• I Read Five Torches Deep vs. Shadowdark

    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’ve been thinking a lot about my own module writing, which I write for a genericised B/X. Allegedly, Shadowdark has a large audience. Should I write for it or something like it? I didn’t like Shadowdark very much when it came out and left it a fairly unforgiving review. I never brought Five Torches Deep to the table either, even though some tech in it stuck with me. I thought I’d come back to these two, revisiting them in the light of a different question: Is the load on the referee (if any) of the 5th Edition SRD, worth the trade off in making them more accessible to a broader audience? And if it is, should I be running Shadowdark, or Five Torches Deep? Or should SLIMDNGN, my own dungeon crawler, change directions and fork off the now Creative Commons 5th Edition SRD? Let’s compare these two dungeon crawlers, side to side. Five Torches Deep is by Ben and Jessica Dutter; Shadowdark is written, designed and laid out by Kelsey Dionne.

    Off the top, Five Torches Deep avoids “dump stats” by assigning special uses to each of your ability scores (as well as modifiers being used as per 5th edition SRD), for example Strength being directly related to Load, Intelligence being related to Supply, Charisma being related to Retainers, etc. This is really elegant although try as they might, they can’t make everything equally important. Shadowdark is more traditional in that Charisma, for example, is pretty useless, but Constitution saves lives.

    Both Five Torches Deep and Shadowdark give experience for gold recovered, although Shadowdark adds carousing to “convert” gold to XP, and in addition has a very different advancement table. I’ll put this in a table below, because Shadowdark deviates significantly here. In Shadowdark, a bag of gold is worth 1 XP, which is about 20 GP for early levels, but it changes as you level up, and so I’ll modify Shadowdark’s advancement in the table below to show roughly how much GP a PC has to gain. Note, however, that all PCs gain XP for all GP – it’s not divided by the party in Shadowdark, which means I could treat this as 1/4 the gold required to level up compared to Old School Essentials and Five Torches Deep. Basically, Five Torches Deep treats XP as roughly equivalent to Fighter advancement in B/X, just simplifying the numbers a little. In Shadowdark, you advance far quicker based on the gold you earn, and can earn XP theoretically for magical treasure and other achievements. If you’re running a B/X module in Shadowdark, you’re going to have to reduce the amount of treasure by about 10 fold, but luckily, that’s not too difficult because of that number: Simply turn all the gold to silver, and all the silver to copper. I don’t find Shadowdark’s carousing compelling, but I like carousing as a design choice, I’d just steal from Gearing’s for a more interesting table.

    OSE5TDSDSD (Modified)
    22000250010200
    34000500020400
    480001000030600
    51600020000402000
    63200030000502500
    76400050000603000
    812000075000705600
    92400001000008064000
    Comparing Old School Essentials, Five Torches Deep, Shadowdark, and Shadowdark modified by how much gold is suggested.

    Both Five Torches Deep and Shadowdark have roll-to-cast spells with mishaps, taking clear inspiration from Dungeon Crawl Classics, although with less bespoke mishaps. I prefer Shadowdark’s more detailed mishaps, and but Five Torches Deep explicitly allows use of 5th edition spells, which really adds to character customisation options. Five Torches Deep also uses attunement, though, which I’m not a fan of at all, limiting the number of magic items you can wield, which is unneccesary in my opinion given the amount of things you already need to fit into your inventory. Overall here, Five Torches Deep is stronger, but barely, and with a little less flavour.

    Five Torches Deep’s approach to both overland travel and rolling to return are elegant and lack an equivalent procedure in Shadowdark, as well as including foraging, crafting, and associated rules for equipment breakage and durability. Shadowdark doesn’t even try here, making a clear choice to focus on simplicity with regards to equipment and crafting, and to minimise wilderness rules to focus on the underworld: It’s right there in the name. But I’m not going to avoid non-dungeon environments when I play or when I write, so Five Torches Deep is stronger here.

    I prefer Shadowdark’s infamous live timer for tracking consumables over traditional torch tracking, although I’d play in blitz mode to make it faster paced. Five Torches Deep is more traditional in its resource tracking, which in my experience is never effective. I really like Five Torches Deep’s use of supply to combat consumable loss, as it makes resource management more active and introduces a push-your-luck element. This one is a draw, and I’m certain there’s a middle ground to be found here.

    Both Five Torches Deep and Shadowdark use encumbrance slots, although they don’t say that outright — I marginally prefer Five Torches Deep’s. They both use simplified armour — I marginally prefer Shadowdark’s. Both have fixed initiative – in Five Torches Deep, you don’t roll at all, and in Shadowdark, it’s rolled at the beginning of the session — I marginally prefer Five Torches Deep. Shadowdark alone out of the two pair has an equivalent to 5th edition’s inspiration — luck points — which honestly I don’t feel strongly about, but I know players love it and it will help with familiarity. Neither have saving throws; they go unmentioned in Shadowdark — another sign it’s not intended for use with unofficial products — and in Five Torches Deep it says to just use the closest check if one is called for. I prefer Five Torches Deep’s approach here, and honestly it’s a little better than 5th Editions approach.

    One big strength of Shadowdark is that it’s full of lists, random tables, and generators. It comes with monsters and plenty of spells. This is all great, I guess, as it makes it feel a better product than Five Torches Deep, but the truth is what I really want is to be able to pick up any module and run it. Now, Dionne’s model is to sell modules – she’s a really stellar module writer, and has over a decade of experience writing for 5th edition. It looks to me there are already 3 zines full of modules written for Shadowdark, as well as a jam’s worth of modules on itch.io. But, it is notably absent from storefronts that aren’t Arcane Library and the jam isn’t official; Shadowdark doesn’t want me to run modules that aren’t from Arcane Library, it appears. That said, especially the trap and hazard generators here are great; add this to Knave on your list of unremarkable games with excellent tables. Shadowdark also often transplants DIY elfgame concepts directly across, for example reaction rolls are the 2d6 table you’ve seen a million times, which for me makes it feel strangely less true to its intent of a 5th edition dungeon crawler than Five Torches Deep, which relies more heavily on the d20. I prefer Five Torches Deep’s approach, but it’s an incredibly strange and unimportant preference to have.

    A huge strength of Five Torches Deep is that it really lays its “monster math” (as it calls it) out clearly, which means we can look at how compatible they are with each other and with B/X (I’ve used Old School Essentials here as a proxy as it’s available online). Here I’ve taken a Hobgoblin from each game:

    Hobgoblin

    Five Torches Deep 4HD Soldier. To Hit +6, Damage 2d6+2, AC 14, HP 17, Strong: Str/Con +6, Morale +6, Disciplined, tough, brave, deadly. Weak: vs Magic +0, Stealth +0, needs a leader, slow). Techniques: +2 AC when in formation. Shove: Hit pushes PC back 10 feet.

    Shadowdark AC 15 (Chainmail+Shield) HP 10, Atk 1 longsword +3 (1d8) or 1 longbow far +0 (1d8), MV near, S +3, D +0, C +1, I +2, W +1, Ch +1, AL C, LV 2. Phalanx. +1 to attacks and AC when in close range of an allied hobgoblin.

    Old School Essentials AC 6 (13), HD 1+1 (5 HP), Atk 1 weapon (1d8), THAC0 18 (+1), MV 30′, ST D12, W12, P14, B15, S16 (1), Morale 8, AL C, XP 15, Number Appearing 1d6.

    I chose Hobgoblin because I expected it to be a pretty uncontroversial but fascinatingly, you can see completely different perspectives on exactly what a Hobgoblin is. But if we account for the HD difference between the 3 Hobgoblins (we have 1 HD for OSE, Level 2 for Shadowdark, and 4 HD for Five Torches Deep), I think it’s roughly equivalent. HD still appears to be a 1d6 throughout, damage is equivalent, as is AC (the three just use different scales slightly, but it’s probability is roughly equivalent). If I were to pick a random stat block for OSE and convert it directly, simplifying a little because I rarely use the full stat block for OSE either:

    Goblin

    Old School Essentials: 1-1 HD (3HP), AC 13, Atk +0, 1 x Short Sword (1d6). -1 to hit in full daylight.

    My Five Torches Deep: 1/2 HD Soldier. 2 HP, AC 13, To Hit +0, 1 x short sword (1d6), Weak vs Magic -2, Stealth -2. -1 to hit in full daylight.

    My Shadowdark: HP 5, AC 13, 1 x short sword +0 (1d6), MV near. -1 to hit in full daylight.

    Actual Shadowdark: HP 5, AC 11, 1 x club +0 (1d4), MV near. Can’t be surprised.

    That’s pretty close. Overall, Five Torches Deep wins out here with its more detailed explanation of monster building and converting; but it’s also clumsier (if also more clear and interesting) than Shadowdark. It’s monsters (and PCs for that matter) are consistently lower in HP and hit harder, though. More importantly, though, you could play a B/X module without much noticeable problem in either, I suspect, even if they don’t sell it as such.

    Now the questions I’m trying to answer by reviewing these are legion, so I’ll break them down.

    Should I be writing for Five Torches Deep or Shadowdark? Shadowdark in particular appears to have a significant audience. But, you can see from this review, that while Shadowdark is a more complete product — especially when you count all the backmatter, spells, treasure and monster lists — I think Five Torches Deep does a better job of making elegant and minimalist decisions that maintain cohesiveness with 5th edition while staying true to dungeon crawling as broadly imagined. There’s not a clear answer to that question, but looking at Dionne’s approach to selling Shadowdark — it’s not on DriveThruRPG at all for example – I can’t see myself finding that audience easily unless I really engaged in the Shadowdark discord and community with all my heart.

    Following on, would it be hard to write for Shadowdark or Five Torches Deep, actually? No, I don’t think so at all. I can reproduce a Shadowdark stat block really easily from a B/X one, because the math is very similar. Both Shadowdark and Five Torches Deep want complex stat blocks with a load of unique information, though, so it wouldn’t be easy to say “Compatible with B/X, Shadowdark and Five Torches Deep”, because I suspect a 5th edition derived audience would rail against the briefer stat blocks I prefer, where most DIY elf gamers are used to being just the basics. But it wouldn’t be hard at all to convert any module I wanted to run or had written to either of them.

    How hard does the load come on the referee to make it feel more dungeon-crawly and to onboard from 5th edition? I don’t think there’s much of a load here, to be honest, except for the clash of expectations between a 5th edition audience and a DIY elfgame audience. While Shadowdark proudly proclaims that it doesn’t have any proficiencies, I think that’s one thing that the audience it’s drawing from will bounce off, for example; similarly with saving throws. But those barriers are present whether running Shadowdark or anything else; you definitely won’t have to explain what THAC0 means or why thief skills are percentile or x-in-6, as most things player-facing hews towards 5th edition.

    I want to talk about one particular expansion to Five Torches Deep because I think it addresses one of my concerns with both Shadowdark and Five Torches Deep. In 5th edition, one of the strong appeals to the players of player characters in my opinion is the huge breadth of character options – 117 subclasses on a quick google, and while I can’t actually find a source for how many races there are, I’d guess at least 30 or so. In combination with backgrounds and alignment, this provides a strong menu of characters with depth and potential to grow for up to 20 levels. This, while it can be overwhelming, is also a huge selling point, because your character isn’t just defined in the moment of play, but your character’s story arc is somewhat defined as well. Five Torches Deep has 4 races, and 4 classes each with 3 subclasses (known as archetypes), but those archetypes only gain 2 special abilities of their potential lists. Shadowdark has 4 races and 4 classes with no subclasses, and the special talent is random, although you get more talents overall than you get in Five Torches Deep. Shadowdark features a little more flavourful depth, though — it has backgrounds, titles and there are deities to choose from. But still, these are very basic character options in comparison to 5th edition, and just won’t do it in my opinion for most people who enjoy the character menu of 5th edition.

