Reviewn June 12: The Undercellars

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I read The Undercellars, a 7-page dungeon by Joseph Manola. It was a response to a community challenge a few years ago, to use a Dyson Logos map for ‘the condensation of utility, beauty, meaning and originality into a functional and interesting micro-adventure’.

Joseph M’s dungeon could be used for his Against the Wicked City setting, but could equally be plopped down and used as-is in many games. It seems to be for a non-specific old-school or OSR system; anything with GP, AC, and classic ability scores should work. Monster stats are compiled at the end, referring back to their locations. All the monsters have specific traits rather than being bags of hit points, which is nice.

The dungeon’s contents:

The dungeon is an abandoned secret temple complex lying in ruin, with layers of history. There’s a strong implied story, about a family lying in ruin, with its own layers of history. I really liked this dungeon, and the only thing I think it was lacking was a concise explanation for the GM at the very beginning, if its purpose isn’t to be ‘read for entertainment’ (something Joseph M has talked about at length).

The Undercellars has some consistent theming, in particular sleep, hallucination, blood, worship, ruination, and a corrupted family line. There’s history there, with a murderous family, blackmail, cult worship, a covert graveyard, dark secrets, shame and horror, bloodlines and mysteries. It’s all discoverable and more importantly, the dungeon offers actual interactions with player characters, such as the chance to perform an ancient rites and acquire power at a nasty cost.

Everything on the map is keyed, and nothing notable on the map is absent. Even in seven pages, The Undercellars resonates with a feeling that there’s always more to discover. It’s full of evocative details which are great fodder for dungeon adventure:

• Animated skeletons that are desperately trying to get away, and which crumble under an open sky
• Laudanum laced with hallucinogenic herbs “worth 10 GP per dose to an artist or insomniac”
• Troglodytic proto-human ghouls
• Dead cultists lying where they were killed long ago by looters, deepening a sense of history
• Undying demonic object of worship offering magical/chemical indoctrination into the cult
• A monster with deathly cold toxic blood, and another which causes wounds to bleed secrets

One of the set pieces is a big persistent slow beast that can be eluded but is unlikely to be beaten in a straight-up fight, the kind of thing that's an OSR staple. The text includes half a dozen possible ways of dealing with it, scattered throughout the dungeon, which I appreciate. They are some of numerous ties between aspects of the dungeon, giving it a dynamic feel and enhancing the feeling of history.

Minor text quibbles:

This scenario was well-written and textually polished, with nary a typo to be seen (if I remember correctly, Joseph M is an academic writer, which might help). The only thing I noticed was the occasional mismatch of full sentences alongside others that are simplified phrases (eliding ‘is’ or ‘the’ or ‘there is a’).

My favourite bit:

The mysterious, laconic, semi-immortal lotus-eater ‘Dryden’, languishing in a pit.

Where to get it:

On Joseph M's blog: http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-undercellars-playable-dungeon-for.html

Reviewn June 11: Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

I've ended up reading some shorter things to try to keep up the pace. That hits a zenith today with a one-page ‘microgame’: Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword, by David J Prokopetz / Penguin King. It develops the premise that “it doesn't make sense to talk about combat and roleplaying as separate activities in tabletop roleplaying games, because a battle can be a story.” It’s licensed under a CC-BY license if you wanted to tinker with its ideas.

Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword is a game for one to two players using colour-coded dice pools, requiring dice of six colours associated with symbols like ‘ambition’, ‘blood’, and ‘sorrow’. It has an interesting minimalist design, and it is fundamentally about a storybook hero going to slay a storybook dragon.

The game being so short means that I can't go into much detail without just giving away the game's content. But it also means that I did play the game through a couple of times! It felt a little like a choose-your-own-adventure, but with less certainty (or less association from action to outcome?), and different stakes. I kind of saw the ‘twist’, if you want to call it that, coming. The dice associations and the questions for Olaf and The Dragon to answer make it obvious what the flavour of the ultimate action resolution is going to be, after Olaf hits The Dragon with his sword.

What do I think of the game? It's an interesting diversion. It's about as small as it could be and still count as a game, I think. So ‘microgame’ is apt. I suppose you could try using Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword as a resolution mechanism specifically for ‘dragon slaying’ if that came up unexpectedly in a game that’s really not about combat or individual characters. It makes me wonder if anyone’s tried to run a series of games using a disparate rule set in the form of various completely separate ‘microgames’.

Minor text quibbles:

I don't really have any criticisms! The text doesn’t specify that all the dice should be of the same sidedness (or clarify that they needn’t be), but that’s a common sense assumption.

My favourite bit:

The dragon isn’t colour-coded, but its intrinsic nature is.

Where to get it:

On Itch at: https://penguinking.itch.io/olaf-hits-the-dragon-with-his-sword

Reviewn June 10: Fey Critter Tea Party

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today for Reviewn June I read Fey Critter Tea Party, by AnnieDisaster09. I picked it up in the “Your Best Games” Indie TTRPGs bundle on Itch.

The game is 15 pages, and strictly a story-telling game rather than a TTRPG, although each player does have ownership over one character (‘critter’). Being the storyteller is a matter of turn-taking plus collaboration.

The characters must journey through a sort of liminal fantasy fairy-world, gathering ingredients to prepare food for a witches’ tea party. The tone is cutesy, perhaps even twee, carried by both the subject matter and the verbiage – ‘ask nicely’, ‘Orchardhome’, ‘sneezefests’, ‘tricksy’, ‘yield the sweetest reward’, ‘hurt feelings’, etc. I’m a sucker for games with an unusual focus (food preparation) and setting (interlocking fairy worlds). It feels a little like Candied Violets.

The game system:

Fey Critter Tea Party is built on the Caltrop Core game engine, which I’m not familiar with. A 1d4-based system is rare (they don’t seem to be a popular dice type). Having only four outcomes necessitates a coarse-grained dice resolution system, in this case packing in four different degrees of success. You can have a success requiring teamwork, for example. I was interested to find that you can't roll a simple failure, only a ‘success plus a bad side effect’ or a ‘failure plus a bad side effect’. It makes sense, for a story-telling game; everything has some immediate impact, serving to drive the narrative forward.

The game isn’t mechanically complex. It has a nice, simple split of stats, Gumption / Grace / Guile, and character generation looks like it would be fast.

It’s always interesting to me what goes unexplained in a full game release, especially for a small game. The hobby has a certain amount of jargon. In this case, both common TTRPG elements (‘d4’; ‘stats’; ‘NPCs’; ‘an adventure’) and common story game elements (‘scene’; ‘mechanical element’; ‘story element’; ‘the prompt’) are left undefined.

There are a few undefined phrases, like ‘magic ability’ and ‘movement ability’, which feel like an oversight. Notably, the game mentions eight specific types of magic but has no magic system. You use the ‘Guile’ stat for it and then make the 1d4 dice roll. If you have a 2 in Guile, you will always succeed. It’s interesting that there’s no meta-guidance on magic, since (a) at the upper limit you can just ‘cast a spell to win the game’ if you want, (b) in practise players are going to have different ideas about which particular power level is going to be in the spirit of the game, and (c) rotating through the GM role means there’s no authority.

