• Monsters in Trophy Gold

    Trophy Gold monsters really have only one stat: Endurance. Endurance is between 2 and 12, and players pool their efforts and take the two best results to equal to or beat the endurance to defeat the monster.

    The problem is, I’m not really sure how to set Endurance.

    From my experience, it’s hard to get a party of 4 treasure-hunters to all contribute to combat due to risk of ruin. However, if we know weaknesses or have relevant skills (usually likely in a party of 4), we’re not likely to contribute only 1 dice. So, dice numbers tend to be lower, but greater than 1.

    Endurance on left, number of dice rolled at top. Percentage of rolling equal to or greater than endurance.

    What does this mean? Endurance of 4 or less is virtually impossible not to beat in 1 combat roll with just 1 or 2 treasure hunters participating. Endurance of 5 to 7 will require 1 or 2 combat rolls or an additional treasure hunter. An additional treasure hunter is required to see off an Endurance of 8 to 9 in 1 or 2 combat rolls. An Endurance of 10 to 12 is likely to take 5 to 9 combat rolls.

    Probabilities quickly shift in favour of the treasure-hunters, if they team up: If we assume all four treasure-hunters contribute 1.5 dice each, only Endurance of 11 to 12 are a challenge, and then still with only 2 to 4 combat rolls.

    Ok, so let’s translate this to something practical:

    • Endurance of 2–4: Goblin-like creatures. Only dangerous in numbers. Giant rats, bandits. ~25–100 XP, 1 HD.
    • Endurance of 5–6: Orc-like creatures. Sturdy and deadly foes, impossible to fight off in numbers. Warriors, dire wolves. In OSE, 100–250 XP, 4HD.
    • Endurance of 7-8. Bear-like creature. Dangerous, but defeats me. Trolls, Wyverns. In OSE, ~300–800 XP, 6HD.
    • Endurance of 9–10: Giant-like creature. Extremely dangerous. Spectres, fire-elementals. In OSE, ~1000–1250 XP, 8HD.
    • Endurance of 11–12. Tyrannosaurus -like creatures. Do not approach. Vampires, hydras. ~1500 XP, 8 HD.
    • Endurance of 13+. Dragon-like creature. Liches and death knights . Need preparation to defeat. ~2500 XP, 10 HD.

    This is for my purposes; technically orcs are weaker than this but I like strong orcs so it works for me. Replace with bugbears or ogres if you wish. Most importantly, it’s a very steep curve. The only challenging creatures in TG will be boss monsters. Trophy Gold is designed for singular unique, boss-foes.

    Anyway this is cool and useful.

    20th May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

  • Playtest Report – Bridewell Session 1

    I thought people may enjoy a Bridewell playtest report. I started my playtest campaign with Marcia and Sandro yesterday. We’re playing in a modified version of Trophy Gold, the rules of which I’ve posted bitwise here. There will be spoilers for the events in the session, and hence some for Bridewell, but no spoilers outside of the session. If you’re a part of the playtest, you can definitely read this.

    We have two characters in the company. Ursaline is a wild woman bear-priestess, travelling with Ferdrek, a disgraced noble in shining armour, seeking to redeem his family’s name. This session they took a shortcut through the abandoned valley of Bridewell, only to find it wasn’t abandoned at all.

    I asked Marcia and Sandro if it was ok if they started at Angel Gate, because this was the secondary starting location initially, but I’m considering making it the primary starting location, and I want to give it a test drive to see if the company is adequately lured to the south. They broke down the cherubic gates as night fell, and found a settlement – Chamouny – grown around an Abbey, which they visited in the hope of finding rest. The gatekeeper mentioned missing children when asked about the wolf-scratches on the gates, and mentioned that you could get lost in the mists if you didn’t stick to the road. Ferdrek doesn’t believe in such folktales.

    The inn, the Knight & Blizzard, was run by three frantic teenagers, and there the Burgomaster of the village offered them reward to either help refresh the village’s supply of wine (“Our Lady of Perpetual Light hasn’t been sending the shipments, and we’re drying up”) or to help find two children, missing the past week, attributed to prowling wolves. One of the children’s great-grandfathers, Veaceslav, was present, drinking in the inn, and directed them back to his farm (“we farm sprouts, it’s the manse out the gates and to the east”).

    The company decided to ignore the winery and investigate the missing children. They sought out family, and looked for tracks in the frozen ground, drinking mushroom tea, and headed into the mists, following the tracks, although it seemed they were circling and changing direction strangely, especially when compared to Ferdrek’s compass bearings.

    Travel in Bridewell is unique. The mists are a curse, and so when you travel in them, unless you know where you’re going, and where you are coming from, the location you end up in is entirely random, and you run a 25% risk of a random encounter. If you stick to the roads, you’re limited to visiting the next location along the way, but all the encounters lie off the road, and you’ll only encounter omens inviting you to leave it. In this case, the company drew an omen and the location they drew just happened to be the next location along the road.