    I want to be clear about this: Most of the players of 5th edition I know like the menu aspect of the class lists and splatbooks, not the complexity. They aren’t min-maxing. They’re excited when they find out they can play a chaotic good summer exiled eladrin bladesinger. It’s what they want out of a game. But the flavour is more important to them than avoiding the complexity. It’s why so many people are more likely to try Pathfinder 2e before moving to other games. Shadowdark has nothing to offer players with these preferences. If you pay an additional $4.50, though, you can buy Five Torches Deep: Origins, which adds 8 more (now rebranded) ancestries, lifepaths which are more complex backgrounds, lineages which add more depth to your ancestries, and 3 new “race-as-classes” if you choose to go in that direction instead. I wouldn’t buy this, and I think that to be frank Five Torches Deep needs to be re-released with a lot of the supplements included as it’s quite anemic a product compared to Shadowdark, but it gets closer to satisfying the need for more character options that players of 5th edition need. If you’re willing to pony up that extra cash, Five Torches Deep wins out solidly in terms of character options, and I don’t think Shadowdark’s titles, backgrounds and deities are sufficient to make up the ground there.

    You know what’s not clear after all of that, though? What I should be running, and what I should be writing for. In terms of running, I bounce solidly off aspects of both Five Torches Deep and Shadowdark, but none of the things I bounce off are actually related to their relationship with 5th edition at all. And I also bounce of most of the things I do run things in, like Cairn, Knave, Trophy Gold, and even my own games like SLIMDNGN (although chalk that up to playtesting). Because of that, my probable conclusion is that I should be running a 5th edition analog, even if I don’t like these two. In terms of what to write for, you really have to write specifically for Shadowdark or for Five Torches Deep, with the former requiring a lot of community engagement, and the latter appearing to lack an audience that would make it worthwhile switching. It turns out that it’s easier to convert to both from B/X than is immediately apparent, and I think they should both provide a guide to doing so, although I don’t favour my odds. Most importantly, though, while a lot of the adoptions from 5th edition will make onboarding 5th edition players to the systems smoother than to say OSE or Cairn, I still think both of these games miss what players of player characters love about 5th edition and why so many people who’re happy to run a game that isn’t 5th edition have trouble finding players, and that’s depth in character creation. Both of these games smooth everything out on the referee end — in different ways — but they do disservice to the players of the very audiences they’re looking to populate their tables with. Five Torches Deep does a better job through its expansions to satisfy this need, but not good enough at all in my opinion.

    Overall, I think I like Five Torches Deep as a system more than Shadowdark, although Shadowdark is a better and more complete product. But they’re both flawed in what they’re trying to achieve. Closely reading the two of them together hasn’t persuaded me to play or write for either, to be honest, but what it has persuaded me that my aversion to a 5th edition derived DIY elfgame is an unfounded aversion, and that the benefits to a 5th edition derived DIY elfgame outweigh the negatives. But, if I were to look at another 5th edition derived DIY elfgame, I would hope they’d try to keep in mind the best parts of 5th edition’s player-facing game, and incorporate them as best they could, as both of these two games fail to do that, and in doing so become games designed for referees and not for players of player characters.

    Anyway, if you’re reading this you’ve probably already bought Shadowdark, given its popularity. You may not have bought Five Torches Deep, and I’d check it out, if you’re interested in running DIY modules for 5th edition players. Five Torches Deep is solid, and it’s designed so you could port a lot of your (players) 5th edition favourites across to it. Shadowdark isn’t, so while it’s a flashier, more well-known game, it’s probably not quite as good a pitch.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Bathtub Review: Tephrotic Nightmares

    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.

    Tephrotic Nightmares is a 158 page module for Mörk Borg, styling itself as a campaign. It’s written by Luke Gearing, with art and design by the inestimable Johan Nohr. This is an “official” campaign for Mörk Borg by the author who created the virile phallic uber-druid of the Isle, and is laid out by the hyper-tuned in and vision-breaking creator of Mörk Borg, so I was prepared for a messy and over the top ride, but to be honest there was nothing here that shocked me given that context; just a lot of gore, torture, and violence. Consider that some kind of trigger warning, I suppose?

    The first two chapters set up the overriding setting of the Ash Sea and the rules governing crazed profane boats that sail upon it. These seem inspired by Fury Road’s war machines (or perhaps the machines from Descent to Avernus), to be honest. I was surprised how much attention they got — 20 pages or so. I could see the pursuit of new and weirder modules for your boat being a driving force for players of Tephrotic Nightmares. As it is, the boat rules, while interesting, don’t feel incorporated outside of the chapter they’re in. There are no races here. Aside from some random encounters, it feels like your extreme customised ride will be set aside for dungeon crawling in the 25 locations that are included — we’ll get to that in a bit.

    Chapter 3 is the bestiary: a bunch of creative and unexpected weirdly dark beasts with darkly humorous descriptions. I like these. They very from fine to exceptional, some such as the dry-witches treading the line between faction and beast. Gearings writing really shines in beastly descriptions. It also includes factions, but I’ll come back to that.

    The bulk of the book, though, is 25 locations, scattered across a massive hex map all roughly 5 hexes distant from each other. Some areas on the hex map are modified by their inhabitants — they have their own special encounter table insert; some are raider territory, and subject to their interference. There are 13 lighter locations, designed to be faction bases or places to seemingly rest or interact, and there are 9 heavier locations that are keyed for crawling and plunder; the biggest at 20 odd rooms. There is a lot of breadth here, in terms of type, location and size. At least two of these heavier locations would happily be published in isolation; by contrast the more complex of the lighter locations feel a little undercooked, being settlements with too few levers on play in my opinion. Many in the middle are only 1 or 2 paragraph encounters, appropriately. I’m starting to see cracks, though: If I assume the players are plunderers, they’re just earning enemies across the map. Where are the politics and the interactions? Where is the serendipity?

    The locations themselves — the best of them feature the same mythical qualities featured in the Isle, albeit at smaller scale. This is both a positive and negative: This isn’t a sea of interconnections, it’s a sea full of isolated islands, each their own story, scarcely impacting on the others. Finishing a dungeon changes the world or the player characters for the worse, never for the better (I wouldn’t expect it of Mörk Borg) but also never in a way that renders the politics of the world more interesting. They are similar better suited to be individual and divorced from the greater world, as the Isle was. The fulfilment of the myth there did not mean you had wasted the rest of the book. The apocalypse came only at the end of the story. There, I adore the earth-shattering finale. Here, on an already shattered earth, why would we enjoy seeing this uninteresting destruction repeatedly? It lacks the foreboding and tension of the Calendar of Nechrubel, and instead feels written to be read rather than to be played, even though in isolation most would be interesting and commendable one-shots.

    The random encounter table, which is hidden in the boating rules, contains a 15% chance at best of encountering anything faction-specific. You roll every day, which means generally once or twice between locations, depending on your boat and the wind speed. Most of those 3-in-20 chance of encounters aren’t going to tie into specific locations or generate narrative spontaneously. There is no chance of encountering more than 1 simultaneously, interacting. This encounter table is simply stuff to encounter. If I were to run this, I’d modify it significantly to make these encounters meaningful or at least potentially filled with meaning if chance favours the players.

    The third chapter contains factions as well as beasts, and I’ll come back to them now. Six of them are arranged alphabetically, and vary in size and complexity. But which am I to recall details regarding? Their relative importance (if any) is unclear, except for the raiders who get unique treatment — but individually the encounters with them will be less bespoke, featuring generation rather than specifics. At least it’s clear the raiders are major — I suspect counterintuitively their lack of specificity is by design as they’re meant to be ubiquitous. They are all potentially interesting to involve yourself with, in a twisted apocalyptic way — a bunch of darkly humorous and grim factions. But there is no clear contest between them, except in a few specific moments throughout the locations — the finale of the Sunken Temple for example. A few are recruiting, but their goals and challenges, despite being stated, are somewhat opaque although pretty to behold. A random example: “Ascension begins the world through radical denial / The neighbours, determining the true path out of this world”. I’m sure I could expand on it — a generous read is that it’s supposed to be evocative both of their speech and of their beliefs — but it could have just been less opaque? Good writing isn’t meaningless poetry, it needs to communicate clearly where necessary. Most of these goals and challenges are nigh on useless in this regard to me, without further development on my own. And I could’ve developed my own instead of buying this premium module, if I wanted that. The cumulative effect is a sea without clear goals as to why you’d sail it or where to sail, filled with factions that are ultimately disinterested in interacting with each other, unless you patch it yourself.

    Gearing recently wrote a screed declaring that hooks are unnecessary, though rumours are valuable. Tephrotic Nightmares opens with 42 (or so) rumours (of course, no hooks), and I really don’t care for them, which compounds this issue. There is indeed a social contract in sitting down to play a game — we should want to engage with the world around us — but the rumours here are all places to avoid and glimmers of the world, and only 5 (maybe 7 — the additional 2 are vague at best) out of the 42 are tempting further exploration. I don’t need hooks to want to engage with the world, but I need something to decide what to do when you drop me into it; I need a lever to pull. This is a terrifying world, and there’s not even a suggestion of who you could play in it or why you’re taking to the seas in the first place, beyond a gesture in the first paragraph: “The dark, forgotten places full of things from below. Much safer atop the ash, they say. Yet what has been forgotten will hold value”. To whom? What rumours direct us to any of these forgotten places? Why would you go into any of these locations at all, hidden in your blank map with no indication of their presence?

    Layout-wise, this is a vanilla design by a clearly masterful hand. The masterful, first. Flagging is clear: San-serif for rules text, serif for flavour and in-world text, bold and centered blackletter for headings, kept to 3 levels only. 2 raggedy columns scratched onto the page in the same fountain pen the illustrations are sketched in; tricks you can only pull off if you’re doing both the design and the art. But, a lot of the Nohr flourishes feel hampered by the writing: sketched frames seem crowded out by the words; spectacular illustrations often seem similarly crowded when not full page (although as a response, there are a lot of full page artworks — very impressive); the maps while gorgeous are pedestrian compared to other Nohr maps like those in A Wizard; there are no really striking layout surprises as I’d expect in a Nohr designed book. All of these, I think, are a result of the tension between Gearing’s drive to write text that stands alone without art (exemplified by the nigh artless efforts, Empire of Texas, Wolves Upon the Coast and the Isle), and Nohr’s vision-first approach, rather than a failure of design per se. This feels inevitable with this coupling. The only visual decision I find baffling, is that at no point did my brain learn to parse that heading blackletter “A” as anything but a “U”, and given a not insignificant part of this module begins with the letter A (“The Ash Sea”, “Ashcrawling”) there could’ve been a better choice made there. I’m reading the digital version, but of course the print version is both beautiful and in this case an interactive art object that requires you to crack it open “like you would a human spine. If you want to read this book, you have to first defeat it”. I don’t know how practical this would be at the table, but if it floats your boat?

    Fascinating to see this and Seas of Sand, two waterless sea-crawling campaigns, released in such close succession. The differences in approach are striking: Where Seas of Sand is a sea generator strapped to an interesting world narrative, Tephrotic Nightmares is a book filled to the brim with locations. It acts like a megadungeon — a series of dungeons with common factions, linked together by sea rather than stairs. You’re travelling blindly, more a megadungeon than any wilderness travel. Unlike Seas of Stars, the wilderness has no interest in and itself. An ashy desolation and naught else. Seas of Sand feels like it’s intended to feel like sailing, albeit a fantastic version of sailing. Tephrotic Nightmares seems at first more interested in being a post-apocalyptic machine battlefield — except this aspect of play feels utterly divorced from crawling that fills the second half of the book, wherein it switches gears and seems interested in the mechanics of specific locations. They are utterly dissimilar, except in that they’re both providing quite high preparation games. The key dissimilarity is that in Tephrotic Nightmares my prep is patching areas where it falls short for me, whereas with Seas of Sand my prep is simply part of following the rules as written. When I saw these two had similar concepts, I was excited, because I was quite up front with my disappointment in Seas of Sand’s hard lean into anticanon and prep-heavy play, and lack of concrete places and people. But it turns out, I miss the connective tissue that Seas of Sand really compelling, here. A mix would be what I like best, I now suspect.