I’m curious whether things like magic are deliberately elided, or are something given a complete treatment in the underlying Caltrop Core game system. If the latter, they could have been included in the Fey Critter Tea Party text, if the author’s relying on the Creative Commons license to use the Caltrop Core SRD. But I’m actually not sure on that point – the text references the CC-BY-SA license, but doesn’t appear to actually state that the game is released under that license, which is a requirement of using CC-BY-SA.

The tone and feeling:

The titular critters, who are also the player characters, are sort of like witches’ familiars, but in fairy form. I tend to associate ‘critter’ with a small animal, and some of the options are anthropomorphic animal fairies, but you can also play as a pixie, water spirit, walking plant, and so on. They have fun little abilities, like ‘Anytime you use an object that is your favorite color, add a +1 to the check’. I think such class features probably work fine for collaborative low-stakes story games like this whereas for a classic TTRPG they’d be fodder for tiresome min-maxing.

The text provides just enough detail on various creatures and backgrounds to build from, without constraining or needing the players to memorise a bunch of canon. All the characters are capable of using magic, which is a fine solution to the matter of ‘spellcaster disparity’, and of course is thematically appropriate.

Following its tone and aesthetics, Fey Critter Tea Party limits the severity of negative consequences to any bit of gameplay. (Although I did notice that the text sometimes evokes the idea of harm greater than the rules strictly allow.) It’s interesting to see how rules try to route around needing to depict harm when they can’t directly prohibit the player choices leading to that; for example, in Fey Critter Tea Party, sufficient failure in combat leads to the character involuntarily running away. With this, the simple mechanics, and the primacy of story participation, it might be a good game for kids of a certain age.

The layout makes nice use of simple graphics. The sections have nice descriptive titles like “The scones and cream of it all”. The text does a good job of making the food and ingredients sound tasty, a prerequisite for a food-focused game. I like the tone, and I like the intermingling of fluff and crunch which is more common in indie games like this: things like “Storytelling will continue until the Critters successfully obtain their ingredient for each chapter.”

 

The adventures:

Any good game includes a starting adventure (scenario, etc), and this one includes four. They have to be a little vaguer to fit the purposes of a story-telling game, but Fey Critter Tea Party handles it with aplomb.

• I really like that the text breaks down each adventure into a shallow hierarchical information structure of goals and subgoals, rather than making the players search around for what they’ll need. These are also optional, so you can improvise and adjust for your level of comfort. Each adventure is similarly structured, so I’m not sure I’d want to run several back to back.
  
• The adventures have some evocative details (hot peppers that only grow in the dark, a sapient tide, etc) and there’s a bit of magical treasure which interacts directly with the few facets of the very simple rule system (e.g. providing a type of magic, or preventing a critter from losing in combat).
• The specific challenges are left very open-ended, almost always amounting to just a few short NPC descriptions; it’s not clear if you use just one or all of them (the latter is both more constraining and offers more complexity to sink your teeth into). I suppose that open-endedness is part of the intrinsic fun of story-telling games when you’re taking turns to run the challenges.
• They also don’t dictate a mode of problem solving, even implicitly: there are rules for combat, there’s the previously-discussed unconstrained magic, and the biggest challenges are clearly written with either subterfuge or social interaction in mind. This subtle emphasis on player choice is something I look for in any game, and is one of Fey Critter Tea Party’s best features.
• Each adventure has a built-in climax in the form of a slightly bigger NPC obstacle between the characters and the last ingredient on their list. On the whole it’s good, tight design.

 

Minor text quibbles:

• A fair number of grammar problems, in particular punctuation problems (in the form of missing commas, spaces, and periods) and inconsistencies: mismatch of number words; inconsistent capitalisation for most of the key terms.
• A few typos (‘reccomended’, ‘lychens’) and homophone errors (‘weary’ for ‘wary’ throughout). One typo particularly confused me: ‘Guise’ for ‘Grace’, not for another stat, ‘Guile’.
• Layout-wise, I don't like the ragged right edge, runt lines, and indents on section start. But my biggest quibble is that the text uses up more space than necessary (combining paragraph indents and paragraph spacing) while the headings suffer from lack of space.

 

My favourite bit:

Playable mushrooms!

Where to get it:

On itch at https://anniedisaster09.itch.io/fey-critter-tea-party

Reviewn June 9: Realistic Gold And Silver

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I’m looking at Realistic Gold And Silver, by Worshipful Satan. It’s a 21-page “guide to bringing the realistic value of gold and silver into fantasy role-playing, based on medieval England.” Arguably more about world-building than roleplaying, it aims to give “a realistic representation of the medieval value of gold and silver”, which although not “necessary or desirable in every fantasy setting, [...] should be an option available to you.”

It's a bit niche. Few games are set in medieval [implied:] Western Europe, or even in a fantasy alt-history version thereof. I don’t think there’s any reason for other Earth-like planets to necessarily have similar quantities of silver and gold ores deposited in their crusts near the surface, let alone wherever the technology to mine them has been developed. And that’s even if said planets are formed by mundane processes rather than fantastic ones.

But all of that said, I am a fan of grounding fiction in real information. The real world is full of details that the first pass of the imagination often fails to create. And for those who want a historicalesque feeling to their gameplay, getting things like coinage right is a must.

Most of this text’s content was matter I’m already familiar with, but I’m a wonk when it comes to this specific intersection of history and economics and gaming, so I think other readers might get a lot more out of it. Realistic Gold And Silver is a good primer. I'm going to look at it on its own terms: it’s a plaintext document exported to PDF, not a polished thesis.

‘Realistic’ gold and silver values

The text admits that its initial premise is something of a canard, that the wide range of places and times and specific contexts means “that we must arbitrarily choose prices for gold and silver which fit our gameplay needs.” I don't think many people approaching a read like this are going to be surprised by that.

I think that working out all coin values by weight of metal is actually a very elegant approach to the TTRPG nightmare of trying to provide a plausibly wide variety of different denomination coins as the adventurers rampage across the landscape, looting archaeological sites. I like it a lot!

• The mechanism boils down to “Large purchases are made by measuring the weight of coins rather than by counting a specific number of coins”.
• It means that you can have the PCs find a big bag of Somewherian silver florins and half-florins and pour them into their sack of local groats and Elsewheric ‘new pence’ and imperial sestertii and you don’t need to consider either number or face value of coins, only the weight of the silver.
• It even works alongside bullion bars and hacksilver, and, as the author points out, works with the damaged, cut, underweight, and clipped coins that you would realistically get in any system without the technology and state power to prevent that.
• Note that this does require that all coins of a particular metal have similar levels of purity. That abstraction may be a stretch for some people who are really into this idea, but they could easily add in e.g. one lower level of purity and track those lesser-quality coins separately.
• Personally, unless I was leaning into the pseudo-historical aesthetic, I would pick a name other than ‘pence’ for the unit of measure/account if I was actually using ‘pennies’ as coins.

