I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
My wife and daughter are trapped searching for birthday presents, and instead of walking for 45 minutes I’m reading Rosewood Abbey. Rosewood Abbey is a “Carved by Brindlewood” game, meaning it is based on Brindlewood Bay, a game I was very excited by but (as I have written here), I found horrendously disappointing. When I saw Rosewood Abbey, a game adapting the concepts and structure to something inspired by the Name of the Rose and Hieronymous Bosch, my eye cocked, and I just had see if this was the game I wanted from the original. It’s by “Kalum” and perhaps the Rolistes (in addition to Kalum, if they aren’t just a pseudonym), so I might be putting too much pressure on a one-person project. But I’m excited.
My excitement, however was tamped by an 80 — yes eighty — page example of play that fronts the book. It’s actually pretty well written, but there was – point about 15 pages when there was a chapter break and I started to wonder when we’d get to the game. I’m all for examples of play, but it just feels strongly like this approach is best taken with a running commentary. I can see where the author was going with this — Name of the Rose is a deep cut of a pitch. But having an example of play as a left hand column throughout the book, with the right hand column explaining the rules as they come up, is genius design that we doing see here. This, instead, is sluggish design that requires too much of me in my opinion. There is some rules explanation in here, framed as the referee explaining to the players, but without the context of the book, it doesn’t really make sense. I know I’m not reading 80 pages of play report thoroughly, and right now I’m literally trapped in a room with nothing to do but read that report. I can’t imagine many people will ever utilise those 80 pages of example — sadly a lot of transcribing and editing will go to waste.
The game proper begins on page 90, and introduces the conceits proper: You’re a member of a group of friends analogous to the Murder Mavens, (potentially) up against an evil force called the Ancient. The premise is colourfully “about levelheaded scholars surrounded by people increasingly caught up in their exaggerations, lies, and misguided beliefs”. It then goes on to explain our Powered by the Apocalypse basics, with two additions: Vignettes and the Rumour Mill. I don’t recall Vignettes in Brindlewood Bay, but I’ve wiped my mind of that game in frustration. Vignettes occur for flashback moves or when transcribing rumours, and are basically monologues. The text itself identifies them as problematic, and there’s a whole section on how to make them work without running the game. The second addition, the Rumour Mill, drives the whole game, and I’ll get to it in a moment.
Rosewood Abbey follows Brindlewood Bays annoying habit of naming moves non-descriptively. This time we have Pious and Profane for moves in and out of Abbey grounds, replacing Day and Night. For me, at least, all the basic moves face this problem of being unclearly titled, even if they’re secretly a reference to monk fiction somewhere. The Friar Moves however are all given a patron saint, which is cute and flavourful, and are clearly inspired by that fantastic chapter in Brindlewood Bay with ask the pop culture moves in it. Love them.
Providence moves are the core of the game, but to me they’re clumsily explained. In Prick of a Thorn, a friar takes a thorn to change the outcome — either indulging in sin or being so pious as to inspire a negative reaction. These inspire rumours, and as rumours mount up, things become increasingly ludicrous and blamed on the Ancient. This builds up rumours randomly that point towards this heresy in the town. The structure that rumours develop by is the rumour mill, and it’s a very fun innovation in my opinion. You track the rumours as they become increasingly bizarre, and whether they’re a sin or virtue, and how bad it’s getting, which gives the game momentum and a clear endpoint that everything points towards, and binds all the mysteries together. It’s very cool, very thematic, very flavourful, the kind of clever mechanic I love seeing.
At the pinnacle of this heresy, someone you care about is blamed for it all, and church hierarchy shows up, with the Canonise/Excommunicate moves. First, the friars attempt to prove or disprove certain rumours, and then an outcome for the friars turbines is rolled in response. This doesn’t work for me at all, but largely through lack of clarity. The judgement rolls use the Librete pattern, but it’s not clear what stats we’re using to boost it — it’s entirely random if there are none , so I’m not sure what it means to overshoot your mark here, or how to manipulate the proceedings in order to do so. You need to be able to choose how high you roll, to make pushing your luck structures make sense. The Final Judgement relies on these random results, so while you could theoretically guide this result according to the first set of moves, in reality your outcome is set with a small amount of randomness. It’s definitely possible I’m missing something, but if I am it’s because the text is fairly unclear in its explanations — I read this section a few times, and even went back to the example of play and word searched the terms. Perhaps this is a problem with playtesting only happening with people involved in production, or perhaps this complexity is why the author felt the need to open with an extended example? But, the example of play doesn’t include an example of the final moves of the game, although it indicates that the proven and disproven judgements may occur during play rather than in an extended scene prior to Final Judgement. Which just confuses me further, as it appears to contradict the actual rules. Overall, while I find the concepts in Rosewood Abbey compelling, the rules are frankly confusing to me.
Which is disappointing, because there’s interesting referee side tech here. You’re instructed to always keep 3 mysteries on the go, adding new mysteries as they’re solved, resulting in a fairly dense play area. Sessions go through a fairly structured selection of beats, that coincide with the canonical time that I recall being confused at being included earlier in the game. I really like this stuff, but honestly it should be player facing as well, taking cues from Blades in the Dark, given the players are supposed to participate in them and are given specific instructions. I’d honestly have loved canonical time being simplified to game structures instead of selling it as verisimilitude, too. The game ends with three mysteries to get you started, and shows handily how you can have overarching more complex mysteries to make a kind of modern police procedural style of gameplay. Very cool, but again, it’s not fully supported by referee chapter that I can see. Like, make this stuff explicit!
Well, Rosewood Abbey is a mixed bag for me. The rules text isn’t very clear at all to someone coming in blind, and perhaps it would’ve made more sense to someone who’s played enough Brindlewood Bay to write a medieval monk hack of it. I don’t think the example of play works as it needs annotation, and is far longer than can be reasonably expected to read without all that context, despite there being some rules explanation built in. I see this alot in games borne from this legacy: A lot of assumptions underpin the games texts, that result in an incompetent game to those who aren’t in the community itself. On the other hand, I find the whole concept and structure to be deeply compelling, the themes of conflicting rumour and truth in the context of an interesting religion that will take the events and use them to destroy someone’s life disturbing and interesting, and I really want to love this game even more than I hoped to initially, because if these factors.
Luckily, the book itself claims that this is an unfinished product — and so hopefully as development continues, some of these structural barriers to my actually bringing a game to game will be addressed. Certainly though, while more mysteries and support would be appreciated, it’s the core of the text that needs rethinking in my opinion. If you’ve already got a lot of Brindlewood Bay under your belt, or you have friends so keen on the themed they’re happy to stumble through the climactic sections a few times to figure out the rhythm, Rosewood Abbey is for you. For me, I’ll have to continue to wait for a Carved by Brindlewood game that includes all the necessary rules to play.
So much editing “advice” given in TTRPGs is basic copyediting advice. An example is Sams’ recent post, but it’s just one example among many. Why?
RPGs aren’t journalism, so the AP Stylebook (or New Yorker House Style, or Elements of Style, or etc. etc.) doesn’t apply, and even if we did have a unified style guide for TTRPGs, I don’t think we have a major copyediting problem that needs addressing. Copy editing is concerned with clarity, coherence, and consistency, but there is not epidemic of unclear, incoherent, inconsistent TTRPGs, in my opinion as someone who closely reads far too many of them.
I do see an editing problem, though. It’s not because we don’t have a good enough style guide, but rather because we have no clue what this medium actually is, and accordingly the greatest thing we can do is experiment with how to present information in a way that works for the conflicting needs of the format. How to edit in a spirit of experimentation that befits our hobby? Developmental and line editors need to pioneer those treacherous waters, and that requires a lot of thought and creativity. It’s hard. Copyediting is straightforward, comparatively. That’s why, in my opinion, we get so much copywriting advice. That’s the answer. But what should we be doing instead?
Consider the conflicting needs a TTRPG must address: TTRPG writing both attempts to be readable cover to cover in the style of a novel, but simultaneously be a reference manual for the pragmatics of running the game. These two things, I suspect, cannot be fully reconciled: You’ll be finding your middle ground; the balance between the two that you find most satisfying for the specific text you’re writing as well as for your personal needsor perhaps the needs of afickle theoretical audience. Reconciling these things, in my opinion, is an information design problem at multiple levels, and resolving that involves layout decisions, ordering decisions, and word-and-sentence-level decisions. What should you be considering when you, as someone performing a developmental or line edit on your (or someone elses’) book, try to reconcile this conflict? I’m going to make eight suggestions for principal considerations, with examples.
Disclaimer 1: This is a blogpost about editing, so someone’s going to get sassy about a typo in the comments. It’s a blog post, I ain’t going to edit this. I’m a working mother of two writing on my phone. Typos are annoying, but they don’t invalidate anyone’s opinions.
Disclaimer 2: This is TTRPGs. There is no authority on how to best write, edit or present them. In my opinion that’s what makes it exciting. At the moment there’s just the legacy of cheaply put together xeroxed pamphlets holding us back. The advice of your aunt who edits the church bulletin’s needn’t apply (thanks Aunt Karen for your input), and you sure can claim my advice doesn’t if you wish.
Disclaimer 3: I’ve added a bunch of visual examples. I talked about all of them in both the context of the section they’re included in, and the broader context of this post, so you definitely could go back and re-read them once you’ve finished to see if you agree. Also, you might look at them and disagree, which is also fine: Figure out your preferences.
1. Consistency and redundancy
Consistency is important, because it helps the reader predict what comes next, and hence navigate the text more fluently. It’s equally important to choose what to have consistency in — if you’re always consistent, you’re boring, and if you’re consistent with the wrong things, then you clog the text up with unnecessary dredge (see: the problem with Stat Blocks, that I’m sure someone has written). You need to figure out what things need to be consistent in your TTRPG text for it to navigate to what’s important specifically in that text.
In the same way, you need to choose what redundancy is necessary and identify why that redundancy helps the reader navigate or understand the text. Does that particular section, concept or rule belong in a summary at the beginning of the text? Is it best split up and peppered throughout the text? Is it an appendix? Should it be all three, or just two?
Think about redundancy, consistency, and repetition when you’re setting yourself rules to add to your (real or imaginary) style guide. Some key questions you might ask yourself are “Does this pattern occur regularly enough I need to set myself a rule to consistently govern it? Will doing this consistently render the text illegible in some places?”
Seas of Sand by Sam Sorensen, page 46: The overall page structure remains the same for each of the 7 types of sand, very consistent, easy to identify differences and effects. Also note page references, section footers for navigation, use of inverted colour for table headings. I think that the choice to italicise the entire right hand column is a poor consistency choice, and that the bold text highlighting gets lost in the level 2 headings on the left.
2. Highlighting
Highlighting is my generic term for bold, italics, colour, Capitalising and other ways to make certain types of text easy to identify in a block of text. Highlighting is very important for navigation during play, and using multiple kinds of highlight can be useful for the purposes of highlighting different types of information. Butif I use a differenttypeof highlighting ineachword, we quickly have an illegible text, particularly replicated over many pages. Your choice of what to highlight has significant impact on how the text reads and navigates, though, so choose wisely how to use it or not use it.
A key question you might ask yourself is “Are the key pieces of information easy to find? Would they benefit from highlighting in some way?”
Stygian Library, by Emmy Allen, page 10: In addition to the highlighting, note the headings, use of decoration, and the breaking of convention to signify importance. Maximalist in its approach without completely being rendered illegible.The Hand of God by Mike Knee, page 48: Note that lack of highlighting renders the text challenging to scan even in bullet format, despite the prose being readable and clear, and full of details legacy poeticism (“The thread of fate for all living beings” is level in my opinion). Given colour is already on the page, it’s woefully under-utilised here; colour in the bullets provides no significance or meaning, but were it used to highlight it could carry much more unobtrusively. Also note that heading locations change between texts, and are reduced levels (or a least, levels aren’t clear at all). Also note that while ordering is creative (this comes between 8 and 9) but only makes sense in the context of the map.
