Appendix Nova is me, reviewing stuff that isn’t games. I just thought it might be fun. But, I as with everything I do, I always use these things to give me game ideas, and so I’ll loop it back around to that eventually.So honestly, this is a little bit just me taking notes, so they’ll be brief.Oh, and there’ll be spoilers. I’ll talk about what I want, but I’ll try to be vague.
The Blacktongue Thief is a fantasy novel by Christopher Buehlman. It’s randomly violent picaresque where a thief with magical gifts of an unknown origin, a witchling, and a knight who can summon massive war birds out of her skin, go on an adventure through a land that feels low fantasy but is indeed not at all.
First up, I listen to audiobooks mainly, and the voices the author puts on here are really impressive and very much drew me into the story. The story, being a tour around the world, benefits from the people in those places having a range of accents was significant and giving the main character a brogue made for a compelling listen, as did his breaking into song every now and then.
The Blacktongue Thief is honestly a masterpiece of interesting and largely exposition free world building. Where there is exposition, it’s usually in the form of a fallible story from an unreliable narrator, and so each time a story is told it’s a Rashomon-esque twist on a story told previously about the world. Mostly, though, you stumble upon things as they are encountered in the world: You don’t realise that there was a plague that killed all the horses until it became relevant, you don’t know that there was a decades long war against goblins until you meet someone who fought in it, you don’t know what a goblin or giant looks like (or whether or not they are as horrible as it is said they are) until you meet one. I absolutely adore this drip feeding of the world through when that history becomes relevant and no sooner — I genuinely don’t think giants are even mentioned until the two thirds point, even though they’re incredibly key to the resolution of the story.
Also of note is how this resolves in ways that could not be figured out at the outset, because of its reliance on the core narrator. That narrator is reliable in the sense that he usually tells you, the reader, the truth (he doesn’t once or twice but with a wink and a nod), but is unreliable in the sense that he’s being lied to by his companions and the world around him, and he only discovers the truth gradually over the course of the story. The core mystery here is unsolvable, because Kinch doesn’t have the necessary information, and hence, neither do you.
Also remarkable here is how it subverts so many Dungeons and Dragons tropes: Ubiquitous magic, beast masters, goblins, giants, thieves guilds, krakens, apocalypses are all subverted in interesting and surprising ways, and this book is surprising enough that I’m reluctant to spoil any further.
There are occasionally confounding missteps, however. It seems to me that many of the companions along the way simply exist to prove the danger of the journey, and I never feel as connected to them as I do the core three characters. The Kugel-inspired picaresque structure occasionally feels like the scene or location was imagined, but its bearing on the plot has not been adequately thought through. In this way it surely feels like a D&D campaign, to be honest.
Overall though, it inspires me to stop explaining everything. There are joy here, in discovering things as you go. And while I appreciate the desire to understand what you’re running, I feel like the urge for explanation can run counter to bringing that joy: The referee can have that joy, too. There is a lot of lore finding its way into my current project, and reading this feels salient, because I don’t want to read as much lore as I’ve written, but I think it’d be better drip fed and hidden throughout the module, like I did in Bridewell: I know the economy of the valley, but I never describe it anywhere.
Anyway, the Blacktongue Thief: Strong recommendation, for a precisely R-rated picaresque with a compellingly flawed and spiky protagonist.
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.
Largshire is a 30-odd page system agnostic module for any fantasy roleplaying game, by Stuart Watkinson. It details a town intended to serve as a base of operations for a campaign. It is a peaceful seaside town with a dark underbelly.
Largshire heavily illustrated by Sam Wannan, and the consistent, sketchy art style feels like something drawn by the beach. The map is a frankly beautiful sketch, but the key is difficult to spot and needed bolder choices to be called usable. Layout is difficult to follow, and would benefit from more generous spacing, bolder headings, or other approaches (it doesn’t have page numbers!) to making the text easier to navigate.
The biggest strength of the layout is breaking locations down structurally into what in perceived the referee needs most: hooks, rumours and NPCs. This is consistent, with every location in every district — that’s 17 locations across 4 districts — featuring these subheadings. In addition, 3 major town-wide events are taking place and are alluded to throughout the module. Most locations take about half a page with all said and done, although some are longer; I’ve got to say that for those that outstay their welcome they don’t offer a lot in compensation, and probably needed a bit of an edit. These longer locations — the Pier Inn and Wellington’s Shop — feel like they are from an earlier version of this town far was more traditionally designed.
Because what this module doesn’t give you are the adventures. Your players want to fight in the underground pugilist competition? You’d better be confident to improvise it. Are they going to break into Zilindor’s Mansion? You’d better have a mansion map handy and a few hours to key it. This is as intended, and a referee with a good ruleset under their belt and a wealth of experience can make this town sing. But you need to work to make it sing, finding other modules to plug its gaps or designing your own forays between sessions. This is the antithesis of a low-prep module: It’s a module designed to make you do extra prep.
But the personality! Largshire is a lovely place to spend time in! The NPCs are kind and pleasant to get to know, although not as interlinked with each other as I’d prefer. The vibes here are impeccable, and pretty unique. It makes for an interesting, seaside mystery town vibe for your campaign which is quite frankly a pleasure.
I’m torn, to be honest. A lovely town, but high prep by intent. if you’re looking for something to inspire you with a specific vibe, and are happy to do the work — perhaps you’ll seed the town with encounters from other modules you already own, or make your own — you can’t beat it. If you want to have a town with all its interests fleshed out, this is not it. I’d love to have seen this fulfilling the promises it made in its hooks and secrets, because that would have been an exceptionally excellent setting and one to bring to the table immediately. As is, Largshire is a mixed proposition.
A 2d6 table, wordpress just won’t let me start at 2. Best used in a game with a world that acts independently of the players. Omens directly affect the world for 1d6 + 1 days.
Sun stands still at noon. A ruler will fall. Advantage on murdering nobles. The King abdicates his throne temporarily.
Falling star. A devil or angel takes action on the world. The church selects a random person after a long church to be their gods representative in the world.
Rook flying north. If you follow the rook, only positive reactions on random encounters. Merchants will only sell to North-travelling folk.
An uneaten dead hare. Undead will rise again if slain. Churches lock all their graveyards down for the week.
Green clouds at sunset. 1-in-6 chance fresh water is poisoned. The population only drink wine, resulting in increased drunkenness.
Double rainbow. Treasure found is doubled. The king raises taxes and sends out roadside inspectors.
The stars align. Grants a free flashback to when a player character prepared for a planned action. The king makes declares war on a neighbour.
Albatross flies over land. Disadvantage on any random rolls. No guests are accepted through the kingdom.
Blood moon. Any slain in the last day rose again. The King declares himself immortal and this a reflection of his splendour.
The moon is doubled at midnight. Advantage on all saving throws. Feasts are thrown for the doubling moon.
Meteor shower. The gods declare war. All churches become hostile to each other.
The omen applies whether or not you detect it. Any chance who is superstitious will notice it if they are on watch during the time it is visible. “King” here is short hand for whatever nobles are in power and have advise from astrologers.
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
I was going to tidy the garage of the mess that inevitably accumulates, but I walked in and was overwhelmed, and instead I read Armour Astir: Advent. A lot of the games I’ve reviewed have been funded through Kickstarter and are showing signs of similar problems that could be attributable to the funding method. After my thoughts in my review of Mountain Home on slowfunding, I decided to look at other large-scale projects that slow-funded, and Armour Astir is one of those projects. Armour Astir is a 172 page game by Briar Sovereign about magical people and the mechs they pilot.
I don’t usually start with layout but I really struggle with Armour Astir’s layout, so I’m going to talk about it up front and forget about it. It’s in single column, small point A5, and I genuinely find it difficult to read. This is a game in desperate need of white space, or spot art, to break these walls of text up. I usually read on my phone, but I printed this one because that was actually impossible, and it was marginally better in text. My eyes glaze about a third of the way through every page. Admittedly I am perpetually tired, but the layout choices cause a barrier here that simply doesn’t need to exist. That said, within these challenges, it’s well broken up by headings and easy to navigate; these strengths just get lost in my overall difficulty with the text at large. I shall persist, despite the struggle.
Armour Astir is Powered by the Apocalypse, and in basic terms doesn’t stray from the template set 15 years ago, It does feature some cool innovations (I can’t speak to whether they are new here or not), such as confidence and desperation which are new ways to be at risk or advantage, which are tied to hooks which define your character. The basic rules are explained in a page, but the “main concepts” section is a long list of mechanics that admittedly blur into each other a lot, despite individually being quite neat. There are tokens that are downtime currency, gravity which are clocks that cause relationship conflict, and dangers and burdens which replace harm in sorties and downtime phases respectively. I’m hitting maximum new terminology threshold quickly, and am in danger of overheating.
We move on from the rules summary to Setting Up, which is a collaborative world-building exercise. The collaborative world-building is not a difficult or challenging process in and of itself — it takes two pages — but I happen upon a problem in Armour Astir where it feels like it has some specificities — magic mechs called Astirs, channelers, stuff like that — but then wants us to generate the rest of the world ourselves. For me and my table, I need a little bit more. It would be sufficient to give me an actual foe and organisation, and go from there. Unlike in say, Apocalypse World, where being surprised by the world is part of the appeal, here we’re rebels against some kind of empire, and so it makes sense to just give us that empire to kick start things. If I were to actually do some collaborative world building to lead into Armour Astir, I think I’d need to do something very different — perhaps a set up session of another game like Microscope — because this doesn’t quite get me there.
