Tick-tock-tock game design

Let's talk a bit about prototyping, i.e., creating the foundation of a game as the first step before iterating on the design.

I sometimes use a specific approach for this, which I call "tick-tock-tock game design".

The name (as opposed to tick-tock-tick-tock) is meant to evoke simplicity and granularity, procedurality and semi-predictability, and deliberate avoidance of symmetry. Specifically, tick-tock-tock game design is

• Minimalist: The game's complexity emerges from a small set of simple, interconnected processes and abstractions acting on each other. Additional complexity may be introduced creatively by the player. For example: The game has two stats and two actions, and the gameplay state is limited to a set of five possibilities plus some numbers.
• Clockwork: There is a core gameplay loop, precisely described, which you don't deviate from. The loop's particulars almost certainly involve randomness and player choice, but in general Z follows Y follows X. For example: The game is an escalating series of four-stage cycles where you ante up, make a bet, apply the consequences, then raise the stakes.
• Asymmetric: Although minimalism + clockwork permits a very high level of symmetry and regularity in principle, the game deliberately leans in the other direction. For example: The game has four stats, but they aren't equally important. The game has four actions with the same magnitude of effect, but one is only situationally useful, and another one has a cost.

This combination can be a potent one for engaging play.

I'll give a few examples from my current game project, Overzealous.

This is a solo TTRPG where you (an outsider god) want to be summoned into reality, but you're mismatched with a cartoonishly bloodthirsty cult who keep getting distracted by their own horrible havoc.

Poster by me. Art credits: Evlyn Moreau. Gordy Higgins. Adobe Stock. Lorc, CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), modified.

 

Overzealous is Minimalist. There are five stats. The two 'good stats' are Cultists and Imminence. The three 'bad stats' are Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity. You want to get your good stats high and keep your bad stats from creeping up too fast.

All the game's additional mechanics (random weekly events, the actions an outsider god can take, ongoing problems like your cultists turning into cannibals, etc) revolve around these essentials. It is very easy to understand the fundamentals and everything hinging off them aids further comprehension.

Overzealous is Clockwork. Stats matter at the values 0 and 13 (as starting points, points where you win or lose, etc). Stats change iteratively, each turn, with a random factor. The actions available to you have precisely specified outcomes.

After setting up, play proceeds in a tight game loop in which a turn begins, developments happen, actions are chosen, random events are rolled, and consequences are suffered. The loop only ends in a victory or a loss, with a little extra gameplay associated with either, much of the complexity of which is driven by player creativity.

Overzealous is Asymmetric. You want 13 Cultists and 13 Imminence so that you can win, but you need more Cultists than that if your cult has too many heretical ideas. Also, having high Cultists increases the rate of increase in all your other stats.

Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity are all bad, but Divergence is the worst because it can passively make it harder to win the game. All three stats can make you lose the game if they reach 13, but Fervour and Divergence matter more before that because they result in worse effects from the random rolls you make for cult shenanigans.

Ongoing problems in your cult can cause stat penalties over time, and there are 25 possible combinations for this, but in practise you only face a subset of ten problems the cult can bring upon themselves, with stat penalties appropriate to the nature of those problems. There's a wide variety of actions that you can choose between to trade off your stats, but they don't all have quite the same expected value or magnitude of effect, some are random, and some effects you might want aren't encoded as actions.

Why tick-tock-tock game design?

Minimalist and clockwork approaches are easy to learn and play and well suited to casual and solo gaming. The flip side is that they can be boring, and the kind of complexity they create can be limited in various ways, such as predictability or lack of verisimilitude.

But small deviations from a pattern feel meaningful (whereas pure unpredictable randomness circles all the way around to pablum).

To put it another way, wielding asymmetry means setting up expectations – the player can envisage a huge gleaming clockwork machine built on these simple bones, a game where a player is barely needed because everything proceeds in so orderly a fashion – and then subverting them. Having things go in different directions. Hiding better solutions amidst worse ones. Presenting a damaged machine to play with. Making things messier and more interesting in the process.

The earlier the better

I think it's best to bake this sort of thing in at the prototyping stage, where it will necessarily affect the end result, rather than try to get it right in later stages of design.

Accidental symmetries are possible, and in my experience if you're not careful when you are designing to thread the needle between symmetrical and chaotic, you can end up e.g. creating trap choices or areas of game-space which never get reached because the better path is so obvious.

This is all part of the game design vision where you avoid having equilibrium states or necessary actions or unavoidable penalties or slow death spirals. Early in the design of Overzealous I switched from ongoing problems causing a stat change of 1 to a 50% chance of a stat change of 2. It should be obvious why. It's less fun to just go around in circles, tick tock tick tock tick tock.

 

Update: Overzealous is now available!

A simple treasure table system

Here's a classic problem: The characters find some treasure – let's say there are diadems, gilt-framed paintings, jade figurines, and various other art objects. The GM describes them so that the players can write them down. The objects may not be sold for many sessions, before which many other treasures will be acquired from various sources, including different modules and the GM's improvisation.

The characters shouldn't generally know how much the art objects are worth when they find them. That should be GM-facing information. On the other hand, the GM shouldn't have to remember where every item came from, or transcribe each one and then try to hunt for it on the big list when the characters eventually try to sell it.

The typical solution is usually to bite the bullet: give out sale values along with treasure, or make it a hassle for the GM. Or perhaps compromise by giving out an indication of a treasure's worth and then rolling randomly based on the indication at the time it is appraised or sold.

 

A better solution:

I'm proposing a system which I've never seen in a TTRPG before, but it's so obvious that I bet I'm reinventing the wheel. It's similar to how item values work in the video game Dwarf Fortress.

We express each treasure as a phrase containing {class, descriptors}, where class is a type of item with a baseline monetary value, and descriptors are adjectives with multiplicative value modifiers. These are on big lists that are privileged GM information.

So the GM has a list of item classes coupled with base values that looks something like

Amulet   2 gold

Beads    1 silver

Cutlery  5 silver

Diadem   20 gold

Ewer     12 gold

Figurine 4 gold 

...