    They heard chanting and saw a faint glow in the forest away from the tracks. Knowing that they wouldn’t be able to find the tracks again, they investigated the chanting, finding a group of naked folk wearing wooden masks carved with patterns, sacrificing a goat to some unusually healthy looking trees. They recognised one of these people by the elderly body: Veaceslav. They followed him, called him out, before encountering wolves and fleeing back to his home. They promised to keep his druidic secret, learnt a little about the forest spirit Padru, and then went back into the mists, following the tracks once more.

    This time they emerged from the mists at Our Lady of Perpetual Light, the vineyard that has not been delivering wine. Violet balls of light hovered above the grapes, but many were extinguished and the vines there were wilted and dying. On investigation, barefooted tracks of small men or large children were found by the edges of the vineyard that had no light, but the investigations awoke a flock of ravens that came to defend the vineyard. Ferdrek broke up the flock with grease and the heat from the violet lights, but not before awaking the inhabitants of the vineyard.

    A whole household emerged, in bedclothes and cloaks with deadly weapons. Sweet talking allowed them to persuade the patriarch of the family, Davian, to ask them to find a religious relic (which he was suspiciously cagey in describing) that had been stolen not too long since. Davian attributes the footprints to this theft, and also the ailing vines, and offered a large reward. Ursaline queried the matriarch of the family about her religion (“Who’s this Lady of Perpetual Light”), and got a strange and cryptic response; a young member of the household wanted nothing to do with the strangers but was over ruled sullenly. Ferdrek, getting cocky, angered the matriarch and saw a vision of an attacking raven, before they left to carry on their investigation in the mists.

    This time they drew the exact location the footprints were supposed to be leading to (10% chance of that happening), so I allowed to tracking to be effective. Ursaline, realising something was stranged, began to examine the mists and realised they were indeed cursed, finding unrecognisable glyphs in the mist-forms, although they dissipated when she saw them. They arrived at the abbey they’d seen earlier, but a back entrance. It was morning, now, and so they decided the front entrance would be more effective an approach, and met here the guardsmen, monks Zigfiend and Orto, who were welcoming and bored. Ursaline asked questions about the strange religions she was seeing evidence of – the forest spirits, this saint, this Lady (“she’s older than these frivolous forest spirits”) – so Zigfiend invited them to visit their theological questions upon the Father.

    The Father was a very tall, incredibly hunched person, androgynous and beautiful of face. They placed the book they were reading closed on the table, and welcomed the company. They were happy to answer any questions about theology, but became cagey when Ferdrek accused them of being involved in the theft due to the tracks they’d followed. Before Father Autoriel had the opportunity to answer, though, a beautiful woman interrupted, asking the Father a question about a book she had been reading. She was a pleasant, kind, and thoughtful girl. Ursaline noticed surgical scars on her wrists and body, well-hidden beneath makeup and clothing (she spent a hunt token on this). At this point, Ferdrek pocketed the book (this being something that happened retroactively when they burnt hunt tokens after leaving the abbey), and then the Father asked them to leave, insisting that the abbey had nothing to do with the kidnapping of any children.

    Ferdrek persuaded Zigfiend and Orto to play tarocchini with him, and Ursaline wondered the grounds unsupervised, looking for the back entrance. She found an infirmary with surgical tools, and vents that lead down to a bath-house, in which were discarded limbs and wild and angry corpse-creatures she fled back up the vents to escape. She fled to Ferdrek just as he clumsily failed to persuade Zigfiend and Orto to admit wrongdoing, and they asked him to leave.

    As they left, they read the book, piecing together that in order to create life, part of a god, still living, must be incorporated into the creations body. Thinking that this must be the stolen relic, they realise that they must choose: Do they sacrifice the young woman, Atanasia’s life, for the gold promised by Davian and the winery? Or do they sacrifice the livelihoods of the winery to save this woman, potentially brought to life by nefarious and evil means, who may not want to be saved?

    We chose to end the session there.

    I thought the session was a little slow-paced, but looking back at the recap, actually a lot happened. I needn’t have worried. With my revised combat rules, the combat with the flock of rooks went smoothly, too. The goal-setting revisions worked very well, particularly because the hunt token exchanges pushed the story forward rather than ended a field of inquiry. The mists weren’t immediately clear to the players, and the interactions between the mists and tracking was fuzzy for me, something I’ll revise in the text. The fact that they were trapped in the valley wasn’t immediately clear either, something that I’ll revise in the text. I noticed a few things that needed fleshing out – particularly a few of the characters in the Abbey needed more improvisation than I’d intended. I’ll make quick work of that.