3. Hierarchy
So, how do we manage this tightrope of consistency and complexity? Well, the most important decision is what order to present things in. This is called hierarchy, but here it doesn’t imply superiority, but rather the order in which you want things to be understood or recalled. One important psychological principle that applies is the advice “Put the ghoul last” (i.e. We humans remember the most recent fact most clearly): When describing a rule, you may choose to put the inferring rules first, so the key points, provided at the end, are easier recalled. But it’s not the only thing to consider: When writing read aloud text, definitely don’t tuck the critical information in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, where it can be lost amongst the other concepts. But, when describing a room, the thing you see first may be more important to write first. You can also present hierarchies in more obvious ways: Bullets and numbering come to mind, as subservient to their preceding body text, and numbering is often subservient to preceding items in the list. Sidebars and boxed off areas are often visually defined as subservient to the body text. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other ways to do this. You can be creative with hierarchies: Even indentation, padding or decoration can be used to imply hierarchy.
Some key questions you might ask yourself are “Is this information presented in an order or format that allows the reader to optimally locate the information as needed?” “What is the best format to present this hierarchy in?”
Beyond the Pale, by Yochai Gal, page 65: Bullets indicate specific information, and are subservient to body text. Set aside box is subservient to overall page. Information is displayed in order of discovery.
4. Referencing
Another way to walk the tightrope of consistency and complexity is through referencing, the bugbear of the editing world. Referencing, particularly in large documents, is hard to implement. But, page referencing goes a ludicrously long way to reduce the need for redundancy and hence reduces complexity by a significant margin when done well. You can minimise the difficulty of referencing as well by being clever with how you number or alphabetise the text. You can also use footnotes and indexes to address some of the same issues, dependent on complexity. Genuinely, where are the footnotes in RPG writing? An under-utilised tech in TTRPGs given we were all raised on Pratchett.
A key question you might ask is “Does this section provideenough context to be usable without searching the book?”
Into the Cess and Citadel by Charlie Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggin, page 145: Note page references for Spire treasures (a choice to avoid redundancy). use of colour, position and uniqueness for headings to substitute for lack of padding, and judicious use of highlighting.
The question to ask yourself is “Do I think this is important for the reader to remember and to return to? How am I using space, art and typography to signal that?”
The Waking of Willoughby Hall by Ben Milton, page 20: Note how the rooms are not numbered, but directly paginated. Neat! Also note clear headings without complex levelling, and clear structuring across columns. On the other hand, excessive bold highlighting renders it ineffective, and bullets are indistinct and overused.
5. Headings
Headings are important, mainly for the purposes of navigation. You need to be able to find different information, and headings are one of the major ways you do it. This means the headings have to be descriptive, clear and easy to find. This in turn means that usually, you put them in the same place on the page, and give them some padding around them so they aren’t crowded out by the rest of the text.
Heading levels are for different levels of navigation, so they need to be differentiated clearly from one another: Identifiable padding, typography, or decoration, or whatever clever thing you can come up with. Level 1 headings help you navigate through the book, level 2 headings help you navigate within a section, level 3 a subsection, etc. More than 2 levels of headings can get confusing in my experience; consider using other ways of setting out information if it’s this low in the hierarchy, such as sidebars, boxes, or parentheticals.
A key question you might ask is “Does this heading stand out when I flick through the book as a whole?” Substituting the word section, page or spread for book as required.
Raiding the Obsidian Keep, by Joseph R Lewis, page 28. Note the strongly significant level 1 headings; level 2 and 3 headings aren’t adequately differentiated. Also note boxed text is subordinate to body, decoration is well used to differentiate description, bullets aren’t overused, and bold and italics highlighting is used judiciously and effectively.Tephrotic Nightmares, by Luke Gearing, page 90: Note that 1st and 3rd level headings are clear with structured design making it easy to navigate from the map, but 2nd level headings aren’t clear, particularly in the context of the previous 2nd level headings being 2 pages prior — a case where scanning your text for places where choices render the text less coherent is important. No highlighting in text makes it difficult to scan for significant information.
6. Sufficiency of prior information
One major challenge we face in RPG writing is that they’re highly interdependent texts, which means that information that appears on page 2 might lack immediate meaning without the context on page 25. Creative ordering of information is our mantra here. When we’re reading through a section, for each section, we should be either familiar (fairly immediately in the text) with the context that is needed to make sense of it, or we need to be able to find it easily. And if we can’t do that textually — through reorganising or rewriting — we rely on referencing and redundancy.
A key question you might ask yourself is “Does this make sense in the context of the order the reader is reading the book, or do I need to change the place in the book or how it’s presented so that it does make sense?”
The Tide Returning, in the Cairn Adventure Anthology Vol. 1, by Zedeck Siew, page 41. Note the principal characters are redundant, for the purpose of providing prior information for what comes later. Also note the judicious use of highlighting, overuse of bullets to provide hierarchy, page referencing.Another Bug Hunt, by DG Chapman et. al., page 4: Note distribution of information clearly, splitting it between referee and player-facing information, and using padding to make it visually digestible.
7. Visual significance
Text is a visual medium. What I mean is: You see the text on the page with your eyes, which means how that text is displayed on the page is important. This both goes for low-art texts and high-art texts — how you position and arrange the text on the page has meaning. You can actively make a choice to ignore that aspect of the medium, but you would be doing the medium a disservice.
We use space, art, and typography to manage visual significance. In terms of typography, we’re talking about size and uniqueness. In terms of art, we’re talking about using it to thoughtfully identify certain pages as more relevant and to draw the eye (not just to fill space, or at least clearly identifying space-filling art from art used for identification of significance). In terms of white space, we’re using it to set apart the sections of text that are significant.
Visual significance is super important for navigation — all of these are cues to the significance of a section, which means that they allow the eye to find significant text easily while flicking through the text or skimming it in digital. The impression the page makes is a key thing we use to find things and to differentiate the significant from the insignificant: Both the shape the blank space leaves, and the art that accompanies the text, but also consider the layout.
Tiny Fables, by Josiah Moore, page 16. Note the use of a single column to show the significance of sections and lead the eye. Choice of art placement is such that the two columns are easily identified — had it been places at the bottom of the column, more difficult for the eye to trace. Also note how the use of colour allows for less obtrusive highlighting, how the heading needs less size and boldness in the context of the single-column pattern than in say Raid on the Obsidian Keep or Into the Cess and Citadel. Text is provided in the order of encounter, as well.Mork Börg, by Pelle Nilsson, page 21: Inventive, but equal presentation of information but…Mork Börg, page 22-23: The contrast between this double spread and the previous page emphasises the importance of these more powerful weapons.
8. Poeticism
Surprise! RPG writing is neither technical writing nor is it literary writing. In my opinion it’s better to think of it as akin to writing a user’s manual, but using poetry as a primary text form rather than prose. I’ve spent plenty of time talking about the technical aspects of the writing already, so I won’t harp on that here. If you consider the evocativeness of the text as key to good RPG writing, as I do, specific prescriptions on text looks a little foolish — poetry can choose to ignore convention on the name of communication. So, I wouldn’t ascribe or offer you any prescriptions, but rather consider how your words and arrangement of words communicate the feelings and images you’re trying to convey. There’s a spectrum here, and you need to find where you lie on it — swing too far towards poeticism and you can be incomprehensible. But, careful consideration of the other principles here render poetic writing very comprehensible. I’d also challenge you to learn from poetry: Experiment with the words on the page, where they are placed, creating your own, going abstract. I see a reluctance in authors to let go of Gygax’ legacy of mundanity, but where better to let loose with language than in works of fantasy?
Some questions you might ask yourself: “How can I rearrange these words or sentences to be the most impactful on the reader? Will they be excited to describe it to the table table?”
Rakehell, by Brian Yaksha, page 46: Poeticism in every line. But note lack of headings makes it hard to navigate, the lack of any visual signifiers, and there being no on-page context for the content at all.Resonant, by Amanda P, page 42: Note despite the technical layout and limitations of the science fiction setting, poeticism at (1) and (6). Wherever you can bring evocativeness and the right vibes. Also note, consistent headings, judicious highlighting, visually distinct stat blocks, clearly hierarchical bullets, and page references.
Conclusions
This is my perspective on what we need to be considering in an RPG text edit (or for that matter, as we write our first draft). I think that focusing on the minutiae of copywriting trivialises our interesting and not yet fully formed hobby. We are equal parts poet and technician, and we should be editing accordingly, not treating our text as simply copy to be streamlined. And we should be editing towards grander, more broad-stretching concerns around information design and visual impacts on complexity, in the context of our strange and unique medium. I think we have to embrace the weirdness of TTRPGs rather than assume they follow the same rules as everything else. Embrace the visual elements of the medium and its tactility. Experiment. Make mistakes. Push our informational design, visual design, our poeticism, our understanding of the form forward. We’re not novelists. We’re not journalists. Let’s not look at our texts through their eyes.
I hope these examples and questions help you bring our medium’s uniqueness out in your creations.
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.
Ave Nox is a 206 page module with writing, layout and illustration by Charlie Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggon. It’s system neutral, which in this case means a kind of melange of 5e and B/X — I think this is the same as Into the Cess & Citadel, and I suspect it’s the team’s house rules. I’m pretty excited about Ave Nox, because back when I read Into the Cess & Citadel, I thought it was beautiful but wasted on what was effectively a book-long city generator, when what I wanted was an actual city. This, however, is a dungeon, not a dungeon generator: One, singular location, filled with denizens and places in relation to each other. This, I think and hope, will play to the teams’ strengths. In Ave Nox, a fissure has been found beneath the Ghost Fields, and you’re venturing into it, for fun, profit, or curiosity, to explore the underground city of Solaris, and uncover its’ secret history.
We open with the dungeons’ history. I was seeking feedback on an upcoming project recently, and one insightful comment was that the timeline was more confusing than it was helpful, because it relied on an understanding of the rest of the module to make sense. This is how I feel about Ave Nox’ history. Front-leading timelines need to be brief clarifying affairs — the best recent one that comes to mind is the dual timeline of Another Bug Hunt — rather than exhaustive histories. I suspect that this could’ve been summarised in less space, and just needed a solid edit, and it all made sense when I went back and reread it after I’d finished the book: But if I were running this, and not reviewing this, I wouldn’t read the 200 or more rooms in order (who honestly would?). I’d wing it, and this would be so much nonsense and context I’d be missing. Four pages of timeline full of names and factions you’re unfamiliar with is entirely unhelpful at the beginning of the book, before you’ve read it; it would be very helpful as an appendix, I think. It’s sadly, not a promising start.
The next 20 or so pages cover Shear, the town that serves as your base to enter the dungeon — simply called “the Dungeon” at this stage, although it will come to be understood as the city of Solaris mentioned in the history. Shear is designed to discourage in-town conflict. The illustrations and descriptions suggest a cosmopolitan, Forgotten Realms-ish setting, although that’s easy to excise. It’s explicitly anarchist, reluctant to take in strangers, and without law enforcement (although there’s an under-explained council of elders — I’d like to know how that interacts with the lack of law enforcement). This all feels like an explicit response to the Keep on the Borderlands model of “lawful outpost close to dungeon”. Most of the characters have quirks — Thracite the blacksmith pays double for adamantine; Mama Xhiri gossips if you help her with her orphans. All of these characters are compelling, but not in a factional, interactive way, just in the way that they make for a lovely background cast. I don’t get the impression Shear is a place for politics or drama, so these aren’t NPCs with desires or relationships. There are also a bunch of merchants (characters with equipment lists, really), and mercenaries (intended to serve as hirelings, or competitors), similarly superficial characters, fun to interact with, but drama-less. Overall, I like it, and it suits the kind of characters and vibes my players tend to be in for — cosmopolitan, Forgotten-Realms-ish settings that justify the PCs being wherever they want to be without racism or sexism. I would have appreciated a map of this town though, or some kind of visual representation to hand to the players, or at least a referee summary (especially with my post on towns recent in my mind). Right now I feel like I’d be flicking through it all, having difficulty figuring out where, who and what they can access or interact with.
