of wizarding schools. The minigames are largely strong, although a few rely on improvisational prowess many tables won’t have, and you might need to remove those or warn your table of their existence before play. I wish it had a framework for longer term play, as well, as I feel the subject matter begs for it. But gosh, there’s a lot of fun to be had even in a one-shot of Arcane Academia, and there’s a lot of interesting directions to take it, like further sessions featuring peers rather than the original cast.
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!
Dead After Dinner is a game of familial drama inspired by movies like Clue, Murder on the Orient Express, and Knives Out, by Jenn Martin. I’ll get back to this, but that lineage made me feel like it might be a murder mystery and familial drama game, but it doesn’t turn out to quite be that. It’s a Descended From the Queen game, so that link is to a deck of physical cards.
This was the second game I was offered as part of Critique Navidad, and immediately…how do I review a deck of cards? Obviously, any Descended from the Queen game has rules, they’re just hidden in the cards themselves, and the prompts are as much a part of the game as the rules themselves. The difficulty, though, is that because Storysynth runs things for you, the rules there are different than the rules of the deck. Ok, reframe, this ain’t so hard. Get yourself together. I chose to review the deck.
Drawing through one of 8 decks with different backings, each player is assigned a random character at the dinner, and provided a resentment rating representing how they feel about their family and the patriarch at its head. The final scene and deck is where the detective questions the family and a murderer is revealed. Most of these phases change in size depending on the players, so the cards you draw will be somewhat unique to your play through, although it’s a small set to randomise from.
These phases are super clever, and both make Dead After Dinner just work, and also are the major way they depart from their source material. You see, in the source material, you start at the end: It’s all phase 7, where the detective arrives. All of the other information is unreliable, coming from the lies and stories the family tells. In Dead After Dinner, the family is telling their own truths, and the actual murderer is the one revealed at the end to have actually done the deed. If you come at this from the perspective of wanting a compelling murder mystery, this story structure isn’t going to satisfy you. Instead, Dead After Dinner wants to use the conceit of a murder mystery, to tell the story of a broken and dysfunctional family. You’re all telling your truths, your perspectives on each other and on the patriarch that your fortunes depend on. This is a drama, first and foremost. For me, that was a disappointing realisation, but it may not be for you. I think if you’re embracing this kind of genre, leaning into the unreliability of the narration, making chances around confounding other player’s stories, and running things out of chronological order, are all to a degree an essential part of the experience, and I’d like to see how prompts could be used to build an internal truth and support a story that presents the alternate truth you present to the world and family.
That said, the final set of prompts — the ones framed as the detective getting involved — are all positioned to reframe your past decisions as lies. That’s cool, but I feel a little backwards to the genre. The other prompts — most of them — are fairly typical of what appear in these prompt-based games, and follow the typical structure, effectively “What’s this thing? Who does it impact” in variations. They’re fine, I think, if they’re what you’re looking for in prompts. They simply aren’t, for me. They’re not structured enough. I’m trying to think, because both this and the previous game I reviewed were prompt-based, why I don’t feel like the prompts give the players enough to improvise a story from. I think in this case they rely altogether too much on our collective memory of, say, Knives Out, to be effective. I’m reminded of Alex’s uncharitably titled article, F**k You Design:
It will incite the reader to follow the fiction and use their imagination. Naturally, why else do we play if not do just that? To those who ask, but how do I situate these question in the fiction? What am I meant to imagine here? These are difficult game design questions, and this design proclaims: F**k you, figure it out.
I cannot help but think that the fact that a Descended from the Queen game is a deck of cards costing no small amount of money brings a desire for replayability, and the desire is being interpreted by the designers of these games as a need for vagueness, a reluctance to proclaim “Want to make Knives Out? Imagine this!”. But Knives Out, Clue and its ilk are as much the set design, the casting, the opulence of the mega-rich and those that surround them as they are the family dramatics that emerge from them. I do not think that the playability would be decreased by drenching the prompts in set design and charming and specifics. I want that: I think these are difficult design questions that there is a tradition of designers turning back on the players of their games in prompt-based games.
