• 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

    ,

  • Bathtub Review: Mystery on Big Rock Candy Mountain

    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.

    Mystery on Big Rock Candy Mountain (hereafter Mystery) is a 42 page module for Cairn by RUN DMG released as part of the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam. I’m looking at select jam entries as a way of highlighting up and coming authors. It’s inspired by the titular song, and asks if in fact it was a cautionary tale?

    Mystery is as decadent as the story it tells. There is an overabundance of words. Before you get to the adventure, you’re reading three full prose pages of text. The voice is conversational, which also means it could be significantly terser. I think that I’d find the generous prose more forgivable if they’d leaned a little harder into the regional dialects they’re referring to in their themes and in the title, but they sadly don’t. The sense of place doesn’t shine through through the narrative voice.

    Where it does shine through, though, is the descriptions themselves. While they would benefit from a good scissor cut, what you find them describing is quirky, interesting characters — a Reverend who “uses his age, place of reverence in the community, and wits to get outsiders to do him favors” — clear differentiated locations — “Cool, damp, and strange. The smell of rust is heavy in the air.” and weird tasty creatures (Wampus Cat! Alchoholic Bears!). Here the place is weird and decadent with a distinct flavour that feels Appalachian from a distance and through candy coloured glasses.

    The dungeon map is half point crawl and half traditional dungeon map, and it’s pretty, and I like the mini maps in theory, but I really struggle to make sense of it all. Each location gets exit details, but I wish they had signs of what were down those halls as well, so there was more guidance for the PCs. It’s a very linear dungeon as well, leading straight to the Bossman without much capacity for side tracks, sneaking or retreating. The locations within it though, are as flavourful as ever. The final boss feels very prescribed and one-note, although fun. I wish that he were not the final thing you find, but rather a despicable figure you could choose to be ally or enemy during the adventure instead of just afterwards. Placing these moral quandaries in the centre of the module make for more interesting outcomes than placing them at the end; I feel like this is obvious, we’ve just had the poison of multiple ending videogames deep into module design. Remember! We can do what we want!

    If I were to describe the graphic design in Mystery in one word it would be whiplash. It leverages public domain art often to create vibrant clashing color-switched pages especially for maps, creating in some spaces a very dynamic feeling DIY zine vibe. But more pages than not are monochrome, single column graphic design drudgery where even the monumental amount of spot art fail to create interest. Now, perhaps perpetuating the gorgeous look that some pages have would make the product challenging to use (like it was in Beast of Borgenwold), but I think the creator could have leant into the striking style even if it was out of necessity. The dark framing on the less-designed pages feel claustrophobic, not because the margins are fine, but because they’re crowded in with the border art. There are six of so sometimes clashing font choices here, which also contributes to the collage zine vibe, but could be leveraged more to increase usability in terms of headings and wayfinding. I found the structure quite challenging to follow, not realising the overarching structure of the module until about halfway through.

    Mystery on Big Rock Candy Mountain is a mixed bag for me. There is a lot to love, here. Some of it — the narrative voice, the graphic design — needed to go harder, but falls short. Some of it — the actual contents — is really interesting. Nothing here is irredeemable at all; I think for me it comes down to being a little more challenging to run than I’d like because of the cumulative effects of the choices made. There are at least two other Big Rock Candy Mountain themed adventures out there, so it’s stiff competition. This is however the longest and most thorough, and probably the one I’d most likely run at my table if I wanted to run an Appalachian sidetrek for an ongoing campaign. I just wish they’d taken the extra time to polish — one big negative of jam deadlines. This could’ve been very special with some extra attention.

    9th November, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

  • Bathtub Review: The Weeps

    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 Weeps is a 15 page module for Cairn by Tony Jaguar and Spooky Rusty, the best named pair of writers in elfgames in my opinion. It’s one of the submissions to the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam that I’m reviewing to highlight lower budget hobbyist work.

    In terms of layout, I think it would’ve been better to lay this out in more pages, perhaps in a two-column format. There’s a lot of text here, and it’s a bit intimidating to the eye, and not broken up with spot art, with very narrow margins. The art is amateurish but appropriate, as are the maps. The cover art is striking but compromised by the logo placements which I assume are a reference to the village’s makeup habits or perhaps a pun on the title.

    I don’t like the introductory page at all; a lot of words that inadequately communicate the hook and the character of the village and it’s people. But it is flavourfully written, and that flavour carries over into the more conceptually dense writing that follows.

    What follows is a bunch of tables, a forest and it’s key, and a dungeon and it’s key. The longest single block of writing is seven sentences, and most are one to two. This is completely what I look for in terms of terseness, but is it up to scratch with regards to evocativeness?

