• SLIMDNGN 0.7

    I just release a HUGE SLIMDNGN update this morning!

    In terms of rules revisions, it’s pretty minor except that I’ve excised the character rules entirely from what I’m now called SLIMDNGN CORE and have written 36 classes all with their own unique class sheets and rules specific to them, as well as spells lists and a bonus equipment list.

    Check it out here! It’s free!

    I’ve also added in a whole design commentary, which I’ll reproduce here!

    Design Commentary

    Why write a commentary?

    It helped me with the design process, to be honest. I wrote the most recent version of SLIMDNGN, then I wrote the commentary, and that made me reconsider some of my decisions, so I changed it, and then rewrote the commentary in some unending loop. I’m not sure if this commentary is actually useful or interesting, though. Let me know.

    Why SLIMDNGN?

    Honestly it’s right there in the name. I read and write a lot of modules, and so I play a lot of modules. And it’s a drag, recruiting for and running them in B/X or OSE. They’re not rules light, not for me, not for my table. And the alternatives are either too rules heavy or too characterful, or both.

    SLIMDNGN was my attempt to stick B/X into a 1-page box. I’ll talk about how and why I did that in a moment. But the referee-facing rules are only part of the equation. Also, my table just adores fifth edition. They’d probably adore Pathfinder, too. They love character options. And there are really only two great approaches to character options in the DIY elfgame space: Troika and GLOG. Troika isn’t chunky enough for my table. GLOG isn’t written for B/X.

    So the SLIMDNGN class sheets were born. Troika-style randomly chosen character classes, but with the targeted mechanical heft of GLOG. And they became Powered by the Apocalypse–style playbooks — class sheets I called them, because  I jammed six pages into two — because I wanted it to be as easy to create a character as it is to run.

    From both ends then: Easy to play, easy to run. 

    SLIMDNGN Core

    My basic design goals were:

    1. Fully B/X compatible,

    2. Be able to fit all the rules in my head,

    3. Rolling just D6s

    4. Be able to convert most modules at the table and not before 

    5. It’s really for short-term picaresque play, rather than meant to sustain long-term campaign play

    The idea for the symbolic representation of the dice basically came from my need to make space. I think it works well, although has become unwieldy as the class sheets progressed.

    Actions are clearly based on Blades in the Dark. I originally intended to have a step up / step down terminology, however I realised that due to the limited number range, it’s actually easier to say +2 instead of “decrease difficulty by a step”. I used only 1 die, because I wanted to lean into the X-in-6 of B/X, because I really like the simplicity. 

    So the basic theoretical construct around this, is that environmental affects the action’s target, a risky situation – probably the most common situation – being roll over 5 or a 17% chance of success. Then, you make your roll, which can be modified by character-related factors, specifically class powers and spells. The only kink here, is that I realised that in terms of word count, it’s easier to say –2 to your roll than to say “it’s one step up harder” like you would in Blades in the Dark, and also the smaller granularity in the rolls means that +1 and –1 are very powerful impacts, so you probably want to stick to the very quickly stacking up small modifiers. I didn’t cap these, because by default you have eight or higher for desperate (i.e. you have to have a bonus of 2 or more to succeed), or (one can assume, although it’s not in the text) 10 or higher for impossible. 

    Consequences are very simplified referee moves from Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark as well. Dynamite sprung from a discussion I had on the Dice Exploder discord about how 2-step clocks make for dynamic, simple activities. The design goal of picaresque play matches with these 2-step clocks. The world reacts in simple, straightforward ways in SLIMDNGN.

    The 5 slightly different saves are a compromise. I preferred to use the original terms, because they’re used in modules, but they’re wordy and unclear. The new 5 saves are basically the same, and intended to use like this: Death is basically a Con save, Wands is now the magic save, Petrify is the bodily transformation save, Breath weapons is the dexterity save, and charm is the will save. The only difference to remember is the one from spells to charm. The original draft had these as 5 additional stats – basically, you were controlled, risky or desperate in a save –  and I put so much effort into avoiding having stats already that I wanted to avoid that. So instead, I adopted a granulated version of resistance from Blades in the Dark here. I like the push-your-luck-iness this brings to the game, but it detracted from that edge-of-your-seat sense you get each time you roll a saving throw. I added a reference to GLOG’s spell dice here, by making them expire on a roll of over 3, to reintroduce that little bit of luck to compensate. One thing that I went in and added, was that “a save can always be used”, because writing spells and powers, I found my self writing “save vs. death to X” a lot, and I decided that’s silly. If it’s pretty universal, I just don’t write that. You always can use your save. 

    Abilities are gone here, kind of: They’re subsumed with proficiencies into skills. I like how this downplays them, and makes strength something you’ve worked hard on instead of something you’re born with.

    Inventory is obviously modelled after Knave and Mausritter. I can’t remember whose heartbreaker I first saw d6-only-damage in, but I liked it. Damage penalties for increasing range is my take on the more typical difficulty penalty for range. Armour is simplified as simply setting the target for attack actions, and shields are from the classic blog post.

    Conditions are pretty straightforward. They always expire at next rest or are dynamite. Here’s a list of conditions in the game somewhere: Fatigue. Blinded. Clumsy. Confused. Charmed. Dazed. Deafened. Fear. Grappled. Hidden. Invisible. Paralysed. Petrified. Poisoned. Restrained. Sickened. Slowed. Stunned. Unconscious.

    Reaction rolls, morale and initiative is all very basic and uninventive intentionally. Connections originated as my wanting to put some allies and foes directly on the character sheet. I added rules for dual-wielding and for unarmed and improvise attacks as a result of getting to the class sheets.

    Dungeon and Wilderness time is the simplest version I could come up with. Random encounter rolls are soft overloaded, so that distance, surprise, and consequences are built into the simple 1d6 roll. I’m pretty proud of the density of this roll. Lunch and bed time is from Skerples, as I adored the neatness of it. Light sources are also the simplest version of them I could come up with.

    Character creation is based in GLOG, so there are four practices (rather than templates) that you gain sequentially. I had to introduce more dice notation here, which I strongly disliked doing. I added d66, weighted d66, exploding d6 and more than 2d6, because spells and powers required it. As far as I know I invented weighted d66, and I really like it as a method to weigh a list of 36 items heavily towards the early items. I created it specifically because I wanted the more “basic” class sheets to be quite common, but the very weird and unique class sheets towards the end of the list to hardly ever come up and be quite special.

    Writing the class sheets put the CORE through its paces. I wrote about 42 class sheets (some were scrapped completely or reworked, and will never see the light of day) each featuring a mechanical niche, which resulted in my being able to remove a bunch of rules to the class sheets and out of core, and also having to add some rules to core because they were required to maintain niches. 

    SLIMDNGN class sheets

    Non-class sheet stuff first: I included an empty class sheet, so that people could choose to multiclass if they wanted to. I had to break my 1-page rule for spell lists: Magician, Impmother, Mentalist, Witchling, Blink, Pantheonist and Riverdaughter all needed a separate spell list, with the Magician and Impmother requiring more than one page extra, sadly. Of these classes, only the Mentalist gets to choose from a bunch of spells at any given moment.

    One significant concession that I made to the B/X compatibility, was the naming of spells. It’s more handy for the spell names to match, so phrases like “as the sleep spell” make sense, but I’m always nervous about borrowing that stuff. I don’t deeply care that other people won’t intuit the spell names, but basically it goes like this: If a spell effect is similar to a B/X spell, then the treat it as that spell.

    Oh, and I made a wee equipment list. This is based on the stuff in the B/X list. It’s the kind of stuff that just comes up a lot, in my experience. I put it at the end of the Class Sheets

    SLIMDNGN Classes

    My approach to choosing and writing the class sheets was to go through the list of fifth edition subclasses and write down all the ones that were interesting to me. Then, I scoured the internet for GLOG classes with interesting approaches to those niches. Some of them (the mystic, for example), I chose to incorporate as their own class, and some were bumped altogether. Skerple’s summoner, for example, ended up becoming the Impmother, a vastly different class, and a Fae-bargain themed class ended up more deeply inspired by Saltygoo’s Nereid when I couldn’t find a more specific mechanical hook for it. The core three classes ended up more niche than in earlier drafts, because a generic fighter, thief and wizard just felt out of place in the larger tableau, and were replaced with Brawler, (Second) Storeyman, and Magician. Also, I could build a flavourful fantasy world that suits my own archaio-gonzo stylings a little better than popular systems out there right now, like Cairn and Dolmenwood.