    I was concerned that the multitude of relationships and plot lines would be too much, but Marcia and Sandro reassured me that it felt mysterious and not overwhelming. I didn’t intend for three separate religions to be introduced in one session, as the druids were a random encounter and I’d assumed that “Our Lady of Perpetual Light” would be encountered in the context of the Abbey or other churches dedicated to saints, and so that the players would assume she were related and that it wouldn’t be revealed it were not until much later. But this ended up being a boon, as Ursaline was instantly interested in this conflict between religions (which is very much implied in the text, but came quickly text in play).

    Sandro fed back that his favourite moment was when he realised that there might be a character they knew in the random encounter, rather than just random cultists. This was a meta moment, as he knew that I’d been revising a lot of my random encounters to incorporate existing characters, but he said it was magical. The challenge, then, is how do we communicate to players who don’t follow this blog or who don’t talk to me about the module, that these cultists are real people that they may have met before, and that’s why they’re masked?

    Overall, it was a very successful session and a very successful playtest. I’m happy with myself!

    19th May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: The Isle

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The Isle is seventy five page module for the Vanilla Game by Luke Gearing, a dungeon crawl beneath an isolated island monastery. The Isle is a beautiful piece of writing, both in terms of individual pieces of prose and of structure and incorporation of the dungeon as a way to add intrigue and interest to the writing and the adventure. Layout and art choices have been made with this in mind: Minimal, in order to draw attention to the writing as the main star.

    The minimalist layout, I think, is successful. Smartly, the single column layout is not full page width, making it easy to read, and headings are consistent and clear. Italics have one use case, and they’re also indented in that use case. Things known before entering a room are marked with a symbol.

    The minimalist mapping, in my opinion, is not so successful. A lot of page flipping is required even for the simple map of the island. The dungeon maps try to preserve space and distance, but without much success. The written entries seem to acknowledge this failure as they describe all exits and entries and where they lead to (this is what italics are used for). There are five maps, which might be a reason for the choice not to place them on the endpapers where references belong, but the minimalist nature of the maps means more flipping between pages and less clear information design. If a map exists, let it add value. These maps could remain minimalist and incorporate room names, exits and probably the brief information communicated by the symbol, and I wouldn’t mind having to find the maps so much. As is, I’m going to have to print off the maps and write on them to use them.

    Luke Gearings writing in this hews traditional (“every 2d6 minutes, 1d6 sea-things appear”) in places, but more often hews poetic (“the trunk almost perpendicular to the ground, like a dog about to pounce”), or evocative (“the sound of wet, fleshy movement”) in a way that behooves the dungeon setting he’s writing for. It’s really inspiring stuff, both as a writer and a game master.

    One writing choice that made me think deeply, was the overground location that I quoted earlier, an ancient thorny tree. The monks use this tree for fish hooks and needles, but aside from that this tree has no purpose, or as I often describe it, it is a passive site. I am curious the purpose of passive sites in modules such as the Isle. This is not a traditional dungeon in the style of Palace of the Silver Princess; empty rooms (or in this case empty above ground spaces) do not behoove progress through it. It is a narrative journey, and one theory of design of location is the red barrel theory, which dictates that locations, factions, people should all be prepared to explode. This Auld Tree, is not prepped to explode, its thorns are not essential for the progress of the story, it simply is. I am accepting of the beauty of stories existing in isolation, for those isolated stories bring a sense of place to the world. But this tree is a story in isolation from a people, and perhaps simply speaks to the inhospitability of the Isle. I’m on the fence regarding the value and purpose of such a location, and as such I think I’ll seek out further examples in other modules to flesh out my opinion on such.

    The structure in this is novelistic, and I’ve never read a module quite like it. The writing foreshadows elegantly, draws you forward. It’s a module that wants to be read, as well as run. I find this quite inspiring, but I’ve thought about the structure here for some time, and realise that it’s leaning into the relative linearity of the dungeon to allow it to tell stories as part of the location keys and bestiary entries: There are places where you can sequence break here (one of the very first above surface locations is a sequence break), but it’s a dungeon and hence the assumption that there is a next in sequence gives rise to an opportunity to tell stories in a way that I haven’t seen in a module before. Can stories be told in this way in a non-linear sandbox? I suspect with less cohesiveness, yes. Or perhaps small stories could similarly be placed in separate locations around the sandbox, where progression might be more linear. A sandbox is an opportunity for a different type of story, but the one told here is elegant and impressive.

    Interestingly, one elegant thing about the Isle is that it provides subtle, narrative on-and off-ramps within the location entry texts. Three reasons and ways to get onto the island, and a interesting consequences and outcomes to completing the adventure (my favourite “ — cities burn for months hence”). But while these exist, the primary lack of scaffolding here is why would we enter the dungeon? The dungeon isn’t known to exist, except by the monks (this is clear) and the monks don’t wish anyone to enter it (also clear) and while they are gullible, there appears to be no incentive to trick them presented in the world. The iron-claddedness of this flaw needs to be weakened when I run it.

