Reviewn June: A Brief Retrospective

A month ago I had the idea that I should spend my free time in June reading and publicly reviewing various things languishing in my TTRPG library. The precommitment was meant to spur me to read more of these resources than I would normally have, and that certainly worked.

I reviewed fourteen works, which was about what I had placed as a pessimistic estimate of one every other day, and somewhat short of what I'd hoped. It's, at a guess, five to ten percent of the unread part of my library; continuing to read at the same rate might take more than a year to get fully caught up.

My approach to Reviewn June was “if you don’t have something nice to say then don’t say anything”. There were a couple of resources I read which didn't make the cut, so I didn't review them. I also read one game which got me fired up on a specific game design question, and the review I was writing quickly turned into an essay that was only referring back to the game as a running example, so I ended up cutting that too (and might come back to it).

Personal lessons learned

1. I've worked professionally and semi-professionally as a couple of types of editor, and it was impossible for my eye not to catch on what seemed like obvious fixes, usually a few times on every page, for almost everything I read. This was more frustrating than I expected it to be, and including a 'minor text quibbles' part in each review was a useful outlet for that.
2. At a rough estimate, I invested 30 hours in Reviewn June. It was usually 2 or 3 hours every 2 or 3 days. At least half of that time was writing! My main take-home is, if I do this again (Octobereview? Febreviewary?), I should place considerably less focus on the actual review part. A fixed formal four-paragraph structure might help: introductory paragraph, discussion paragraph, quibbles paragraph, my-favourite-bit paragraph.
3. It was gruelling, but overall rewarding, to do. I picked up a few specific inspirations. I'm hoping it's building towards a habit of more reading. This blog doesn't have many readers, but the reviews did see some traffic, so some people wanted to see them. And in the end, writing practise is writing practise.

Finally, it's already borne some fruit: my gaming group ended up filling in a last-minute cancellation with a free-form riff on Coincackler Well, which wouldn't have happened without Reviewn June.

Thanks for reading!

Reviewn June 11: Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword

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

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

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

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

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

Minor text quibbles:

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

My favourite bit:

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

Where to get it:

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

Reviewn June 8: Coincackler Well

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

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

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

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

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

Trying my hand at GM-less play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dungeon itself

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

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

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

Minor text quibbles:

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

My favourite bit:

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

Where to get it:

Pay-what-you-like at DriveThruRPG

Straw demon

RPG idea

If you ever find yourself making up a guy in your head to get mad at, that's the avatar of a memetic monster protruding into your reality.

The first time it's invoked, it's just a mess of straw in the rough shape of a figure. But every time you imagine someone who's in the wrong and have a completely fabricated argument with them, the demon takes on a more human form. Eventually, when it's become a perfect facsimile of you, it reaches through the next mirror you see and tries to drag you back into its realm.