One thing Shear doesn’t have is a rumour table, or a list of hooks. Part of this is the lack of needs or desires amongst the Shear NPCs — this is so blatant it feels intentional, rather than an unforced error. Either the authors have fully bought into the hard reading of You Have Been Lied To, or the intention here is that this is a megadungeon in the sense that your play should all be contained in the dungeon, and anything outside the dungeon needs be minimised as much as possible. I like rumours and hooks, so long they impact your interaction with the dungeon. But I this feels as if it’s intended to increase the mystique of the dungeon, which is supposedly newly discovered and unexplored. While rumours and hooks make a lot of sense in many dungeons, I can see this being positioned as a low-prep, low-impact, pick-up dungeon, through this omission, which tracks with the approach to the NPCs: Flavourful scene-setters that don’t delay your returning to the main event. And that, in turn, further clarifies to me what isn’t made explicit otherwise: this is a megadungeon, intended to be the primary mode of play for a long time.
The next section is entitled “dungeon quirks”, and this is where I start to get excited about the dungeon. There are ghosts throughout the dungeon, who interact with the players through a reputation system that is semi-religious in a really interesting way. There are gas pipes throughout the dungeon that can be manipulated for environmental effects — but not just by you. There are unique “solar” keys — reminiscent of Legend of Zelda dungeons — that wall off certain dungeon areas until you locate them, driving exploration. There is an in-dungeon merchant that can be summoned once a day — likely to be discovered by accident, and also clearly inspired by Legend of Zelda dungeons, but enabling deeper delves through its inclusion. There is a demon whose prison is scattered throughout the dungeon in pieces — the players get powers for each piece they collect, but when they collect them all the demon is freed! There are fast-travel points that you can discover as you get deeper into the dungeon, allowing you to explore deeper without touching the surface levels that you’ve already explored thoroughly. These are all really fun and interesting concepts, that also position this particular megadungeon differently from others: Clearing and re-exploring areas already explored is discouraged, and rather it’s intended to be a long term campaign concerned primarily with forward motion to a clear end point. It’s a video game inspired megadungeon, not inspired by the ambling, treading-in-your-own-footsteps model of Castle Greyhawk at all. And, going back to my earlier hypothesis, this model is perfect for low-commitment pickup games, and I feel like it may also be perfect for open tables, if clear expectations are set.
There are, however, important quirks which aren’t mentioned here, and it also isn’t mentioned where they all are or key points of interaction. So, I had to search for where the mirror shards containing the demon were in the dungeon; and I had to search to find out how the players could find out, how they knew the Solaris Wards might need to be destroyed to defeat the Sun King (I didn’t find the answers, though). It turns out you can switch off all the gas pipes, too, but that isn’t mentioned until well into the book. If we’re going to front-load dungeon-wide concepts, I think we need to front-load them all and give the referee information to use and anticipate their use, especially in a text this dense and long.
We now reach the dungeon itself! I like the key here — not overexplained, simply bold for items of interest, stat blocks set aside from the text, italicised read-aloud text. The flexibility of this key is nice: As opposed to the methods in Nightwick Abbey, Curse of Mizzling Grove and Beyond the Pale — each seemingly inspired by Landmark, Hidden, Secret — this features a lot more flexibility while hitting the same notes. Each area (containing multiple keyed locations) is given an alphabetic prefix, allowing for smooth recognition of different appearing or interacting spaces — an elegant conceit.
The descriptions themselves are a little much for me, but not so overboard that I’d find it difficult to parse. Part of this is the strict length considerations: All keys stay on a single column, or page, or more rarely spread. I like that the history of the dungeon — even as a non-actionable insight — is considered valuable, as research was a primary reason given for venturing in. It does add to the challenge of parsing the description, though. There are missteps though, whose solutions are pretty clear, though, and hence would’ve been caught with either more editing or more playtesting: For example, the sculpture in A4 that provides clues regarding the layout of the dungeon absolutely needs an illustration, and it’s unforgivable it doesn’t have one, given the illustrators also wrote the module. I’d have to draw one, I think, if I ran it. On the other hand, they take advantage of their chosen quirks exceedingly well: In B3, the ghosts, dead by gas leak, warn the players if they’re friendly, but endanger them if they’re angry. At this point in the dungeon, that’s an excellent early foreshadow of the implementation of gas pipes and the ghosts later in the module. It’s tutorialising, just like in a video game.
One thing you might notice this dungeon lacks, though, random encounter tables. Individual rooms have random encounters in them — A2, G3, J2, and U1, for example. Areas M, O and V have their own random encounter tables. King Linnorm leaves area H intermittently to wreak havok on area D. But overall, this is not a dungeon that depends on random encounters. What does this imply about Ave Nox? Well, it’s super reliant on encounters that are in the key. This might be a problem in play — in a traditional dungeon it definitely would be — but noting the jaquaysing in place and the generous fast travel points, I don’t think it’s a dungeon concerned with the resource management minigame that random encounters are designed to encourage, nor with restocking cleared spaces in the dungeon, as it’s not meant to be retread. Rather it uses random encounters to mimic heavily populated areas. In the context of the implied principle “don’t retrace your steps”, summonable in-dungeon merchants, and plenty of empty rooms, the lack of consistent random encounters makes more sense, I think, than my original impression.
I don’t think Ave Nox assumes the use of a reaction roll, which most megadungeons do, but it’s not entirely clear, and it would be better and easier to run if this was in the brief rules section at the front. It would be hard to intuit the intent of the “ragged cultists” in area A if I rolled a positive result. The “summer cultists” of area J are simply living in their quarters when you encounter them, and you encounter them doing mundane activities — but in the absence of any faction or individual agendas, there’s not a clear suggestion for how to interact with them if the reaction roll is positive. There’s “alarm” for the summer cult in their second area, K, to determine how they pursue the players — this further suggests you shouldn’t be interacting with them, as “being spotted” increases alarm. In O8, there is a stat block that varies according to your reputation with ghosts — but is still hostile irregardless. There is an actual reaction table in area U, which strongly implies that there shouldn’t be one used elsewhere. Given all of this, it appears Ave Nox is intended to be a combat gauntlet, rather than a dungeon of social interaction and faction politics.
To further support that hypothesis, there are only six named characters in the dungeon with any kind of agenda that imply you can interact with them — Knife Man on page 57, Tul-Yafshalamr on page 144, Serdati on page 170, Goloch on page 174, Vox Solaris on page 178, and The Zealous Many on page 193. It’s worth noting that only 1 of these is in the first quarter of the dungeon, and three of them are in the last quarter: Most of the interaction will be in the depths of the dungeon, not in the surface levels. Two-thirds of them are gated behind the three solar keys. This does not promise to draw people in and provide them gifts or drive, and it threatens to contradict the reluctance of the dungeon to retread its steps by placing all the interesting characters behind closed doors. I’d prefer this interactivity be more evenly spaced, or more common, for my taste. The presence of fetch-questgivers like Knife Man in E2, further support this as a video game inspired dungeon, where you’re given goals to achieve to gain rewards, and that contextualises the choice that violent hostilities are the norm. Most of these characters occupy videogame-like roles, reminding me a lot of Dead Cells, to be honest. I’m disappointed, though, in the lack of factions here. There are factions that clearly should be able to be played off each other — the exiled cultists who can change form seem to be perfect to stir into revolution against the cultists of the city above who literally defecate on them, for example. The city is supposed to have decayed into turmoil in 30 years, but in the subsequent 470 years the remaining factions never clashed or developed enmity? Entire areas filled with inhabitants were shut off by the summer cultists, and their violent ghosts remain. It feels like a missed opportunity, albeit one that is, again, intentional. Cultists here aren’t characters, they’re goombas: Generic enemies with regional variations. They’re not actually inhabitants of the city. They might be directly inspired by the inhabitants of the City of Tears in Hollow Knight — that’s the strong vibe I get. Like it or not, this is internally consistent with the videogame inspired design.
In terms of spatial design, the maps are clear and legible, and the dungeon, particularly between levels, is interestingly jaquaysed — the sewer accesses lavatories everywhere, for example, and there’s an elevator connecting trade levels for another — so at a macro level it’s quite satisfying. One really smart decision is the solar keys I mentioned earlier — the big finale section of the dungeon is visible more or less from entry (it’s a dungeon, so it’s not a mountain looming over everything, but it’s a left turn from your entry), effectively reminding you the whole time you play, as you slowly collect the keys to unlock it. This keeps the ending of the dungeon in sight, which is really important, I think, for a megadungeon that is positioning itself as potentially able to be completed. It also provides drives: “This is locked? We’ll go the other way. There’s a key? Oh cool! Wait we need three? Let’s keep delving.” Clever design, I think. At a micro level, loops are present on the map, but a closer examination — so close I almost missed them — reveals some missed opportunities. An example of this, is that the fantastic R7 — “a tight passage filled with statues piled upon each other. They appear to be climbing over each other, their faces filled with fear and shock” —lies between two distant rooms, rather than being used to foreshadow the cockatrice-like creature that created the barrier. Still a great room! But it could’ve been the centrepiece of a spatial story, whose climax was the hostile encounter; instead it’s incidental. These small missteps are common, and unlikely to affect your experience negatively, but rather they could have had a significantly more positive impact had they been more thoughtfully implemented.
The layout here is very reminiscent of Into the Cess and Citadel, and not at all in a bad way. It’s consistent, dense, but also readable and largely legible. It appears written or at least edited in layout, which brings blessings of less page-turning and more awareness of relative content size. The art is very evocative and there’s plenty of it, and the maps are stellar. It actually comes with a map supplement which you can print and have on your wall or your table, which is pretty great. It strikes I think a good balance between this becoming an unmanageable tome, and it being overcrowded, and for a low-white space, densely spaced text it’s about as good as it gets. These kind of books could always use more breathing space, but it uses its’ claustrophobia well. It would’ve benefited from some quality of life additions, though, namely an index or page references, because sometimes even word searching the pdf couldn’t find what I was looking for.
An interesting twist are the limited tables — there are dozens of places where the random tables of items or treasures that often feature in dungeons are accompanied by a set of check boxes — you can continue to search, but once all the check boxes are gone, you’ll find no more things off the list. There are also trackers in the book for ghostly reputation, for example. This also implies the book is intended to be written in, and this adds to the sense that Ave Nox is disposable and not intended to be retreaded or restocked. I think that a disposable workbook concept could’ve been leant into harder, though, if that was the intent: Destructible, modifiable maps are suddenly an option, player contributions to lore, sections for impacts of rival adventurers. All of these things become more viable options if the megadungeon is a workbook to be completed; this is a step towards legacy megadungeon, which is interesting as hell. But, the layout itself doesn’t facilitate this approach well in my opinion — this stuff isn’t in the printable workbook, they aren’t sitting in easy to find places like at the beginning, end, or center spreads. There aren’t clear indexing in the margins to find different sections easily to facilitate note taking and modification. Again, this is a clever idea that needs to be leant into and iterated on, but has huge potential in my opinion.
Ave Nox’s themes bounce a little off the cosmopolitan Forgotten-Realms-ness of Shear, I fear, as it gets dark and gloomy and messy in the depths. I don’t mind this, but if you were taking rosy-cheeked wide-eyed 5e players into the city of Solaris, I’d give them warning. The combat-heavy gameplay and less traditional dungeon crawl structure really feels like it would sing in Errant in particular, though, and 5th edition or Pathfinder 2R as well. I think I’d fatigue on the combat in Old School Essentials, and it feels utterly incompatible with something like Cairn or Knave, at least the way I play them.