I’ll interrupt a moment to flag a safety choice that I find a little perplexing. Early in the deck, you’re told that being the murderer is opt-in. This feels to be presented as a safety choice, given its proximity to the x-card in the introduction. This surprised me, of course, because it raises the possibility of there being no murderer, and the question of how to resolve that. However, when you reach the end, we find out that if everyone opts out, everyone is the killer. As a safety rule, that feels profoundly unkind (although as a genre choice it’s fitting), and I don’t think in the context of safety it should be left to the end to reveal, as it is. This is a case where the gradual drip of rules through cards causes a problem, in my opinion.
Dead After Dinner isn’t exactly what I expected from the description, but it’s an interesting few hours to spend a night if you love nasty family dynamics. If your table has trouble improvising things whole cloth, though, this isn’t the game for you, unless you’re going to accompany it with a murder mystery viewing party to get everyone immersed in the absurdity of the imaginary worlds of Christie and Johnson. Now that I know what it is, I could see some really interesting approaches to it: I could see a series of games with the same charters modelled after Succession, for example. Really cool stuff, but it’s important to realise before bringing it to the table that the real juice here is in the drama, and not the murder.
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!
Necromancer Heretic is a 26 page solo journaling game by Junk Food Games. In it, you’re a gay sorcerer trying to bring your lover back from the dead, after he was executed by the king, while avoiding the Void Guard who seek to end you.
I love the weird, sci-fantasy vibes that Necromancer Heretic brings in its very first page. It’s immediately vibrant, queer, and evocative in a way that’s compelling to me. But, the nature of card-based prompts — prompt based games in general — means that this vibrancy doesn’t carry over to the prompts that follow. There is only one, really, that does, “For a moment, you feel a connection with the dark god, Noct. What do they say?”, and that one isn’t all new, as it refers to a rule that has already been mentioned. I’d love for these prompts to offer hyperdiegesis, as I always feel that journaling games rely on my own internal drive more than I want them to, and this solo game in particular has such a compelling offering I’d love a little more scaffolding in inhabiting it.
The mechanics are basically a game of Blackjack where you’re playing against 3 others, but drawing their hands yourself. They damage you when they’re beating you, but they “break” when they go above 21 (as does yours), and you get 1 point — one step towards the 5 you need to resurrect your lover-Prince — if you get 21. These rules, and the layout of the cards on the table, is quite elegantly visualised. It’s easy to figure out how to play the game, and I just finished a day of work, and am reading this while putting the kids through their routine. The “how to play” is only 2 pages long, however due to the nature of the rules on the second page, it’s a little challenging to remember them. I think they’d be better folded into the phases where they’d take place, in my opinion. There’s a lot of depth to the rules of the card game, in addition to the special necrotic powers, with each suit having unique uses and strengths. All of this is flavourful, tactical, and brings surprising depth to a solo card game. I like them, a lot.
But, so far, I’ve described an interesting solo card game, where’s the journaling? Well, at the end of each turn of the game, you draw a card, and consult a prompts list which varies based on what occurs during the round of card play: past, present or future. This results in a really interesting feeling of flitting about the timeline, and making decisions about your future before your present or past, and then actively having unexpected information inform your choices.
Necromancer Heretic has a really striking, readable, pink, green and black layout. Font choices are simple, and not overwhelming. Art is by Charlie Ferguson-Avery, and is absolutely perfect for the subject matter. The visualisations are great. In digital, it’s excellent, and I suspect it would translate well to print as well, although it’d be an ink-heavy print, and I suspect it would bleed a little and lose its crispness because of that. It’s perfect for a riso print, though.
Overall, this was a very pleasant surprise to find under the Christmas tree! Necromancer Heretic is an interesting card game, has some fun prompts, and has a compelling set up. It’s a cool, queer romance game with a tactical component and a unique and striking aesthetic. What’s not to love?
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.
Saving Saxham is a 20 page module for Cairn, written and illustrated by Joseph R Lewis. This is classic module design, with a small town, a dungeon and a wilderness, set in a dismal forest filled with fairy and undead, pitching itself against such old school classics as Against the Cult of the Reptile God and popular modern fare like Beast of Borgenwold. This was a comp copy provided by the author, of the remastered version, but you get that for free with the older version, which it turns out I’d already purchased at some point. C’est la vie.
