• 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

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  • 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.
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  • 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

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  • 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

  • Bathtub Review: Neverland

    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.

    Neverland is a one hundred and thirty five page hex crawl based on the stories of Peter Pan, written and illustrated by Andrew Kolb. I purchased it about three years ago and ran it in Dungeon World, although it’s written for Fifth Edition. It is the first large module that I ever ran directly from the book without copious preparatory re-writing. I adored it at the time as one of the best modules I’d run, and I decided to bathtub review it because I’m curious to see if I still feel it holds up in my esteem, especially with the recent release of a spiritual sequel, Oz, which I’ll be getting in July.

    When I say one hundred and thirty five pages, really there’s an additional thirty pages on top of that of short stories and concept art, which strikes me strongly as self-indulgent. The book structure itself is (roughly) ten pages of rules, forty pages of NPCs and bestiary, twenty-five pages of hex fills, ten pages of fairy-land, thirty-five pages of location maps and keys relating back to the hex fills, and ten or so pages of random tables. Given the book is large, I’ll break it down by section.

    The rules section seems half superfluous and half Andrew’s House Rules. Fifth edition doesn’t have good travel rules, and I don’t mind these very simple ones. The island changes and morphs over 24 hours, which is a neat way to keep a smallish hexcrawl interesting. Lots of rules like chase sequences and scavenging just seem unnecessary. This section is just overwritten and unnecessary and doesn’t put me in a place where I’m excited to run the expensive book I’ve just purchased.

    The section supposed to summarise the adventure is here too, and the problem here is that there’s a lot going on and it all appears to be happening everywhere at once. This means that you’re given the strong impression immediately that you need to be all over the actions of fifteen separate factions, which is an immediate turn off for me, who has no doubt forgotten the first faction by the time she has read the last one. Such a large book should have a lot of moving parts, the problem here is that they’re all introduced at once, rather than by region or by hex or location.

    This same problem continues with the heavily structured “Cast” section. It’s a combination NPC and bestiary. I like the terseness of the bestiary sections — a beast gets a paragraph of description and a huge fifth edition stat block. NPCs get fifth edition Trauts, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws, a structure I don’t find awfully useful. I dislike how I have to navigate the whole bestiary to get a sense for major characters at play and their drives, but in play it’s a convenient glossary for the most part. I don’t love it but it works, for a module that’s intended to be a lot of combat and shenanigans.

    The hex fill section has a fairly useless quick reference, two versions of the map (one not illustrated and in tiny font), and then single-page hex fills with zoomed in maps, short summaries, special time-related events, random exploration table, and a fairly complex multi-roll encounter table. There’s a tiny useless map that shows (kind of) which hexes are adjacent, but doesn’t tell you more than that hexes number well.

    The meat here is the random encounter table, where between one and four random encounters will occur in each hex, or every four hours. There are something like a hundred possible encounter combinations from the encounter table, which tells us a lot about how this is expected to be played: An encounter-heavy exploration crawl, heavily incentivising avoiding overground travel using shortcuts like flying, magic lost boy trees and mermaid whirlpools. There is a loot table in the appendix, but clearly loot associated with these random encounters is an afterthought.

    Fairyland is a strange, brief, fascinating, plot essential afterthought. The fairies are elevated, they have a bunch of interesting rules and they steal children. Travel is random and kind of weirdly over complicated. You have to do significant preparation, which is contrary to the apparent intent of the rest of the book. I like it but the thirty wasted pages in this book would have been better just giving me more locations so I don’t have to write it myself.

    The maps in resources are incomplete. The advice is to pre-plan where NPCs are, what they’re doing, and why, and in my opinion this is what the book is for. Maps vary a lot — some are minimally keyed (“Tools Storage: Spare equipment and weapons kept here”, all abstract and not particularly useful as visual aids. Some are traditionally keyed (“100’ room, lake of acid of varying levels”). There’s good variety (even one location with randomly generated d100 rooms). And the art is all pretty cute. I like it. It’s just that key and art together don’t add up to locations that feel compelling or consistent.

