Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

The Model Minster is a 5 page mission for Spire by Sebastian Yūe. In it you are tasked with assassinating a compromised agent embedded in a fashion house.

First up, the cover by Adrian Stone slaps. Just excellent. It communicates the content of the mission extremely well. The layout is a simple, two-column one, very reminiscent of Spire itself, and at 5 pages it’s navigable and readable. The only criticism I have is that potentially if I printed it at home, the textured background might render it more difficult to read in greyscale.

The themes and a characterisation here are exceptional: The aesir are twisted and evil in an unselfconscious way, the drow are desperate. The disguising of abuse as fashion and of experimentation and infection as healthcare is compelling, and scary given the real world parallels. It’s a hell of a basis for a module. I want to run this; it’s rare that a non-horror module explores horrific themes in such a compelling way.

As a mission, I find the tension here fascinating. I really want this to be a typical, location-based module. But that’s not what Spire wants it to be! So, what we have, is a set up that drops you straight into the action without preamble, 4 NPCs that have 2-3 paragraphs of description for them and how to run them, 4 suggested scenes that might occur somewhere in the running of the module, and a twist, which reinterprets the other information. Let’s call these the base of the module. You don’t need anything else, is the impression I get. Then you get 4 single paragraph descriptions of locations, 6 props, a potential reward for completing the mission, and then some ideas for continuing the story.

I haven’t read or played enough Spire to know if this is a typical structure for Spire or Heart modules – I’ve written about how I clash with the system before – but I can see this working quite well. I could make this work quite well, myself, if I had the memory – but that’s the thing, I don’t, and with this many variables and suggestions, I think I’d have to study these 5 pages pretty hard to use it as an improvisation base. For example, the character of Alix has about 8 different pieces of information that are true about her. These are 8 interesting pieces of information – I genuinely think that the concoction brewed by Yue here across the 4 main characters in particular is a potent one – but that’s 24 pieces of information across the main characters, plus the suggested interactions. I’m going to lose track. And neither characters nor props are tied to any locations – this is clearly intended to be for ease, in the way that some modules give generic clues to hand out to ensure they always feel appropriate and help the players progress – but in this case it means the added cognitive load of deciding where to encounter these people, where they are going to be, and more. Adding in the fact that I don’t have a sense for the broader estate we are supposed to be infiltrating, and I don’t think I’d be able to run this, for the same reason that I could run Blades in the Dark without Tim’s maps, but it’s much, much easier with them. It’s not the detail of every room, but the support that having the visualisation would provide me.

For me, then, I’d have to put a fair bit of effort into running this: I’d need to provide myself with the support. I’d find an estate map, I’d decide where the people are hanging out, and I’d mark up where the key 4 rooms are on the map, and where the suggested scenes are likely to occur. I’d come up with a few extra characters that live in the estate, so it doesn’t feel like a dead space. And then, it’d be an excellent module: It has everything you need for interesting intrigue, but without the extra information that make the estate feel like a real place, it feels like it would be walking the players through scenes of my own devising, in the worst possible way.

If you’re better at improvising than I, or better at memorising, then I think the Model Minister is an excellent little infiltration and intrigue module. The concepts and characters are creepy and have the exact amount of honesty that they’re compelling. But for me, then brevity sacrifices a sense of reality that I want to be seeing in my modules, that helps me run them. If you’re after a neat little intrigue mission, you’re running spire, or you’re compelled by the very cool twisted concepts in the characters, check out the Model Minister.

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

Assault Fleet Centauri is a 75 page roleplaying game “Quickstart” by Reizor. To my knowledge the full game is still in development. It’s a spaceship combat roleplaying game, where each player takes command of a warship in the titular fleet, defending the outer planets from the imperialist inner planets.

The game opens with a brief overview of the setting, where the solar system is fully inhabited, but the inner and outer planets are at war. I struggle with extended setting descriptions, but this keeps it tight enough that I don’t tune out, and it uses analogies to modern day locations and relationships to keep things relatable. It’s pretty good as far as setting goes, and if you want to dig deeper, there’s a bunch more on world anvil.

The rules here are designed to focus on captains making the hard decisions of war, managing resources, and commanding crew, and so you’re playing all of these things: Captain, Crew and Ship. Despite the straightforward basic mechanic, which is inspired by Blades in the Dark, but substitutes a dice chain for a dice pool. because you’re covering all of these, the rules are a lot. I’d say there are two perspectives on that a lot: For me, it’s a little too much. But, for you, it might be that being the captain of a spaceship is a bit much, and it feels right to be juggling a lot of balls.

