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.
What Child Is This? is a 2 page module by Nate Treme for 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. It’s one of my favourite pamphlet adventures to play in the holidays, so I thought I’d interrupt my regular programming (and Critique Navidad) for a holiday Bathtub Review!
On page 1: The 5th edition stat block of the God-baby. All who hear it cry must care for it; animals adore it. I love the 5th-edition-ness of statting up a baby for combat, but this baby’s powers are largely a stone around the neck of the party as they carry out their goal.
Their goal is to carry it across page 2, a 20-hex crawl with 6 keyed hexes. You start in the village of Holluck, and are aiming for city of Cortezia, which you can follow the road to in just 4 random and 1 mandatory encounter. This is the main issue with the module, to be honest — there’s not many reasons to stray off the path. I’d add some — I’d scrap the mandatory ambush and make that a blockade of soldiers from the evil King Bazbet hoping to kill the child, and hence driving the PCs off course. There are 21 random encounters on the third page. Most of these are great, and the biggest disappointment running this is that you’ll never encounter enough of them. The main reason you want to drive people off the road, is because they need to find the minidungeon on page 4: It’s not part of the “plot” or the critical path of the module, but it’s a whole quarter of it.
Nate Treme’s simple but effective art is convincingly child-like, which suits the lightheartedness of the module well. The layout is very simple but effective, clearly intended to be a bifold. The nature of a short module is that it’s going to be a bit crowded, though. It’s useable, though.
It’s interesting to look at this excellent micro-module as a lens through which to look at the challenges that face designers of them, and how we might overcome them. There are a few challenges here: You can’t provide complexity for puzzles enough in the space, so it’s perfect for a concept that is focused on vibes like this one. You need to rely on existing stat blocks in your core books, because stat blocks take up space. But, you need to connect things together in an interesting way. I think this third area is where What Child Is Born falls down, even though I’ve run it a few times and really like it.
If I were to redesign this, what I’d do is place a Mines of Moria style decision in front of the player characters — you can take a trip through the dungeon, a short cut to avoid foes that know you’re coming, or you can face the empire or try to avoid them. By doing this, you keep agency with the players, without preventing them from encountering all the cool stuff — it’s just 4 pages, you want to use as much of it as possible! I’d probably also key the space more closely, because by doing so you can move the random encounters into set spaces, and hence the plethora of demon encounters suddenly become a third faction seeking the baby. If we take these random encounters and seed them, we get far more interactivity, rather than just a series of encounters. All of this is very doable with just the encounters already there, I think, in fact it’s subtraction rather than addition (aside from naming a faction or two, and having that chat at the outset about choosing your route).
Anyway! What Child Is This is an excellent holiday one-shot, it’s cheap, and it’s written for 5th edition so it’ll work for basically everything. What are your favourite holiday modules?
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!
Eco Mofos is a 170 page game by David Blandy, with art by Daniel Locke. It’s based on Into the Odd and Cairn, and claims “rules-lite gameplay, procedural no-prep adventures, and psychedelic future explosion” in an ecopunk ruin-delving survival game. I backed the Kickstarter, but I haven’t actually looked at the game itself until it was offered for Critique Navidad.
In terms of what the rules consist of, this is a blogosphere- informed NSR ruleset, that walks through the basics of play based on a bunch of contemporary sources. It lays this out in a smart, principles-forward way, that differentiates itself well in terms of tone. Because of this, its basis will be familiar to anyone who’s read recent games in the the D&D unlike cluster of games. Features worth mentioning: Character creation is a randomly created affair, featuring 36 backgrounds with associated key-items, which are designed to lure the characters into dangerous locations. It has an optional advancement system, with a risk vs. reward basis, which is fun to engage with and not to, as you wish. Luck is a burnable resource as well as a stat. Combat gives generous leeway in avoiding death, fitting the hopeful themes. Cover rules for gunfights are simple. A standout feature is the random crafting rules, which manage to feel like Breath of the Wild’s crafting music sounds like — I want to steal and adapt this to every future game I play. Very elegant and joyful. As befits a game about scavenging, there are 10 pages of random treasure tables, with some cute surprises befitting the retro ecopunk stylings.
In general, the best thing about Eco Mofos is also somewhat underwhelming to say, but: Whenever I thought about something I thought it needed, it was there, somewhere, when I looked for it: A bestiary, mass combat, faction rules, downtime events that change the world, specific NPCs, an NPC generator, solo rules, job rules if you’re stuck for something to do next. It provides a bunch of support, so that you really can, as a referee, just play the damned thing, so long as you know the book back to front, without having to do any work. That’s huge praise coming from me, but so often my complaint about games that I read is that they leave design work for me to do, rather than just let me play. And, for me at least, I do my own design work: When I’m at the table, I’m there to play, not design a game loosely based on someone else’s game.
