• I Read Swyvers

    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 all prep for my daughter’s birthday party, but I need a break, so between blowing up balloons and assembling cakes, I’m reading Swyvers. Because of the nature of my day, this may be a more chaotic read than usual. Swyvers is a 95 page rules light roleplaying game by Luke Gearing in which you play criminals in a corrupt, steampunk city. Obviously, this invites direct comparison to another game in which you play criminals in a corrupt, steampunk city: Blades in the Dark. I’m not going to bother avoiding those comparisons, and actually I’ll lean into it, as I love a good campaign of Blades in the Dark, and I’ve previously complained about Spire being not enough like Blades.

    One thing that sets Swyvers apart straight away is the approach: The book is described in the intro as being “light-weight set of rules married to a full set of tools and tables”, which makes me expect this to be (given the modus operandi of the author) something of the minimalist elf game variety, perhaps verging on Braunstein, attached to a randomised setting guide. This leaves me a little nervous: Luke Gearing is an exceptional writer, but I’ve written before about my objections to Brian Yaksha’s — also an excellent author — approach to setting and how this hard anticanon approach can make settings unapproachable to me. There’s a place for concrete setting and a place for random generation, and it’s a rare book that walks the tightrope successfully in my mind.

    Character creation for Swyvers is an elegant 2 pages, with most of those being a list of trinkets reminiscent of Mothership’s patches. These are for the most part, though, humorous and feel leveraged at use in play rather than as a sideways glance at character building. After a little more world building in the form of “atypical PCs”, we launch into the equipment section, which is mainly — no joke — prosthetics. The brevity of the character creation and the emphasis on both gameable equipment and disability to me speaks clearly to what Swyvers is intended to be: A violent game of nasty desperate people, likely to die or be injured for stupid reasons at stupid ends.

    The rules though, whilst hardly being crunchy, are a solid 40 pages, covering skills and saves, fighting, gaming and disease, morale, timekeeping, advancement, encumbrance downtime, and fences: Nothing exciting, and pretty basic stuff.

    This is a very save forward system, but it does involve skill rolls as well, rather than the more extreme save only systems. Combat is intentionally chaotic and weird, and is a little clumsier in response to that — I’d need a wee referee’s screen during combat, I think. But the consequence of combat here is both humorous again — hence the prominence of prosthetics in the equipment section — and the reason for the skills section at all. We’re leaning into this silliness of the 5th edition check here, I think, evidenced by the skill check instructions: Actions requiring training that players do not have; Actions which rely on information the Swyvers have access to; Actions relying on the Swyvers physique or ability alone.

    The investment and property rules lm interesting and evocative. I’m not sure they’re easily useable — we have no framework or procedures in this game, so no formal downtime — but I could see a player flipping through this and realising they were desperate for a smut library or a printing press. These aren’t very mechanical — the most you get is 5% chance of something per month — and I wish they had a little more heft, because making something that generates significant narrative effect seems unlikely for the work put in. I’d be inclined because of the OSR-iness of this game, to play in real time (there’s no guidance for this at all), which means my 5% chance per month is only 60% chance in a year of play. I’d like my players investments to result in more concrete narrative consequences than that. That said, the lack of mechanics here suggest it’s really more intended to direct narrative “diagetically” in the sense that this is not a game about mechanical heft at any point: most weapons don’t even have mechanics attached to them (the most mechanical been “d10, 3 round reload, ignore Armour”). The idea of my entire campaign pivoting to criminal Bridgerton after the purchase of a printing press, really tensions in my mind at the fact that that printing press doesn’t provide you with any suggested perks at all. This can’t really relies on a particular type of table, and given the importance of the lists to the world building, probably one that flips through the book themselves to recognise these opportunities.

    There is downtime, called expenditure: A way to use the money you steal. There’s no long term goal line in Blades in the dark; it feels like the swyvers aren’t meant to survive long. Expenditure feels like an addendum, but a meaningful one: You get XP by carousing and exposing yourself to drama and plot hooks, you can research for low risk XP, and you can train a “putterer” — basically a sidekick that acts as a backup PC for you if you die, and an assistant in the case that you don’t. As the primary source of expenses, it feels like it’s just not enough, compared to the fact that there’s never enough clinic to go around in Blades in the Dark.

    40 pages and we’re into Running Swyvers, explicitly the important part of the book in the author’s esteem; How to run the Smoke, the big city at the games’ core. The problem I anticipated is very much the case here, in my opinion: There is no the Smoke here, just a generator for the Smoke. I don’t think the heist-directed gameplay of Swyvers benefits from me creating parts of the city on the fly: Blades in the Dark feels most heisty when you e paid extra for the fancy maps or on the now defunct One More Multiverse, than when you’re making it up on the fly. So I’m faced with a choice as a Swyvers referee: Do I use these tables to spend hours doing prep, so I can answer freely my players planning questions? Or do I wing it, and my players are just finding out what the city is as it comes? Someone somewhere said that they feel like, if the players are supposed to be experts in the city, Doskvol doesn’t work, because there’s a bunch of lore that they don’t know. It steals their opportunity for expertise from them. They used this as an argument that the city should be entirely (or at least partially) improvised by the players as hoc, because they’re the experts. I feel this argument is a little disingenuous, to be honest, although I know people who experience games this way, because if there’s no existing facts about the city, how can you be an expert in it? And that’s not perfect phrasing, but at least: If you’re supposed to be making plans, the experience of making plans around improvised facts is very different than the experience of making plans around pre-existing facts. This is the argument that perpetually surrounds Brindlewood Bay. I don’t think Swyvers wants to be the Brindlewood Bay of the OSR, though.

    I think Luke Gearing’s wants the referee to be inventing the world on the fly, and presenting this to the players. My evidence for that is that in his Pariah session recaps, Luke talks about how he generates each session on the fly, similar to how these tables work. The difference though, is that Pariah is about wandering; Swyvers is about taking information and applying it to steal power, information or money, and dealing with the consequences. You want to be able to make heist plans: There’s no facility for flashbacks here. And the way the Smoke is set up, I don’t think it actually support that style of play. The random encounters just aren’t gameable, aside from the very specific list of criminal opportunities. This Smoke is mainly things I’d rather have been told the answers to, and not enough to help me run a session. Could I build my own Smoke, using the tables here? In combination with the implied factions here and in the bestiary, I probably could, yes. So could basically anyone willing to pick up this book. Would it be easier to just run a campaign in Doskvol? Yes, and I’d prefer to. I’ll come back to this, I’m sure. But back to the book.

    The bestiary is mainly beasts: A bit of a disappointment to be honest, given this game isn’t really a dungeon crawler — or at least this far hasn’t presented as one. I like the weird and unique monsters, but monsters don’t feel like they’re truly a part of this world in the same way they are in more traditional fantasy. I’d like to have seen more actual characters from the Smoke, and more actual gangs or factions. I value that content. Gearing has a knack for creatures that feel fun to incorporate, though. It’s good stuff.

