1d20 wizardly afflictions

In the vein of 1d20 spells from a cursed spellbook, here's 

1d20 wizardly afflictions

Art by Perplexing Ruins

1. Localised portent. The patient's viscera rearranges into meaningful forms. Small objects nearby may transform into birds or comets.
2. Mano-a-manomania. An uncontrollable obsession with magical duels. Treatable with high dosage antimagic.
3. Sympathetic polymorph. The patient reflexively takes on the forms they magically impose on others.
4. Partial possession. Intermittently under the control of imps or quasi-elemental spirits. Contagious.
5. Cetaceanthropy. Transmitted by bite (usually a disease of krill). The patient swims amok on the night of the full moon.
6. Antimitosis. Sometimes called 'void disease'. Incurable reverse aging accompanied by disintegration of bodily tissues.
7. Clone narcissism. Obsession with the perfection of one's own form, growing in a vat.
8. St Belthin's Fever. Infection occurs during thunderstorms. Symptoms include glowing eyes, shivers, electrical discharge.
9. Intestinal bookworms. Ubiquitous parasitic reminder about proper hand hygiene while reading mouldering tomes.
10. Persistent featherweight. A lingering spell reduces the patient's mass. Prolonged affliction causes brittle bones and muscle atrophy.
11. Psychic papercut. Stinging pain in the mind brought on by telepathically reading recklessly fast.
12. Orb-gazer's wrist. Strain caused by the weight of an overheavy head resting chin-on-upturned-palm.
13. Oak gall stones. A solstice-time disease, thought to be caused by mishandling of galls during preparation of magical inks.
14. Chronic hubris. Pathological egotism characterised by challenges offered against the gods. However, see also early onset apotheosis for differential diagnosis.
15. Transitive curse. A tomb-hex heritable from mentors, yes-men, and ideological allies.
16. Wand splinter. Burrows deeper to get away from any tweezers not made of meteorite iron.
17. Petridermis. Overuse of protective spells leads to gradual stoneification of the patient's skin. Very bad for the pores.
18. Prophetic bones. Generally benign. Affected bones have a telltale ache on planes where the concept of weather does not exist.
19. Component magnetism. A lingering magnetic attraction to moss, sulfur, dried spiders, guano, and so on. Brought on by reckless overreliance on telekinesis.
20. Early onset apotheosis. A traumatic rupture in the godhead leads to total or partial deification.

I had been thinking about Discworld's magical afflictions (like 'planets'), and that made me wonder what sort of bedevilments the Thirty Wicked Wizards would suffer from.

 

For more build-your-own wizardly fever-dream content, check out my zine, Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed].

Smooth vs Chunky game design

Sometimes it helps to look at game design through the "Smooth or Chunky" lens. What do these terms mean? Well, they encapsulate certain vibes. They occupy the middle ground between game mechanics and game feel.

🥛🥛🥛 Smooth is

• small numbers changing incrementally
• things being at the same level
• player-facing subsystems with modest game impact (say, situational dice roll modifiers)
• overloaded dice rolls with small results
• rounded probability curves like 4d6
• anything pre-planned
• predictable consequences, with randomness used as a spice

Smooth is like gradient descent and intricate clockwork and elegant flowcharts. Typical Smooth design elements are sensible, explicable, predictable, fine-grained, subtle, simulationist, world-associated, and introduce enough complexity as they need to be internally coherent.

🥜🥜🥜 Chunky is

• one dice that does everything
• flat high-variance probability curves (say, a 1d100 roll)
• one number that represents a bunch of things
• rollercoaster rides of remarkable successes and sudden catastrophes
• randomness underpinning creative direction
• huge sudden changes to big important things
• hefty modifiers 
• random tables

Chunky is like high stakes roulette wheels and staccato noises and refusing to erase anything. Typical Chunky design elements are simple, wide-reaching, experimental, flashy, coarse-grained, gamist, surprising, central, and do as much as possible with one thing.

Now in game design, unlike with peanut butter, neither one is clearly better than the other. It's situational.

Case study 1

I'm working on a RPG called Overzealous. In this game, you're a well-meaning elder god but your cultists are the typical bloodthirsty crazed zealots. This sets up the tension. You need to become manifest in the world before your cult tears itself apart with ridiculous behaviour.

Early conceptualisation had Overzealous revolve around large random tables, with most of the consequences falling out of those. This played fast but felt random. And it meant that I couldn't model persistent problems, like your cultists getting bored and summoning a bunch of monsters that then hung around, or continuous schisms in your cult leading to further attrition and outrage.

I Smoothed out this Chunkiness by expanding two numerically-tracked stats to five, and adding a granular subsystem for acquiring ongoing "problems" which took trade-offs to solve. The gameplay became a lot richer!

Case study 2

After these changes to Overzealous, you have three "bad" stats (Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity) which you want to keep a lid on and two "good" stats (Imminence, Cultists) which you need to get high enough that your cult can perform a ritual to bring you into reality.

In the draft version after the Smooth changes, if a bad stat exceeded 20, it's game over. The bad stats crept up slowly through various mechanisms, all at about the same pace. This increase was slightly faster than you could deal with, which you generally attempted to do by sacrificing positive stats, setting yourself back. That's Smooth design! The intention was that the player needed to find and pursue a good strategy to secure a win before a loss became inevitable.

In practise, though, my introduction of this much Smoothness created two issues. Because the changes were small and fairly predictable,

1. A skilled player could find one obviously optimal strategy, and didn't have to deviate much from that strategy for random events. This reduced gameplay scope.
2. If through poor luck, lack of experience, or exploring other options, the player's negative stats got too high, there was a tipping point where it was obvious that a loss was inevitable... but it took a long time to lose the game.

To deal with this, I eased up on the Smooth pedal and re-introduced some Chunky. I had stats go to 13 instead of 20, took out some of the cases where multiple stats all change by 1, and doubled down on cases where a single stat change by 2 or 3. Also, the ongoing problems that beset your cult (like cannibalism, diabolism, and schisms) only have a chance to come into play each turn, but are more impactful when they do.