As ever, Lewis’ writing is succinct and evocative, although rarely beautiful. While don’t adore the bullet pointed style, which is akin to the one used in Tomb of the Primate Priest, expanding it out to a larger scale means packing a huge amount of bang for your page for page buck, which nobody can argue is a bad thing. And, while it’s rarely beautiful, I can’t say in honestly, whatever my preferences for prose, that a more florid version of “A wolf-sized mutant rat, covered in normal rats” would be any better a description than it already is. for the balance Lewis is aiming for between function and aesthetics, here he walks the tightrope, I think, even if I personally prefer the tension to favour aesthetics.
The same writing choices mean that the simplistic layout choices, which to me feel inspired by early TSR modules, are far more effective than it appears they should be. Honestly, the layout and writing work together in a hell of a feat: Only once in the module does a location not fill either a page or a column. This is very, very easy to read, and very easy to run. The only criticism of such densely packed pages is navigational, but smart uses of headings, highlighting and decoration make navigation a breeze, and the general aesthetic choices here suit Lewis’ crisp art style far better than in Tomb. Nothing flashy is going on here in terms of layout, but it’s functional.
The first page and a half are timeline and set up. There’s an interesting preference that I’m seeing, that everything in a module must be interdependent and related to the core story, in recent releases. I don’t hate that inclination — I can understand why seems a stretch to some that there could be ten different unrelated things going on in a small town. But Saving Saxham’s approach, at the end of the timeline, runs contrary to that, in a way I like: “Also, there are several goblin thieves in the area. And two elves hunting the goblins. And some angry pixies, too. Not to mention all the rats.” These small additions make the world feel more real, and less like a clockwork, Christopher Nolan movie. I like the loose ends. I also like the simplicity of the timeline, and how it folds regular events in seamlessly. Clever stuff.
The second interesting thing about Saving Saxham in this introductory section is the Catch (Spoilers): That is, that actually the “curse” is a blessing. If the heroes do nothing, the ghost is released from this realm, the villagers are returned to life, the forest recovers, and everyone lives happily ever after. I’ve mixed feelings on this: There’s a decent chance, on one hand, that it could be a downer if the heroes don’t figure this out before they make a decision that causes things to be worse. But on the other, I love the subversion here, and it makes me smile. I’d consider the makeup of your table, though, before running it.
I don’t subscribe to Gearing’s “You have been lied to” manifesto against hooks, but I can’t say I feel these hooks are strong for me. I prefer hooks with juicier worms that provide solid basis for interaction, and preferable give the players a bias coming in that means you can nudge the module in different directions. Here, some better hooks would be for the child to directly ask them for help with missing family, for a local vicar to ask them for aid ending the curse mentioned in the introduction, or for them to be hired as rat catchers or goblin hunters, specifically for those subplots. That way, you’re linking the players into certain threads for them to pull if they wish, giving them a clear direction if they arrive and don’t know where to go. These hooks feature a bunch of dialogue (an approach I love), which means I think space for hooks with juicier worms were available.
The rumours here are interesting, and well placed. As you arrive in town, there’s a meeting taking place, and this conversation is the source of the rumours. I like the confused villagers being the source of the rumours, but why aren’t they suspicious of the strangers? It makes for an easy introduction, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And it definitely doesn’t make sense they’d suspect the ghost in the cemetery, among other rumours they provide, at this point. I feel a little bit like the rumours here are forced in. This is the negative consequence of the intriguing setup, for me: An astute player might begin to question what’s going on, based on these rumours and the open arms, rather than the actual mystery. An even cleverer thing to do if you’d anticipated this, would be to make the fact that they are so open to you, or the strangeness of the rumours, and make them a part of the curse or story.
