bridewell

  • Surprise! New projects!

    Two new projects sprang fully formed into my head this week, so I thought I’d update you all on them. Firstly I wrote a traditional, constrained dungeoncrawl called the Curse of Mizzling Grove. Just a small tower and its surrounds, a lot of treasure and some strange and eery creatures. I’ve written it, am seeking Continue reading

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  • Every Character A Major (Character)

    This is a polish-up of a tweetstorm I wrote a while ago. I keep forgetting that it’s better to write here than on Twitter; force of habit I guess. I saw someone talking about how “only certain important NPCs really need detail”. I came to thinking of how I applied the concept “all NPCs are Continue reading

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  • The Bridewell Bestiary

    There are about 40 monsters in Bridewell. I’m going to playtest in Trophy Gold, maybe Into the Odd, two systems that are easy to stat for, so here is a dual bestiary. This is why I wrote the other week. I’ll write about ten at a time, I suppose. Content Warning: Horror, implied abuse, murder. Continue reading

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  • Playtest Report – Bridewell Session 3

    My Bridewell playtest campaign continued today with Marcia and Alex joining. It was a longer session as I’m out of hospital. We’re playing in my own hack of Trophy Gold. There will be Bridewell spoilers, but if you’re a part of the playtest, you can definitely read this. Erstwhile the disaster girlfriend joined Ursaline the Continue reading

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  • The You’re Not An Idiot Principle

    One of my guiding principles in Bridewell is “The reader is not an idiot”. What do I mean by this? I’m assuming that someone reading my (independently published, single-creator, idiosyncratic horror sandbox influenced by haiku, 17th century literature, and queer rage) setting sandbox has come to it with the wherewithal to figure out how to Continue reading

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  • Playtest Report – Bridewell Session 2

    My Bridewell playtest campaign continued today with Marcia, Sandro, and with Zedeck joining. It was a shorter session because I was running it from in hospital! We’re playing in my own hack of Trophy Gold. There will be Bridewell spoilers, but if you’re a part of the playtest, you can definitely read this. Vero the Continue reading

  • 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 Continue reading

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  • 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, Continue reading

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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 Continue reading

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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 Continue reading

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Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

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

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