    The random tables are great. Interesting where they need to be interesting, functional when they need to be functional. I especially like the rumour table which allows the GM to decide what’s true or not — honestly one of the most promising and interesting pieces of writing in the book.

    Overall, I think this was less compelling on this read through than I found it a few years ago when I ran it. The structure makes a lot of it easy to run, but hard to wrap your head around initially. There’s no on-ramp like starting locations and hooks are delegated to an appendix rather than the front of the book. The writing is workmanlike, and not particularly evocative, although there are a lot of concepts that are evocative and exciting to engage with. I personally would prefer evocative writing, because (for example) I have to wrap my head around Kolbs rules for shooting stars rather than be inspired by his writing about shooting stars — you may well feel that this low-density developed concept approach is better suited to the way you run or enjoy your games.

    More disappointing is the lack of consistency with the low-preparation design. A clear selling point and goal of this book is its capacity to pick up and run, but the location keys and the entire fairyland section runs contrary to this design goal. Given there was a bunch of wasted pages at the end of this book spent on fiction and concept art, I don’t feel like this particular design flaw is justified.

    I really like the design intentions and goals, and there’s a lot to learn from the directed layout choices and structural decisions. I’m excited to get my hands on Oz, to see whether Kolb has learnt from and refined his intentions here. I just wish that those intentions were consistently applied throughout this book.

    It’s a long book to read through with a lot of rules-active moving parts, and you’ll need to do some legwork to get up and running, but if you avoid fairyland or are happy to spend a fair bit of time preparing it in advance, there’s a lot of fun adventuring and faction play in this module. It’s pretty cheap on Amazon right now, if you’re at all interested you should probably check it out.

    29th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: Tomb of the Swine Prophet

    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.

    Continuing my series of tiny modules, Tomb of the Swine Prophet is a four page generic OSR dungeon module by Nate Treme, where one of those four pages is the title page.

    The title page has a blurb which doubles as a hook, as well as foreshadows your foe in the dungeon. The second page contains the map and key to a ten room dungeon with five empty rooms. The best of the keys are one-sentence wonders, the others are all good and interesting rooms.

    The third page is a twenty item random encounter table you roll any time you enter one of the five empty rooms. These double as randomly populating these rooms with furnishings, reveal the factions movements, and introduce saltwater-themed creatures and traps into the dungeon. The keys aren’t as good as the rooms, but they’re all interesting. The final page is twelve once sentence unique treasures and stats for the three creatures found in the dungeon. Succinct and interesting.

    Overall, Tomb of the Swine Prophet is a fun, characterful dungeon that I’d enjoy throwing into any ocean-faring campaign or near any coastal town for a one-shot detour. In comparison to other small modules I’ve read, it isn’t as dense or exciting as Break Their Pride, but it’s more flavourful and evocative and easier to use than A Simple Dungeon, but perhaps more importantly the flavour is more to my taste.

    23rd April , 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bridewell Gothic: State of Play

    Forgive me for this pointless stream of consciousness, but I’m spending so much time on this project right now and I want to talk about it.

    My all-consuming project right now is Bridewell Gothic (or perhaps just Bridewell, that’s just not a great name for a project). It’s intended to be a system agnostic gothic sandbox mini-setting, inspired by how much of a failure every version of Ravenloft ever was, but especially Curse of Strahd. As a friend of the blog once, it’s “Strahd but good”.

    When I ran Curse of Strahd, I was taken by how bad a vampire story it told. There was no powerful god impossible to kill, but rather an interloper who peers over fences and makes flawed plans executed by incompetent lackeys. It was a Saturday morning cartoon of a module, with a purposeless forty year old dungeon at its center.

    In my esteem, vampire stories are about some pretty uncomfortable subjects — abuse, toxic relationships, the threat of violence. And gothic stories are about inter generational trauma, family conflict, the past returning to haunt you. A gothic horror sandbox has to allow you to be a part of these stories, and most likely not resolve the issues, because both vampire and gothic horror stories are tragedies.