It’s interesting that the text recommends this for silver and then treats gold coins as special, counted individually rather than being weighed out. I think this against depends on whether you need that pseudo-historical feeling, but also the degree to which your campaign ramps up. If the PCs are meant to be finding hoards at tenth level that are worth thousands of times what they were getting at first level, then you might start out counting coins and face value variations for each kind of coinage, and transition to measuring each one in turn by weight as (e.g.) silver, electrum, gold, then platinum become commonplace.

I think the text’s attempt to approximate an equivalent modern-day value for medieval coins might give people some wrong ideas. The economic realities were so fundamentally different, states worked differently and their economies were less monetised, most people were growing most of their own food, and so on. People were spending proportionally much more on food because yields were lower and harder to produce at the same time as other costs were proportionally cheaper (e.g. housing could be made quickly by non-experts from cheap materials without regulation and overheads).

Instead, just let the prices speak for themselves. Which the author does:

Equipment and prices

The plausible price list for equipment is nice. It covers a fair amount of ground, mostly matching early D&D equipment lists. The author is clearly aware that you can’t really put together a reliable price list for even a relatively well-attested historical setting, and hedges appropriately (I would appreciate distinguishing in the text which prices are historically supported and which are just guesses, but again, I'm an outlier, most people aren't going to care).

• I like the authorial commentary on little bits of the equipment list, giving context on things like the German zweihänder, the price and usage of caltrops, and disparaging the typical ahistorically high-lux fantasy oil lamps. The text includes a scattering of fantasy gear for specific purposes. I also like spices as loot.
• I think the author overstates the case for not having gemstone faceting. But I have often thought that intaglio should be a much more common kind of treasure!
• Amethyst was a precious stone comparable to diamond and ruby up until the 1700s. The author doesn't mention this, but I suspect had this fact in mind, as the text prices amethyst alongside the other cardinal gemstones (albeit assigning it the lowest value of them).
• The text makes the good but oft-made point that any remotely dragonworthy hoard of gold is simply too much for verisimilitude. The author just advises against having them. My own opinion is that fantasy problems demand fantasy solutions. I can think of a few ways to set up the cosmology and world so that dragons can still have huge valuable (but not completely society-altering valuable) hoards. You do have to abandon attempts at a medieval feel, and consider the knock-on effects, though.

The classic explanation for D&D prices as gold-rush-induced-wealth-disparity has also been done to death, but the author lays it out elegantly. I would have eagerly read any extra material on these speculative fantasy parts, with guidelines for setting ‘true’ prices vs inflated ‘dungeon rush’ prices for equipment and staples, how buying vs selling are differently effected, considerations about prices of dungeon treasure based on proximity to the rush, etc.

Minor text quibbles:

• This is a plaintext document, not fancied up. Design simplicity can be strength! In this case, though, the ragged right edge justification is hard to read.
• The text also would benefit from an editing pass. There’s various typos, some grammar problems, and not much conclusion. Even some of the fundamentals are missing: the reader has to work backwards from disparate numbers to calculate that the author has chosen to value gold at 15× silver by weight.
• A few intersections with game terms (rounds, xp per coin) are highly D&D-specific, but the text doesn't acknowledge this.

My favourite bit:

The last couple of pages provide very important context and commentary, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. They provide a primer on certain game-relevant aspects of pre-modern “adventure economics”. These extrapolations and speculations about fantasy economics are the kind of thing I love reading.

Where to get it:

On itch at: https://worshipful-satan.itch.io/realistic-gold-and-silver

Reviewn June 8: Coincackler Well

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I read Coincackler Well, a two-page ‘Pamphlet Adventure’ by John Lopez (SoloRPG). It's a location for 2–4 level 2 characters to explore, aligned for the Basic Fantasy system, but as the author points out, pretty readily convertible to most old-school ‘D&D-like’ rule sets.

The site is an ancient wishing well, neglected for centuries. Clearly something’s up, given that it hasn’t filled in with detritus or collapsed!

Here's what's up: giant bees, kobold cowboys, wish-sniffing frog princes, and a crazed brownie. Love it!

As any professional writer knows, writing cohesive compressed content is harder than just writing. (See e.g. “I had not the time to make it shorter”, variously attributed but apparently originating from the pen of 17th Century philosopher Blaise Pascal.) Writing just two pages is a big task, so let's see how this adventure manages it!

Trying my hand at GM-less play

I’ve not dabbled much in solo TTRPG and/or journaling play, so I’m not sure how much you're meant to approach this with more of a story-telling, flexible mindset, and how much you're meant to use the actual game/simulation rules from the full TTRPG system (Basic Fantasy) that it has stats for. I’m in particular not clear on whether the player is meant to read ahead in order to perform the GM's role.

The guidance Coincackler Well provides in place of a ruleset and referee is the 'Micro GM Emulator'. It's pretty aspirational, a set of random tables with basic open-ended instructions for interpreting the results ‘within the context of the adventure’. The result feels like a creative exercise (or looking for auguries in stochastic patterns).

I tested it out with the first location in the five-room dungeon, the Old Wishing Well.

A rusty bucket hangs over the stone well suspended on a tattered rope. Buzzing sounds echo up from the well shaft. A dead body lies curled up in a slimy puddle.

We make a What Happens roll for at least one key word per room. Let's take 'rusty bucket'. I got the result ‘foreshadow an event or find a clue’. The fact that this is a result makes me think I am meant to be reading ahead. Otherwise you're going to need to tie whatever you decide back in, and it'll all be murky.

I re-rolled it because I wasn't sure, and got ‘resolve a circumstance’, which is tricky for the start of the adventure. Let’s say I decide to ‘resolve’ the buzzing sounds mentioned in the initial description. I could simply have them stop, but again, it goes to the question of whether to read ahead: do I know if the buzzing is something that can or should stop? What are the repercussions?

I did read ahead, and then decided to use the Micro GM Emulator tool to answer ‘a more complex GM question’ about how to resolve the buzzing sounds the characters hear. I don’t think we need Action, so I roll four dice to get a couple of Theme Descriptors, getting one ‘power’ and ‘lies’. Interpreting that, maybe the characters get the false impression that the source of the buzzing is a swarm of relatively powerless normal-sized bees, their buzzing amplified by the well. This solution of course depends on partitioning of knowledge, which is trickier at the TTRPG table than it is for a story-telling game.

Reading further, there's a twisted wish-brownie at the end of the dungeon, whose ‘ability to hear wishes has been corrupted by his madness. Therefore, he will use an already fulfilled wish from the past as a reward, after retrieving the corresponding coin’. The text gives d6 past wishes, but this actually seems like the kind of thing that would be an interesting test for the Micro GM Emulator. I decided to roll What Happens, How did it go, two Action Descriptors, and two Theme Descriptors.