The most complex aspect of the game is the combat, which involves tokens, movement cards, and ship cards, with players and enemies alternating activations. For me, this is a return to the kind of Lancer-style combat that I struggle to referee, but enjoy playing, but I do think that this firm nudge into war game territory is only right for the kind of audience that wants to play spaceship commanders. But here you still need a referee to run those enemies, and as a forever referee, I couldn’t see myself building these battles out. That said, unlike a game like Lancer, Assault Fleet Centauri is designed to be interesting in a vacuum (no pun intended), and so you don’t have to put so much effort into the preparation here, or at least so it appears. And the referee section is quite supportive, providing playsheets and advice on running missions and mission structure, as well as covering some specific locations for you to dig into and base your own locations off. It comes with a free mission pack, “No Win Scenario”, which supports my hypothesis about what Assault Fleet Centauri is supposed to look like at the table: This looks a lot like a Lancer module, albeit without the detailed maps. The players are making hard decisions about dangerous situations, that are likely to result in combat.

In yesterday’s review of Cryptid Keeper, I wondered about the importance of familiarity with specific texts as a scaffold to specific games, and it comes up again here. The only real piece of media I’m familiar with that feels like it fits Assault Fleet Centauri is Battlestar Galactica, but with that being 20 years lost to memory, I don’t think I’d know how to act or what to say in either the role of referee, or as player, if you handed me the complexity of Assault Fleet Centauri. Is it the game’s fault that it doesn’t cater to me, that it assumes that people interested in a spaceship battle roleplaying game are going to be familiar with the Expanse, the Culture, or the Hunt for the Red October? No, I don’t think so, and I don’t think that weakens its’ appeal to those players. A comprehensive system for handing Martian-Outer Planet negotiation would likely weaken the game for them, while simply adding a complex system I’m not interested in, in the name of making it easier for me to understand. I think this is the game it wants to be.

Assault Fleet Centauri is a great roleplaying game for people interested in the kind of interplanetary spacecraft warfare it’s aiming for. It has complex systems, you’re managing hard decisions at crew, ship and command levels, you’re trying to liaise with other captains, and you’re doing it all in the depths of uninhabitable space. But it’s not a bunch of things that I personally relate to more: It’s not an espionage game, it’s not a game of dashing around spaceships making repairs to systems, it’s not a game of space exploration. Don’t look here for that. If you’re looking to feel like you’re the captain of a huge vessel, managing a large crew, and fighting in battles on the scale of light-seconds? I’d check this out. The mission-pack is available for free, if you’d like to have a taste.

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

Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Cryptid Keeper is a referee-less, trifold pamphlet roleplaying game where in you play zookeepers in a zoo for mystical creatures, by Joie Yong.

Your keeper has 3 stats (charisma, lore and body), as well as a favourite cryptid. You roll against a random challenge rating, for any challenges you face facing cryptids, patrons or other NPCs. There is also a simple procedure to generate a zoo, filling it with between 8 and 20 cryptids, and identifying the biome filling the habitat. The zoo is obviously magical, to allow for this.

The bulk of play itself is a generated by the event table, which contains 20 randomised events, of which you’ll experience 1-2 per day, depending on how many players you’re playing with. These randomised events or vague, but in a way that invites story-telling – for example, “A cryptid in Habitat 6 has found its way into Habitat 3” isn’t that interesting on the face of it, but with the relationships you’ve developed with the cryptids, your zoo design, and the randomness of the generation, you’ll liked get a unique situation out of it. Most of the prompts work really well like this – simple, but effective.

That’s the whole game, which is interesting. Most of the play here is implied, which is something I generally dislike. For example, it’s implied that the moment-to-moment gameplay will include cleaning and maintaining habitats, feeding, bathing and entertaining cryptids, and meeting with the vet and also wealthy donors, punctuated by the events. It’s clearly supposed to be a “week in the life” kind of game, played for a maximum of a few days. It’s clearly implied that you’re supposed to collaboratively draw a little map of your zoo and potentially also your cryptid guests, which just sounds like a pleasure to do to me. It probably helps that I recently read a book about a cryptid zoo, The Phoenix Keeper by SA Maclean, which gives me a very clear picture of what I’d want this to be.