    The tableau in particular was intentionally ordered, which is why I invented that weighted d66. Originally each group of six had a name; Basic, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, Odd and Unique. I scrapped this at some point, but this is still the underlying intention.

    I’ll talk about the stuff that is common to almost all the class sheets first: 

    Names are either off-brand inspirational characters or kind-of-random. Looks are intended to spark your imagination, a bit like the original Apocalypse World ones. 

    Heritages give you a simple power, which I had to balance with the complexity of the classes. My intent was 3 basic heritages (like dwarf or elf or human – which I called gnomon here) and 3 weird ones, but that quickly soured as I realised that the niche powers needed to vibe a little more with the classes. 

    Backgrounds I always had a story in mind when I wrote them, but didn’t tell you it, which is a ton of fun. 

    Skills and foibles are half basic ability scores with a class sheet-specific twist, half proficiencies, half personality traits. 

    Connections are from a cast of about 50 characters, so closely based on Blades in the Dark. 

    Equipment was limited to 3 items by space, which was unintentional but interesting. The equipment list sprang out of this limitation, as I imagine most people will want to spend a few shillings on stuff. Speaking of shillings, I set rules on money quickly in the XP section, and XP is roughly the same as B/X, but is for shillings only, and gets unwieldy at high levels which I don’t mind because this isn’t for campaign play. Further in, we get mentions of pennies and pounds as equivalents to copper and gold pieces.

    A few little conventions emerged in the writing here that reward writing down, I think: A size scale of cat to person to horse to elephant to house emerged as the equivalent of small, medium, large and huge. Whenever I say “a size larger”, I’m referring to this scale.

    One final thought on hit points: Sticking to d6s has an interesting consequence: Fighters have 1 fewer HP per level, and wizards and thieves have 1 more per level. I tried to keep this in mind with the class sheet design: A lot of core practices or powers for wizard-types have HP-spending powers to balance out this over-supply, and a lot of the fighter-types have healing powers to balance out the under-supply. This is intentional, but I didn’t do it consistently, but rather where it made sense thematically, so I’m not sure how balanced it all is.

    Class sheets specifics

    The Bruiser was originally the fighter, but there are significant changes from the first draft to the current one, to differentiate them from the Cavalier, the Toxophilite, the Ravager, the Hunter and the Zealot. Now they’re about wading into the fray and beating down.

    The (Second) Storeyman is the new thief, and was almost Burglar on and off, but Storey-man is so much more flavourful. I scrapped some classic thief practice for practices that felt like they were related to break into peoples houses.

    The Magician is basically the Wizard. Not much has changed from my earlier draft, although it bears little resemblance to the classic GLOG magic-user. They can have a total of 6 memory and 8 to 28 spells, although 50% will have 8 and the chances of 28 are around 1%. Because of their huge variety of powers, their practices are pretty straightforward. I like the Magician labelling because they feel a little more Vancian.

    The Cavalier is basically our noble, non-magical paladin. We get a nastier, more religious paladin later in the Zealot. They can inspire their allies, duel their enemies, defend their allies, and are better at slaying dragons.

    The Hunter was a Skerples class that I split in two, making the Hunter half into a companion class with a  hound or falcon, and powers related to observation and stalking. On first draft, it seemed a little too niche, so I added the capacity to fight with your beast in battle for a little more combat utility.

    The Jekyll is was originally the Ravager, our barbarian class. On first draft, taken largely from Skerples, it was pretty uninventive, and I don’t really find the archetype to be particularly interesting. So, I rewrote it to be a Hulk-like secondary personality, developing their own independent goals even as they become more powerful.

    The Toxophilite is our archer class, the other half of the Hunter. The practices that were devoted to environmental stuff, are now for flashy archery. This is our Robin Hood character, and it really feels like it.

    The Warrior-nun is our second gendered class sheet, a decision I actually struggled with a bit, but I thought that gendering the class sheets was actually an interesting world-building decision, and also the whole game is built around rulings, so you can just change it. Everything here is a suggestion, after all, not a rule. This class sheet is a scholar-fighter, with unarmed attacks, but also skills with reading and writing. I quite like this subtler take. 

    Artificer was a complex mess of a class. I didn’t love the vibe of the original draft, and so it evolved through two other classes, first to the automatonist, which had too much overlap with the Iron Man (that became the Automaton), then to the biomechanist, which involved physical upgrades to himself, and finally to the Grafted, inspired by Elden Ring’s Grafted boss, which leads to a much more satisfying open-ended class in my opinion. I don’t think the Artificer will come back, mainly because of the overlap with the more-interesting variant, the Alchemist.

    Xaositect is my wild magic class, largely adapted from Skerple’s sorcerer, with a bunch of additions. I really think this feels chaotic, which is what I want, in a core way that most wild magic classes don’t. I like the simple three powers a lot (not my idea at all), and it’s the only class sheet where I brought across mishaps, which are a common theme in GLOG.

    The Animalist was originally my druid class, but I decided to focus it in on wildlife rather than both wildlife and plant life, basically because an earlier draft of the Witch was plant life based. It initially had wildshape, which I scrapped, to focus on it’s theme of animal control, and to carve out space for the rarer Thereothrope. I moved the combat abilities earlier, as well, because of this. I think this one is a lot of fun, with you gaining animals and gaining ways to interact with them over time.

    The Cantabank is our bard, removed from music. This is our first re-used mechanic, having one similar to the Warrior-Nun’s reality warping knowledge ability, and I’ve incorporated a more powerful version of the Cavalier’s inspiration to buff the Cantabank as they weren’t feeling an appealing class to take.

    Part of why the Cantabank was a little weak, was because I prefer the Jongleur, our acrobat type. This one is primarily mine, and has been a favourite subclass of mine since 2nd Edition. I’m very happy with the five repertoirs that you can gain four of by the end, and the four practices (one of which is in common with the Cantabank, but less powerful) are interesting and applicable to a range of situations. Just a great utility class sheet.

    The Alchemist is a much more inspired Artificer, I think. You too, collect things, then turn them into things that you can later use. The alchemist is a much stronger archetype though, so the practices are neater: You get a homunculus, and you can turn lead to gold. Lots of fun, as the gold turns back.

    The Exorcist is our cleric. I’m not a fan of clerics, but I like this one. It’s a simplification of Skerple’s exorcists. The problem in the original draft is that they were too niche and focused on undead to be fun to play. So, I expanded their powers to utility, removing some combat, and added some utility to their exorcisms outside combat.

    The Powder Rat is my gunslinger. This one is all my own, because most gunslinger types are heavily themed as wild-west, rather than as a very particular type of artificer, which is what this one is. The fire arts are really fun, in my opinion, and I like how I managed to include firearm rules here, and still have significant advantages for being a powder rat. 

    The Assassin has a small overlap with the Hunter (actually it went the other way, I stole the Assassin practice for the Hunter), and we have some random poisons and slowly learn different methods of applying poisons. I love the bespoke poison power, which I think is from Skerples, but otherwise the first draft was just a little soft, so I increase the number of poisons, added limitations to them, and then added some more Hitman-inspired practices.

    Impmother was the one of the last classes I wrote, as it used to be the Summoner, and really the strength of that Skerples class was the huge list of very cool entities. I didn’t really want to steal things wholesale for SLIMDNGN (I don’t know why, I’m adapting enough I feel obliged to use a CC BY NC SA license anyway), so I struggled for a while, until I realised that Skerple’s summoner just wasn’t what I wanted out of a summoner. A summoner to me is like a necromancer, raising legions of the dead. But that also doesn’t make an interesting class sheet (and also, we have Warlord which is similar in theme). So instead, we have a family of imps that live with you. I like these imps, their mutations, and love the idea of growing a family of NPCs, however challenging that might be at the table.

    The Illusionist is another one that is all mine, largely because most of the wizardly classes out there are pseudoclasses that use wizard spell lists, and I was trying to minimise that. I like the power and simplicity of the Illusionist, and I maintained their uniqueness in the spell-list choices for the magician, which I really like too.