    There’s an interesting magic system. It seems cool. Very culty, it reminds me of the videogame cultist simulator in a positive way. You don’t learn about spells until you find a spellbook — this is supposed to be rare and illegal, although there’s one in the starter adventure. As you learn more of magic, you can (spoilers if you’ll be a player) substitute components for cards, add specific effects, and make bargains with devils for permanently held face cards, in exchange for service. These systems are really, really neat, and like the best of the systems in Swyvers, are likely to drive play through player agency. I like that it feels alien to the rest of the systems in the game, due to the black jack cards system, as well. You’re more likely to chicken out on completing the spell, and being aggressive will likely cause certain doom. I like that the magic system is difficult, and likely to be goal oriented and drive play. But also, such a big section makes it feel like it’s expected to be core to play in a way that’s out of step with the way it’s presented in-world. At least, it’s packed full of Gearing’s signature vibrant and evocative writing, though. It’s stellar stuff.

    The shortcomings of Swyvers are hammered home by the interesting and very good module that comes at the end: There’s only one. I can’t adapt just any module to Swyvers easily: We’re not heroes but criminals. It doesn’t matter that Blue Cheese, Left to Rot is a very good starter module (it is, genuinely, pretty great, Gearing doing a Gus L impersonation after watching too much Peaky Blinders), because this game requires more modules, and will need significant support from either Luke Gearing or Melisonian Arts for there to be enough to get things rolling. It thrives with a well-written module. I’d run a Swyvers one-shot using this module with pleasure. But the amount of work that I’d have to put into the second session (or likely group of sessions) feels prohibitive to me.

    Based on this, what does this Swyvers campaign with no real city actually entail in play? I can only imagine this: The referee starts with the built in starter, then at the end of the heist, the players decide their next heist, and the referee designs the dungeon for them for next few sessions. The referee improvises using the tables provided enough for any free play that might occur in the gaps between dungeons. This feels like a hellish loop for me — I don’t think the tables here provide me with sufficient meat to improvise a city and have it feel as complex as a London or New York analogue should be to be entirely honest — but it may not feel hellish for you.

    I don’t like the layout. Gearing is on the record as not considering layout and infusion design a key part of game design (or rather, that the writing is far more important), and it shows here. Good luck quickly finding the “research rules”, or figuring out war magic is available in a pinch. Subheadings are subtle and plenty of things aren’t flagposted well. We’re in two-column layout, which works just fine, but the information design is just not very strong in Swyvers at all. Things are just in whatever order they were written, it appears, rather than by type (to my eye) or even alphabetical. To play Swyvers would be to write an extended cheat sheet to summarise the rules, something I haven’t done since I played Pathfinder 2e. The rules and writing deserve better. Even the art m, which feels sparing and striking, is uncharacteristically clean and polished compared to the world it portrays.

    In general, to me Swyvers’ humour is its main strength. By comparison to Duskvol, a city with very similar fantasy Victorian London vibes, it’s more intentionally comedic, it takes its grimness with a shot of humour. A lot of terminology feels co-opted from dictionaries of slang such as this one. If you’re not already a fan of such terminology, expect to do a lot of googling. But, the vibes it brings are funny, evocative and engaging. It’s full of asides: Every piece of equipment gets a comment that’s purely for laughs: Glass Eye 5s Could lob it at someone in a pinch?This is, to me, Luke Gearing’s most engaging writing in some time, after he’s spent a lot of time on more heady ideas.

    But despite its similarities, Swyvers is not Blades in the Dark. It is a dungeon crawler, that wants to lean into the “dungeon as heist” perspective, but without significant support, becomes just another DIY elfgame whose interesting setting is prohibitive of using most of the modules that already exist. If you want to build your own setting, and not use modules, and you’re interested in an off-kilter Victorian crime grot vibe, Swyvers is not just very good, but probably the only thing out there. You could combine this with something like Skerples Magic Industrial Revolution or Into the Cess and Citadel — or to be honest, Doskvol — to fill in the gaps, as generating the Smoke feels incomplete here. You can make this work, if you have the time. It might be with it.

    Swyvers in many ways feels like it encapsulates a number of trends in the DIY elfgame space that I haven’t been vibing lately. An over-reliance on random tables as a substitute for actually building a world, and the perhaps related a reluctance to build a world as a response or reaction to the encyclopaedic lore bibles of yore. The insistence on building a games built on the same core engines without consideration of why those engines thrive, namely in my opinion, the existence of 50 years of modules that facilitate play. I adore the counter examples to these trends: Pariah is one, which Gearing has played! As is Gearing’s own Wolves Upon the Coast! And it’s possible to support a bespoke DIY elfgame with bespoke modules, I’m just not seeing enough of this support to justify making the switch. I wonder how much of this is really a core problem with the commodification of the hobby: People producing high quality, expensive, high art modules aren’t going to produce them for Swyvers or your bespoke samurai or age of sail elfgame. They’ll make it for Old School Essentials, or for something else with a sales ecosystem: Mausritter or Mothership or DCC or the like. Why wouldn’t they? It won’t get seen without the art and expense, and they won’t make their money back without customers. We need a drive for simple, low-production quality modules to support games like Swyvers, or there’s no point in producing them.

    Swyvers is really engaging, but falls short for me despite its flair for the verbose and evocative. I want a more concrete the Smoke to run heists in, and in the absence of that, I need a catalogue of modules. If there’s a follow-up release: An omnibus of Swyvers heists, I’d revisit Swyvers as a really interesting option for regular play. But until there is one, Swyvers is written off for me, as falling solidly in the too hard to prep and run basket.

    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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  • An Overloaded Restocking Procedure

    I like Chris’s procedure for its simplicity. I also like John’s procedure, but it’s too complex. Chris loses something for its lack of complexity — it requires a little too much of my input, and I want to be able to restock on the way home when I have a migraine. John’s is the opposite: I don’t ever want to spend this much time on checking whether the dungeon has changed. Can I smush them together?Addendum: Mid-this post, Prismatic posted this restocking procedure. I also like this. It adds new complexities that I incorporated into the process.

    Firstly, a basic overloading principle. I want the chance of restocking, the new contents (these two being simplified from Chris’ version), and the story of why it’s restocking (John’s theme table), all to be generated in one roll. The most logical and simple solution: Roll 3d6. Dice order, doubles, triples. 5 outcomes, 1 roll, keeping in mind that the roll is weighted — lowest dice will display 6s less, for example.

    For chance of a restock, Chris uses “lower than the dungeon level”. This basically means that on a d10, the chance is 10% per level. On a d6, this maxes out our dungeon at 6 levels. Not many dungeons I run or write have more than 6 levels, but if I had a 9 or 12 level dungeon, I’d just say 150% or double your roll.

    Roll 1d6 for each area. If the result is less than the level of the dungeon, or less than the HD of the monster or challenge that was here originally, restock the area.

    What’s an area here?

    An area for the purposes of restocking is any group of rooms “owned” by one faction or group. Neutral areas may transfer ownership at the world’s discretion. If most of the faction or group remain, consider restocking and have them at war (1-3) or allied (4-6.) with the new inhabitants.