    So the challenge I’ve set myself is to write this haunted valley full of broken people and with a monster emblematic of that time-haunted brokenness at its heart. I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge, but bad art is the side-effect of good art, so I think it’s worth my attempt.

    As I’ve written, I’ve realised things I’ve lacked and had to rewrite — too much, to be honest. I definitely departed on the journey without goals, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re trying to produce something compelling and unique.

    The rules I’m currently following are:

    • Individuals are members of families
    • A family’s story features a visual motif
    • A family’s store features a perspective on a theme
    • Every place and person is active in the world.

    And I’m finding interesting exceptions that are required by these rules I’ve set myself. I’m creating new motifs, or new versions of the motifs I named initially. I’m incorporating broken families in various ways everywhere — but because of this characters are proliferating, and hence as are connections between locations and stories, which is proving unwieldy. I’m finding that active can have many meanings — they can be isolated, with the stories resolving in situ rather than having wider consequences or even consequences for the party at all. And all of these discoveries I think are giving the mini-setting more depth and interest and tragedy.

    The fascinating thing here, is that in developing a tragic, gothic setting for OSR, and having to playtest it soon, I’m interested in what fun will be found in a broken, haunted, tragic setting such as this. It’s not grimdark at all, and it has its humour, but it’s overarching ambience is one of melancholy. This is very much the vibe of most of my RPG writing, but a whole setting will be an interesting sell, and I can’t wait to see how people respond to it.

    20th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: A Spy in the House of Eth

    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.

    A Spy in the House of Eth is a sixty page module by Zedeck Siew for Best Left Buried. Full disclosure: Zedeck and I were talking on discord, and this module came up, so he comped me a copy.

    I’ll come right out and say the layout and typography doesn’t do this module any favours, for me at least. Formatting varies a lot within the text, intended to make things easier to read, but is a bit much and results in a less legible text. Certainly, the Best Left Buried boxed stat blocks could be a quarter of the size or even just bracketed, and it would make for easier reading. In this module, it feels like combat will play a relatively lower role in the proceedings and it gets more attention than it deserves. The bigger problem is the heading size and typeface choices, which make it genuinely difficult to identify and read subject changes. I struggled moving through the text in a way that I didn’t need to, especially as there is a lack of front-ended structural guidance aside from the map and the identification of the four major points of interest at the top of the table of contents.

    The writing itself, however is firing on all cylinders with regards to imagination, evocativeness and terseness. There’s very little here that I’d come up with myself (Dugong-folk with Man ‘o War slaves), and they are brief and specific enough that my imagination immediately snowballs into asking “What’s next?”. This level of imagination continues throughout the book; the value of sixty pages of surprises can’t be overstated. This is the kind of writing where I want to keep quoting the best bits. Especially appreciated are the many, “oh, and —” surprises, where an already interesting idea is given depth and life in a later table or entry (kingfishers laying eggs, for those in the know).

    Document structure is an ongoing challenge I think when writing sandboxes and hexcrawls. There’s a threefold difficulty here: This is a play-space intended to thrive when play is undirected, so there is no true beginning, no true ending, and must be left open for various approaches. So, where do you start?

    Zedeck’s answer here is to detail the various factions that inhabit the world, and then follow up with the locations. I think this is a reasonable approach. Most authors would decide to place NPCs in an appendix, but these are interesting and exciting foundations for a campaign and fronting them is a great idea to hook you. I’d be interested to know his reasoning behind the order of the locations displayed in the book, because to me this is where the scaffolding falls down. As a GM wanting to run this sandbox, the most logical place to start it isn’t in the northeastern wilderness of the map where the fourth point of interest is, but rather at the major port in the southwest which is proximate to two points of interest. What is happening with Weiren Oils is interesting, but it’s not the first interesting thing the PCs are likely to encounter. Encounters and connections are well indicated with page references, however, which makes it much easier to navigate.