What Happens: Change a circumstance
How did it go? Distastrously [sic] bad
Action Descriptor: Control
Theme Descriptor: Enemy

Interpreting that, let's say someone in the past wished to draw some powerful monster out of hiding to themselves. So now that’s what the characters unexpectedly get. I'm happy with that.

The dungeon itself

I like the strong theming of Coincackler Well, which has a touch of the ‘Gygaxian dungeon ecosystem’. Colonies of wild bees do take up residence in enclosed spaces, and I can imagine giant bees being tempted by a well. Kobolds are one of those monsters without a single central niche, and this adventure's use of them as giant bee ranchers works well. Perhaps ranchers isn't the right word; the text makes clear that they are more parasitic raiders than symbiotic pastoralists.

• I like that ‘honey-smeared combat’ can attract more bees.
  
• It’s interesting that the well shaft ends up smeared in wax and honey; I’m unclear on whether that’s intended to be natural distribution, or a deliberate trap set up by the kobold bee riders. I guess that’s a question for the Micro GM Emulator!
• It’s also interesting that the kobolds are overtly harvesting the honey ‘for trade’. It’s a very OSR type approach of creatures doing their own semi-peaceable thing, compared to many games which would make them automatically ‘the bad guys’.

It would be useful to have the total numbers of all creatures, which are separated out into a random encounter table, chance-based rolls for creatures at locations, fixed numbers at other locations, chance for reinforcements to join combat, etc. The dungeon is just five rooms, the kind of thing that could be ‘cleared’ incidentally through play, and I know as a GM I would need to know the actual numbers; I have to imagine that GM-less play is also going to need them. In particular, the characters might run into anywhere from zero to sixty or more giant bees. ‘All remaining giant bees are found [in the hive]’. Maybe I'm missing a Number Appearing entry from Basic Fantasy? Or maybe the details existed but were pruned during the difficult process of writing short content?

Minor text quibbles:

• Just one typo I spotted, plus I’m not sure where I stand on the word ‘Gmless’.

My favourite bit:

Interplanar fey frog princes have been attracted by the wishing well’s 2000+ unused wishing coins! ‘A portal to their weird realm exists at the bottom for as long as the coins remain.’ The pool itself has been corrupted by faerie magic, too. Great stuff.

Where to get it:

Pay-what-you-like at DriveThruRPG

Reviewn June 7: Candied Violets

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Here’s a short one at 7 pages. I read through Candied Violets: The Sweet Treat RPG, an indie game by Monroe Soto. It’s one of a bunch of games I got together in the “Your Best Games” Indie TTRPGs bundle on itch.io.

I found it to be a relaxing read, a light-hearted cooperative storytelling game. It's Beatrix Potter meets Great British Bake Off, with woodland creatures as characters and judges.

It's done with bright block colours, a mixture of vivid hues and something closer to pastels, with baking photos like a magazine. The updated version available is a little easier on the eye for casual reading.

Amusingly for the short length and low-stakes format, Candied Violets does include a way to lose.

Minor text quibbles:

• It assumes familiarity with terms like ‘advantage’ and ‘disadvantage’ specific to D&D 5e. Have those become terms of art? Perhaps they have.
  
• One place in the light rules could do with a little more explanation: “Pick a skill and assign the appropriate modifiers of 0, +1, +2, +3, and +4” seems underdetermined.
  

My favourite bit:

The judges having randomly determined allergies. There's perhaps room for high drama to enter play here, beyond that already implied by the instruction “Try not to set anything on fire.”

Where to get it:

https://monroeroe.itch.io/candied-violets

Reviewn June 6: Monster Knight Cult Wizard

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

A short one today, to ease back after reading WTF.

I looked through Monster Knight Cult Wizard, a 15 page zine or artbook by Perplexing Ruins. I follow Perplexing Ruins for their RPG fantasy art on Patreon.

The work in this resource ranges from ‘outsider art’ feeling to professional work that could appear as a full-page image in a major gamebook. Most or all of the art is in physical media as far as I can tell. But I’m far from an art expert, so I’m going to keep it short and sweet!

The inkiness of the artwork, for lack of knowing the right phrase, plus the aesthetics of gothic ruin, sets the tone somewhere between fantasy, horror, and the surreal. In Monster Knight Cult Wizard this creates an interesting juxtaposition with the gritty, distressed, uncapitalised ‘typewriter’ text, the use of block colour, and the lack of overarching structure, which all together give it a punk feel. My punchy one-sentence summary would be: It’s like if a zine was a coffee table book.

The gameable content is, I think, secondary. The potion-crafting and ingredient rules on page 7 are evocative, but pretty basic. Mostly this just reminded me of the ton of great art that Perplexing Ruins has put out and that I should use some in my next project.

Minor text quibbles:

I understand that the text was formatted so as to impart a specific aesthetic. Regardless, not putting spaces between the numbers and the entries in a numbered list is a venial sin.

My favourite bit:

‘Tale of a castle’, on page 4, is probably my favourite artwork in the book.

An extract. Artist: Perplexing Ruins

Where to get it:

https://www.patreon.com/perplexingruins/
 

Affinity Publisher editable object styles workaround

Unlike e.g. InDesign, Affinity Publisher doesn't have full object styles. You can create 'styles' as, essentially, presets, but you can't update or edit them and have the effect propagated to the contents of your project, in the way that you can with paragraph or character styles.

Suppose you want to apply, say, a coloured stroke to some subset of the objects in your project to make some cut-out art pop or to distinguish frames. You know that you might later need to tweak the colour, or the width, or the opacity, for all those objects.

An Affinity Publisher 'style' doesn't let you do that.

So here are two easy hacks to capture some of the basic functionality of proper object styles.

1. Names-as-styles

When you apply a style to an object, rename the object to the style name. Then when you need to change the look of objects with that style, use Select Same → Name from the right click or the Select menu.

This works for things like repeated placed images and copy-pasted frames: cases where all the instances will have the same name by default, so you don't need to do anything as you go.

2. Tags-as-styles

But suppose your project requires certain naming conventions. Or you're creating elements in such a way that objects in the same style won't have a uniquely shared name. Then you can get the same results but using layer tags.

Assign a specific unique tag to objects which are meant to have the same style, from the bottom of the right click menu. Then you can later use Select Same → Tag Color to adjust the look of all those layers at once.

Just be careful with nested and grouped layers, where tags get inherited by default.

Reviewn June 5: Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It’s a 100 page work, written by Jenna K. Moran, who you may know from things like Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. This breaks the pattern for Reviewn June, as it's something I’ve read parts of before. But this is the first time I'm reading it through on its own (supposed?) terms: as a (supposed?) role-playing game.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (which can be abbreviated to WTF for reasons which aren’t accidental because nothing is ever an accident) bills itself in its subtitle as a story-telling game. Is it a story-telling game? Is it a game? Is it a series of sense-impressions? I’m unclear whether it’s a joke game, or at least, just a joke game. It’s a concept game, or it's the concept of a game, or at the very least it’s very interested in the concept of a game. It is, maybe, a partial exploration of games-space. It’s Buddhist philosophy and fake astrology, for some reason.