I’m not going to go through the whole moves listing here, but it’s pretty typical for a Powered by the Apocalypse game — they always feel a bit much to be honest, but a necessity — and these all have accompanying commentary which, again, is a longstanding tradition but one I don’t really love. I feel like your design should speak for itself, and I value brevity, so designer commentary is not something I appreciate. When I think Powered by the Apocalypse moves, I think juicy moments that spur difficult and dramatic decision-making, like the ones in Gran Guignol, Under Hollow Hills, or Pasión de las Pasiones. These are not moves like that: instead they leverage the mechanical set up in the core mechanics section, and do this quite well, in a way that feels reminiscent of Blades in the Dark. Now, this diverges from my expectations, but it’s not a bad thing — it just places this closer to Beam Saber in intent than it does to Firebrands, something I didn’t expect. Another interesting side-effect is that it moves interpersonal relationships squarely into the spaces of gravity clocks, hooks and desperation/confidence, setting up a separate “relationship economy” that operates in tandem with but influenced by the action that occurs, and creates interesting in game prompts. I suspect that in-game, we’d also have opportunities for characters suited up appearing in the middle of the battle because a hook was activated by a desperate move, which is very very gundam. Playbook moves largely follow the same pattern, although there are a few exceptions, like the Firebrand move for the Paradigm, and the Captain’s Force Multiplier, both of which introduce some of the more juicy narrative twists I expect when I hear Powered by the Apocalypse. I get excited about these kind of moves, but they’re largely narrative and dramatic and not relational, maintaining that dichotomy between systems.
An interesting addition that also feels inspired by Blades in the Dark is the Carrier and downtime, which runs on a token economy in which the Director (the GM role) gets their own tokens to interfere and interact during this phase. This makes for a fun, active downtime without need for that ambiguous “free play” blob that confused so many in Blades in the Dark. There is a lot of punch in this very brief list of actions, and I like this system a lot.
I mentioned the playbooks, but one feature of them that I really like is Gravity Triggers, which effectively give each playbook a different reason for conflict in their relationships. This is a neat way to differentiate playbooks based on their personalities, and adds some relational uniqueness and fuel to otherwise fairly mechanically inclined playbooks.
Ok, conflict is a big one, and is pretty complex actually. A combat system, where there are five approaches, and different ranges, which determine who is acting desperately or with confidence against whom. These approaches are assigned by your playbook or astir (your mech). Tier exists here to help differentiate scale — a Unicron-style planet cannot be defeated by a mech, and a mech cannot be defeated by a lone human. This, again, feels inspired by Blades in the Dark, and leans into the mechanical combat in Armour Astir.
We then go onto a long equipment list. Here, again, we have hints of a world in the mind of the creator that we’re not privy to. This is all pretty juicy and more heavily illustrated than anywhere else in the game; this is all very good, and it makes me wonder why it starts with how to make an Astir rather than with the list of Astirs and a “by the way you can make one”. And actually, that’s not accurate: I know why, because a guiding principle here has been make it yourself here, and so of course it holds here too. The high quantity of art here makes me feel like in an earlier draft the lists weren’t there, but were added on request by play testers.
The Conflict Turn is a heavily structured faction turn, and this, I must say, I like a lot. A lot lot. The divisions of the Authority all acting out of concert but against the resistance is stellar, their automatic moves are stellar, it really gives a strong sense that all odds are against the player characters. The Cause works differently, because it’s in isolated cells, and become exhausted with activity limiting when it can provide aid. They both fight over pillars — major places and people — which I suspect will be the driving force for the missions that the player characters go on. In the conflict turn, everyone switches sides and plays out cutscenes of the authority or wider cause’s actions, which is cool and fun.
We next come to GM tips, which are pretty typical to be honest aside from some optional rules and a cool mechanic for rivals. These principles and moves don’t leave me shocked and awed, but they’re functional. More interesting are the mission hooks and factions that follow — there aren’t enough of them, but they’re really, really good. The appendices are also really flavourful and useful.
One of the big impressions I’m left with in Armour Astir is that I’m really intrigued by the world that is implied by everything in this book, but the book doesn’t want to tell me about that world, it wants me and my friends to make up my own. The mechanics imply a lot of interesting things well, as do the naming conventions. It’s pretty rare that I ask for more lore as I am, in general, a lore disliker, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them: I’d like more support to play this game, and it’s not given me here. I’ve been speaking a lot about Heart lately, something I reviewed a long time ago, and I said that it has “impeccable vibes”, by which I meant that the art and non-technical writing was really, really good at communicating a sense of place. Armour Astir gives me hints, but refuses to communicate any sense of place, and for me, that’s what I need. It’s not a mistake, its the author’s intent, but it’s a design direction that just doesn’t work for me. Apocalypse World, for example has a similar amount of guidance, and I don’t bounce, and I have roughly equal familiarity (that’s some, but not a lot) with the genre it approaches. Why? I have a working theory, and that’s that the playbooks and equipment lists don’t communicate as much here about the world itself, because they’re really focused on the more complex systems at play, rather than the narrative. In Apocalypse World, the playbooks are roles in the world, but here they’re roles in the carrier: They don’t teach us about the world outside the carrier. They don’t automatically imply anything, even by their lack of existence. Where in many games, the absence of a Paradigm might been no gods in this world, here divine power is in the approach chart. The psychic maelstrom looms over every playbook in Apocalypse World despite it being vague, but it’s a very specific thing that bring mystery and danger and potential, where the Authority and the Cause are known and necessary causes. The focus here on known and necessary world building instead of world building that activates and implies always of a familiar world, is, I suspect, why I feel left wanting.
I honestly was surprised by what Armour Astir is, which is a mech combat game where that conflict is a means to resolving relationships. Saying that, I’m honestly feeling like I missed the memo: Obviously this is what it should be. That is Gundam. What I expected it to do is take the other angle: Be a drama primarily, that was also about mechs sometimes. This was initially jarring to me, and I’m still not convinced it’s the right choice; it feels like the game I imagined this would be would be a better fit for a Powered by the Apocalypse game, and the game it is would be a more natural fit for a Forged in the Dark game. Potentially the author agrees: Her current project is a Forged in the Dark mech game. But the very heavy modification and broad inspiration taken here makes what it actually is a very interesting beast all of its own, mainly because it feels like an old mech kept running through ingenuity and spare parts, and yet it still fights well. It’s full of small elegant innovations that help achieve its sideloaded goals. A remarkable achievement.
I think the biggest error with the design approach is that because it’s so combat forward (which it is, in my opinion, despite clearly trying not to be), thematically it comes across a little garbled. In many ways, making this about a high school would be clearer than making it about a rebellion, because the impact is that you bring your own theme rather than are supplied one. It’s characterised by what it tries to emulate rather than its own perspective, and while cool, and I suspect it will be very fun, it rings a little hollow as a result. Games are usually at their most interesting when the author has their personal perspective and story rooted clearly in the text, and hence this feels awfully board gamey in its sterility and reluctance to give you a glimpse into the authors psyche. But, board games are still fun.
Does this bear out my theory about slowfunding games? My opinion is a little muddled as I adore this less than Mountain Home, but I think so, yes. We have a similarly unflashy, often workmanlike approach, with a clear understanding of what it is and innovative approaches to doing so, and is a little idiosyncratic in its inspirations and its interpretations of those inspirations. It subverts Apocalypse World in a similar way to how Blades in the Dark does. What it definitely isn’t is bloated or poorly organised, although it’s cleverness in information design pales in comparison to Mountain Home’s. It does show that one disadvantage of the slowfunding approach is the likelihood of bringing those extra team members on board: This could’ve used a layout artist, in my opinion. But it lacks the bloat and aimlessness characteristic of crowdfunded work.
Overall, would I bring this to my table? I think I want a little more than this provides. Is almost there, but not quite. I think the combat would be thrilling, and I can see set up for some really exciting moments and conflicts, and the pieces of this game — the conflict turn, the interactive antagonistic downtime — I will probably hack into other games at some point. But I have to build the world myself, and at that point I’d rather write my own emotion-forward mech game, the inverse of this: Pasión de las Pasiones in high school with mech escalation. But, if the perspective this takes on the genre is one that vibes with your own understanding of it, and you don’t mind the extent of the world-building required, then Armour Astir: Advent just might be right up your alley.
I saw a TikTok (which thereafter disappeared into the algorithm) that talked about problem stacking in story writing and I was like This Needs To Be Said about module writing and home brewing adventure scenarios:
Don’t give the player characters one problem. Give them many possible problems.
We do this in a bunch of ways: Random encounter tables, action schedules, duelling factions, combat encounters, adversaries, hostile environments. In a dungeon or other exploration type scenario, it’s important to drip-feed these problems or we come across the problem of Why Would I Go To There.
So, in the beach module I’m writing, I think about the problems I’m stacking and how they’ll be fed to the player characters:
There’s a missing lighthouse keeper
People are being kidnapped off the beach
The caves beneath the lighthouse are tidal and often underwater
The bag-sistas are facing off against the franken-sharks over the treasure in the sunken pirate ship
The lighthouse-keeper has been possessed by a dark power that escaped the wreck
Plus there’ll be some random encounters, and some location specific problems. The tidal nature will be a surprise, and force retreat until they have a swimming solution. You’ll meet the one faction before the other, foreshadowing the complexity.
Stack up the problems. The player characters can choose to engage with them or not, but the stacking is what gives your module interest.
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.