This really makes me wonder about the role of genre or text familiarity as a form of scaffolding in games that we don’t talk about enough. Cryptid Keeper slaps, because it’s a very very specific homage to a niche genre. Could this be a very detailed genre-emulation storygame? Yeah, sure. Would that make it better? I don’t think it would be better for me, someone who reads this and thinks “Oooh I can play Phoenix Keeper”. I don’t think someone who has no magical zookeeper tropes in their head would benefit from those extra rules that would ensure a rigid adherence to the story beats, either. This is kind of the sweet spot for me. But I’ve played and read plenty of tiny games where it didn’t hit the sweet spot for me, perhaps because I didn’t have that familiarity. How much of the love, for example, for Brindlewood Bay, is borne from how many generations grew up on reruns of Murder She Wrote and Ms Marple, rather than the surplus of loving moves structured especially to replicate the story beats therein?

The other thing I enjoy and love about Cryptid Keeper, is that I while it’s clearly a game that would be a joyful night of play with a few friends, it is also designed explicitly to also be playable solo. And I think it would be a pleasure to play solo. I have trouble doing things for me, at times, so I’d feel the urge to record it as an audio journal, or journal it, which I wouldn’t feel the need to in a group, but for those who enjoy solo games, it’s honestly a great one, and, unlike most solo games I’ve come across, it doesn’t copy one of only a few systems designed for solo play.

I can’t imagine there’s a surplus of gamers out there looking for a cryptid zoo keeping game, but if that sounds like something adorable to you, either alone or with your friends, Cryptid Keeper is a no-brainer to me. It’s cute, it’s short, and would be a pleasure to play, and there aren’t many tiny games I feel like wouldn’t benefit from expansion.

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

Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

When I get a submission for Critique Navidad, I put them all in a big folder, so I can access them on the various platforms I write on easily. This means I lose the context of who the author is, the page the game was purchased on, etc. When I first opened Mandog, my response was “What the absolute hell is this”. What Mandog turns out to be is a 16 page module, primarily an investigation, written for OD&D, but set in 2018, in a suburban neighbourhood, by Gromb, with art by Wilber H. Force.

Layout in Mandog is basic and works for the most part. Nobody likes a monospaced font, but here it works. Highlighting is left to bolding and italics, which works well as keying is kept simple. The keying is arranged by address, so it’s hard for me to flick easily through the key, and section headers (or some other way of identifying things at a glance) would be helpful. That said, this is an investigation module; I’m not sure the player characters are going to be crawling through this space, and even more to the point, I wonder if location was the right choice to separate this by at all given it’s an investigation. I’ll come back to this point later. One particularly egregious issue with the layout is that Mandog is completely unsearchable; this made the smaller issues I had with information design far, far more significant. For example, it’s not clear what the “Black Moon” or “Black Moon Syndrome” is and I can’t look it up; I don’t know who Bill “Brainiac” Quimee is and I can’t find them without scanning 20 pages of text. It renders this completely impossible to run on the fly, and difficult to run without printing it off and marking it up. There are page references in some places, but many things I need to reference don’t have page references — any of the random encounters for example. I don’t really see any good reason for a digital file to be unsearchable. The art is mostly limited to maps, but they all look scrawled out by someone taking their best guess, which honestly slaps and suits the subject matter perfectly; when it isn’t, it’s impressionistic charcoal and crayon stuff like the cover above that also slaps. Great choices.

The basic gist of this investigation is that there’s a monster on the loose, and each night, it kills another victim, becoming stronger. The cops are useless, and so the responsibility of investigation falls to the player characters. The player characters take 2 investigation rounds per day and 2 per night, and might encounter specific characters or monsters. at a rate of 1 in every 6 rounds or so. There’s no invitation or suggestion of why the investigation falls to the player characters. I have no idea why the player characters might be here, whether they’re internal to the community or external, and without that, it’s pretty hard to intuit where to start here. In order to kick off the investigation, as a referee I’d have to do a fair bit of work developing the hooks, or else I’d have to do some collaborative worldbuilding with the table. The latter might work pretty well, but it’s definitely not supported in any way, so I’d still have to do a fair bit of work to make sure the worldbuilding doesn’t contradict the test. I’d far prefer if there was support for one of these options.