The most interesting way Eco Mofos innovates, though is through the use of burdens, which are emotional debts with specific ways to diffuse them. That in and of itself isn’t interesting — there’s been plenty written of using inventory in alternative ways — but the way Eco Mofos uses them is interesting, because basically it serves as a currency for using most of the background’s powers. For moderate powers, you can “risk a burden”, or test luck to see if you take one. And for major powers, you can just take a burden for immediate effect. As a simple way to implement currency for power use, make it feel fair between classes, and give a small mechanical crunch to an otherwise simple rules system, this is elegant and I really, really like it. You’re balancing burdens with inventory, and more than three burdens causes the deprived condition, and removing your burdens takes specific action that often serves to draw you deeper into the drama of the adventure — such as “take pity on an adversary” or “unleash your anger on the world”. Cleverly, most of these have multiple options to remove them, which give you character-specific choices to make at any time. I’m really impressed with this mechanic which on initial note didn’t seem to matter at all.
The magic system here is a fun and unique take, and provides a huge amount of flavour to a game that up until that point is a kind of 90’s post-apocalypse pastiche. Here, the magic is something released by the earth in response to humanities abuse of the biosphere, and it’s the cause of the gamma-world-esque adaptations that exist in Eco Mofos. It is found in orbs and shards of shimmering material, and can be absorbed and manipulated to cast spells. There’s an associated misfire system that has flavours of Dungeon Crawl Classics (well, it’s a little closer to that of Shadowdark, but they’re both in Dungeon Crawl Classic’s shadow in my opinion), but also of Gamma World, and it has associated visions that feel a combination between Pariah and the psychic maelstrom of Apocalypse World. There are 6 pages of spells, and they are an interesting blend of Gamma World and classic old school spells. This melange of influences is pretty unique and the main hook for me in terms of this world; I was a little underwhelmed until I got to this, and now I’m leaning forward to see how it feels in play. This makes me go back to re-read the 36 classes, because most of the low-HP choices are spell focused, and they leverage these rules in ways that wasn’t apparent on the first read: The Oracle, for example, has very concrete possibilities in the context of the Vision rules, and the Pyromancer can use orbs in a way unique to all the classes.
One of Eco Mofo’s major selling points is that it can be run with absolutely no prep. The final third of the book is entirely devoted to the systems around generating content on the fly. How do these hold up? They took a while for me to grasp the basic procedures, because there are (kind of) three, depending on the scale of travel, but basically they take Marcia’s Bite-sized Dungeons, and turn them into a random spatial generation procedure — neat! The set of 12 maps are keyed, and those keys mean different things for each scale of travel, so basically they represent weeks of travel at one scale, or minutes at a smaller scale. This is complemented by absolutely boatloads of tables to help with generating what these spaces contain: Weather, day and night encounters, locations, lair generation, random encounters, characters, etc. This is very strong procedural stuff, and playing with it for 15 minutes came up with some entertaining stuff. Colour me impressed. Is it realistic for me, though, to use this on the go? I think I’d get the procedure itself down pat after a few sessions, sure, but the preponderance of tables here is a lot to manage, and it’s the one area of the book where the layout makes navigation challenging, due to the lack of strong headings and section separation here. My first thought was that this must exist in automated form, given I knew that Eco Mofos achieved a bunch of stretch goals on it’s crowdfunding campaign, but I can’t find anywhere that this has been automated. I think that if I were to use this procedure as the core of my campaign, I’d need to get some automation happening to handle the pages and pages of tables, or the on-the-spot aspect just won’t work.
The visual style created by the team of Blandy and Locke is absolutely fire. Stellar visualisations, comic-book interludes and post-apocalyptic vistas pepper the pages of this book. The basic layout stylishly adapts the Explorer Template to good effect, with clear headings and spacing, and flags section headings for easy navigation. For my eye, reading digitally, I think monotype is overused, but there’s smart use of spacing to overcome the issues with the typography choice, making it far less straining than it could be. Font choices don’t change much on a single page, maxing out on maybe 6 subtle variations. Generous white spaces are balanced with regular spot art, making a very spacious layout feel cosy rather than sparse. It’s good stuff, for most of the book, although in places you lose the navigability, particularly the sections where you’re generating locations where the heading choices which are a really visually appealing choice elsewhere get lost in the business of the table layouts — sadly a place where it’s really important to be able to flick through quickly.
I talked about one of the defining features of old school style games being that they are in need of an ecosystem, and here Blandy has really leant in. I’ve reviewed two modules that were commissioned as post of the Kickstarter here, but there are an additional four listed — pretty cool to be honest, for such a new system. In combination with the “procedural no prep” procedures, you’ve got a decent amount of play here, and to be honest, I reckon there’d be mileage in some kind of “Eco-twisted Classics Jam” like Liminal Horror did, adapting classic modules and tales to Eco Mofos, especially given they’ve developed a decent house style. There’s potential here for this to become a strong community for sci-fantasy adventures, just like Liminal Horror has excelled at in the modern horror space.