Beyond Corny Groń is a 339 page (read: absolutely massive) system agnostic setting module by Kuba Skurzyński. It gets its striking names and inspiration from Polish folklore and history. It’s heavily illustrated, with English-language editing and sensitivity from Brian Yaksha, whose writing I’m a big fan of. It’s a sequel, or an expansion, to Corny Groń, a solo mapmaking game.
Because it’s such an intimidating text, I’m start with art and layout: It’s sparse and clear, with clear well-spaced headings and minimal font variation for signaling. The art complements this well, giving the sense of a barren and desolate wilderness filled with desperate and dangerous folk. This is supported by how the topographical mapping maximises white size, as do wide margins and very generously spaced tables. These map-graphics also do double duty as representations of other aspects of gameplay, although less elegantly than Is like. I’d prefer maps that were more immediately useable, though. For me, I’d rather, in this prose-heavy approach to module writing, have more font variation to help me wayfind, but as is the vibes, at least are impeccable, even if the legibility is not.
The scene is set early: This writing is beautiful but challenging: “Now, the nominal ruler of the Karpakian Valley is Her Solar Grace, the Empress of Styria and the Queen of Pannonia, Eleanor Angela I Dunburg, whose domain extends to the far coast of the Scythian Sea, into which streams f low from the southern slopes of Karpaki.” We don’t stray far from this Polish dialect of high Gygaxian, which is both a blessing and a curse: Flavour? Yes! Ease of use and retention? No!
The first section, after this dense and rambling introduction, is a system agnostic character creation procedure which is honestly, so, so charming to me. It brings detail, hooks galore, and a sense of locality (is that a word?) to the PCs. My main problem is actually the intertextuality of it: It would be hard for all players to sit at the table with this and do this together, because of the detail and relations to elsewhere in the book. Would it be worth it though? Undoubtedly, in my opinion. I could see a briefer version of this appearing in more setting books in the future, using elegant dice conceits as a streamline. On the other hand, stumbling upon that “You woke up with a headache” table is comedy gold.
There is a significant section on arms and equipment. There is very little world building in this, unless I squint: Marbles rather than ball-bearings are suggestive of a volcanic north, for example. I don’t think it’s worth the space. A lot of time is spent inconsequentially on black powder and coinage, which leads to naught in my opinion.
Next up comes our map generation processes…ah, this accounts for the minimalist maps. Procedural generation is both jarring (after an extended monologue about how this is thinly veiled Poland) and disappointing (twenty pages of how to generate the wilderness map rather than just providing one). The procedures themselves are pretty good and (again, if streamlined) they’d make for an excellent “travelling in the mountains” supplement to an existing map. But that’s the thing: They’re way I’d use to supplement keyed locations, they don’t replace them. They’re not an adequate replacement for what they’re in the place of, here. But they’re great in their own.
I’m going to pause here and talk for a moment about the actual experience of the sparse and increased whitespaced tables: They’re easy to read, but horrible to use. Instead of these pages after pages of tables to flick through repeatedly, I want some Mothership-assed maximalist design so all of this fits in just one spread. sure, it’s take a genius layout designer to make that mesh with the rest of the design work, but these tables are drag to use — I know, I tried — especially the way the rules are but consistently applied and so you must flick through them chronologically.
What we are getting here, between the mountains and the caves section that follow, are clearly related to the solo mapmaking game that this emerged from. And I’d use these! There effectively hexfill and generation procedures, and good ones. The cavern generators here would make a very cool dungeon if you combined them with, say, a bite-sized dungeon or one of the bigger Yora dungeons. But I want to know about Corny Groń!
We do find out about it, in the form of factions, in the next section. These 9 factions are at once elegant and lacking: their half page of prose rendering their half page of usable information moot. More structure and more (any?) specific characters would render this a stellar basis for faction play; as is, I need to figure these nine factions out, with a highlighter and come up with some members on my own, even when the faction is named for them.
Then we have a metric horse-ton of tables, followed by even more treasure tables. Then we have NPC generators. These are, again, largely good tables, rendered difficult to use largely through visually elegant design. Unlike, for example, the tables in Knave 2e, rate well organized so you could easily refer to them and find what you need. But neither are they entirely worth it: As I discussed back on Lorn Song of the Bachelor, an NPC generator is not my preference at all, let alone when it provides no relationship to the world around them at all.
I’m half way through, and the remainder is all bestiary. This is a good bestiary, reminding me at its best of the Monster Overhaul without the structure, and with more interesting monster inspired by specific folklore instead of simply being twists on existing fantasy fare (although the last section, Monstrosities, is specifically that). These are fire, to be honest. Unbeholden to structure, they range from laden with bespoke tables to customize your unique dragon, to a very specific and concise Skarbek. The extended prose here, while a little too much for me, usually doesn’t detract: I don’t have much of a basis for a lot of the monsters, and it feels good to weigh into it.
This goes for a lot of the examples that pepper the book. I want a book that’s just the examples, because they’re good. The example people, the example caverns, the example mountains. It’s absolute gold. But they total maybe 5 percent of the total page-count of the book. I want the 75 percent example version of Corny Groń. I want that Corny Groń, not the one I got in this book.
The appendixes vex me. The first are rules. To a game! Based on Knave, the game they say it’s best to play it in! Just make it a capsule game, and put this in the front! This is not a book that hurries to get started: There is copious preamble and explanation of intent and process in the introduction. Ten additional pages of rules there, would make a lot of the mechanical choices further in make more sense, and would (and perhaps this is why it’s in the appendix) have required the book to be more rooted in the ruleset, which would, to be honest, have been to its advantage. The second appendix is plants. And this is good stuff! It honestly just belongs in the book. Again, this is not a book that really cares about word length or rambling prose, so working these plants and their folkloric history into the mountain-generation or travel properly would be a right flavourful and interesting, unique thing to do. As it is, it’s just tagged on, ripe to be ignored. It’s always advantageous to lean into the unique aspects of your system. The final appendix is a pronunciation guide. 6 pages of it. And, sure, it’s nice to know how to pronounce, for example, Groń. But I’ve finished the book! Put the pronunciation in the book! Use parentheses!
The core problem, for me, with Corny Groń, then, it is this: In making a setting that is almost all tables, almost all quantum, almost all create-as-you go, you intentionally also remove any chance that you have to build relationships between whatever is created, unless you build your system of generation around relationship-building. There is no relationship-building here. Corny Groń does not have a networking algorithm built into it. The hooks the character find don’t lead anywhere, because nowhere exists until you create it. I can imagine a quantum setting like this one, that, with the right approach and forethought, could anticipate this anti-social side-effect and come up with a system that undermines it and creates a world that feels worth adventuring in, but I certainly don’t want to adventure in a world that feels isolated even from itself. I’m in your world for connection.
I’m going to come around to a counterexample here: I’ve spoken many times before about how Wanderhome is in my opinion inspired by the wilderness travel present in DIY elfgames and similar adventure games. Corny Groń has Wanderhome travel. But Wanderhome is not a game of Knave. Much of the pleasure in Wanderhome is the sense of discovery you get in collaborating with your friends in creating the world you travel through, and then choosing how to respond to it. That is not the pleasure I seek in my adventure games. I’m seeking the pleasure of stumbling upon world that presents at least partially the illusion of being bespoke and detailed, of existing outside of the moment I am imagining it. I want that world to feel real and solid, even though I know in my heart it is all smoke and mirrors. Exploration, for me, is about going somewhere I’ve never been, not creating a place together with my friends. Corny Groń, for me, mistakes these two pleasures for one and the same.
So, then, the recommendation is mixed: Corny Groń is not for me, although I may well dip into its location generation procedures and its bestiary at some point because they’re really interesting pieces of design, for me, as a referee, designing for my table or as a writer looking for inspiration for my next module. But that doesn’t mean Corny Groń isn’t for you: If the idea of playing Wanderhome as a party of faux-Polish adventurers in a Knave-fork in a savage mountain home filled with unusual monsters from northern European folklore appeals to you, then this game is absolutely for you. To be entirely honest, I think there’s a whole group of people for whom Corny Groń could be an interesting way to venture into the realm of lightweight fantasy adventure games for the first time, if their favoured experiences are games like Wanderhome.
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 threw a party for my 4 year old today, and now I can’t feel my feet, so I’m reading Mountain Home instead of doing necessary housework, while my feet soak in peppermint butter. After reviewing DIE:RPG and it being one of a multitude of fairly straightforward games, poorly organised to their detriment, that I had recently reviewed, I thought I’d review a complex game that is well organised, as a counterexample. I didn’t intend for Mountain Home to be that counterexample, but ah! Serendipity she visits us! Mountain Home is a 200 page game by Karl Sheer (duties including game design, writing and layout) about dwarves colonising a mountain. It’s in its final form, after a long development period in slowfunding on itch.io.
For anyone who is familiar with the Forged in the Dark framework, just how Forged in the Dark is Mountain Home? The answer is very, both in terms of sections and overall complexity. It’s been a while since I’ve run Blades in the Dark, but in terms of the core mechanical chassis, from memory this diverges almost not at all except for a few appropriate superficial changes, such as changing the actions to dwarfier versions, renaming vices to obsessions, trauma to weariness and position and effect to risk and reward. Everything you’d expect is there: Devil’s Bargains, Resistance Rolls, the phases diagram, playbooks. This is all covered in the first ten or so pages, although explicated in detail later. Ten pages in, I have an idea of how to play the game, that isn’t predicated on my previous knowledge of the system. It’s all here, softened for the PG-rated new theme, clear for beginners, and familiar to old Forged in the Dark hands.