Then there's a list of descriptors, or possibly separate lists of positive and negative descriptors, each with a fractional modifier. Perhaps

Antique     ×5

Cracked     ×3/4

Gold        ×12

Half-rotten ×1/4

Jade        ×2

Large       ×3 

Rusty       ×9/10

Shattered   ×1/20

...

The GM has these lists at their fingertips. They are lookup tables, but of course if you did have a nice number like 20 or 66 or 100 entries, they could pull double duty as dice tables for treasure generation.

Illustration by Zed Nope

 

How do we use the tables?

A zillion sessions ago, the GM let the players know that they found an antique gold diadem and a large cracked jade figurine.

Perhaps they were described more fully (what does the figurine depict?) originally, but the GM made sure to communicate which were the key words, so that's what the players wrote down. The players weren't told the value, just the description.

Now time has come to sell these art objects. The GM doesn't need to remember anything about the treasure – where in the world it was found; what published adventure it came from or whether it was rolled or improvised; what rough-and-ready valuation the characters were given by a passing tinker.

The GM only has to do a couple of table lookups.

Diadem: Base price of 20 gold pieces. Antique: ×5. Gold: ×12. Actual value: 1200 gp. 

Figurine: Base price of 4 gold pieces. Large: ×3. Cracked: ×3/4. Jade: ×2. Actual value: 18 gp.

And that's all you need. The lookups are trivially easy; they're in alphabetical order and should fit on one piece of paper. The maths ain't hard.

 

Joseph Gandy (1771-1843)

 

The benefits:

There are seriously so many.

1. Hidden information stays hidden.

Players don't get information on value which should be secret. If they've found something made of 'ebonshell' and they've heard in passing that ebonshell is valuable, the word is a descriptor on the table and the players won't find out if that means "buy another round" or "buy a castle" until they seek out a valuation in-world.

Prior valuations stay consistent, too. If the GM allows a skill check for valuation, they can look up the true value, give an approximation (or a false answer if the check fails), and then completely forget they've given out that information whether or not the players go on to sell the item.

2. Descriptions correlate nicely with values.

Assuming you have a good set of tables, you're buying extra verisimilitude. The "cloudy garnet ring" you find in one dungeon and the "dull garnet necklace" you find two dungeons later have similar values, both are vastly less valuable than the "hundred-faceted ruby amulet", and that's exactly what players will expect.

Things that would otherwise 'just' be flavour start to matter more to the players. We can only take so much stuff back with us. Is the one-of-a-kind altarpiece cracked or just chipped? What's our best guess about how that compares to this sack of obsolete silver coins? Speaking of which,

3. There are learning opportunities.

We're all big fans of rewarding player skill, right? With this system, attentive players can begin to infer what words matter most for treasure values. This reflects the learning their characters would be doing.

On the other hand, the tables are

4. Easily reset.

If you want to start fresh in a new universe, or with new characters, or change GMs, it's trivially easy to just cross out a bunch of values for base items and modifiers and write in slightly different ones.

Players no longer know what to expect but the whole thing stays internally consistent, because you only tweaked the values. For the same reason, it's

5. Easily customisable.

Let's say you decided in this world, jade has mystic properties which make it worth more than gold. Cool, change ×2 to ×15 in the table and you're done. Any treasure you've already put out there is immediately converted.

If you're using treasure from a publication, when you go to convert an item you'll notice that it's described as "jade", check "jade" in the table, be reminded of your modification, and decide whether this particular thing is massively more valuable or whether you'll keep the value and change the material.

It's easy, because in general, this whole system is

6. Compatible with published treasures.

It's not much effort to start with treasures described by value and work backwards to create the descriptive {class, descriptors} phrase.

Suppose an adventure says "the bag contains three opals worth 300 gp each". What does that convert to? Well, you start by finding the "opal" class base value (or maybe "gemstone" is a class and "opal" is a descriptor), then flick around looking for more descriptors that will get you to 300 gp.

Maybe huge + dazzling + round + opal = 300 gp? Perfect. You've acquired more information about what the treasure is actually like. Or maybe it doesn't fit that they're "huge" so you try a few other descriptors and find that small + flawless + fashionable + opal = 320 gp? Close enough.

7. Simple calculations.

It's easy to price something up. We can put both decimals and fractions in the tables, so that people who are less proficient at mental maths can use a calculator. It wouldn't be hard to make a spreadsheet or online tool that calculates values very quickly.

8. Adaptive.

This single framework should work for most systems and settings. Only the tables will need to change.

Once published, individual GMs could hack further as they pleased. Have as many or few base object classes and modifiers as you want. It's easy to simplify or expand, because

9. You can hang stuff off the system. 

Let's say a character comes from a clothier background, and makes alterations to a "silk sash". Now it's a "tailored silk sash" and its value changes accordingly. A fighter is able to repair the "ragged rusted mail hauberk" enough that she can wear it, and now it's a "patched mail hauberk".

Want to get more out of jewellery and gemstones? Have a subsystem for inset jewels, which might add to or multiply an item's value.

Want to get into meticulous detail regarding some setting-specific fine arts? Add a whole extra table of modifiers referring to specific artists and times and trends and students and suspected forgeries.

Want collectors to be interested in specific things? Express that as custom modifiers. The antiquarian pays ×7 instead of ×5 for the "antique" descriptor. The archivist ignores penalties from the keywords "old" or "repaired" on books. The vizier only wants jewellery in good condition, so will pay double for any items without any negative modifiers, half otherwise.

Have item valuation and haggling skill systems? This framework just establishes the ground truth / base price, so those should sit neatly on top without you having to lift a finger.

10. No tracking.

It really bears repeating that the GM doesn't need to track any extra information, or resort to improvisation when they can't find the item they gave out months ago.

Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874)

So there's my idea! Do something cool with it. I've added "make a whole little book for this stuff and possible extensions" to the ideas pile.