The woods are interesting, though, more interesting to be honest, than the curse of Saxham. Here we have 5 factions, each petitioning the player characters for aid against the others. It gets complicated, but in interesting ways (spoilers again): The elves will kill the goblins or humans, the pixies want to end the blight and blame the goblins and elves, the goblins want to steal treasure, the skeleton want to kill both goblins and elves, and the ghost wants to save the humans but is causing the blight to do so. It’s complicated enough that I think it would have been worth explicating it in the introduction, so that the referee doesn’t have to piece it together themselves; it took me a while to figure it out. But it leaves the players in a hell of a conundrum: Effectively, there are two factions at odds with one another for doing the right thing, and three interfering with them, and potentially at odds with those two. It’s a very neat set-up. Except, it’s not clear how much of that is explicit, particularly around the ancillary factions. If you just take the pixies and ghost, we get what’s going on. But that the elves will kill the humans in their grove if aided against the goblins? They’re unlikely to tell the human player characters that. And while the goblins are presented as “unlovely”, and are thieves, they don’t appear to be intrinsically bad at all, and I could imagine a lot of players siding with them as underdogs, putting them at odds with the pixies and the elves if they encountered them first. If I was winging these conversations, there’s a decent chance I’d make a mess of them; I think a little more guidance would be useful for the referee, but also a little more opportunity for the players to figure out how to find out their intentions. But it’s a very fun melting pot.
The random encounters, though, I find a little perplexing. A few of them tie in pleasingly — the pixie and the ichor, the naked villagers. Most are connected to the blight, but I think the players would need a more direct connection to understand that. Given the cemetery is associated with green light and ichor, I’d add these aspects to these blighted encounters, to make it a little clearer what they referenced. I don’t feel like subtlety is your friend in such a short module. In a larger module you’d build up the clues over time and so the subtlety won’t cause things to be missed. These encounters should be hitting you over the head with a hammer, I think, but it’s easily fixed.
This module is so tightly tuned to fit its’ space, that I suspect that it’s been edited to the bone already, but one thing I’d like a little more is that some of the odd characters be given a little more meat. This is personal preference: Definitely all the factions are given leaders with short descriptions, agendas and things they can provide the party: That’s enough to run on. But I’d love to know a little more about the villagers (we only get two detailed, and neither of them is the one we’re given a hook for), so that it’s less effort to make the player characters care about the village. I feel like not giving the rat king a personality and an agenda in all this is a missed opportunity, especially given it’s very reasonable for the rats to be occupying this village, and personifying them introduces a hard choice once you realise that the villagers are actually the invaders here. That could make for a more interesting faction interaction in my opinion than the goblins or elves. The elves could have slightly different personalities, just as the goblins do, as in general, I feel it’s a little easier to be attached to any faction if you’re given two characters with a relationship to care about, rather than one in isolation. Saving Saxham gives you just enough to run, but not enough to luxuriate in the characters and factions.
I think Saving Saxham is my favourite of Lewis’ modules I’ve read to date. I shouldn’t be surprised: It takes the strengths of Tomb of the Primate Priests, and expands them out to a larger scale. The faction interactions here are super juicy, and unlike Raiding the Obsidian Keep, which felt designed for 5th edition rather than OSE, Saving Saxham feels designed for Cairn. It’s interesting, because I’m quite an advocate for generic modules in general, as I feel modules are really what elf gamers are here for, but Saving Saxham is an argument for specificity I think. It feels like it would suit every Cairn table I’ve played at.
While I think Saving Saxham would benefit from even more expansion, it is something I’d very happily bring to my table, and we’d get 2 or 3 very enjoyable sessions, the players would get to make some very tough decisions, interact with some undead and some fairies, and possibly save some lives. If your table enjoys faction play more than combat focused or puzzle play, they like tough decisions, and you’re confident enough to wing polishing up those characters (or doing a little prep to the end), Saving Saxham is a great choice to add to your campaign.
It’s Blog Friday (Cyber Blogday?), so I thought I’d talk about gold and why I hate it.
In the medieval period the main currency was the gold nomisma, about 5 grams of pure gold, and in the early modern period the sovereign was about 15 grams (this is all according to wikipedia, I ain’t no expert). That means the average full time working person in my country would be earning about 3 sovereign per week, before tax. You know what I have almost never in my life carried around in my purse? A whole week’s wages. From the PHB ‘24 (it was handy because I reviewed it the other week), a violin costs 30 GP, which is about $21 000. A bucket cost 5CP, or $35. A week’s food cost 5SP, which is $350, which is even absurd in the current economic climate. A single beer costs $30. I know it’s a game, and game economies aren’t supposed to be realistic, but all of this is patently absurd.
