• I Read Cloud Empress

    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.

    Edit, 24th January 2024: This post was nominated for a Bloggie award! Thank you for all your support everyone!

    I was going to go to the beach today, but there’s a cyclone or something and the weather is miserable, so instead I read Cloud Empress. It was on my list mainly because I was talking to Sam about my review of Beecher’s Bibles, and was asked the question “Do Mothership fans like the system enough to follow it to other settings or is that community ultimately more about the settings/vibes than the specifics of the rules?” and I thought that was interesting, and Cloud Empress is about the opposite approach to a Panic Engine game to Beecher’s Bibles, to be entirely honest.

    You see, Cloud Empress isn’t just a rulebook based on the Panic Engine, it’s also got a companion setting book, and it has seven additional short zines that detail specific locations beyond what’s in the setting book. If what Mothership fans like about Mothership is that there’s a lot of content available for it, Cloud Empress is off to a resounding start. It makes this a difficult review, though. I said I was going to the beach, but honestly It’ll probably take me a few days to read all of this and write about them, so I’m going to take my time, and review the entirety of Cloud Empress, because honestly why make nine zines when you could have just released a book? That’s Watt’s first mistake, to be entirely honest. This should’ve been a chonky hardcover book.

    Oh, I should start more formally. Cloud Empress is an ecological science-fantasy setting, reminiscent (to me) of Nausicca and Mononoke, mostly written by Watt (with a star-studded cast of guest writers and additional developers), fully illustrated in absolutely excellent form. The core two books are 60 A5 pages long each, and all seven modules total about the same, so it’s an ambitious project, and as I said above, honestly it should’ve been a chonky hardcover, and I’d hold off until Watt releases it as a deluxe edition because these different documents I find a little difficult to wrap my head around. Like, at least release it as three books?

    Enough about that particular complaint, anyway. To the first of the nine books: The Rulebook. Watt is a lovely writer, who adopts the voice of a grandmother telling her people’s story to the younglings. It’s wordy, though, and I immediately bounce off the density of the text, and the floridness of the word choice. It’s well-written, but it’s definitely not for me. In the rulebook, this prose text doesn’t play a huge part in the delivery, and to perhaps the text’s detriment, my eyes tend to skip over it. I need this delivered in bite-sized pieces, scattered through the rules and in its tables, rather than where it’s delivered in page-long (or to be fair, half-page long with art) chunks. It’s also organised a little unintuitively: You don’t find out what chalk is until after you have to decide if you need to take the “Chalk Collecting” skill. But I definitely don’t begrudge the time spent on this unique world and its unique terminology. The vibes here are immaculate, right down to the borders on the character sheet.

    The character creation rules seem equally inspired by Into the Odd’s backgrounds as they are by the original mothership rules, with less focus on skills (no skill tree, just a skill list) and more on gear and sparks for roleplay. The skill list itself has a few entries that speak to the uniqueness of the world (“chalk collecting”, “thopter piloting”), but some that while they do do that, may be of limited use from first impressions (“Farmwork”, “Needlework”). In most players, with the background of deadliness we’re inheriting from Mothership, I wonder if anyone would choose the latter over “Spell casting” or “Firearms”, despite what it says about the world.

    The basic rules feature little deviation from what you’d expect from an adaptation of the Panic Engine (although, and I’m not sure if this is a feature of timing or something else, it’s not called a Panic Engine system but rather a Mothership hack). There are a few additions that do shed light on the intentions of the world: Rest, for example suggests tasty meals or heartfelt conversation. There are weird magical mushroom spores. There are spells that are very weird in a perfect way related to the fact that they’re closely related in theme to the magical bug corpses that litter the landscape. Magical items (“crests“) are the stolen and broken remains of ancient civilizations architecture. The biggest deviation (again, seemingly seeking inspiration from Into The Odd) is that “most attacks auto-hit”. You only roll an attack if it’s difficult, as do your foes, so there’s a lot of implication that you’re supposed to be clever with combat so that you deal a bunch of damage very quickly for free and they have to roll their dice. Again, there’s good flavour here, though: All weapons are dual use, because this world is not a one of violence. I love the equipment lists which are full of flavour but with very few elucidations. Great fuel for imagination, as are the “What Do You Find” tables. Before I move onto the next book, I’m left feeling like the rules would have been best simplified to a few pages, and the flavour been transferred to the next book, as this feels like it would be a messy reference at the table; but the rules are simple and who doesn’t know how to play Mothership? I could do it from memory. We shall see.

    My first impression of the setting book is the inside cover, a big whopping impressive hex map that is rendered as a 16 bit video game map and that…honestly it’s incredibly jarring. The amount of money spent on the art in these books, and they couldn’t have splurged for an illustrated map? Really disappointing, and completely out of left field design wise, in a series of books that is otherwise has an incredibly coherent design direction. The map itself works, and is full of relevant information on the different areas, travel and trade. The rules for the hexcrawl are in this book, rather than in the other. I suspect that from a readability perspective, I’d expect to have these two zines at the table, and so I’d want the rules for travel in the rule book on my left, and the setting details on my right in a separate book. They were released simultaneously (relatively) for me, so I don’t see benefit in separating these out. The rules are fine, and the map is useful. That’s nice. I’ll reset my expectations going into the book proper.