    ThePantheonist is a later draft of the earlier God-bothered. The God-botherer was a good idea I struggled with implementing. I wanted a polytheistic cleric, that got their powers from whatever gods they were encountering at the time. Basically, though, this means you had to generate a god for every biome you enter. So I scrapped it for a list of biome-specific gods and scrapped the animist type practices for some more cleric-like ones.

    The Mentalist isn’t based on any GLOG class, but rather on the 2nd edition class, because most of the GLOG classes were the wrong flavour. Some GLOG psychic concepts made their way into the Voidblight and of course I introduced the Mystic whole cloth because it was such a cool take. They’re a classic psionicist, and I love their uses and the focus point system. I love how they get whole disciplines at a time, easy and hard. I love that you lose focus points when you’re interrupted, specifically. Some sciences are a little OP though.

    The Warlord was me wanting to have someone whose specialty was in their followers. I don’t like everyone having followers – it becomes challenging to run. So, trying to load it into a class (similar in concept to the Impmother), is cool. And this one, unlike the impmother, isn’t a caster, so they’re good in combat, and simply have an extra force to direct. They’re very cool, but again, you need to want to manage a cast of characters. They were heavily inspired by the Hardholder from AW.

    The Zealot is the other type of paladin, a kind of cross between ravager and paladin, driven by their religious dogma. Ravager was the first draft Jekyll, and with it gone it preserves the Zealot’s angry niche. I love this one. Simple and flavourful. I got the core idea of an idea from someone, but it’s scrambled up with paladin and things to make it a little more interesting.

    The Quaker is my Avatar homage. I decided making someone to bend all four elements was overkill, so I made them an earthbender, and gave them powers from all the elements. These are drawn from the bender class in the acknowledgements, but are a significant reworking of it.

    The Sage is a little bit of Dwiz conversation and a little bit of Sam, but I tweaked them a lot, because I really liked them as a traveller rather than as a Gandalf. I’m a big fan of this class.

    The Apiarist is the bee-keeper one. On first draft they became more a mutant than a bee-focused druid. After significant revision, they became this more hive-focused class, which I’m much more happy with.

    I adore the Soothsayer, which was a whole cloth creation of mine. I initially made them a real future-teller, and it was a profoundly uninteresting class sheet to play. I revised it to be a charlatan, and it became so much more vibrant. I love how it’s unclear whether or not they are supernatural – practice 2 and 4 seem clearly magical in some way, but 1 and 3 are clearly con-artist territory. Great stuff.

    The Witch is a direct adaptation, but much simplified. I loved how Bottomless Sarcophagus really nailed it feeling like a witch, but it was immensely complex, more than I wanted for any of these classes. I simplified significantly. I liked the little touch of including a coven in the connections on the front page, too.

    The Wormtongue was initially envisioned as a Lich Warlock, and scouring the GLOG sphere I found a series of cultists, and then I stole parts of all those cultists, and then made them into a single, negotiation and lie-themed cultist, which ended up tying back into the name Wormtongue which I really liked. The dying breath thing is very creepy, and I love it. 

    The Sporecerer (previously known as a bunch of things including Fungomancer) is a class sheet I’m having trouble naming. The only real thing I had in mind was hive-minds from Out of the Abyss and being able to raise people from the dead, and so adapted a bunch of this from the fungal colony horror GLOG. I like them a lot, as one of the peak weirdness later class sheets.

    Thereothrope is our werewolf class sheet. There’s a significant amount of overlap with the animalist, but I like the relationships you have with other lycanthropes, and the fact that you’re really all about these specific physical changes. Weirdly, twilight and Buffy ended up being major touchstones in making it more interesting than the classic d&d lycanthrope. 

    The Horologian is a fun reworking of the clockwork man, and I really like it overall. Simple and flavourful, and not too powerful. It got a strong buff on second draft, after we did a lot of work on the Automatonist, and then scrapped it again. 

    Riverdaughter, as I said previously, was originally a fae-blessed or changeling type class, but I couldn’t make it work, and she transformed into this nereid-inspired class sheet instead. She’s all about charm, and water, and it’s a nice theme. I switched her to a siren rather than a water-elemental controller, though.

    The Blink is all me, and is all about having a large amount of very specific niche teleportation powers as a result of their being severed from reality somehow. I imagine them glitching everywhere. I really like the Blink, especially that they get 3 random blinks each day, and that they slowly fix up to 10 blinks that they can use whenever they want. I’m really happy with the absurd utility of all the blinks I came up with, too.

    The Voidblight is a weird one, and ended up more inspired by Skerples Void Cultist than I wanted it to be, particularly in terms of the first practice. The Void gifts are from the Cultist GLOG class, although much rarer. 

    The Mentalist was something I decided to adapt wholesale, because it was so cool. It was intended as a psionicist class, but I felt like it was much bigger than that. Seems like it’d be a lot of fun in play, but it’s almost definitely OP.

    Also, it might be interesting to go through deleted classes. The Summoner was scrapped, as both too heavily derivative of Skerples and also just wasn’t vibing for the simplicity I was aiming for with these class sheets. The Artificier was scrapped after this design commentary was started, as a result of the design commentary, for the Automatonist, who has a robot friend they can upgrade.The God-botherer was scrapped for the Polytheist, who got a list of 36 gods they can switch freely between depending on the Biome they’re in, in order to gain a specific but limited power set. 

    So, how do you build a class sheet, then?

    Names. 3 names inspired by specific characters, 3 names I like for the role. 

    Heritages. I tried to hew to 3 classic heritages (human, dwarf, elf, halfling, orc), and 3 unique weird ones but this quickly devolved as my imagination ran dry. I ended up with a list of about 20 heritages, so by the end I was just picking role specific ones.

    Skills. 3 role specific synonyms for the traditional D&D ability scores, and 3 things that would otherwise have been proficiencies.

    Foibles. 3 role specific synonyms for the traditional D&D ability scores, and 3 things that you’d consider personality flaws.

    Equipment. Necessary and iconic, and a maximum of three. 

    Connections. 3 shared and 3 new. Try to make ones that are interesting either as debtors or allies.

    Backgrounds. Have a story in mind with each background but don’t tell it. They got a combination of 2 of: Trait, Item, Shillings, Mechanical Boon, Relationships.

    Saves: Just choose whichever feels right.

    Practices are unique and thematic. Anything is game for theme, but I kept in mind that thief and magic user classes have a bonus +1 HP per level and combat classes have –1 HP level compared to B/X which I’m balancing against, so I tried to provide balance in terms of HP expenditure for powers or additional healing or defence. A few attempts were made to use non-d6 based mechanics but they never felt worth it. 

    Based off Dungeon Antology’s analysis, I basically considered how powerful the practices were relative to each other, and tried to assign them roughly the following:

    1. Defensive feature or a special skill

    1. Offensive feature or a special skill

    2. Niche ability or progressive ability

    3. Build on a previous practice, authorial power, or quantum feature

    4. Capstone ability

    Attributions and acknowleDgements

    When I look at B/X and most other people’s GLOGs, I love them, but they’re a bit much and I want running them and playing them to be easier. But I love modules. 

    While SLIMDNGN’s rules themselves take no particular inspiration from GLOGs, the class sheets do adapt wholesale huge swathes of the work of others.

    Some class sheets are entirely my own, such as the Blink, Soothsayer, Impfather and Pantheonist, some are frankensteins of many people’s work, such as the Jongleur and Toxophilite. Some are adaptations almost whole cloth, such as the Riverdaughter and the Mystic.

    Accordingly these class sheets are, like the rest of SLIMDNGN, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. 

    Here are the attributions, where there were direct adaptations.

    • Skerple’s Many Rats on Sticks 

    • Skerple’s Coins and Scrolls

    • Arnold K’s Goblin Punch 

    • Arnold K’s GLOG

    • J.N.Sinombre’s Playthings of Mad Gods

    • Ancalagon’s Of Slugs and Silver

    • Dan D’s Throne of Salt

    • Phlox’s Whose Measure God Could Not Take

    • Alex C’s To Distant Lands

    • Spwack’s Meandering Banter

    • Saker Tarsos’ Tarsos Theorem

    • Velexiraptor’s A Blasted, Cratered Land

    • Sam S’s Caput Caprae

    • Type 1 Ninja’s Two Goblins in a Trenchcoat

    • Martin O’s Goodberry Monthly

    • Vayra’s The Mad Queen’s Court and the Mountain at the End of the World.