Would I bring this to my table? There is a lot to recommend it. I think Ave Nox brings some absolutely fascinating innovations from videogame dungeons into TTRPGs in a way that I haven’t seen successfully implemented in one module before. I think that these innovations together make it an exceptional beer and pretzels game for dropping in and dropping out, which is precisely a gap that needs filling on a lot of people’s tables. But it leans away from my favoured styles of play in order to achieve these goals. I think it could’ve fairly easily walked the tightrope of achieving both, and I think if I had some time, I could add faction play, without much trouble. The dearth of NPCs could be mitigated by running rival adventurers — a bunch of which are already provided — and in combination with multiple groups of players, this would quickly become a quite dynamic space to play in.
Irregardless of whether or not I’d run it, if you’re looking for a megadungeon that you can run sessions in quickly, if you run a table in Errant or 5e already and they want a megadungeon, and if you’re willing to describe some grotesque monsters, Ave Nox is probably the best thing to come out in a while. Looking at my recent megadungeon series, this is the strongest out of them all, except His Majesty the Worm, which you’ll have to learn a new system for. If you’re happy to modify it significantly to make it more political, or must lean into it and go combat-heavy, there’s nothing as strong as Ave Nox in recent memory, I think. But it’s not beholden to tradition, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Let’s be frank, you don’t navigate a town — or a city — like you navigate a dungeon. It’s silly to do design your town that way. How do we facilitate interesting navigation in a town or city setting?
“…the reason we see tentative play in things like the OSR — where people are tapping around with 10 foot poles — or in D&D — where people are making insight rolls or perception rolls all the time — is because those games both have a poor way for players to extract information from the GM to generate certainty, which means that they have to play tentative because they don’t understand the world around them…”
That’s Sid Icarus being interviewed on the Yes Indie’d podcast. It’s a far reaching comment, and I’ll probably come back to it in other posts, because it made me think about how as someone designing an adventure location I can think about making it easy for players to extract information from the referee, and in turn how to make it easy for the referee to extract information from a written key. In the context of a town or city, I think that means how do I make the town gameable by making it easy for players to extract actionable insights from the referee, by making it easy for the referee toextractthose actionable insights from the key and put them into the conversation. In this equation, you might say Gameability = Ease of Extraction + Actionable Insights to Extract.
Redirecting Rumours and Encounters
In a town — where everything is close together — you navigate by landmark and address — “go down Bosq Road and look for the house with the red door”. Of course, your town needs a vibe. If it’s an exciting town, you’ll need a random encounter table. You don’t explore a town for secret doors, unless you’re investigating a specific house or space. This means the clues regarding where to go, who to talk to, and why you’d go there, need to be provided through some kind of menu: A rumour menu, for example. The random encounter table and the rumour menu together are our first sources of actionable insights.
This is why I called it a rumour menu: Basically, you need to make sure that both the random encounter table and the rumour menu can be easily accessed by the players. Random encounters are just given to them randomly (obviously), but I’d suggest rumours should be also just given: “You get 2 rumours from a towns person each day you spend loafing about town.” You can roll to see what they’re doing. Maybe have every NPC give a bonus rumour. Maybe even make a PbtA style move about it:
When you’re loafing at the Harp & Harpoon, Roll 2d6 +Charisma. On 10+, roll 3 rumours and make friends with a faction. On 7-9, roll 2 rumours and make a friend. On 6–, roll 1 rumour and make an enemy.
You’re generous with rumours and tension encounters because we’re designing them to provide actionable insights and actionable insights are necessary for navigating the town. You want the town to be easy to navigate through actionable insights because it can’t be sensibly navigated in other ways.
Even a point crawl doesn’t truly make sense, in the context of a town — while you are (obviously) navigating between points, the way you navigate between those points is very different from the point crawl as presented originally in Slumbering Using Dunes. I don’t want to make up a name here, although citycrawl is how people will swing and it’s not accurate: It’s really an information-driven navigation system, a datacrawl. This is why you’re generous in both provision and design of rumours and random encounters — without data to crawl, you can’t navigate.
A city, by the by, is simply a bunch of towns — called districts — hung together. Each district has its vibe, and its own random encounter table. Each district has a unique rumour menu, but at this scale also each big topic has a rumour menu: Perhaps these topics are factions, or events. This is because factions and events are information that travel the city widely, rather than locally, and hence provide city-wide actionable insights. You might have them vary by district, however, as different socioeconomic groups may perceive events differently. Otherwise, design as per towns.
Reimagining the Town Map
The purpose of a map in both these cases is to provide logical landmarks in an intuitive fashion: If you go down Bosq road to the house with the red door, you pass the village green and the Bear-owl Tavern. Maybe you get distracted?
This means, more so than dungeon maps which are about practical traversal, town and city maps should be eye candy: “Wait, we walked past a bakery? Can I go in?” Stick it on the table for everyone to see, so they can interact with it visually, like you do when you’re visiting a town you’ve never been to. It provides us with an opportunity for the sense of discovery we get when we find the cute coffee shop lane, and provides another vector for actionable insights. The map itself: Data you want to provide to your players, so that have actionable insight in order to navigate towns.
Plotty & Petty Overlays
The problem with Against the Cult of the Reptile God, my own Hiss, and the recent Hungry Hollow, is that they recognise there’s another, hidden layer, but fail to present this hidden layer in a compelling or accessible way. The referee can’t extract the information (easily), so the players don’t have access, because in addition to this information-driven-traversal layer, there is a hidden layer, which should be visible to the referee, and that contains plots and social connections.
How do we solve this? You need to have a kind of map overlay, that sorts plotlines that overlap in terms of space, revealing where they intersect and how they change. This means I think playing with key order: Have locations 1-5 not be connected by relative geographic direction, but rather by plots or social relation. Now, plots can be presented together, as a unit — a single spread or set of spreads. This allows the actionable insights to be more easily extracted by the referee. It also means I can have encounter tables or rumour menus serving plot in certain places, if I choose to.
I’m also trying to intuit how to better incorporate petty desires — much as Amanda P lays out here —into this. Petty desires are kind of an additional hidden layer. Are they a relevant player of plot or social connection? Do they provide actionable insights. Oftentimes, for example in my unfinished Mothership module Tragedy of Grimsby-Almaz, the role they play is to provide connections to follow in an investigation. It’s important that so-and-so have a drink with such-and-such each Friday, because they’re the ones to notice the murder. But also, they provide meaning and reason to actions — certain people might put a bad tinge to a rumour because they dislike their competitor for the Biggest Pumpkin. I’m not sure if these belong on the character description, on the map, or on a social overlay, at this stage. What do you think?
But basically, this is something I’m working towards: Flavourful, engaging town maps, so you can approach navigating them visually as you do in real life, keyed out of geographical order but by social or story subcategory, in order to facilitate ease of extracting actionable insights from the world.
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
I was going to take the kids to the beach, but my wife is sleeping in after a rough night and the kids are entertaining themselves in an act of the gods , so I’m going to read the GM Core. This is what the remastered version of Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster calls its Dungeon Master’s Guide. Over the last few weeks I reviewed the D&D Player’s Handbook (2024), and the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster: Player Core, basically trying to figure out how they relate to each other, and whether they succeed at onboarding new players to the game. I also asked questions about their relationships to the changes that have happened to the hobby over the past decade — things like actual play, online play, and the ascension of D&D lore into the pop culture mainstream via the memification of alignment and classes and popular properties like Baldur’s Gate and the recent movie. The goal isn’t to break down rules differences; plenty of places will do these better if you care about the intricacies of action economy. There’s neither right nor wrong with regards to how these things are designed, simply player preference. In terms of players, these two behemoths of the TTRPG scene compete on the stage of character options, but as a referee who stopped running these games in the light of having a family and the scourge of scheduling with other friends in similar situations that have found deprioritising TTRPG time a necessity for survival, I care more about how they compare in terms of referee support? Does the GM Core make me want to run Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster?
Now, I got a bunch of comments on my review of Player Core last week, and I’m going to clarify my opinions on the most popular refrains. Is PF2R in conversation with D&D2024? I think they’re clearly and historically of the same lineage — both descended from 3.5th Edition — and D&D2024 clearly takes inspiration from PF2R and both from 4th edition. PF2 came 5 years after D&D 2014 was released, with D&D to re-entering the popular consciousness with Community in 2011 and then hugely so in 2015 after Stranger Things, the same year Critical Role began changing how people interacted with TTRPGs (which, notably, was a PF1 campaign until this point). Not only are they in conversation with each other, PF2R is explicitly a response to changes in the licensing that are associated with D&D2024. So, no, not entirely separate design conversations. Is Player Core intended to be for new players? The PF2 Beginner Box came out in November 2020, the original Core in August 2019, so it’s bizarre to assert the Core is not intended for new players to the game as the Beginner Box didn’t exist for new players for a year, and in that year there were only new players. PF2R doesn’t have a new Beginner Box, and you can’t tell from looking whether your Beginner Box is updated or not. D&D2024 will, too, have a beginner box also releasing almost a year later, which also doesn’t mean that the PHB 2024 isn’t aimed at new players. So, no, I don’t think it’s a sensible assertion that it want aimed at new players. Is PF2R is in competition with D&D2024? Of course it is, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. For people interested in D&D2014, PF and PF2 have long been the primary alternative. You can have different approaches and still be in competition; stating that they have a totally different approach to GM fiat is flatly in contradiction to the the text of the GM Core which says that “it does not require mastery” and “the details will fall into place”, as well as the fact that D&D2024 clearly takes inspiration from PF2R’s approach, as discussed in the Player Core review. Obviously, I’m not reviewing your table, I’m just reviewing the book, but it’s also silly to assert (especially in the context of the disclaimer at the top of every I Read Review), that you can’t review the book of a game without playing it, especially when you’re also asserting that this specific game is supposed to be run by the book. Now, let’s move on.
I’ll begin with the great lie of this book: Despite it being 100 pages shorter than Player Core, and bulk of Player Core’s 450 pages largely being irrelevant to the GM, it requires the GM to buy Player Core for the 40 pages of rules at the back. I know that all the PF2R rules are available for free, but: This is a freaking rule book. Put. The. Rules. In. The. Book. I’d rather pay for the extra pages than google or buy a whole extra book. I know there’s a Player Core 2 on the horizon: If it also requires purchasing the Player Core by not including those 40 pages of rules, then Paizo you’ve completely lost me. Don’t call it Core if it doesn’t contain the Core of what you need to know. Bad start, GM Core.
You might recall the Player Core didn’t have anything much to say about being a GM. GM Core has a lot to say about it, though. The GM: “Tells a story”, “Fleshes out the world”, “entertains” everyone, “prepares through studying”, “improvises” and “makes rules decisions”. But, it’s “collaborative”. Sorry for the snark there, but I hate this it’s even worse than what the PHB2024 says about the Dungeon Master. Absolutely horrendous introduction, basically setting up the GM to occupy all roles from scheduling to hospitality to conflict management. It’s a huge step down from the PHB 2024, which gave principles drawn from other areas of the hobby (to my eyes at least) for both Player and Dungeon Master to follow: PF2R treats players like cats to be herded or tolerated in order to get your story told.
From here, it basically splits into three: A guide for GMs who’ve never run PF2R before, a guide for building your own world and adventures, a gazetteer, and optional rules and treasures. Honestly, with this structure, it seems modelled after the infamously terrible DMG2014. Uh oh.
The Running the Game chapter is a relentless barrage of advice. It covers a lot, making gestures to hospitality and safety of the players; it covers scheduling and how to start and pace a session; it considers sensory processing, attention and disabilities. Overall, this is a very thorough, but incredibly dry, lesson in how to run a game. None of this advice is bad, but it’s a relentless, unbroken stream of how to play that goes for 45 pages. Nothing about this helps with onboarding me into running the game, it assumes — and to be honest it does foreshadow this when it says the GM needs to study in the principles earlier — you’re willing to study this section. At least the only section you need to study are these first 45 or so pages, if you aren’t planning on creating your own adventures. Compared to the graceful education of the Mothership Warden’s Manual, this is a gauntlet designed to weed out the weak. Compared to the annotated examples of play in the PHB2024, it’s abysmal. It feels like something written 30 years ago, just including content for modern sensibilities. If you’re new to running PF2R, this doesn’t provide you with training wheels, it places you at the top of the hill expects you to just start riding.