    We have a few different regions, each with a Hunt & Gather table, encounters (some with expanded descriptions), unique NPCs, brief 1 paragraph hex descriptions, and then a few specific fully keyed locations (again in that jarring 16 bit map style, which I’m suspecting now was a conscious choice but in my opinion it’s a bad one). So much of this book’s writing is absolute fire, even the merchant generators (which give you a nice single word description of each merchant, plus what they have), and the mood table (which is an interesting take on the reaction table). There’s even a rumour table, although it’s not the most magnetic take on the rumour table; it ranges from clear hooks “Sleepy Renault will give a crest to anyone who brings him the Farmerling pirates on the Broken Back river” to very vague ones that don’t provide much guidance, “There must be a Flesh-thresher repair depot“. I genuinely love most of this.

    The layout is very clear in terms of finding what you want, when you want it, and the art (apart from the maps that I shan’t perseverate on) is fantastic and consistent. See the art on the cover? The books are packed full of art that level of quality. To the gills. The only criticism is that the bold layout choices make the columns of text writing into a challenging read for me, at least in digital format. The font feels a medium or bold set, even for the body text, and my eyes glaze by the end of a paragraph. Luckily, though, most of Watt’s writing doesn’t range more than a paragraph for a single item. The ones that do are usually the major characters in specific locations, and should they be shorter? They’d be easier to run, but their descriptions are so compelling: “The giant is waking, and crumbling to dust. Oola must learn all she can. She only agonises over her lost memories and the evaporating resources.”. I don’t think we’d be better off without these descriptions, but maybe we could use a lighter weight to make it easier to read in this level of consistent density.

    The final seven short zines are specific keyed locations on this hex map. Each of these are very cool, but interestingly aren’t included on the hex map descriptions where all the others are. This makes sense as they’re not included in the main setting book, but it makes them a clumsier addition. They, like the main book, do not share a common structure, and while they’re all good, Alfred Valley and Joel Hine’s really stand out as being compelling and places with a reason to explore rather than simply a vibe. That said, I’ll call out Kienna Shaw’s piece because it’s genuinely a great vibe, even if I don’t see a reason why I as a person would actually attend the ball.

    Ok, that was a lot of reading, and it took me a few days. I was definitely right on the money with my first impression that this should all have been a single book. There are just not many rules, and they’re hard to navigate amongst the setting information. It’s very well written, although longer-form than my taste leans, and the guest writers contributions are decent to excellent. But the lack of incorporation of the guest writers works into the setting book is an oversight that weakens that setting book overall, which is otherwise excellent. The entirety of Cloud Empress’s releases so far give me a confused sense of what they’re trying to be: It seems like they want a somewhat pastoral, travelling company type gameplay (with skills like farming and needlework) but haven’t provided the tools to do that. They did a better job than Beecher’s Bibles did (even if Beecher’s Bibles didn’t telegraph that gameplay as well as Cloud Empress did), but not enough for what they communicate. What they’ve written instead, in the hex-crawl and keyed dungeon locations, is a more traditional wilderness fantasy exploration game with a unique setting. And there are world elements that support that well! Crests, Spores, the dangerous combat system — all of this supports some interesting, heavily-themed traditional dungeoncrawling play. The stronger supplementary material supports that kind of play as well, with the other supplementary material somewhat listless; I just wish that the other modules actually were better supported by the rules. What’s the point of giving me new rules, if they don’t support the type of gameplay you’re aiming for?

    All in all, I suspect what I’m experiencing is a sense of betrayed expectations: The references, the descriptor of “ecological sci-fi” and the promise to “find a way to thrive, live and love in the psychic wreckage of earth, scavenging” is hinted at by the modifications to the Panic Engine and then gives way to a traditional mode of play, unsupported by the supplementary material and the setting book. Yes, I can still play that game — I could run Cloud Empress in Fifth Edition if I wanted to as well — but I feel like if you make a promise, there should be support for the kind of play you want, in the modules, in the setting book, or in the rules. Somewhere. I wish I was seeing it, but I’m not.

    That fairly major complaint set aside, this is well-written, an intensely compelling far-future post-apocalyptic setting, weird and unique and familiar enough to me that I could easily make it my own, with popular enough referents that I could easily sell it to friends to get them to join my table. The Panic Engine is fine here, and although it doesn’t support the play that it promises, it still makes for compelling, high-risk gameplay. What Cloud Empress actually is, it is pretty damned good at. It just isn’t everything it says it is.

    (For what it’s worth, today, when I finished reading Cloud Empress, I was going to go to an air-conditioned shopping centre and shop for Christmas presents, but my wife ran late with the car, so I did this instead.)

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: Seven Stars of the Unseen

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

    Seven Stars of the Unseen is a 24 page module for Cairn by Dan Fawcett. It’s another submission to the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam that I’m using to highlight excellent hobbyists and up and coming authors. It’s an isekai adventure (for those not into manga think the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), featuring a search for. mysterious missing woman who was cursed by a dark god.

    Layout wise, it’s not hard to follow, but not especially pretty or easy on the eyes. It opens poorly, with messy font choices and spacing, but for the majority of the Art is appropriate public domain, and I really like the look of the maps even though they’re really just point crawls layered over nice public domain art.

    I like this module a lot. It is bursting with ideas. It’s lovely to set a Cairn adventure in the real world, or in a folkloric historical France. But it feels as if some of these ideas don’t come together fluently.