The solution, aside from “fix the equipment prices”, I think is pretty simple. Silver coins, which have been the standard coin for about 500 years for actual use. There were about 20 shillings (or, apparently testoons which is a term I love) to the pound (the sovereign technically wasn’t the name of the currency, a sovereign was worth 1 pound), so a shilling is worth about 5CP or half an SP in D&D speak. So a beer is about a shilling. A violin is about 4000 shillings — still a lot, but…
Says Bing
…it’s in the ball park. Now, does comparing to capitalistic hell pricing make sense for an elfgame? Of course not. But what I really want is an economy that makes sense to me, so I understand the kind of cash involved in what is essentially a game of theft. Now, I can say, keeping in mind there were 12 (sigh) pennies to a shilling, that a penny is worth about $3. And I can totally wing daily expenses by that.
So, to keep things neater let’s call a penny $4, a shilling $40, and a sovereign $800. A shilling was about 5g — silver is lighter than gold — so a purse full of silver is only about 100 grams. But a small chest full of silver, about a foot in length, would fit about 20 000 shillings, which is about a metric ton.
[I’m not a math girl, but: Shilling is 23.5 mm * 1.2 mm, so shilling volume is π * (1.175 cm)^2 * 0.12 cm height ≈ 0.52 cm³. Chest: 30 cm * 20 cm * 15 cm = 9000 cm³, so 9,000 cm³ / 0.52 cm³ per shilling ≈ 17,307 shillings. A shilling is 5g: 5 * 17307 = 86 535g, 87.5kg or the roughly weight of the average adult male. Nobody’s carrying that comfortably.
Nobody’s carrying a chest full of sovereigns, though, if they’re the same size (they weren’t), it weighs 260kg for a small chest. That’s the same as grand piano or a polar bear, in a chest I can fit in my arms. And look, let’s say that in real life (because of air and friction and whatnot) half that number of coins fits in a chest. That’s still incredibly heavy, in fact a half full chest of silver shillings would be the average 1 repetition max for deadlift for women.
Anyway, based on that, to polish off a silly post, here’s the entire creative commons D&D equipment list, adjusted for real life money and for my imaginary currency:
I can’t figure out how to actually make a table in WordPress from the Excel document I used to convert it, so here’s a screenshot.
I didn’t actually do any price rationalising here, I just literally converted based on the formula I mentioned above. You can see how weird and gamey some of the prices are, though, huh?
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.
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.
When in Rome is a 23 page module for Mothership by Chris Airiau, with illustration by Brandon Yu and Carly AF. In it, to escape your corporate indenture, you need to steal a few items from an abandoned space station to power your stolen ship, but it turns out that the corporation has been experimenting with dangerous beasts that you have to get past to assure your escape. I got a comp copy as a surprise when I reached out to creators about Mothership Month.
I’m going to start with theme: It’s impeccably satirising capitalism here. Not even trying to be subtle, but it works. Mothership always shines when it’s placing the spotlight primarily on the horrors of capitalism; it’s a world where you play the working class and your blood keeps the incompetent rich aloft. It’s a satire that maybe cuts too deep this political cycle, but it’s sound. Your goal is literally to escape to a place with a union. The only problem is, the space station is not decommissioned, but rather a tomb for a crew murdered by aliens that were being experimented on. I love this plot as an introductory one to Mothership, because the original Alien is obviously the perfect onboarding point for what Mothership is about.
The module opens with about 4 pages of character set up. This is good stuff — there are 5 NPCs travelling with you, and you all have connections to them in some way. Those 5 NPCs, given you’re entering a ship abandoned apart from an alien predator, are the juice of the module. You need to be signed up for leaning deeply into them as a referee if you want to run When In Rome. I feel they deserves a little more support, especially given its importance to the progression of the module. The main plot point that emerges there, is El is looking for TVU research, and looking for that research will likely lead to El switching to the alien’s side at some point. This plot line, to me, isn’t adequately foreshadowed or expanded enough for it to make sense to the players, unless you really lean into El’s religion hard. There’s a strong implication that Cap is looking for stuff to sell, too, but values aren’t listed here, and it’s not clear what he’ll try to smuggle out at all, or whether he’ll push to move off course to do it. The third potential crux is the secretly pregnant, possibly to a PC, Isabelle, which if revealed probably just leads to more cautious play, particularly if she’s the PC’s ex-lover. I don’t think that’s intended though, and it might just be a back door to the alien getting off the ship? There are two real options here: You can scrap the social aspects altogether, and run these as hirelings, which I’m kind of inclined to given how deadly this module is. Or, you can lean into them harder. I think the latter means having a scene where you’re getting to know each other prior to boarding, leaning into the unique aspects of them — military, education, religion for example, and really making it apparent how they tick — and then making more explicit what they’ll do on the station, so that they’re going rogue with warning rather than for no apparent reason. If you want this PC-NPC conflict, where the NPCs aren’t villains, I think we need a little more advice regarding how to do it; here we’re relying a little too much on the expertise and foresight of the referee.