If you are planning on running or creating your own adventures, though, the support provided by the section on “Building Games” is absolutely magnificent. Campaign types, frames and themes. Frameworks for individual adventure, detailing number of encounters, scenes and sessions with particular details: “2 conversations with doubtful authority figures” and “avoid trivial or low thread encounters” in a horror-style game, for example. Advice for building sandboxes in a structured system requiring encounter prep. Use of motifs and recurring characters for story arcs if that’s your jam. Encounters have XP budgets, there are encounter quick frameworks if you don’t want to spend time on the nitty gritty, the impacts of weather and terrain are accounted for in the encounter maths too if you want to mix things up. This is all presented incredibly clearly and smoothly. If I wanted to build my own PF2R adventures, it would be very easy to be confident that I’m creating things suitable for my party, or the dungeon level, or whatever I was aiming for. It also covers — after an interjection — building hazards, creature and items with the same level of specificity. The only thing I could do without is the world-building section, and I’ll come back to why. This is absolutely S-tier support.
The interjection is for a GM-only rules sections — this covers optional variants, afflictions which are things like curses and diseases, and rules around environments and hazards. Aside from the variant rules, these are only here because you can’t teach a GM to build a hazard until you’ve explained what they were — these rules should’ve been in the Player Core. Why the variant rules aren’t grouped with the subsystems later is completely beyond me. Those subsystems come at the back of the book — they’re all rules that you engage with only occasionally, but honestly they’re player facing rules and should be in Player Core as well not the GM Core. This reveals a strong lack of thought regarding what rules belong where — if all the rules aren’t in both books, why are player facing rules split between two books? This reveals a either a major flaw in the information design of these books — a lack of clarity regarding who and what they’re actually for — or more cynically, a decision made so that more people have to spend more money on more books because no single book provides everything you need to play.
The section on Golarion itself is a marginally more detailed version of what is in the Player Core — both of these just aren’t enough at all to get a sense of the world in my opinion. There are no characters here, nothing to interact with — it’s all dry description of places and politics. In D&D2014, they chose to focus on a small section of the world, and I think for the purposes of core rule books it’s a much better choice. The Golarion sections in both Player Core and GM Core have been an absolute waste of space, and soured me on the potential of the world.
So, why did I rail against the world-building section? It feels cursory, and contrary to the message that the GM Core is sending from page 1. There’s a massive underlying assumption in the GM Core, and that assumption is that if you’re the GM, you’ve GM’d before. It assumes it has things to teach you, but you know what all of this is already. Like the Player Core, the audience here is experienced gamers looking for a specific experience, not onboarding a new audience. They’re not even trying. In that context, the section on world building seems utterly pointless. In all truth, I think that choosing to target this honestly at their implied audience — people who played Pathfinder 1e, or people who are looking for more character customisation, or a more satisfying and less attritive combat than D&D2014, but are experienced in playing or running games — would’ve made this a far more compelling book.
Because as it is, this is a mixed bag. There’s gold in these hills, but also the organisation of both Player and GM Core are highly questionable in each other’s contexts. A bunch of rules here should be in Player Core, as they’re player facing, especially if it’s expected the GM own both. If the GM should only own one, it should all be here. The advice centred on new GMs is abysmal, a dreary exercise in exposition. But the structures that support encounter, adventure and campaign design are without peer, and make it incredibly easy to create your own stuff, if that’s what you’re interested in. This is one of my big hopes for the DMG2024, was missing in the DMG 2014, and this has it in spades. The optional rules here give a lot of support for a wide variety of play types that are skipped over in both the PC and the PHB2024; but procedural exploration is still missing.
The GM Core is a poorly directed mess, and it fails to live up to the hopes I had placed on it. It does little to nothing to assist me in my first few sessions of running PF2R, although there’s plenty to assist me once I’ve got some experience. It doesn’t systematically support any of my preferred (and fairly classic) play styles, despite having a series of subsystems built into it that attempt to cover the ground; the authors of this appear to have no familiarity with the larger space or are disinterested in broader play styles that you might want to bring to PF2R. And it doesn’t sell Golarion as a place I want to hang out. The biggest strength here is that it supports me building my encounters and campaigns very well — but if I’m investing in the PF2R ecosystem, I’m probably also investing in their encounter paths, so that’s not something I’m likely to be using. I’m a module girl, though and through, so while I appreciate the support for when I need it, it won’t be my primary engagement with the game. This has utterly failed to sell me on running PF2R, but I’ve heard good things about the PF2 starter set, so we’ll see if it manages to do what the GM Core fails to.
There are only a few questions in this battle between the Mean Girls of the TTRPG world, and the next that will be answered is whether the DMG2024 will come out swinging as hard as the PHB2024 did. And then, I think, there’ll be a sizeable break, until the Starter Set 2024 is released — and then I’ll compare it to the updated PF2R Beginner’s Box.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
The Secret Vault of the Windswept Island is a 29 page module for Old School Essentials by Gabriel Ramos with art and maps by Colin Lor. Described as a fantasy horror module, in it the players are trapped in a vault with a death cult, and need to escape. I backed it for Zinequest this year.
In terms of art and layout, this is designed to be reminiscent of official OSE modules, utilising holding of key points of interest, bullet points for clarity, and two column layout. The colour is under-utilised in the art, but it is used well to tie key points and headings to the maps and to differentiate heading clearly by subject as well as level. Stat blocks are boldly differentiated in white on black text — this works, although a subtler but no less effective choice would’ve been to use those colours doubly here. I find Lor’s art, while excellent, is too cartoonish to communicate a sense of horror, although it’s technically excellent and clear. This comes across particularly in the character illustrations in the prefab characters at the back — these come across as fun starter characters, rather than characters in a horror module with trigger warnings for self-harm suicide. Once you’ve finished the module, the choice makes sense, but based on the pitch it’s a surprise. One giant peeve of mine is that the pdf isn’t searchable — half the benefit of a digital version is that you can search for things in it. You have to make an effort to turn off searchability in a pdf — I assume they don’t want people to copy their sacred text — but overall this is misguided and means I can’t look things up effectively. A massive mistake.
The module opens with two pages of very solid summary. Main NPCs, hooks and unanswered questions take one page and advice for running the two more complex encounters follow on the second, the third being a list of rumours. Only one of these rules of a solidly poor one, although a lot of them are a little meh. A good rumour should change behaviour of the player character who hears it —“A sentient artifact of tremendous power is hidden in the vault” for example doesn’t really give you anything to act on or change your behaviour. I’d rather 6 excellent, game-changing rumours than 12 ones insignificant to play.
We then have 4 pages covering the island itself. The island is very interactive, which is a pretty great feature to have. They’re all quite charming, although I’d have love more of them to have been interactive with the dungeon, or when they are called out to do so. It’s not clear here whether lighting the skeleton buoy impacts the dungeon at all, although it feels like it should — I certainly can’t see why lighting the buoy would change anything anywhere else, and as I said earlier I can’t search for “buoy” to make sure I didn’t miss anything. If I did, it should be mentioned here at the same place irregardless. The only one I dislike is the caltrop beach, which seems to unnecessarily call for a dexterity check on arrival. While I could see this being used as a trap, there are no nearby creatures to lure there.
There are some inconsistencies in the keying, though, indicating the need for an editor with a closer eye; some sensory cues being bulleted points of interest for example, rather than in the main description, but inconsistently. As a writer, I know this happens; often your information design choices occur organically as you write. But the editors job is to iron out those mistakes that appear in the evolution of the writing.
Immediately in room 1, the dungeon features some problems. The Convoker is here, which locks the dungeon doors if “grabbed”, although it’s not clear if this means “touched” or “activated”, or only if it’s removed from the statue it is held by. There’s strong indication that it’s essential that the Convoker is activated so that dead PCs can return to life as ghosts for the duration of the module, but there’s no mention of this effect by the rumours table or any NPCs, and the time pressure of your ghost expiring isn’t stated to the players at all, even though it’s mentioned in the “advice” section. While I admired the brevity of the intro, the lack of cohesive word choice here combined with the brevity of the text mean I’m not sure what to do in the first, essential room. There are at two rooms that are flagged in the introduction as being more complex than this one. It’s clarified three pages later in the second page of the entry for room 2 that it’s touching the Convoker that closes the door. This is the kind of mistake I could see derailing my session after I made the wrong call in room 1.
Room 2 features a lovely coloured panel, that’s intended to be shown to the players. It’s a simple puzzle, explaining how to get the major hidden treasure. I love this, and just wish it was available as a file for printing along with the map. Room 3 continues the habit of troublesome descriptions. It took repeated flicking forwards and backwards to pick exactly where the gelatinous cube was in the setup, with a number of red herrings — like the fact that the roof is dripping — making me second guess the choices. This habit of confusingly described spaces continues throughout the seven rooms in the dungeon. Once you get the room, they’re usually each a fun puzzle. But the advice to “read it from front to back” before running it is an understatement. You need to spend time figuring these rooms out and taking notes. If you don’t take the right notes, you’ll describe it wrong. All of these descriptions needed a close, blind read by someone not playtesting it.
One problem here is that this is not explicitly a funhouse dungeon — but there are no empty rooms here, each is an uber-dangerous puzzle. When you describe your adventure as “fantasy horror” that’s not what I’m expecting. I’m expecting some kind of horror. But no, this is a gauntlet, a modern take on a tournament dungeon where your 3-8 player characters are slowly turned to ghosts, which make future deadly traps less deadly for the remaining party. This is fun, and clever, but it ain’t horror, compared to say The Wizard which is quite explicitly a horror dungeon. This kind of incorrect sales pitch feels to me really common in our hobby, and I’m not sure exactly why: You want people to be into what you’ve made, so mislabelling it is never a good thing. Just recently, I reviewed Tephrotic Nightmares which similarly fails to pitch itself accurately.
I’d like to pause to praise the ancient language translation system that’s baked in here. There’s not much to talk about, but it smoothly integrates multiple levels of translation into the text, as well as clearly indicates how to choose which to read, It’s very cool. There are also two fun randomisers at the back, for unique undead and crystal exposure.
Overall, this is an odd duck of a module. Despite a suggestion early on (a miscommunication, but this module is full of those), there is no death cult here. It’s a gauntlet dungeon. The primary treasures at two sentient weapons and the aforementioned Convoker. Being magical treasure, this doesn’t contribute to party XP, and two of them are cursed and not really useful outside the dungeon. There is surprisingly no treasure to speak of in the dungeon otherwise — certainly not enough to level up a party of level 1 characters. A few valuable items aren’t given value, like the gilded chest in room 3. The implication is that this is really intended as a one shot — a single session module for specifically the pregenerated characters, where they’re going to die. But, there are only 3 pregenerated characters — it feels a lot like there should be more, given the 3 level 3 characters provided will almost certainly die by room 4 given nowhere to rest and that none of them can heal.
That said, flawed though it is, and poorly pitched, this is a fun little gauntlet and puzzle dungeon. If you’re signing up to have a party of low level characters put through a meatgrinder, for a single night of fun and goofiness, and you’re not playing for your character development or levelling up or any of those lingering term goals, The Secret Vault of the Windswept Island a neat little distraction for an evening.
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
I was going to go to bed because I have an absolute throbbing headache, but my kids are sick and refusing to fall asleep, so I’m going to read the Player Core. This is what the remastered version of Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remaster calls its Player’s Handbook. I actually got this a few months ago, but I didn’t have an angle for a review. Then, last week, I read the D&D Player’s Handbook (2024), and I realised: These two games are both trying to be the same thing to the same people; the 2nd Edition of Pathfinder was also released 10 years after the 1st, and this is basically pitched a usability and lore rebrand of that 2nd Edition, in the light of Paizo backing away from the OGL. How does the Player Core compare to the onboarding that the PHB2024 succeeds so well at? Does it respond to changes in the the hobby over the past more-than-a-decade? Similarly, I’m not going to break down rules intricacies here: There’s neither right nor wrong with regards to how these things are designed, simply player preference, but I’ll drop it here, early: It seems apparent that you get more bang per round for your combat dollar in PF2R than D&D2024. But aside from those that are specifically looking for deeper tactical combat, these two behemoths of the TTRPG scene are mainly competing on the stage of character customisation, and D&D 2024 has significantly upped its game there. Let’s see how they stack up.