    The first section, New York City, 2014 is an example. It’s asking me to ask my group to free roleplay what they would have done in New York in 2014, until (I assume, this isn’t in the module but it’s referred to) a chauffeur brings you all to a mysterious book shop (why you?) and a mysterious man whose orders you have to follow (it’s his curse) sends you to 18th century France on a quest. And…I’m not sure why? I don’t feel like this section adds much to the story told (it does add some interesting touches in the form of the solutions the author provides to the inherent problems with an isekai dungeon crawl), and simply having a quest giver grant the quest in 18th century France would be simpler and less clumsy a start to the adventure. The author is clearly attached to the framing device, but even then: “You are a group of friends, and you found your way to a mysterious book store where a mysterious man gave you a mysterious quest and sent you to 18th century France” is what I’d do if I were running this.

    One you get to the forestcrawl in France though, boy is this characterful! Random encounters include squirrel merchants and squirrel-hating gnomes. The locations are a bit overwritten for my tastes, although part of that feeling may be attributable to the two column layout being quite dense. For the most part, though, the locations have two factors plus Luc’s encounter, so there’s a reason they’re busy, and it makes for some interesting locations, if not written as evocatively as I’d like, the descriptions feeling a little too boxed text for my tastes.

    There are two significant twists on the typical forestcrawl. The memory curse makes for an absolutely fascinating twist on the small number of encounters and locations, as the NPCs that have been interacted with will never remember the previous encounter. I adore this as an influence on encounters, and so could see it being manipulated in a really fun way by the players. Also, the villain stalks, bargains and teases the PCs throughout their time in the forest. Specific prompts and deals are given in different locations, and are optional. This means you could choose to slay the main villain early, or could be on the wrong side by the time the final confrontation in the dungeon comes. Very cool touches.

    The dungeon, however, feels a little arbitrary for my tastes. There is no clear indication that swimming in a portal pool will take you to Luc, for example. There is an ogre just hanging out in the dungeon for shelter. There’s a rock fall that needs to be cleared, but I’m not sure the PCs would have any reasons to other than “we haven’t found Luc yet” and even then, there’s no clear signal it’s Luc’s lair. Compared to the varied, complex forest encounters, this is a disappointing climax.

    Overall I’m very mixed on Seven Stars of the Unseen. It is an absolutely fascinating idea, that isn’t executed as successfully as I wanted it to be, but despite that, it incorporates a bunch of great ideas and techniques that I’d love to see developed further and incorporated into more modules to add interest and excitement. If you’re interested in a fairytale forestcrawl, it’s well worth running that section over most other forestcrawls I’ve read, I’d just transplant Luc to a different place, and change the opening somewhat. Dan Fawcett is certainly someone to keep an eye out for, if this innovative if flawed module is something to go on, and there are a few principles in the forestcrawl that I’ll eagerly incorporate into my own work. It’s free, so if anything here raises your brow, I’d check it out.

    7th December, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • I Read Beecher’s Bibles

    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 do yard work today, but it’s 38 degrees outside so I’m going to read Beecher’s Bibles (words by Noora Rose), because of events happening of late and I’d like to drop a little positivity into the shark-infested waters that can be the roleplaying game scene. A year or two ago, I was playing Boot Hill (first edition), and thinking how much Mothership’s Panic Engine (I don’t think it had a name back then) would suit Boot Hill so well, and I began writing something along those lines, then stopped (because the list of unfinished projects of mine are far longer than the list of finished projects), and a few years later this Kickstarter popped up and I was like “Woah! Cool! This is exactly what I wanted!” Today, let’s see if it was.

    This is a 30-odd page double column layout presented neatly as something written in the 1800’s, complete with cute hand-drawn manicules. I don’t have the physical version, but it looks like it’s intended to be printed as an A5 zine, and it’s not especially readable. A glaring problem is that on non-titled pages, the headers are consistently Beecher’s Bibles and Noora Rose, which, while thematic and reminiscent of contemporary layout, actually makes it hard to recognise when the page is a Critical Effects table or whatever when you’re flicking through the book. The equipment tables are both nigh illegible and look exactly like a Sears catalogue from the same time period looked like. Overall, the layout is stylish as heck and its vibes are impeccable (complete with what I assume are period black and white photos), but there are trade-offs to that which make it a wee bit more difficult to use than I’d like.

    The rules themselves are the Panic Engine rules, with minor changes: Stat names are more flavourful (I adore Justice replacing Combat here), a new skill list (which is, to be honest, due to the layout choices, far less intuitive or nuanced than the original), and an elegant combat difficulty systemand hit location that reflects the way you’d likely play a Western game without all the absurd complexity of Boot Hill 1st (or any, really) edition. There are lots of aspects of the expanded rules that I really like and that say a lot about the intended pace and setting of the game. The list of real diseases strongly suggests these are going to happen to you, drugs are likely to be a part of the game. Sometimes this is undermined by a reliance on traditional structures — the hunting rule suggests a very slow, day-based approach to travel, but the travel and foraging rules base things upon watches. Movement is handled in miles per hour, rather than using either the watch-based or day-based timelines. I’d need to put together a table to figure out what all these things actually mean. One thing that I don’t love is that it’s not as lethal as I’d like – you can take twice your Fortitude in wounds, and that is a lot of bullet strikes. I want every time you draw your gun to be tense; that goes back to my desire to retroclone Boot Hill 1st edition to the Panic Engine.