    The Isle is, to me, a groundbreaking dungeon crawl, largely because of Luke Gearing’s writing and attention to detail and structure. Some of the experiments with layout and mapping are less successful, but I don’t think that detracts from the value of running and reading this module. I strongly recommend it, if you’re partial to Luke’s historical faux-celtic oeuvre such as Wolves Upon the Coast which, to be honest, this would slip straight into.

    16th May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Combat in Trophy Gold

    Combat in Trophy Gold is a mess, as written in the book. I suspect it’s just badly written, not badly designed. I’m going to decipher it, hack it if necessary.

    Say how you expose yourself to injury, then roll your weak point. If, during combat, any dark die is equal to your weak point, take ruin or mark armour.

    This rule makes combat less dangerous, than hunt or risk. I like this.

    Weaken

    If you don’t participate in the attack , you can weaken the monster!

    Instead saying how you’re trying to weaken the monster, then making a Risk Roll. If you are using a ranged weapon, add a light die. On a success, reduce endurance by 1. If you are using a ritual, reduce endurance by 2 on a 6.

    For each light die that comes up a 1, 2, or 3, mark a slot of ammunition. If you are using a ritual, on any result of 1, 2 or 3 you also suffer exhaustion, magical backlash, a monster attack, or something else that prevents you from engaging in the Combat Roll for the rest of the combat.

    Moved to the front, because it happens before the attack, and moved the ranged and ritual rules here where they belong. I don’t love tree messiness of the rituals rules, but magic should be messier.

    Attack

    All remaining treasure-hunters declare together what weapons you are using, and roll a dark die for each character involved in the attack. Add a light die if you have relevant skills, equipment, or are taking advantage of the environment, or monster weaknesses. If you are using a ritual as a weapon, make a Risk Roll before using your Ritual this way, unless you can justify why it is risk free to use a ritual in combat.

    If the total of the two highest dice is equal to or higher than the Endurance of the monster, it is defeated in the manner y’all describe.

    If it is not defeated, you may now continue the attack, adding one more dark die and re-roll all the dark dice. You may keep trying again, adding a dark die and re-rolling until you defeat the monster, or until all treasure-hunters give up the fight or die.

    Changed perspective on rituals here, so it’s not just GM fiat. Playing on the table, all light dice are weak points. But I play online, so that’s redundant. Add a light dice for any advantages seems more intuitive, although it’s probably on average stronger, despite it being potentially much more powerful in rules as written (as all treasure-hunters could stack three out of four advantages individually, technically, each reducing endurance once, for a potential reduction from 12 to 2 in a group of 3).

    Endurance

    Endurance is between 2 and 12. Increase if the monster is particularly tough, if there are multiple monsters present, or if you are at a disadvantage.

    If Endurance is less than the number of dark dice, automatically win. If the Endurance is above 12 due to numbers or disadvantages tell the treasure-hunters they must retract or find an advantage.

    I don’t like fiddling with endurance, but can see that it mechanises overwhelming odds and keeps light and dark dice to specific roles. I removed half the fiddling earlier, but don’t see a better solution to this half of the fiddling.

    Retreat

    After taking ruin, if you wants your treasure-hunter to retreat, do so by handing your Weak Point to another player. They now suffer if either their original Weak Point number or the new number comes up during a re-roll of the dark dice.

    Retreating as a group from an incomplete fight may trigger Risk Rolls or other consequences.

    So that’s my version of Trophy Gold combat. Pretty similar, but reorganised so it makes more sense to me. Possibilities in favour of the treasure-hunters, but away from optimisation. I’d love to hear your thoughts?

    13th May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

  • Only two or three things

    Just today, Luke wrote about NPCs:

    When writing NPCs, you can communicate 2 or 3 things, or 4 related things.

    Anything more than that, and you’re either going to be ignored by the person running the game, they’re going to change it, as is the nature of translation, or they’ll be checking your notes so often that they do a worse job of running the game than if they’d just winged it.

    I agree wholeheartedly, which is why none of my NPCs in Bridewell are more than a few sentences.

    Grandmother Poppia. Squinting, sun-pruned. Whip-tongued. Won’t let a bass word be said about her grandson Marco or Parson Creori.

    I feel this way about most information in a module, though. A dungeon room can only be 2 or 3 concepts, plus a relationship. A location can only be 2 or 3 things, plus a relationship.

    Mess-kitchen. Empty, rattling, pots stained red and black. Hearth-chimney leading to the formal office. Territorial bone-snake nests in the soot.

    A creature can only be 2 or 3 concepts, plus a relationship.