    • G.R. Michael’s As They Must

    • Rowan Monseur le Battlier’s Bottomless Sarcophagus

    • Xenophon’s Ramblings

    • Salty Goo

    • Princesses & Pioneers

    • GLOG Extra Classes

    • Dungeon Antology

    I encourage you to check out all of their websites!

    There are also very obviously a bunch of games that inform this game, not the least classic Dungeons & Dragons, but also Blades in the Dark, Knave, Cairn, and Troika are all clear inspirations, as are a bunch

    Most importantly, I always play with Dr Wifey, and she was my sounding board for bringing a broader range of references and tropes to appeal to my table, full of princess-playing character optimisers, who’d want to experiment with a broad range of interesting classes.

    Final Conclusions

    I’m proud of the work, I think, although it goes a little against the original super-slim directive. I think the rules are both neater and more thorough that the earlier versions, and also there’s a whole lot more interest as a player for the kind of people I tend to play with. 

    I think I’ll need to leave 0.5 available, though, because it’ll appeal to the slim-purists a little more than this version. And there’s a translation! Overall it worked really well for what it was, I just wanted a little more, it turns out. 

    I imagine there’ll be a long hiatus on updates after this, because it’ll take a very long time to get all of these classes to the table. I hope in the meantime, you enjoy SLIMDNGN!

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: Nirvana on Fire

    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.

    Nirvana on Fire is a 35 page module for Mothership by D Kenny with art by Jerome Berthier. In it, the player characters are sent to save a colony of monks by retrieving a power converter from a manufactory, one that is controlled by an AI who believes itself to be a god.

    In the first location, the colony, I like the stylistic, first-person maps and the simple, evocative keying a lot. The keying is elegant and evocative, although not beautiful or poetic, and swings wildly tonally in a way that is really pleasing and thematic. I’m not a fan of the random encounter table, where events occur without fail whenever you enter a new location. This timing falls down as well, because rolling blackouts happen with the same trigger, meaning I’m rolling 3d10 and using those dice for different things. Most of these encounters don’t add anything to the adventure; they’re flavour. Using random encounters in this way is interesting, but as they’re all atmospheric in nature, they also feel very insubstantial. The exceptions are if you roll a 1 or a 10; a 1 is a concrete encounter with an interesting character; a 10 is the revolution starting! But also there’s a 10% chance that the revolution will start the first time the player characters take a walk; it almost assumes you’ll fudge the dice by the lack of any mechanism to avoid this. Overall, I think the point of this location is simply to communicate a sense of civil unrest and push the player characters to the main “dungeon” of the module, but it’s a little overwrought and complicated for such a simple role.

    In that “dungeon” — Bishamontem’s Sanctum — everything is stronger and more meaningful. The random encounters are punchy and all interesting, foreshadowing or actively engage the player characters. Three of these concern the stalking monster of the space, which is really simply and well handled — unlike the meaningless complexity in the colony. The maps, however — these are the node-based maps — are neither as visually intriguing or as clear as those in the earlier (admittedly simpler) area. They work, though, and use colour as a differentiation, which is elegant although I’m not sure how accessible it is. Closely examining these maps, the whole complex is freely accessible, and only limited by specific access cards; I’d have to get this to the table to see how this feels, but my gut is that this won’t be an interesting or complex puzzle to solve. It’s a small enough space — only 10 rooms — that things like the written out admin password seem a blunt instrument, rather than a fun discovery. This same place has the password to kill the boss, which means if you don’t get this one spot, you can neither finish your job or find out what happened. I can’t find even on rereading how to get access to the final areas, which are marked for Straylight Official access only but I can’t see anywhere how to get that access; it also speaks of Genma the Prophet and I don’t know where he is, although he gets a write up early on. It’s all a bit vague, too vague for me to really feel like I could run with any confidence. I could be missing something, but if I am when I’m rereading large module chunks to find information, I’d argue it’s a failure of information design, rather than my wayfinding. This isn’t a long module; I should be able to find what I want with a find and search function let alone a re-read.

    That’s it for the actual module; 24 pages in total. The rest is what appears to be stretch goal additions: Two additional modules and a custom class. Custom classes are cool, I guess, but I just don’t vibe with them for Mothership. The Acolyte should scream the religious zealots of Alien 3, but it doesn’t sing for me. Both of the modules are better than either location in the main part of Nirvana on Fire: Better, more interesting maps; Clearer, more interestingly keyed spaces; both Noora and Roz’ writing is less florid than the main module, but I’d run either of these interacting, interesting and equally large (or larger) spaces over the main section any day.

    Thematically, I really like the twist at the core of Nirvana on Fire (which I won’t relate here). It brings the module from a bizarre religious twist on Mothership to solidly back under the working class science fiction horror banner. I think it’s neat and fitting.

    I’m not usually a nitpicker for proofing in these reviews, but this zine really needed a good proofread. There an enough small jarring errors, missing words and missing capitalisation that it stopped being a one-off and started becoming a pattern. This team really needed to be one person bigger. This isn’t complex work: You just need someone to read the thing and circle the mistakes.

    The layout in this is clear and bold, but not as hyperdense or complex as in house Mothership layouts. I think it makes a mistake here, as it chooses small condensed point sizes which aren’t especially legible at this page size, and could use the space more wisely. The art is unique and fantastic in my opinion, and very evocative of the religious undertones of the module as a whole. Maps are abstract and modular, which is not my preference, but they’re pretty good as far as modular maps go, particularly just the stretch modules, and better than in, for example, Gradient Descent which operates itself in a similar manner.

    Overall, Nirvana on Fire is a promising concept with interesting themes, that utterly fails for me on execution. I’d have no confidence to run this. There are no playtesters listed and yes, it shows that nobody has run this. I’m honestly pretty disappointed that something with such great art direction and conceptual cohesion was fritters away into such a mess of a module, and that I paid for it. The positive, though: There’s room for another big, artistically innovative religious take on Mothership, for anyone else who cares to take that leap. Both the stretch modules though, make for some decent one-shot material, and particularly if you wanted to introduce someone to Mothership in one night, they’d make an excellent choice.

    Idle Cartulary

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

  • Bathtub Review: Spectacle!

    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.

    Spectacle is a 55 page setting for Troika by Seth Ian and illustrated by Mark Conway, inspired by Jack Kirby cosmic superhero comic books. Spectacle had a complicated funding journey — a failed Kickstarter, and then a re-evaluation and relaunch. Did the challenging landscape of indie development cause this module to falter, or does it thrive despite the cutthroat competition?

    Spectacle opens with an introduction, written in purple and opaque prose fitting the silver age of comics that inspired it, and presenting the premise: People of all worlds are thrown together onto a prison planet to fight in an arena for the pleasure of some kind of god-planet. I am filled with excitement for the premise.

    It follows it up with 36 Troika backgrounds. This is the meat of the module. These are written in the same florid prose as the introduction, and they’re excellent and communicating the world through implication. I’m truly impressed by the author’s style here, as much as it’s aping Kirby. The backgrounds tend towards combat-centric play — there’s an arena so of course — but surprisingly there are hints of non-arena focused play as well in the Bound Haruspex and Tailypo the good dog. Many cleverly imply their goals here too, which could drive play in a way that the original Troika backgrounds failed to do for me — take the Living Bullet’s need to consume star matter or the Knave of Nihil’s desire to bring oblivion. This is clever writing and I’m here for it.

    Next up we have 36 enemies to fight in the arena. Aside from the Occulants, which are specifically servants of Spectacle, I’m not sure what differentiates these enemies from backgrounds. Many are also, simply creatures brought into the arena. However, more clever world-building is here: The implication of rest time between fights, bathhouses, bureaucracies that record information for the Eye, medics and wildlife is all interesting, but leaves me wondering if I’ve missed the point of this module altogether. I thought I was telling a slight tale of rebellion and battle, but perhaps I’m supposed to be telling a tale of living in servitude and under persecution? The Eye itself is started out as number 37: A clear indication to me of the implied story arc here. The player characters are to kill the Eye. After this come a few random tables: Firstly a gladiator name generator, which I appreciate and helps me get into the right state of Kirby-an mind. Then an encounter table suggesting a larger world, endless wastes and a shantytown, but needlessly limiting itself to a d66 table when it probably needed to be more to really communicate this larger world and the activity of the arena in a meaningful way.