    All of this really lends itself to a Red Dead Redemption feeling game — with the exception that the pleasure of Red Dead Redemption II is in the small moments, the pleasure of fishing, the vistas and the feel of the horse underneath you. I recently read Atop the Wailing Dunes, and it does a really good job of giving its neolithic fantasy world which I have no guidelines for and making it a world I could describe as a walk through one mile hexes, one mile at a time. Beecher’s Bibles doesn’t try to do this, but the way the rules point suggest a type of gameplay that would benefit from this approach. To be fair, Pariah, the system that Atop the Wailing Dunes is written for, also fails to support that type of play. But, as you’ll see when I Bathtub Review that in a few months, that’s a significant criticism of Pariah in my opinion, and a fair criticism as well of Beecher’s Bibles, as I don’t think I could run the game that this game points to without a bit more support.

    This goes to a few of the rules, as well. I referred to those disease rules that I really like, but the game talks about what it means to have the disease, but now how to catch them or how you’re likely to be infected with them. If I’m going to beat around the bush learning a set of rules, I want a little more support in how to use them, especially (and maybe it’s my non-American-ness here) given how I can’t rely as strongly on the tropes of the Western as I can the tropes of generic elfgames. Unlike Gary Gygax, I wasn’t brought up on John Wayne and western pulps, I know the tropes from a few videogames and spaghetti westerns.

    The book’s climax is a module to run a scenario during the Wakarusa War, what appears to be a real world event. I have no familiarity with 1800s state history, so I can’t judge as to how true-to-life this book is, but it certainly seems well-researched. This set up, harking back to the previous section, doesn’t feel like the kind of adventure the rules are written to support: It’s a battle, a stand-off, and the rules are violent and deadly, and are concerned with wandering through the wilderness and catching diseases at brothels or dockyards. I wonder to what degree it’s meant to stand as an example of what you should do with the game, rather than provide an actual scenario: The encounter table is neat, and hits some of the notes I wish the game hit as a whole; the chase rules appear here and not earlier, but are the first example of how skills would be used. I’d love for the key NPCs to have a clearer direction rather than just a description of their recent history and notoriety.

    How do I feel about Beecher’s Bibles as a whole? I think it’s very good, but the parts of it that spark my imagination, don’t appear to be the same ones that sparked the author’s imagination, and so those aspects are underdeveloped in my opinion. I play rules-lite games, but for that very reason, if I play a new game, I want it to support the type of play I want, or I’ll just write or hack a new game myself. This one doesn’t give me the Kansas generator I want, so that wilderness travel won’t have the juice of seeing a herd of Bison in Red Dead Redemption 2 and detouring from my goal to go hunting and claim a perfect pelt, or of seeing a storm rolling in or an abandoned hut. This doesn’t support the interesting play directions it implies, like its diseases and travel giving nice, slow timelines, and suggesting the exact ramifications of high-speed travel like rail would have on this world. I don’t like how durable your characters are.

    Does that make it a bad game? I don’t think so. It’s fine if your picture of a western roleplaying game is different from what mine is. I’m a little disappointed, though, because it showed a lot of promise to be exactly what I wanted. This is a game which feels like it could have been though, it’s just not fully baked. I’m aware that I can make all the content myself, but I could have written the game myself, writing rules isn’t that hard, particularly using someone else’s engine. What has been added here is good, even when it’s not to my taste, and I could tweak those thing easily to be to my liking. But there is so much that isn’t added, that I’d want to make running my 1800’s Kansas campaign an ease and a pleasure, that isn’t here.

    So, in conclusion, Beecher’s Bibles: A good western game, that feels incomplete. It’s $6.99, a price at which I wouldn’t expect perfection. It’s better than pretty much every other Western game out there, because they are better kept simple, in my opinion. I’d recommend picking it up, if it’s your jam, but I warn you that unless you’re from Kansas, it’ll take a bit of effort to pick up and run.

    Idle Cartulary

  • Writing Dungeons Without Dice

    I have two processes for dungeons: In one, I draw a map, then figure out what’s in it. In the other, I figure out what’s in it, and draw the dungeon to match those ideas.

    The second is really hard, because I usually only have one or two ideas for a full dungeon level. So, I use this, based on the Old School Essentials random room stocking table, to help cue myself:

    1. Empty
    2. Empty
    3. Empty
    4. Monster
    5. Monster
    6. Trap
    7. Empty
    8. Monster
    9. Empty
    10. Trap
    11. Empty
    12. Monster

    What is this and who cares? Basically, I’ll never have a dungeon level or area with less than six rooms, and I usually limit areas to a maximum of twelve. By filling this out from top to bottom, I basically get a nice variation of room types. I don’t include “Special” rooms because I like to put them in according to theme, and they’ll be one of the empty rooms.

    So, I’ll label the rooms, and then decide what goes in them. I’ll arrange them later when I’m mapping, so this numbering isn’t necessarily in order of encounter at all. Use tarot cards or Magic: The Gathering Cards or a spark table or your world anchors to prompt your theme. I’ve decided this is a wee cursed chapel.