And these tweaks got me exactly the gameplay experience I wanted for Overzealous! There's no longer one clear strategy to follow, as the feeling is more one of running around putting out fires. Now the player is tempted to push things, to e.g. just spend one more turn scrambling towards completing the ritual when their Fervour has crested 10, because the end's in sight, knowing that a couple of bad rolls might be their downfall.

New words to use

Was I thinking about Smooth vs Chunky throughout this design process? Not exactly, but I was certainly aware of what was going on with the overall vibes, and now that I've constructed this jargon to talk about it, I suspect I'll be thinking in those terms in the future.

With gameplay pretty much where I want it, I'm ready to get the visual design finished!

Anyway, that is the age-old "Smooth vs Chunky" dichotomy, brought to you by peanut butter on toast.

When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!

Winning the game by being well-rested

I have long believed that the perfect RPG would reward the PCs for getting a good night's sleep – and penalise them for a bad enough one.

There are many upsides to doing this.

1. It's realistic. In my experience, getting particularly good or bad sleep could have a +/- 50% effect on your baseline competence.
2. It encourages roleplaying. People want to get a good night's sleep. Now characters want to get a good night's sleep.
3. It incentivises investing in comforts and nice-to-haves. Without the carrot and the stick, most players tend to default to only getting functional equipment.
4. It adds more choice to campsite selection. More choice is better. (I think it was Peter D who suggested: concealed, secure, or comfortable; pick one)
5. You can tie it to character injury. In HP-based systems, characters tend to either be fine or dead, resulting in confusion about what HP and damage really "are". Well-restedness is pretty much a score of overall condition, so being wounded can reduce the same score. Now it's actually more difficult to jump around on a stabbed leg.
6. You can tie it to character morale. Generally, telling players how their characters feel is a bad idea. Telling them they must act some way as a result is disastrous. But a hard rule like "a character who sees a friend die loses 1 point of overall condition" is non-intrusive, assuming you don't allow sociopathic PCs.
7. It incentivises problem-solving. To get the best outcomes, you need to acquire and carry around more creature comforts, even through hard terrain. So now you have a to-do list and some logistics to work out.
8. It encourages having a bunch of attendants (lackeys, entertainers, back-scrubbers, cooks, night watchmen, etc). This is in keeping with commonly emulated genres like "low-technology fantasy", and opens up new kinds of gameplay.
9. It makes the weather feel real. Most of us are well insulated from the effects of weather in 2025. Travelling, sleeping, or making a meal in bad weather is really rough going. 

and

10. It's also a soft progression system!

Characters with more resources can spend them to improve their day-to-day efficacy.

Characters who end the first game flush with cash might be able to get good provisions and nice camping gear, and secure a future +1 when there's fine weather and uninterrupted nights. Later, they might hire some camp drudges so they can get more rest per day, porters to carry their extra stuff, and maybe a proper cook. They're looking to get that +2. By the end of the campaign, expect everyone to travel with fine silks and furs, feather mattresses, bevies of personal chefs and butlers, vintage wines, and magical solutions meant to ensure good dreams, chasing that +5.

(Of course, if you want your normal "levelly" game, you can turn it into a treadmill: characters get used to the finer things, and their baseline expectations slowly creep up, so the bonus never gets too big)

I've had worse naps. (Artwork via www.lustigesrollenspiel.de)

How to get a good night's sleep

I think this metric is dependent on six things:

• Being sated (not hungry, thirsty, etc)
• Being comfortable (resting in a quiet, comfortable place, in shelter, at a nice temperature, etc)
• Getting enough sleep and enough down time
• Having creature comforts (indulging in vices, enjoying entertainment, being with friends, etc)
• Being safe
• Being healthy (not injured, cursed, ill, in shock, etc)

Some games have relevant mechanics (like systems for dehydration or sleep deprivation), which this approach could either subsume or integrate with.

Mechanically, how does it work? Is there an individual character roll depending on the factors? GM fiat? Player-facing prescribed requirements for each tier? The implementation will of course differ with the system.

So will the outcome. Games with a single central dice mechanic obviously get a dice bonus or malus. Then it's just a matter of magnitude and deciding which rolls it applies to (I think you could make a very good case for "all of them").

Final thought

You might have noticed I didn't call this "the INSERT_NAME rule". My thesaurus failed me.

Fettle and Invigoration are awkward. Condition or Vigour would be good but tend to be reserved game terms, so might be confusing. Words like Well-Rested and Energised don't cover the negative cases. Restedness is apt, but clunky.

Freshness is pretty good (except for sounding like you're in a supermarket).

'Consume alien': Reviewing Encounter Critical

...You ever hear of Encounter Critical by Riley and Ireland? A long-forgotten piece of amateur RPG design from the 70s, originally published "on a school mimeograph" and sold through hobby stores, and now available only as a scan.

It's one of those early masterpieces in which fantasy and science fiction tropes collide. And yes, that does mean the currency is "gold credits".

Quest into the slaver kingdoms or hurl yourself into the galaxies of space to find wealth and destiny. Your tactics and your character are yours to control as you undertake ENCOUNTER CRITICAL.

...Of course, it's a joke. This "forgotten gem from 1978" was created by S. John Ross in 2004, with flourishes such as advertisements for an official Gazette (a newsletter in four supposed issues), as well as a reference to "a forthcoming line of Encounter Critical miniatures" and a search for a book deal.

Originally it was cast back in time 26 years from the true 2004 publication. Now 21 years have passed in turn.

How does the hoax hold up?

🛸 The aesthetic is perfectly on point: typewritten; amateur; hand-crafted and hand-drawn; retro; photocopied

🛸 The prose is breathlessly earnest, and preoccupied with its own relationship to conventions of war gaming

🛸 The game is full of sci-fi plagiarism and the kind of dated sexism obsessed with 'seduction' and 'doxies'

🛸 It's the classic nine-stat system we all know and love: Adaptation, Dexterity, ESP, Intellect, Leadership, Luck, Magic Power, Robot Nature, and Strength.