    What would I change? Firstly, while I appreciate the subtlety of the gradually unraveling mysteries, a summary page would be appreciated, given you need to get a decent chunk of the way into the book before even meeting a spy. Secondly, more direction for where and when to start or hook the party would be beneficial, given the structure implies a northeastern route, but the southwestern one makes more sense but also puts you in the path of greater danger. In every new location, there’s a list of “What is here?”. If these lists were cherry-picked out and placed next to or on the map, I think the connections and goals of the locations be easier to run.

    An example of the document structure betraying its own intentions is the placement of a key, ever-evolving hell-pollutant on page fifty-five. A very brief rule is here that describes how the greed-driven colonisation of hell has caused hell to seep into our reality, destroying and replacing what is there. This is one of two major storylines reflecting the overall themes of the piece, but I’ve already read much of the book without consideration of it. Better placed forward, or summarised early.

    The spiel on the back of the book doesn’t do a great job of selling what’s in the book in my opinion; it’s a bit vague regarding the specifics of what you’re exploring the hexcrawl for; these specifics are interesting though, but they’re really well buried in implication within the module. I think that the fact that this is set in a colonised land, features hellish pollutions destroying the environment caused by the invaders, features slaves in an uprising against their owners, and that the players are asked to pick sides, places this module in a unique position that isn’t well stated outside the text itself. It’s a message that took 60 pages to communicate and would take many sessions to play through, but probably needs to be summarised for the sake of selling to the table and for ease of play.

    Overall, Spy in the House of Eth is a powerhouse of evocative writing and conceptual density, hamstrung by a lack of scaffolding to step into the world and to navigate it. If you’re happy to expect to read sixty pages closely and take notes to run it (let’s face it, plenty of modules ask more, I’m a harsh critic), this is one of the better longer modules I’ve read, and I’d recommend it.

    16th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Module Design and Scaffolding

    I read Throne of Avarice this morning on its release, which brands itself a “setting book and procedural generation toolbox.”. I considered writing a review of it, but I’ve been avoiding reviewing new releases as my Bathtub Reviews can be quite critical. But I found myself encountering a very specific problem.

    Front cover, by Ben Brown

    This book is jam packed with lists, most of them unique, interesting and well-written, and almost none of them well-tethered. I don’t think every list needs to be tethered to a concept! But the problem is that it’s never clear to me which list I should consult in a given moment. There are groups of lists, sure: to generate a location roll on these three lists. But I need to get to that section of the book to find out that that group of lists exists. There’s no sign pointing me there.

    This is easily solved: Individual items are as good in this book as something like Fever Dreaming Marlinko and if the author (Brian Yaksha) had chosen to, they could easily have formatted it as a more concrete world to great success. I think this would have worked better than what I read, but it’s clearly not the design intention. I’m not sure it’s a real solution if it runs contrary to the design intent.

    I think the problem is a lack of what I’m going to term scaffolding: An overarching structural framework that allows the reader to organically explore the world in a way that invites delving further with intention. I can think of a few scaffolding types off the top of my head.

    A narrative scaffold is presenting a core story and allowing the larger setting to be footnotes to that story. A mechanical scaffold is presenting a core mechanic which points to various sections of the larger setting in its outputs (an overland travel system for example). A structural scaffold is designing the module such that as you read it you are pointed deeper (or back further) into the module.

    I’m certain there are other scaffolding types that I haven’t thought of, but I think that in writing a sandbox or tool-based module, it’s important to consider that navigation can be the most significant barrier to accessing the creativity you’re putting on display, and placing an appropriate scaffold in place to allow your readers to navigate your material is just as important as putting good material down on paper.

    15th April 2023,

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: You Got A Job On The Garbage Barge

    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.

    You Got A Job On The Garbage Barge (hereon simply Garbage Barge) is a 64 page module by Amanda Lee Franck. I call it a module, but it’s kind of a setting masquerading as a module? I might have backed it on Kickstarter, I can’t remember. I’m a big fan of some of the luminaries involved, I’m in a discord and have played games with some of them. It’s fully illustrated with generic OSR stats.