    1. Empty: Vestibule
    2. Empty: Chapel
    3. Empty: Cave-in
    4. Monster: Apse (Undead Priest)
    5. Monster: Catacomb (Rock-Eater)
    6. Trap: Catacomb (Roof collapse)
    7. Empty: Scriptorium
    8. Monster: Baptismal Font (Ghost-possessed water)

    There is roughly 1/3 of a treasure in each room (again, this is extrapolated from the OSE random room stocking), which means an 8 room dungeon area has 2 1/3 treasures in it, and I’ll just decide where that’ll be thematically. For the extra third of a treasure, either I’ll stick something trinkety in or I’ll add it to the next dungeon area if that makes sense. The amount of treasure I put in something varies, but usually I’ll aim for about 200gp per dungeon room (but that’s spread out), which means a party of five levels up every 50 rooms or so. So for this one, I do this:

    1. Empty: Vestibule
    2. Empty: Chapel (Golden idol worth 200gp and antique, magically preserved tapestry depicting the Hind-Headed God of Septvictus worth 350gp)
    3. Empty: Cave-in (buried under the cave-in is the body of an adventurer, bearing 150gp and wearing faintly glowing plate armour)
    4. Monster: Apse (2d4 Undead Priests)
    5. Monster: Catacomb (Rock-Eater, if carved open has 100gp in gold nuggets in its belly)
    6. Trap: Catacomb (Roof collapse)
    7. Empty: Scriptorium (if the library is searched, there are a dozen heavy tomes in excellent condition, each worth 100gp to a collector of religious texts)
    8. Monster: Baptismal Font (Ghost-possessed water)

    Now, I draw the dungeon area (I reiterate that this is usually a section or level of the larger dungeon, not the entirety of it — that’s why there are stairs in an unnumbered, empty catacomb):

    Look I just whipped this up don’t examine it

    If I’m doing this for my table I won’t do much more, I’ll just add key words to help descriptions pop, and say what other creature it acts like that already has stats (fungal, moist, crumbling and stats as bear). If I’m writing for publication, I’ll actually key it with pretty words and renumber it in a logical order, as this process will make me number things illogically and I intensely dislike that (you can see that above — the numbering doesn’t serve the internal logic of the dungeon without tweaking).

    Anyway, that’s how I write a dungeon without rolling any dice.

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Fleeing the Dungeon

    When I’m running a draft dungeon, I love giving the player characters a fairly sure escape option if they encounter something that they’re not prepared for. This is how I do it.

    Here’s a dungeon I prepared earlier

    The players characters entered through the eastern door in room 6, and find the secret door to room 7. Oh no! An ogre! They’re not prepared for it. They choose to flee: They get a chance of losing the ogre, at risk of getting lost in the dungeon. They need to flee through 4 rooms to escape as the ogre has 4HD.

    I count 4 rooms. There’s only one exit from 7, so they are in room 6 (first room). There are two exits from 6, and I roll west to room 5 (second room). There are three exits from room 5, and I roll north to room 3 (third room). There are two exits from room 3 and I roll west to room 1 (fourth and final room). They’ve escaped the ogre. My description is a frenzied and impressionistic overview of the rooms they’ve been through, and then I describe their destination room in detail as Id explain any room.

    That’s if there are no hiccups! What if there are traps or monsters in the room? If there is a trap they would trigger, they receive damage and stumble onwards as part of the fleeing description. If there is a monster, the monster is surprised, and I allow a choice: Do the players dash past them or do they interact with the monster. In the first case I roll a reaction roll to see how the monsters respond) — they only chase if they roll hostile. In the second case, I’ll give them an exchange to interact with the monsters before the Ogre arrives for a more complex encounter.

    If there’s a hidden or secret door that I roll, I’ll usually allow it (depending on the kind of secret — I’m more likely to allow a trap door covered with a rug than a statue that requires a puzzle to be solved unless they’ve already solved it) and give a bonus room, as the ogre is more likely to have trouble chasing, and I’ll describe it as hiding in the secret room while the ogre searches for them.

    I enjoy this, particularly in larger dungeons, as you can accidentally end up on another level of the dungeon and with no clue where you are. More difficult opponents are harder to flee from (or perhaps impossible in a small dungeon, resulting in a surface world confrontation or chase).

    Gus L suggested that you could choose dungeon landmarks rather than exits to travel between, which is a neat idea in a larger dungeon particularly if you were designing it around a major xenomorph-like creature. You could also add additional rules around using tricks to distract the ogre or to flee faster, if you wanted to, or to incorporate territories in your dungeon to flavour your flights. These I think would be great again, if the dungeon was intentionally the kind of dungeon where it’s balanced towards more difficult challenges.

    One proviso: In my opinion, this works quite well in most systems, but some systems with softer levelling take a little more customisation; I play Cairn a lot, and I use a factor of HP there (half HP to be precise) just because creatures tend to be tougher there. Your mileage may vary, but I want it to be not too tough to escape in terms if number of rooms, because there are additional risks in terms of traps, other monsters and getting lost to consider as well.

    Hope you enjoy this little mechanic,

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: Knowing Revenge of the Grasping Gods

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

    Knowing Revenge of the Grasping Gods is a 20 page system agnostic module written by Kyle Tam with graphic design by Lone Archivist, who also did Another Bug Hunt. It’s about stealing fire from the gods.

    This zine is clean, structured and creepy in the way protestants find catholic texts creepy. I’m not sure what Lone Archivists’ references were, but it feels like a clean version of an illuminated apocrypha. Big, bold paragraphs on single column large point, clear explosive headings and if it’s not a single typeface throughout, it’s painstakingly picked to appear that way to the layperson.

    The big, bold paragraphs are a fascinating choice for a module. Usually, we have a huge heading and a single (rarely double) spread covering a point of interest. Each point of interest feels like it stands on its own through the unusual layout choices, and feels like it’s screaming at the reader. It reminds me a little of a Maria Mison layout, like it was inspired in part by I Eat Mantras For Breakfast. It doesn’t feel clean, it feels like a clean recitation of something messy.