    Overall, I feel like I’ve come down more negative on this book than I actually feel, so I’ll tamp my criticisms down a bit and reiterate its strengths: The boat combat here seems a lot of fun, the bestiary is a-grade, and there are 25 locations most of which are compelling places to find adventure or at least horror. Gearing’s writing shines as always: “If a group of crows is a murder, this is a statistic”, “They have abandoned language—it was insufficient to express their torment.”, “roots force it ever-wider. You could just about fit. The smell of smoke and blood emanates”, to pick a few random sentences from random pages. There is so much content here for only 150 pages, and that’s ignoring a lot of frankly spectacular art. If your aesthetic and humour matches Mörk Borg, you simply have to overlook the flawed factions and make them more ambitious and driven (an easy enough task), fix the random encounter table to make it more interactive, and then you have a compelling campaign that will last you…I’d estimate over 30 hours of play, probably more.

    I think, aside from the flaws — ones that are dealbreakers for me but perhaps not for you — this is a perfectly worthwhile read, an exceptional value book of encounters, and if you’re willing to amend it a little, it’s a banging post-apocalyptic doom metal vehicle battle simulator with dungeon crawl elements. If that amended pitch (the one on the back of the book and on the website is frankly uninspiring) catches your attention, and you like Mörk Borg, I’d take a serious look at Tephrotic Nightmares.

    Idle Cartulary

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

  • Bathtub Review: The Stygian Library

    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.

    I’m continuing Megadungeon July with The Stygian Library, a depth-crawl by Emmy Allen, with art by Alec Sorensen and Layout by David Wilke. Honestly I’m enjoying this, and I’m pretty keen to do Megadungeon July again next year. Let’s make a thing of it. It’s a goth-whimsical adventure through an infinite library.

    Now, I realise at this point, in the last week of megadungeon July, that none of these have satisfied all of what one might describe as the megadungeon criteria. Is a point crawl like Gradient Descent or Through Ultan’s Door, or a depthcrawl like the Stygian Library (and the Gardens of Ynn which I’m waiting to receive the remastered print to review), or something without measurements in feet like Tomb of a Thousand Doors a megadungeon, actually? Surely Nightwick Abbey is More Megadungeon? And, like, sure I’ll accept that as a premise. But the foot-by-foot measurement and deep concern for the rules of B/X is not what makes Nightwick Abbey or Dwimmermount (actually I’ll withhold my judgement for when I finally read it) great megadungeons. There are a few factors, but the core factor is that they can remain the focus of play for an entire campaign. That the town, if there is one, is off-screen. That they are perpetual motion machines, their factions and characters bouncing off each other in a never ending cascade of play-inducing unexpected twists. The dungeon need not be without end to be mega, it simply must be infinite in its potential for play. Argue as you will with me on this; a megadungeon is like pornography — you know it when you see it — and a stricter taxonomy in my opinion speaks more to personal preference than meaningful taxonomy.

    The Stygian Library is a depth-crawl, a format invented by the author Allen in Gardens of Ynn and replicated here. I’m not actually aware of another released depth crawl aside from my own Hell in Rev-X, which I find surprising, because it’s a compelling format for spaces that are so large as to not be meaningfully mapped, or ones that defy understanding. In brief, the dungeon is mapped anew each time it is entered, from a selection of rooms that changes the deeper you travel into it. This casts aside the spatial aspect of dungeon crawling (except within a trip into the Library), but preserves the strength of your learning about factions, locations and characters as they will still recur. The dungeon becomes a kind of deck of cards, with recurring themes, but which recombines in surprising ways each time you play.

    My favourite thing about the Stygian Library as a concept is that it is infinitely flexible, because any knowledge can be found in its depths. So, drop it into any campaign: The place you go to find the secrets you need. There are mechanisms inside the book specifically to facilitate this; it’s assumed this is the primary reason to enter. They’re solid, interesting mechanics, well grounded in the dungeon but with excellent flexibility.

    The layout and overall design of Stygian Abyss approaches perfection for me. Just incredibly thoughtful and playable work. Beautiful pages often reminiscent of classic novels but not beholden to them; headings so bold they could not be missed; judicious use of weight and italics as highlighting with clear use cases; adventurous and rare use of sizing for emphasis; simple layers of bullet points for detail; page references throughout; subtle but confident white spaces; alphabetised room order with clear marginalia; a strong attempt to keep information to either a page or a spread, and intelligent use of art and other motifs to facilitate this and maintaining the aesthetic. The art when it appears is bold and striking, is well paired with the choices in typeface. It all makes for a book both beautiful and usable. The main failing is that there are no major headings separating out the details from the monsters and locations — this makes it a little harder to navigate than I’d like, but there are plenty of stylistic differences between the layouts on these pages, so they are differentiated. This approach would have gone a long way to making Through Ultan’s Door a more usable book, while maintaining a similar overall aesthetic goal. I want this book on my shelf; I checked my pledge for Gardens of Ynn to see if I’d backed for a print copy and I’m relieved to say I have.

    The challenge with reviewing the Stygian Library is that it’s not a traditional dungeon, but rather a series of locations, characters and factions that are expected to interact in interesting and unexpected ways. It makes the keying difficult to review, in comparison: It’s a list of places, some interesting and some interactive, and some intentionally not. But, they combine with the encounter and detail systems to create some surprising results. The first time you visit the Planetarium it is well lit by 3 portable candlesticks, and haunted by a harmless lost soul. The next time you enter there, after angering the librarians, it might be uncomfortably warm and full of smoke, with an eye sentinel standing guard. Either time, you can interact with the planetarium, but each time you’ll find it in a different place, by different routes. This is an effective method, I think, for variety. I’m not sure it’ll sustain long term play, as the primary driver for play in a campaign, like I would hope for a dungeon this size. But, it would sustain a really fascinating pillar of play, long term, in a campaign, as a recurring location, with developing relationships inside the dungeon, both positive and negative.

    It feels like Allen knows this, so I’m a little disappointed that the bestiary isn’t better set up to facilitate interelational play along these lines. As always there’s the proviso that the referee can add these things, but my constant refrain is that I use modules so I don’t have to add things, but so I can choose to. Here, the Archivist-liches are prime recurring character material, but no facility is provided to support that. Educated Rodents and Escaped Fictions, Librarians, Researchers and of course Visitors all would benefit from this kind of support, and would raise the calibre of the dungeon in terms of replayability and attractiveness to players.

    It’s a fascinating point of comparison with the others I’ve reviewed this month: Unlike the others, it’s designed as a place to be regularly visited, rather than to tell a story like Gradient Descent, or to facilitate a dreamworlds campaign like Through Ultan’s Door, or to provide a funhouse to play in like Tomb of a Thousand Doors. Even harking back to my preview of Nightwick Abbey, which aims to be a meat grinder that builds faction-related horror stories. The Stygian Library is unique in the role it expects to play in your campaign, and that’s valuable, and likely makes it a more invaluable text to have on your shelf, as you could use it in almost any campaign, even across campaign.

    Overall, the Stygian Library is a masterpiece of design, beautiful writing and interesting location, rendered in a way that will make it an invaluable resource. If you’re running DIY elfgames, or honestly even 5th edition or Dungeon Crawl Classics in a campaign, this will be a worthy addition to your table. It has its flaws, most certainly, but they’re more than covered by its advantages. I couldn’t recommend it more to almost any table.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • I Read Last Fleet

    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.

    Our eldest is at gymnastics and usually I go for a walk but instead our youngest is is tagging along counting trains and I’m flicking through my copy of Last Fleet. Last Fleet is a 248 page Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game, by Joshua Fox which has been on my shelf for 4 years largely because I bounced off it when I first read it. I remember why I bounced, but I’m curious regarding whether I’ll bounce so hard again. It explicitly tells stories inspired by Battlestar Galactica (2004), which, 20 years later, is a choice, but I remember loving that show when it aired, and imagine on streaming services it may have be being experienced by a new generation of viewers.

    I have the print and digital version of this book, and it’s unusual to say I prefer the digital version of a book, but despite the lovely quality of the hardcover and paper itself, this layout is abysmal for reading in print; the typeface is set in a light weight that makes it hard to read, it’s entirely in sans serif — harder on the eye for long reading sessions in print, which this demands, the headings typeface renders them inconsistently legible, and the borders render everything strangely contained and crowded. It’s single column in A5 or so format, and that doesn’t work in its favour here, despite technically being at a manageable line length for that format. There are ostensibly margin tags to help me find my way around, but often either the font or contrast renders these illegible. The art gives big uncanny valley vibes to me: odd, awkward semi-realistic painterly stuff. This works, to be honest, with the theme, and is probably my favourite thing about the graphic design. Just overall, not a success for me.

    The first 20 pages are the overview section. I have mixed feelings on this, because while this overview contains a very smart, concise set of summaries helping to orient you to what’s coming, and particularly the basic rules summary elegantly covers most mechanics in PbtA games generally and the changes made in Last Fleet specifically, it’s still a 20 page overview. In my mind, an overview is 2 pages, rather than 20. In a nutshell, this 20 page overview kind of communicates clearly my primary issue with PbtA games: They’re complex as all get out, it’s just that the complexity is rarely targeted at typical targets for complexity as you see in say Pathfinder 2.

    The overabundance of explanation continues, clearly aimed at that massive audience who stumbled upon this kickstarter having never encountered a PtbA game, but were intimately familiar with the 20 year old series on which it was based. That’s 2 pages on framing scenes; 3 pages on when to use a move (“make sure you hold each other to this!”), etc. New concepts aren’t differentiated in this, and I think they could be. These new concepts are more deserving of more space, but I truly call into question the design of a rule — let’s take Attrition for example — that requires 3 pages to explain. Actually, that’s unfair: I simply think it’s overexplained, and that for me that isn’t an asset. It says things like “Once you have a Shortage of something, it becomes an urgent problem to address.” eliciting an eye roll in me, not just because a shortage implies that, but especially given this has been explained before at least twice, in various summaries.

    Interestingly, the GM guidance section comes up next, a unique choice among the largely uninventive information design of PbtA games, and, I think, a smart one, as it makes an assumption that nobody except the GM will ever read the book. One issue with many PbtA games in my opinion is information hierarchy: GM rules are mainly in the form of non-directives; things like principles, agendas and moves. There are a a lot of these, and for the most part I don’t see concern with how many there are, except that I won’t remember them all until I know the game well. So what Last Fleet does here, by separating GM moves into core and thematic, is very smart and intuitive. The principles here, as well, are brief, but lack the beauty you see in really compelling principles — those in Mountain Home come to mind. At least one of them also feels an impossible principle: “Make them care”. While I get what they’re going for, principles should be things the GM has control over, rather than things they hope the players should feel in response. From there it goes into “techniques”, and then into an extended breakdown of every possible moves; 18 pages of them. Now, I’m not saying that these don’t contain any good advice or clarification — they have plenty — but keeping with theme this is too much to be core instruction. For me, the placement here at center stage reduces the effectiveness of the book. It’s like the main character pauses in the middle of a play and provides a long exposition of the plot both future and past. I’ll accept the final section, “Threat Moves”, which are equivalent to Apocalypse World’s fronts and I quite like how they’re folded in, and by their nature require a little more explication. But also, could these have had their own play sheets, given this game effectively its own setting, which would (in my opinion) reduce the need for their presence here at all. That said, when you do get to playbooks, you realise they get the same kind of explication rather than using the playbooks themselves, which (I’ll get back to this) to me breaks the most innovative onboarding tech that Apocalypse World brought with it.