Complications! Serendipity! Action resolution twists

An envelope gets tugged out of your hand by the wind. You kick your desk and slosh coffee everywhere. You bump into a friend in an unexpected place. A bird lands on your shoulder. The pen runs out of ink when you try to sign.

Because of how our own world works, we expect fictional worlds to be full of lots of little chance things which individually happen rarely. Pieces of serendipity. Unwanted side effects. Unexpected interruptions. Unforeseen complications.

Characters in the fictive world of a tabletop game should expect to encounter little surprises here and there. Not all the time; perhaps not as much as they do in the real world, because of the focus on exciting impactful play — but enough for verisimilitude.

Twisting outcomes ad hoc

TTRPGs often have rules for very consequential rare outcomes (critical hits, spell mishaps, fumbles, etc). But (especially in rules-light games) it is often down to the referee to come up with any smaller "twists": the complications and bits of serendipity we expect to happen not-too-infrequently when someone attempts to do something.

There are two problems with having the referee add twists to action outcomes on the spur of the moment.

1. The imagination is a resource. Thinking requires time and effort, a referee has a lot of mental overhead, and adding twists to action resolution begins with remembering to actually do it. Even an experienced and confident ref likes to have tools at their disposal to reduce mental effort.
2. If it's not a formal procedure, it can feel arbitrary. If the referee just tells a player "your sword hilt catches in the reins of the knight's horse as it gallops past and is ripped away, pinwheeling across the battlefield" it may feel unfair, even punishing. Why them? Why now? Why misfortune instead of fortune? This naturally leads to the ref only adding complications in low-risk environments, which is less interesting.

So here's an approach you can bolt on to any game to add more twists.

 

A procedure for twists

I was reading some older blog posts about (1) spark tables (Bastionland), (2) GM intrusions in Numenera (Alexandrian), and (3) the habit of rolling for complications (Necropraxis), and they got me thinking. We can put together some simple tools for adding twists.

The design goal is to create a procedure that is

• quick, simple, and useful to a referee,
• neither too game-specific nor too vague,
• open-ended and flexible. 

We just need a few dice tables and a basic rule for rolling on them. 

Here's the simple procedure I came up with:

1️⃣ The referee (or designer) should decide on the mechanical trigger for adding a twist to an action outcome. This will be system-dependent, e.g., "when the margin of success or failure is 10 or more", or "when a 01-03 or 98-00 is rolled on percentage dice", or "when rolling with (dis)advantage", or "when anyone spends a luck point".

2️⃣ Ideally it's something that players and referee alike can notice, so that it gets remembered, and eventually comes to be expected.

3️⃣ Now if this trigger applies during action resolution, the referee rolls 1d10 twice and consults the following dice tables, picking whichever of the two outcomes is more plausible for the context. Reroll if absolutely necessary.

(If there's no appropriate trigger for your system, you might roll 1d12 before each action adjudication and give a positive twist on a 12 or a negative twist on a 1. Or if you want lots of serendipity/misfortune and fewer dice rolls, just extend the following dice tables to 1d20 size and roll a pair of d20s for every action adjudication, one for a positive twist and one for a negative twist, ignoring results higher than 10.)

 

Dice table #1: Combat-specific twists

In a fight, one side's boon is the other's bane. The table entries refer to a "combatant" who should either be the character acting, or the opponent they are focusing on, as appropriate for the trigger. (This should work even for games without symmetrical combat mechanics, with a reasonable choice of trigger.)

1. Exposed. Combatant is drawn out of position, surrounded, or put on bad footing.
2. Toppled. Combatant is knocked down.
3. Lost grip. Combatant drops their weapon, gets it stuck in something, or loses their grip.
4. Disoriented. Combatant is blinded, dazed, scared, or demoralised by a combat event.
5. Jostled. Combatant is trampled, grabbed, or knocked aside.
6. Extra injury. Combatant suffers an additional incidental wound.
7. Ally harmed. Combatant accidentally causes harm to (or disrupts) one of their allies.
8. Armour broken. Combatant's shield or a piece of body armour breaks, is removed, or is rendered useless.
9. Weapon breaks. Combatant's weapon is made useless: a blade breaks, string snaps, gun jams, etc.
10. Impeded. Combatant is tangled or otherwise hampered by terrain or their own armour.

 

Next we'll look at random tables for general actions. We can't expect there to be a zero-sum symmetry like there is in combat, so we'll need separate misfortune and benefit tables. Choose the appropriate one for the trigger.

(Depending on the trigger, negative twists might still occur for successful actions and positive twists for failures. I think this is a good thing.)

Dice table #2: General action twists (misfortune)

1. Incidental damage. Whatever the character is working on or with (a rope, lock, computer, tool, weapon, etc) is damaged.
2. Extra time. The action takes longer than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task early when this becomes clear).
3. Costly. The action will take more resources than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task instead when this becomes clear).
4. Loud or unimpressive. A mistake or coincidence causes the action to get everyone's attention. This may be laughable, socially objectionable, distracting, or dangerous.
5. Minor injury. The character suffers some small harm in the course of attempting the action.
6. Crudely done. The action is performed clumsily or its effect is crude and sloppy, in a way likely to have later repercussions.
7. Unwanted side effect. Attempting the action also causes a problem, likely related to the method used and the circumstances.
8. Hidden step. Attempting the action reveals a new challenge which must be overcome before the action can actually be completed. *
9. One shot. Attempting the action reveals circumstances which mean the task can't be tried again following this attempt. *
10. Tougher than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something about the situation which makes the task harder than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Note the last three entries may necessitate changing the details of the world. This approach might not work for everyone.