    There’s more verbiage in these descriptions than I’d prefer, but it feels forgivable here. Why? I’m not sure. It’s florid but not absurd or self-indulgent. It could honestly afford to lean into its largeness more, be a bit more David Foster Wallace. But as is, I’m running this module telling my players to have a coffee while I read and absorb each point of interest, and then am running it off vibes.

    I couldn’t run it traditionally, I don’t think. Instructions are buried in the prose along with descriptions. It’s beautiful but inconvenient. It ends with a choice between godhood and humanity, having impressed the guardian at the gates of Olympus. It feels like a drift from module to lyric game, and I mean this with no aspersions. I could play this in free kreigspiel as a one shot I think with great success. It would be impeccable vibes. But could I drop it into an ongoing campaign? Only one with a very specific vibe.

    I think the most damning and complementary thing about this module is that, while I’d enjoy playing it with the right group, what it does do is set my brain on fire for variations on the concept: I want a heist on god mountain, structured to reflect Oceans 11’s antiheroics rather than Promethean heroics. This is excellent, but it wallows in its subject matter rather than subverts or frolicks in it. And sometimes you just want to lay back and soak.

    This is the kind of story and atmosphere I often see bundled with a plentitude if half-baked mechanics when really what you need is a table of players which are sold on the mythical heroes stealing fire from the gods vibe and good at improvising heroes based on a random treasure table. I like this a lot, on its own terms, but it’s far enough afield it’s hard for me to recommend aside from: If you found this review intriguing, it’s probably worth at least a read through.

    30th November, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

  • Dungeons, Regularly

    I just released the second issue of my (potentially) regular zine full of dungeon maps.

    Dungeons, Regularly #2 contains thirteen maps (mainly dungeons) for you to key yourself and use for personal or commercial use.

    If you pay a little extra, you get two pages of things to put in those dungeons, if you need inspiration, as well as the jpgs of the maps if you want to use them commercially or as a VTT. I statted them for Cairn because right now I’m in a Cairn state of mind, but I might move to 0D&D next as a feel inspired by FMC Basic.

    This is a lot of fun to make, so I hope people find or make use of them. If you do, let me know! And if you back me monthly on my Ko-fi, you can have them for free!

    Idle Cartulary

  • Bathtub Review Double Feature: Reign of Guano and the Skeleton Closet

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

    I normally don’t review 5e modules, but I was offered two when I reached out for modules by lesser known creators, and read them in close proximity. They gave me enough similar food for thought that I wanted to comment on them together.

    Reign of Guano

    Reign of Guano is an 18 page module for 5e by Alex Rinehart. It’s documented as a laid out version of his home campaign notes. It features a deadly, fire breathing pigeon.

    Reign of Guano is laid out in the classic 5e two column A4 format, functionally but not in an exciting way. I wonder if straying from the format would alienate readers of 5e? To a degree, the Microsoft Word template for 5e has done a wondrous job of democratising production, but on the other hand many of the creators on DM’s Guild would benefit from learning some of the layout skills necessary to put something together in Affinity or Indesign. The art is stock, and there is a simple map of the city in which it takes place.

    The introduction neatly includes a summary of the location, what the players know or will quickly learn, and what they don’t know. I like this structure, but overall the summaries are hard to relate (I’m not going to read four paragraphs to the players). This would be better as a list or rumours or secrets, or expressly as handouts or connected to recommended player backgrounds. Another Bug Hunt, recent Mothership introductory module, uses a similar approach t much success. The city description lacks a keyed map, and is also described in paragraph form. The description reminds me of the structure used in Fever Dreaming Marlinko, but it fails to structure in hooks and clear points of interactivity and gameability.

    The campaign (a campaign! In 15 pages!) is designed around six set-piece encounters, two side quests and three introductory scenes. All of these encounters are individually fun and weird enough, but they definitely make considerable assumptions about what the PCs are going to be doing. While the module speaks specifically to the fact that the flexibility is necessary and that encounters are likely to occur out of order or not in written fashion, the encounters aren’t written to facilitate that flexibility.

    There are nice touches here and there, creative writing flares such as “The stars wouldn’t like to shine here anyway” and a wizard who uses trained parrots to speak his spells for him, but they’re lost in the sea of words. Terseness is not a well-modelled habit in official 5e products, and there is evidence of that here. Most of these could be cut to a paragraph or two; in fact one of them literally has a paragraph in it starting with “let’s cut to the chase” because it knows it can be summarised more simply.

    In total, this is a fun, brief campaign that is overly reliant on dense prose. Despite its brevity, it’s complex and weird enough that it’d be messy to incorporate into your campaign. I do think there’s a version of this where all of these encounters, options and quests are rolled into a small city crawl, and structured so that everything would happen independently of the players, and that’s something I’d definitely run, but in its current form it’s too crowded and rigid for me to want to extract the fun that is definitely there.

    The Skeleton Closet

    The Skeleton Closet is a 36 page single location for 5e, a manual shop. It takes the opposite approach to Reign of Guano: It expands considerably on a specific aspect, rather than present a broad-strokes overview of a series of events.

    It riffs on classic 5e layout, but makes some unique decisions in terms of colour choice and matching art to those choices, as well as heading choices that make it a little more readable.

    Like Reign of Guano, the Skeleton Closet is overwritten in 5e house style. There are nice touches; like the separate interior and exterior descriptions. The meat here, though (it’s padded out with subclasses and magical items as 5e is wont to do), is in the five magical skeletons each of whom are detailed, provide hooks.