    “Filthy rodents mating loudly, d6 Cave Cassowaries are feasting on crawlers and shrooms”, “town filled with dreams and black lungs”, “Has a small medical practice. Practice makes perfect, and he needs a lot of it. “We’re going to have to amputate.” He jokes constantly.”. Most of it is like this. Funny, memorable, evocative, brief and when it uses words, valuable.

    The negative of such a table-heavy module is that it could be clearer where and what they’re all for. I could wing it, but with such excellent and specific tables, I’d like brief but specific guidance to their use. It would make them just a little bit more useful.

    In terms of connective tissue, it doesn’t do well, however. It relies heavily on the players acting in the spirit of the game; while the introduction suggests the PCs should be seeking flasks of magic water, they needn’t access the dungeon to do that, and the given hooks are colourful and don’t include that. None of the hooks point to the mines or the forest lake, actually. There’s a good chance that the PCs wouldn’t delve into these locations, despite the pleasure it would be to run them.

    Overall, this module is full of fantastic, colourful characters and locations, well written. It’s a module devoid of hooks, so I’d be remiss to recommend running it by itself, as it’d take some effort to add them; but popping these three locations onto your map for a campaign or a West Marches, and they’d make for a great contribution to your world.

    2nd November, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

  • Pirate City and Creole Collabs

    There have been a bunch of posts lately that have me thinking about languages in games, specifically the fact that they kind are honestly kind of the worst most of the time.

    There’s Justin, who proposes a pidgin rule where the PC makes a check, and the margin of success gives them a pool of points from which they can establish a word in common with the other speaker. You track these words, and are limited to those words in their attempts to communicate. You get a bonus if you know a closely related language, and you get to roll again for successive successful conversations.

    Then, HIPONFA built on this, suggesting a few world-building conceits, the most interesting being that common as either a pidgin (useless for anything but visiting the market), or as a Koine (a smushing of similar languages into a single language due to political pressure).

    Finally (and I don’t know how I’ll ever use this), there’s The Worlds Writing Systems, which is a database of all of these amazing glyphs from more languages than I can count, many no longer used. If you can’t find inspiration for a fantasy script here, you need to seek a muse.

    Anyway, all of these got me thinking, it would be very cool for a campaign to be based around a trade intersection. Honestly, I do that a lot, particularly for fantasy locations, because a village on a trade route makes a lot of sense for somewhere adventurers might stumble upon. So what if your party weren’t pirates coming to Pirate City, but instead, the crew come to establish it? And ships from three nations, perhaps Orcish, Elvish and Dwarvish nations, all started arriving there, and you had to build a common language? And of course, Pirate City is built on the remains of an ancient civilisation, but if you want to go dungeon crawling, all those antiques and rare magicks can’t be sold unless you speak in common. And so, your party, who speak only Elvish, have to piece together a dworcfish pidgin in order to sell their wares, and gain access only to the best that those nations have to offer aren’t available until you all can butter each other up fluently?

    Or, to mix two of these together, what if, whenever you bump into someone in your campaign you can’t communicate, you get a collaborative worldbuilding opportunity? Oh, I don’t speak Goblin? Well, back where we live, there’s a goblin enclave, and I used to go there to buy Goblin Horchata for my grandmother, so I have a few words of goblin? Now, we can use Justin’s language check in a justifiable way, and we get to build the world a little bit more, if you’re a table who enjoys doing that sort of thing.

    Anyway, languages are cool. More language minigames, I think, would be better.

    Idle Cartulary

  • Bathtub Review: A Rasp of Sand

    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.

    A Rasp of Sand is a 76-page module by Dave Cox written for Knave 1st Edition. It stretches the meaning of module — this is an entire campaign, it spans generations, and it modifies a lot of Knave’s rules. You pay ongoing generations of a family, who are sent into a ritual ocean-themed dungeon to seek their destinies and whose children return to do the same.

    Cover by Ma-ko

    The conceit of a Rasp of Sand is that it is “Rogue-lite” dungeon crawl, which each character delves only once (and dies or retires) and the dungeon is randomly generated, but you carry equipment and information over between delves. It does this by generating families rather than individual characters, who pass tales and equipment and skills down to the next generation. One page is spent explaining this, which is perfect.

    Creating your family fills seven pages. Creating your heir and the rules for inheritance cover the next eight. There’s two pages of exploration rules, necessary to explain the structure and randomisation of the dungeon. There are a lot of rules here, in addition to the basic Knave ruleset (admittedly only 4 pages or so if I recall), but it all works together to turn what follows into a near-infinite self-perpetuating adventure.