    Next up is story, adapted from John’s themes, but different: I’m looking for reasons the monsters or traps might change due to the power change. We do this next so we know why or who the new contents are there. I’ve arranged them by weirdness.

    Roll 1d6 to determine the story behind the restock: 1. The same monster, reinforced or stronger; 2. The same monster, having discovered a strong bargaining chip; 3. Paranoia: All but one monster are replaced with traps; 4. Neighbouring monsters move in; 5. Mind-control, religion or infection changes the monsters; 6. Refugees from distant lands or other worlds move in.

    For contents, I’ll just use Chris’ version. Theirs is simpler than John’s, and that works I think for me: Because I’ll rely on the theme more than anything else to decide what these are. I don’t need the specific table.

    Roll 1d6 to determine what moves into the room: 1-2. Monster; 3.Monster & Treasure; 4-5. Trap; 6. Treasure (2-in-6 chance it is concealed).

    Now, there are a few obvious instances here where you’d get more utility out of a larger die, such as hidden treasure, and number of dungeon levels and HD. If I had 12 stories, I’d probably just change the die size to that size, and adjust how long between restocks. If you’ve got other ideas, comment below!

    Now for overloading and combining. The obvious additional information is doubles (8% chance) and triples (3%). I’ll modify the previous lists, so that doubles indicates a major change in faction. What’s a more major change in a dungeon? Layout, I think. John has this as standard, but I think it should be rarer.

    Roll 3d6 for each area in the dungeon that has been cleared. An area for the purposes of restocking is any group of rooms “owned” by one faction or group. Neutral areas transfer ownership at the world’s discretion.

    If the highest die is less than the level of the dungeon, or less than the HD of the monster or challenge that was here originally, restock the area.

    The lowest die determines the story behind the restock: 1. Reinforced or stronger; 2. With a strong bargaining chip (magic item, resource); 3. Few, but paranoid: All but one are replaced with traps; 4. Returned, but undead; 5. Physically changed by infection or mutation; 6. Objectives changed through mind-control or religion

    The final die determines what moves into the room: 1-2. Monster; 3. Monster & Treasure; 4-5. Trap; 6. Treasure (2-in-6 chance it is concealed).

    If you roll doubles, the cleared area were the last of their kind in the area. Replace them with a new faction or group: 1. Neighbouring; 2. Refugees from distant lands; 3. Colonisers from other worlds; 4. Hunters; 5. Merchants and smugglers; 6. A wizard, oracle or sage.

    If you roll triples, the cleared area has changed or is rearranged. Replace the area with a new area of dungeon, or reroll the exits and passages randomly: 1. Unlocked; 2. Locked; 3. Stuck; 4. Collapsed; 5. Pit or ascent to another level; 6. Secret to a distant room.

    That’s my overloaded restocking procedure. I like it. Streamlined unlike John’s, but not quite as minimal as Chris’s. FYI, you can switch highest and lowest die without much impact, if you want a higher likelihood of restock, you just need to reverse the order of the theme/story list. Tweaks or suggestions?

    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: The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The first thing a bunch of people asked me when I put up my review of Secret of the Black Crag was “Have you read Black Wyrm of Brandonsford?” So, I added it to my list, a much less ambitious module and much more a one-man show. It’s a 17 page module with a town, a wilderness and a dungeon, with art, maps and words by Chance Dudinak.

    The vibes here are off the impeccably fairytale variety, a pleasant surprise after the more vanilla fantasy of Black Crag. There are dwarves, curses, witches in cottages. It reminds me a lot of the same vibes Curse of the Ganshoggr evokes, but in a traditional faux-British folktale way. The opening poem (it’s on the cover!) sets a great scene for this vibe, but I can see fans of the horror in modern elfgames bouncing off the lighthearted tone.

    The town of Brandonsford is nine characters and two secrets, and damned if it isn’t ten times more compelling than the pirate city in Black Crag. What‘a perfection here is the density of connections, which both give you hooks within and outside the town, but also provide the illusion of a lot more depth than is actually there. The characters are written like the locations: 3 bullets or bust, terse as a cowboy with no tongue. The secrets are the same. This town is fire, y’all. While it doesn’t have the real depth of something complex like my own Hiss, could be that the implied depth here is as good or better when the trade-offs in page count and utility are taken into account.

    When we get to the woods, it stays strong, with a random encounter table where almost every entry either bullies vibes or tires into a major thread. The wolves, stirges and dryad are the exceptions: The network density is so great at this point it’s a hollow criticism, but I’d have preferred they be tied to something. And the wolves still are; rolling this encounter is a reward, if you bought a certain product from a certain townsperson. The locations here are straight out of fairy tales: A mild-mannered witch, a giant, a fairy bargain, a dragon’s lair and the home of seven dwarves. They’re all worth the time you spend there, giving either a tool to achieve your goal or information to guide you.

    There’s a misstep here, though, which is the scale and encounter rate. It’s a small map, only between 4 and 6 miles across (hard to be specific as I don’t have a print copy, and it uses an inches to miles scale), so crossing the map will result in a probable 1 encounter, at 2-in-6 every 2 miles. You won’t see many of these juicy encounters because of this choice, and they bring a lot of personality. I like the density of the wood, but I think an increased encounter rate would behoove the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford.

    Honestly the weakest aspect are the two dungeons. The first because I doubt the Goblin Castle required a map in the first place, nor deserved the key (there’s one encounter of note in it, one that leads back to the dragon). The second is an unrelated ancient tomb, which is full of undead celtic warriors in an aesthetic whiplash. The dungeon itself is a half-decent dungeon, full of classic challenges and underground creatures, with no one to talk to and plenty of treasure, and some neat loops to reward exploration. It feels an addition made as a concession to classic play, it’s so jarring and has so little connection with the rest of the module. I say little connection, because there is a single clue pointing to the sword in the final room of the Barrow Mound.

    Layout is solid, elegant two column layout, easy to read and to wayfind in. For most of the length of the module, the bullet point choices work, largely because the complexity looks intentionally capped at 3 points of interest per key, but it falls apart terribly in the dragon’s lair and in some rooms in the barrow mound that are by necessity more complex. The art is minimal but well chosen, and the maps are both charming and useful.

    Overall, the Black Wyrm of Brandonsford is an excellent module, oozing folksy charm. There’s one misstep in tone, which at the same time is something good enough I would include as a diversion anyway, I’d just like an opportunity for a conversation there. I can see how Chance was given the chance for a more ambitious project after this, but this more constrained project really brings out the strengths in his writing and design, and is well worth bringing to the 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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  • Spacegod Pirates

    A few months ago, I started writing about Rogue Trader, then didn’t finish the project. So I decided to just post my unfinished thoughts and writing, because I’ve moved onto other things. Consider this a design exorcism.

    Part 1

    A few years ago, I decided to work on Advanced Fantasy Dungeons live here on Playful Void, developing a paraclone of the monstrosity of a game that is AD&D 2e. That went well.

    Yesterday, I read Rogue Trader. Just like AD&D 2e, I find Rogue Trader both deeply compelling and not very good. So here I go with Spacegod Pirates, my Rogue Trader paraclone.