    Next up we have a chapter on setting up your game. Given this game provides a setting, they really second guess this and front load the expectation you won’t use it, and I’m strongly of the opinion they should’ve done the opposite, and relegate world building to an appendix. This is mainly because I’m a fan of specificity in games. A game is almost always better with specifics. So, including this (and some other sections) as an appendix which focuses on creating your own world, would make onboarding way easier because as is, we’re 88 pages in and we’re about to get to the “basic moves” which is not at all a promising sign for ease of getting this game into play. Again, the advice in this chapter is fine: I’m just butting up against this recurring reluctance in authors of TTRPGs to provide tutorialising or graduated onboarding, but rather opening with a manual on how to be the best you can be. I recognise that you, the designer, do indeed know how to play this game best! Expecting me, your audience, to pull that off, or absorb all your experience is simply unreasonable. I don’t know how feasible it actually is, but I feel like your game should be communicable in a chapter, with all of this additional depth and breadth coming later once I’ve been sold on whether your game is worth playing. This game needs a strong cold open, that teaches you the basics, not a short course in something I may never actually use.

    Next, we have 30 pages of explication of the player moves. I will just repeat myself here: It’s too much. The more explanation I have, the less prepared I feel to play. This is still aimed at the GM, and the overwhelming impression I’m getting is that — and nowhere does it disclaim this and say “all of this is for reference, just play and figure it out” — I need to be in top of all of this before I suggest to anyone we play together.

    Finally, now, we get the playbooks. Except we don’t, we get three page explanations of the playbooks. I alluded to this earlier, but playbooks are such powerful tech, and it undermines that tech to just explain it all in prose in my opinion. The playbook naming convention are what I bounced off back when I read this initially, and it’s no different now: They’re each named after a zodiac sign, which is an interesting thematic continuity with the show, but as someone who loves the show but who doesn’t have an intimate understanding of the zodiac, the word “Virgo” in no way describes the squadron leader its assigned to. I’m certain it makes sense to people who do have an intuitive understanding — the “you’re such a virgo” crowd — but it 100% alienated me and most of my friends who actually enjoyed the show, especially in the context of almost everyone in the show having a catchy call sign which could have served as a better titling for these playbooks. Interestingly, these playbooks are all brief, and clearly designed to burn out over the length of play. Very cool design choice in my opinion, in contrast to the broad and deep development in games that hew closer to Apocalypse World.

    Page 170, and we’re still not ready to run the game, because we have yet to create the fleet. This is separate to the setting! This chapter sticks out like a sore thumb, because it includes an essay on military rank and operations, and honestly it feels like a stretch goal or something. It just feels extremely appendix-y. It has suggested moves, but not actual moves and doesn’t present the military hierarchy as its own threat, which feels to me to betray the fact that it wasn’t actually intended to be incorporated into the game itself. And, as I said, I still don’t feel prepared to run the game. Perhaps this is unintentional, and this was a stretch goal, but again, not flagging this as optional means I feel I have more and more stuff to wrap my head around. And this is confirmed by the next chapter: Running space battles (oh of course! I still am not ready to run the game!). And then the next! A description of the setting, as if it was a D&D guidebook!

    Interestingly, the best and most useful things in this book are literally relegated as an afterthought: The two quickstart scenarios designed to get you to hit the table as soon as possible, with pregenerated characters and a high pressure opening scenario tying into the core setting. This is genius! Perfect! It’s blatantly obvious though that they’re afterthoughts, given they accompany clear stretch goals such as the alternative setting. They should have been at the front of the book. Get your players playing as soon as possible!

    I’m not saying that a game shouldn’t be aimed at new eyes, but I do feel like you should be recognising that your audience (explicitly the referee here) is likely those who’re already familiar with PbtA games, and this one is not a groundbreaking change in the way they’re played. This is a new person explaining the same rules again. My new PbtA is not going to be anyone’s first, in a game where Masks and Avatar and Monsterhearts exists. Early games like the Warren understood that they exist in a spectrum of conversation, just as other art forms do; When you first played the Warren, you may not have played another PbtA game, but you were aware and had read others. You weren’t coming in blind. What all these detailed rules explanations in effect do, is give you a long run up to a short jump, increasing the chance that the referee is exhausted by the time they need to launch into the air. “This is basically like Apocalypse World, whose rules are available for free, these are the changes and a summary of those rules” is to me a far more approachable onboarding process. I don’t think you need to cater to new audiences in every book you release, even if you’re making your living off this.

    That all said, the problem here is that despite all of these futile gestures at catering to new audiences, it in fact fails to information design that goal completely. I’m not even a new audience, not really, and this was incredibly intimidating. But it’s not hard to make this approachable: Assume they’re going to play in your setting, and bake that in rather than as an afterthought. Develop out your two starter sets as consecutive sessions 1 and 2, to lead into the full campaign. Incorporate into them gradual revelation of the GM moves and techniques, plus chances to try out some special rules like the space battle stuff. And relegate most of this book to an appendix, so “when you’re stuck, check out how to clarify the No One Left Behind rule in Appendix A. You’ll still need, of course a rules explanation, but most of that’s already there in the first 20 pages. That might need a little expansion given the de-emphasising of the rest of the text, and the complete missing of some rules in the introduction, but expand that to 30 pages and it’s everything I need, I can deal with that. The point is, to make this accessible to new audiences you don’t need a better “What’s an RPG” section, you need a complete tutorialising restructure.

    Ok, I’ve been going a lot of complaining, so I’m going to talk about three of the most interesting aspects of the design, the things that make this game actually feel like Battlestar Galactica: Shortages, Momentum and Relationships, particularly Pulling Strings, which work together to make the fleet feel like it’s the last bit of humanity, clinging on by a thread, instead of a thriving city. Shortages basically drive the fiction: It’s only implied, but really something should be in shortage all the time, and when it is, a doom clock ticks by, slowly causing more fictional and descriptive issues, until it affects the health of the fleet as a whole, or it is resolved through the actions of the player characters. I wish this were more concretely tied to attrition, the fleet’s health indicator, but it nevertheless is a clever way to bring the primarily internal forces that challenge the fleet to bear. Pulling strings on an NPC you have a relationship with brings the broader cast into relief, and will become the major way you’re being things done given the severe limitations placed on your playbooks. Momentum is whether or not the fleet is winning, and it ties into the Momentum Move, which drives the fleets relationship with their alien pursuers. These are some cool, flavoursome mechanics.

    In theory, at least. I’m imagining how they might look in the hands of a good GM — proliferating named characters, exciting changes in pace, desperate changes in resource clashing with attacks of opportunity from your foes. For me, though, they’re half baked, though, largely because they increase the huge load already falling in the GM, without giving her the tools to juggle them (aside from “use clocks”, which immediately precedes these sections, intentionally I suspect). This comes back to my previous complaint: Most of ever you need here is relegated to the back of the book, not where relevant: in the setting summary, there are intrafleet factions, lists of characters, and movements within the enemy representing different aggressions. But I really have to be intimately familiar with the book to know that. And there is no easy way to juggle these factions needs and aggressions with the shortages: No cohesive tracking sheet that puts it all in one place. The GM is left to juggle these million balls with no real assistance.

    And you know what? I’ve been that miracle GM before in my life. I’ve run a Blades in the Dark with a dozen active factions. I’ve memorised Lancer lore. I don’t have time for that in my life now, and I’m realising that this doesn’t make me want this kind of game less, it just me less tolerant of the poor design that feels like it is performed without thought because it works for the designers table, and everyone else is used to running games being a chore. It’s the 5e-ification of indie refereeing. I’m not here for it. We deserve better. We deserve games that want us to play them, not lectures from a designer who doesn’t know what is relevant from what is good.

    Because, and that’s the terrible thing, I think Last Fleet might be good. Hidden under this mess of a document, is an excellent game full of intrigue and politics and grand action and desperation. If you’re an excellent, experienced PbtA GM, it’ll probably be a breeze to dredge the gold from the sludge. If you love the subject matter enough, you could carve the experience you want out of this, and I think it’d be an excellent campaign. It’s all here. But for poor old me it’s not worth the effort to draw this game up from the depths.

    If you’re looking for Battlestar Galactica: The RPG, and you’ve either got a lot of time and energy or you’ve got more PbtA under your belt than you’d care to admit, Last Fleet is probably the game for you. There won’t be better coming I imagine. But if you’re like me, the are time and energy poor, this book is difficult to get through, and you’ll reach the end less sure you could run it than when you started. In that case, find another game. More than anything, though, my takeaway on PbtA design remains:

    Design easier games to play. Design your complexity, but that completed beast should only be the first step. That’s not the game. You then have to figure out how to make it playable for your new GMs who haven’t designed three of theee before, or your mothers of 3 who desperately want to get back into TTRPGs, or your teens with cancer running it sick and exhausted, or your, ADHD pals who can’t executive function with out aids and can’t remember your principles to save their lives. If you’re seeking to expand your audience I don’t think it’ll be played by new players to role playing, it’s people who want to play your game already but who can’t find the time or energy to do it. Cater to us. Please.

    Idle Cartulary

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

  • Bathtub Review: Through Ultan’s Door

    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.

    Megadungeon July continues with Through Ultan’s Door, a series of modules by Ben Laurence detailing a megadungeon set in the world of dream. It’s being released periodically, and is yet to be completed. I mentioned this earlier in the month in my Tomb of a Thousand Doors review, as a periodical megadungeon that appears to be maintaining steam. I’ll be reviewing Issue 1, Issue 2, and Issue 3 parts 1 and 2 — 4 zines, but not the accompanying zines Beneath the Moss Courts by Gus L or Downtime in Zyan, because I’ve bit off more than I suspect I can chew with this review already. Each issue is around 36 pages, with writing and art direction by Ben Laurence, with a number of artists on duty across the zines, including Gus L on maps. They’re written for Labyrinth Lords.

    I’ll start off with the most obvious overview: Laurence is a masterful writer, beautiful and to me appears inspired by writers like Harrison, Vance and other midcentury by-the-word authors in his verbose, purple style. He’s up there with Siew as some of the most lyrical authors out there writing in modules right now, however, this style is absolutely not for me, in terms of sheer usability of the text: We have paragraphs of prose, difficult to navigate, with bullets, bolding, and other way to differentiate key points confined to tables and stat blocks almost exclusively (although he compromises a little in later issues). I haven’t run Through Ultan’s Door, but I find it an intimidating prospect, simply due to the approach Laurence takes. Does this approach achieve something? Yes, it evokes such a baroque, dreamlike sense of place that it’s be hard to imagine it written differently. This isn’t relying on my imagination to fill in the gaps, it’s someone describing their dream, with all the negatives and positive aesthetics that suggests.

    Layout is consistent across the 4 zines: Single column, generous margins and spacing, minimal embellishments except when separating stat blocks and accompanying chapter headings. Art is striking and dominates the spaces it’s in, but it’s a text heavy series of zines, rather than art heavy. This shifts a little in later issues, but mainly in the sense that the novelistic, simple prose is separated out increasingly with tables and lists rather than en bloc with those tables and lists bookending the zines. The art is very closely curated, and feels pleasingly otherworldly. This novelistic layout also serves to evoke a novelistic tone, supporting the aesthetic produced by the style of writing. It feels like a purposeful choice, and the simplicity of it works, although quality of life choices like page references and mini maps would probably make it a more usable text. Would it betray the dreamlike quality of the prose? My inclination is sadly, yes. Journeys “beyond the veil of sleep” benefit to some degree from the obscurity baked into the design. One design decision that is intelligent but unusual, is the decision include the encounter tables and map as appendices, clearly intended to be printed and sit on the table, rather than be a reference that you flip through incessantly, although encounters are summarised in the print out rather than not included in the primary text. Decisions like this make it feel like a module intended to be played, even if the prose is a challenge for me.