Skipping to the key, it starts on page 16, and it’s 10 locations that are quite terse — except for the final location, a maximum of half a page. There’s not a lot of room for clever description in Mothership modules, in my experience, but Airiau manages to squeeze some in here, like “A tunnel of Xenoresin. Black, wet, hot and humid. If a PC examines the biomech surroundings, a piece moves”. It’s very interactive, in a fun way. The way I read it, is that these “rooms” are actuallyentiresections, and so there’s always something to do, and moving through them or exploring them takes a decent chunk of your maximum of 8 hours of in-game timer. Just an addendum here: There’s no sign of the dead here, anywhere, nor signs of struggle except in the corporate branch. I assume all the dead have been subsumed into the flesh-ship in the reactor core, but the lack of signs of violence is something that rings oddly to me, when the space is described as a tomb.
Finally, we have the endgame scenario (and its variations) at the end. In this, we have the genre trope of “it followed us onto our escape pod!”, which I don’t mind but I do think it comes out of nowhere to some degree. The alternates really make it feel like to the author the outcome of the module is a foregone conclusion, and “winning” is impossible. I’m not sure I love that — I prefer a solvable puzzle — but it is very on genre. But I can see why they feel that way: There are a lot of situations where everyone just might die, and one is unavoidable: Being locked in cryostorage with increasing temperature to withstand and potentially 30 aliens waking up while you’re trapped there. It’s a super deadly module, and there’s no facility for backup characters back on the Conrad (unless you use the NPCs, of course).
I skipped over the general rules of the module, which come before the key: security clearances, activating subsystems, entry points, security, timekeeping, and the doom clock which keeps the 8 hours you have on the ship tense. Then the 7 types of alien and how they relate; and also how they perhaps relate to the religion that one of the NPCs follows. That is 10 pages straight of systems and things for the referee to wrap their head You could strongly argue that more is going on in the station as a whole than is expected to happen in any individual sector of the ship. There was a point in here — the point was the end of page 15, where you discover the alien may be the messiah of an intergalactic religion — that I realised that there may be more going on than I can actually handle. Is that too much? No. I really don’t think so. It feels like these subsystems add up to be significantly more than the sum of their parts. But, the presentation in general of all of these competing and important pieces of information, really needs to be better to facilitate a smoother run of When In Rome (or potentially it could be supplemented with better worksheets).
The layout is a major part of what could be involved in improving this. Mothership modules tend to have a very dense layout, and in this case, a reluctance to leave space on the page (likely accompanied by a limited art budget) results in information not always being given priority on the page, or being moved to places it doesn’t quite make sense. There’s the interjection of the serum in the middle of the key, for example, and the clearance levels being deferred to a sidebar rather than being with the doors they lock or directly in the section on clearance levels. These feel like issues of page count to me; they don’t make sense in terms of consistency at all, and that has to be obvious to the creator as well. I quite like the mini maps, but their presence multiple times per page, on already busy spreads, with the exits also included on the text, make them redundant (or the exit text redundant) and make the page less clear to read. I don’t think it’s a universal rule — I’ve gotten feedback on a module of mine with mini maps that plenty of people prefer both — but in this particular layout, I think the exit text being removed would make for a clearer read. There’s a lot of art here — only 6 pages don’t have illustrations, and those all have mini maps — and it’s good and on theme, as are the cyberpunk assets used to adorn the page, but all put together with up sometimes 7 fonts (to my count) on a single page make this challenging in terms of legibility at times for me. Most of this, though, would be easily forgiven if big concepts were given a little more room to breathe in terms of space on the page.