    This will be very different though: Rogue Trader is a profoundly simpler game. It has less moving parts. So, if I want to play the theoretical game I see there, I’ll have to do more of my own work: More design work, more world building, and maybe even some tactical combat (gasp!).

    Of the top of my head, it will need to support interstellar and planetary exploration, sci-fi dungeons, faction play, and some kind of trade-driven gameplay. And a way to expand all of those galactic factions to facilitate interaction as well as combat.

    But, I want to stick with the spirit of the game as best I can, and I’ll hold to the principles I used to develop Advanced Fantasy Dungeons:

    • Be intentional with what dice to roll
    • Draw systems to their logical conclusions
    • Simplify system overload
    • Remain in the intent and spirit of the original
    • Use historical context to help to understand what that intention was
    • Excise discrimination
    • Consider the role of the expanded product line in the identity of the original

    And from experience, there will be a lot of repetition and revision in the series. I’m also open to using parallel designs around contemporary contexts: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was contemporary, as was Megatraveller, and of course AD&D 2e. Dipping into these will probably be necessary, but I’ll take modern solutions to unsolved problems over contemporary ones. A quick wikipedia search shows that rules problems were fixed with the Battle and Vehicle Manuals, so I’ll avoid those (I’m not searching for the true wargame here), but the Realms of Chaos, Orks, and White Dwarf Compendiums are all on my radar as bases to touch.

    Part 2

    As a combat-forward game, Rogue Trader cares deeply about terrain, or as it calls it, scenery. Basically, we have a few specific types of basic terrain effects:

    • Hard cover, which provides physical protection (walls, boulders)
    • Soft cover, which provides visual obscurity (hedges, holograms)
    • Obstacles, which uses half your movement (walls, ditches, doors)
    • Difficult ground, which halves movement through it (woods, slopes, streams, stairs)
    • Very difficult ground, which quarters movement (bogs, wreckage)
    • Impassable ground, which you can’t move through

    The referee should transparently adjudicate this.

    There are also weirder terrains in the Advanced section

    • Deadly ground (save or die each turn you’re in it)
    • Boggy ground (vehicles become trapped)
    • Slippery (units save or fall prone)
    • Teleportation tubes (set foot at A, end up at B)

    There are other weirder ones, too. The primacy of terrain in the game makes me really want to have tactical combat in this game, because obviously using those chunky minis is part of the appeal. But I’m not interested in a big table, this is going to be a roleplaying game, right?

    When I think a tactical, terrain based game that complements role playing but still remains somewhat prepared, my thought is we make the arenas chessboard sized, and we place destructible terrain on the board to serve as cover and ground. Vehicles in this size board would be centrepieces: Taking up 2 or 4 squares and being really key to that area.

    The nice thing about chessboard sized arenas, is that you could included a set of basically labelled arenas, and then vary them by biome in interesting ways.

    I also think that making the code arena 8 x8 makes it easier to constrain combat to what I want it to be (not more than 50% of the gameplay, it’s an RPG after all), but also it makes other parts of the combat we’ll encounter later (like cover destruction and being pushed back) more meaningful in a smaller space. I strongly suspect we’d see examples of linked arenas (two stories of a building for example) or consecutive arenas (for a moving train raid or something) occur as core to gameplay, even with this restriction.

    Part 3

    rofiles are what Rogue Trader calls all the numbers that define your character. Really, it’s just these numbers and your equipment, making this a truly classic style role playing game. The characteristics are:

    • Movement, how many inches you move
    • Close combat, your to hit in close combat (so also for, say, pistols)
    • Ballistic (your to hit for any other combat)
    • Toughness (your defence)
    • Wounds (how many times you can be hit)
    • These are all for hand to hand combat:
      • Strength, punch strength (if your weapon doesn’t have its own)
      • Initiative, who punches first
      • Attacks, number of punches
    • Leadership, which is really ability to follow orders
    • Intelligence, which is really tech competency
    • Cool, which is really morale
    • Willpower, which is psionic toughness

    I’d put it out there that there’s an encumbrance as well, and a base size stat in Rogue Trader. All of these feel like a bit of a repetitive mess that could be pared down.

    The obvious ones: Initiative and the H2H state don’t need to be here. This is folded into weapons, special abilities, or feats or whatever ends up being attached to characters, and into side-per-side initiative. Leadership and Intelligence can be folded together, as can Cool and Will. That leaves me with these (renamed):

    • Move for movement
    • Smash for melee
    • Shoot for guns
    • Grit for defence
    • Harm for number of hits
    • Sharp for tech
    • Cool for morale
    • Will for psy defence

    Nice, punchy names. But, if it’s an RPG, I kind of want these to double as like character descriptors.

    • Quick for movement
    • Brutal for melee
    • Trigger for ranged
    • Tough for defence
    • Heart for wounds
    • Tech for cleverness
    • Cool for morale
    • Spine for psionic defence

    I dunno if these are right, but they sure do double duty.

    Now, these are all determined by species in Rogue Trader, which I don’t hate to be honest. Your average human would be 4,3,3,3,1,7,7,7. The weird thing about these numbers is that they’re not on the same scale as each other. That’s a problem — it’s why for to-hit, you have to use a table to translate your Trigger to a to hit score. I’d rather they be the same. Movement and Wounds are on their own scales. It’s less of a mess than it seems, but it seems very messy.

    My gut is that the base human move of 4 should be speed 2, but the rest we’ll have leave until a part 2, after we’ve figure out how Shoot, Weapon Strength, Toughness and Heart interact.

    Well look at the attack process, and then come back.

    Part 4

    I’ll summarise the messy procedure:

    • Weapons have a range. They have a bonus to hit in the bottom half, and a penalty in the top half.
    • The attacker rolls 1d6. They have a Gunner-in-6 chance to succeed.
    • The roll is modified by 1 for small advantages or disadvantages (soft cover, particularly small or large targets, you’re wounded, the weapon is improvised), or by 2 for large ones (hard cover)
    • If 7 or more is required to hit (I can’t see how this would happen, as it looks like a roll that’s unmodified and bottoms out at 1-in-6 chance, which is 6+), your dice explodes on a 6, allowing this.
    • Your damage is then applied if the roll is also above the number on the toughness – weapon strength matrix. Basically this works as, you have to roll over 4 to hit something whose toughness is equal to your strength, ±1 for something 2-3 bigger or smaller, ±2 for something 4-5 bigger or smaller, and otherwise you can’t harm them.
    • The target, if damaged, makes a saving throw equal or higher than their armour to see if they take the damage. They still count as hit for anything other than damage.

    Alright. I love this, but there’s too much going on. I want to preserve the density while simplifying the procedure.

    • Check that the target is within max range.
    • Calculate advantages or disadvantages. Add +1 for each advantage (such as being up to half range, high ground, the target is large) and –1 for each disadvantage (such as being over half range, soft cover, the target is small). Hard cover gives –2.
    • Attacker roll their attack die. If the result is over your gunner score but under your targets toughness, it hits.
    • Simultaneously the target rolls their armour die. If the attack roll is also over this number, the hit does not cause damage, but still counts as a hit for other purposes.