Dice table #3: General action twists (benefit) 

1. Skill increase. The character performing the action learns something along the way. This may be as diegetic or game-mechanical as you please.
2. Mastery. The character can do this specific action again (in this same context) without any chance of failure.
3. Positive side-effect. Performing the action also causes an unexpected helpful outcome.
4. Good return. The action takes fewer resources than expected to accomplish, and/or yields more of some measurable outcome than it normally would.
5. Quick. The action takes half the time it normally would.
6. Quiet. The action is accomplished stealthily and subtly, or there's a distraction elsewhere that takes attention away from it.
7. Impressive. The character performs the action in a way that's inspirational, smooth, culturally appropriate, or garners public approval.
8. Stacking. The way this action changes the world makes it easier for allies or harder for foes to accomplish some related thing(s). *
9. Discovery. The character performing the action finds something (information or an object) when they attempt it. *
10. Easier than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something that makes the task easier than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Again, the last three entries may require changing the details of the world. You'll need alternatives if you don't like that.

The benefits of table-based twists

There are three main benefits to this approach.

1. SALIENCE. The simple procedure means easy referee decisions. It reminds the ref of various outcomes that should be possible. And it's a quick way of selecting between side effects.
2. PLAUSIBILITY. The tables are fairly general. Rolling twice and picking the more plausible twist is easier than having to think of a particularly suitable possibility, but is quick and flexible.
3. PERMISSIVENESS. When a game system doesn't overtly empower the referee to intervene in small ways, adding a defined procedure feels less arbitrary. The one I've written up is neutral with regard to the player characters; in games where characters are more skilled than their opponents, it may even be a small advantage.

You no longer need as many specific rules for monsters, traps, etc, because it all works inside the established fiction of the world. Now if a monster is described as having a hard shell, whenever "Weapon breaks" is one of the rolled options you'll instinctively pick that one without thinking too hard about it.

Alternatively, you can hang stuff off the procedure to extend it.

• A cursed sword might always favour the "Ally harmed" twist when rolled as an option, and doubles the effect when it happens.
• A sticky jelly monster always permits "Lost grip" as a third option to choose between, so that more and more swords end up stuck inside it.

The procedure can be completely player-facing if you want. In story-telling games you could even make the choice of twist a collaborative decision.

You could also use the twist procedure to simplify rules-heavy games, turning their specialised action outcomes into simple table entries and then discarding their complex action resolution mechanics.

Finally, you could build your own tables to come up with task-specific results. If your game is mainly about tracking, you probably want a tracking-specific table of twists.

A potential drawback: Combat asymmetry

This will give you different ratios of good and bad side-effects depending on the number of combatants involved. If a dozen characters fight one giant, or fifteen minions fight one player character, there's a risk of the solo combatant being buffeted by constant 'bad luck' due to the sheer number of rolls the other side is making.

Ultimately this comes down to choice of trigger. Some possible adjustments: Only accept the first two twists that get rolled each round (for combat systems with initiative). Only take the biggest margin of success from each side (for combat systems where everything happens at once). Identify one-vs-many situations and change the trigger to benefit the one. Give boss monsters the power to ignore the first negative twist they would suffer each round.

And of course you can codify rule zero. The referee should simply reject a twist if none of the possibilities rolled seem suitable for the situation. That way a mob of gnomes can't keep knocking the giant over, making her drop her club, etc.

Finally

I should note that this procedure is untested, but I hope to give it a go at the table in the future. I'd love to hear if you have thoughts or feedback. Leave a comment or let me know on Bluesky or Mastodon!

 

The art in this post is by Gordy Higgins. Used with permission.

The Verdant Chamber: A dungeon room

Deep in the dungeon there's a smooth green cyst in the bedrock. Trapped within, a weird organic sludge waits for a chance to begin its expansion once again.

If you open the door, it may bury the world in slime.

 

 

Merry Christmas! Here's a dungeon room for you, courtesy of the 2025 Onegeon Jam on itch.

Blogwagon: The Valley of Eternal Cheer

Merry hexmas! Here's another weird adventure location I made for the community holiday blogwagon courtesy of Prismatic Wasteland. Use it however you like! Creative commons license at the end. If you link one of your hex edges to mine, drop a comment or message me on Bluesky and I'll update the post!

Download link

If you'd like a copy of these Christmas hexes in PDF form, get it for free here: https://periapt-games.itch.io/hexmas-locations

Summary

A sect of treetop angels makes this isolated mountain valley their home. Dwelling in the porous rock caverns, the object of their worship: the Blissful Homogenate. It is an immense festive slush composed of thousands of former intelligent entities, now an immense mushy rainbow sea, a hivemind experiencing True Holiday Joy. It dissolves anyone who touches it.

Hex terrain description

This is an area of lofty wind-wracked mountains, most of them bare other than the omnipresent snow. In the more protected valleys, pine trees huddle together for warmth.

One particularly deep valley, more of a huge crevasse than anything, is curiously warm. Wisps of steam drift about, and a rivulet of snowmelt runs its length. Bubbling up from clefts in the rock, a lumpy rainbow mishmash that looks like a tendrilly mess of soft modelling clay.

Above, there's a stand of huge trees, where glittering candlelight suggests the presence of people.

Connecting hexes

• Southeast: The Transient Snowfields (https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2025/12/blogwagon-transient-snowfields.html)

Locale: The citadel of the treetop angels

A huge ice-encrusted treehouse with numerous parapets, slit windows, and clear sightlines. It is supported on the trunks of six massive pine trees. The only way up, if you can't fly, is a winding path that flips back and forth between ladder, tunnel, and staircase. Concentric walls of stakes at the base help keep out interlopers, but the gate – and the charitable donation box next to it – are both kept unlocked.

Inside, the citadel is freezing cold, lit only by candles. What care angels for warmth?

Principles of hospitality are a little fraught at the moment: the order is nearly torn apart by religious quarrel.

The treetop angels consider the whole valley a holy site. The caves and tunnels honeycombing it are filled with a miraculous vast-lake-sized gelatinous entity of perpetual cheer and enormous power, the Blissful Homogenate. The treetop angels revere this entity as their guardian, guide, and future, but they are at odds over the nature of their worship.

The order of angels is split into several factions, or 'choirs'.