Um

The insane retro creativity of Encounter Critical

You roll for character race. Possibilities include, on the fantasy side, 'Amazons', 'Frankensteins', and Hobbits I mean 'Hoblings'. The purloined sci fi IP includes 'Klengons', 'Planetary Apes', and 'Vulkins'.

You can also play as a 'Wooky' and be penalised for wearing armour, although of course 'a Wooky will seek out magical rings or energy armor when it is available'.

You also have a chance to end up as...

You also may be a mutant, and therefore suffer from character traits such as Cannibal Urges, Allergy to laser, Unusual Sexual Gifts, or Self-Consuming Brain.

The writing mostly serves the "lost 70s indie game" in-joke, but also has its genuine funny moments:

 

Amateur indie design 

The mechanics, while harking back to OD&D, very much like they're just being felt out.

🛸 Warriors get followers and/or animal companions, and an underdetermined number of multiattacks.

🛸 Hit points, damage, and number of monsters appearing, are given as ranges instead of the underlying dice codes.

🛸 The nine stats barely interact at all with the (percentage-based) class abilities, only underpinning the general character abilities.

🛸 Instead, a class's key stats give xp bonuses or penalties. So does Intellect, which means it'll stack for the classes with Intellect as a qualifying stat (pioneer or warlock). If they roll maximum Int they will get +20% experience as well as "a 10% chance at experience bonus", i.e., 10% chance of doubling.

🛸 The terminology is slightly inconsistent.

🛸 The game is stuffed with percentage tables.

In these ways and others, it's all deeply connected to OD&D (while taking sniping pot shots at that game).

The book is laid out as if you pull out the middle pages to use at the table. Pages 23 and 27 are ("mistakenly"?) transposed, breaking the table of monsters.

Which includes extremely compelling types such as: Asteroid Worm, Bee Girl, Dragon of Wisdom, Rogue Robodroid, Sky Piranha, and:

(The entry for the Phasic Wolf helpfully notes that it is "phasic in nature".)

The intended 70s style rings true, IMO

An incautiously designed disease table gives you a chance of getting a brain disorder from sex work. Or you could get the "Pestilence of Dark Withering" or "Curse of Seven Hundred Minds" from a rusty nail.

There is a combat system which somehow combines simplicity, percentage rolls, underspecification, and assuming an understanding of how OD&D did things.

Does the ranged weapon table have "sling", "musket", "tommy gun", and "phasic sniper rifle" on it? Yes. Is it possible to do more damage with the sling than said rifle? Yes.

The text is very persnickety and period-appropriate, with pot shots at house rules and gaming styles, etc. It describes its spells as "correctly balanced", snubs spell levels, and says the authors prefer "a more science fiction approach where a spell is a spell".

(Speaking of spells, I love that a science fiction game has a spell that lets you travel... 500 miles.)

The inscrutably-named abilities are pretty great. Consume alien, Ensorcel, Illicit, Machine friend, and See the future all on one character sheet!

...And Seduce, of course. I've draw a veil over all the gendered stuff, but it's there – doxies, amazons, succubuses, etc. While it's clearly intended as a send-up of the 70s trappings, and works as such, the benefit of another 20 years makes it feels awkward and unnecessary. Rather than making a lot of content actually hinge on it, it could have been presented as a one-note joke.

 

The world of Encounter Critical

In the accompanying adventure, goblins are stealing the brainwaves of abducted girls to fuel up a spaceship in a warlock's lair.

This takes place in the game's setting: "Vanth, a fantasy world of adventure". (Is Vanth just Xanth, but different?)

It comes, of course, with a map:

 

It feels delightfully like the kind of thing I would have been making as an early teen.

My copy of Encounter Critical is from almost twenty years ago. These days you can find it for free on DriveThruRPG. Apparently there's an updated version.

To me, this game reads like a how-it-could have been of the original D&D, like an alternate history Dalluhn Manuscript. The game that resulted from Arneson watching some slightly different films.

Well done.

Pushing the envelope: Deconstructing RPGs

When you push the boundaries of a medium, you tend to reveal interesting things.

A wrong, but illuminating, TTRPG theorypost

In the case of role-playing games, I think there are two very important axioms:

1. players get to make character choices that are meaningful
2. players are deeply constrained as to how they otherwise affect the world

Axiom 1. Players get to make meaningful character choices

By this, I mean their choices must be

real (the outcomes are not faked or predetermined), and

impactful (the outcomes and/or act of deciding matter to the player/character/setting), and

associated (the choices are made as if by the character within the world, not just by the player within the rules), and

plausibly adjudicated (the choices have predictable or at least credible impacts on the imagined world).

Axiom 2. Players are deeply constrained regarding the world

Players impact the world by their character choices, but otherwise have few or no ways to impact the imagined world.

(Most TTRPGs, of course, let a player decide details about the world specifically during character creation, which their character could not possibly have chosen 'in-world'. This is a pretty accepted carve-out, and one of the reasons I say 'deeply constrained'.)

Pushing the TTRPG envelope

Now let's contort these established TTRPG boundaries and principles, to see if anything interesting falls out.

-

We already know what happens when you step back further from Axiom 2 (as part of game design or during play), giving players more options to intervene directly in the world.

You get experiences that are more like collaborative story-telling games, and postmodernish games where the point is to play around with the truth, and eventually you end up with free-form roleplay and expressive world-building.

-

What happens when you deliberately change Axiom 1, making character choices less meaningful?

There are some obvious examples, which tend to be unpleasant, especially in the context of contorting an existing traditionally-designed game.

• If character choices aren't real, you get railroads, which almost nobody likes.
• If character choices aren't impactful, the game (and fiction) has no stakes, which few people like.
• If character choices aren't associated, you're playing something more like a boardgame that has heavy fiction/fluff elements, which some people like, but can be dissonant.
• If character choices aren't plausibly adjudicated, there's little sense in which you're making a 'choice', so you might as well be rolling dice instead, since that's fun.