    I’m going to stop this blackjack approach. The are too many variables I want to include, and it’s resulting in too many small modifications, and bonuses aren’t always bonuses in blackjack.

    What I’m trying to preserve here, is the idea that some enemies will just be too tough for some weapons, and some weapons strong enough to hit anyone. Then the added wrinkle that armour can just negate damage altogether. How do I represent this in a more compelling way?

    What if this is a dice-matching game? The attacker rolls a pool of their to hit, and then the defender rolls their toughness. Match successes. Where the defender rolls higher, that’s a hit. Ok, that’s more elegant. Advantages here simply add or subtract attack dice.

    How does the armour happen, then? Armour here negates all damage on a success, normally. I’m trying to differentiate armour from toughness, here, so I can preserve the hit/damaged differentiation. What about this: Tier 1 armour, means that if you roll a 6 on your toughness, you take no damage. Tier 4 armour means you have to roll 4 sixes to take no damage.

    I like this, because tougher enemies are more likely to benefit from armour even if it’s bad armour, so it replicates the big, naked tank trope.

    But, like, it’s complicated. I don’t want that. I really really like that in Rogue Trader you just roll 1 die. Ok, so how to I overload the attack die here?

    • Roll 2d6. If you’re in the top half of your range, take the lowest. a if you’re in the bottom half of your range, take the highest. If it’s higher than your To Hit, look at the lowest.
    • If the lowest die is higher than the target’s Toughness, you hit. If it equals the target’s Toughness, cause half damage, round up.
    • The target makes an armour save. In a success, the hit causes no damage, but other effects are caused. Armour is annotated with a + or a – (i.e. 6+). You must roll over 6 with 2d6 take the highest on an armour 6+; over 3 with 2d6 take the lowest in an armour 3–.

    Ok, this hits the sweet spot for me. In my head, though, I’m starting to quaver on the 8 x 8 grid for combat, though. I want it constrained, but I’m not sure if it’s too constraining. 64 squares feels like enough movement though, for an arena. I wonder if just increasing the arena to 12 x 12, which doubles the arena size, but still keeps it small, might be the best middle ground here.

    Part 5

    So, Melee is a bit of a confusing mess in Rogue Trader, but there are a few interesting things about it that need to be maintained:

    • Your weapon skill is an additional level of defence.
    • You can’t fire into or out of melee, so by engaging in melee you’re giving yourself protection from most attacks.
    • You can push your foes back, so it gives you a small amount positioning control.
    • Initiative is more dynamic, meaning you can respond to attacks.
    • You can attack multiple times
    • You can follow up attacks if they’re pushed back
    • Disengaging risks rout

    Otherwise, I want to hit those points while maintaining parallels to the shooting procedure.

    The tricky part is maintaining the weapon skill aspect.

    • To open melee, you must charge your opponent. Your opponent has the opportunity to stand and fire (take a free shot) or run away (move their speed away from the attacker).
    • Roll 2d6, take the highest. If it’s higher than your To Hit, check the lower die. If you have multiple attacks, roll an additional die for each additional attack, and check all but the lowest against your To Hit
    • If the lowest die higher than the target’s toughness, full damage. If it’s equal, half damage. If the target has greater melee skill than the attacker, they may reroll this die, but must take the final result.
    • The target makes an armour save. In a success, the hit causes no damage, but other effects are caused.
    • If the target takes a hit, they are pushed back a distance equal to the their base size. The attacker can choose to occupy this space.
    • If the target does not take a hit, they can make a melee attack back at the target in addition to any other attacks they take.
    • Any fire into melee has a 50% chance of hitting an ally instead of your target. You cannot fire out of melee.
    • To break off from melee, you must make a morale check or rout.

    Ok, I think that covers everything I need it to cover to keep melee compelling and interesting.

    The only thing to add is that there are two universal rules:

    • You can only attack (melee or shoot) at an opponent you are facing, unless you have a special attack.
    • Advantages (like attacking a big foe, or high ground) grant +1 to To Hit. Disadvantages (like attacking a small foe or soft cover) grant –1 to hit. Hard cover grants –2 to hit vs shooting.

    Part 6

    Ok, where we left off.

    • Roll 2d6. If you’re in the top half of your range, take the lowest. a if you’re in the bottom half of your range, take the highest. If it’s higher than your To Hit, look at the lowest.
    • If the lowest die is higher than the target’s Toughness, you hit. If it equals the target’s Toughness, cause half damage, round up.
    • The target makes an armour save. In a success, the hit causes no damage, but other effects are caused. Armour is annotated with a + or a – (i.e. 6+). You must roll over 6 with 2d6 take the highest on an armour 6+; over 3 with 2d6 take the lowest in an armour 3–.

    What cool things can you also do, shooting?

    • Aim an area of effect (ie. grenade at a position) or scatter fire
    • Areas of effect and scatter fire can miss and hit the wrong target
    • Slow weapons cannot fire and move on the same turn
    • Following fire weapons allow another attack if the previous hits, indefinitely (regardless of whether damage is caused)

    Conclusions

    Obviously, seriously incomplete. I really lost steam at the end, and moved onto other things. But it really felt like I was heading for an interesting mini wargame with trade elements, which I’d love to see someone else approach to be honest. Anyway, interesting potential that’s still really there.

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  • Bathtub Review: Stirring the Hornet’s Nest at Het Thamsya

    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.

    Stirring the Hornet’s Nest at Het Thamsya is a 26 page module for Cairn, written, laid out and illustrated by Munkao. It concerns a temple full of robots that is suffering a wasp infestation. It’s a module with a bit of pressure behind it: To my knowledge it’s the first thing published by Centaur Games since Zedeck Siew and Munkao parted ways, and the first module entirely produced by Munkao.

    We’ll start with art and layout: We know Munkao is one of the best artists in the business, and his art here is no different. However, in a surprise twist, his art seems an afterthought in this, largely because of the more traditional 2-column layout. This layout feels pretty inconsistent, though: Switching to different column widths and to full page width without warning or apparent reason. This both impacts the reception of the excellent art and makes the module difficult to follow. Typography is simple, but leading and paragraph spacing are tight to the point of being challenging to read. I don’t understand the design intent in the layout, really: If it had given itself more space, it would have been more legible, better looking and easier to absorb. As a black and white zine, the difference between 28 and 36 pages would have been negligible, but there’s no sign of a print run on the itch page, so I’m not sure why keeping the page count to a minimum was a design goal. However, on further examination, it’s not black and white: There is a little colour, again with no real thought as to the placement. It could’ve been used for highlighting, sidebars, but instead is used so intermittently where colour does appear it looks like a mistake (and isn’t colourblind friendly). The layout doesn’t complement either the text or the art, and comes across as quite amateurish in a way that nothing else by Centaur Games has. It goes a long way, I think, to show that layout decisions truly impact the reception of the rest of the text.