I’m surprisingly impressed by Eco Mofos, to be honest. As I started with the modules, I, while not being disappointed, didn’t realise how strong this book would be. There’s some excellent crafting and magic systems here that really colour the game, huge numbers of useful random tables, some innovative rules, and a lot of support for running the game built right into the core book, even if I think it needs some digital tools because of their depth. Add to that a burgeoning module ecosystem, and if you’re interested in playing a hopeful post-apocalyptic old school game, this is a damned strong contender. You get me those digital tools, and I think this might be my first choice, and there are a lot of options out there right now. If Blandy can keep up the momentum on third-party module development, Eco Mofos will be here to stay, I suspect.
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!
Dawn of the Orcs is a 29 page GM-less game by Lyme and Plasmophage. In it, you play a coalition of (evil?) wizards building armies of genetically modified creatures (orcs) to together save your homeland from attack. It’s the first offer a I’ve had for Critique Navidad that has a live crowdfunding campaign going, and admittedly it was already on my radar — if this review compels you, go check it out!
Dawn of the Orcs is played on a series of worksheets called the Chronicle of the Orcs, while you pass the main book between each other to narrate each chapter. I love this structure — I’ve spoken before of how I loved the episodic, semi-predetermined season in the Adventures of Gonan, and this has a similar structure, with unique play sheets for different chapters, and hence an overall narrative arc. The main criticism I hear with this kind of structure I see is a lack of replayability, but I’m not even a little convinced this is a real concern: No two 5e tables games of Horde of the Dragon Queen are the same, so why would we assume that one tables’ second play would be the same? Irregardless, there’s a solution provided here: A bunch of more difficult, replacement chapters, that mean your future plays of the game will come out completely different, at least twice with no repetitions, although there are a lot more combinations possible.
The other exciting thing about this structure is that rules are rolled out as they are needed. Each chapter doesn’t quite consist a minigame, as they are chronological, but small tweaks to the rules and new introductions occur in a way that feels organic and reflective of the world as it evolves. Now, it’s hard to talk about latter chapters without spoiling things, which the rules say is fine, but that’s not my choice to make for you. Suffice to say, it gets really interesting by the end, and develops the story in an interesting and compelling direction, exploring the themes thoroughly and well. I really like that your orcs slowly develop customs over time, gaining their own identity, although I’d like for those customs to be a little more supported, perhaps through an optional table of suggestions. I love the changes that can happen to your orcs over the years (“shifts” and “warps”). I love that they develop beliefs about the world. The orcs become pretty rapidly a character in and of themselves, designed by a committee of petty powermongers.
I played through this solo (because I could and I got really excited and also I read it on a Saturday so I had time), but playing through solo is only part of the experience: This game is mainly, I when played in a larger group, a parlour larp. While each member of the Council of Sages wants to win the war, they all have ulterior motives, implied preferences in terms of what they want the orcs to turn out like, and so a huge part of the game is the discussion between arrogant wizards who don’t want to compromise, and secret alliances and betrayals. The very fun framework that informs and surrounds this discussion is a lot of fun, and super solid and well thought out, but it’s only half of the game.
That framework, while about perfect in my opinion, might be too slight for some tastes, though: You pick a pair of scores to use as your strategy, and that combination can never be used again. Then you roll against a difficulty score specific to your chapter. That’s it. It’s enough, in my opinion, because the juice of this isn’t the battle, but rather the council and the changing nature of the orcs themselves. But I can imagine people wanting a bit more board game in their TTRPG in this particular spot. It would be fun, to be honest, to have a little board game, but I think it would distract from the real juice of the game.
Briefly, the layout and art is genuinely great here. There is so much art — custom banners on most chapters, every page has something unique. It’s well spaced, and clearly labelled. It’s chronological, so being scannable isn’t a concern here, except in the alternate chapters at the end — these could be clearer, to be honest, just because you’ll be clicking a little more to and fro. The play sheets are clear and perfect, and come form-fillable. I don’t have much criticism however the smart information design shortcuts a lot of need for complex layout decisions. When I talk about game design, layout and information design all bring one and the same, this is what I mean.
If you love having a story slowly unfold before your eyes, if you love playing the rich and powerful bickering in desperation but still manipulating for their own goals, and if you love emergent world building, Dawn of the Orcs is a shockingly unique and excellent game. What it’s not is a wargame, and nor is it a reverse dungeon crawler: This is a parlour larp with TTRPG set dressing, in the best possible tradition of games like Seco Creek Vigilance Committee. If anything in this review made your orc-ears prick up, I’d get on the train before it leaves the station.
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?
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Playful Void 