But immediately it diverges: The playbook requires a little more customisation (less messy on the actual attached sheets than in the core book, sadly). Each of the characters (“founders”) gets a guild as part of their starting resources. A whole organisation! Based on the gang rules (I think that’s what they were called in Blades?) but everyone gets them and they’re a little expanded here. The playbooks themselves are almost all focused on resolving conflict through non-violent means (the Shieldbearer being the exception) and are flavourful as all get out: “A perpetually warm beer that heats your blood and prepares you for battle”, for the Artisan, “Just Like Old Times” for the Elder. They’re simpler than Blades of the Dark playbooks, but later we’ll see that simplicity is a trade-off for complexity elsewhere in the system. These early divergences are interesting, intriguing, and utterly at odds with the violent themes of its antecedents.
So we have the introduction to the rules, then the playbooks — and just the playbooks — and then we have How to Play: the aforementioned explication of the rules. This is both brief and thorough. It spends no time on poetics here: It describes the game clearly and in as few words as possible. And, if you’re familiar with Blades in the Dark or any other Forged in the Dark game, there are no surprises, except for some unique actions. You really can breeze through this chapter of you’ve played a few sessions of almost any derivative. And more concepts that contrast with its antecedents keep cropping up, despite a close mechanical hew: A cycle of phases, for example, usually a few days to a week in Blades in the Dark, are unambiguous years here. A game is expected to last about fifteen cycles for a much more leisurely pace, not indefinitely and ending in destruction.
The next chapter details the Settlement. The Settlement replaces the Crew, and again the pattern holds. It has tiers — the same ones! — and advancements and treasure! But wait, an end condition? Let’s talk about end conditions. These are really interesting, and a divergence from the typical Forged in the Dark pattern in a more contemplative and collaboration-forward direction: These are thematic goals, what answers we want from the story of our dwarven settlers. It feels akin to something we see more often in world-building games or like prompts more commonly seen in Dream Askew / Dream Apart and its descendants. This is a neat little addition, and again, moves gameplay subtly — this is a moment of your session zero, no more, but it shifts the direction of the entire campaign, because it dictates when the campaign ends, and that is when the questions you as players have about the settlement are answered.
Instead of Settlement types equivalent to different crews, we have goals — these are really just the story you’re interested in telling, whether you’re Thorin Oakenshield recovering a lost land or being driven from Erebor in the first place, among other options from stories I’m not immediately familiar with. Familiar stuff, just like Blades in the Dark! This is barely its own design — wait! Settlement map? There is no city here, and the tension of a zero-sum criminal game is absent; instead, we have a blank map and the tension of exploration: Because terrors lie in the deep, and other subterranean peoples, and dangers. But your settlement needs bargains and merchants and pubs, and you only find mushroom farms and gem mines in the depths so, really, the only way is down. I mentioned earlier that end conditions reminds me of narrative world builders, and here we have more world-building game influences. How do we do that exploring though? Oh, we have an expedition phase, not a score phase. This phase is follows this same familiar Mountain Home pattern: engagement rolls, methods, and then…wait, only one violent option, And the others are diplomacy, survey, forge or return home? The settlement phase does the same: It’s the same, the same, then there is…trade disputes? Union strikes? Earthquakes? Barrel taps?
What we see here is a really clever disguise, a lulling of the reader into a sense of security through the retention of familiar rules in straightforward ways; then once we arrive, realising that they are rendered in utterly different lights, and timeframes, and with utterly different objectives. This is not the lightly reskinned Blades that you see in Brinkwood, or in Sig, or in Scum and Villainy, and it’s not the brazen reimagining that is Band of Blades. This is a subtler beast. I’ve written this chronologically in order of chapter, and if you’ve been paying attention, you can see the game the information design is playing: A group of familiar mechanics, tried and true since 2017, followed by something new and surprising, usually something that turns the violent core of Forged in the Dark on its head. This is really clever information design.
We’re at the point in the book that the game expects all the players to read to: At this point, you’re very clear that this isn’t your teenager’s Doskvol, but rather your grandfather’s Council of Elrond simulator (there’s probably a better analogy to a PG-rated political text, but it’s not coming to me right now). I think 130 pages is a bit much to ask of every player to read prior to playing (or choosing to play), realistically. But, if you do get this far, you know exactly what you’re in for, and you’re probably already picking yourself a playbook and have a goal in mind, and if you’re still keen: The first session section comes next, and it’s time to play! I’ve mentioned before that this game appears inspired by world builders: Here, we do collaborative world building. There’s no Doskvol here. You make it yourself, in session zero. This is the point where the mask comes off, in my opinion: You’re in? Well, then Mountain Home’s cards are on the table: This is a collaborative world-building game, not just a politics simulator. Together we shape the politics of our exodus, what happens on the journey, and the spirit of the personified Mountain Home itself. Now, it must be said here: I think the degree of freedom here is a misstep for me. I’d prefer a slightly more concrete world with more evocative suggestions for threats and peoples. It’s really relying on your knowledge of the source material to fill in the gaps, and I think it’d be a more interesting game if it filled those gaps — the ones external to the dwarven settlement — with something concrete and evocative, even if I agree leaning to the anti-canon side of concrete is a good choice. I’m well documented to want games to bring the imagination and not require me to come firing on all cylinders all the time; or rather I’d like them to give me a track to race on rather than build my own. But wow! This is an interesting twist on the framework, yeah?
The running the game section — the GM section — comes next: This is bespoke stuff, clearly drawn from years of playtesting. The principles are beautiful: Carve the World From Jagged Stone, Delight in Their Creation, Emphasize Common Personhood. I’m a fan of directive-driven play, although I know a lot of players bounce off it, and I don’t think I’ve seen as compelling directives in just about any other game. And explaining the principles takes two pages! Amazing! Brevity is a blessing in a complex system. I already have a lot to juggle as a GM. A lot of this advice is, appropriately, recycled, and are to do with the grandfathered in mechanics; but new stuff on expeditions and inventions are really thorough and terse, the kind of thing you can flip through and fill out in ten minutes while the table snacks in between phases and then come back for the expedition phase to start.
Finally we have the lore and world building advice for the GM, because they need to bring the dwarvishness to life, and a bunch of spark tables to help when you get stuck. This is fantastic for the kind of exploratory and political play you anticipate here. But, it’s not equal to Doskvol, for the reasons I mentioned earlier: we get a lot on dwarves — understandably so — but not enough on the world they’re exploring. This is supposed to be collaboratively created, but as I mentioned earlier, I’d rather evocative and more specific prompts than these vaguer spark tables that are given. Duskvol understood that the important things to detail are the challenges you might face, but Mountain Home trips up here. Maybe. Maybe this is a rare failure of explanation in a well-explained text, because there is subtle but intriguing through-line here that player vs. player conflict is expected, because they represent distinct political forces within the settlement. There is a lot of time devoted to safety, and GM principles that include “Challenge Their Unity”. I think this would benefit from a more explicit discussion in the game text, as it’s both an interesting and challenging direction that this game is appears expected to veer into, over its 15 year cycle. But I wonder if the lore focus on the internal politics and culture of the dwarves is an implicit indication that this is a game where we are going to be largely plagued by internal conflict, rather than external conflict — certainly this is borne out by the settlement phase’s lists. To that end, the faction and claim generation stuff here is stellar, and lean into that in a way that makes more sense than in isolation.
I have a few design criticisms of Mountain Home, though: The sheets aren’t in the book. I’m not aware of a print version of this, but it’s tricky to flick between pdfs on a phone where I wrote most of my reviews, and space is infinite in a digital book, so there’s no reason they couldn’t be shown where they are referenced. The book is clearly designed such that you have the sheets in front of you when you read their explanations. Some of the lists, like buildings, really should be on the settlement map rather than in the book. But the sheets do exist, and they’re good ones: They elide a lot of the complexity, making the game much more welcoming from the first day, and I love the visual metaphor of the increasing depth of the dwarven delve being layers of paper on the table.
This is a complex game, as are most Forged in the Dark games. An immense mechanism of interlocking systems. But the structure of Mountain Home leads you gently through it, giving you moments of familiarity between twists and subversions, leaving one section into the next via questions raised in that section. The layout is not flashy and the art budget is modest, but the power of that art and layout is maximised by a focus on full page art for chapter separators (or to identify playbooks), and clear headings and heavy use of white space. Would it be nice to have more dwarfy art? Of course. Does it use those gaps to its advantage? Also yes. The combination between smart information design, clear consideration for section linkages, and clear if not flashy use of headings and in-text flags and differentiation, make for an immensely legible read despite the complexity of the overall systems.
It’s also interesting and important to that design commentary that there are a fair few examples of the lyricism of the author’s writing — I quoted a few flavourful moments earlier — particularly in the lore and oracles at the end, and so it suggests that the reversion of the voice in Mountain Home to a fairly technical and dry voice is a conscious one. There’s an artistic choice here, prioritising the clear communication of a complex idea over the choice to wax lyrical. There’s a humility to this decision that I really appreciate; a prioritisation of the integrity of the game text over the ego of the author. But there is a trade-off here: For me, at least, that lyricism is something I yearn for when reading a text especially of length, and while the compelling by system interaction and the constant surprise in this particular game keeps me reading, more concessions to the more beautiful writing in this book would be deeply appreciated.