Mandog’s writing is urgent to a fault. It’s good, though, and the terse and evocative word choices often work here where they don’t work as well in fantasy settings, because most readers have deeper hooks into what an imaginary town would look like than a musty cave. “A small crack in the basement floor opens to a chittering world of filth, a world that armies of pest exterminators fought and lost. The realtor considers a fire insurance policy.” is a pretty typical example: There’s humour, terseness, and more, packed into only a few words. It’s genuinely great. But, it’s filled with forbidden easter eggs, things like “Bobby does not know May prepares his body for possession after her death.” which just aren’t discoverable or interactable, even though they’re a hell of a vibe. In fact, that same home is a good example of the recurring problem with these locations: There’s no reason, really, to get to know these people, and similarly, there’s no mechanism beyond breaking into random homes to identify who’s been killed by Mandog; and there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme nor reason to Mandog’s killings, so there’s no way to anticipate them and stand in Mandog’s way. There are 15 locations before someone suspects anyone of anything. There are only 2 characters with any suspicions at all that might point you to Mandog’s lair. You find out some clue regarding what the Black Moon is on page 11; it’s in the single longest and sloppiest piece of readaloud text in the book, and would better have been directed at the referee non-diagetically, or parceled out somehow.

Now, there’s the question of whether choosing a system other than 0D&D would have made these issues less meaningful. I think, in some ways, it would. Liminal Horror, for example, would be a good choice for this module, and it comes bit a bunch of presuppositions that would help breeze past some of the hiccups with initiating play. But, it wouldn’t eliminate enough of them, and I don’t think the built in rules would be better than 0D&D for many of the included rules. The issues here are primarily level-design, and not resolved by picking a different system.

Overall, Mandog is a conundrum. This is a gorgeously realised and written suburb infected with evil and plagued with a demon in a relatively unique setting; this should be a super-compelling module. But it’s almost completely unplayable; there’s nowhere to start, there are few clues to find out what’s going on; it’s difficult to navigate to a fault. This is not a playground, and that’s a mistake for a module, because nothing works together. There’s very little level design here. I would never run this, because the preparation just to get started is way more than I can justify when there are so many other modules out there; I’d need to mark everything up, develop hooks, and figure out what the characters know so that the investigation will lead somewhere. It’s too much for me. That said, if an investigation set in an alternate demon-haunted 80’s American suburb is your jam, or you’re a sucker for stellar evocative writing, I’d jump on Mandog without hesitation, so long as you have a lot of confidence to fumble through the gaps, or would enjoy building on what’s here in your spare time.

Idle Cartulary

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

Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Carved in Stone, subtitled “A Storyteller’s Guide to the Picts”, is a 160 page setting guide, by Brian Tyrell and Lizy Simonsen, with research by Dr Heather Christie. This is a massive book, with a huge number of other contributors, particularly illustrators. This is, effectively a historical sourcebook, in the guise of a setting guide to a fantasy game, from the perspective of a 7th century Pict (who are, for what its worth, the people who lived in Scotland in the 7th century). Or, perhaps, it’s a setting guide to a fantasy game, in the guise of a historical sourcebook? I’m not really certain — although if the concept of either compel you, or you’re a historian yourself perhaps you should skip the review.

I’m going to choose to breeze over part 1; this is the evidence, and an exploration of what academic choices and work went into this massive book. The mere existence of such a massive collaboration between academia and the roleplaying hobby in the form of such a well-illustrated and well-evidenced book, is absolutely phenomenal, and this section talk about that. But that’s not something I need to recap in detail, and so I’ll move on to the first section: Landscapes.

In Landscapes, we start to talk about the actual locations in Scotland. I like the highlighting choices here. Effectively we have a bolded sentence, the summary of the paragraph that comes next, so you have the short and long description of a feature. This is the first half of a spread; on the second, there are 3 detailed encounters, and 8 less detailed encounters. These are gorgeous, and evocative: “A goatherd finds the remains of a fire by the mountain trail, along with a few iron tools and bits of cloth. While gathering the scattered items, they pray for the soul who left them.”, for example. They conjure questions about the world, and the characters, lots for a referee to improvise and work from. Weather is expressed as an illustrated cycle, again, with both a more technical description and a poetic one. This is solid, if perhaps overly detailed, incorporation of the unique Scottish geography into gameable form.

Next up is Kingdoms. This is a combination of factions and the map and key, with “regions” being by specific people. It follows the same format as Landscapes, to excellent effect. It’s also often funny (at least to those a little familiar with the subject matter): “York. An up-and-coming town that bishops and merchants are keen to support. Perhaps in a decade it might be worth a visit.” Languages are covered, and are shown through colour and symbolism on the maps. I adore how bilingualism is expected, but that examples are given of what that would look like in everyday life. Trade and value is covered, but also the rules of negotiation and trust are discussed, as our power, responsibility, and the specifics of royalty.