    What we have here is a 24 room dungeon, with very little else. A true drop-in dungeon. I like that simplicity, and I love a dungeon that I can just drop into an ongoing campaign. I’ve got to be frank, though, the 4 introductory pages read like someone vomited them onto the page, with no clear rhyme or reason, the automatons are named such that they feel like something my daughter pits me against when she runs Mausritter (“it’s a roomba automaton…a Rhoomton!”). There are neat ideas such as how to subvert robot orders here, but are presented in a way that’s hard to grasp. I think that, if I spent some time eking out these robot rules, they’d be an excellent tool for solving challenges in the hands of the right party. But as is, this feels like “cool idea, maybe I’ll adapt it and use it later”, rather than “cool! I wanna run this!”.

    The map is both simple and the design choices make it hard to grasp. These dotted line labels — honestly confusing to me, and it feels like simple map notation could have sufficed. The dungeon itself is written with no apparent thought given to information order — in one room, the exits are last, in another, no exits at all are given. Some have treasure last, some, the treasure is first. The writing itself is mainly workmanlike, presenting a traditional, actuarial perspective on dungeon design that’s perfectly serviceable, with occasional notable flourishes that make me grin: The random encounter featuring a swallow, the dagger made from ever-molten rocks, “honeycomb cleopatra couch”. But more come across as uninspired: The imprisoned robot with accompanying documentation explaining that it is broken, that says “No pillton, killton!” for example. There are plenty of characters, and two factions of wasps (plus some other potential factions), which is nice and primes well for interesting play, but the characters aren’t given a lot of desires to bounce off or to assist you play or politic with, sadly. I’d need to put in some work. My overwhelming impression of this module, is that it’s full of exactly what I’d envision if asked to write a module about “a robot monastery infested by wasps”, and little else. It’s a first draft. Then you need to go back, review it, and lean into what makes it exciting, strong and unique.

    And that’s the sin of Stirring the Hornet’s Nest at Het Thamsya — it lacks punch. It lacks imagination. Imagination, truly, is why I’m running modules and not making them up myself. If a module doesn’t provide me with sufficient conceptual density, with plenty of ideas that I wouldn’t have managed to come up with myself, why am I reading it, let alone running it? There’s just not much here, when push comes to shove, to draw from.

    In terms of a module I would bring to the table? There’s not much to offer in Stirring the Hornet’s Nest at Het Thamsya I wouldn’t look for elsewhere. The key thing that this module has that I’m not aware of an equivalent elsewhere, is the automatons. They’re pretty cool. If that’s something you’re looking for, and you’re not concerned about putting in some work, this module is for you. It’s cheap for the amount of art in it. You could easily throw this into your campaign if you were looking for things to complement it. But for me: This isn’t going to hit my table any time soon,

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

  • Bathtub Review: Curse of the Ganshoggr

    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.

    Curse of the Ganshoggr is a 14 page module for Errant written and illustrated by Gus L. In those 14 pages it covers the overland Claymarshes and the dungeon itself and lair of the Ganshoggr, King’s Howe. This is Gus L’s classical style of play as exemplified in his introductory module Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, in concentrated form. In a viking-esque hall, a cursed king will reward the anointed champion who slays the monstrous goose with gold and land. This is the second module I’ve reviewed where a common bird substitutes the dragon in a story, and it’s a off kilter trend, to be honest. Hit me up with diversified dragon-replacements in the comments

    The world itself is a romantic fantasy, of cursed champions, troll bridges and honourable battles. It feels an homage to the era of King Arthur, with allusions to the romantic fantasy of him that came after. It’s a pleasant melange, although a little unexpected. I’d enjoy more fairy-tale adventures, I don’t see them often, although it’s got steep competition particularly with a similarly but hugely different in scale Arthurian module Valley of Flowers.

    Unsurprisingly coming from Gus, Kings Howe is an exemplar of how an interesting spatial layout improves a dungeon. I have fresh in my mind the Cleaning of Prison Station Echo, where the dungeon was really a long crawl in which you experienced different scenes. Kings Howe is branching, looping and non-linear despite being only a few rooms, with multiple and secret routes to the final battle with the Ganshoggr. It also is an excellent example of using layered history in a dungeon: The Ganshoggr has claimed this place, but the smaller rooms it cannot fit in predate it and contain more ancient evils. It even squeezes in a neat puzzle challenge in an optional room, that I suspect witty adventurers could use to weigh the odds in their favour in their battle with the Ganshoggr.

    Layout is less excellent than Gus L’s usual fare, probably because this is a shorter, free-release module. That’s not to say it isn’t good: A consistent iconic colour palette and solid high headings make for a higher level easy read, but a lack of differentiation at the paragraph level (for example, monster names and locations are highlighted in the same way), make it a little less legible then I’d like. The art is striking, bizarre and creepy, in a way that I like, but clashes with the humour and quaintness of the piece.

    Overall, this is a neat little dungeon, and one that I’d recommend to drop into your campaign if it weren’t so strangely setting-specific. You could just ignore the set up, though, and have the Ganshoggr inhabiting a region in your sandbox. It definitely serves its apparent purpose of a brief introduction to Errant for those curious to try it out; although if you’re sold on the system, or uninterested in it at all, Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier is a heftier dungeon crawl. Sanctimonious Slimes is an upcoming tense for errant as well, if the fairy tale goose-kingdom vibes aren’t for you. Irregardless, about as good as a short classic style dungeon gets.

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  • Thoughts on module writing

    I reread Curse of Mizzling Grove today (available digitally, and in print soon), and I was surprised by how good it was. I don’t know about you, but often forget how to repeat my successes, so I thought I might make some notes of my learnings from the project.

    Big picture: I realised reading through this, given I was also writing something else, that a lot of the principles written for modules are written for large scale — dungeons with 60+ rooms or megadungeons. And for a compact, succinct short module, that advice doesn’t necessarily apply. Small spaces are not about manipulating groups, but interacting with people, and hence, the details about those people matter. And in terms of my capacity to manage complexity right now, while I have a few larger projects in the pipeline, I am in a time in my life where more succinct projects are better.

    I am proud of Curse of Mizzling Grove as a succinct project, and I’d like to keep making these small, amateur but high quality, low production cost zines regularly. Most of the production cost was art for Curse of Mizzling Grove, pending printing and postage, and I think that particularly once I have the fulfilment sorted and costed out in retrospect, it’ll be a really good model to keep me creating through the hard times that approach me.