It might be in the twenty most entertaining things I’ve ever read, which is impressive for a set of rules and flavour text.

In case you're unfamiliar, let me quote the page 1 introduction in its entirety, just to set the tone.

Reality is an illusion.
Those who seek to understand it corrode their understanding of it. In naïveté, objects are solid, ideas are true or false, sensations are real, and communication conveys information. To the adept, these things are as fading dreams.
There is no object that is not also emptiness.
There is no arbiter of truth.
Sensations are the lies of Maya; they are the shifting of electrical patterns in the brain; they are signifiers without referent.
Communication is violence.
Reality is false.
It does not matter how many layers one peels back. It does not matter what revelations one has. This is because there is no truth.
We are things that we have dreamed, and there is no sense in it, and when the sleeper wakes we shall be washed away.

Really, this is a very hard work to review. I started writing this up from brief notes while I was partway through Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, but by the time I'd read to the end something rung false about my own words. They were somehow lacking in substance. I was writing phrases like “as in many story-games, the role of GM is optional”, things which just don’t seem to cleave reality at its joints when it comes to WTF.

So this is my second attempt. I've decided that to convey my helplessness as a reader, I'm going to forego sections and order and begin most of these paragraphs with "...So", the textual equivalent of the kind of shrug that's meant to indicate being overwhelmed.

...So there are places in the text where two different sentences reference the same footnote. It has rules for working out whether you are playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. And then rules about using those rules. It's all breathlessly earnest and obviously joking at the same time. I am deeply worried that I might be insufficiently enlightened to truly appreciate the idea of this game (as much as I do appreciate it).

...So the wisher/theurgist/fatalist character split is unlike anything I have read before or since, whether in story games or classic TTRPGs. Together, some of these characters must find the Jewel of All Desiring and make the universe they live in, and must make it well; or they fail and are forgotten in the great unravelling of what is. This, on top of the complexity and self-awareness and bizarre philosophy and astrology and player/character/god blurring and fourth-wall-breaking and layers of nuance, gives nothing so much as Homestuck vibes. But the one has has colossal toads fundamentally important to the quest-for-the-universe and the other frogs, so I guess the similarity is superficial.

I mentioned astrology. Page 6 introduces the first of several planet/star diagrams and tells you “Planets and stars help you play”, which is one of the text's many preposterous straight-faced half-truths. It adds that “You'll find more details on these planets — including two mystery planets seen only during eclipses — in the first supplement for WTF.” It sounds like a joke, but I did locate a three-page supplement the author released which introduces some new rules for the Weaver and a “competitive” WTF variant. They’re not presented in the form of planets, and I suspect the ‘supplement’ is basically patch notes (except maybe it was planned from the start). The supplement is called TLDR because of course it is.

The attributes/powers/skills/gifts system seems like it would be robust, and ties in very deeply with the lore that WTF is steeped in and emanates like a weird radiation. I’m not going to go into the mechanics even though I feel like I could write an essay on them. They seem good. Go read the thing.

...So I’ve skimmed this book before and everything about it still feels weird and surprising. On this full read-through I remembered with surprise that it has those hard mechanical underpinnings, and that feels weird. Discovering that it has an enormous pseudo-canonical world setting, not just implicit lore, feels odd and unexpected. (Each setting location includes both practical matters and ‘moral implications’.) The planets subsystem feels weird and I’m sure would surprise someone who didn’t go in forewarned. Don’t get me started on the ‘rules toys’ and ‘donuts’. When the book comes to an end, you blink, startled.

WTF

...So there’s the Weaver, or GM. At one point we are told that “If you are the Weaver, announce this to the group. Note that only one person is the Weaver. If you are the Weaver and someone else speaks up, it's up to you whether to denounce them now or let their heresy flourish.” This isn’t a joke. It can come into play. There are related rules. If a theurgist character becomes corrupted (it’s a whole thing), they can end up forcing the Weaver into the role of player, ‘immured in horrible durance within the world’, and the accursed theurgist takes on a correspondingly greater role in determining what is true. The dragons of the deeps, which are not bound by the rules of WTF, can “free” a weaver immured in the world. The rules note the possibility that you encounter the dragons of the deeps while you are not aware that you are playing WTF.

The rules are bizarre. I cannot begin to do either the base level or higher-order rules justice. Consider just one example. The author deftly calls the reader’s attention to an unlikely, yet possible, meta-rules interaction, neatly outlines the nature of the issue, and writes:

You might think that, having anticipated this problem, we’d have a solution.
Instead, we have a koan.

True to its word, the text presents its koan and continues with no solution offered.

...So there’s this incredible high-level meta stuff, juxtaposed with things like “The elemental basis of communication in WTF is sound and gesture---vibrations that you transmit through the air and gross physical motions that you use to adjust the pattern of light that you reflect.” This is part of a four-page section on talking/communication as a necessary component of “how to play WTF”.

Does the game book even give you enough to go on to play? I’ve read it and I couldn’t tell you, not without making a fool of myself by trying. Numerous places in the text discuss, either subtly or overtly, whether the game is playable or even designed to be played. One diagrammatical rules toy, if I read it right, has implications as to what ways the game might model fate entering into the equation as to whether WTF is being or will be played. A player’s “willful ego that does not want to play WTF” is a node that is lovingly described but never actually used.

What does Jenna Moran think about the actual process of playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? Well, things like this:

The author has a strong sense of what you're supposed to be doing when you play WTF.

That said — you can't read her mind.

It’s protected by the fundamental isolation of personhood and the unbridgeable divide between soul and soul!

We are also offered hints like this:

The players' efforts to incarnate and instantiate a transcendent spirit of infinite universal love in the fabric of the game are the source of the meaning of the game. It is the contention of the author that players cannot help but catch fire with this burning spirit as soon as they attempt to play WTF, preventing any inappropriate uses of the mechanics below.

(I want to go out of my way to reassure you that all the quotes in this review are real.)

...So... Look, I don’t know. I kind of love it.

The game, as a story game, is divided into character creation and rules and then further organised by progression through a prologue and 5 books associated with realms or places. Each one has both practical threats and moral threats. The practical threats seem interesting but the moral threats feel more pressing.

Book 1 is set in the Civilized Lands, unless (except but also or even if) all the characters died in the prologue. In Raif, royalty have become vampires. “Setting forth to find the Jewel of All Desiring without their blessing would be unimaginably improper.” In Tin ’An, wishers are hunted by the Duke’s Axeman. “Also the characters do not know where to go next. That is why their mission must end in ignominy here.”

The game requires the players and/or their characters to at least consider a major problem of philosophy before they can move on to book 2.

Book 2 is travel through “the lands of the savage peoples” and then those of the fairies, whose lives are full of stories, and who, the book takes some pains to point out, do not exist.