    I do think these decisions really clarify the priorities of the text: Firstly a dreamlike aesthetic, secondly the exploration of space itself, thirdly the surprise and dynamism of random encounter driven play, and only lastly the content of the keys itself. Given the evidence of this prioritisation, I can see why Gus L is involved both on art and in supplementary material: This echoes his own priorities in modules like Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier I think.

    Issue 1 covers the entryway to the city of Zyan, and the Ruins of the Inquisitor’s Theatre. Immediately, Issue 1 presents itself as a classic dungeon: Unique treasures, empty rooms, space to play and retreat and be surprised. This is not the encounter-per-room intensity of Tomb of A Thousand Doors or the space-neutral point crawl of Gradient Descent. There are details here, meant to communicate information about the world (“old man, naked and withered, pulls a skein of thread from his open mouth with one hand, untangling it with the other”) or how to interact with it (“The parasol, should someone think to open it[…]is a spinning wheel of death.”). It feels as if these phrases are meant to be a looser form of boxed text, intended to be read as much as possible, to communicate the authors vision somehow to the table, a seance of sorts.

    The factions are well-detailed, but the truth is I could summarise them in much fewer words and I’d probably have to do so if I were to run them. If I didn’t do this preparation, when I finally get to an encounter with the Guildless, I’d have forgotten that they’ll be hostile to people who are masked, for example. This is a key fact, but buried in the description. There is one of these for each faction — each is, on a study, the last paragraph, but that’s not clearly flagged. The novelistic layout could often do the most salient information better justice; it gets lost in the detail more often than not.

    One thing that is clear, though, is that while there are no uninteresting encounters, there is little explanation here. This does add to the dreamlike quality of Zyan, at least for me as a reader, but I fear the lack of clarity — “why are the baths bloody?”— for me would result in a kind of improvisation paralysis, where the lack of information in the presence of a much larger and growing world, would make me hesitant to create my own answers for fear of contradicting something that I don’t remember or hasn’t been written yet. Now, perhaps this is the intent: I’m supposed to make mistakes and contradictions, the dream becoming more dreamlike through the interaction between the Zyan here and the Zyan I imagine. But if this was the case, I think explication of this intent — given there is author-voiced explication already present in the opening pages of Issue 1, albeit less in subsequent issues — should be present. And if it wasn’t, there’s a benefit to simply saying what’s happening to avoid these complications and hesitations. Even if you’re publishing your home megadungeon, it’s valuable to view it as a stranger would.

    Issue 2 details the Catacombs of the Fleischguild. While being of a similar nature to Ruins of the Inquisitor’s Theatre, the Catacombs are more complicated: Five factions, and an escalating schedule of tensions. The theme is more cohesive, too: Gore and death, which to me is a departure from the bizarre melange of themes that were the Ruins in issue 1. The keying in Issue 2 is much clearer, but less charming and novelistic. Honestly, on some pages I prefer the clarity, and in other places I wish the intentional obscurity of the first issue was present. I imagine the changes were a result of feedback, or they’d have been present in issue 1; I’m just of the opinion that if you’re releasing your bizarre take on a megadungeon in a world of dreams, leaning hard into your weirdness is an asset, even if the consequences are a little less usability. For me, idealism and creative vision win over pragmatism every time.

    The truth is though, irregardless of the improvements on presentation and design in Issue 2, I don’t like Issue 2 as much. A follow up to a classic release is hard, but the gory, body horror subject matter is a turn off for me. In Issue 1, while it was grim and gritty, it was bizarre and dreamlike. This feels more like someone riffing on their visit to an abattoir, or at least on the dreams they had after the visit specifically. I don’t want to visit this dream, myself.

    The connections between Issue 2 and Issue 1 are implicit rather than explicit. Issue 3, part 1 makes this explicit, detailing the Sewer River that connects them, as well as introducing more rules for playing in Wishery. Maybe I made an assumption based on the existence of Into the Megadungeon, but I expected a more explicit connection, earlier. What I’m seeing is a series of dungeons instead, joined together by this river. At the end of Part 1, I thought that it foreshadows future additions, but it actually all the listed locations are detailed by the end of Part 2 — just not with locations as large as the first two issues. I must say that I find the map of the river — a dynamic, energetic piece of art certainly — a little difficult to read as a play aid; I’d probably colour it in for clarity. For now, though, we have the mechanism for moving around this megadungeon: Simple rules for travel among the river, and a bunch of encounters in it, with a few secret locations that aren’t likely to have issues of their own in the future.

    The encounters should’ve been the most interesting thing here, but they’re not, largely because they don’t gesture to the future or draw new connections between what we’ve already seen. The river is simply a place of its own. A great river connecting many parts of the megadungeon, is promising as exciting connective tissue. Whether because Laurence doesn’t know what is to come, or because he didn’t want to give anything away, I think the lack of connection here will make this issue grow weaker the deeper beneath Zyan we descend, unless retrospectively this encounter table is added to, or, to be honest, the map.

    Part 2 of Issue 3 features two major destinations — the Sanitarium of the Benefactors and the Dam of the Lurid Toads —and a few other minor ones. It’s not a bumper issue, though, they’re both just a little shorter, at 9 and 5 locations each. The Sanitarium is a settlement rather than a dungeon, a setting for major social interactions and a potential base in Zyan Below, the first we’ve seen. With 3 factions and a score of NPCs, this is a lovely addition to the dungeon, but the factions have short-term, resolvable goals, rather than long term ambitions, and I think having bigger projects in mind once the initial powderkeg situation is resolved would help to expand the dungeons detail so far into a restockable, dynamic place. There are hints of how you could do this, starting with potential changes to the political situation in Zyan Above, but as usual I come back around to: I can write my own situations, I want this to provide me with better ones with little effort. The Dam of Lurid Toads is a brief dungeon, featuring only one faction. It is a space to explore, but I feel like it would be better if the Lurid Toads also had larger ambitions and were likely to spread beyond their borders. Part 2 also features a brief description of the Churning Gate (to be described in depth in a future issue we’re assured) and a description of the Harbour, which is little more than a hook to visit the Lurid Toads. Honestly, Part 2 is a disappointment in terms of providing megadungeon material, after the first 2 issues and the declaration of a double issue.

    In all issues I’ve breezed over the supplementary material, so I’ll come back to it: It’s a mixed bag in my opinion. I’m not sure it’ll feel that way in retrospect, though: I can see them being more meaningful in the context of Zyan Above and future issues. The magic items are all unique, interesting and dynamic, which is a strength, but the assorted rules (diseases, making your world more dream-like, the opium dream) seem haphazard and unclear in their precise positioning in your session. As a referee who has trouble just “dropping in” rules that don’t have a trigger in play, a lot of these feature too-specific triggers or none at all. I’m not sure how to use them. But on the other hand, I want to: They’re flavourful for the fever-dream that Zyan Below is supposed to be, and they gesture towards Zyan the city as a place, as does the latter Downtime in Zyan supplement, that I haven’t read although I’m familiar with the inciting blogposts.

    Four zones and three issues in, I’m surprised to find Through Ultan’s Door a point crawl, despite the classic design of its “levels” and my association of Labyrinth Lord with retro stylings —foolish I realise, given the first point crawl that self-styled as such was Slumbering Ursine Dunes, for Labyrinth Lords. I’m not disappointed exactly — it is a structure that makes sense for an episodic release. But I have to say I was expecting something a little more traditional in structure, with the main variations being in content. To the contrary, we have a pointcrawl and not a 10 foot flagstone or ceiling height mention in sight.

    I hesitate to judge on content, as I’m by definition reviewing an incomplete text here, so more is to come. But after 4 issues (arguably) worth of content, it doesn’t feel like I have 4 issues worth of megadungeon, but rather a framework to create my own slumberlands. Perhaps the addition of Beneath the Moss Courts and Downtime in Zyan provide some expansion in places I wish there to be? I do want more Zyan, to be sure. The glimpses of Zyan are tempting. I definitely want more megadungeon than is provided, as I want to be able to spend all my time in these depths. I also feel disappointed that the Great Sewer River and its accompaniment in Issue 3 provides such brief and superficial locations compared to Issues 1 and 2. It is faint condemnation to wish for more of a product I bought in the knowledge it was incomplete; it might even be considered praise.

    This read of Through Ultan’s Door reveals to me what may be the major pitfall with the periodical release approach to megadungeons — the prohibition on improvisation that accompanies incompleteness. It’s hard to play in a megadungeon where you’re not free to delve as deeply as you wish. The unfulfilled name on the map of the Sewer River are a promise that we’ll see more, but they’re also a challenge: Do we design them ourselves? Do they appear, as in a dream, when they’re released? Is there enough play in these three issues — about 70 locations I estimate — to keep me going until issue 4 or 5? To some degree, the existence of Beneath the Moss Courts suggests Laurence’ awareness of this problem. I’m not entirely sure how to sidestep this issue, aside than to regard this approach as: This is might be intended as a megadungeon, but until it’s all out, it’s best regarded as a series of related dungeons explored over a campaign, I think. Were it a traditional, layer-cake dungeon, this problem would have been less prominent, and to a degree the problem with the megadungeon is that the interconnectedness that characterises them proves a problem when not all the pieces are present, and this is exacerbated when they don’t exist yet.

    In addition, Through Ultan’s Door features the problem of “dolorous pariah Archon Golumex” or rather more generally, the fact that’s it not clear where a phrase intended to be an evocative springboard for improvisation on behalf of the referee, or whether it’s a reference to heretofore incompleted text. There’s a lot of this, and to some degree because it’s incomplete, clarity regarding this problem would have been appreciated. In a complete text, I can search or refer to the index on Golumex; then I know I can add lib why he was a pariah, or what it means that the Pickled Prince is an aspect of him. The Golumex problem can be disregarded (“it’s my campaign, I do what I want”), but I find that dismissive of why I would choose to run a megadungeon or a module at all — I’m doing it because I want connections drawn and ideas laid out that I wouldn’t have made myself, fully knowing that as referee I’ll make the text my own.

    Through Ultan’s Door is a quandary to me, filling me with mixed feelings. The prose is beautiful, and a pleasure to read, seeming designed to be read aloud at a table by a wizard. I get strong Harrison and Vance vibes from it, and for the right table — one that is attached to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands or Robert Chambers — that would be absolute joy. But, that very strength renders it a challenge to run, particularly with regards to self-reference, and I suspect this problem might compound as you introduce multiple issues, rather than run them separately. As a world living in the author’s head, his home game of many years, this is not an issue: For me it is. In addition, I’m not sure I have the connective tissue to run this as anything but a series of standalones, unless I choose to design my own expansions to the content.

    That said, for Dreamlands-like content, there is nothing quite like Through Ultan’s Door in the hobby; in terms of prose, you might choose to read it simply for the pleasure; despite the incompleteness being challenging, you might choose to support it in order for it to be brought to completion. I certainly don’t regret the purchase, but I think it’ll be a few more years and a few more issues before I feel it’s complete enough for me to run.

    (Addition: Since writing this review, which I did a little in advance of release as a megadungeon review needs to be written over multiple baths, Ben Laurence the author actually wrote a blog post acknowledging the challenge of incompleteness, and talking about the future of Through Ultan’s Door, which looks to include at least 8-9 more issues at this stage. Check it out here.)

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • I Read His Majesty the Worm

    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.

    Today is dominated by going to the doctors and getting procedures, so in my time sitting in waiting rooms and twiddling my thumbs while I am poked and prodded and bled, I’m reading His Majesty the Worm, a new release from Exalted Funeral. It seems appropriate, a game about poking, prodding, and bleeding. I received a complementary (digital) copy of this for review purposes, and it seems appropriate that this released during Megadungeon July.