    I think you can sub a concept out for a relationship, but you still max out at 3 to 4 total things.

    Bone-snake. Chalky ground-eel. Bony paralysing spines. Loves wet and dark, hates company.

    I think this solidifies something I’m critiquing in Bathtub Reviews but not doing an excellent job of identifying with clarity:

    The best writing for a module takes 3 or 4 key pieces of information, compresses it into a minimum of words, and does so using information I couldn’t have thought of myself.

    That’s what I’m aspiring to.

    11th May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

  • Bathtub Review: Beast of Borgenwold

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The Beast of Borgenwold is a 60 page, fully illustrated module for OSR by Harry Menear. A town is plagued by an undead creature, and it can only be ended by venturing into the tomb where it was spawned.

    The GM summary could was a bit much for me, two pages when just the timeline was sufficient. The hooks were complex, but tie directly into major NPCs in a specific way which would balance the loss of space, except two of the hooks of the four provided are similar in nature, so really there are three hooks to one page. It wouldn’t matter in a longer list, but in such a short one, the concept density is very dilute in these wordy hooks. There’s a 2d6 encounter table, which is interestingly structured. Half are beast omens, and the two most common are really one-off encounters. This encounter table would be better off unweighted or with different weightings. The stat block for the Beast takes two pages, largely because of layout. I was disappointed to see that it’s a monster manual entry, rather than a unique creature, given it’s the namesake of the module.

    Two out of eight rumours don’t appear to lead anywhere, the rest to various NPCs. One of those NPCs feels like a waste, as you’d head to the inn anyway. I’d prefer all rumours to yield some kind of fruit, even if they aren’t the fruit the PCs are looking for.

    The next fifteen pages are character write ups, which tend towards too long and wordy for me, and the layout is challenging on my eyes. The villager and hunter generators are excellent, but needed to be laid out in one spread instead of multiple. Not particularly usable at all. The characters themselves are interesting, unique, have competing goals, it’s pretty fun.

    There’s a surprising amount of repetition in this, and I’m not sure it’s to the texts benefit. I noticed it in the goblin section, but flicking back and forwards there’s a fair bit. It means the information is always in the place you need, but it also increases the amount of text on each page, which makes it harder to read for me. I think in this case, in a fairly simple module without too many moving parts, I’d lean towards preferring more efficient words than redundancy.

    I adore the concept of the god-goblin cult, but it’s not really fleshed out enough — why would the PCs want to engage with them? What reasons do they have to engage with the PCs? It’s a fun diversion, but hardly tied into everything else, until you get to the dungeon — which contains a bunch more information on the One True Goblin. Weird to split it up, especially without page references.

    The dungeon itself has a stellar map, and it’s mostly keyed 1 room for a page. It’s a bit wordy for my liking, and given how generous with space the early layout is, they could have been more generous here for usability. I like the rooms individually a lot, though.

    The layout on this whole book is striking, but not functional. Headings are inconsistently placed, making it hard to differentiate and find information. I deplore the font choices for readability, and choices are made to the extreme deficit of usability. It’s striking and atmospheric, but it’s not worth the loss, for me.

    My main takeaway is that little things impact usability a lot — this book looks great, but is hard to digest and for me to run. It’s well written, with cool ideas that probably could have fit well in a book half the size, and in this case that would have been a better module. Great ideas left disconnected from the flesh or scattered so things can get missed easily.

    That said, the story it tells us a cute, fantasy story with some interesting horror twists. The vibe of the art and layout renders it more horror than it actually is; really you could drop Borgenwold into any fantasy sandbox and have a fun little adventure. It’d be welcome in my campaign.

    9th May 2023

    Idle Cartulary

  • Bridewell’s Annotated Appendix N

    Influences for Bridewell and my work in general are often distant, vague and sparse. My brain works in impressions, absorbs the shape of a concept which is then brought to bear without reference to the concept itself. So the concept of an Appendix N for it feels odd, but may have value anyway.

    Books

    Thematically, Bridewell is Gothic Horror. So, I read mainly gothic horror classics, although I’m influenced by other types of horror as well. I’ll mention the stuff that wasn’t well-known to me, rather than just talk about things everyone has read like Poe, Stoker and Shelley. I should also note: I’m not a great reader, so I listened to all of these in audiobook format. There were a bunch of books I wanted to read that I couldn’t because of audiobook availability, particularly gothic horror outside of Europe and North America.

    • Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. Not only the first vampire novel but the first lesbian vampire novel, this is a vampire who is emotionally entwined in the other characters lives in a way Dracula was not. Obviously I named the main character of Bridewell, another lesbian vampire after her.
    • The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. A well written, engaging tale, combines fantasy elements and horror elements in a compelling way. Directly inspired my leaning into the more fantastic elements of D&D in Bridewell.
    • The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, honestly a terrible book to listen to as an audiobook, but whose structure directly informed the structure I used in Bridewell, where individual units of story could be nested into each other and seed future units. It’s well worth reading if you want something intricate and creepy.
    • The Monk by Matthew Lewis is proper horror, and inspired the Bridewell-wide recreational activity of making deals with devils or other powers and regretting it in horrifying fashion, either through the devil’s actions, or through the slippery slope the devils requests put you on.
    • Demiurge by Michael Shea and Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff are two contemporary takes on the cosmic horror that Lovecraft looms over. That directly inspired me with engaging prose and varying personalities interacting with ineffable powers.

    I never studied art or literature, but I am a giant nerd, so some non-fiction inspired me as well:

    • My Words to Víctor Frankenstein Above The Village of Chamounix by Susan Stryker is the definitive comment on queer rage, and much of it is echoed throughout Bridewell, but most notably “a monster with a life and will of its own is a principal source of horror”. Also, I named a town after this essay.
    • Shakespeare and the Gothic Strain by Linda Charnes, a long critique of book of Shakespeare scholarship that included such gems as “the gothic invokes it’s own special brand of dread: of something or someone already “in the house” as it were […] issuing audible but indecipherable commands”. It’s really broad in scope, and pointed me to a bunch of other fun literature, including the book it critiques (“night as a counterrealm that privileges imagination, irrationality, wildness and disobedience”; “there is still a strangeness that radiates from the gothic”, and a few other books (Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian and Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves).

    Poetry

    Inspired by Haiku, Hyungga and Shijo, short-form Japanese and Korean poetry, rather than classic module writing or horror poetry, I adopted some of techniques used by them in my prose — things like shorter entries than typical modules, entry series, minimising articles and prepositions, local contrasts for humour, horror and memorability. I’m by no means well-read nor do I read in Korean or Japanese, but nevertheless the influence is there. Here are some examples if you want to see the connections more clearly:

    • Haiku, Kobayashi Issa translated by Haas
    • Hyungga, translates in A History of Korean Literature edited by P.H. Lee
    • Shijo, The Crane in the Clouds by Sung-il Lee.

    Art, Movies, Videogames and Music

    I don’t know, mostly I was inspired by written texts, rather than audiovisual ones, but the sounds and images in my mind were influenced by these.

    • The Wild Tarot by Kim Kranz. They’re just really good cards, and the accompanying book along with WTF is Tarot by Barbara Wintner really got me into tarot and how I might use them to run a sandbox.
    • Hellboy by Mike Mignola. Really I wanted a Mike Mignola tarot for Bridewell, but I’m not sure anyone could afford that.
    • The Deranged Cousins by Edward Gorey. But more generally his art is very creepy in the way I imagine a lot of my secondary characters like the gromlyms, penny dreadfuls, and adamant brood to be.
    • Return of the Obra Dinn. Babes, you may not have noticed but Bridewell is in black and white, and it has a rocking classical soundtrack.
    • Crimson Peak and The Wolfman have impeccable Victorian gothic vibes that informed my images of Dimmness, Raven’s Gate and Saint Angelus.
    • The Witch and the Lighthouse have a meaningless, ineffable horror to them that are reflected in a number of the stories.
    • Spirited Away, Totoro and Oni all present a romantic, complex picture of a particular type of Shintoism that inspired one family of gods that can be found in Bridewell.
    • Dracula (1931). See if you can find the Hamlet-by-way-of-Renfield reference when you read Bridewell. There are a lot of low-key references to classic horror movies in here in the form of quotes and wordplays, it would be a fun game for a horror fan. Most of them are “sufficiently odd to be noticeable but insufficiently elaborated to be fully meaningful” as Peter Hutchins wrote disparagingly in “Theatres of Blood: Shakespeare and the Horror Film”.
    • Philip Glass’ Dracula soundtrack feels like early to mid career Glass in the best way, and played a lot while I was writing. This really feels like the actual soundtrack for the valley itself, even though soundtracks for the above movies were looping as well.
    • Sonatas & Romanian Folk Dances by Bela Bartok also has impeccable Brightcastle vibes, and I imagined a Bridgerton-esque transformation of pop songs into these styles for the parties there.

    Oh ha ha Modules

    Some are obvious, some are not. The three Ravenloft modules are obviously inspirations: Bridewell started and remains a response to how much the Curse of Strahd, like most Fifth Edition modules, sucks.