Book 3 of the game is about the Dragons of the Deeps, unless of course it gets skipped, “although that means never knowing what happened in it or if the characters found the Jewel of All Desiring when you weren't looking.”

The Dragons of the Deeps present a moral threat “whether or not you skip” them.

Book 4 takes the characters under the world, to the realm of the ur-toads. Also, “If the characters have not yet visited the sun now might be a good time”. Did I mention that there are five cardinal directions and that blackguards live on the sun in palaces of ice?

Book 5 is the conclusion, wherein the characters (might) find the Jewel of All Desiring (depending on fate, maybe?). Just working out what it means that this has happened is what an enormous chunk of the book is about. I don’t have the answer. I will note that the game at this point more or less requires the players and/or their characters to solve that major problem of philosophy from the end of book 1.

By the way, somebody “is going to have to die to become the firmament of the world.” There are rules for this. WTF has an imposing spine of metaphysics beneath the dreamlike layers of cloud and poetry veiling it.

The example of play begins with the example character being “troubled by her destiny as an example player in a WTF game” before gathering some other players and discussing whether or not they are already playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It proceeds into a fascinating exercise in creative writing which does not really clear things up all that much, but is written in compelling dialogue of the sort that seems unlikely to occur at a table not occupied by six Jenna Morans. By the time I finished WTF I was looking up all her past work to add to my neglected reading lists.

Minor text quibbles:

• The simple style and layout is actually quite nice. In any other work, I would be nitpicking things like the author’s use of three dashes instead of an em dash. But... I don’t know.
• This work is obviously unfinished from a presentational viewpoint. I don’t remember where or when I found it, but it’s just a word doc converted to PDF with some line diagrams. I don’t know what it could possibly look like, finished and cleaned up and published. If anything, WTF feels like it ought to be more cobbled-together than it. Handwritten in a fading ink, maybe. Or spiralling around like House of Leaves.
  

 

...So that’s it. 100 pages. Difficult to write about but a delight to read. I would be staggered if I read anything more steeped in interesting weirdness for Reviewn June.

I don't know if I'll ever try to play it. There were various little evocative details a person could lift and put in their own games, but that's not why I think you should read it. I don’t care if it counts as a game. It was a textual experience. If you're not in the market for those, leave it alone. What's my favourite bit? All of it.

Let me leave you with a word of warning from page 25 of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist:

Use caution when playing WTF while tired, drunk, or punchy, as it may increase the chance that the shadow lurking beyond the edge of the world shall immure you all in timeless misery.

Where to get it:

http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/a-small-gift-to-my-readers

 

Reviewn June 4: Dolmenwood Dozen

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I cracked into Dolmenwood dozen, a 15-page book by ktrey who you may know from d4caltrops.com. Dolmenwood dozen consists of twelve one-page adventure locations, for use with Necrotic Gnome’s Dolmenwood (which I really thought I owned, but couldn’t find on my hard drive when I checked). The locations were semi-randomly stocked, and I think the results of what ktrey calls ‘calibrating for coherence’ (i.e., polishing them up into something consistent) were very successful overall.

It’s all got a slightly twee, woodsy style, which makes me want to check out Dolmenwood, where it presumably inherits that from.

A cute hint

Things I like:

There’s so much great content in just fifteen pages here. I'm not surprised; I'm a big fan of everything on d4caltrops. These adventure locations are all for detailed situation-based play, from the small (in #1, Strange Smoke from Mattle Mound, three barrowbogeys are bickering over a specific issue) to the broad (#8, the Moonscar Manor, revolves entirely around the disruptive effects of a recent mistake made by some mosslings). All of it’s saturated with unique flavour, so I’m just going to pick out a few highlights.

• A temperamental and fey boat, made without iron, with neat faerie powers
• The aesthetic of tadpoles swimming in a chalice on an old ruined altar
• A suddenly looming horned ogre-like monster (actually a massive puppet being used as a trap)
• A false relic seeing deliberate use at a chantry
• The blood powers of the grume and its sanguineous lair defences

There are lots of interesting magic items, the kind that I like due to their "additional" properties: a shield that is translucent to its bearer, boots that make pond plants bear your weight, and so on. It’s the kind of stuff that I’m always keeping an eye out for, and one of the reasons I follow the d4caltrops blog.

In adventure location #9, Crisis at Kelpie Run, it’s interesting to see the ‘loot’ all presented and priced, even when the place is the village homes of some innocent civilians, almost all of whom are still alive and just need rescuing. PCs gonna PC.

There’s really just one thing that’s a step below stellar in this work, and it’s the order that information is presented in. ktrey described the creation process as:

For each, I tried to limit myself to around twenty minutes or so for each to replicate that “left it to the last minute” experience. Of course, there are some that necessitated breaks or other interruptions during their creation (I didn’t exactly click a stopwatch on each!), and as I was compiling them together I couldn’t help doing a little bit more editing or expanding once I found some free real-estate by consolidating the formatting.

I'm frankly jealous of how fast ktrey can work. But I think this process resulted in some overall information flow problems. This is a free work, one I like a lot, so I don’t want to dwell on the negative. But I do think it would hugely benefit from a paragraph at the start of each entry neatly summing up exactly what’s going on for the GM. This is especially the case because (a) the locations are all mysteries/puzzles/sites of recent activity and (b) there are references to things (characters, monsters, objects, traps, locations, etc) before they are defined, so as it stands, to really understand an adventure location, you have to read it two times in a row.

...But there’s no room left on the page for an introduction! I think that one page per adventure location just isn’t enough. Turning every page into two pages with hierarchically presented information, full sentences, and a brief introduction would do this resource wonders.

Minor text quibbles:

• There are quite a lot of typos.
• I think using pictograms instead of emphasis (boldface and/or colour) for words like ‘door’ and ‘key’ frustrates reading comprehension; there’s a reason why a rebus is a puzzle.
• I suspect that the map in #11, The Ensorcelled Cellar, is mislabelled, with rooms 3 and 4 inadvertently swapped.

All minor concerns, especially for a free resource.

Overall:

I haven’t dived into Dolmenwood, but when I do, I’m going to keep Dolmenwood dozen on hand.

I should note that it also feels like it would be fairly easy to convert this into other old-school style systems, as long as you’re fine with improvising monster stats on the fly.

My favourite bit:

It was hard to pick just one thing! But I love the oenophile wizard, their secret chamber of special magical wines, and their cantankerous rival. That could port to any fantasy game.

Where to get it:

https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2023/12/dolmenwood-dozen.html

Reviewn June 3: Wanderhome, the basic playkit

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I read Wanderhome: The Journey, by Possum Creek Games. Wanderhome’s been on my radar for a while, but I only have the 27-page basic playkit version, so that's what I read. As a Redwall reader growing up, but one for whom the series eventually lost their lustre, I didn’t know whether or not Wanderhome would tickle me. I'm pleased to report that it did!

What I found is a story game founded upon a huge number of options and creative potential. The short playkit book overflows with lists of possibilities and setting elements of all kinds, so that players will never be in wont of things to have in front of their characters.