    The locations themselves are 2–4 to a page, with descriptions ranging from too much (10 sentences) to perfect (2–3 sentences), generally functionally written with some flavourful flourishes (“There’s sticky egg piles everywhere. Oh gods, they are breeding in here! It’s awful I can’t describe it.”). I’d rather more of the latter, but it works well enough.

    The final boss gets 2 pages, situations get 4 pages, there are 12 pages of unique monsters, and 9 pages of loot (including blessings and unique items). Magic takes 3 pages and finally there is a page of how to map this random dungeon. The writing in these is similar: Good ideas, based around the oceanic theme, unique enough to not be a waste of time, but functionally written. Overall, a Rasp of Sand is unique in both inhabitants, location and world, but is written in a dry style that doesn’t luxuriate in it.

    Layout is stellar, as is the art by Jake Morrison. Minimalist, use if light rather than bolded titling complements the colours and art, placement of headings is consistent, there is a consistent two column layout that is very comfortable for most of the book. The readability drops when it transitions to single column layout for pages at a time (for rules and for treasure, for example), but usability does not.

    I ran a campaign of a Rasp of Sand a few years ago, and was impressed at the time by its usability. It is a very dangerous dungeon, with high heir turnover and to be expected, and so mileage at the table will vary, as will tolerance for a cautious playstyle which is rewarded. But, it is an excellent perpetual dungeon crawl, that outlasts it’s apparent size significantly due to its random nature. It may have only 73 rooms (compared to more mega mega dungeons) but they get well used and change contexts considerably. The bigger negative is that you need to lean heavily into generational knowledge both as GM and player, because otherwise faction play becomes challenging, which is one of the bigger pleasures and strategies in a dangerous megadungeon.

    If you’re looking for an all-in-one dungeon delve that you can play consistently with minimal prep, a Rasp of Sand is for you. Just keep in mind that you need a table that is happy with high lethality, cautious play (if they want to progress), and that aren’t adverse to an expectation of not playing the same characters necessarily for the entire campaign.

    26th October, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    , , ,

  • Dungeons, Regularly

    I just released a zine full of dungeon maps at Amanda P’s encouragement.

    It’s called Dungeons Regularly (a joke on my podcast, Dungeon Regular), and it 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 I’m playing Cairn right now, but if anyone wants it but that put them off, let me know and I’ll stat #2 for some other system.

    Anyway, it was a fun little art project, so I think I’ll keep making them. And if you back me monthly on my Ko-fi, you can have them for free!

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

  • Bathtub Review: The Micery Keep

    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 Micery Keep is a 4 page zine adaptation of Misery Keep (a Mork Borg pamphlet module) for Mausritter by Hugh Lashbrooke. It’s a short one, so this is a short one.

    Layout on this is clear and simple. Honestly it wastes space in the cover and gets away with it. The art is a public domain cut out of a vintage car, and a lich-rat. They’re both great, and match in their styles well. Headings and highlights are clear and legible.

    The stat blocks are flavourful (“The Count’s rusted crown casts an aura; any steel nearby will crumble to dust”), the treasure is my favourite style: evocative and unexplained. The location descriptions are terse, often two or three sentences. The longer locations describe set pieces, such as the evil ritual you are sent to dispel.

    The writing is workmanlike, but very effective. My only criticism of the writing as a whole is that one of my favourite parts of a Mausritter module is the connection between the human location and what the mice use or perceive it as; here the connections are a little unclear, both in terms of the big black hexes indicating the rooms obscuring the map, and the lack of clarity in the descriptions. Clarifying them would ruin the perfect terseness, but would be worth it for me as the GM, because it gives me more leverage to describe the locations.

    Honestly, this is the best possible module for Mausritter. It should be a model for other short modules, and is better than some of the modules in the Estate, which I think very highly of. And it’s free. Throw it into your Mausritter campaign. Every campaign needs a lich.

    23rd October, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    , ,

Want to support Playful Void or Bathtub Reviews? Donate to or join my Ko-fi!

I use affiliate links where I can, to keep reviewing sustainable! Please click them if you’re considering buying something I’ve reviewed! Want to know more?

Have a module, adventure or supplement you’d like me to review? Read my review policy here, and then email me at idle dot cartulary at gmail dot com, or direct message me on Discord!

Recent Posts

rootring: follow the ring from blog to blog, catch up on recent posts, and discover new TTRPG writing without relying on feeds, timelines, or recommendation algorithms.
Prev Next Random Ring

Categories

Archives

April 2026
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930  

Recent Posts