    • The Dark Tower of Calibar by Michael Ashton and Lee Sperry from Dungeon Magazine #1, is simply the worst vampire adventure ever written, and really made me think about what a good vampire villain should be like. Then, I wrote Carmilla Teroare to subvert that.
    • The Palace of the Silver Princess by Jean Wells is for me the prototypical dungeon and informs my writing and understanding more than other early dungeons like B2 do.
    • Against the Cult of the Reptile God by Douglas Niles and Witchburner by Luka Rejec do villages well in two different styles, both of which influenced the social and geographical graphs in Bridewell.
    • A Thousand, Thousand Islands by Zedeck Siew and Munkao and The Isle by Luke Gearing made me realise that I’m not the only person interested in innovative approaches to text in traditional fantasy adventure games, and that projects like Bridewell and Ludicrous Compendium weren’t a huge waste of time.

    I’d be remiss in not mentioning that every single Bathtub Review and hence every single one of those adventures contributed to my approach to Bridewell, particularly with regards to consistency across the book and clarity for what the sections were meant to achieve. If you want to look at some great modules, read these reviews! They’re good (in my opinion)!

    So, that’s my Appendix N more or less. I’ll no doubt add to it as I read more or remember things on conversation with people. I haven’t finished my reading for Bridewell, and I’ve only finished writing my first draft.

    6th May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    ,

  • Trophy Freed

    So, I’ve finished writing the main text of Bridewell, with only the maps to go. I’ll do another editing pass to my satisfaction, and then I’ll want to playtest it with myself as GM. I’ve been playing mainly Trophy Gold lately, and I’m really enjoying it as a system. Trophy Dark has a free SRD – check it out!

    Trophy Gold

    Trophy feels mismatched to a module like Bridewell, because in Bridewell the company and the PCs are intrinsically self-directed, and Trophy Gold is story-directed by means of free meta-game information and set adventure goals. On reading, though, I think that mismatch was overstated in my mind compared to Trophy Golds’s rules. I’d already started thinking about it, though, so here are my changes:

    1. Replace drive with Why do I want to get back home? And modify your choice from the list accordingly.
    2. Burdens are reduced to 1 when you arrive in Bridewell. You can take on new burdens in Bridewell and your burdens return to you if you escape.
    3. Choose a class, if you wish.
      • Fighter. Purchase armour with gold rather than burdens. Do not take a burden for armour at first level.
      • Magic-user. Purchase rituals with gold rather than burden.
      • Priest. Take Channel, Hospitality or Heal at character creation. Do not increase your ruin for this ritual.
      • Thief. Do not choose a ritual at character creation. Choose a skill related to thievery in addition to your other skills (for example obfuscation, traps, trickery, stealth). Do not increase your burden for this skill.
    4. A new spell, Heal. Heal another of their an injury in exchange for equal injury.
    5. Exchange 1 hunt token for an asset worth 1 bag of silver.
    6. Exchange 3 hunt tokens to achieve a goal or learn a secret.

    And that’s it. Less changes than I honestly expected. My reasoning behind these changes:

    1. You’re driven to escape not entirely by gold in Bridewell, so I don’t want a burden-heavy group on the outset
    2. Because initially everyone has the same drive (escape), it becomes a why for similar characterisation purposes.
    3. I like character classes. This version is just a free thing, and having more things to play with is fun in Trophy Gold.
    4. Priests need a Heal spell, but there’s a reason Trophy Gold didn’t have one in the first place. I thought this was a reasonable trade-off, effectively exchanging conditions or ruin.
    5. In Bridewell, assets (things you can use) are as important as gold, and they don’t take up your backpack space. “Bag of silver” is just the Bridewell unit of money.
    6. There are no set goals, so goals will be set ad hoc and as a group. This is rules as written in Trophy Gold actually, but in practice it tends to just be “can I skip to the next set please”.
    7. Secrets are an addition, because I think that in a campaign, secrets are treasure.

    I think Bridewell should be playable in anything from Trophy to OSE to Fifth Edition, but admittedly one advantage to Trophy is that I don’t really have to stat anything in advance, although I’ll probably do it retrospectively so that I can include it in an informal “Do you want to run Bridewell in Trophy Gold?” Bestiary.

    So, any thoughts about my minimal Trophy hack?

    5th May 2023,

    Idle Cartulary

    Addition: Changed the fighter a and wizard class concepts. Here are the originals:

    • Fighter. Do not choose a ritual in character creation. Choose a skill related to fighting in addition to your others skills (for example strength, hunting, intimidation, tactics). Do not increase your burden for this skill.
    • Magic-user. Take Bolt, Ward or Mirage at character creation. Do not increase your ruin for this ritual.
    ,

  • Bathtub Review: The Drain

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The Drain is a sixteen page Mothership module by Ian Yusem designed to act as a funnel for character generation. It’s fully illustrated in Mothership house style, and I think I backed it for a zinequest one year maybe? I spoil the ending for this one, fyi.