Next up is Perspectives, which covers time, traditions, storytelling, celebrations and the like. Less concrete cultural considerations. These abandon the easy-to-run structure of the earlier chapters, mainly because the topics are a little more difficult to define. Most importantly to most referees, this covers magic, which covers spirits and the rules around them, how Christians think these are demons, how sorcerers weave magic into quartz stones and brew potions, Magi and their more powerful magic, as well as the role Christianity has in magic and in politics, including miracles, magic and saints. This implies a lot of potential magical complexity, that isn’t explored in depth here.

The final and longest section is Lives. This is the real stuff of the world, which you’ll be preparing yourself: Travel includes pros and cons of different methods of travel, random landmarks you might encounter while travelling, people you might meet. Then there are settlement generators. Then 7 detailed locations, to show what things could look like for the various types of settlements. Then lots more things that I honestly feel belonged in perspectives: Skills, food, medicine, fashion and art, more time on the symbol stones mentioned earlier, equipment and entertainment.

The appendices are a mixed bag; I think the text itself is meandering enough that many of these things could’ve been incorporated in their relevant sections. There’s more on law, medicine, trade and magic here that simply should have been in the main text. But there are also useful things that definitely belong in the appendices: Lists of names, for example. I get the overall feeling the appendix is a bunch of detail that they didn’t want to bog down the reader with, but thought were interesting enough to be “further reading”, and it ends up being just a little clumsy.

The layout is stellar; the art is vibrant and interesting. I’ve often opined the fact that there are too few roleplaying game books designed like children’s history books: This is that book. While it could be more navigable from an information design perspective — this is a curse that I suspect comes from the desire to communicate academic as well as game design information — I think the layout is just stellar; this is by far the most readable roleplaying game gazette I’ve ever read. It’s gorgeous. You could leave it on your coffee table.

My preference is for a more detailed and intertwined world; this isn’t that. But what it is, is a huge step up in detail in the best possible way, from most worlds designed to be mostly evocative and improvised upon. A recent example of the style is Empire of Hatred; but the detail here is far more supportive, and if you wish modules like that one were more detailed, this is an excellent choice.

Carved in Stone is strictly system agnostic, which may work for some people, and may not work for others. My own style, I could run this as easily as anything, with a little prep for stat blocks. That may not be as compatible with every referee’s style. Certainly, I think this would be extremely compatible with something like Wulwald which I reviewed last year and seems a no-brainer for the kind of world set here. The main clash with popular systems is the ambiguity with which Carved in Stone treats magic here. The big challenge, for me, is that there are loads of implied systems of complexity: Language, trade and negotiation, and reputation are examples. These are things that are often mechanised in OSR style games, but here are simply described. I think I’d need to develop my own systems for these, if I were to run Carved in Stone, which is a not insignificant commitment. But, if you have an abiding love for the subject matter, you might also consider that just a bit of fun. One massive, implied subsystem here is tale-telling, which gets a section with lots of detail, but that I really feel should be a significant mini-game — it feels a lot like boasts from Wolves Upon the Coast. Overall, I can understand the choice not to put this to a system, but I think it is far weaker for it. That said, I can see a world where the community crowd-sources a system to play this in, and if it gains popularity, I’m excited to see what the community does with all of these fascinating implied systems.

If you’re interested at all in the history of the British isles, Carved In Stone is probably one of the better books I’ve seen on said history. It’s also an excellent setting guide for an OSR style roleplaying game (or, I suppose, a traditional system like 5th edition), although the kind that leaves a lot of room for your own interpretation. If you love to take worlds and build your campaign around them, this is a hell of a world to build around. But there’s a lot of gaps by virtue of this being system-agnostic: A lot of important concepts here that you’ll need to figure out how to explore, a lot of things you’ll have to decide whether you consider important regardless of the import the book places on it. It’s a game that seems designed really well to take advantage of specific systems that you could adapt to its use: Wulfwald or Wolves Upon the Coast come to mind. It’s a book that you’ll want to study if you’re going to run it, but if you do, there’s so much power in the minutiae you’re going to be able to describe, and the writing is often gorgeous and assists you in communicating a lot of the strengths of the texts. This is a complex one, I think in terms of the tension between the academic or historical, and the game design or gameability, and every referee will fall in a different place. But if the concepts here are exciting to you, Carved in Stone will be a beautiful book to have on your coffee table, filled with great historical communication, even if you choose not to take the effort that is likely required to bring it to your table.

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