    This feels like the intended end to the book. The back matter that follows is firstly another six enemies — mini-bosses of a kind, the minor gods of spectacle. These add an interesting wrinkle of faith on Spectacle, but fail to do the interesting thing and provide us with factions with clear or competing goals. Then comes Bitter Herbs, which is intended to be a 2-page scenario, set in a village on Spectacle, however its illegibly laid out, the only place in the book where the purple prose renders the text unusable for me. If written more clearly and with some headings or any layout choices at all to make it usable, this two page scenario has promise in terms of competing factions and is full of seeds about what Spectacle is supposed to be about: Not the arena, but rather existing in this horrible political climate. An unexpected twist I didn’t anticipate, to be honest, is that this is truly a campaign setting, albeit likely a short one, rather than a one-off arena module.

    And that’s helpful, and I could see uses for this module, but specially with the glaring omission from the Kickstarter promise of “detailed rules for creating and running adventures on the planet”. These are simply not present at all, and this absence is my most significant problem with Spectacle. Because I would have to do a lot of work to make this playable, given the dearth of locations, and the lack of true hooks into play, and lack of information on the arena or how it works. Too much work, to be honest. Perhaps I could get more inspiration from reading Secret Wars or a similar comic that inspired the setting (I’m sure there are others), but that should be here. The nature of the setting — full of characters from other worlds — means that there isn’t enough here about the world in this format.

    Now art. I get the strong impression that the key difference between the first (unsuccessful) and second (successful) crowdfunding campaigns was to do with the art budget on this module, because Mark Conway featured heavily in that first campaign, and contributes 9 pieces of art to my count (aside from the covers) to this. Based on analogous products and of course Troika itself, I would bet that the intent was to have him illustrate every single background here. That would have made for a spectacular book of art, as what he has contributed here are for the most part half-tone masterpieces. But this absence of that art combined with an incredibly pedestrian layout — readable, but not at all compelling or remarkable in any way — Spectacle, sadly, is anything but a feast for the eyes.

    Spectacle is a module after the vein and design of Fronds of Benevolence and Acid Death Fantasy, two modules that have been sitting on my desk to review for some time. And Spectacle also shows the reason why they’re sitting in my desk: This background-forward approach to setting is highly appealing to a writer’s writer, an exercise in iteration and communicating setting through implication, and one that I’d enjoy performing myself, but as a playable product, for me it falls terribly short. This is because I don’t want to pay money for a quantum world that only exists by the whims of the players. Spectacle promised more than that — it promised a structure to support an unusual style of play — but it doesn’t fulfil that promise. What I’m left with is the implication of a grander world full of twisted creatures and interesting politics, the planning of a rebellion and the defeat of a malevolent cosmic god — but all I actually have is an arena where characters with different Troika backgrounds fight. And Troika combat in a desert arena isn’t going to keep my table interested for very long.

    Could I make Spectacle interesting? Yes, if I tried hard enough. But I don’t want to try hard, I want Spectacle to provide me with an everything I need to run at least a few sessions in this battle-torn world. And sadly, Spectacle fails to do that for me. If you sport a deep familiarity with silver age comic book lore, and think you could improvise the setting or are willing to develop it out yourself based on the nuggets here, then Spectacle is the module for you. Its Dark Sun meets Troika in space with cosmic superheroes! But sadly, Spectacle is not for me.

    Idle Cartulary

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

  • Double-overloading the Random Encounter Table

    Over on Prismatic Wasteland, we have a very cool way to roll just 3d6 to tell you what monster, how many monsters, the distance they’re at, their reaction, and whether the players are surprised by this all. It’s elegant as heck at the front end, and takes advantage of the power of 3d6, but because using 3d6 causes every value to become a dependent variable, it is messy as heck at the back end, requiring a worksheet and an extended example to make work.

    Credit to Savid25 on Deviantart

    Now, to be pretty damned clear, dependent variables can lead to interesting overall results, particularly in this case where if you use a variation on “advantage” for increasingly dangerous areas, you’ll get higher numbers and more dangerous results. And having these specific requirements for a random encounter table might actually inspire you to more interesting writing. However, for me, I don’t want to have to put this much thought into the positions on my random encounter table.

    I have a few problems with the specific results here too, particularly that only about 5% of results are surprise results, versus about 17% in B/X. This just seems like less fun, I like surprises. This has a positive dependency in it though: surprises are always at close range.

    Of course, the “problem” (if it is such a thing) of dependency is pretty straightforwardly solved: Firstly but simply using 3 different coloured dice rather than ones that are indistinguishable from each other. But this is both (a) annoying to non-colour blind players and (b) not an accessible tool for colour-blind players.

    But an easier solution is simply to use different sized dice. This is analogous to rolling on 3 different tables simultaneously, yes, but so is the original exploding random encounter table, to be honest, you’re just not differentiating which dice rolls on which of your tables.

    Quickly with probability differences. Switching to 1d4+1d6+1d8 (Jonathan Korman called this d468 on twitter and I’ll take it) gives a slightly softer curve. The chance of doubles on 3d6 is about 33%, and of triples is 5%. The chance of doubles on d468 is about 42%, and of triples is about 2%.

    We can’t explode the d468 die, sadly. It has a very neat weighted danger curve. However, adding 3 to the result gives us this slightly more dangerous overall curve:

    The Rule

    Write a table with results labelled from 3 to 18. The d4 indicates the number of monsters in the encounter. The d6 indicates the distance of the encounter. The d8 indicates monsters reaction. On doubles, the player character’s gain initiative. On triples, roll again: Two random encounters are already engaged with each other.

    In the table results, indicate whether the monsters are in a small, medium or large group, and double or triple your d4 result accordingly. If an encounter result is a specified as a single monster, the d4 can be used to indicate their behaviour. If an area is more dangerous, add 1 to each die (and hence 3 to the overall result).

    The Generic Template

    d4: #d6: Distanced8: Reaction
    11/2/3FarActively friendly
    22/4/6FarCurious and open to cooperation
    33/6/9FarCurious and open to cooperation
    44/8/12Close Bargain or parley
    5–Close Bargain or parley
    6–SurprisedMay attack if victory is likely
    7––May attack if victory is likely
    8––Offended or disgusted

    This gives us a dependency-free version of the original overloaded random encounter table. This incorporates side-based initiative at a slightly higher rate than the original 50% (rather than individual and dex-modified, which was optional in B/X). It gives us a chance of multiple encounters concurrently. The only necessary rule to remember is that more dangerous things should go at the bottom of the table, so that the increased danger works.

    I’d say similarly elegant at the front end, with a lot less math at the back end. I can’t be stuffed writing an example table after all that, so I’ll just copy and modify Prismatic Wasteland’s:

    3 — Small number of escaped human prisoners from the nearby village

    4 — Small number of emaciated dwarves scrubbing orcish graffiti from the walls

    5 — A forbidden orc and dwarf lovers fleeing from their families

    6 — An animated dining room set restlessly rearranging itself (# appearing is highest die)

    7 — A wise troglodyte admiring their treasure, a dwarf-crafted weapon

    8 — Medium number of troglodytes gleefully dragging a fresh orc corpse

    9 — An ooze that disguises itself as a puddle of putrid liquid

    10 — An orc shaman looking for: (1) someone who can teach her a new spell, (2) fresh, wriggling ingredients for a stew, (3) a worthy puppet to overthrow her former ogre-puppet who has become unruly, (4) her kissing snake-kitten

    11 — Orc warriors that are (consult lowest die): (1) grumbling about their ogre of a boss, (2) carrying a wounded ally, (3) taking turns boasting over martial accomplishments (# appearing is double the median die)

    12 — A sentient stalagmite-beast with tentacles, needle teeth and a single eye, that appears as a simple stalagmite

    13 — An ogre warlord playing fetch with his small number of pet dire wolves 

    14 — A giant worm-beast whose face peels open like a banana to reveal sharp pincers

    15 — A pile of bones knitting together to form a large number of animated skeletons of orc warriors

    16 — A young black dragon, searching for materials to add to its burgeoning hoard

    17 — The wraith of a dwarf mage wracked with crippling guilt and consumed with anger

    18 — A demon that wants to possess the body of an innocent looking outsider so it can escape into the surface world and wreak havoc in a populated haven

    Notes on the above table: I’ve already been writing this post for a while and wanted to move on to other things, so it’s definitely all straight up Prismatic Wasteland’s with a few small changes. If it were mine, I’d do these things: All the individual monsters would have 4 unique behaviours. I didn’t order things at all except for putting deadlier and rare things higher, and less deadly and rarer things early, with more common things in the middle.