    This is a interesting way to draw out the nuance in a location, and I like it a lot. Each shopkeeping skeleton has a spread, with a stat block, fun facts, roleplaying tips, the 5e personality traits block, and a list of chronological relationship events. Now, all of this is a little too much: I think each of these could be better summarised in less words, and there just needn’t be a full stat block for five characters you are unlikely to fight (one will do, add a few minor differences and list them). But this is a fun and interesting location and set of characters to drop into your campaign.

    But, a desire to have these characters fit anywhere means that their stories rarely extend outside the four walls of the shop, and that is a missed opportunity. There is sadly no setting these skeletons up on dates or solving the mystery of their murders or anything of the sort. And that means it’s left a little toothless. I’d drop this in my campaign, but I’d probably hack it aggressively do that the PCs could easily slide into these skeletons lives.

    Thoughts

    These are both interesting perspectives I think on what a 5e module could be. But also, they feel limited by either the authors lack of knowledge of what is happening outside of 5e, or perhaps by the expectations set by 5e itself. I wonder if the lack of experimentation and divergence from the 5e house layout is a factor of ease of entry, or a factor of how non-officially formatted are received on the DMs Guild? There’s a huge range of format experimentation outside the space after all, but I can only think of two major releases that buck the trend, which are Oz and Neverland.

    There is eternal harping on about converting these players to new systems, but honestly, the hook for other playstyles is the modules that exist for them. Nobody pays OSE or Cairn because they have the most fascinating rules. But the adventures you can have? Without peer! I admire these two, if flawed, modules for attempting something new. I’d love to see 5e modules structured or inspired by what exists out there already in the wide diy elfgame space, because I think that’s a more realistic vector for exposing people to the joys of elfgaming than, say, Shadowdark ever will be.

    23rd November, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

  • Intro to Game Design Carnival

    Over on the Dice Exploder discord, someone was asking about the canon of Game Design, and we all agreed it was pretty fruitless an exercise. So, Sam D suggested we do it personally as a personal canon is more meaningful, I suggested a Blog Carnival, and I proceeded to forget about it until Sam posted his summary with only a few submissions (of course! It wasn’t advertised or anything!).

    Now, I feel spurred into action. The suggestion was: 3 posts/podcasts/episodes/pieces of media to consume; 1 game to play; a paragraph or so of your own advice. I’m also not going to repeat anything written in the other posts, there’s enough (very good) Vincent & Meg and Jay Dragon recommendations in there to last you a lifetime. My greatest challenge, to be entirely honest, is that the blogosphere has an incredibly rich and varied background of game design writing, that it’s hard to choose and I want to choose some things outside of game design. But, I probably won’t, and I’ll talk about that in the “Let me talk section”.

    1. Abstraction & Elision in Trophy by Marcia B

    This post is, as most conversations that occur in the DIY elfgame blogosphere, simply part of the conversation, and I’d encourage you to also read the inciting post by Jared Sinclair and the post that Marcia is responding to by Noora Rose. I think it summarises and critiques a quite clearly very important but heavily misused notion that floats about in DIY elfgame circles, regarding what role rules should play in games, and whether they consistently achieve what we often assume they achieve. As a game design moderate, I’ve long railed against Rules Elide extremists who have trouble accounting for Pathfinder 2e at all, but also stand strongly by Rules Elide as my favoured approach to analysing game rules.

    2. Blorb Principles by Sandra Snan

    Blorb Principles is a description of a playstyle, not a post of theory. It’s a Manifesto, as much as it is anything else, and to be entirely honest I strongly suspect that this article is not the entirety of the concept that I’m referring to, but rather, it is the entirety of Sandra’s output that refers back to this, elucidates her approaches to playing her complex and multifaceted DIY fifth edition. The recognition that there are unique playstyles and elucidation about the depth and complexity of those playstyles is important, because much of the railing and argument I see in TTRPG spaces seems predicated on the misunderstanding that people engage with TTRPGs in different ways. While Blorbiness is one axis on the spectrum, another approach to considering playstyles is John B’s Six Cultures of Play, also quite formative.

    3. The Monomyth Thread by Hy Libre

    Another piece of text that is inseparable in my mind from the conversations that surrounded it, sprung from it, and caused it to come into being, and which because of that my own interpretation of both the essay and game is unique. This is one perspective on a conversation that was had from two other perspectives. For me, though, it’s a very important principle in, again, understanding and not judging the choices other people make in game design and in their choices in play. I’ll summarise that as: Having a story on rails is, in effect, one kind of safety tool, or at least, a support mechanism that allows people to occupy their characters with a sense of confidence. Understanding that opens up a breadth of design opportunities that simply sticking to the most open and minimalist play does not allow.

    4. Lorn Song of the Bachelor by Zedeck Siew

    Truth be told, this was my second choice, but my first, by the same author, is not available. It was my first because I believe (despite what you’d believe from my writing) that brevity is the soul of wit, but this beauty comes at a close second. I will talk about Lorn Song of the Bachelor at length in an upcoming episode of Song Exploder (and at around the same time, I’ll publish a Bathtub Review of it), so I won’t expound at length here, but, while the definition of mechanics can be broad, this is a masterclass in writing a game with mechanics minimised and often backhandedly referred to by tradition and societal momentum, while innovating on poeticisms and beauty in a way that few other games have achieved.