It should be noted, though, that that complexity in concert with the lack of a pre-existing Doskvol equivalent means a lot more load falls on the GM, or at least the players as a whole if we assume that world-building is entirely collaborative. The GM irregardless really has to have this book under their belt, cover to cover. Familiarity with the broader tools is a necessity; I’d probably print a binder with all of the necessary rules and procedures and tables at hand. An explanation of how this gameplay loop looks at the table would also help: I imagine a session would be full of toilet breaks and snack trips where the GM frantically prepares something for the future; else the GM might prepare the whole claims map in advance and nary another moment of prep aside from faction actions. I’m curious the intent there, though, and some examples of play would help me bridge this gap.
There also is very little concession to wanting to play Mountain Home in different formats. This is a game that knows what it wants to be. There is a short section talking about solo play and about one-shots or shorter campaigns, but it’s clear almost from page 1 that it wants to be a 15 or so session campaign, and it’s tailored strongly to be that. I don’t feel like I need permission to hack or modify a game, and in fact it could be argued, having played the same games at many different tables, that we all house rule our games, often unconsciously. So for me, the focus on a core play loop is a huge strength in Mountain Home, rather than spending time and energy explicating game loops that are less than ideal in the eyes of the designer. I’m not saying there aren’t advantages in a broader approach: I personally would find it hard to commit to 15 or more sessions of any game. But the clarity of artistic vision is revelatory here, and the focus of the design benefits from it. This game is better for the knowledge of what it wants itself to be.
This is an unashamedly colonialist fantasy, although it carefully treads around the settler colonialism in most of the text. Only a few examples imply indigenous inhabitants, and the mountain is at once expected to be hostile but also empty places to delve. Of course, there are myriad ways around this: In the stories this is based on, the evil in the mountain is a literal demon, for example. And the existence of the personified mountain means there’s a lot of room for conflict that doesn’t come in the form of a displaced population. And finally, I’ve spoken about how there is a subtle undertone that the conflict is supposed to be internal to the settlement, not external. But in a settler colonialist fantasy, the lack of any comment on the potential for sensitive and complex topics to be broached stands out. In a similar way, one of the core stories this is inspired by is a clear analog of the Jewish diaspora, and it’s odd that in a game that focuses exclusively on this topic doesn’t make any motions towards acknowledging that either. Acknowledgement would be, in my opinion, sufficient if not interesting. I don’t possess a great desire to expunge our art of complexities or of reflections or analogies to real life, but rather to the contrary we should encourage it. It is the lack of any comment that brings me hesitance here, not the presence of the potential connections. And to me, leaning into these complexities would make Mountain Home better, even if it had meant hiring a sensitivity reader or cultural consultant or two. I really want Mountain Home to have more to say. My first impression, especially in the light of the avoidance of specific themes, is that it wants to avoid complex themes at all. But perhaps this is doing the game a disservice. The inspirations are really worn on its sleeve, and those inspirations are the game Dwarf Fortress and the book, the Hobbit, primarily, although there are others. The Hobbit is squarely a children’s book seen through a child’s eyes. It skips past scenes of violence altogether, and is largely concerned with a child’s view of politics and of interactions between mysterious fairy-tale quantities — ethereal elves, evil goblins, massive giants, iconic dragons. It is unconcerned with realistic politics, appropriately so in a children’s book, although it betrays its author’s biases certainly. These themes are central here to the exploration and to the design of playbooks and in the absence of concrete enemies. And Dwarf Fortress is a mechanical beast; it’s a creature of surprise borne of unexpected interactions and complex algorithms. And while the success of the complex interactions and oracle tables here is hard to assess without a full 15 sessions of play, you can see clearly these themes are also the direction the game is pointing in. It does feel, as I mentioned earlier, like these themes would have been better achieved with a little more specificity, and I wonder how much that specificity was avoided out of a desire for open-ended creation and how much out of thematic anxiety. But when push comes to shove, while there is some sense of awkwardness in the specific avoidance of certain complex themes, those themes aren’t off the table or in the table for you by default, you’re well supported by safety tools, and the themes the author is interested in are on full display. So, to call the avoidance of specific themes a failure in this game is probably unfair.
To close the loop with DIE:RPG that I promised at the top of the review, it is really easy to see by comparison how one can arrange and explain complex systems and unfamiliar subjects in a way that makes them grokkable. For me, at least, I have less of a grasp on how to play dwarven settler politics than D&D isekai, so conceptually Mountain Home is more challenging rather than less, and it’s definitely more complex a system. But thoughtful design and, I suspect, considerate playtesters, as well as editors that were happy with a back and forth over multiple phases, can render the opaque transparent. I also think there are broader economic factors that impacted the final forms of two games, that are worth discussing: Namely that DIE:RPG was a large scale, high budget kickstarter success from a relatively major publisher (keeping in mind a major TTRPG publisher is still a small business) and Mountain Home is a slow-funded labour of love that took 5 years to bring to completion. For the uninitiated, crowdfunding is a marketing-focused way of getting funding for a game, that relies on additional content to drive increased advertising and revenue. Crowdfunding campaigns like DIE:RPG earn hundreds of thousands in weeks. Slow funding is effectively paid playtesting: Games release in limited and affordable, usually artless “ashcan” form, and as the money rolls in, the cost of purchasing increases commensurate to the status of development. Slow funding campaigns are much less public about their earnings, but they take years, not weeks. There’s a lot of talk in the hobby about the negative and positive impact of hype-based crowdfunding, but I think there are manifest in these two games some of the core differences: Mountain Home is focused, well-playtested, and its text is measured and well-integrated. DIE feels scattered, it meanders in its explanations and the back half of the book often feels at odds with the front half of the book. There are clear indications that the deadlines and pressure associated with a crowd funding campaign affected DIE:RPG for the worse, but until reading Mountain Home closely I don’t think I had really realised that slow funding has such a positive impact on the design of the final product; perhaps it allows a more focused and systematic approach to design that minimises challenges being overlooked, and minimises the jarring or exhausting unnecessary “additional content” I so often bounce off. I’m interested in looking at other slow-funded products to see if this is a trend, although I’m also hesitant to review unfinished games.
I’m not sure how this fits into my review, but honestly the biggest challenge for me, reading Mountain Home in close proximity to DIE:RPG, is that DIE:RPG is trying very hard to be capital-A Art, and Mountain Home is not, and I want to talk about that. Because I don’t think it’s true that Mountain Home is not art, but I think it’s aspirations are to a kind of folk or pop art, rather than making gestures towards high art or the “Art Scene”, and this reveals itself in the way I respond to it. Games like Mountain Home and Mausritter are inarguably to me artistic masterpieces, albeit in diverging ways, but they don’t trigger myart radar as much as DIE:RPG does largely because DIE:RPG is about big emotions and trauma and childhood whereas Mausritter is about mice knights and Mountain Home feels like ASCII art and childhood stories. One could really say that I’m responding to the fact that DIE:RPG is more heavily art-coded than the other two games, and that to me is a problem, because the way you position or code your art should not impact whether it is actually received as art by the audience (that is, me). Of course railing against this is largely pointless: I’m never going to change the way art is received by the public, and there’s nothing wrong with aspiring to be pop or folk art. Art is art. I can, however, reframe the coding of TTRPGs for myself: TTRPGs, irregardless of theme, are inherently a participatory performance, and irregardless of what emotion that performance elicits — childlike joy, political intrigue or exploration of trauma — and because of the nature of the medium itself — it is the medium of TTRPGs that should be considered art-coded, potentially more so than most traditional non-participatory art forms.
Back to Mountain Home, though: Mountain Home is a compelling subversion of the Forged in the Dark formula, inspired by children’s books and videogames. While it is workmanlike and not flashy in its presentation, that brings with it a clarity of purpose and thoughtful informational design that makes it very accessible despite the challenges its subversions and disparate inspirations bring. I would love to bring this game to my table, and if I could get it to my table in the next week, I could run it with little more preparation than printing off some tables and sticking them in a binder. And from me, I think that’s a pretty strong recommendation to check Mountain Home out.
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
I was going to prepare for my daughter’s birthday party today, but I didn’t feel like packing party bags, so instead I read DIE: RPG. DIE:RPG is a 416 page game written by Kieron Gillen with art by Stephanie Hans and a veritable cornucopia of guest writers and industry alumni. It’s based on comic of the same name by the same creators, the premise of which is that the kids in the 80s cartoon, Dungeons and Dragons, have grown up and gone back, and it turns out it is a much darker place than they remember.