    Anyway that’s my double-overloaded random encounter table. Even more overloaded, but with even fewer dependencies, and only really one probability concession.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • SLMDNGN Update

    SLMDNGN, my slim dungeon-crawler, has just received an update.

    I’m really enjoying playing this hyper-light B/X /GLOG fork, so I’m finding little tweaks.

    The new version separates the core rules and character creation, so that players can create their characters using the character sheet.

    Gran has also generously provided a Portuguese translation for any Portuguese-speaking fans!

    Check the latest update here!

    Idle Cartulary

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

  • Bathtub Review: The Stone-Flesh Gift

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

    The Stone-Flesh Gift is a 38 page module for Mothership by Jordan Boschman. In it, the player characters explore a living, breathing ship that that has gone rogue and they have a chance to correct its systems. As with many (perhaps most) Mothership modules, it leans heavily into body horror and the themes that accompany it. It specifically pitches itself as a low prep module, which is an admirable goal.

    The low prep approach for me is a little compromised by the 8 pages of introductory rules. These rules contain a lot of the conflicting subsystems that contribute to making the ship an interesting puzzle to explore, however it’s a lot, and most of it is the kind of stuff that’d be better off in a sidebar in a different layout approach to reduce this high prep front-loading effect. Oddly, the back matter hides relevant information like the role of Father in its text, which probably could be more interestingly front-loaded, so I wonder if this is more a lack of consideration and reliance on legacy scripting than a conscious choice. Either way, I think this front matter — which all makes the module more interesting — undermines the goals of reducing prep. I think that leaning harder in either direction — an easily referenced index section (although I wouldn’t put it at the front) or drip feeding in the text — would’ve been a better approach for usability than this hybrid approach.

    I really like the approach of giving almost all rooms a single column in two column layout. These are clearly nested, well signalled body texts that are easy to understand and to find relevant information. However, it often feels like the information needed to run a location isn’t always at hand, relating back to the previous concerns on organisation. Take the Neurocouncil, for example: information on thinkmatter, what you can do from here, the nature of the malfunction, and the fact that the council is supposed to give out a quest are all elsewhere in the book and not easily referenced. This is space ripe for improvisation, but there are instructions that the module wants me to follow that I could miss in the moment because of this. I need easier reference to the intertextual links, or for it to be something I can improvise, because low prep to me is not I memorise your whole 40-odd page zine.

    Some of the choices here are counter-intuitive as me as well: I thought the room number listing on the minimap was for the column that contains it, and it wasn’t clear at all that these numbers referred to different page numbers until I realised I needed to figure out what those numbers were referring to. In my opinion it needs to be used in conjunction with a printed map to take advantage of its features.

    I should add there are a bunch of features I like here a lot. While the hallways are not numbered, exits are described which support with player character informed decision making. The neurolinks that feature in most rooms dole out interesting, flawed information regularly. Most rooms have some level of interactivity, although information for fulfilling the functions in the introductory section is pretty thin on the ground, and I think it seems pretty unlikely following the text that the player characters will figure out how to fix the ship; I feel like the neuro link could have more consistently provided useful information.

    I really enjoy the writing flourishes here, although they’re more spaced out than is my preference. Evocative phrases such as “the constant temperature of a fever” and “a gland, hardened into a large crystal and with facets like singed emeralds” appear sprinkled throughour the book, and really bring the body horror and the text as a whole home. But most of the writing is purely functional: The professed goal of a low-prep, usable text appears in the author’s mind to be in tension with leaning into his best lyrical inclinations, sadly. I’d love to see him write a module without the gestures towards usability, and let his imagination run wild.

    It also leans into its central goal of body horror in terms of its themes, taking advantage of the alive-ness of the ship and its factions to delve into topics that are interesting to me, such as reproductive rights and control, and into the ontology of cancer and cancerous growth. This is cool and interesting themes to be addressing in body horror, and most sci-fi horror isn’t as thoughtful in its faction set up as this is.

    The layout in the Stone-Flesh Gift is easily criticised, but also is rather pleasingly DIY and just kind of ziney, y’know? And it was a Zinequest module. There’s some exceptional layout artist somewhere who can make something seem like it was put together with xerox and glue and also be highly usable and legible, but in the mean time I really appreciate how much this leans into the zine in zinequest. I particularly adore the cut out public domain (I assume) anatomical drawings used as maps, and the striking use of colour and highlights. In the light of the balance attempting to be struck between a DIY aesthetic and dense, TKG-style usability, the two main layout flaws that outweigh the charming DIY ugliness in some of the choices, are the choice to bottom-center the headings, which makes it difficult to find at a flick through, and the interminable line length on the single column pages.

    So, reading cover to cover, what we have is an interestingly complex dungeon for Mothership, with a weird theme, three pleasingly alien factions — plenty for a relatively small dungeon — and generally interesting themes. It’s very much on my radar, but the missed opportunities in terms of organisation mean that it feels like it’ll be more effortful to bring to my table than most other modules I have, which really just need me to show up with the book. Sadly, while excellent in so many ways, with striking aesthetics, compelling themes, interesting spaces and cool interactions, the Stone-Flesh Gift fails to achieve its goal of low-prep for me. But, if you don’t mind reading 40 pages of pretty decent writing, taking some notes, and printing off the map and a few worksheets, this is going to be a few very unnerving, interesting sessions of Mothership play, that I’d highly recommend.

    Idle Cartulary

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

  • SLMDNGN Design Notes

    Advanced Fantasy Dungeons was a whole lotta maximalist design. You might be surprised to find that’s not what I usually play, and I’m craving simplicity. So I wrote SLMDNGN. Today. You can download it here for free. The design principles:

    • Basically B/X
    • Run it mainly in my head
    • Just d6s
    • Live conversion only

    I drew from Skerples’ GLOG hack Many Rats on Sticks and Blades in the Dark for this wee pamphlet game.

    Here are my poorly organised design notes:

    • I basically wrote it because I was sick of deciding what system to use, so I’ll playtest it when I next playtest a module I’ve written.
    • I chose GLOG as a partial template mainly because I love GLOG classes, and it’s a way more interesting and approach to classes to make weird unique versions of the three core classes for your characters or campaigns than to make a bunch of classes that already exists.
    • I chose B/X because I wanna just play B/X modules, and I tend to stat for B/X simplified (HP, AC as armour, attacks and saving throws).
    • Everyone gets 1d8 HP equivalent at Level 1. This basically means wizards and thieves have bonus 2HP extra, and clerics have bonus 1 HP extra every level. I should incorporate these bonus HP into their class powers. Fighters get a 1 HP penalty each level as they level up; this really adds up. These are incorporated into Wizard and Fighter as Bodge and Parry, but I don’t have anything for the thief.
    • I basically modelled saves after resistance because they don’t have a target number, and I didn’t want a matrix of values. I changed my mind about AC and enemies rolling dice, but then realised it’s a cool power for Fighters to be able to just nope the occasional attack, so I left it Steel Saves in anyway.
    • Dynamite was inspired by Monsterhearts and my friends in the Dice Exploder discord.
    • I decided to use meters because this is for me, and 10 feet — the size of a typical B/X flagstone — is the easy to remember 3 meters.
    • Death saves are fun and dramatic. If this was more than a pamphlet, I’d include a fatal wounds table.
    • It was hard to squeeze classes in, so the most interesting thing from Skerple’s hack had to be cut — the unique skills.
    • The only thing that would need on the fly conversion is ability score related stuff, which I’d award as a positive or negative condition.
    • I’ll just have to remember the new ACs, sorry, but there are only 3 of them.
    • Heritages I just wanted to be there, I borrowed them all from Skerples I think.