From an information design perspective, I think it’s challenging front loading referee with 10 pages of information to absorb, especially when the tracking tools given to the referee don’t summarise it. I think some of it could be offloaded to players — it would probably be a more interesting module, for example, if the players knew what they needed to access certain areas, because they had that intel going in. I also think that, given there are plenty of surprises and interconnections to be found throughout the key, some of that ten pages could be deferred into sidebar or footnote if the keys themselves had been 1-to-a-page. I also think that it could benefit from more referee asides in general, to guide them through what is a complex module. This reduces the need for referee expertise and foresight that I mentioned much earlier.
I think it’s clear that these problems were on the author’s mind, though. When In Rome leans very hard into a particular OSR-style challenge style, which peppers potential solutions throughout the module, but provides no answers. I think this is misguided: It helps the referee to know what’s going on, when there’s a lot to juggle like there is here. But it means that hidden in sector 4 is a way to see that there’s an alien in the pregnant woman’s belly, and that’s going to be a surprise because not even the referee is flagged that that’s a possibility. That’s fun! I love being surprised! But in the context of the broader complexity, I think more clarification (perhaps even just footnotes or page references) would go a long way.
If I were to run When in Rome, I’d have to put a fair bit of work into streamlining it, I think. I’d give the players lots of information — it’s a heist, after all. They know what the security levels are, and where they have to go to find things. Their goal is to get in and out, and the aliens, androids and other horrors are the barriers in their way. This might break the module though, due to the map structure: If you know where everything is, you know you have to go to 2, 5 and 6, and nowhere else (well, there’s a surprise detour in there, but even that doesn’t take you off that track). The direct route through the main entrance would only take you 3 hours, and you’d only be exposed to one potential alien threat that I can see. The doom clock is what is supposed to circumvent this quickly in and quickly out route, I think: There are plenty of terminals in this half of the station, but I suspect you’re not supposed to be able to fix the gravity plates and temperature regulation errors that occur in the first 3 hours on the doom clock at these terminals, but rather you have to head to the terminals at 9 and 10, diverting you into the alien storyline. But this really isn’t made clear, and if I weren’t really studying this module, I think I’d probably have allowed any terminal, because that’s what the instructions seem to indicate. Again, the lack of clarity means that the authorial intent, unless you’re interrogating it closely, is likely to be missed.
Overall, in When In Rome’s favour, we have a really intricate set of rules, events, and interactions, all designed to draw players further into a dangerous place despite their misgivings, and likely resulting in a massive disaster of their own making. This is really, really clever design; some of the best I’ve seen this year, in terms of systemic interactions, although the brevity sometimes backfires. I think, though, that if you want social interaction to be a cornerstone of your module, you really need to make it clearer what the NPCs are after and how they’ll act in response to the events and locations; they’re a referee-specific wildcard as it is, where I think they have more specific design objectives to satisfy that aren’t well spelt out. Nevertheless, When In Rome a slam dunk when it comes to a particular kind of module design.
Against it, comes the information design and layout flaws, leading to a lack of clarity and legibility, and making it much, much harder to run as intended, and in fact much harder to parse how it’s supposed to play out and what’s intended. This is one of those occasions where I’ve done the heavy lifting by virtue of writing this review: I know how to run this, and it’s a hell of a module, full of drama and danger. But, I’ve just talked about the module for almost as many words as the module actually runs. I really like the complexity and density here, but I think that one way creators need to innovate on in Rube Goldberg modules like this is how to make it legible to the referee and how to defer some of that load onto the players. That means, sadly, bringing the powers of layout, information design and art and applying them to other things than affordable printing and aesthetics. I think we’ll get there as a hobby, as I keep seeing authors creating amazing things like these, and improving every time.
In the meantime, if you’re willing to put in the effort to understand it, or willing to take a punt and run it blind and hope it turns out perfectly, When In Rome is compelling module that will fill a few sessions of Mothership. That said, Mothership month isn’t over yet, and Chris Airiau is running a campaign that apparently shares a world with this module over there — based on the promise in this, I’d be considering throwing a few dollars his way.
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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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.
Playful Void 