...But those are mostly the results of taking a role-playing game and 'playing it wrong'.

Designing an experimental game

Challenge: Can we go against the zeitgeist and design games which play with the formula of Axiom 1? Can we push the envelope to deliberately make character choices less meaningful, and still create something compelling?

I can see two things to try.

Less meaningful choice... in pursuit of themes

You could do this deliberately, in an artsy way, to explore certain themes.

Inevitability and the linear nature of time. Doom and futility. Fate and prophecy. Closed-loop time travel. Nihilism.

Less meaningful choice... but more meaning elsewhere

You could shift the focus of the game from meaningful choice to something else, so that there's still something challenging for the player to do.

One possibility is having the player grapple with emotion and feeling, something reactive and exploratory rather than goal-oriented and decision-guided. The obvious pathway for doing this is through journaling games, which often emphasise those aspects more than traditional RPGs (as well as often relaxing Axiom 2).

Combining these ideas into new experimental game designs

I'd like to see a game develop some of those specific themes in parallel with locking down player choice in favour of developing character emotions and feelings (while still being on this side of 'being a roleplaying game').

I'd like to see a choose-your-own-path game set in a world deliberately designed to teach the player that their character's choices fundamentally don't matter in this particular fictional context, and develop an exploration of what that entails (...while still on this side of 'being a game at all').

I'd like to see some hybrid of boardgame and roleplaying game that's not just 'boardgame mechanics under deep layers of fictive fluff', but some other unusual interpolation of the two mediums.

And if I can't find them, maybe I'll make them.

 

Wiki Articles Are Wizards!

Wizards are bizarre uniquities who carve their own paths through reality like rogue stars.

Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed] is my new zine for crafting these characters out of wiki articles, then pitting them against each other in a wizard-off!

To get a thematically consistent weird wizard with spooky powers and an appropriately unpleasant set of personality traits, you'll want to use procedural generation rather than strictly random generation. This small book gives you a comprehensive method for doing that, using wiki articles as the inspirational material, and has all sorts of bonus wizard-lore to boot.

🧙 Available today!

 

And I'm publishing a companion piece: a collection of troublesome characters, 30 Wicked Wizards!

From Miarthetrolut the Regulator (who meddles with fish kinematics) to Sthogar the Ambitious (and his reanimated giant spiders)!

The thirty wizards and archwizards in this zine-style book are all made using the Wiki Articles Are Wizards rules, all laid out in a splattery OSR style, and all very weird and wicked.

🧙 Also available today!

 

As well as print copies, you can get a digital edition of either zine!

Are you interested in both? Hey! You can grab the PDF bundle!

 

The retconned lifepath

I want to develop an idea about a novel RPG progression mechanic which was pitched here:

https://www.tumblr.com/alexanderwales/771838390587047936/pitchposting-retcon

The main idea is this: it's a narrative game where the majority of the gameplay involves placing the pieces of your own past.
[...]
So the whole game would be this: slowly adding to your own backstory, penning yourself in over time, until there's no room to maneuver anymore, and shortly thereafter, the game ends. The fundamental tension of the game is that you want to keep the character as amorphous as possible, to commit to as few details as possible, but commitment is necessary to actually accomplish things.
[...]
in this game "progression" does not come from increasing skills because you got better, it comes from defining the past.

I view this as an interesting twist on lifepaths.

 

Refresher: Lifepath mechanics

In TTRPG gaming, characters are classically generated by picking character elements (or clusters of them) from a set of options, supplemented with dice rolls to instantiate numerical attributes. Most games still do something in this vein.

A lifepath character generation system switches this up. Now you make early life decisions as your character, and/or roll to see what happened to them before gameplay began, and the outcome of that process is your character's start state.

(Aside: I made a comprehensive lifepath character generation book for D&D 5e which you can check out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/438774/Steps-to-a-Hero)

Lifepaths are an attractive alternative because they (can) restrict a player's decisions to only those of their character, not a bunch of things that their character was never in a position to choose themselves like their 'intelligence' stat. As a result,

• They add more gameplay to the game
• They feel more real
• They reduce the pressure on the player to be creative
• They replace the part of a role-playing game that has little to no role-playing (character generation) with a version that is mostly role-playing

Refresher: Retcon mechanics

Retcon is retroactive continuity. It's a broad category of ideas, and 'deciding parts of the past which were left undecided' is just one very narrow part.

The main RPG retcon mechanic I'm familiar with is the one Alexander Wales mentions in his pitch. Blades In The Dark, the GLOG, etc, permit a character by 'careful preparation' to retcon in things they have available to them, e.g., by carrying a bundle of unspecified equipment.

Outside of RPGs, something like this is a common part of story-telling games, where there are mechanisms for a player (as opposed to game master) to determine or replace parts of the world, often to the benefit of a character favoured or controlled by that player.

 

A possible synthesis

So we have this idea for, essentially, building a character by determining underdetermined bits of a lifepath.

➡️ Let's say characters all start at age 25, having had formative experiences since the age of 15, and initially have just one or two of their traits determined.

➡️ There's experience points, and you 'spend' xp at any time to declare how you 'spent' one year of your life (a nice little verbal correspondence).

➡️ Each year of your life grants you an appropriate character trait: an ability, skill, power, whatever.

➡️ Each trait you 'gain' in this way is, of course, one you've always had within the continuity of the game world. You're just revealing it now.

So you decide you spent a year traipsing the desert trade routes, and get increased endurance. Or you were pressed into military service as an archer, and are capable with a war bow. Or you spent a year repairing fishing trawlers, and have basic sailing and carpentry skills.

This setup allows for ten "level-ups", one for each adult / young adult year of your life prior to starting the game proper. You could tweak the time periods to get more buffer. If you do bump into the end game having 'spent' all your undetermined years, the game master would need to contrive a year-long time skip between adventures for the player characters to keep progressing, or switch to a different progression system.