    That’s my whole thought process.

    I hope you enjoy SLMDNGN.

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

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  • I Read Slugblaster

    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 stick my new cargo bike in the car and drive it home, but it doesn’t fit and instead I have to ride it home, so I’m resting in a park half way through this interminable ride and reading Slugblaster while sipping a hot cross bun iced chai chocolate.

    Slugblaster is a much-lauded purportedly Forged in the Dark game featuring teens on hoverboards sneaking into other dimensions to do delinquent teenager things. The vibe here is kind of Scott Pilgrim meets Ferris Bueller meets Paper Girls? It gives massive inspired-by-music I-don’t-listen-to-personally vibes, although while it calls out punk at one point it never provides a playlist or an inspiration list.

    The art and layout here does a lot of heavy lifting regarding these vibes: Bright, cartoony, with a very strong colour palette. This colour palette could be better adhered to — it steps away for in-world advertisements and a few other things and I think suffers for it — but overall it’s a stellar effort. The layout is in square format, in two columns (although in a few variants), and is beautifully simple and clear, while keeping visually interesting and consistent. It’s a remarkable feat.

    The introductory section largely follows the same structure as Blades in the Dark, complete with a pop-punk version of the blob diagram. It incorporates a very neat reframing of the player principles as player tips, which I like a lot — more games should do this. I love a good set of bespoke principles. There are no action ratings here, but you can boost, kick or hype for a bonus, and you can make a dare — a cute take on devil’s bargain but it doesn’t work like its namesake — in exchange for one as well. The GM’s moves are similarly reduced to simply snags and slams, and resistance is retained in the form of a more metatextual Nope! At this point, I start to feel quite overwhelmed by the endless list of quite flavourful but also very samey terminology. While it’s redeemed by the smart move to keep each section to one spread each, twenty new terms in six pages is just too much for me to retain.

    Beats are a new addition without an analogue: Players can buy story beats for their characters. This is a neat mechanic, but complicated by the way it’s presented, which is into different lists according to the kind of story you want to tell, in addition to unique beats for your specific personality (these will be our playbooks, and will be discovered later). I thought initially, that the opportunities and challenges presented here were in fact a run generating tool because at 25 pages in I’m not sure what a run will look like, so would’ve been neat, but alas they’re not. Runs gets two spreads, one of them being the generator I was hoping for. It really leans into the GM not being the driver of the plot here — the players come up with what they do and the GM is to react. Weirdly, it then jumps to epilogues, which I had to search the text for as they’d been scarcely mentioned at this point. This is how you finish out the campaign. I know you have to fit it in somewhere, but a little repetition would’ve helped here to clarify the role of the epilogue. These work a little like the epilogues in Fiasco, leveraging the doom and legacy that characters have earnt over the campaign.

    Our next section is a whole big example of play, which is, to be frank, fantastic. It shows exactly how the game is meant to be played: A combination between high-emotion low-stakes teen drama and wild pulpy hi-octane action. The problem, I think, is that it feels lower paced than I want a game with these vibes to feel. It doesn’t feel like this game wants to slow down for discussions with your parents. The vibes this game gives says to me this window into the teen experience wants to be only the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. I feel tension in how much the example and the rules want it to be a quieter exploration of adolescence.

    Character creation is a fill in the form style, which I really don’t prefer to the picklist and checkbox style. I think more flavour and vibes that are trying to be communicated through flavour text in the book could be communicated with names and families built into more traditionally designed playbooks, and befit the teen experience of really experiencing the world through other people’s lenses. That said, the personalities are really mainly about their beats and arcs, and I expect you’ll be choosing from the heart or smarts arc more than anything else. But this is not the only thing the player designs: They also design their “signature device”. This is fun, cool and flavourful, but character creation is becoming a bit of a drag for what was previously presenting as a very rules light game. Again, this feels like it’d have been better as a playbook variation than a book section. This ain’t Kansas and I’m not optimising anything here. Crew creation is collaborative, and includes a little worldbuilding as well — factions and worlds start appearing here.

    One jarring inclusion here is tier, rebranded as fame. As in Blades in the Dark, this indicates how powerful you are, and feels oddly out of place in a game that tries really hard to avoid these kind of conceits — appropriately given the subjects are teens. I understand the urge to make worlds of increasing difficulty, it just feels at odds with the rest of the design to me.

    Next up we have a bunch of universes and a bunch of monsters, and a bunch of factions, sponsors and rival crews. Altogether this section is absolutely fire, and it raises Slugblaster to the next level: Given these universes are simply sets for your latest run, and everything else is interdimensional too, despite the increased freedom it serves as a graffitied hypersaturated Doskvol. Reading through these — and the stretch goal additions that are also included in the correct sections rather than at the end of the book, an innovation I shouldn’t have to make note of — I feel like I could throw them down at the table and get this game running very quickly.

    The GM section (now they call them Slugmaster, which it should’ve been already imho), is pretty good stuff. As always, there’s too much, but we have bespoke GM principles and moves, which I love to see, we have guidance for special scenes — which is also super valuable (although the chase rules aren’t super dynamic for me) — and most importantly we have clear guidance around saying no (and yes, but the no advice is just golden). Then we have the seemingly mandatory “how to hack my game section”, which I’ll say little on except: I don’t need help thank you.

    That’s Slugblaster! How do I feel about it? It’s a more thematic simplification of the Forged in the Dark framework than other simplifications I’ve played, my favourite of which was Retropunk. Most of what it does is solidly in line with its themes, with a few jarring examples. I must say, though, the Forged in the Dark framework feels at odds with what it’s trying to achieve, and you can see this with its considerable overtures towards distributing narrative control mechanically in a very conscious way. You’re really choosing personalities by story you want to play out, and using your character sheet to facilitate those stories and their beats. And you can see the seams showing as this distributed, goal-oriented narrative design goal strains against the sandbox, systems driven heritage it’s developed from. This contrasts with less adventurous Forged in the Dark games such as Brinkwood or Retropunk (although Retropunk is more innovative than Brinkwood), but it doesn’t innovate on its predecessor as seamlessly and interestingly as Mountain Home for example. It feels a little like the three biological child of Monsterhearts who don’t understand why it doesn’t have the same systems as its adopted Forged in the Dark siblings.

    It’s themes, although I think clear in the author’s mind, clash a little with its aesthetics, too, although looking through the personalities and the character archetypes listed in them, perhaps this is simply a bad sell at the front of the book. Most of these properties feature gonzo action and heartfelt quiet moments, they just don’t feature going home to the real world to have them. Reading Armour Astir, I noted I want those big feelings to resolve themselves through metaphorical action in these types of games, but Slugblaster wants you to resolve it through dinners, stargazing and first kisses under the bleachers, and it doesn’t communicate that particularly well. Not my jam, but if it’s yours, you’ll enjoy the downtime and beats here.

    I really struggled with the onboarding here. The structure combined with the admirable insistence on brevity, combined to make a very front-heavy rules text that I struggled to wrap my head around despite most of the terms being analogous to a system I already understood. It may have been better drip-fed than presented in a smorgasbord; certainly for me at least. The vibes were impeccable, though, for the most part, in the rules structure.

    Overall, then, despite the mess, and despite the poor onboarding, Slugblaster is a unique game with great artwork and clear layout. It’s held back by challenges in information design, and by mixed thematic messages that take a significant portion of the text to clarify and wash out. I don’t think Slugblaster is the best version of itself — what game is? — but if you want to play skateboarding interdimensional teens feeling their feelings without the darkness and biting queer truths that come with a game of Monsterhearts, this is probably the game for you. But for me, the biting angst of Monsterhearts is closer to my own experience, and so Slugblaster feels a little sanitised and cartoony for me to vibe with strongly. It was still worth a read, though, as for me it was an interesting but unsuccessful experiment in taking the chassis of Blades in the Dark and reimagining it as a very different kind of game, and it has helped me understand better where some of those limits on the chassis might lie, and why. As someone interested in games, a good read. Will I play Slugblaster? Nah, I didn’t grow up in Hillview.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Reflections on a West Marches Campaign

    So, a few years ago I ran an open tabled West Marches campaign in 5th edition. I did this because it didn’t seem like enough of my in person playing friends could commit to a weekly game, and a West Marches campaign seemed like a good way to get people to the table without a commitment to showing up every week. I’m going to talk about what the basic set up was, what my experience as a referee was, and how it worked out.