    His Majesty the Worm is a 400 page all-in-one megadungeon crawling roleplaying game by Josh McCrowell, using tarot cards as a randomising factor. It espouses itself a procedure focused game, intended to “make the boring parts interesting”. It’s worth looking at if you’re looking for a game with old school sensibilities but that reimagines it with fresh eyes. This book is a monster and it covers character and guild creation, phases of play, sorcery and alchemy on the player side, and dungeon, city and monster creation, and advice for running the game on the referee side, and includes a number of examples of all of these.

    Starting with the introduction: Although it is hardly remarkable, it finishes with the principle, “This should be delightful”. I’ve got to say that as the one the final words I saw as I began to wade into a tome such as this, it fills me with optimism. I’ll keep coming back to this phrase throughout the review, because I think the repeated intentional circling back to delight is a defining characteristic that sets it apart from other modern takes on the genre. The visual representation of the procedures that comprise the game as a whole, which begins the rules explanation off, is clearly inspired by the infamous diagram in Blades in the Dark, but are more succinct, useful and compelling. Super neat. It’s obvious a lot of thought went into these four unusual phases — crawl, camp, challenge and city — straight off the bat, and it’s followed up with a summary of “book-keeping” which is incredibly valuable as general refereeing advice. In terms of defining the conversation between referee and players, it breaks it down to four stock phrases to keep returning to, which is a really elegant approach to “referee moves” in my opinion. This should be stolen, frankly, by everyone who comes after. The resolution system is simple and juicy: Draw a minor arcana, add your attribute, and if it’s higher than 14 you succeed. If you draw trump (that is, a card whose suit matches the activity you’re doing — swords for violence for example), it’s a critical hit. If you don’t succeed, you can draw a second card, “pushing fate”, but if you fail after pushing fate it’s a critical failure. The element of pushing your luck combined with the simplicity of the system makes me smile.

    There’s a ton of interesting complexity in both the Adventurer and Guild sections. So much that I won’t go over it. I don’t think I can get a solid sense of how it’ll go in play, but it’s obvious it provides a huge amount of potential leverage for drama, especially the motifs and bonds, and almost everything ties into a mechanic neatly and in a way that makes sense. This is a game interested in mechanical interactions as much as it is in roleplaying, and it shows. The guild rules fold in a lot of complexity that’s normally not well organised, such as marching order, in a very neat way. These two chapters are an intricate network of concepts and ideas, that I think I’d have trouble communicating to a table of players unless they were the kind of players to read the book beforehand — and in my experience, the kind of players who read the book are usually looking for a different kind of complexity, one that’s more concrete and consists a lot of lists and interactions.

    That said, HMTW does bring some of that complexity in chapters 4 and 5, which details Kith, Kin and Paths which are essentially equivalent to feats or specialisations, as well as later with Sorcery and Alchemy. As I said, character creation here feels as complex than a game like Pathfinder 2e, if not a little more because it’s front-loaded rather than you developing over time an increasing number of individual features or abilities. When you’re creating a character, you’re creating a bomb with many sensitive triggers that create drama in as many different situations as you can, be they combat or exploration or interpersonal situations. This is a huge asset to the game in my opinion, because having a character sheet oriented to creating drama and scaffolding many forms of interaction that aren’t combat (“I get focus if I provide advise to my mentee?”) is really helpful to a huge number of players out there who feel lost when they’re not playing from the menu they see their character sheet as. Also, these chapters really lean into the ambiguity of the setting: There’s a heap of weird and flavourful setting material here, untethered from anything else. The disadvantage of this is that it becomes the referee’s responsibility to integrate these things. I imagine a panicked note taking session after session 0 with photographs of all the character sheets and me trying to intuit some connections between all the players ideas. But the advantage is that there is so much juice to pick and choose from when it comes to characterising your creation.

    I’ll interrupt a moment to talk about sorcery and alchemy, which do not come next, but feel relevant at this point. I like their simplicity and depth. Spells have simple, universal limitations that must be overcome, making them niche at best; most underworld monsters are valuable of being harvested for reagents which can be converted into bombs, oils or potions during camp so long as you set aside room in your inventory for it. They don’t have the depth of flavour that, say, Swyvers magic has, but they’re nevertheless a delight for dungeon-crawling antics. They add to the peculiar complexities at play here in an intriguing way.

    The adventurer creation process here is really meant to be collaborative, creating a team together, and developing them as individuals and as a guild as a part of a session 0, and I think your mileage on how successfully this freewheeling together-but-apart process goes will vary significantly depending on the players at your table. It’s a challenge, because everything here is so strong! But it’s really, really player dependent. I am tempted to say that for a first go, most of the people I play with regularly would be best off with some pre-made characters and a pre-made guild, and perhaps running a one-shot, because while the rules aren’t more complex than any other dungeon crawler, they’re not as intuitive to someone who plays a bunch of dungeon crawls, and I could see that being a barrier initially. I’ll come back to this impression again later.

    The four phases of the game are split over a number of chapters. In the Crawl phase, the detail here mainly explains to the players how the game works. It’s kind of an extended example of play, punctuated by a lot of small rules covering common edge cases. There are small delights, though: The players can expect a map of the dungeon, albeit without full information (this is followed up thoughtfully in the latter chapters on designing dungeons). The meatgrinder table is an extremely well expanded hazard die. A random doom occurs when you’re completely out of light sources, ending your session in the underworld, and making torch management important and meaningful beyond “everything is harder”. The reaction table is an absurd and detailed three-tiered, seven-pointed star that you can walk around on in two dimensions. It feels initially unwieldy, but is very clever. These dispositions have mechanical effects if they’re strong enough — closer to the points of the star. All of this together brings us a densely populated set of rules, covering everything that a more traditional game like Fifth Edition does, but in a very different way. It sings of the accumulation of house rules, polished for publication.

    The Challenge phase — for combat and primarily — is a fairly rigid, zone based system, that you may have seen before in games like 13th Age. It works, and I like this iteration of the system. Small delights here: The fool is powerful but costly, a nice twist on its usual use. Having a hand brings tactical complexity as well as limitation and randomness to your choices. You can banter with Wands, affecting disposition and morale. The referee can play major dooms for big, flashy effects. If you die you will rise from the dead as an NPC. My main criticism of this section is that honestly I find the diagrams of the cards on the table in the example of play a little confusing; it’s probably just the fact that the cards all look similar in the example, though.

    The Camp phase is elegantly summarised with a lovely spread. These lovely summaries that pepper the book are all in the back as play aids, but the game is begging for a referees screen, to be honest. The Camp phase is full of other delights, but the key one is that your recovery isn’t interrupted by any random encounters.

    I adore the City phase; I love how upkeep — the equivalent of the social standing concept present in many elfgames — becomes a deeply important consideration to survival here: You want to live in luxury if you can afford it, and that gives us our main consideration for how much treasure: A luxurious upkeep is what were aiming for. I love the collaborative myth making concerning your guild, where you tell tales and record them about your deeds. City events and actions are interesting and compelling. Referee prep is built into the city phase, as restocking and refreshing used up events in the meat grinder tables. It’s all very neat in theory, particularly if the players are independent with their choices, as they’ll be eventually.

    The referee’s section really revolves for me around the creation rules for the city and the underworld. The referee’s principles that come that are solid, and draw from a pretty excellent reading list. If you’re not already an experienced runner of dungeons in the style of modern blogosphere informed elf games, this will be a solid class for you (or for your interested friend). While the bestiary frontloads making your own monsters, it nevertheless includes a bestiary as well as a bunch of templates that serve as a middle ground. I really appreciate this support — I love making a unique monster, but I also love easy prep.

    City creation is interesting. As a general rule, I prefer my cities, dungeons, et cetera to be created for me. I don’t see a lot of utility in a unique city just for my table; I can make that alone. I want the specifics that an author can provide. The process of city creation here is a lot of fun though. So much fun. And it has a lot of specifics and universals to it. The utility is that the city can expand to suit your needs with this system; and it’s expansible theoretically to a full deck of cards worth of districts. What I don’t like about it, though, is that the city — at least in the form it is presented — is largely defined by mechanics rather than people. You go to the Gambol to hide out, but you don’t know Black Caval, who’ll put you up in his sewer-court for a gift and a promise. Given the amount of time spent elucidating these potential districts, I’d have loved that additional characterisation to be an additional touch. But I get the impression this is intentional: The hope is that the players hang out on the city, exercising their city actions in transit isolation from the referee, while the referee takes notes and restocks the underground and any city events that have been expended. Good design, perhaps. But not what I want out of a city; maybe, though, it suits this game perfectly.

    The underworld creation section is good procedure for any dungeon creator, even if you aren’t choosing to play this game. Interestingly, for a megadungeon, the very accessible number of 5 levels is suggested. The bulk of this, though, like the bulk of the city creation section is the Dungeon Seeds, which I believe have been released as a standalone product, although I’m not sure exactly how closely what I’m reviewing here reflects on that. You’re provided 21 potential dungeon levels, each of which are very juicy, as well as following that with an equal number of ways to make rooms interesting, example interesting traps, and an entire tutorial dungeon called the Tomb of Golden Ghosts to walk you through the process.

    His Majesty the Worm has an anti-canon setting; a rough outline and a bunch of tools for the referee and her players to build upon. It is, in many ways, an excellent example of this approach. There is a lot of detail here, and to some degree the players choices in what they’re interested in or what they recall from their Kith, or their Paths or whatever are going to guide the referee in the building of the world outside of their knowledge, resulting in a feedback loop that should be positive with a sufficiently engaged table. McCrowell’s writing is lovely, bouncing from a very casual voice in rules explanation that is charming and welcoming, to a gothic aesthetic dripping with moss and grit for the details of the city and underworld. The title, His Majesty the Worm, adequately communicates in my opinion the kind of dusk and mud fantasy this book prefers, and it doesn’t stray far from that aesthetic except in the service of making the moment to moment play filled with interesting choices.

    The layout here is pretty gorgeous. I have the digital version (the postage on the print version, which was available I believe from today, being sadly prohibitive to me), and it’s stylish, easy to read and locate information in, and the art despite coming from a huge variety of sources is well curated and never disappointing. My only criticism is that I find the script text used in some areas difficult to read; this is all flavour text, anyway, and the use of the book doesn’t suffer from the choice. In the other hand the wavering, seemingly custom font used for the titling is gorgeous and mood-setting. I’ve seen pictures of the print version, and given this is the kind of book you’re likely to be flicking through, it looks to be a beautiful and practical investment if you’re planning on running it.

    Would you run it, is the question? My overall impression of His Majesty The Worm is one of complexity. This is intended to be Your Game if you choose to run it, but, unlike most games that aspire to be Your One Game, this actually feels like it has the juice to sustain long term play without buying lots of other supplements. For that reason alone — return on investment — His Majesty the Worm deserves to supplant Pathfinder or Fifth Edition as your weekly beer and pretzels game. It has the mechanical complexity to sustain a huge amount of play in the same way those games do; but it also requires the same kind of prolonged and gradual learning. The anticanon setting supports minimal prep, the underworld supports night infinite dungeons, and so could see this developing into a dramatic and exciting campaign that could run for years, if you had buy in from your table. It’s an impressively well put together game, and it shows that McCrowell has been playing this and playtesting this for years (I can’t remember how many years, but I’d hazard I’ve heard him talking about it on twitter for at least 7). It’s not quite the same timeline as Break! But it’s an equally impressive work of design. There are so many light touches — the rumour mill, for example — that attempt to bring home the goal of being a delight to play.