Art from the Wanderhome Kickstarter

The game style and rules

On the spectrum of collaborative story-telling game to tabletop role-playing game, this is far on the CSTG end. I’m interested in both, but personally more of a TTRPG enthusiast. I found the Wanderhome playkit a tantalising read regardless, and I’d be interested in giving the complete game (with its wonderful artwork) a try at some point.

In particular, it's interesting to see a game that’s not fundamentally about problem-solving and in fact several times goes out of its way to disavow it. “Stories tend to involve groups of people who have gathered for a reason, who set forth on a quest with a purpose and a goal. Wanderhome is not like that.” Wanderhome also isn’t “preoccupied with failure”.

It’s all very wholesome. It's charming without quite veering into twee. It does feel like it’s going to need absolute player buy-in up front, to avoid the ‘but what if I try to do this thing that the game says it’s not about’ problem. Some of the 'journeying tools' seem like they might be geared to help, but without having played it, I can't say for sure.

Wanderhome is a game to be played collaboratively, with or without a guide (GM). The guide doesn't have any ‘special authority’, acting more as a character-less player than a referee.

All the game rules and terms are given in a conversational, in-world manner, as if discussing an actual story or journey that the speaker or their audience has been on or is going on. There are very few references to it being a game.

• This ties in well to the overall nice and wholesome vibe, but I also found it slightly frustrating when it veers into vagueness, and also when the plain language slightly obscures the gameplay elements.
  
• For example, the word ‘kith’, a key term in the game, isn’t defined until halfway through despite being mentioned numerous times. Sure, it’s nicer and more flavourful than ‘NPC’ or ‘temporary character’, but knowing the real-world meaning of the world is insufficient for understanding.
• There's only one really gamey term, ‘token’, which by design doesn't seem to represent anything within-setting. I wonder how it actually plays at the table when you can't help solve a problem or connect to someone “on a personal level” because you have insufficient tokens, or you declare that you’re attaining a token by doing something like “taking a moment to bask in the grandeur of the world”. (There’s definitely a meta-game wackiness to getting a token in return for “doing something kind without getting anything in return”.)
• These minor plaints might be resolved in the full game book, of course.
  

The content of the playbooks (character class exemplars, roughly) makes it seem like Wanderhome must play as a deeply performative game, with all the players ideally absorbed in their own and fascinated by each others’ characters, not just what they do but who they are and how they feel. This makes sense, given that many of the main avenues of more trad RPG play (goal-driven problem-solving, overcoming perilous obstacles, exploring an internally-consistent simulated world, etc) are, deliberately, absent from Wanderhome.

Setting:

• I love the giant-bugs-as-livestock trope in basically any setting. It works well here.
• I wonder if the full version of the book has more lore and guidance behind the animal-folk thing beyond “While a family might be all the same animal-folk, they might also have wildly different appearances. It’s frankly none of your business to inquire.”
• I wasn’t expecting animals as big as horses to be in the mix, maybe because I don't remember Redwall going bigger than badgers and this game had such a “Redwall” pigeonhole to me.
• Mighty people being the only candidates for evil, their souls ‘weighed down with power’, their goodness possibly ‘poisoned by struggle’, is an interesting element in such a pleasant and placid game. It’s hard not to read it as both political commentary and metaphysics.
• I like the emphasis on seasonality and the rhythms of the year, which I think most games in pre-industrial worlds don’t place anywhere near enough importance on.
• The character classes (‘playbooks’) are very content-rich and evocative, which is probably especially important for a relatively rules-light CSTG. I’m always a big fan of starting a character with a selection of class-specific equipment or clothing.
• I like the level advancement, which can result in things as disparate as magical powers, changes to friends, or realisations. I like that it happens on seasonal holidays – IMO vague ‘milestonesque’ level advancement works much better for games like this one: loose and low-stakes, without choices which revolve around challenges and costs and expectation of rewards.

Minor text quibbles:

• Part of Wanderhome’s strength is its big structured lists of content. Some of the emphasised adjectives have an additional symbol which is never defined, but makes it clear they are keywords. They’re basically magic powers, or things that are connected with magic powers, which might force the spending of tokens. I don't know whether this lacuna is due to the stripped-down nature of the playkit, or the text's commitment to never speaking in 'game terms'.
  
• The fact that the vagabond character is necessarily a criminal and/or moral failure seems at odds with the spirit of the game. It feels like they’re leaning heavily into the (secondary) negative connotations of the word ‘vagabond’. Really, all the characters are vagabonds! This is one of several cases where Wanderhome slightly redefines words or selects more archaic meanings, and it can trip you up because it's not like other games which sit you down and say e.g. there’s a game thing we call a hallow; it's not quite the same as the normal meanings of the word 'hallow'; here’s what it is and what its rules are.

My favourite bit:

The firelight character. For a game about the road and helping people, a ‘guide class’ works well. Their key feature is that they have a firefly companion and a light source. A close second place for me is the moth-tender, a little pigeon or rabbit or whatever who looks after the courier moths and their towers.

Where to get it:

The playkit is on itch.io
The full game is on the publisher's site or on DriveThruRPG

Reviewn June 2: Dungeon fantasy monster seeds

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I’m looking at Dungeon fantasy monster seeds, a 16-page pamphlet by Matt Riggsby and Peter Dell’Orto, published by Steve Jackson Games. It’s for Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, a ‘powered by GURPS’ game. This little resource just collects and compiles the bonus monster ideas from the game’s crowdfunding campaign.

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG has been on my “want to play or run” wishlist since I started following Peter D’s blog many years ago. This expansion wouldn’t make much sense without the basic Dungeon Fantasy materials; I believe I got it a little while ago from a Kickstarter.

Gameable content:

This is just sixteen pages, but they provide plenty of old-school style world content. All of it, at least to me, hearkens back to AD&D days.

• One idea is capturing a crushroom for sale to guard a druid’s grove. It’s reminiscent of AD&D dragon prices.
• I’m always on the lookout for diegetic reasons that the dungeon would be restored to a hazardous state. In DF, that’s bronze spiders.
• An ancestor’s draugr bodyguards wear delicate golden jewellery, vulnerable to fire.
• Werewolves inhabiting a dungeon might round up herds of animalian monsters, driving them in waves towards delvers.
• Gargoyles that attack by actually spitting water, a defining feature of real gargoyles (which are both artistic flourishes, and fundamentally designed to keep erosive water away from building).

If the goal was to spike a reader's interest in Dungeon Fantasy RPG, it succeeded.

My favourite bit:

A troll smart enough to be a wizard! Or perhaps a cleric of a trollish god. TTRPG trolls can be a bit played-out, so it’s always good to mix in some fresh ideas. Juxtaposition (the primeval, bestial troll with its unstoppable physiology; the sagacious, finesse-based, usually frail wizard) is often a good way to get that.