    Mothership doesn’t have rules for level zero PCs, so the first page is rules to cover this. It includes some interesting and appreciated additions, such as “allow swarming to overcome odds”, as well as a table of items and criminal convictions to ascertain why you’ve been sent to the hellhole that is the Drain.

    The setting is a failed colony ship where inhabitants have turned to a crazed religion as their crops fail and the people starve. The PCs have been drafted to recover the source of a transmission deep within the colony. Warships battle around the colony, perhaps because of this transmission, perhaps for other reasons — it wasn’t clear to me.

    The colony (“The Wheel”) is loosely mapped into zones which are broken into sections, effectively a point crawl. The distances don’t quite make sense to me, as it specifies 2500 acres of farmland but the most you’ll travel for is 1 hour to cover the diameter of the colony. I think this undermines the scale of the colony on one hand, but also I don’t want to spend hours travelling, so perhaps we need a smaller station? The abstract nature of the map also impacts descriptions, with secret passages, blockages not being represented on the map, and hence being hidden in block text. The point crawl doesn’t actually show the lines between points clearly.

    Randomisers worked into the locations are often wasted space, in my opinion, but here they support replayability when there’s a decent chance that characters won’t survive the first attempt. Initial descriptions are short and excellent, although sometimes poorly ordered. Dot points are standard here, if that’s your jam. It works well enough for me, but writing is concise enough it’s hardly necessary.

    This module leans heavily into body horror in a lot of the encounters and descriptions, which is 100% my jam but you mileage may vary. They do include a content warning at the beginning of the module. For a funnel adventure, the climax is likely to change the entire campaign permanently, which means by signing up to this funnel, you’re commuting to exploring the impact of a demon invasion into your sci-fi world.

    Two pages of enemies come next; the descriptions are one or two sentences and very evocative, although the more complex stat blocks detract from this a little. A page of loot generators is flavourful in the sense that it’s awfully nihilistic.

    This module is pretty great in the specifics — descriptions, themes, mechanics — but is compromised by not using visual information as a communication strategy, particularly in the map, which probably would have been better represented as a diagram or an actual map. The ending makes for a permanent campaign direction, which is not usually something I’d find ideal in a funnel.

    My takeaways are that visual information needs to be functional and pretty, and that I wish I could write terse beautiful description as well as Ian Yusem. I probably wouldn’t run this without reading the sequel adventure, as apparently it explores the consequences of the ending in a bit more detail, but it’s still good on its own.

    2nd May, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

    , ,

  • Dungeons without borders

    In Bridewell, there two traditional dungeons that are challenges to the principles guiding Bridewell. A traditionally keyed large dungeon, ones that have practical, common-sense usages, and lots of “37. Empty room.” does not fit with Bridewell’s sensibilities. But also, the orcs need a place to toilet, right? Just because it’s gothic doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to make sense.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this, which is part of the reason the maps for Bridewell are the last items to complete. And because of that, I’ve written these dungeons very differently than I’ve ever written a dungeon before, because I usually design dungeons around the map. These dungeons have been keyed (albeit with some sense in my head of the layout of the dungeon) before the maps have even been started.

    But I’ve left out the keys for empty rooms and the like, because I don’t have a map yet, and also because they’re empty rooms. And I’ve been expecting to draw a traditional dungeon map and just leave the unkeyed rooms empty. But then I remembered this:

    From B3: Palace of the Silver Princess

    “To expand the dungeon, the DM need but open up the blocked passageways”. And I wondered, hey, what if I just put doors where unkeyed dungeon areas were? What if I keyed only the bits I cared about, and let the DM open up those blocked passageways if they wished, or handwave them if they wished?

    My first thought was that just days ago I complained about a module in a Bathtub Review for doing precisely that thing. What’s the point of a module that terms the GM to make up the dungeon map?

    But nevertheless, empty rooms are contrary to what I’m trying to achieve in my writing. What about a random empty room generator? I put 14 potential empty rooms in my dungeon, I give each four permutations, and when the company stumbles into an empty room, bam! There’s a lavatory full of grasping arms. But they can be ignored if you wish, Trophy style, and I can maintain Bridewell’s trademark dense, punchy style.

    For Bridewell, it’d look something like this. Draw minor arcana for an empty room. Suit indicates Cups – Overflowing; Wands – Creating; Swords – Violence; Coins – Precious.

    1. Mess hall
    2. Barracks
    3. Chapel
    4. Gymnasium
    5. Bath
    6. Cistern
    7. Armoury
    8. Pantry
    9. Privy
    10. Salon
    11. Kitchen
    12. Classroom
    13. Library
    14. Oubliette

    The question really is, whether this is an interesting solution, springboarding off one of the oldest texts in the games history, or if it’s just a bad idea?

    I probably won’t know until I try. I’ll report back.

    2nd May, 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
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  4. They Also Serve
  5. The Artisan’s Tomb

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