Other than managing time, I see two main open problems. They're shared by most retcon / story-influencing mechanics:

1. Things in the game world can / should be able to interact with your character's history before you're "ready" to determine it. When this happens, the choices are: do the character advancement early, contrive a way out of revealing (deciding) it, or suffer contradiction later on.
2. When you do determine part of your character's history, it may make previous in-character choices and outcomes seem very stupid indeed. "You're telling me you apprenticed as an acrobat for a year? So have you been deliberately clumsy these last few weeks?"

 

Closing thoughts

By its nature, I think as a class of game mechanic this idea leans a bit towards the story-telling game end of the spectrum. It doesn't have many of the advantages of lifepaths which I mentioned.

It's a way for players to influence the overall narrative or game world more than their character's decisions. So I think if you were to develop it further, you'd be better off implementing it in a story-telling game or hybrid game rather than a 'strict' TTRPG.

'Reasons for reactions' to improve random encounters

You don't want your encounters, especially random encounters, to be susceptible to is-this-a-combat-or-do-we-ignore-it thinking.

Plenty has already been written about giving encounters extra contextual details (where are the creatures, what are they doing, what are they hiding, etc).

But it's also important to give the encountered characters the appearance of agency by varying their reactions. The orcs don't always attack on sight. The halflings don't always ask you to join them in a meal.

So how do they feel about you?

Different games go to different lengths with this.

🟩🟩✅ Varied reactions: The rules randomly modify how aggressively a particular set of encountered creatures react, in some way. Most games do this.

🟩✅✅ Default reactions: The rules specify a creature's or group's default reaction (friendly, suspicious, wary, indifferent, curious, issues challenges, hostile, fearful, neutral...), and modify this with a dice roll.

✅✅✅ Motivated reactions: The rules provide plausible reasons for encountered creatures deviating from the default reaction (in case the GM struggles to tie it all together).

That last approach, motivated reactions, is a very useful tool but few games do it. So here are some appropriate options you can roll or pick.

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually friendly:

1. unusual individual/leader
2. need a favour
3. recently sated
4. intimidated and trying not to show it
   
5. hiding a secret
   
6. smell food on the party
7. recent festival, harvest, windfall, or celebration
   
8. hoping to steal / other deceit
9. feeling secure after recent victory
   
10. party is a reminder of old friend(s)
    

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually hostile:

1. on high alert after recent attack
   
2. mistaken identity
3. resource-starved and desperate
4. rabid or maddened
5. hiding a secret
6. already in bad mood
   
7. subject to tyrannical orders
8. party inadvertently breaking taboo/custom
   
9. fear of reprisals from a greater threat
10. bandits, soldiers, hated nemeses sighted in area
    

"The minotaur is trying not to disturb a spider's web by moving, and settles for glaring at you balefully."

It's infamously difficult to get across motivations, secrets, and motivations at the table, so signal the reasons as clearly as you can to the players. Your encounters will have more verisimilitude, be more engaging, and be easier to improvise.

The First RPG Ever Published in 2025

It occurred to me that living in New Zealand (GMT+13) means a shot at being the first to publish a TTRPG in 2025.

So here it is.

 

The premise

SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE is a mystery puzzle-based role-playing game for two players. Play as a small, psychic cat burglar and the specialised anti-psychic hired to hunt them down.

 

The background

Usually, of course, the REGIONAL CONSTABULARY simply hire a MEDIUM to solve any given crime. But this time, a MEDIUM is the perpetrator, and is muddying the PSYCHIC AETHER to cover their tracks. What's needed is a CLAIRVOYANT whose third eye can still see when things are UNCLEAR.

An UNCLEARVOYANT, in fact.

 

The game

This is a joke but also an actual game I made, and published at 12:45 AM, January 1, 2025, New Zealand time. Until I hear otherwise from my competitors in the Republic of Kiribati, I am declaring it to be The First TTRPG Of 2025.

You can check it out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/507211/SMALL-MEDIUM-AT-LARGE

Quality and Quantity of Player Choices

Just some brief design musings.

Player choices are perhaps the most important component of TTRPG play. They're certainly one of the very most fundamental parts of any game.

We know that having more, and more compelling, choices means more fun when it comes to (for example):

• Spells or powers that are one-use, very limited, or come with a dramatic cost
• Systems where combat is dangerous and clever play gets you a huge edge
• Traps, in the style of play where traps are fundamentally puzzles and roll-to-disarm isn't an option
• Exploration, in an environment where there are (a) resource costs + (b) threats + (c) a goal which can (only) be accomplished here + (d) no clear-the-whole-map expectation

So a natural question to ask is: Can we improve certain game loops by adding more, or more compelling, choices?

Some areas come immediately to mind – places where many RPGs, big and small, have struggled in the past.

• Researching and investigation. In some games these are a simple matter of GM fiat, or just an in-world-time commitment plus a few dice rolls resulting in binary success or failure.
• Social relationships. In the (unfortunately common) absence of mechanical support and game structures, the need for these puts a burden on the GM. Social relationships ought to have mechanical impact on gameplay and emotional impact on the player... but all too often you hear them relegated to meaningless flavour. Some games don't really even ask: how do you live your character's life?
• Wilderness journeys. These can sometimes become somewhat performative/menial resource juggling or a matter of having the prescribed One Combat Encounter.
• Trade. When it comes to selling loot / buying equipment, some games skip past it, make it abstract or automatic, or reduce it to a haggle mechanic. Playing out the 'social encounter' with every trader isn't any better, if it doesn't involve compelling choices!
• Dying. Why not give a dying character things to do with their last breath? Or offer a decision between a slim chance to survive and using one's last strength to attempt something?
• Hacking archetypes/minigames. My impression is these often have a poor reputation even in otherwise-good games.

Some of these certainly could be improved with a greater centering of player choice.

More choices; more compelling choices

It's far from trivial to solve, of course.