I have the pocket edition which is about 450 pages and in trade paperback format— an option I wish D&D2024 had to be honest —but the hardback, letter-format version that’s more equivalent to the PHB2024 is actually shorter than it at 320 pages. When I talk page counts, I’m going to convert page counts roughly at that 70% ratio, just so we’re comparing like to relative like. It’s clearly implied that the Player Core is intended to be the only book a player needs to buy, and the GM Core is the only book (aside from the Monster Core) that the GM needs to buy. I’m not convinced any edition of D&D has had these same aspirations: Dungeon Masters have always needs the PHB to learn the rules. This, however, wants to buck that trend and make accessing the game a simple process.
It opens with a rules summary. This is about 10 pages of terms and symbols which are absolutely opaque. This is the flaw in leaving rules to the end of the book: You’re expected to understand what a reaction (et cetera) is straightaway, so you can make your character creation decisions based on that. Then we have 10 pages of character creation, which is heavily illustrated and features a similar annotated character sheet to guide you through character creation, as well as a levelling up guide. This is very brief and neat. It then spends a little time — only about 7 pages — talking about the world of Golarion. This is a gazetteer style summary, and feels like a misstep compared to PHB2024s elegant incorporation of lore into the mechanics themselves.
The bulk of the book is character options, though. First ancestries and backgrounds — about 30 pages, and notably the backgrounds here clearly inspired the ones in the PHB2024, with similar mechanical heft. For ancestries, you get a decent chunk of lore, but gain a bunch of feats for each ancestry, making them a very potent source of character customisation. Then we have our 100 or so pages of classes. These classes take a very different direction to the PHB2024 — no subclasses, but boatloads of feats —making them broader in concept, but far more granular. None of these classes are really strongly hooked into any lore in a way that appears meaningful to my laypersons eye, which is actually a misstep in my opinion. There’s a Player Core 2 on the horizon, and if we’re going to keep coming with new classes, lore specificity feels like a fruitful place to create them from. At this point, the Player Core has 11 ancestries, 8 classes, and 39 backgrounds, for about 3500 variations. But, this is not as accurate I think, as that same equation for PHB 2024: Feats in particular really expand the gradual customisation of your characters, and are the core of the both the optimisation at a given level, and the creation of a “soup of character potential” at first level. This kind of customisation is a different kind of appeal to the one in the PHB2024, where most of your decision making comes early, and later you can simply add a few feats or epic boons. Here, you’re choosing a feat at most levels, and the amount of choice you have could be considered overwhelming by some — but exciting to others.
The “soup of character potential” here is unique to PF2R. While decisions can be deferred until later, and your broader character concept still needs to be chosen early, the details do not. This means you can still be surprised or choose to change directions very easily as you continue to play, simply by choosing different feats from the very large menu available. The path you take in D&D2024 is set in stone usually by 3rd level. This is not the case in PF2R. While the cliche of “I have planned my choices for every level through to 20” is definitely a potential approach here, it’s not the only one, and I could see a tables where the chosen approach was to discover your characters rather than plan them.
The movement of PHB2024 towards more concrete actions also appears to be inspired by this book — or at least by 4th Edition D&D, which it seems to me PF2R also draws some inspiration from. Skills are tied to specific actions here, too. Weapons get special powers if you’re good at them here, too. And I’ve got to say I far prefer the spell lists here, especially in the context that there are far fewer spells, as the PHB2024 uses spell slots as a resource economy for more classes than than Player Core, which depends on Feats to fill that role.
As I alluded to earlier, the rules here go at the very end. They’re only about 40 pages, including important appendices. There are a few key differences here, but the big one is a more generous action economy; compared to D&D2014, D&D2024 has really closed the gap with PF2R in terms of formalising actions and equipment rules rather than relying on adjudication.
While the rules differences are less than I expected, and the differences in customisation approach are not what I expected, the differences in approach that do exist between the Player Core and the PHB2024 are honestly astounding. The Player Core seems disinterested in attracting a new audience — or at least is blind to the impact of its approach. It forefronts character creation, almost immediately, and playing the game is almost an afterthought to the lonely fun of creating a character. The character customisation has miles more granularity, but does not cater anywhere near as much to provide scaffolding for roleplay or mechanical complexity as the PHB2024 does — for example, the PHB2024 guides you through choosing class by mechanical complexity, where PF2R assumes everyone wants equal complexity. From the player perspective, this game is all about optimisation and finding interesting mechanical perspectives, and it’s largely disinterested in scaffolding roleplay, positioning in the world, or setting up interesting levers for roleplay. Even the Witch, the class whose concept is infamously the one that is most famously the one with the hooks, really shies away from providing those hooks.
Despite all the praise for Golarion as a world, nothing about these character building blocks scream connection with that world. It feels afraid to impose a world on the players, in a similar way to D&D2014 — “but what if the GM doesn’t want to play in Golarion? I can’t make the classes definitive!” is Player Core’s refrain. The gazette chapter is cursory and uninteresting, and probably doesn’t belong in this book at all; there’s no way to meaningfully draw connections with people in the world. It feels like a rules chassis strapped to nothing at all in comparison to PHB2024. There’s no appeal here to people who just wanna play with their blorbos or adventure with their OCs at all.
What surprises me here is, despite the fact that I can clearly see that the mechanics and customisability of Player Core are far superior for what they’re focused on — combat and optimisation — they lack soul where the PHB2024 leans very hard into its own identity. Perhaps this is a side-effect of the revised edition stepping away from D&D-isms after the OGL debacle, as I’ve heard nothing but praise for Paizo’s world, but this feels like it’s replacing the stolen glory of D&D’s adopted history with nothing at all.
For myself, if someone was willing to run either PF2R or D&D2024 for me, I’m not sure which I’d choose. PF2R definitely has a more interesting a compelling combat system; feats and powers are much more streamlined and interesting; I’ll be constantly full of surprises and surprised by my fellow players. But, I’m busy. I might have the time to read through all of these feats and get excited — if I stop doing anything else. As a sole hobby, PF2R could be my everything. As a casual part of my hobby, I think I’d prefer to be sitting in a D&D2024 game, making choices only when I want to rather than multiple every level up, choosing whether to engage with the world through my choices — or not and keeping self-contained — and engaging as much in clearly scaffolded character play as I am engaging in combat-centric time. The combat wouldn’t be as fun in D&D2024, that much is obvious. But does the consequence outweigh the benefit? Depends on where this game fits into your life.
If I was given a choice between gifting Player Core or PHB2024 to someone hoping for them to engage in the game, I wouldn’t choose the Player Core, unless I knew very well that what they’d enjoy doing was, to analogise, “building their deck”. If I wasn’t sure what aspect of the game they’d be engaged with, PHB2024 is much broader, much stronger product. If I knew they wanted scaffolding for OC play — like my niece — Player Core doesn’t feel even an option based on the content of the book itself.
However, the same issue presents itself as presented itself at the end of reading the PHB2024: If I were to run one of these games for that friend, or that niece, which one would I choose? I have no idea. Player Core has almost nothing to say on the subject of GMing — the core rules are about the same length in this book, but while I’m more familiar with PHB2024’s rules, the changes are changes more likely to trip me up. Luckily, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has already released its GM Core, pitched as “the only book the GM needs” (aside from the Monster Core), so next week, I’m going to read that, and report back on how well it scaffolds and supports me, as a potential GM.
So, for Zinequest in February 2024, I ran a crowdfunding campaign for a module in zine format called Curse of Mizzling Grove. My previous zines, Ludicrous Compendium and Tattoopunk Antebible, were both stocked by US distributors, but I wanted to avoid the complications involved commissions and stocking this time around, and so I’d resigned myself to no further Kickstarters and to perhaps trying to find people to publish me.
But, self-fulfilling a Kickstarter became possible when I saw that Lulu Direct, the print on demand online publishing company, has a new crowdfunding fulfilment service. I decided to try to run Curse of Mizzling Grove through this service, as a trial run that hopefully wouldn’t run me into the ground financially. I’ll talk through the finances here, and I’ll be talking in AUD, sorry for my international readers.
Preproduction predictions
The main concern I had with Lulu fulfilment at the outset, is that Lulu wouldn’t give me any shipping prices in advance. This is pretty reasonable, but it made it challenging for me to set prices for my campaign. My predictions and assumptions were this:
My previous Zinequest achieved 50% digital and 50% print pledges.
Between kickstarter and taxes, I paid about $800 in taxes and fees.
My minimum to pay for the print run was AU$1650 based on these numbers.
I guessed Lulu would charge $6.00 per zine based on my proof prints.
I guessed based on previous Kickstarters which countries would be making orders, and guesstimated that the postage would average out around $16 per zine.
I’d need 28 digital backers and 28 print backers to achieve this, with digital backers necessary to subsidise the postage costs for print backers.
$500 for art
How did the campaign end up working out?
48% digital and 52% print pledges
$300 in fees, however taxes aren’t confirmed until I pay my taxes
$2780 in pledges total
Zine printing costs ended up $5 per zine
Postage was $11.50 and $20 depending on address
39 digital-only backers, and 42 print pledges
Art cost what I expected (+ a free copy of the book!)
Basically, I nailed all of my predictions, except it was a little more successful than I had expected. It looks like I won’t be going into the red on this one, although whether I’ll be in the black will remain unclear until tax time.
The one prediction that I didn’t nail was the timeline – I sent the orders to Lulu for distribution on the 14th of August, and I estimated May, so I was off by 3 months. I estimated the digital version would be finished by March, and it wasn’t done until the end of April. Part of this was just life – I needed a little more time to receive art and pull things all together, as well as iron out the kinks with the digital release, and underestimated. I’ll be more generous next time. But the delay from May to August was all due to issues with fulfillment, so I’ll talk about what happened there. Skip to fulfillment if you don’t care.
Post-production woes
Firstly, before any of this happened, I had to access Lulu and find out what information they needed to fulfil, and then writing a Kickstarter Survey to accept this information. Lulu requires a phone number for postage. Kickstarter surveys are difficult to design, and don’t allow you to put in mandatory fields, which meant that despite my specifically stating in Kickstarter updates and in the survey itself that if you didn’t put in a phone number I couldn’t deliver the zine, a few people didn’t provide one. I’m not sure how to get around that issue in future – I’d love if Kickstarter would allow mandatory fields.
So, the process with Lulu is, you make a Lulu compatible set of .pdf files and submit it to them for review. In order for it to be distributed using their “Order Import Tool” — what you use for crowdfunding — it needs to be approved for Global Distribution. Global Distribution means the approval process is a little more complex, as your zine (or book) has to be suitable for sale in bookstores, which means it has to follow certain rules.
Lulu, sadly, is a little opaque about those rules, and I’m a ditz, so even though I knew a few of these beforehand, I forgot them in my rush to get the zines to backers, and had to go through a re-approval process. More annoyingly, they identified 1 issue and asked me to correct it, then identified another and asked me to correct it a second time. Hence, I had to have proofs sent to me twice, rather than the hopeful once. Simultaneously, I had issues with the postal service – both of these proofs weren’t delivered to my house, and I wasn’t alerted to them being at my local post office. Which meant, a waiting period that should have been 1-2 weeks ended up being 3-4 in both cases, even though I corrected the issues pretty promptly. I’ll get better, I hope, at avoiding these proofing issues in the future, however there was a benefit – I ended up double proofing the book, so I ironed out a few copy errors that would’ve snuck into the final printed version had it not occurred. So, overall there was about a $100 cost in terms of proofing and ordering test copies that I didn’t account for, and I lost 3 months to postage and errors.