• The loudest voice is that of the status quo, who sing: those who should be drawn into the Blissful Homogenate are already fated to do so. No intervention is needed.
• Another choir believes the angels should be united with their deity at once. These angels are only holding back long enough to convince their sistren to take the plunge together.
• A more radical faction sings carols of escalation: the heathen must be converted, whether by the sword, by persuasion and pilgrimage, or by cracking the stone of the valley asunder and letting the Blissful Homogenate descend like a multicoloured avalanche into the plains below.
• A small number of voices call for study and for optimisation. The rate of dissolution should be maximised. The Blissful Homogenate should be increased in volume if possible. The order should investigate methods for budding off new homogenates to carry elsewhere in the world.

The rift between angels is unlikely to be repaired, but canny adventurers could align themselves with a choir for personal gain, and possibly even egg on the factions to the point of violence. The treetop angels don't have much gold, but their stockpiles of frankincense and myrrh run deep.

Locale: The overlooking cliff

A precipice directly above the deepest part of the valley. Ancient, crumbling steps descend in fits and starts into the crevasse. It's screamingly windy here, shredding the wisps of steam that rise up.

When the sun is high, you can see through eddies in the mist below: parts of the Blissful Homogenate extend from the valley's caverns. It looks like a colourful smear across the rocks, as if vomited by some vast sherry-soused god on its way home to a mountaintop paradise to sleep it off.

There is a little shanty town here, made from rough-hewn pine wood, stacked boulders, and reindeer hides. A motley bunch of people have come here, mostly on bad information, and are unsure of what to do next. There's a continual argument simmering like an eternal stew.

Currently about twenty people live in the shacks (detailed in the encounter table below). Many others before them have returned to the lowlands, or descended into the valley to become one with the Blissful Homogenate.

There are also four treetop angels hanging around here:

• Numerica Of The Last Apex Unclimbed. Studying the Blissful Homogenate by observing those who may or may not eventually enter it. She's conducting an ongoing census and interviews. Currently taking measurements.
• Radiala Of The Final Pinnacle Unmatched. Feels a desperately personal relationship with the Blissful Homogenate. Paranoid. Fanatical. Has given up everything. Will keep herself out of the homogenate for all eternity to fulfil her self-appointed role of keeping it safe. Currently making patrols.
• Levitica Of The Ultimate Peak Unsurmounted. She's trying to enforce a taboo against hanging around the valley through persuasive sermons. Mostly she has succeeded in making everyone annoyed with her. Currently standing on a boulder and lecturing to the wind.
• Honoria Of The True Zenith Unparalleled. She's dipped a toe in the Blissful Homogenate and will soon be part of it. She's flown back up the cliff to spread the good word. Currently ecstatically dissolving.

Random cliff encounters (1d10):

1. Inkoo and Shmo. Pair of gigantic lumbering penguins. Mountain natives who make a simple living guiding curious people out here, then usually earning even more to guide them back again. Very disliked by the treetop angels.
2. Jenk Holdfraught. Withered old man. A would-be lich who hasn't managed to walk any of the normal dark paths. He's decided that eternity will still be worth it even if filled with tinsel, whistling, and the cross-talk of a happy hivemind, but it's not his first choice, and he's waiting until the last moment possible. If he waits much longer he won't be able to get down the steps under his own power. Has a small amount of treasure, mostly in the form of magical scrolls and cursed ritual equipment.
3. Five tuskers (huge tusked trolls) all wearing enormous boots and ceremonial bells. Not very smart. A small religious pilgrimage from the Grove Where The Snow Is Like Icing, over Rime Ridge. They were trying to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain and are unsure of what they've stumbled upon. That thing down there... is it pudding?
4. Prudence Dearborn. Half-angel. Skilled chef. Her current ambition is to make the ultimate festive spice mix, and she's travelled here for inspiration.
5. Old Father Chrysalis. A white-bearded wizard who touched the Blissful Homogenate and is becoming one with it, but much more slowly than usual. Meanwhile, he's wandering the valley and the cliff. Nobody knows his real name. Doesn't converse. Mumbles a slurpy bubbly mixture of arcane half-secrets and mystic half-truths. (Probably warded himself against the homogenate's effects and only partly succeeded.)
   
   
   
6. Snarlface, Dayglo, and Toad. Three escaped orcs of the Red Lord (see magnoliakeep.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-bandwagon-orcish-toy-factory.html). One of several secret orc cells combing the world for potential superweapons to wield against their despicable master. Cautiously excited by the potential of the Blissful Homogenate, but underequipped to do anything with it.
7. Plush Carl. Three-eyed misfit toy. Trying to track down his happy-go-lucky great aunt, missing for months. She's one with the homogenate already.
8. Terrrence Norrbrright. Gangly hollow-eyed elf. Legate of a deposed tyrant. Truly hates good cheer, but is pretending otherwise. Smile like a death rictus. Hums off-key. Secretly wants to destroy the Blissful Homogenate and has brought a sorcerous weapon looted from his old boss's treasury to accomplish this. With the right invocation, the Cauldron Of Inversion should turn the homogenate's boiling, joyous form into something cold and hard and miserable. It won't, though. It'll just splatter dangerous chunks of it all over the landscape.
9. Jephrow Bosk. A skeleton percussionist. Inexpertly plays his ribcage like a xylophone. Thinking of branching out into skull bongos. Extremely cheerful; was drawn to this place by a mysterious inner pressure he can't explain. Jephrow wears the bejewelled Tiara Of Undead Control, giving him enormous amounts of self-actualisation. If it is removed he will become a mindless bloodthirsty monster.
   
    
10. Zephany. A westerly wind, separated from her easterly sister Gale (see thegloaminglog.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-quiet-season.html?m=1). Gale was last seen above these mountains, having talked to a treetop angel on the way past. She has left already, but Zephany doesn't know that, and deeply dreads descending into the valley. She hopes her brother Eddy will catch up to her here to lend some support.

 

Locale: The cheer-clogged depths

The rocky valley floor is in shadow for much of the day (the parts near the walls, perpetually so). A small stream of snowmelt pours the length of the middle and ends up in a sinkhole, feeding who knows what underground river further on.