Adding player choices may actually make things worse unless you meet the criteria for quality, which I would say at a minimum are:

1. The choice is interesting, urgent, or otherwise compelling to players
2. The choice has enough risk or potential mechanical impact to be worth the game time
3. The choice can't just be resolved with a straightforward calculation in terms of concrete or absolute costs, preference ordering of relative outcomes, etc
4. The choice is presented alongside enough grounded detail for the players to actually make informed decisions

Worth thinking about.

 

TTRPG art on a shoestring budget

Here's a little general advice for indie game creators who can't afford all the art they want.

Stock art

If you have a little bit of money to use, stock art is cheaper than commissioned art and it's way easier to find what you need compared to trawling through commons (more on that later).

Understand and abide by licenses!

Artists license their art in different ways, with drastically different conditions. If all your art comes from one or two artists (or is all under particular licenses, like CC-BY), you'll save some headaches when it comes to complying with licensing terms and laying out credits.

An aside: I have found several pieces of licensed art where artists specify how they must be credited, and then the provided credit line has a spelling mistake or grammatical error. Should you fix it? I wouldn't personally risk it. I'm not a lawyer. I follow instructions.

I'm assuming you're not using AI material. Stock art creators are increasingly (and understandably) forbidding use of their work alongside it. Note that stock art websites don't do a very good job of tagging and filtering this stuff out!

• Some, like Adobe Stock, are moderately diligent for mediocre results: exclude generative AI from a search and maybe one will slip through in ten pages of results.
• Sites relying strictly on self-reporting, like Pixabay, are pretty much all saturated in untagged AI images. They've become practically unusable; you're basically reduced to searching in older time periods or within specific artists with a consistent, identifiable style.
• DriveThruRPG also relies mostly on self-reporting, but I haven't seen many AI images passing themselves off as handcrafted.
  

Stock art directly from the creator

If there's a specific look/type of art you want, Patreon is one of the better sources, because you can support currently-active artists on an individual basis and at reasonable prices. I can't speak to whether or not it's better for the actual artists (I know they hiked their cut a little while ago).
 

An aside for Patreon artists: Please provide something like an actual license! It doesn't have to be long or detailed. It just has to make me feel confident that I am permitted to use your work for commercial purposes, can or can't advertise with it, won't be infringing on your moral rights, etc.

Open-sourcing your game art

So, on to doing it yourself! Lots of indie game makers have achieved great results by sourcing, compositing, and laying out their own art. Expect it to take a lot of work.

You'll probably have looked into public domain art. Specifically, works that have lost copyright status due to the amount of time that has passed since the death of their creator. If someone tells you a hard and fast rule for establishing this, they are wrong!

• The "falls into PD" age differs between nations, there are all sorts of carve-outs, and even a photo reproduction may or may not be transformative. Don't rely on anyone but your lawyer for legal advice.
  

A lot of sites purport to collect and curate art "in the public domain". They almost always mean "in the public domain in the USA", and even if that's fine with you, they might be wrong, and even if they're right, they might not be conscientious. Check your sources!

Where can you get free-to-use art? Well, there's tons of places. Start with Wikimedia Commons, which is huge and usually quite accurately labelled with regards to sources and licensing (...but I have found errors before. Check your sources! Check your sources! Check your sources!).

Other sites for free art include: OpenGameArt, Pixabay, Pexels, Adobe Stock, various open clip art creators, and museums and libraries like The Met and the NYPL digital collections. All have their own foibles.

Understand that "free" doesn't mean "obligation-free".

I mentioned stock art licenses earlier. Learn what the various Creative Commons licenses do. CC0 (essentially a PD dedication) is the most generous, but fairly rare in the wild. As well as the license requirements, learn about and respect creators' moral rights. Credit people even when you're not required to by the license terms.

A lot of old PD art is unfortunately physically degraded. There are great pieces made unusable by age. Too bad. Don't waste time on things that are too small for your DPI, too faded or blurry, or too palimpsest'd. Understand that entropy is mostly irreversible. Or try tracing.

And know the value of your time. If you spent a hundred hours sorting through public domain art trying to find suitable works, and you didn't enjoy the process... would you have been better off just working for money and using that to pay an artist?

Good news

Anyone can be a competent collage artist by compositing, cropping, tweaking, and laying out PD / open license art. And digital tools stratospherically expand what the word 'collage' means. Have fun testing things!

The more you try things out, the more neat combinations you'll find. Sometimes even a very simple effect can make a serviceable piece of art out of something stylistically inappropriate.

For example, I had this old black-and-white John Batten illustration saved:

 

I wanted to use it as the Nuckelavee demon in my current monster compendium (https://bit.ly/ancblasph). But it's a bit cartoonish, there's no colour to make it pop, and the solid white won't work against my backgrounds. It only takes six or seven trivial image operations to get something a bit more atmospheric:

I'm not much of an artist, but if I spent a bit more time on it, I could use more masks and curves and things to make this into a really crisp, vibrant piece.

Software

What tools should you use for image editing? I love FOSS in principle, and the people striving to make it work, but you do tend to get more or less what you pay for.

GIMP is perhaps your best free option, but it lags behind Affinity Photo (having no proper CMYK support, for example). APhoto in turn is cheaper than Photoshop, but lacks a few of its features.

You can do pretty much everything in a suite like Affinity Photo or Photoshop. But there are specialist tools for TTRPG-specific things (hexographer, inkarnate, etc), and their narrow focus may make them easier and more convenient than doing the same thing in an image editor.

Using these tools

What do you need to learn? I would say the ten basic concepts to familiarise yourself with are:

• colour level/curve manipulation
• selections
• non-destructive editing
• filters/adjustments
• brush tools
• geometry tools
• perspective tools
• touch-up tools
• layers and layer modes
• masks and clipping

There's plenty more, of course.

What do you need in terms of meta-level knowledge? Mainly, where to go for help. The internet is awash with tutorials. Start by reading/watching one of those, and then turn to searching/asking in the forums for your software.