    Anyway, my notes on how to reproduce what I think was a success:

    • Focus on a single location with a single theme. In this case, Renwall Tower.
    • Use the surrounding areas to expand on that theme, rather than make them independently meaningful, In this case, Mizzling Grove itself wasn’t the town, I only implied the town.
    • Lots of specific, weird details. This did the heavy lifting for the surrounding area and world, as well as made many of the small features compelling. It also helped speak to what the people in the space considered important.
    • Instead of thinking in factions, think in characters. Everyone in Mizzling Grove really belong to two factions — highwaymen and trapped souls. But actually it’s the NPCs goals that make it compelling, rather than the factions.
    • Simple structure. Simple layout. I’ve since written in other structures and layouts, but I don’t think I will again. The single column plus sidebar structure, combined with no frills informational design and clear referencing works very well, in combination with the Hidden/Secret/Treasure keying.
    • Keep the dungeon concise. The conciseness of Mizzling Grove is an asset. I’ve been sitting on a finished module for a few months, and couldn’t figure out why I didn’t care enough to start revising and finishing it. It was because the dungeon was too big; that meant there’s boring rooms in there.
    • There are empty rooms, but not boring rooms. Reduce dead weight. Every room here is edited into significance. It’s obvious part of the process was, is this room interesting? Or, Where does it make sense to hide this?
    • Just one, short random encounter table. This is another iteration of keep it simple. It means you’re communicating mood and theme strongly, at the cost of the perception of an ecosystem.
    • Use sensory details to teach about the environment and allow predictions. Particular smells are associated with Cacus for example, and reveal his presence. Also exits: I like including exits (so know some grogs hate them because it’s repeating map information) mainly because I use them for sensory clues into what rooms PCs might go into next. However, in complex rooms here, they got a bit much. Perhaps simplify or bullet exits in future.
    • Tragic or complex characters. There’s not a character in there that someone couldn’t relate to, even if they were making obviously evil choices.
    • Random things in a dungeon are cool. Not everything needs to be a part of a faction. they can just be there, and cool.
    • Hooks are a mix of direct quests and more interesting, quirky tidbits. They serve to create mood as much as practical hooking. Have things serve double duty.
    • Subtle conclusions, like the implication the turtle sages are an escaped experiment, are awesome. Don’t explain everything.
    • When laying out, it’s hard for artists to draw to weird sizes. Try to layout to portrait or landscape sizes. This might mean compromising your neat, room to a page preferences.
    • It’s written in the second person, for the most part. I really like that. Keep doing this.

    I’m going to try to implement these principles into my next tiny module, currently tentatively titled Sharky.

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  • Bathtub Review: Desert Moon of Karth

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique 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.

    Desert Moon of Karth is a 52 page module for Mothership by Joel Hines. It’s fully illustrated by Logan Stahl, Francesco Zanieri, Glynn Seal, and Ben Smith. It’s a mini-setting in an unusual vein for Mothership, more inspired by Cowboy Bebop and Dune than by the working class horror in most other modules for the system.

    The layout and art direction is beautiful in monochrome and clear to read as a cover to cover, with art reminiscent of Moebius that is gorgeous, sparse and characterful. I say clear cover to cover, as the inconsistent approaches to layout throughout the module, while striking, make it a little more challenging to find things when flicking through the book, although the vertical titling that always lies on the far left margin helps to locate sections well enough. It’s dense, interconnected and dense enough I think it’d benefit from an index or cross-referencing (like in Reach of the Roach God) to be easier to run, especially as you hear a lot about certain factions and characters well before they’re described.

    Joel’s writing isn’t beautiful, but it’s serviceable in a way that feels workmanlike and elegant in a way that suits the setting. Regardless of whether or not it’s intentional, it works well: “bronze statue of a mutton chopped man with a cane and a beatific expression, left boot tip rubbed to a shine by hands seeking good luck.” In places, it’s too long winded for my tastes, but this largely occurs in places where the mechanics and traditions of the world are being described, where it’s a little more forgivable, rather than in location or character descriptions. Not precisely what I want, but perfectly usable.

    There’s a lot of small locations in Desert Moon of Karth, rather than a few large ones, and breaking them down individually will be tedious to read, I think. My favourites on vibes: A dungeon inside a fallen statue and one inside a living sandsquid, this settings’ take on the sandworms of dune. The best though are probably the traditional dungeon that is Seahorse Mine or the social challenge that is the Dawnseeker’s Spire.

    The real question is, should I play this? And it’s an interesting question to me, because is Desert Moon of Karth good? Definitely. Does it have traditional Mothership aesthetics or vibes? No, not at all. Would I recommend it anyway? Definitely. Mothership is a very flexible system, it works well enough. You could run an entire campaign based on Desert Moon of Karth, and if space cowboy is your vibe, this is the best package for you, I think — better than, for example, Orbital Blues (or it’s module Trouble on the Rock of Tariq). I’d wouldn’t recommend Desert Moon, though, as a starter module for Mothership, because the vibes aren’t Mothership enough. Perhaps I’ll second guess though, because the first time I ran Mothership — Dead Planet is what I ran — and half the group asked we never play again. Maybe a sandbox with a dash of horror is a better introduction than an entire zine of horrors? Depends on your group.

    While Desert Moon of Karth needs a contents page, or an index, writing could be terser and prettier, the information design requires rereading and it features that most dreadful of creatures, an NPC generator, my main complaint is honestly that it isn’t big enough. I could see myself playing in this sandbox for longer than it could support it, and with little to no preparation either. Thats hardly a strong criticism, though, and if the space cowboy vibes are what you’re after, and you’re not interested in the harder horror of modules like Dead Planet, Another Bug Hunt or In Carmine, this is an excellent way to play Mothershiip.

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  • I Read The Adventures of Gonan

    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’m sitting alone on my lunch break, so instead of socialising with the colleagues I’m reading The Adventures of Gonan: The Season 1 Adventure Game (TAG for short). TAG is a strange and remarkable beast of a game by Ricardo Peraça Cavassane: It takes the conceit of Yazeba’s B&B — you’re playing out the story of an imaginary 80’s cartoon — but applies it to a fantasy child’s series, and does it seemingly without having ever glanced at Yazeba’s at all. It’s 20 pages of two-column layout, with evocative black and white line art that knocks it out of the park by Felipe da Silva Faria. Apparently Ricardo is a prolific creator, but I’d never heard of them until now.

    While tackling the same conceit, this comes at it from a completely different direction: A slim booklet, it’s relying heavily on the collaboration of the three players, who all share different aspects of the referee role, as well as one of the main characters. It’s clearly designed for 3 players, although theoretically adaptable up to 4, and more easily adaptable to 2 I think. The referee roles are Fan, Casual and Newbie, each responsible for the integrity of a different aspect: Continuity, Character and Logic. There are 3 stats with a mixed success model. Episodes have 3 acts, and the bulk of the game is a bunch of episode synopses that set you up for 14 sessions of play.

    And I love these synopses. There’s a summary of the plot, a unique initiative order, a side character and a screenshot to give you one banger moment to build to. They’re brief, but with the weight of previous story and 3 players collaborating on the story, it’s so much to work with and potentially a lot of momentum. My main worry is that we don’t have that momentum for the pilot: I wish we got a little more scaffolding for episode 1, because we don’t know anyone yet, and we don’t have that weight of previous story to help us improvise the gaps. But, I suspect it’s presumed that when you get stuck, you’ll come back to the random tables at the end of the book, of which there are 2 pages, and which covers unique twists for each act, scene features, encounters and dangers. This is definitely enough to get me through a momentary lull, but maybe not enough for episode 1 I suspect.

    Nitpicking: For me, while there are a lot of characters here, they’re defined mainly through their powers rather than anything else. For a kids show I don’t mind this: Often their power reflects their personalities, but I’m not seeing that here. I’d be happy with caricature, but even a one word personality trait or a guiding principle for each character would bring playing them (either collaborative or your personal main character) a whole lot of weight that they don’t have here.