    Bringing this back to Megadungeon July, and comparing to the two megadungeons I’ve already reviewed, I think His Majesty the Worm actually has its own strong thesis regarding what a megadungeon is: It thinks a megadungeon has to be developed at the table, the way Castle Greyhawk was, your game and dungeon and table all integrated and interdependent. You can’t be provided a megadungeon, although you can be provided better tools to create your own, says His Majesty the Worm. In a world full of products for consumption, this is a fairly remarkable thesis. And to that end, I realise that indeed this is a megadungeon after the style of Castle Greyhawk indeed: Political strife above, danger and treasure below. No predetermined narrative, but also no utter randomness. Your megadungeon is to make sense, but it is mythical, a place for fun, an arena full of treasure that you risk delving into.

    The main barrier for me actually playing His Majesty the Worm is that this is just simply not a one-shot game, and so giving it a go isn’t easily on the table. How will I know if this is for us? There are so many rules, there is a lot of prep and pre reading to do. So many of its innovations are not intuitive, and you need a table willing to bring completely fresh eyes and open minds to an old style of play. That’s a big investment, or it appears to be, right off the bat. But, it comes with a tutorial dungeon, and you could pregenerate characters easily despite it not being ideal play, so with a little effort you could run a trial in the mini-dungeon to test the waters. I just wish there was a little more support for weaning us into this challenging and complex game right out of the metaphorical box. I don’t need a His Majesty the Worm starter set, but it is complex enough to benefit from a starter of some kind.

    But I want to try it. I said somewhere earlier, His Majesty the Worm just sings “I’m accumulation of house rules over years, polished for publication”, and this is a time-honoured tradition in this hobby. This ain’t an elegant but simple dungeon-crawler like the currently populists Knave and Cairn. This is a maximalist game, more akin in its approach to Errant or my own Advanced Fantasy Dungeons. But, for what it’s worth, it has a lot of strengths for particularly its specific direction into megadungeon play, over and above what those two games have to offer (although in their defence, they win over in plenty of other ways, such as overland travel and domain play). There’s a strong sales pitch, in my opinion, for complex maximalist games. I have more players looking for a regular table bounce off light games because they don’t offer sufficient scaffolding, despite their being my personal preference.

    I’ve been reading Pathfinder Remastered lately — I’m really enjoying it — and to be honest the rules and prep overhead here feels roughly similar. There are a lot of particulars that will require flicking through the book looking for solutions, and enough generalities that we can probably wing it in the short term. We have an index, which will help with that if the editors have excelled at their work. I think certainly, this at least equals the complexity seen in most Forged in the Dark games, if you’re looking for a benchmark, and for me people are more likely to go for the pitch “dungeon crawling based in a fantasy metropolis” over “emo thieves with ghosts”, “post apocalyptic melancholy” or “doomed armies against undead legions”, despite their all being absolutely slapping pitches. For a campaign, particularly one that may be infinite (as much as it’s unlikely, people often think they will be playing forever), a familiar comfort is often an easier sell. So His Majesty the Worm: With mechanical depth, familiar themes, friendly stylings, and beautiful presentation, is a strong sell. As you may suspect, I love a good module, and so His Majesty the Worm may not be for me — at least not until my kids are old enough that I can run a regular table at home again. But if you’re just in it to get your friends around the table, His Majesty the Worm is a hell of a game in a small but generous package, that will bring a lot of drama.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Bathtub Review: Gradient Descent

    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.

    Gradient Descent is a 61 page module for Mothership by Luke Gearing with art by Nick Tofani and layout by Sean McCoy. It’s a megadungeon writ compact, using every terse writing trick by author Gearing and every clever layout trick by Sean McCoy to make it work. After last week’s Tomb of a Thousand Doors, it’s turning into megadungeon July here on Playful Void. You’re a desperate artefact hunter, delving into a massive abandoned android factory run by a rogue AI. The androids here can be indistinguishable from humans…wait, am I human, or a was I an android the whole time?

    This is an in-house Mothership module, so I’m going to talk about presentation first: Sean McCoy and Nick Tofani are a powerhouse pairing here, with a dense layout and art that feel in tune with each other, and do a lot of heavy lifting in bringing the working class science fiction vibes. It looks great, just like the other house Mothership modules I’ve reviewed. How legible is it? Honestly, nigh impossible to read front to back. I had to take breaks, this is a multi-bath review, unusual for a book this short. But is it usable? Yeah, I think so. The first fifteen pages, which contain all the information you need to read before you run it, are gorgeous, but dense and tricky to parse. It uses bold, underline, colour (and coloured bold and underlining), and capitalisation, as well as highlighting and boxed text to differentiate in-text concepts, which is busy enough it’s not clear to me immediately what means what. The crowded layout leaves me missing certain parts of the page that aren’t really lead to visually — usually these are tips on how to run that page. Text bends around art on many pages, which looks good but makes it harder to scan in images with extreme dimensions. Headings, at least, are consistent and easy to pick.

    Maps are stylised as circuit diagrams, which is an efficient and stylish approach, although one that isn’t effective at communicating scale or spatial positioning. Combine this with the use of multiple scales on the map and, while it’s cleverly coded, I really don’t understand the spatial relationships between these rooms or locations. It’s not a crawl, it’s a funhouse tour. I can’t help but feel there’s something lost in this point-crawl approach to the megadungeon, but also it’s supposed to feel like an alien space, I think, wrapping around itself, as if you’re both at the mercy of powerful beings with ineffable goals, and potentially losing your mind slowly as you delve. If that’s the intent, and you’re leaning into it, it works.

    Like most house Mothership modules, the inside covers are maps and tables. I think, looking at the first fifteen pages, I’d have preferred some of this information — factions, procedures, a full legend to the unique and non-intuitive map — to have been more easily accessible instead. This information I feel like I’m going to either print off separately or keep flipping back to, and likely will use more than the random search and artefact tables on the back, though they’re also important. As is, I’m probably printing some extra pages out for reference, if that bothers you.

    The module thrives more once you hit the key itself. Detailed minimaps — not cut outs, but unique maps with more information — punctuate the key, text becomes more clear in use, and the nonsensical use of space earlier makes more sense when those tips are typically attached to maps. It uses a bullet point structure that separates out details and secrets. The key though, is a bland piece of work from a usually lyrical writer, punctuated by boxed text with fantastic description: “An emaciated android-torso with six articulated scything blades for limbs. The top half of the head is all eyes, the lower jaw is replaced by a surgical syringe/proboscis. A huge nodule on its back spins forth a Steel Web.” although occasionally, but not often, he manages to break out of his structure: “When exiting: a man in a lab coat appears, a halo of blades floating around his head.” There a a lot of good ideas here, but they’re truly spread around the dungeon and interspersed with dry keying. This feels like another case of a sacrifice to the gods of science-fiction, a bit like we saw in Resonant, where a normally lyrical author must trade off beauty for clarity as a result of the subject matter. Now, is this actually a bad thing? Honestly, probably not. A lot of rooms I think are intended as empty, the ones that are lyrical as prompts to interact or flee, with random encounters and rules around ghosts and believing you’re an android intended to being the drama and interest as you explore the factory, and then flee with the artefacts you’ve found.

    Given it’s fresh in my mind, a comparison to Tomb of a Thousand Doors is automatic. The cohesiveness and theme of Gradient Descent puts it in a very strong position, but it’s also a module that’s more alienating due to its horror and mental health theming. Tomb provides a lovely variety and a more traditional structure, supported by the Mausritter rules which sing with a classic approach to a megadungeon. The most interesting thing about the comparison is how well Gradient Descent uses a megadungeon shell to tell a psychological story, with a distinct (potential) arc reminiscent of classic sci fi, where Mausritter provides simply a lot of fun over a lot of sessions. It’s a lovely example of how megadungeon form does not necessarily equal function.

    Megadungeons are hard, and this one is zine-length. I prefer a more thorough key, but in brevity and through creative mapping approaches, this megadungeon is genuinely runnable. I could definitely improvise around this, without it having to do significant prep aside from perhaps printing off those first 15 or so pages as references for myself. I think, if my players enjoyed the horror-crawl and learning the secrets behind this complex, we could get a lot of play by delving into it repeatedly. But, a whole aspect of play is missing because of the mapping choices, and even if we’re not hand-mapping those options make exploration more interesting than what this amounts to: A purely push your luck dungeon crawl.

    Gradient Descent is the best (only?) megadungeon for Mothership, I think. Combine it with a good station base (repurpose the Bell, or use Prospero’s Dream), and you’ve got a lot of playtime. So long as you’re happy with removing a problem-solving aspect from your crawl, and your players are content with the challenging themes of mental health and the what constitutes being human, or are playing with players for don’t care for classic crawling and aren’t expecting it, this is a keeper.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Bathtub Review: Tomb of a Thousand Doors

    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.

    Tomb of a Thousand Doors is a crowdsourced megadungeon with editing and production duties by Matthew Morris, a stellar art team, and a list of authors so long click through above to read them. It’s 94 pages, and features over 37 individual submissions and I’m assured over 250 rooms. If there ever was as a way to assemble a megadungeon efficiently, this is it. The big question in my mind is, does the grand editorial and production effort take the tonally broad potential of a crowdsourced megadungeon and synthesise it into a cohensive unit?

    The first 10 pages or so are the primary attempt to do this. This dungeon-spanning section covers an interesting encounter mechanic, a page full of treasure, 3 major factions, 3 dungeon merchants, 3-4 rival adventuring parties. I love the addition of rival adventuring parties, but I find them difficult to run (unless you’re running many groups in one dungeon), and so I’m disappointed in no guidance in how to do so. It may be it’s intended to only be driven by the encounter mechanic, but if that was the case I’d want more sign of them in the dungeon itself (this never eventuates). The merchants however, are stellar and weird in hand Legends of Zelda style: “pile of maggots disguised as an albino rat in a heavy black cloak. It serves a dark master”, “blind albino mouse who lives inside the carcass of a dead chicken she hollowed out and animated”, but I’d soften them a little for my young table. The having is nice and simple number, providing easy to track interactions. In the context of this dungeon, it’s a good choice. The encounter mechanic is nifty: It’s a hazard die, but instead of an encounter, you roll an alarm die, which increases in size the more risky things you do. Accordingly there are 4 encounter tables according to risk level. Given this is a flat megadungeon — no levels here — this works really well to give the players a sense of how much risk they’re at, and to give them control over that risk by retreating or hunkering down.

    Then, we get a summary of all the mini-dungeons, and a keyed map (an earlier map was ostensibly player-facing and unkeyed, but leaves secret doors and rooms in the map, sadly). I don’t adore the “at a glance” section. It summarises each individual contribution, but it doesn’t summarise the story of the megadungeon, which would have gone a long way to making it feel more cohesive. It doesn’t think about what the Sisters and Bat-cultists are doing, despite them featuring in the random encounter tables, for example. I don’t think I’d use this beyond the first read through, because the players will just be wondering through the dungeon, as crawlers are wont to do.

    From here, this is a challenging module to review, largely because it has so many sections — more than I can reasonably review and expect anyone to read. Firstly there are 7 loosely associated locations — 2 are surface locations that connect to the megadungeon, one being the headquarters of a faction, 3 are large scale additional areas underground, with a bunch of interesting rules and spaces, that don’t fit neatly into the rest of the megadungeon structure, and 2 are pocket dimensions inside the dungeon. I have no objection to the content of these in particular — I think the Cave of Fongi is a little undercooked for a hex crawl, but the others are truly interesting locations — but because of their isolation from the rest of the dungeon, I don’t think they’re interesting additions, and rather than go there when the dungeon is cleared (which is unlikely to occur), I think they’re a high-effort alternative to simply introducing new factions to the Tomb and restocking to keep the space interesting. I think this is a failure of the crowdsourcing process more than anything else, rather than a failure of the individual locations or authors. It just doesn’t fit, and I can’t see any editor knocking back generously donated quality submissions.