This opens with about eight pages of introductory comic. Most people who read me regularly are aware I’m not a fan of pieces of fiction incorporated into the text of TTRPGs. It’s beautiful for sure — but opening with this, preceded by Gillen equivocating about whether or not this is the spin off or not (it is, Kieron, because you made it and released it after the comic), it’s not off to a compelling start. Then we get to our introduction: It introduces us to our paragons of which my first impressions are that they’re awfully ham-handedly and unimaginatively named: Emotion knight? Neo? Dictator? I wasn’t sure if my response to these naming conventions was unfair, so I told my wife in the car, and she laughed out loud: “They sound like my goth friend in high school wrote them”. Really, we couldn’t come up with anything better? Perhaps this is a call-back to the comic books in some way, but they don’t appear named with any clear convention in mind to me, and don’t describe most of the archetypes well. The descriptions of the paragons remain the same throughout the book, and they’re pretty good, it’s just the titling that’s as subtle as a hammer wrought of gold. Then we get to the “What is a roleplaying game” section. It comes across to me as patronising and wrong-headed, as it points readers to actual play (and hence probably Critical Role as the most prominent player) and that is both not an example of TTRPGs and not even vaguely what DIE is going for. Honestly, if you’re not going to try, don’t include the section. It came across incredibly negatively. This is the only part of the book I was familiar with prior to reading the whole thing, and it still comes across as negatively as I remember. This section literally stopped me for reading this book for months. And, in addition, this flippancy causes whiplash with the next section on tone, which describes the game as being about personal trauma and loss; if this is such a serious and important game, why aren’t you taking it more seriously in the previous paragraph? We get a brief detour (“Spoilers!” it says, suggesting that this is a book for all the players, which quickly feels like it is not the case) into the lore of the world this takes place in. The lore of DIE has been described as “goth jumanji”, and that’s pretty apt: It is trying very hard to be grimdark and horrifying in a way I find utterly uncompelling. “From your perspective, the games are all canon. From Die’s perspective, the games are all prey.” is obviously intended to be a banger line, but for me, it just doesn’t land as edgily as it feels intended to. I wonder if this is a philosophical divergence: I’m not interested, as Gillen claims to be, in exploring why people spend so much time on imagined worlds. I know why. I’m not interested in imagining my hobby as a parasite that preys on me and my insecurities. This seems like a profoundly self-hating perspective, that on the face of it has very little of value to add. But there are directions it could take that could be interesting: Explorations of the toxicities of different play cultures, for example, or an indictment of capitalism’s impact on folk art. I’ve read plenty enough of Gillen to know that for me, he usually doesn’t stick these complex thematic landings. Let’s see if he pulls this one off without my feeling like I’ve been sold nerd self-hatred as a product. Let’s put a pin on that and come back to it in conclusions.
Ok. I’m going to set aside that fairly poor first impression now, as I enter into the rules proper, and will try to loop back around to those questions again at the end. The rules explanations are pretty good, and clear, and well laid out with diagrams. Superficially looks like there was a lot of collaboration between layout and writing, and it shows, but I’ll come back to layout when I’ve finished the book. I quite like the dice pool system it uses, which is not unique, but is simple and works, and ties intimately into the paragon (this games classes) powers. Thematically I question the choice to not just make this a damned d20 game, though, as I don’t see the additional utility of the system aside from the activation of powers on 6s, and the failure of recognising the thematic power of using a d20 when the lore sets the world on a d20 seems an obvious own goal to me. There’s a flashback mechanic drawn from Blades in the Dark with the twist that it’s always from the real world. The “extra mechanics” section is a grab bag from modern RPG design. The basic rules are…fine, I guess? Like, obviously they are not where the juice is intended to be. That’s the —
Paragons, which come up next. The placement of three different advancement rulesets for different length games here at the front of the section is a huge WTF decision to me. Everything the advancement section speaks about is nonsense to me at this point in the book; I don’t know what any of these things are. Put it somewhere else. It barely even tells you what to do — most of it is in two other chapters, except for the third optional advancement option, which is here. Were the editors scared of the author, that they didn’t suggest, say, moving it to the end? Or to one of the two other sections on advancement? And it goes on, showing you how to advance in this clumsy but visually compelling map (I imagine the iconography means something to someone familiar with the comics? No wait, it’s an unfolded d20, I get it, you’re very clever Gillon), using the Neo’s advancement map as an example (you see the Neo’s advancement map before you see the Neo). A whole page is devoted to navigating the map. Sigh. It feels like somebody plays more videogames than TTRPGs in choosing to fight this particular design battle: Might have been smarter to just assume the audience wasn’t stupid, because this page of diagrams feel (uh oh is this becoming a theme?) a little patronising. Finally, it gets to the paragons themselves. As said earlier, these appear named by a teenager who’s just barely discovered metaphor, and the while some of the names are a little better in the context of their advancements and powers, most of them are not. Each paragon is basically a classes of Dungeons and Dragons reimagined in such a way that they are most vulnerable to their own worst impulses and implications. I don’t love the overwhelming negativity here — there is no joy in these paragons, just power and potential for harm — but it actually fits earlier stated themes of corruption and power quite well, and in play, I could see an interesting tension developing between the pettiness of the real world characters and the temptations that these paragons provide. On the other hand, while it’s been alluded to that we’ll make those real world characters, and there’s nothing so far about them, and the paragons have really taken the spotlight: I wonder when they’ll show up, as it feels like they should come first in the game loop. Anyway, in the absence of tension with the real world characters (later in I’ll be told they’re called personas), I’m left with little more than a bad taste in my mouth. There are some interesting approaches here though: each paragon feels like they’re playing they’re own minigames, which I really like in terms of a design approach, even though I am bouncing off the relentless gothiness of it all. By the end of this chapter, it appears at this point that each class is assigned a class dice, but aside from a number given for a special advance, this dice doesn’t seem to have any significant impact on running the paragon. Perhaps this is the legacy of an excised rule, or it comes up later? It’s weird that this stuff isn’t being explained 100 pages into the book. The most interesting part of the paragon section is the Master, which is the GM section. This states that it’s not adversarial, but the mechanics are obviously encouraging adversarial play. It seems there are rules somewhere else in the game to support either of these kinds of play (there’s a reference to the “Antagonist Master” in a sidebar), but not here, in the section devoted to the paragon. This is another example of the repeated messy information design: If you’re spending other chapters on the Master, don’t pretend it’s here, and don’t put half here and half there (and in this case, since in the sidebar). At this point it feels like it wants everyone at the table to read this 400 page book before playing, which like. That’s not for me. Please, this game doesn’t actually appear that complex, please present it in a way that I can play it with ease.
The next section is Rituals, which tells you how to pay DIE:RPG as intended. Remember that earlier, there were rules that you can apply to Rituals to make them more like Campaigns, which is the not-intended mode of play, if you want to. Because, it turns out, most of those advancements we learnt about? They won’t be seen if you play the ideal session length without the optional rules. Sigh: This is a game that’s either confused about its identity or too beholden to either notes or playtesting feedback. Ok, finally we find out about Personas, those real life characters! This is on page 107. The first time they’re named, that I recall. I got the strong impression from the earlier sections that the Master paragon was the “GM” of this game, which now appears to perhaps not be the case: This game is not explaining itself well. I went back and re-read the earlier chapters, and it really talks about the GM a lot throughout the rules, but doesn’t talk about the Master a lot. I breezed over the use of GM in those sections, but now O realise the distinction between GM, Master and their persona needs more dedicated expansion. They’re played by the GM, but are they a character? Is it their persona? Is the GM playing the Master, the persona of the Master, and the world? An entire additional layer of meta on top of everything else? The terminology and explanation really needs to be clearer if you’re going to introduce this complexity — it’s really the only level of complexity mechanically here at all. Certainly, rituals makes it pretty clear that the desired flow of the game is: Everyone gets together at the table, creates their personas, then chooses a paragon. It’s really unclear here about whether the GM is already set here, or not. It strongly implies both that the GM is playing their traditional facilitator role, but also in contrast that they just pick their paragon along with anyone else and realise they’re the Master part way through the first session.
I’ll take a detour here, to talk about personas: For such a core part of the game tension and theme, they feel under-utilised. Throughout the book, it seems they only have two real rulings to incorporate them: The flashback and the master’s instruction “personas always grow”. Everything else is tied into prompts associated with your paragon, specifically their powers, but also their unique “minigame” mechanics. There’s a hard limit on all of these: Powers only manifest on 6s, flashbacks once per session. This, definitely probably could be enough? You want the fun of the game to be in the actual fantasy, with the thematic weight being drawn out in the connections with the personas, right? It just feels like the intent of these mechanics may behoove a more collaborative storytelling approach: Those flashbacks being big narrative moments rather than just ways to succeed. Back to rituals.
A huge section of Rituals is safety tools: This is well done (in retrospect, it’s written by the creators of the Safety Toolkit). But overall this procedure might be a good and necessary set up for complex gameplay but boooy does it seem like it’s a chore. Part of it is “explain the premise”! Who is sitting down at a table playing DIE without knowing the premise? Are they going to walk away at this point if they decide they aren’t interested? This just needed a solid revision or two to make the first half of this chapter more than a very very long checklist and rules introduction. Oh and here the class die and the paragons are explained for the table. I’m now confused what the earlier section was for and who was supposed to read it. Why aren’t we starting here with the paragons, where the personas are? Was that a weirdly positioned pre-appendix? Some clarity on previously confused positions happens here: Each patron gets their own special die (badoom ching); the Master is the GM. Then it morphs without warning into GM advice on how to run the short “ritual” campaign, with no headings to disengage from the earlier onboarding procedure. Honestly, I’m giddy this is so poorly organised. I have whiplash from being confounded and by surprise introductions of core concepts. Honestly, it feels like the editor didn’t feel empowered to actually suggest changes to the text, and so no developmental editing occurred. Reading these first 150 or so pages blind and without foreknowledge is an exercise in confusion. I feel like my four year old is explaining a game they’re very excited about to me. I honestly need a break or I’ll spiral into negativity in response.