Concluding thoughts

I started this by addressing those "who can't afford all the art they want". Again, don't forget that your time on Earth has value. If you have some exact image in mind, and it takes you 50 hours to assemble a pretty good version of it from diverse sources and painstaking image manipulations... then maybe you were better off paying an artist.

Except.

You're gaining skills as you go, and that alone may be worth it in the end. You're trying new things and making stuff.

Assembling other people's work in new ways is itself an art form, and constructing things from publicly available works may lead you to explore other ways to create.

There are side benefits, too.

Once you have the basics down, you can make your life easier by using your image manipulation tools to do mockups and visualisations. For example, I spent ten minutes this morning pairing up different candidate typefaces against different grungy/distressed visual styles in a scratch-built design, as in this snapshot:

Art, like everything in life, is a learning process. You'll find that you can cut some corners and not others.

And finally, if none of the above works for you, you could always Learn To Do Art Using Raw Materials yourself. I hear it can be very rewarding!

Discworld RPG: Concludium

In this Octobereview, I wrap up the Discworld Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS), by Terry Pratchett and Phil Masters. Last time, I talked about the setting chapters.

This time, I'm reviewing the remaining parts of the book (pp 367–408), all the juicy running-the-game stuff!

This is probably the most important section to me. Although the 'GURPS rules' parts are necessary for running the game, and the 'Discworld review' parts are necessary for understanding the canon world, this is where the authors are handed the reins to really extrapolate, develop, and get creative.

Part 11: Bad food, no sleep, and strange people

We start the section with Running for your laugh, guidance for game/campaign management. There's some good general structural advice here. They also managed to get a chuckle out of me (p 368):

If anyone really wanted, they could use the setting for an old-fashioned game in which heroes and wizards beat up monsters and take their treasure. Or they could create gloomy sagas about angst-ridden vampires on the streets of Ankh-Morpork. There's no obvious reason to do so, but nothing to stop anyone, either.

The authors talk about managing tempo and pace (p 369). This advice is generally good, but some lines jumped out to me here: "a fight that lasts mere seconds in the game world can take much of the session to run [...] The GM should avoid combat if the current aim of the game is to get to the next important plot point quickly." Emphasis in original.

I must admit, this – and some similar language scattered throughout the book – rubbed me the wrong way. It practically admits that the underlying engine is too slow to be useful. It also suggests a view of the GM as fundamentally a linear storyteller, which might be appropriate if this was, you know, a story-telling game, rather than a traditional TTRPG with a smattering of story-telling elements.* Pesto and chocolate milk are both tasty, and maybe you could find a recipe to combine them complementarily, but it's been 368 pages of rules for chocolate milk and now I'm being told to sprinkle pesto on top.

* The implication, here and elsewhere, is that the GM's role is to decide "the next important plot point", disregarding choices and rules to shepherd the player (character)s towards it. I'm not a fan.

The text goes on to add, "In general, Discworld games should run fast and light. [...] A roleplaying game, humorous or not, is a cooperative project, and if the GM takes too much power from the players, they'll ultimately become frustrated. Everyone should be allowed input." Again, this sentiment seems out of place for a simulation-heavy TTRPG

"Everyone should be allowed input" ...into what, exactly? This pretty clearly doesn't just mean the truism, "don't take away for non-diegetic reasons the exactly one way players can affect their environment in a classic TTRPG, i.e., their power to make their characters' decisions".

Even with a generous reading it seems to mean, "import story-telling-game elements into how you run this TTRPG, by having aspects of the world/outcomes decided by an unspecified collaborative process with the players." And in 408 pages there are no rules for doing that, and little to no advice for dealing with the dissonance of players having to break out of the making-decisions-as-if-they-were-their-character headspace to make decisions about the world as if they were its creator. Shrug.

One little thing that caught my attention, on p 371, is that "The Colour of Magic contains several RPG references". This surprised me; maybe I need to read it again.* It definitely contains a lot of references to the sort of 1960s-70s pulp adventure and sci-fi/fantasy fiction on which early D&D was built, but if there are direct TTRPG aspects, I never noticed them.

* The game the gods play throughout has miniature tokens representing characters and creatures, but I remember it being in much more of a "European boardgame" style.

Sample campaign setting

The book's main sample setting (essentially, pirate adventure in the Brown Islands*) is quite good! It covers a region that sits largely outside of the Discworld canon, and it hits a lot of the right notes in terms of descriptiveness and usefulness to a GM. The islands are presented as a sort of semi-policed melting-pot wilderness borderlands, which is an excellent background for RPG adventure.

* A pastiche of Hawaii, mostly.

I'm pretty sure that Llapffargoch-Wokkaiiooii is meant to extend the Hawaiian pastiche to include some of the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, which (as a New Zealander) feels a bit forced, but that's pretty much always going to be the case when you're reading an outsider's view.

I've got to say, the idea of hiring the PCs to "break into an enemy's home or workplace and rearrange the furniture to bring bad luck" is great. That's completely outside of the classic RPG scenario space, and I'd love to use it some day. (The book also gives it pretty thorough mechanical support.)

The Discworld RPG presents several other settings in short form, and all of them seem like they could be a good time. For example, there's advice for a Fourecks "road warrior" setting.* I should note that this book is somewhat old-fashioned in places, but it could be worse when it comes to things like colonialism and female empowerment. The Brown Islands is run by foreign governors... but the indigenous people don't much care what they say. There's a Klatchian setting with a harem... but the women are comfortably running the town. Et cetera.

* I was expecting the waterless regatta from The Last Continent, given this book's reluctance to extend canon. I suspect road warrior was chosen just for the cart wars / car wars joke.

Sample scenarios

The book presents three adventure scenarios; two about fruit and one about herring historical justice.

In "Lost and Found", the PCs investigate a banana shortage and discover a magical jungle lab emitting reptilian monsters. In "Full Court Press", the PCs get involved in the succession politics of an apple-growing duchy. In "Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord", the PCs set out to rescue a skald (storyteller) from a huge troll and probably end up settling a historical injustice.