    Garbage Barge’s setting is pretty unique; it is kind of inconsistently maybe early 20th century technology? It certainly is a setting for a micro-campaign I suspect, as chances are it wouldn’t fit very well into many existing campaigns unless the garbage barge itself was re-framed as some kind of interdimensional entity that didn’t belong there, and appears in cities at random, as it traverses the grand totality of rivers trawling for garbage. But, from the tangent I just went on, it’s definitely an evocative unique setting, and because it’s vague and wide-spread, it isn’t too challenging to add to or incorporate more into. It mightn’t be perfect for every campaign, but it probably is an excellent launching pad for a campaign.

    It opens with an excellent map of the Garbage Barge, and I suspect this map inspired the contents rather than the other way around. Travel is primarily by magical pneumatic tube, effectively rendering it a point crawl. It’s not outright stated, but I think that it’d be best run as if it were a subway, i.e. with signage or by using a subway map maker. This is all very neat. I suspect the map inspired the contents because the keyed locations range from a number of pages to a single sentence.

    These keyed locations have some pretty gutsy sentences though, they’re very concept dense although they are not very encounter dense. It feels like I’d spend most of my time just hanging out with the people I bump into randomly, even the ones that are interesting, weird or magical. The first true hostile encounter doesn’t give much in the way of characterisation, which is disappointing. Further in, there are a few given more interesting levers to pull: Clams who want dental work, for example, or a snake needing friendship but somewhat toxic in its methods. The locations take up the first twenty or so pages (or so? I haven’t located the last two yet). The non-combat, non-specific encounters, however, are just gold, and it’s gold overall.

    The next fifteen pages are people and creatures that inhabit the garbage barge. Lots of stat blocks, these people are meant to be fought it seems. These are all weird and dirty people and I like them all, but there’s little reference to them in the locations, and little reason to incorporate them with a few specific exceptions; I like the content but I want more support in using them. There is a random encounter table in an appendix, which has page references and incorporates all of these (but not, it seems, the appendix creatures), but it’s kind of hidden and I feel should be a little more front-loaded.

    There are a few short modules now, the first a small dungeon. The rooms in this dungeons each get three or four times as much space as the garbage barge locations itself, which honestly makes me reel with uncertainty regarding what the hell this actually is. The maps are excellent, though, clarifying the space very well while keeping the sketchy aesthetic of the art. The second is a character heavy dive into the depths of the garbage, which is weird and excellent, but very dense and wordy and I would have to copy and paste it and make it into bullet points and break it up for more space and relevance in order to run it.

    There is an appendix on garbage smells and an appendix on trash searching, which includes what appears to be a 5e bard subclass and a bunch of smell-related people and creatures. These are nice additions. I probably won’t use any of the smell stuff, because it isn’t referenced by the random encounter table or any of the rest of the book and also I wouldn’t run this (well, anything given the choice) in 5e.

    Overall, this is weird and flawed but very engaging. As a module or setting, it feels a little directionless. Perhaps this is a symptom of Kickstarter stretch goals resulting in a number of long digressions by guest creators, all of which are pretty great individually but all of which stand out from the ‘natural’ text. But there are also some design issues, like, this could do with a ‘Mothership’ pass in terms of putting the random encounter table at the front, talking about what happens when travelling the subway, things like that. There’s nothing wrong with a product that is simply there to kindle your imagination, but I distinctly do not feel like that is what this module is trying to be, and it needs a little more structure and infill to do what it wants.

    And then, to contradict myself, would I want to sully a product that’s evocative as this with rules? Like, probably not. I’m currently very intentionally writing a socio-gothic micro-setting, and I really hate putting rules in it. But some of the things Garbage Barge needs isn’t just rules (although subway guidance would help), but also filling in gaps in the world that are necessary, such as the subway, or putting the evocative and interesting people and creatures into places in the world rather than just saying they exist. I like this a lot, and I think I couldn’t run it even if I tried. I guess my takeaway learning from reading this, is that even if I choose to write system-agnostic and evocatively, I still need to consider scaffolding the writing more than I’d like from a purely creative perspective.

    11th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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