I took that break. It’s tomorrow, and I’m up to Running DIE, a chapter that is now confirmed to be for the Master paragon, who is also sometimes called the GM, and who also has rules in the paragon and rituals chapters that explain how to Run DIE. It opens with the Principles section: This is fine. It feels like the author was really, really trying not to be derivative at the expense of saying something useful. There’s a bunch on safety tools, oddly placing all of the responsibility for safety on one person who, as implied by the procedure in rituals, has no foreknowledge that they’d have that role. There are three pages each on running the game for each paragon — I hope you don’t have a full table if you hope to remember all that. No pressure. There is a section on the multiple levels of play that for me doesn’t feel helpful, but rather just an acknowledgment, of the fact that it’s a little confusing to play someone who is playing someone. I’d rather some actual advice on this universal challenge than most of the preceding advice to be honest, but we don’t get that. There’s then a bunch of ways to play the game differently, again really just acknowledging briefly them rather than actually helping you do them: “You can make any paragon the Antagonist” (wait, this is one of the first mentions of Antagonist outside the glossary, what’s that again?”). You can switch roles (and not personas? How does that work if you’re stuck in DIE??). I’m not a fan of “running the game” chapters in general— they tend to be both overwhelming and insufficient — and this one is particularly empty of meaningful advice and full of additional concepts that might improve or change your perspective on the game however aren’t adequately borne out. You don’t have to tell me that I can hack your game or what ways are permissible. It is, however, great if you tell me how to run it in different ways and actually support me to do so.
The next section is mostly solidly useful world and session planning advice, slowly transforming into lore that I don’t really care about (why give DIE the sentient god world a stat block?) and which has already been explored. But, if I were running DIE (as the GM, the Master, or perhaps his paragon?) this is gold. Seriously good. The echoes and their monsters are great, the session plan is great if you like railroads, there’s lots on customising NPCs here (although of course not called that). I repeat, the bestiary is genuinely great and its principles really could be used in any game to interesting emotion effect. This chapter is good. The incredibly strong response I have to the chapter feels a little jarring, in retrospect on second read through, as when I went back to the acknowledgements on my second pass of this review, and I realised that this was the part not written by Gillen. Ouch. I’ll just leave it at that.
The Campaign chapter is basically a repeat of Rituals but to set up for indefinite rather than limited sessions. As with most sections, it meanders from one topic to another like a confused old lady sitting at the bus stop in a nursing home cul-de-sac. It basically teaches you how to run a standard fantasy campaign, which has been done better elsewhere by other people, plus tries to retcon the lore so that indefinite play makes sense. I…this is fine. It seems an afterthought, a concession to the fact that to appeal to the D&D crowd you need to offer the hope of an infinite campaign, even if such a thing is exceedingly rare. I feel like doing this would really lean away from DIEs strengths and into its weaknesses, and the book itself supports this reading I think, through implication and text prioritisation (although judging by the poor consideration put into informational design here, this latter may be a mistake). This, as well as some of the other sections here in the latter half of the book, really feel like Gillen being given notes on what needs to be in a TTRPG book by someone else, and trying to meet the remit but not really understanding why or how to really make these sections sing.
We finish up with two additions, both that feel like appendices but only one of which is labelled as such: Scenarios, that I imagine are the kickstarter stretch goals that the guest authors wrote. I read most of DIE on my phone, but I went back on my PC when it came to writing my conclusions on my second pass to double check if these scenarios had any authors attached to them: They don’t, but looking at the credits perhaps it’s all Gillen. Certainly, though, in retrospect looking at the credits, retrospectively a bunch of sections are uncredited and implied to be Gillen’s work, that feels like it’s the product leaning into his fame and auteur status: To be clear the majority of the excellent monster writing as well as the rituals safety content was written by hired labour. That makes me feel a little uncomfortable, although I assume the co-writers here agreed on the vague crediting. And finally what appears to be an actual complete Master’s character sheet, a veritable tome in an appendix, but decidedly necessary and if I were to run this I’d be grateful for it.
I said I’d come back to layout now, at the end. While my first impression is of a clean, well-organised book, I was wrong: This book is not sufficiently broken up. It needs more subheadings. Things just blur into each other, and are impossible to find. It’s pretty, but white space here is often a liability, breaking even simple concepts up over many pages. The art is beautiful, but honestly don’t give me anything additional from the writing. It doesn’t complement the writing, and I wouldn’t ever flip the book over to show anyone any of it. A 400 page book is such a challenge to lay out well, I know — even a much shorter one — but gosh this one is a hash of ideas that desperately needs organising; I spent half the book actively confused, and I was searching for terms in the digital edition to help with my understanding. This is definitely not all the layout designer’s fault, but it likely speaks to less communication between editor, writer and layout designer than is ideal in a book of this size, communicating ideas of this complexity.
That is what is in DIE:RPG. I have so many thoughts, where even to start?
DIE:RPG feels like it was written by someone who has long since been disenfranchised from the traditional roleplaying scene and glances at it with disdain, writing an artistic response to that in good faith (DIE: The Comic Book), and translating that art back into the medium that inspired it, also out of excitement and good faith, but not actually having the design chops to pull it off. Potentially Gillen recognised this: He pulled a team around him to pull it off, including some of the best in the business. But at some point the design and writing chops being recruited were not brought to bear on the game, whether it was by fear of Gillen’s fame, or something else (time pressure, perhaps? An unexpected Kickstarter success has compromised many a game). There is a good game in this mess of a book, but the book is a dog’s breakfast.
A dog’s breakfast, you ask? Well, honestly read the review again if you skipped it. But the big jarring things are the terrible misordering of information, the legacy terms that cause confusion, the poor text prioritisation causing text to flow into each other. It reads like an unedited draft, to be entirely honest. There were a few typos in my version as well, which lends credence to there being not enough time spent on all levels of editing, early or late stage, and this might be evidence of a rushed production. Irregardless of cause, I found this an incredibly difficult book to read and make sense of, even though the rules themselves were for the most part straightforward.
There is a strong impression I get of in this book, which is that Kieron Gillon doesn’t like D&D. Huge “was teased for being a nerd in high school and has a huge amount of loathing for the elf game as a concept as a result” vibes going on here. The grimdarkness of this topic seems a response to a dislike of the place D&D has in his psyche in the same way that I, as a young woman, stopped playing D&D because it’s kid stuff and got back into TTRPGs through adult stuff like Apocalypse World and Sorcerer with sex in it and violence and aggressive writing. I was wrong in retrospect, and now I feel my response was immature, and the hence to me, the apparent self-loathing here strikes me as distasteful. It feels like a game written about D&D by someone who doesn’t like D&D, or at least doesn’t understand it, rather than a game written about D&D by someone who understands the appeal. As someone who likes playing games about elves and wizards, and thinks it’s a perfectly appropriate hobby for grown adults, it seems like a huge attempt to Make For Grown Ups something that can be made for grownups without the weird disdain it seems to have for the subject matter. Case in point: Die itself, the amoral god at the heart of the lore. If Gillen didn’t mean for this to say that Dungeons and Dragons is a destructive, life-destroying parasite that should be avoided at all costs, then he’s absolutely blind to what he’s writing. Maybe he didn’t: Maybe he just thought that it was a cool, incredibly creepy concept. But to not think further than that would be…gosh I can’t imagine being a creator of Gillen’s apparent calibre and not realise the implications he’s making there. And I spoke earlier, there are other potential takes on Die inherent in the concept itself that could have been leant into to avoid this interpretation, had he been conscious enough of the implications of it; these aren’t apparent in the RPG. Coming back to the question raised earlier, in the second or third paragraph: No, I don’t think Gillen sticks the thematic landing on this.
In addition, there are so many small things that feel like either missed design opportunities or failures of design imagination. Given Gillen’s inexperience with TTRPG design I suspect it’s the latter, but surely that’s what a strong team is for? Procedures like the ones in Rituals and in Campaigns are endless drudgery, where games like Errant and Knave 2e treat procedures with a relative lightness and elegance that is elusive to DIE: RPG. The principles are clunky, where this was a solved problem in 2010 with Apocalypse World. I mentioned early on, the reliance on d6s for a core mechanic could have had tremendous thematic meaning, but the Fool uses a d6 for their class die, rendering that potential toothless in the name of what perhaps was a visual metaphor in the comics. Using a d20 for the core mechanic would have made so much more thematic sense for a game set on a giant d20, ruled by a god that is a twisted metaphor for (another option?) the satanic panic, matching up for example with the unfolded d20 used for the class advancement maps, however they chose instead a fairly unremarkable dice pool mechanic. There is a lack of follow-through that fails to harness the potential symbolic resonance in the games concepts and themes, that really feels a little thrown together at times. And this sense of thrown togetherness is probably not helped by the slapdash nature of the (dis)organisation.
The lack of a clear assumption about who the audience for this book is super jarring, and it feels tied into what feels like a lack of familiarity with much more than the canon texts of the TTRPG landscape: It’s arranged like a D&D, but it shouldn’t have been. I, as a reader of the book from cover to cover, was absolutely confounded as to who it was for. The rules would dictate that the role of the Master be chosen early in the first session, but the book is written as if the Master is the one that read the book and will explain the rules, as well as will do all the prep. The structure that places the Master as just another one of the players feels inspired by No Dice No Masters, but in practice feels like either a meaningless nod to those games (or the concept that the “GM is a player too”), or a genuine design mistake. I could see a version of this game that had a truly GMless structure (or GMfull, whatever boats float), and that version I think, leaning away from the structural reliance that this has on D&D, would be much better in my opinion. In general, and as someone who really likes refereed elf games, I think this would’ve been better leaning into more popular indie TTRPG trends than the system it does use. If not No Dice No Masters, the crew books of Blades in the Dark as personas, or even as parties of paragons rather than individuals? Blades in the Dark is already clearly a significant influence, as is Apocalypse World (or at least Dungeon World); leaning into those influences I feel would be a strength and not a weakness here, as much as I prefer non-derivative works that really reflect their themes.