Where to get it:

https://warehouse23.com/products/dungeon-fantasy-monster-seeds-pdf

Reviewn June 1: Lair of the Lamb

Every few days in June I’ll be picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

We’re starting out strong with Lair of the Lamb, a 54-page adventure by Arnold Kemp of Goblin Punch fame.

The sketch summary is that the White Temple of Vandoh, God(dess) of Wisdom, Patience, Self-improvement, and Sunlight, is keeping the titular Lamb, a huge fleshy beast and horrible holy monster, in its back rooms and feeding it people to harvest its lambfruit.

The PCs are some of the human sacrifices (a dozen generic level 0 characters), making for a classic ‘funnel’ and introduction to dungeon delving. I like this. Leaving out full-blown backstory-having character creation means one less chance for players to get in their PCs’ heads, but it’s a really fast start, and I think the intention is that the players will build up a rapport with the characters who survive. The heightened peril of a funnel makes for exciting play.

It’s overtly a tutorial for new TTRPG players, or at least players new to old-school style. Lair of the Lamb is a ‘teaching dungeon’, not only for OSR play, but as an introduction to the GLOG ruleset. I think it does that pretty well, although at some point you still have to list out all the rules.

Goblin Punch is in my lengthy folder of bookmarks for blogs where I’ve read scattered entries and decided it’s worth reading the whole thing, but haven’t got around to it. I thought I probably had a winner cracking open this adventure, and I was right.

Illustration by Warren D

 

The style:

• It has all the things I like about old-school play. (“A shocking amount [sic] of problems can be solved with enough rope.”)
• The Advice to DMs is gold. It’s like a twelve-bullet-point condensation of great TTRPG advice (despite, or possibly because, of the fact that half of them are variations of the idea “role-playing is ultimately about making meaningful choices”). I'd recommend reading this adventure just for that half page.
• The Lamb is a huge gross monster. It’s a puzzle monster, designed to squish characters into the funnel, but it’s also clearly expected that if the players succeed in escaping the dungeon, their characters will probably find a way to kill it along the way.
• Mystic languages which have minor magical effects just by speaking them. The fact they’re associated with certain kinds of fantasy people says something about what those people are in the implied setting.
• There's some old standbys in use. I’m not a fan of flammable oil, especially in an implied low-magic, low-technology setting (if you can ignite a pool of oil, it’s either refined petroleum or it’s magical). But that’s easy enough to change.

There’s some nasty body horror stuff, but as long as it’s not too much for you, it’s very evocative and grounding in the world. There’s also a small number of very cool (and gross) magic items, and dangerous magical miscellanea. I like the chest that is heavily-sealed in ways clearly meant to contain rather than keep out. It’s not a fakeout or a dare; the fully-detailed horrible entity inside the chest will be a huge problem and the death of at least one character if released, but I can also see how the delve would continue with it around.

The rules:

• Each level 0 funnel character is a set of just 14 statistics, determined with 10 separate rolls. Likewise, the extreme simplicity of monster stats should make for a fast-paced game.
• I really like the idea of unlocking additional class options through play, at least for new campaigns. It might work best per player and/or across campaigns, if people come and go in a long-running campaign or in a series of different games run in the same system. The idea is tied in well to the dungeon, with three or four bonus classes unlockable along the way depending on what PCs do.
• By requiring a player to hit a target number, the level-up system quietly makes it easy to increase awful stats but increasingly difficult to improve an outstanding ability score. That’s an interesting choice.
• The investigation/search/noise keywords is elegant, even if they’re not used completely consistently in the dungeon (there are a few spots where they’re notably absent).
• HP are overtly don’t-get-hit points and come back quickly with a meal. I always respect when a game at least takes a position on this.
• There’s great little mechanics like this: “5 favors: The party's favorite ghoul will join the party.” and this: “Whenever you nearly die as a result of a failed Save, you gain a permanent +4 bonus to that type of Save. The triggering event is recorded on the back of your character sheet (in your Legendarium).”

There were two parts of the rules that puzzled me, but I may simply be missing something, not having actually tried them out in play.

• First, OSR-style play requires ease of escape (as this book points out: “If a combat is too difficult for the PCs, they can always flee”), which in turn demands robust escape rules. But the pursuit rules look incredibly punishing. The PCs usually have a slightly worse than even chance of getting a step ahead of their pursuers, even if they’re not slowed by anything, and on failure they suffer a round of attacks. On top of this, an enemy can use all their attacks against a PC who flees past them. Is the funnel enough to compensate for this?
  
• Second, the encounter system, with its Encounter Die vs Recon/Ambush die, has some neat mechanics but needs tweaking to factor in e.g. different senses. As it stands, the less light you are emitting in the pitch-black dungeon, the more likely you are to be ambushed, regardless of context.

It's worth noting that the adventure is meant to be 'complete', in that it contains all the necessary base rules, and is put in the creative commons.

The dungeon:

The lair of the Lamb in Lair of the Lamb is well thought out and well laid out. It has a slightly patchwork feeling, but there's also a plausible backbone to the main chambers, hints at a history, cunning traps and puzzles, and a consistent tone. I love dungeons with elevation changes.

It's all designed to provide a gradual opening of possibilities, which makes sense as a teaching dungeon. More exploration directions become available of course, but I also mean in terms of what’s attainable with the group’s equipment, knowledge, and possibly allies. For example, the PCs begin trapped in the lair, but with skill can find a way to trade with a ruthless merchant through a crack in the wall, opening up possibilities.

The presentation of information for the GM running the dungeon is generally exceptional. A precis is given beforehand for new sections, like the second-floor ghouls. The last page is an index to some key items in the dungeon, and gives notes about alternative ways to run the dungeon which could be very helpful; I’ve seen professionally published adventures that aren’t anywhere near this helpful.

Spells:

This game has by far the best implementation of Geas I’ve seen in any D&D-like, ever. Precognition is also a great spell. TTRPGs often have trouble with divinatory magic, but I can see this working.

I'm going to have to read up on GLOG magic some more, and try it out. I love the flat power level aspect, the inherently dangerous aspect, and the evocative and novel spells. Only having a semi-fixed number of spells per day is an interesting midpoint between approaches with spell slots/points and those with infinite magic (limited by time, magnitude of effect, or by other means).

Minor text quibbles:

• Lair of the Lamb is rough and ready, riddled with typos, with some NPC names changing, wrong map references, etc. A three-hour editing pass would have found them, but it was distributed for free, so I can hardly complain.
• A couple of the starting professions offer variations by gender, but a large number don’t. Also, if the setting is quasi-medieval, then you probably shouldn’t be able to roll up a male wet nurse; conversely, if we’re applying modern norms, then ‘gypsy’ should not be on the list.
• The ‘advice to players’ leaves a few terms undefined which might trip new players up.
• The text isn’t always sure, from one sentence to the next, whether it’s talking to the players or the DM.

No real impediments to usability, I think.

My favourite bit:

Pacifist polypores!

Where to get it:

https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/04/lair-of-lamb-final.html