Once this was sorted, there was an issue with Lulu not approving it but not emailing me to tell me (which is what they normally do), and not telling me what was wrong (which is normally in the email). I didn’t check the updates center for a while, while I was waiting for this approval to come through, and when I finally went to query it, I realised it was rejected but couldn’t find the reason. I had to contact Lulu directly, wherein they realised it was an error, and approved it.
Fulfillment
Now it was approved for Global Distribution, there was a waiting period (this is so that the printing centers get the final version), and then I could actually put in the orders. The Order Import Tool was pretty intuitive, although the Kickstarter survey export gives you a heap of information that means you have to pick it apart and spend a bunch of time merging things and separating things out to be correct. Mainly painless, though, and the Order Import Tool gives feedback on what errors you’ve made in the submission process.
You can map multiple products in the Order Import Tool, which means you could have soft-covers and hard-covers in the same list, and fulfil them all in the same order, which is very neat, although I didn’t need to use that feature. Once everything is approved, you select the postage type you want to use for each country, and then pay for it with credit card (annoyingly, I’d have liked more options there), and they process everything and post things out. At this point things started printing and being posted out. Two thirds were printed and posted by the end of the first week, and the reminder by the two week mark. All backers (except one, a SEA backer) had their copies delivered at the week three mark. If I’d known that this would be a month-long process, I’d have added another month to the timeline I think.
I was concerned that I chose the most affordable postal option, as I expected there to be issues with tracking, but every single parcel that went out had tracking anyway, so it wouldn’t have been worthwhile it turns out to pay the extra. All the posted zines were delivered, and I haven’t had to send out any replacements. I’d been considering whether the higher postal price would have been more worthwhile, but at this stage it appears that standard post has progressed enough in tracking that it won’t be worth investing in more expensive postage in the future.
Do I think this is something I could do again in the future? Could other creators replicate it? Yes, I think so. I think, now knowing the errors and delays I encountered, I’d give myself an extra month on art, layout and test copies, and then an extra 3-4 months to bring that finished product to delivery, given the delays and rejections and awaiting things to be posted — that is, expect it to take 6-7 months rather than 3-4 months, even though it was fully written and laid out at time of the campaign.
But yeah, Lulu Fulfilment is a great service. I will use it on the next Zinequest, I think. If you’re looking to use it to fulfil, happy to answer any questions (I’ll add them to the end of this post, if you don’t mind). And, it’ll also potentially be available on Amazon and here on the Lulu storefront, if you want a print copy.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
The Dream Shrine is a 19 page module for Old School Essentials (with conversions for Cairn) by Brad Kerr with art by Skull Fungus. In it, the player characters have fallen asleep in a magic bed and been transported to the Dream Shrine, a dreamworld pocket dimension, where they must learn to think like a dreamer or die trying.
The layout here is simple, single column stuff, with Skull Fungus art decorating almost every page, and featuring a beautiful Skull Fungus map. It has clear headings, a simple colour palette which is both dreamlike and used well as a highlighter. Keys are page-to-a-room, with the right hand side of each spread featuring a node-based version of the map in the margin (utilising aforementioned colour highlighting) as well as descriptions of exits. It’s not my favourite information design, but it does the job and is clearly a part of ongoing experimentation in how to better integrate information into a key, and it works pretty well without relying on preponderance of fonts used for flagging. The use of node-based maps is an admission that as beautiful as Skull Fungus’ map is, it’s not particularly legible, and using cut outs of it wouldn’t have worked for the purposes of the mini maps.
The Dream Shrine is a 10 room dungeon — a tiny dungeon, like last week’s Tomb of the Primate Priest. My preference always lies with social interaction in dungeons, but a 10 room dungeon doesn’t have a lot of capacity for complexity and interconnection, and instead it needs to rely heavily on individual rooms being interesting, building on one another, then making you feel clever, and an abundance of mood. The random encounter table for Dream Shrine, for example, is all about the vibes, and providing opportunities to understand the kind of dream logic the Dream Shrine follows. Half of the entries are there to teach the party that helping dreamers in their dreams will reap rewards; the other half are devoted to the villain of the shrine, a crocodile-clown that steals human teeth. Similarly, a recurring character in every room is there to teach the player characters about how to manipulate dream logic. This is a neat and interesting approach to random encounter tables in smaller dungeons. Tomb of the Primate Priest does away with them altogether, a strong break from form, but works there; twisting the form to achieve different goals, such as this does, is a clever decision.
Kerr’s writing here is off-beat and weird, and anachronistic in a way that even in a dreamlike context I’d hesitate myself to incorporate into my fantasy worlds. But it’s very evocative, interesting writing, much that you’ll want to read aloud: “pink marshmallowy clouds, miles above a cerulean sea at sunset…a frizzy-haired lady in a nightgown sulks cross-legged, face in her hands, two clouds up”. Every room is sumptuous, and a pleasure. All of the rooms contain something interesting to interact with, although just under half of them are mainly concerned with providing traversal options or interesting long-term consequences as opposed to providing interesting or challenging encounters in and of themselves. The rest are directly related to solving the primary problem, which is the entryway to the secret room, a puzzle involving finding a way to kill or take advantage of the tooth-eating clown. It really all loops back to that, and providing ways to easily move between rooms in order to solve that problem through cleverness. Off the top of my head, I see three solutions to the main problem, and I suspect that there are plenty more solutions in the hands of a clever group of players.
In the context of all of this, the one thing that jars me desperately is the presence of mundane things: There’s gold sitting around, and fairly mundane magical items, and it’s absolutely beyond me how this is justified aside from “well we’re playing a game that requires gold for XP”. It feels like this is a recognised problem, as a number of the treasures with gold value — all the ones in the random encounter table for example — are justified by dream logic. But the others are jarring for me. I’d change these to weirder items.
A few negatives: I solidly dislike room 2 and in the context of the whole module it seems pointless and unnecessary. None of the other rooms are vestigial so it’s strange that there is one that is. I feel like it could’ve been more clearly connected to everything else had effort been put in; the dream here is interconnected, so this single disconnected room feels off in context for me. Finally, there’s a mini-module at the back. It’s 2 pages of a cursed forest, which is fine, but I’d have rathered it simply not be there or have simply included a location that was the Dream Shrine’s cottage itself.
So effectively, the Dream Shrine is a single puzzle, all revolving around the choice in the final secret room to free the chained goddess that is imprisoned here. The entire module is designed about driving the player characters to the 10th room, including both of the hooks. In this way, you could frame this as a railroad: I disagree with this analysis, but I do think that a module designed like this should be clearly flagged ahead for anyone playing. This is a module seemingly designed perfectly to be played at a con, or as a one-shot when the usual group doesn’t show up. The puzzle solution will get lost in a week’s break I suspect, and the purpose of the narrow funnel and recursive structure that could be interpreted as a railroad is to be sure the players are provided the information to solve the puzzle in a satisfying manner, while getting a chance to feel clever in almost every room. I think it’s smart design, and with a bit more polish could’ve been incredibly elegant. It would be very interesting to see more tiny modules designed as 5 to 10 part puzzles, instead of just as an exercise in pushing your luck, or room-by-room combat. Combining the high-density spaces of Priest with the innovative structure and conceptual density of the Dream Shrine would be a hell of an approach to tiny dungeons — I’d love to see that.
It’s probably worth mentioning the difference in format between this tiny module and the Tomb of the Primate Priest: 2 page vs. 19 pages. One contributing factor here is the complexity of the rooms, the additional random encounter table and other complicating factors. The Dream Shrine is simply more complex and more wordy than the Tomb of the Primate Priest. I suspect that if it was shrunk down to the same font and two-column layout, it would still be over double the length. Tomb of the Primate Priest makes that 2-page spread incredibly easy to read, I must say, but for the complexity here, I think larger fonts and more white space and art is a smart decision. The space is used to make a complex space more legible to the referee, which is an exceptional use of space in layout in my opinion. Your mileage may vary, however, depending on your preferences; I think the Dream Shrine makes the right call, although a more compactly laid out version would be a very valuable supplement to what’s already here. To some degree, whatever Skull Fungus’ gorgeous art adds to the module, it also to a degree detracts in terms of size and also map legibility. Whether it is worth that trade-off is also a personal preference. I certainly think that the clarity of the map here is not at the clearer end of Skull Fungus’ work, compared to, for example, the work in Workers Work Rulers Rule; how much of that is the nature of the dream-like map, which Skull Fungus does an admirable job of communicating, rather than the art itself, is up for debate, although there’s no doubt it contributes.
The Dream Shrine is an exceptional 1-shot for any table that enjoys puzzle-based play. There are a few caveats though: If you’re running it as part of your regular campaign, the anachronistic, dream-state humour here may not be a great fit; on the other hand, it’s in a dream, and if you provide warning, it might just be right for an off-kilter evening. The significant ramifications suggested for ending the module are likely to destroy whatever your status quo is. If you’re not in the middle of any big political plays, though, honestly those very ramifications are damned interesting and much less weird than everything else that’s going on in this module. I wouldn’t say no to them changing the direction of my world at all, if changing the world introduced a battle between gods, a titan-mammoth and a tooth-eating clown to my world. And, of course, if the table doesn’t enjoy puzzle-solving this isn’t for them. If it still appeals to you, the Dream Shrine is a hell of a tiny module to pick up.
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
My daughter is at gymnastics and it’s 36 degrees out (that’s 97 for ya’ll Americans), so instead of my usual walk to the sandwich shop I’m reading the Player’s Handbook (2024). Now, this version of the PHB is a whopping 383 pages long — a solid 80 pages longer than the 2014 version — so I suspect it’ll take longer than an hour for me to get through, and breaking the rules of the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons down? That seems tiresome, honestly, and I have no interest in breaking down intricacies in a very complex system I have little interest in playing. So, why review this? Curiosity, mainly. This will be a (loosely) comparative review with the 2014 edition, a text which is known for its complexity and opaqueness despite its popularity. I’m interested in what this new game actually is — is it new, actually? — and how it responds to the surprising twists and turns the hobby has taken in the least decade.With the unlimited power and money of the 1745th most valuable company in the world (according to Bing), can they take what they’ve learnt in the last ten years to make this challenging game easy to learn? And what direction are they choosing to take the game in? Are they listening from actual play, how lockdowns affected gaming, and the resurgence of digital play?
[Disclaimer: I’m not being paid for this, obviously, I wish I was, but if I was I’d have published this a month ago with all the famous people and news sites]
The book (aside from a preface, which you can skip reasonably, and is mainly Crawford boasting about hanging out with Gygax), starts, in grand contrast with the last edition, with the rules of the game. All of them. It summarises the lot of them in 29 pages. That’s an absolute feat of information design, helped in great part by the 18 page rules glossary in Appendix C it depends on. These 48 pages aren’t just rules, though: Most notably each section features a really compelling two column layout where one column is an example of play, and the second annotates that example with applicable rules and reasoning behind decision-making. It feels inspired by the play examples in Mothership 1e (and the small nods in these examples of play to popular figures in the current DIY elegant scene suggests the authors remain cognisant of how the scene is developing). They do this for social interaction, exploration and combat, all for extended examples. This is very good information design. This stresses a problem in the 2014 edition, which was the lack of support for social and exploration pillars — they get support here, although don’t innovate as much as you’d hope. Nothing like exploration procedure here, sadly, and no renegade innovations in social interaction like in Errant; but they streamline and bring optional roles like disposition to the fore.
Starting with the rules rather than with the character creation signals to me a significant change in perspective from the 2014 edition; it suggests to me that they think that they have more faith that the new generation of players will be comfortable with the rules, and will make their character building dependent on how they can bend and implement those rules, rather than based on vibe or on flavour. It suggests that either the audience has changed since 4th edition, or that they have more faith in their audience than they did in 2014.