    It terms of basic set up, it was pretty much identical to the West Marches by Ben Robbins. A core town on the southern border of a frontier; a revolving party of characters where many players had multiple characters; the deeper into the wilderness you get, the more dangerous it got. Under the hood it was a little more complicated. I built in four layers of history, back thousands of years, and tied all dungeons and treasure to these different layers. They had unique powers and iconography and their own script and their own documents out there. Modern societies out there were tied in some way to this history, and fast travel was tied to one of these societies and translating their artefacts. The world itself was a huge hex map which I filled completely close to the town, and then gradually built out as we played further from town. So my prep every week was “make more world” and then “change the world” according to the player’s actions. Oh, and I realised pretty quickly they wouldn’t ever plan to return home, so I added a roll to return that was pretty punishing.

    As a referee, this was a very prep intensive set up. As I have no idea where the players are heading, I have to prepare for as far as they can travel in a session. That’s a lot of hexes for session one. It took weeks of preparation. But it was also pretty satisfying to see the random encounter tables and locations interact and respond to the player characters as they travelled around.

    The decisions the players made also confounded my prep a lot: They didn’t want to delve deeper, they wanted to see what was in every direction. This has the effect of firstly expending a lot of my early encounters fairly quickly, making the closer locations a lot dryer (else I have to restock them,), and secondly triggering a bunch of events and then ignoring them while things progressed unchecked. This was both challenging and really, really interesting, because it resulted in a really dynamic world that was clearly operating independently of the player characters, but also escalated things relatively quickly at low levels, making play very dangerous very quickly.

    The players who started coming, eventually just formed a regular group anyway, which made me feel like all the prep was a waste of time, as for a small group we could have as much fun with my doing a small percentage of the preparation, if we ran a more traditional campaign. This is why the campaign ended: We had a ball, but it was very challenging to run, and the payoff wasn’t worth the amount of work we were putting in.

    But, that payoff was a really fun, dynamic and memorable campaign full of unexpected twists, meaningful and funny deaths, and compelling characters and location. The players loved having a rotating cast of characters because they had the opportunity to experiment with the huge potential characters available in fifth edition.

    Ok, so take-aways:

    For the players, there was a huge joy in running this in a system that rewarded having a bunch of characters. For the referee, though, fifth edition was quite punishing. If I were to run a West Marches game again, I would run it in a game that offers a lot of support for a wide range of character options, without the complexity: Something like OSE (with Black Pudding or something similar added) or GLOG strikes me as excellent options.

    For the referee, the prep was excessive. The scale of prep is difficult in the west-marches model to avoid, but there are ways to minimise it: The easiest is to run this entirely in a pre-written world: Dolmenwood or Wolves Upon the Coast strike me as recent options that are of sufficient size to sustain this type of play long-term, although to both you’d have to add restocking and more global interactivity to replicate the dynamics, because that was one of the best parts of play. You could do that simply by building random encounter tables that feature adjacent region incursions, and by making sure different factions are actually actively competing for territory.

    In terms of the town, my players really wanted to increase in it. I’d use Downtime in Zyan or another similar supplement (maybe On Downtime and Demesnes) to facilitate this natural inclination towards active, interesting downtime.

    Building big, map-spanning linguistic and other puzzles and history into the world made for interesting and compelling play. I’d do that again. Maybe use this to facilitate this stuff. Breaking groups of hexes into regions, giving each region an iconic boss with existing relationships with the other bosses around it really worked. These bosses were not necessarily all aggressive, some were creepy, some oracles, some good, most were mixed.

    I would never run a game like this for my home table again. It just didn’t work and I wasted a lot of time on unused prep. Your home table might be different, but I think my home game wanted to be a regular game and not an open table, and it self selected for that. I would run West Marches for a public table or an online game, though.

    Oh, I’d arrange the organisation differently if I ran it again, too. My group had trouble organising themselves, but part of that was paucity of information. I would provide a map with lots of rumours pinned to it if I ran it again. Make the rumours visual. Tie them to expeditions and scraps. Jobs. Make it easier to be directed out in the world. This might impact the broad exploration inclination that my group showed.

    This isn’t exhaustive at all, but rather a free association and remembrance. I don’t have any notes from this campaign, unlike my Dragonlance campaign I wrote about a few months ago, sadly. If anyone has specific questions, I’m happy to answer them tov the best of my recollection, of course, and I may add them to here as well if you do.

    My conclusion: West Marches, for me, didn’t work. I could facilitate similar play at an open table more easily than I did back then, with some of the considerations mentioned here. I think that it takes a very specific group to be as independently driven as Ben Robbin’s group was, and sadly at the time I ran this, that wasn’t who I had. So your mileage with any of this advise may vary.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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  • Bathtub Review: The Undermall

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

    The Undermall is an 18 page dungeon crawl for Electric Bastionland with art, writing and layout by Ari-Matti Toivonen. It features an abandoned mall beneath Bastion, that has been warped by the evil there. If it wasn’t inspired by Warren’s post Megadungeon Malls, it’s a case of remarkable convergent evolution.

    This is a comedic dungeon. It’s full of little tidbits like a gelatinous cube collecting appliances and clockwork cops chasing rat teens. The vibes are very much 21st century mall, which clashes a little with my electric-era bastion, but leads to a lot of decent jokes. I think the vibes would’ve been a little better had they been a little more early 20th century mall, and I’d dress it up this way if I were to run it I think; I feel like adding more anachronism would make it a little more fun and weird. But the tension between humour and usable, interesting play is managed well here, which isn’t something I see done well, often.

    As far as dungeons go, this doesn’t innovate or skip any essentials, but it nails most of them. The hooks and random encounters are highly relational and location-specific, leading play rather than just interrupting it. I just wish there was a “roll twice” option on the encounter table simply because it would be fun to see these interact; they do occur in rooms as well, though, so perhaps that’s inevitable.

    The map has multiple entrances and appears looped, but actually isn’t meaningfully so. Thanks to dimension-warping stretches access to many areas is randomised. There are only six hallways aside from these stretches, making, I would expect, a difficult to navigate space. In addition to this, there are no “empty” rooms on the map, making it a very dense dungeon. There is a random table of empty stores and the map implies, perhaps, that they’re there, but I’d have rathered a 13 room dungeon with a few empty rooms than randomised empty stores with no set locations. All in all, I’d have to put some effort into modifying this dungeon, I think: Adding predictable routes to make navigating it an interesting spatial challenge, and adding a few empty rooms for retreat and pacing purposes.

    But the contents of those ten rooms are honestly excellent. They’re weird and wonderful in my opinion, fun twists on what you encounter in a suburban mall: Optometrists that change your vision on a hit, skeletal baristas, murderous plushies. Good stuff. There are non combat encounters here, but they play not as rests but as interludes; I like them, but I don’t see the party barricading in the Starbucks with Jakke. The writing isn’t beautiful, and is very dense, but it’s clever and interesting.

    The legibility of these entries could be improved with clearer typographical flagging, better indentation in the bullet points, and perhaps a clearer pattern with bullet use. At a page and text level though, it’s easy and clear to navigate. The art is good, and characterful, and I like the recurring mini-map.

    The book finishes with the aforementioned abandoned stores and a few other flavourful tables, all of which I like, but wish they were built into the other procedures: Simple: An encounter is a six, an announcement on 5, perhaps. Then this table isn’t something I need to consider how to incorporate or something I’d forget. Even better: Make the announcements foreshadowing for upcoming events encounters.

    All up, yeah, I’d run the Undermall. This is a damned good short module, that just needs a few tweaks to be nigh perfect, with some of those tweaks being entirely personal preference. It’s a no-brainer addition to an Electric Bastionland campaign, and I’m going to keep an eye out for future work from Ari-Matti Toivonen. We have an up-and-comer here.

    Idle Cartulary

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

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