    The first location that I find striking is Nordengren’s Five Equipments, a creepy and interesting ocean where the islands are the corpse of a buried cat. This one is evocative and weird. Utopia Fallen is a stark contrast of a romantic burial ground, that I vibe very strongly with, and features Nigel, one of my favourite NPCs in the tomb. Dungeon of the Mad Maus is a not so interesting dungeon full of interesting tools that I’d love to see players play with. Saint Ginger’s Hospital is huge, and I could see its Froglodytes spreading outside of the hospital, despite there being no provision for that. Lair of the Gorgon, Zola is cute and fun and features a really fun boss battle. Overall, we have about a 50% rate of success with minidungeons that are exciting, with most being acceptable. Only a few that are genuinely weak submissions or unlikely to find use. There are very few empty rooms in this megadungeon — makes sense given it’s been crowdsourced — so even those weaker areas will find use as bases, which works just fine in conjunction with the presence of the merchants for a self-contained megadungeon experience.

    Of the factions, there are 5 Snake Worshipper areas, but the Mole Combine barely makes an appearance and the Plague Ratz barely make an appearance. They do, however, appear in the alarm table as do a smattering of other factions that aren’t detailed aside from in their dungeons. These ones aren’t given page-references, though, so that’s some homework for you, and they’re not all designed for interactivity. A few of the unique creatures in the random table act as factions as well, but they’re given the Mausritter house amount of explication, and hence don’t have a lot of meat, with the exception of the very charming Dragon Turtle. The Snake Worshippers receive a little extra attention than everyone else — I think they’re intended as primary antagonists — but it wasn’t clear on my read if the shrines and unique snakes are intended to be additional locations or describe the existing locations. Perhaps in play, it will all come together, but the connective tissue isn’t quite there in the text. You’re going to need to bring a lot of your own flair to bring this megadungeon up to an interactive scratch. But also I can see this going very well if you just name everyone, and add the Nemesis system (if anyone still remembers Shadows of Mordor) and apply it to everyone who’s encountered.

    A personal peeve: This dungeon incorporates fairy additions to Mausritter. I assume that this is associated with editor Matthew Morris’ Lilliputian rules which are quite popular in the Mausritter community, although it’s explicitly associated with a few other products so it may be those instead. There isn’t much in the way of rules associated with this, but for me, I’m not playing Mausritter to bring what are effectively little humans into my game. Not to my taste. It means I’d change the references to fae runes and the fairy characters here to something else, something I find annoying and contrary to the purpose of this for me. That said, I suspect that the fairies will appeal solidly to my core player pool, which is 4 to 10 year old girls. Your mileage may, obviously, vary.

    The information design isn’t immediately obvious to me, but after reading it I understood the choices; there are two areas that really should’ve been at the end in an “associated underground areas” section with the other spaces that are placed at the end, though, in my opinion, which are the pocket dimensions. I think the surface locations should be here too, separated and not numbered with the rest of the dungeon. An incredible touch is that each individual mini dungeon is individually mapped in addition to the larger whole dungeon map — these aren’t cut outs, they have additional details. This touch makes the megadungeon incredibly usable. There’s some intelligent use of art, as well, in such a massive tome, to minimise page-turning and keep almost everything you’d need to a single spread, almost all the time (I don’t want to give you a guarantee, because it’s hard to confirm that in a large book in pdf that I’m reading on my phone in the bath, but it’s close at least). Honestly, this isn’t flashy, but it’s thoughtfully laid out, with some a good number of creative choices that result in a readable, easy to navigate book. No small feat in a complex text like this one. The primary issue is one of information design stemming from the crowdsourced approach: The different areas of the dungeon just aren’t keyed the same. I think, if I were to crowdsource something like this, I’d add a condition that to be eligible it needs to use the Mausritter house style, just because the lack of consistency is jarring, even if I wouldn’t mind running any of these spaces individually based on their own merits.

    Tomb of a Thousand Doors is an admirable experiment, in my opinion. Recently, a similar project, Return to Perinthos was attempted as a memorial to Jennell Jaquays, and I’m interested in how it’ll come along. There are few mega dungeons published in a state of completeness; episodic releases are more common but vary between slow but progressing (Through Ultan’s Door) and in development hell (Anomalous Subsurface Environment) — in that context, the crowdfunded model makes sense. The haphazard system model of Return to Perinthos feels a step backwards from the model that Tomb of a Thousand Doors takes, but I think that if it’s to be a truly successful model, more editorial control needs to be incorporated from the outset; a challenging prospect, I think, for a community funded project that to my knowledge was not for profit. A decent number of the pitfalls the Tomb of A Thousand Doors falls into, however, would have been avoided simply with a little more direction in terms of “please choose one of these factions to incorporate” or the freedom of the editorial team to drop more tidbits from one section into another. The Tomb feels more funhouse than cohesive place, because of the lack of this editorial direction.

    Now, I run Mausritter for my kids on a regular basis, and so an investment like the print version of The Tomb of a Thousand Doors is appealing to me: It’s easy for the girls to track and stay involved in. This goal — infinite easy to implement Mausritter adventures —colours my perception of this product. I am not a fan of the digital version of the Tomb of a Thousand Doors. The landscape layout translates poorly to a small screen, making it hard to read and impractical to use, even though the layout in and of itself is solid. If you work from a laptop or wider screen, it’ll work just fine. I don’t have the print copy, but I suspect the very weaknesses I see in the digital version would be strengths in the print version. I went to look at the price of the pre-order of the hardcover as soon as I finished reading it.

    In terms of content, there is enough in here that’s a little too confronting for kids the age mine are (four and six), but would be just fine in a few years time. I’d either just block off those passages, or substitute another Mausritter dungeon for those locations. But the sheer amount of content here is months of play, even for kids who tend to rush through content like water through rapids. The inconsistent content, formatting and writing won’t impact their enjoyment of the Tomb of a Thousand Doors at all, either: This is a playground for them to play in, and they’ll enjoy it plenty. I’d strongly consider picking this up if you’re playing Mausritter with your kids. If you’re looking for a megadungeon and enjoy playing with adults, I feel like this would benefit from a fair bit of extra work before you go into it, but it’s a megadungeon — that extra work is a whole lot less than writing your own. Overall, there’s plenty to recommend in the Tomb of a Thousand Doors, irregardless of your table, if you don’t mind the caveats.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Bathtub Review Double Feature: To Put Away A Sword and Into the Antlion’s Den

    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.

    These are two brief kickstarter stretch goals for Eco Mofos, and Into the Odd based post apocalyptic ecopunk game. To Put Away A Sword is a module by Zedeck Siew, and Into the Antlion’s Den is a module by Samantha Leigh, both with art by Daniel Locke. One is 12 pages, and the other 8, which is why I’m reviewing them as a double feature.

    Into the Antlion’s Den is a 9 hex hexcrawl, where the goal is the library and antlion’s den about 4 hexes distant from the starting town. I like this familiar structure, and it starts strong, by identifying that the hardest part is accessing the antlion’s pit, and listing the ways to do so, as well as hooks for tight framing. Leigh’s writing is immediately striking: “…wind-swept desert of pulverized metal that buries an oldworld city set in a deep canyon. A few crumbling buildings pierce above the scrap-sand, shimmering in the heat.” This carries on through the Random Encounters and the hex descriptions: “Sailing stones made of compacted scrap cubes speed through the desert”.

    I really like the hex descriptions. They’re not bite-sized, varying from quarter to a half page, but they’re clear, evocative and targeted. The intent is clearly that the referee ad lib most of the encounters, after the style of a Mausritter module, and I don’t hate that approach, it just marks it clearly as not a classic style of play, despite eco mofos styling itself as a dungeon crawler.

    The rumours are a little weaker: I want them to drive the players consistently towards adventure, but rumours like “Someone took the last hoverboard from the SkidKid factory” do the opposite. The other weakness in the module is that there’s only one faction here: There’s not a lot going on aside from stumbling about running into admittedly compelling encounters. These encounters would be made more compelling with more tools for interactivity. Any surprises you encounter running this will be entirely of your tables devising, and not reflecting the design, I fear.

    But overall, for an 8 page hex crawl, Into the Antlions Den is a pretty stellar offering. It doesn’t have a lot to offer my adult table, but it’s stellar for playing with the kids, with lots of flashy encounters and a straightforward drive. If you’re running for kids who love Kipo or Adventure Time, this is a damned good choice, especially as Eco Mofos is not a long stretch from Mausritter. I noticed after I wrote this that it’s labelled family fun on the cover, so I think it hits the nail on the head.

    To Put Away A Sword on the other hand is not labelled family fun. Siew’s approach to writing in brevity is to dial up the poetry and interactivity, which is a bold move. It opens with a table of things you love about town, and the question “Describe what you love. Why would you bleed to keep it safe? The god soldier’s throes threaten it, as they do all of Grove.” The players are then asked to draw the map themselves, based on the description by the elders. This is elegant ritualistic gaming more akin to Sleepaway than the Iron Coral. Innovative stuff from Siew, which is saying something as a fan of his work.

    Despite this dialled up poetics — I’ll reframe from quoting every page — there are references to the core rules here, and page references that are appreciated. And the poetics are there in spades. Siew remains the best writer in the hobby in my opinion. At random: “Assembly-robot arms, frozen upright like roach legs.”, “bandits, covered in acid burns, as mean as cornered cats”, “A ball of plasma, three metres in diameter. Ignited to be a death machine’s battery, she has decided to be more.”. You don’t get better than this.

    The biggest negative I think is in terms of structure. My sense of space in both the valley and within the Mountain — the giant dying mecha — is a little overwhelmed, or perhaps Siew is just disinterested in the spatial element here. That said, it’s very playable, if only because most locations are limited to 3 paragraphs of text — a pattern so rigid it feels intentional. And, in terms of the space, I think you’re supposed to use your mecha action figure as a dungeon map here — travelling through those limbs as passages. I have to say, though, that the impact of this method is reduced a little through its re-use for the military base Ursus Point.

    But again, To Put Away A Sword is a stellar offering for 12 pages of point crawl. Absolute bang for your buck, and you get to see Siew writing sci fi with a post-apocalyptic religious undertone. This one, however is solidly for adults, with themes of violence, body horror, and child soldiers. Not for the light hearted.

    Between the two of these, it’s an interesting overview of the approach of Eco Mofos: The game is not adult, but there’s an effort here to produce content that fits a range of audiences. Fascinating stuff, and if Eco Mofos can keep up this two pronged approach, and keep up the module release in pace with the audience (I’ve written before about the bespoke elfgame module problem), we’re in for a post-apocalyptic treat.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Dungeon Regular: Feedback Reachout

    Ok, so I’m thinking about Dungeon Regular, and how it’s a minisode format of about 5 minutes. I’ve got some listeners, but not bucketloads. I’m wondering if this micro content would be better suited to Tiktok or Instagram, to be honest, but I’m not sure how much of the elfgame dungeon design crowd doomscroll on video platforms vs listen to a podcast.

    I’m looking for feedback here: Is micro design advice better situated as a podcast, or as short video content?

    Idle Cartulary

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

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Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

Dungeon Regular is a show about modules, adventures and dungeons. I’m Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary and I’m reading through Dungeon magazine, one module at a time, picking a few favourite things in that adventure module, and talking about them. On this episode I talk about Threshold of Evil, in Issue #10, March 1988! You can find my famous Bathtub Reviews at my blog, https://playfulvoid.game.blog/, you can buy my supplements for elfgames and Mothership at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/, check out my game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/advanced-fantasy-dungeons and you can support Dungeon Regular on Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/idlecartulary.
  1. Threshold of Evil
  2. Secrets of the Towers
  3. Monsterquest
  4. They Also Serve
  5. The Artisan’s Tomb

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