Now, I have little to zero interest in exploring the psychological depths of the human soul through the medium of roleplay, but I know that there are plenty of people who are: This game is for them, and not for me. DIE:RPG definitely has some interesting things to say about how power corrupts, about how petty relationships between normal people can twist and become stale and cruel. Is it something I’d want to explore for 10 to 16 sessions, or indefinitely? Nope, definitely not. They should’ve spent more time on DIE:RPG one-shots and less on campaign play if they wanted me to give this a go. I am not a believer that art for adults has to be bleak drudgery, my life has enough psychological complexity that I don’t need Kieron Gillon or a comic book fan friend to be my therapist. And I’m a little disappointed, because I feel like the lore of DIE:RPG wants to say more than just an exploration of the pettiness of humanity when provided power: I feel like it wants to speak to the toxicity of subcultures in a way that could be really resonant in an internet-centric social-media centric always on world. It’s disappointing it doesn’t go straight there. I feel Die, the amoral god itself should be a metaphor for Dungeons and Dragons and the challenging and complex shadow it casts over the rest of the hobby. Gestures to the former are made in the final pages of Scenarios, although not the latter, and it feels overall that in a book of this size, the chance to really double down on clear potential for thematic coherency is a significant failure. I’m confident that future additions to this will do some of this work, though, at least in terms of some additional scenario work that is coming. It just seems like a huge missed opportunity.
It also falls down in some areas because it doesn’t want to assume that its players know about TTRPGs: Maybe they like the comic book and wonder what are these roleplaying games all about, I’ll check that out! Or whatever, it probably was on the front page of Kickstarter and got random fans that way. So, it opens with a glossary of terms that defines a bunch of stuff that is either nonsense at the time or that is incredibly obvious. Gillen patronises the “what’s an RPG section” embarrassingly because clearly he doesn’t believe it’s worthwhile, but then walks through the game like a child showing you her new toys, with no apparent forethought or reason. This is a game I can’t imagine has a significant audience of the Brand New to RPGS (although sure, it’s possible), but is both bending over to accommodate them and failing to explain anything within it satisfactorily to them. In doing so it both alienates the experienced and the inexperienced; quite an achievement.
And hence, it’s an achievement to me that it has such a following despite all of these flaws. A game is not its text: A game is its play, at your table. And the reports I’ve gotten from DIE:RPG are of emotionally resonant, deep, and memorable play. My response to the tension between my criticisms of the book and those play reports is that a good table can truly make any game sing, and also that play truly sings in the unexpected interactions between the players and the rules, not in the expected ones. It’s one reason I have that disclaimer at the top of these reviews. The fact that I got through the read-through of this book and have written (checks notes) ten additional paragraphs of analysis, tells me that at the very least it’s clearly a whole-hearted attempt to create a piece of art with high production values in the medium of TTRPGs. I think that if the themes that this game actually manifests appeal to you and your friends, you’ll probably have similar experiences to the reports I’ve heard. Art elicits a response in us humans: This, as much as it’s deeply flawed, is a piece of art.
But, because of those flaws, it’s also a deeply inaccessible piece of art in my opinion: Hard to understand where it should be easy, and poorly explained where it is complex, an exercise in parsing similar but different terminologies: A thoroughly unusable text full of heart and passion. While it’s not a piece of art that lights me up with excitement, I can fully recognise why it might for some. And for that reason, it’s probably worth checking out? I guess, your mileage may vary. If you want to delve into the psyche of your friends, there are games I’d personally prefer to do that in, but there’s nothing else that does this specifically for the nerd subculture, so exploring that might be more appealing here than in something like Bluebeard’s Bride for example. And that bestiary… well, it’s fire. It’ll honestly be a resource for most fantasy games. So, yeah, again, your mileage may vary. But while deeply flawed, DIE:RPG is never uninteresting.
In a recent Dungeon Regular episode, the Kappa of Pachee Bridge, I drew a connection between a particular monster in that module, and the boss battles in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and The Legend of Zelda: Not The Most Recent Two. It reminds me of a 16 HP Dragon, in some senses, but leaning more into making monsters puzzle challenges rather than attrition or resource challenges.
In certain Nintendo games (and yes, other games, obviously), we have boss monsters with big, obvious traits that are obviously unique and obviously tie into a recently-learnt skill or environmental feature. Making monsters dangerous and nigh-unkillable without recognising and solving the puzzle, is what makes these boss battles unique and memorable.
There’s a simple recipe for developing Red Button Monster like this:
Take The Cake: Take an iconic monster with a number of iconic features.
Add the Toppings: At least one topping, each a twist or addition to the original iconic monster or features.
Add the Garnish: At least one signal for each twist you’ve added.
Provide Spoons: At least one clear method to take advantage of each twist.
Eat: Let the players figure it out.
I don’t know why I chose a dessert metaphor, it’s probably reflective of my state of mind today. Ok, here are some complex examples.
The Kappa
A shark-toothed turtle-spirit with a pool of water in its head.
Intangible and immune to non-magical weapons. Feeds on flesh.
Its eyes glow when it is about to pounce and take a bite out of you, healing itself. Its water-bowl glows when it controls water to drag you to drowning.
You can trick it into emptying its head of water (by bowing to you, for example) in order to remove its intangibility and immunity to non-magical weapons.
Witch-owl Cebreus
A giant owl, with sharp talons, gusting wings, and big eyes.
It wears a witch’s hat, has skeletal wings, shoots rays out of its eyes.
When the hat glows, either the wings sprout ectoplasmic wings allowing it to fly and divebomb, or the eyes charge up allowing it to shoot rays out of its eyes.
You can remove the hat to take away its flying or eye rays; you can break its wings to take away its flying; you can attack its eyes to prevent the eye rays from working.
Spinning-top Golem
A golem; it is immune to normal weapons and it is extremely strong.
It has spinning top for legs, a single red eye on its brass head and six arms.
The spinning top means that each turn its two attacks are randomised 1. Fire gout; 2. Spinning blade; 3. Lance; 4. Chain lightning; 5. Shield; 6 Recharge.
Removing a limb will remove an attack. Damaging the eye will disable it from attacking for 1 round.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on red button monsters.
Addit: More recently, Joseph wrote this, which is an alternate but interesting and slightly easier approach!
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.
Electric Mangrove is an 8-page module slash art installation by Andre Novoa, Diarmuid Ó Cáthain, Guilherme Gontijo and the Dead Robotz. I gave the artist, layout designer and “musical collective”(I’m not sure if there are other contributors, or if Dead Robotz is these three performing) equal billing here because this is as much their product as it is the writer’s. In it, wizard-summoned robots replicate infinitely in a mangrove swamp, and only you can stop them!
Elephant in the room: This is a product designed clearly to be printed and listened to. I’m reading it in digital, on my phone. I’m not getting the intended experience, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. It’s a limited edition LP, with music by the Dead Robotz (that you can listen to here). The module itself is an insert for the LP. The shape of the page doesn’t neatly fit the screen of either my phone or my computer, but it would be pleasant in the hand. It feels more like a poster you would have gotten in a video game box in the 90s than a CD insert to be honest.
The music is a kind of jazz-hop fusion with funk vibes, it’s pretty good. I’m not a music critic, but I’d listen to this by itself. It sets a cool atmosphere for a module like this. But there are only 5 tracks that are connected by name to things inside the module itself, though (and that wasn’t clear, I had to close read the module to increase the number from 3). And I can’t say the track “Swimming in the Cockatoo Lagoon” gives me anything to help me run it; in fact the track feels a bit resort-like, and that’s not what the description states.
In the insert, we have three locations and their maps, and four pages of description, along with a cover. The words are brief and the art is beautiful, but honestly I’d appreciate the art being denser, as right now it doesn’t double as usable, playable information. Give the terseness and the limited information, I really want a product like this to lean into using the art as a replacement for the key, rather than just displaying what’s already written. It doesn’t do that, which means it’s really not taking advantage of its format. And realistically, the music should provide a triple threat here.
The pages aren’t really used consistently: Only four of the eight pages are packed with information (be it visual or text) and the other four are sparse or don’t communicate anything. The Incubator location feels half-baked because of this, compared to the other two locations; the Meteorite really could have been part of another place. The Mutations didn’t need a whole page. It’s beautiful and striking, but really confounding informational design in a product that on its face appears to be innovative in this regard.
What writing is here, though, and is evocative and compelling. It’s a gonzo fantasy, so that needs to be your jam, but if it is the vibes are impeccable. If you’re looking for a vibe-laiden pamphlet or poster to riff off as you improvise your way through a bizarro-mangrove, this has it in spades.
Overall, though, I found it disappointing. It has good writing, great art and layout, and I don’t know why I’m surprised, but great music too. Despite that it doesn’t feel well designed as a cohesive whole, or as a module. It feels like a tour through the creator’s weirdest imaginings rather than something into which forethought has been put into how it might generate fun for your table, or how things in it relate to each other.
Could you bring Electric Mangrove to your table and have fun? Yes, if the vibe suited your campaign, or you wanted to run a one-shot. It’s fun, and it’s pretty, and maybe that’s enough, especially if you collect LPs. It’s begging to be given a night to be to listen to the LP and play FKR, under the influence of something mellow and mildly hallucinogenic. But I feel like with a unified vision and collaboration between skilled creatives such as this, it could have been much much more.
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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.
Playful Void 