The other thing that to me is notable is that it spends a decent chunk of time describing the expectations of play: Namely, that teamwork, collaboration, and exploration are key to play and that adversarial play is clearly discouraged. The lack of reframing of the Dungeon Master’s role disappoints me, though. For players like me who ran many hundreds of sessions of 5th edition, the lack of Dungeon Master support seems to continue to exclude me, expecting me to “guide the story” and to “make sure the rules serve the groups fun”. It doesn’t encourage me to dip my feet back into the official waters of Dungeons and Dragons. It also borrows from the lineage of Apocalypse World in talking about rhythm and flow of conversation, which is lovely and brings innovations that really should’ve been in the last edition. While it ain’t no Trophy Gold principle-driven play, it’s a step in the right direction.
The character creation chapter is also much better than the old one, with advice on class complexity, how to build a party together, and most importantly an annotated character sheet that the descriptions refer to. Like the previous section, this is much better organised to encourage the type of play and introduce you to the rules if you haven’t done it before, than 2014 was.
Individually, classes are really robust. Let’s take the infamously dodgy rangers as an example. It’s classed in the creation chapter as a class that likes survival with average complexity — just like a wizard. Instructions cover 1st level and multiclassing, and you get spell casting and spell slots to streamline resource management. You get a new power every level unless you choose not to take feats, and choose 1 new spell consistently each level. A new mechanic called “Casting Spells Without Slots” also streamlines how powers like hunters mark work. 5 out of 20 of the class wide powers are utility, but most have alternate combat utility. You get a bunch of cool stuff from your subclass, too — I’m disappointed in the taking a subclass at level 3 brevity retaining here, especially as it breaks the clean tier lines — Tier 2 begins at 5th level, not third. Overall, though, the ranger is far more robust and stands shoulder to shoulder with the other classes, while maintaining its essentials — and all the other classes manage to do this as well.
I love the tables that determine what traits you have based on your ability scores and alignment. It makes the process of determining your character from your stats — something that a lot of players struggle to do — intuitive. There’s some interesting world building in the character creation and class lists, too. The language table positions Sigil at the centre of a D&D multiverse (and amusingly implies to anyone familiar with 2nd edition that everyone speaks in a faux cockney accent). This planar emphasis also manifests in the classes: there is a planar barbarism here, feywild bards, shadowfel monks, feywild and shadowfel rangers, and far realm, astral, mechanus and limbo sorcerers. Almost race — now species, is that better? — has a planar connection, even humans. We get psionics in the core book, in fighter, rogue and sorcerer subclasses, which are tied directly to the astral plane, and all of these also get feats you can just take if you want. The multiverse is the only non-rules appendix in the book. Why does position the appendix mean so much? the appendices are streamlined down to 3, from 5, although 1 is added. Two of these are incorporated into the body text — conditions and religion. Religion gets centre stage in species descriptions, another indication of the importance of lore in this edition. Conditions is in the core rules now. Inspirational reading is completely gone here. Overall the world building here is very 3rd edition: A huge amount of confidence that the weirdness of the Dungeons and Dragons multiverse is something to lean into, rather than something to be embarrassed about. The prestige of the brand has changed alot in a decade, and it shows.
The 2024 edition is a hell of a nostalgia kick compared to the 2014 edition — honestly that’s a big statement — pulling hard from a bunch of older editions. The centrality of the planes, many settings, and Sigil in particular pulls from 2nd edition. They’ve dropped the barebones world building of the 2014 edition and replaced it with loads of references to gods and specific locations right there in the character options in a way that hasn’t been done since 3rd edition. Feats get centre stage here, a huge pull from 3rd edition, but structurally (especially with the epic boons) more like 4th. There are a bunch of new weapon specific abilities (“mastery properties”) that are reminiscent to me of 2nd edition. Either they’re aiming at winning back crowds who’ve left 5th edition behind, or they’re confident that these added complexities will further serve to entrench their existing audience.
Layout is pretty unremarkable as your expect; the most interesting innovation is the annotations in the first chapter. Chapters are separated by full page art of the uncanny digital painting style that has become more popular over the last ten years. There more interesting as anecdotes than as art, and seem muddy and poorly-framed for the most part, although I’ll admit a “ooh! i know them!” factor which tells me they’re more confident now that their audience will recognise their assets more — the first big splash is a hefty Dragonlance reference for example. The art ratio here is actually pretty low in most places, but notably multiplies hugely to illustrate character options; the beginning and ends of the book are art light, and the midsection is art heavy. I’m also not super sold on the art styles here, but mainly because it’s really tonally inconsistent; we have sketchy line art that would’ve fit in with 3rd edition, stylistic painted art from 4th, a more modern version of the 2014 editions art in some places, and a more cartoonish style reminiscent of webcomics joining them. I miss the cohesiveness of previous editions, and wish they’d had the guts to lean into one of these art styles to give the book its own personality.
But information design is a whole different beast, heavily innovating. Let’s look at the core rules as an example: Interestingly, comparing page counts indicates the 2014 spends only 35 pages on core rules (compared to 48) although it is all split into other sections as well, so it’s much less neat there. So why does the 2024 edition seem better? It should be worse! It has bloated! But the truth is, I was convinced this was shorter and more succinct than the 2014 edition. The organisation and use of the rules glossary is absolutely stellar information design if used how it’s supposed to be used, which is as a complement, covering regularly referred to rules. Sometimes, this is clumsy — the Influence action isn’t defined in the social interaction section for example — but more often it makes for less interruptions and non-sequiter rules or sidebars. The improvement in information design is universal: Tier is spelled out more clearly like in 4th edition, meaning class descriptions are also clarified. and class power descriptions become level by level instead of guesswork. Spell lists are with your class description, so you refer to only one section when you level up. Classes are given equal space, with wizards and clerics no longer being double or triple the number of subclasses compared to the other classes. Everything, including backgrounds, impact your character mechanically, granting almost complete flexibility in an intuitive way. Equipment lists are very clear on the rules governing their use, harkening back to 3rd edition, something that incorporates optional rules like crafting into the core rules in a pleasing way. Spell preparation differences between classes is spelt out clearly in the spellcasting section, and common use cases like spell identification get clarified. The spell list has who can use the spell in the description. Stat blocks, while still not exactly brief, fit far more relevant information into the same space. I would have to spend far more time immersed in the rules glossary and the index to see if these work, but in principle it’s highly referenced, which is always a good thing, and allegedly the index will point old terms to the rules for new terms — inspiration to heroic inspiration, for example. Overall, the information design lesson is that shockingly, the adage that 5th edition is complex is a misnomer: The 2014 edition had an information design problem, not a complexity problem. All the complexity is in the character options and the players love those: It just felt complex because those rules weren’t clearly explained and were poorly organised and written. Hate to break it to you Chris Mcdowall, but Into the Odd takes 57 pages to cover the same rules. Obviously that’s a tongue in cheek comment: Into the Odd is a smaller format, less dense book. But it points to a truth: Ignoring character options, this rule book is most definitely not more complex than other less popular TTRPGs, and the 2024 edition ups its game considerably in making it accessible.
This is an incredibly confident book. It successfully reframes and develops the 2014 formula into something more compelling for the players who love it. It teaches these new rules very well, truth be told, although it does it better for new players than for existing ones. It does as good a job or better than most of the rule books I’ve read in recent memory; it’s definitely better than the Pathfinder Remaster which I read a few months ago, I’m loath to admit. This is a hell of a rule book. I’m impressed, and surprised by the direction it takes: It leans hard into the lore of Dungeons and Dragons, showing either a confidence in the audience that they’ll buy into it, as 3rd edition did, or more cynically leaning into the intellectual property they own and can sell, in the light of the popularity of Exandria and the slow movement of IPs such as Critical Role away from 5th edition, and in the light of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the recent Dungeons and Dragons movie.
It also leans harder into the tactical combat of 4th edition, which it already shared a lot of DNA with, and the customisation of 3rd edition, for a more complex and intricate character creation system with a much larger range of tactical, utility and flavourful options. There are 48 subclasses, 10 races out of the box, and 16 backgrounds making for over 7000 character combinations out of the box, and the now mandatory feats mean that non-magical classes effectively have a spell list of their own, making for far more. The backgrounds have more mechanical heft here, so in my opinion they count more for customisation than they did as a more or less optional addition in the 2014 edition. For comparisons sake, 2014 has 42 subclasses (but most of those are cleric or wizard), 9 races, and the backgrounds lacked mechanical heft, resulting in under 400 options. With feats underplayed competitively in 2014 and considered optional, this gap is huge. But tying these tactical and utility options into the lore means there’s a reason to invest for people who aren’t interested in optimisation.
One thing it doesn’t do is relieve the Dungeon Master of any of the pressure that I believe to be the source of so many prominent Dungeon Masters turning coat against the game — the huge money to Shadowdark by the Youtube GM advice community being a recent example of this longstanding trend. Instead, it perfects the player options, and as I’ve long felt, the huge amount of scaffolding and excitement the character options bring for players of 5th edition are difficult to substitute for in any other game.
This is not what I expected at all, to be honest. I was expecting, as my friend Marcia declared, that this edition would be focused on recreating Critical Role or Dimension 20 at the table; it would be about playing with your OCs, mechanical framework be damned. But no, I think it’s a renewed attempt to do what the 2014 edition set out to do: Unify the various playstyles under one roof, and solidify the player base. It attempts to make the mechanics more appealing, tie them into the story of the characters more deeply. And it does this by leaning into the memefication of Dungeons and Dragons as an intellectual property, for a very clever corporate double tap.
Speaking of corporate gunplay, though, the elephant in the room: The other surprise here is that there is no mention at all of online tools or D&D Beyond. I have no doubt that the firming of the mechanical systems and proliferation of character options are in tune with the rumoured upcoming virtual tabletop and the dreaded loss of the 2014 content from D&D Beyond, and inevitable microtransaction filled future, but there is no sales pitch here for it at all. This book still wants to be at a table with your friends, and it’s better designed for that than ever before.
While I can’t imagine I’ll run D&D 2024, I’ve got to say reading this has me very interested in what comes next. Should you buy D&D 2024? Like, if you’re not going to escape 5th editions orbit, this is better than 2014. Buy this if your old book decays. Is it worth all the extra cash? No, I wouldn’t drop it with any urgency. If I wanted to introduce my niece to 5th edition though? This is a far better option than the book that actually caused the ascendancy of 5th edition in the last decade. If I was forced to run 5th edition again (heavens forbid), after giving away all my 2014 books: Yes, I’d pick these up. Are the rules better? I don’t freaking know; it wasn’t immediately obvious to me the ranger was broken in 2014. certainly, they seem more cohesive and confident in their choices, less appeasing of an imaginary audience. It feels intentionally designed, in a way that no other edition aside from 4th edition has.
The rules definitely aren’t better for Dungeon Masters, though. The 2024 Player’s Handbook doesn’t try to bring me specifically back into the fold. But also, the Dungeon Master’s Guide isn’t released until November. To put my money where my mouth is, what would the Dungeon Master’s Guide (and the Monster Manual in February, and potentially the adventures later in the year) have to do to bring me back into the fold? Well, a lot:
Robust system for generating balanced combats (CR or whatever)
Streamlined ways to run mobs and large scale battles
More interesting approaches to bosses than “oh my gosh more hit points!”
Support for running faction
A deeper dive into disposition
Procedural exploration and dungeon crawling
Slot-based inventory as no 5th edition table I’ve played in have ever tracked weight
Modules that aren’t boulders needing sculpting to turn into anything interesting or fun
Online tools to support streamlined prep
Basically, I want a minimal prep, easy-to-run session. I’m not confident based on the lack of implementation of some of these rules in the PHB. But based on the Player’s Handbook (2024), I’ll read them to find out. I’m no longer confident it won’t surprise me.
Because this did surprise me — because we’re right — Dungeons and Dragons 2024 isn’t 6th edition, this is what 5th edition should have been, 10 years too late for me. Maybe it’s right on time for you, or someone you care about.
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Playful Void 