Steam shrouds much of the valley depths, stirred by the omnipresent mountain wind, and occasionally scattered in wisps to the top of the overlooking cliff. It's slightly warm down here, and feels shockingly hot compared to the rest of the freezing mountains.

There's a pleasant humming sound.

Entity: The Blissful Homogenate

Larger than most lakes, and composed of colourful whorls of half-liquid, half-solid organic strands. These flow and wobble and slowly move about by themselves, occasionally splitting off and wandering semi-independently, never far from the main mass. Looks like the aftermath of an inconceivably huge and ultimately failed modeling clay project.

Vestiges of faces smile back at you.

It smells of cinnamon and hot plastic.

Background and expansion

The world's most optimistic and spirited are instinctually drawn to this place on their deathbeds, making it an elephant's graveyard of the merry. They make up the bulk of the homogenate. It has also amalgamated various stupid or unlucky animals (most avoid this place), unwanted experiments/victims who were disposed of here long ago, and a certain number of people who couldn't hack it as liches.

The rest of the homogenate is made up of molten treetop angels. They've been joining it pretty regularly over the years.

If you touch the Blissful Homogenate, you immediately start turning into it. You go runny bit by bit, the event horizon slowly travelling up your arm. You can be saved from the effect if you strike off the digit (or, for the incautious, the limb). Just make sure you cut far enough up.

It usually takes a few hours, after touching the Blissful Homogenate, to collapse into a pile of goo. Features slide off the face. The face drips off the body. Limbs elongate. Clothing melds with flesh. A distinct cheerfulness is felt all the while.

Once it's done, you're indistinguishable. Now if anybody touches you, they start turning, too.

Capabilities

The Blissful Homogenate is in a sense an intelligent hivemind, but undirected. It has never been known to take any real action; it is continually thrilled beyond mortal comprehension just to be experiencing the world around it.

The entity only cares for things that are lively and moving and glittery; it doesn't eat through rock and trees.

The Blissful Homogenate is extremely hot to the touch, like flowing candle wax. Hot enough to warm the rock of the valley and melt the snow above. Bits can be struck off its mass, and if this happens, they slowly cool, losing their animation. They will try to return to the main mass before this happens.

The entity doesn't retaliate if struck. There's an ocean of this stuff, much of it underground. What could possibly harm it?

Challenges and opportunities:

• The Blissful Homogenate is always happily humming. Its underground parts sometimes break out into full-on carols. The distant singing could draw characters into the dangerous cave systems around the valley walls where the goo level ebbs and flows.
• There's tall cliffs above and below the valley, and the rock is porous. A landslide, snowmelt-heavy river, earth tremor, or explosion could knock things into motion. An avalanche of hot homogenate would flow into the network of valleys below like a rainbow lahar, eventually reaching inhabited pastures. There'd be enough mass for it to last for weeks or months independently of the main blob, with all the trouble that would ensue.
• The trouble that's brewing with the treetop angels could easily reach a head. The outlook for their custodianship of the Blissful Homogenate is different depending on which faction wins.
• The shantytown inhabitants all want different things. Trouble is particularly likely from Terrrence Norrbrright, Jephrow Bosk, the orc trio, or the not-too-clever tuskers.
• If a small part of Blissful Homogenate is separated from the main mass, it will eventually cool down, deanimating. But it does not become completely inert. If a small part got into a town's water table before rotting away completely, it could cause strange hallucinations, and toys to be born as misfits.
• Buried in the caverns of the Blissful Homogenate are a few bits of magical treasure too dull and/or cold to be homogenised. The Sceptre Of The Snow Miser turns a foot-wide sphere of solid matter into snow with a touch (exactly as horrid as it sounds). The Woadstone is a simple stone amulet which dyes you blue as long as it is worn. The Snow Deanimation Orb projects a league-wide field which annihilates the consciousness of any snow-based lifeforms.
• The Blissful Homogenate has never been stirred to anger... to date. Characters who presented a genuine threat to it would find out how mobile it really is.

Rumours about this hex (1d6):

1. The long-sought Fountain of Merriment really does exist, and it's closer than you'd think! A drop of its waters would leave you happy for the rest of your life.
2. The Banshee Queen, whose voice was the demise of thousands, did not herself perish but is still alive somewhere in a hidden valley, kept alive by unnatural magics.
3. There's a geothermal springs with miraculous healing properties deep in the mountains. Their waters can even heal a damaged spirit!
4. Should a treetop angel be slain in anger by its brethren, the body's angelic halo can be snatched up by a mortal to grant an unearned textra life.
5. Some deranged alchemist created a dangerous substance called Colourful Amalgamising Clay. If you survive a brush with it, your mind will be forever changed.
6. A cabal of the world's most naturally cheerful people have a secret mountain retreat where they recharge their optimistic energy and make blood sacrifice to a great chthonic god.

Credits

The text of this post is released under a Creative Commons BY (4.0) license. Do what you like with it as long as you follow the terms: credit me, link here, and link to the license.

Illustrations licensed from Alderdoodle (alderdoodle.co.uk), Amanda Lee Franck, Jose Eduardo "Jegs" Gonzalez, and Art SilverGlass / Sophie Grunnet. Some illustrations by Fernando Salvaterra - used with permission.

Blogwagon: The Transient Snowfields

Merry hexmas! Here's a weird hex I made for Prismatic Wasteland's end-of-year blogwagon. Use it however you like! Creative commons license at the end. If you link one of your hex edges to mine, drop a comment or message me on Bluesky and I'll update the post!

Download link

If you'd like a copy of these Christmas hexes in PDF form, get it for free here: https://periapt-games.itch.io/hexmas-locations

Summary

A highland region of magically-animated snow. It is home to a village of 'roblings', creatures cursed to compulsively steal. A dysfunctional team of researchers has travelled here in a gingerbread mecha, now broken down.

 

Hex terrain description

This hilly region rises out of the rich pastures to the south and grassy steppe to the southeast. Here little grows beyond a dark moss, with snow always blanketing the ground.