I want to say off the bat that the underlying ideas are great. I'd run a scenario based on the first or third scenario without hesitation. 👍

And the implementation of those ideas is mostly good. 👍

Unfortunately, the presentation of the scenarios is undermined by two major issues.

Issue 1: Failing to help the reader

The authors commit one of the cardinal sins of RPG scenario design: presenting the adventure as a fun little mystery for the GM to be puzzled by until they've read to the end. None of the important parts are explained up front. The authors want the players to feel like they're experiencing a story? Sure. Writing the scenario as if the GM trying to read the thing also has to experience it as a story? Excruciating.

So in Lost and Found, the GM reading isn't told why there's a banana shortage, which is the entire basis of the scenario. Without a precis sketch up front, they won't find out for many pages. Long after they encounter a text box which says: "remember that the problem lies hundreds of miles distant, and is somewhat peculiar, with a certain amount of unconventional magic involved." The reader can't "remember" those three things. They haven't been told any of it!

So the GM who just wants to know if they like this adventure enough to study it and run it has to read the whole thing through to find out, then reread it with the basis facts required to actually plan how to use the scenario. It would have been trivially easy to provide the necessary information in a text box or paragraph at the start.

In Full Court Press, it's worse. The scenario writers simply didn't finish their job. Who killed the old duke, and why? What do the various described activities indicate? Well, it "depends on what the GM has decided about the true history and motivation of the NPCs" (p 394). "Matters should culminate in the revelation of some truth".

This is a cop-out, and one which particularly stings because not only does the text lack a disclaimer up front ("this scenario is incomplete"), it actually claims a GM can use the scenario "as is"!

If the problem was space, why not just write even less of the adventure and put it with the other incomplete scenario ideas at the end of the book?

The "failing to help the reader" issue comes up somewhat in Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord, too. The PCs are in a cave complex chasing after an abducted skald (p 396). They hear a deep voice relating things that happened in the past (something a skald does), and then they see the abductee. Seven paragraphs and a section break later, the reader discovers that it's not the skald who's been talking! I'm fairly sure this was just sloppy editing rather than a deliberate mystery, but again, a paragraph at the start sketching the overall scenario would have avoided the problem.

Issue 2: Implied culture of play

The other issue I'll freely admit is subjective: The scenarios advocate for a culture of play which makes me uncomfortable. It's similar to the problem I had with some of the tempo/pace advice (above).

We're told that the GM should just veto a PC's advantages from putting points in Wealth (p 386). The GM should fudge dice results and move things behind the scenes and ignore creature traits (p 391) so that things happen as they envisaged. There's this expectation for the GM to have an idea of "the way things ought to go" and covertly change things to make that happen. Is it railroading? It's at least railroading-adjacent.

Reading Sektoberfest in NoThingFjord, I started to believe that the authors just fundamentally disagree with what I would consider the deepest TTRPG loop: mentally simulating a world, seeing what the characters try to do, and then arriving at plausible outcomes using rules + good judgment + knowledge of how the world works.

• Instead of referring to rules for light, it's "reasonable" to "penalise" explorers for not taking equipment such as lanterns.
• Instead of referring to rules for navigation, "there's only a limited amount of fun to be had by getting them lost, and having them completely lost and starving to death is dull. But the players might pay more attention if they sense that the GM is thinking about that possibility."*
• Players get to "make IQ rolls to grasp the subtleties of" an issue once the GM has described it, instead of engaging their brains.
• After the script says a troll gestures at the wall, "visitors should make Per rolls to notice the general shape of the walls on the far side of the cave." Implicitly, characters can't notice a secret until the "right" story beat, no matter what they do.

* There are numerous references throughout the book to the GM feeling "kind" or "sadistic".

Again: The Discworld RPG has very few story-telling-game mechanics, and the ones it has (like Riding The Narrative) are limited and optional. But there are all these little asides telling a GM not to run the game as the crunchy traditional GURPS TTRPG it has been built as.

I understand that occasionally a GM might end up with the donkey up the minaret, and have to choose between (a) cheating to create a fun play experience, or (b) letting the chips fall where they may. But note that this is a choice.

If you play it without cheating, yes, you might have an early TPK or an anticlimactic ending or have to split a session because you run out of time. Yes, it might be less fun.* You at least won't be teaching the players lessons like "the PCs can't lose" or "the PCs can't win early with cleverness" or "there will be x amount of conflict per game session no matter what" or "the GM doesn't care about the rules of the game".

* But you don't know for sure.

If the GM finds that they need to cheat to "save" a fun play experience, something brought them to that point. It's almost certainly down to a failure of the system, a failure of the scenario, or a failure of the GM. Two of those things were within the purview of the authors to fix, and in a book of this size they could have advised on the third. Instead, they keep calling for a thumb on the scale within the scenario design. My personal opinion is that it's a bad look. Rant over; my apologies.

Other scenario possibilities

Fortunately, we don't have to end the review on a sour note! The final part of the chapter ends with a half a dozen scenario seeds, for a GM to take and run with. These are all very ideas-dense and a great fit for the canon, and I enjoyed reading them.

If I were to run the GURPS Discworld RPG, I'd pick one of these to start with – probably Plumbing the depths. If PTerry hadn't suffered his health disaster, I think we were cued up for a book about the Undertaking in Ankh-Morpork, and this offers a chance to explore what that might have been.

Remainder

There's some end matter, too! It consists of a slightly absurd glossary of Disc terms, the inevitable Discworld + GURPS bibliography (which sums up the books fairly pithily), and a comprehensive index which almost never just redirects the reader to another index entry (D&D, take note).

Final thoughts

I began this book as a Discworld fan and GURPS outsider. By the end of it, I had a better grip on GURPS and an itch to go back and read through the Discworld books. I consider that a win!

I'm also backing the new Modiphius game, Terry Pratchett's Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork. I can't wait to see the difference in approaches to this large (and for many reasons difficult-to-translate) corpus of creative material.