    There’s only 20 pages, so there’s not a whole lot else to talk about here, except: I love this, love this, love this. The Adventures of Gonan: The Season 1 Adventure Game is not a perfect game, but this structure is *chef’s kiss* and I want to see a proliferation of TAG clones that iterate and leverage this remarkable tech to more powerful and interesting ends. I haven’t been this excited for a basic game structure before, since No Dice No Masters, and it combines it with the best elements of the OSR in a way I adore. It’s PWYW with a recommended price of $3. At that price it’s a no brainer, and this is something you can play with adults or kids, and is fruitful space for design if that’s your angle. And if this does nothing but put Ricardo Peraça Cavassane on your radar, it’s worth it.

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  • Bathtub Review: Resonant

    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.

    Resonant is a 46 page module for Mothership from Amanda P of Tannic fame with art by Tony Tran. I’m going to add a credit there for Dai Shugars, because the layout on this is absolute fire, and while I’m not always on board with Dai’s choices, here they’re at the absolute top of their game and they contribute a LOT. In it, the party are hired to assist with dam repairs and investigate the dam’s collapse on a far-off planet, and face an alien presence and the poorly advised science of a private military force. This is an unabashed horror scenario, but if you’re looking at Mothership modules, I reckon you’re anticipating that. Cards on the table, Amanda P’s a friend of mine, and we share some preferences, so I went into this anticipating Resonant would be good.

    I’m going to start with layout and art else I’ll keep coming back to it: Shugar’s layout and Tran’s art perfectly complement each other and the writing. They’re grimy, messy without being illegible or unintelligible, portray the disguised corporate horrors with a cheerful guise and perfectly embody the working class science fiction horror typical of Mothership. I say without being illegible — the texture on the pages occasionally obscures text, but not often; it could’ve used a closer eye for this. Shugar’s maps are clear and iconic, and work really well for Mothership-style crawling, and are each rendered uniquely which helps with navigation. I’d like to call out the very cool in-world advertisements as something that could’ve come across as weak, but instead the writing and layout rendered them excellent. Headings are clear and feel bold and thematically sci-fi corporate, and (hyperlinked in digital!) page references help with movement around the document. This is an easy to read module, and easy to navigate. This is close to the best work on art, layout and information design I’ve seen in a mid-size module, and while its cohesive with the wider Mothership line, it adopts many of the strengths of that approach and few of the weaknesses.

    It opens with a very brief timeline of recent events, which I appreciate a lot, having both written and read a lot of very comprehensive complex timelines that are sometimes challenging to internalise, and then a the mission description with the very elegant twist of having 5 secret side-missions you’re concealing from your bosses. Some of these secret objectives are spicier than others, and I’d choose one according to the preferences of my table instead of randomly choosing them as suggested. There are three factions detailed, and again there’s an elegant twist to their descriptions, in addition to the kind of thing you’d usually see in a faction description: A “how the PCs can get involved with them” section. I’m going to add this section to every faction going forward, and y’all should too, even if it’s pencilled into the margins.

    Amanda P’s writing here is a little jarring, because they alternate between poetic and terse (“A home for some, a goldmine for others. A waking dread.” is so far up my alley as a description that you couldn’t have written it better if you had me in mind) and more traditional expositional prose (the description of how the Resonance works, which is on the same page as the previous quote). This makes for a very clear adventure at the expense of the poetry they’re capable of writing, and to some degree I think this is a sacrifice to the gods of science-fiction: Unlike in their module Tannic, this exposition feels more necessary because what’s going on in Tannic is magic. The trade off between science fiction clarity and pretty, terse, punchy writing is one where different people will land differently, but I personally don’t need the additional exposition at the expense of a briefer more beautiful word choice. That said, Mothership house style is one of wordfullness and clarity, and a high-white space terse Mothership text would be a little off-brand. For me, at least, while the clarity of the rules text makes the text more gameable, it doesn’t make it more compelling. I just…guess I don’t like rules text. That said, the encounter mechanic here is gorgeous, although I feel with a little finesse it could have been overloaded into fewer rolls. What’s nice is that in addition to the reaction roll being incorporated (not in Mothership core rules), it incorporates encounter positioning as well, which is neat tech that I’m going to have to steal.

    Ok, now we’re into the location text itself, and it is glorious, and takes advantage of the brevity of Amanda P’s writing style. Individual keyed locations are a maximum of a paragraph long (in some cases broken up for clarity), and full of terse and evocative description: “Previously barred from inside, the cracked steel security bar lies in pieces. A yawning hallway extends east into the dark.” Chef’s kiss. There is more description of overarching locations — Forward Base and its Crashed Supply Shuttle are close to a page, which is too much for me to process, and would have benefited from a breakdown in my opinion — but overall this is exactly what I want the bulk of a module to look like. “Looks and smells like he’s been here for weeks.”, “She stands tall but twirls a wrench in her hands nervously. Drive: To live a quiet life, leaving her past behind.” I could just keep listing descriptions I adore in this.

    The humans in Resonant feel real, which is something I crave in modules and rarely get. I wrote Hiss basically as an extreme example of dense, real-feeling relational connection because I value that in modules. The interconnection here is more subtle, but it’s plainly there, and easy to understand, and compelling in a way that I often term petty, but by petty I mean mundane and relatable. It’s something that really makes the module stand out, because you’re likely to immediately develop care for Gaspar and Lucy, or the aforementioned dam mechanic, or heroic android Ziggy. And this makes the horror ring far truer. My main complaint, to be entirely honest, is that the investigation ends up being quite straightforward, and the villain straightforwardly evil — the only stereotype in the story, in what will most likely be the final scene in the module, leaves me feeling a little hollow.

    When Resonant’s writing is at its best — and that’s more often than most books — it’s succinct, concept-dense, and highly evocative. In rare character, it’s not dense in a high concept, gonzo way, but in a way that conjures character and relationships: The woman I quoted above, for example, in just two sentences, I can picture her and all of her behaviours from that brief glimpse. There are many things that make a good module, many of them purely technical in nature. But truthfully, the particular quality of the writing in Resonant is a perfect example one of the things that I treasure the most in a good module.

    Combine that particular element of writing with the excellently coordinated layout and art, and thoughtful construction and informational design, and Resonant more than overcomes its few flaws. If you’re looking for a great Mothership module, with a straightforward investigatory crawl structure, that’s easy to run, and feels populated with real people, than to be honest this is the only thing out there, so we’re lucky it’s good. It immediately slots up there as one of the best Mothership modules I’ve read, but it does appeal to my specific predilections in a way most do not. It certainly doesn’t replace Gradient Descent or a Pound of Flesh for what they specifically try to be — it’s not a megadungeon or a city module. But of all those more typical, “crew venturing into horrors unknown” stories that typify the Mothership module, I was right to anticipate this release: If I had to choose one dungeon crawl to run for a new Mothership group from hereon in, I’d choose Resonant, not Dead Planet or Another Bug Hunt.

    Idle Cartulary

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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.
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