The snowscape is dotted with missing patches, each one beginning a trail of footprints, as if areas of snow were getting up and walking away.

The region otherwise appears devoid of villages, hamlets, or other habitation. It rises higher into tall mountains at the northwest edge.

Connecting hexes

• Northeast: Three Calves (see https://elsewhere-elsewhere.neocities.org/posts/2025-12-07-23.-hexmas)
• Northwest: The Valley of Eternal Cheer (see https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2025/12/blogwagon-valley-of-eternal-cheer.html)
• Southwest: The town of Borsk (see https://coppershaman.com/merry-hexmas-babbling-baboon/)
• Southeast: The Silver Steppe (see https://www.fluoriteguillotine.com/blog/2025/11/08/blogwagon-broken-bronco-on-the-silver-steppe/)
• ➡️ Let me know if I should change any for organisational purposes.

Description

The landscape is not-quite-beautiful. The sparkling white snow is thoroughly dotted with missing patches and criss-crossed with tracks. The wind gently sighs, except for when it's howling.

Transient snow can be found covering the hex. The large hilly snowfields look quite mundane, but are home to intelligent creatures who fall as snow during the night and collapse into quickly-dissolving piles of slush by the following afternoon.

The transient snow creatures all have names, personal stories lining up with hazy false memories of the world, and often relationships with each other. They have a dull understanding of the broader world, but only come to comprehend their own immediate mortality through the course of the day. Each has a unique appearance, as if bespokely made by a snow artist. They have equipment, clothing, and skills, all of which dissolves as the sun descends.

 

 

Locale: The village of the roblings

Roblings are part mischievous goblin, part red-breasted robin, although they joke that there's more magpie than robin. Something in the genetic mix gives them tails and claws, too, and makes them taller than most humans. They're muscular and very quick, and with the aforementioned claws, each one is about as dangerous as a bear if it comes to a fight.

These folk are all covered in long fur. Apart from a touch of red at the chest, they are dark green shading to black, the same colour as the moss and lichen under the snow. The roblings harvest those tiny plants, and hunt the reindeer that compete for it. They supplement their diets with small river fish and with sugared oranges of unclear origin.

Their village is two hundred roblings, of all ages. They hatch from knobbly hairy eggs, and their yurt homes have a nest-like look to them, low communal structures made from reindeer hides stitched with sinew, huge mammoth tusk struts, dried moss, and goose down.

The roblings are hospitable, but seem a little concerned that they are receiving visitors. A village elder will explain their circumstances:

• Background: The roblings as a species are cursed with kleptomaniac episodes. They are individually compelled at random intervals to go to the nearest place where they think some valuable objects might be, taking a big sack, and loot it all in a mischievous frenzy. They then return to wherever they live and find they don't care about the things they've taken, feeling fairly embarrassed about it (but not inclined to give anything back).
• Community: Because they are otherwise normal, the roblings don't like the outcomes from this behaviour. Their attempts to sublimate the urges failed, so a couple of generations ago they formed this community, leagues away from anywhere. A big part of their local culture consists of stealing from each other and the attendant little customs of going around to find their stuff again. Relatively few robling robberies now take place outside the village, but they have a big collection of things they stole in the past.
• Transient snow: Because the ancestral curse is about stealing valuable things, the roblings can safely live here amongst the transient snow creatures. The creatures' snow equipment (which evaporates daily) is largely worthless, so the robling instinct never targets them.
• History: The roblings were created in vats as an arcane experiment. Oral history says their creator was a genius archwizard whose hobby was thievery. She was betrayed by her apprentice who killed her, stole her powers, and abandoned the roblings for a new project, making some kind of huge mechanical baboon (see https://coppershaman.com/merry-hexmas-babbling-baboon/)

The roblings are smiling. Self-actualised. Happy with the niche they've carved out for themselves. They only admit to two worries:

1. In the distant future, population growth could have them brushing up against regions with other kinds of people, with friction as a result. They'd like to find a way to lift their curse if they could.
2. More immediately, some big, pricy, well-defended target could come along, prove irresistible, and the village would suffer some violent retaliation after robbing it. (They don't know about the W.A.I. gingerbread mech yet – see below)

If you could somehow alleviate either fear, you'd have the gratitude of a lot of interesting people.

Notable items stolen from the outside world by roblings (1d10):

1. Mrs Clause's rocking chair. She probably wants it back, but it's pretty heavy and unwieldy.
2. Treacle hourglass. Ornate ceremonial timepiece. The dark liquid very slowly flowing through it has almost finished counting down a decade.
3. Sack of large rubies and sapphires. Used as 'practise gems' by an apprentice gnome lapidary, they are all quite misshapen or in some cases have been split in half. Still valuable.
4. A set of telescope lenses once belonging to the Snow Miser (see https://tbr.bearblog.dev/merry-hexmas-blog-bandwagon-snow-misers-houseboat/)
5. Two large golden rings, from a set of five. A recent political intrigue is said to have revolved around them. Sounds like a tall tale to you.
   
6. A taxidermied chimerical denizen of some nightmarish realm. This particular chimera has the glassy-eyed head of a reindeer, body of a giant penguin, and feathers of a turkey, duck, and chicken combined. It also has human arms, holding a knife and fork.
7. Trunk-sized golden key to the city of Sniffleheim, fortified ancestral home of the frost giants. Etched on one side with the Sniffleheim coat of arms (a stylised scowl) and on the other with "Property of Jarl Keith".
   
8. Tongs of the Heat Miser. Magically room-temperature kitchen tongs. Once used by this mysterious figure to manipulate objects without melting them into white-hot blobs, before he learned a measure of control over his eldritch power.
9. Bottomless Pouch of Sugared Oranges. Vital to the roblings, who use it to supplement their moss-based diet with extra calories and vitamins.
   
10. Single-use doomsday device stolen from the Red Lord (see https://magnoliakeep.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-bandwagon-orcish-toy-factory.html). Ugly pear-shaped mess of steel pipes, loose wires, and warning symbols. If activated, it instantly tinselifies all organic life in a six-league radius, leaving nothing but glittering strands and a mass of fused slag at the epicentre.