    5. My Advice for Game Design

    My advice is to find the most absurd concept you could conceptualise writing that excites you, and write that. Lean into that. Don’t write something that anyone else could write. Write the innermost aspects of your psyche. Write in your grandparents and your home soil and what you miss about your childhood. Write your greatest fears and the things you take most joy out of. Our hobby is besieged by dry homages and regurgitated nostaliga, and that may be where you might make money (although I doubt it), but nobody will love you for that. Make art that makes you cry to read and play it.

    My start to game design was hacking fifth edition, but it wasn’t until I started writing lyric games to process a cancer diagnosis that I started to understand what game design could do. And it wasn’t until I started writing DIY-elfgame bestiaries in haiku that I realised what direction I wanted to take. And it wasn’t until I read the Isle and A Thousand Thousand Islands that I realised that someone might read something patently absurd and prone to interpretation and actually want to play it and be interested in consuming it as art.

    And so, in this way, the long list of what I’d recommend is my extended appendix N, and it’s not Jack Vance but My Words to Víctor Frankenstein Above The Village of Chamounix and Kobayashi Isso and the Crane in the Clouds and it’s the Maltese Bestiary by Stephan Misfud and it’s Cultist Simulator and it’s Planescape: Torment and it’s the Tale of Princess Kaguya and it’s DL1-8 despite the fact that it’s terrible, and it’s that Matthew Colville video where he suggested I run Against the Cult of the Reptile God which opened my eyes to exactly what a module could be, and that we’re 41 years on from that release so why aren’t we creating things that challenge us the way that 41 years of development should have? It’s everything that isn’t TTRPGs and isn’t about TTRPGs, because if it’s not, you’re just JJ Abrams making trash movies with “Star” in the title.

    Ignore my list. Make off-the-wall games.

    Idle Cartulary

  • Bathtub Review: The Incandescent Grottoes

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

    The Incandescent Grottoes is a 48-page dungeon module by Gavin Norman with art by Nate Treme, in the Old School Essentials official line of modules. I have to admit straight up, the 50-page A5 hardcover format for the OSE official adventures is a format I absolutely adore, I’m always thrilled when other modules come in the same format (The Isle and Witchburner come to mind). I can’t afford shipping for every little thing I want to read, and so this affordable but pretty and sturdy format is a winner. I’d really love for the OSE official adventure line to be expanded, as well, because they’re readily available even in places where shipping is difficult.

    I’m choosing to start with layout for this one, because the elephant in the room is that the official OSE line has its own conventions that modules published under adhere to. There are some great aspects to these conventions: Maps are always on the endpapers, for example; full colour illustrations increase the potential for text differentiation using colours as well as typefacing; headings are consistently easy to identify and differentiate. Negatives, for me though, are the excessive use of bolding in descriptions. Here’s an example:

    For me, at least, in the section starting “Crystal grotto”, I could do without any of the bolded text; for me this is because the text is crowded already, it’s brief already, and because the bolded and unbolded text are already separated by grammatical indicators (parentheses in this case). For the bullet text starting “South-west”, the text is less crowded, so the bolding feels less egregious to me. There are a few other things I don’t love about the OSE conventions, that are trade-offs: For example, there are in-line stat blocks, which I don’t like in games that aren’t tactical combat games, but in this case it means there isn’t a bestiary at the end of the book, which is nice.

    The book starts (as convention dictates) with an introduction page, and a dungeon overview spread. These are nice and neat and don’t adhere to the YNAI principle so I find them a little annoying. The faction and relationship summary that’s a part of them is very useful, though, and probably would make great endpaper content, or at least better placed content. There’s a list of rumours and a list of treasures, of which the list of rumours is useful and the list of treasures appears largely rolled straight out of the OSE rulebook. I appreciate not having to flick through the rulebook, but I’d really appreciate some more interesting and unique treasure. Random encounters are good.

    The rest of the book is the dungeon itself, which is a fun romp through a light-hearted dungeon involving an ooze-worshipping cult, with four other factions competing for various objectives and who’ve already forged various relationships. These factions are stereotypical enough to be easy to run, have enough characterisation that they won’t bore except in the hands of an exceptional GM, and the writing is stellar (“crystal-eating dragon who is not averse to a morsel of flesh”).

    The example I cited above is pretty typical of the writing of the Incandescent Grottoes. It’s functional, brief enough to be usable at the table, but often not particularly inventive. One thing I like about the writing is that the dungeon descriptions are packed full of signs and omens of challenges that are present in the rooms but unseen or yet to come – the information here is traditional in the sense that unusual things are meant to stand out. However, it gives me little to springboard off in terms of improvisation, which means I’m stuck with the point of interest written rather than springboarding off it to something exciting. The writing is not evocative, but it’s a perfection of the dry gygaxian description. Map inserts are provided on most pages, and descriptions are very brief, although most of the time they take up the whole page due to the co-location of stat blocks.

    Overall, the Incandescent Grottoes is a well-formatted, solid module that would slot easily into any generic fantasy campaign. It doesn’t shoot for the stars, but it achieves most of its goals. It implies things about the larger setting that could change the direction of your campaign, which for me is a necessity for any good module. I’m a big fan of modules that shoot for the stars, but there’s something to be said for identifying whether what you’re writing is actually going to benefit from your ambition. If I compare this to Beast of Borgenwold, for example, Beast of Borgenwold probably would have been a better adventure if presented in this format with these limitations placed on it. Something like The Isle, however, would lose most of its charm and uniqueness if rearranged into the same format as the Incandescent Grottoes.

    Overall, I’d recommend this for lighthearted dungeon-crawling, but it’s not going to blow anyone’s mind.

    16th November, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

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Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

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

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