 

 

 

Locale: A curious expedition

A campsite huddles around the legs of a massive gingerbread mecha. The five-storey-tall delicious biscuit robot is currently immobile.

Houses a research party from the Weather Advancements Institute (W.A.I.), here to study the magical properties of the snow. They are competing with the North Pole Ironworks and the Hannukademy for funding, and would offer trade tips and small favours for news about either group or for leads on new sources of private equity.

The gingerbread mecha is a quadrupedic walking vehicle constructed from pastry, icing, spun sugar, high-tensile marzipan, and rolled steel. The inside smells like a holiday drink made from hot machine oil. The mecha broke down slightly short of its destination two leagues further into the snowfield, so the expedition has set up camp here while mechanic Grace tinkers with it.

The mecha is armed with a devastating heat ray and six pop-out autocannon turrets which lob chocolate shells at an unbelievable rate of fire. Part of an experimental fleet belonging to the Heat Miser, who contracted the design out to the W.A.I., funded the construction, and leased it back in a sweetheart deal.

Weather Advancements Institute team members (1d8):

1. Dr Margrit Blithely. Principal investigator. Stressed out. Really needs this expedition to work. Has only just found out about the roblings and is worried there could be a violent clash. The mecha has autonomous defences which can't be deactivated.
2. Thab Xnox. Research assistant. Hammock enthusiast. Has raised laziness to an artform. Motivated by nothing but new excuses not to do his job.
3. Magus Kaleb Baiseen. Academic wizard. Fascinated with the elements. His life's work is the construction of a periodic table partitioned along the lines of which elements can or cannot be animated or summoned.
4. Jennet Jensdottir. Meteorologist. Seven feet tall, platinum blonde, glittering celebrity smile, mind like a steel trap. Sociopath. Prolific writer. Managing editor for a journal of sorcerous metereology.
5. Dward Blue. Former jolly postman. Current grouchy mech driver. Chain smoker. Mood made worse by the expedition's limited stock of booze and their current inability to get out of here on a moment's notice if anything goes wrong.
6. Grace Isthmus. Gingerbread mechanic. Green-skinned and covered in warts. Wears black overalls, bright red sequinned shoes, a permanent grin. Omnidirectionally overoptimistic. Very confident. Loves her job. Currently trying to work out why the gingerbread engine in Knee #3 won't start.
7. Snid Kipper. Dogsbody. Young, anxious, splay-eared. Self-consciously amateur bagpiper and even more amateur poet. Very earnest.
8. Chunk. Team mascot. Salamander. Little salamander collar with her name on it. Sleeps in the main boiler. Eats coal kibble. Very fat.

 

 

 

Random hex encounters (1d10):

1. Jessica Bonechill. Transient snow creature in the form of an axe-wielding skeleton. Mercenary for hire, briefly. She wears a windbreaker and complains of the cold.
2. Magus Glace von Zephyrous. Transient snow creature in the form of a pretentious floating wizard. Capable of casting up to fourth level spells, but will thoroughly indulge his fondness for riddles before being any help at all.
3. Mister Hiphup. Transient snow creature in the form of a snowman. Hiking through the snow, eager to explore this new world he has found himself in, unaware he will live only a few more hours
4. Megafrosty. Transient snow creature in the form of a gigantic three-headed snowman. Sings in a robotic voice. Has false memories of having lived thirty centuries. Dislikes solemnity and may attack the maudlin.
5. Ia Snowhorn. Transient snow creature in the form of a fearsome ice centaur. He is struggling to traverse the snow on icicle legs which sink knee-deep with every stride.
6. Kel Brittlegrasp. A young wandering robling, curious about foreigners.
7. A small team of gnomes wearing piping hot steamsuits for warmth. They are crossing the snow on coal-burning sledges on a long journey to the big city. All of them are accomplished builders and interior designers, absolutely desperate for work (perhaps at a place like this).
8. 
   Three roblings (Bok, Twik, and Winston) armed with spears and big empty sacks, stalking a small herd of reindeer across the snow.
9. A small herd of reindeer.
10. Snid Kipper from the W.A.I., looking for a bit of solitude to practise the bagpipes. He keeps bumping into slightly simple-minded transient snow creatures and is finding it hard to shake them.

 

 

Rumours about this hex (1d8):

1. There's a whole town of grinning demons out beyond the steppe, dark green like the algae-slick walls of an old well. They live to steal.
2. A privately-funded research group has sent an expedition armed with gingerbread technology after something valuable out in the deep snowfields.
3. There's a place where the snow gets up and walks around, asking confused questions.
4. There was a string of odd thefts a couple of decades ago. Mrs Clause's rocking chair. The key to the city of Sniffleheim. The Tongs of the Heat Miser. Things that have never been fenced.
5. Some strange naive chap walked down from the hills. He was white as snow and dressed in strange baubles. He got drunk enough at the public house to cause problems, and couldn't pay his tab. When they opened up the gaol cell the next day there was nothing left of him but a puddle.
6. The Red Lord has been furious about a break-in which he was never able to avenge. He's put a big bounty on the head of something called a 'robling'.
7. If you find a place where odd folk are birthed from the snow itself, the flowering lichen there should be cut under a full moon, dried, powdered, and burned as incense. You'll have oracular visions.
8. Up beyond the snowline there's an orc spawning pit that went wrong and all the orcs there are obsessed with theft.

 

 

Credits

The text of this post is released under a Creative Commons BY (4.0) license. Do what you like with it as long as you follow the terms: credit me, link here, and link to the license.

The illustrations incorporated here are by Alderdoodle (alderdoodle.co.uk), Joe-Austin Flynn (www.patreon.com/c/u95234086/), Evlyn Moreau (www.patreon.com/c/evlynmoreau/), Steven Colling (https://stevencolling.itch.io/), and Jeffrey Koch (https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/26533/Jeff-Koch-Stock-Art). Used with permission.