In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025
Part three: TTRPGs and game content
What games have I checked out in the last six months? Here I'm including published books and files, commercial or free, but not blog posts (which I read too many of).
It's Reviewn June!
Tiny Spaceship
An alien exploration to understand Planet Earth
By Tanya Floaker (https://floaker.itch.io/tiny-spaceship)
A wholesome diceless three-page mini-RPG about a spaceship that's come to visit us, and the dangers it faces (from other players, in the roles of e.g. "a big flock of birds"). Has a beautiful cover by August Charters, and the layout is nice (although it would benefit from a proofread and a looser line spacing).
I appreciate the extensive endnote about inspirations and mechanical sources, and the use of CC0.
Mechanically this is a collaborative story-building game with simple natural-language rules. The tiny spaceship plays off exploration (drawing attention to itself) against understanding (thereby resolving problems). With the caveat that I haven't yet played this, I would call it story-telling gaming done right: a game at a high level of abstraction should be fuelled by simple, abstract, broadly-interpretable rules. Looks fun.
RPG Design Zine
A how-to zine about tabletop roleplaying game design
By Nathan D. Paoletta (https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine)
Published 2019, it's 28 pages of quite abstract, but useful, advice. The thesis is "I'm not here to tell you which [design decisions] to make, but I do want you to know why you’re making them." That's largely borne out. The content covers pragmatic approaches to, and implications of, various design angles: articulating inspiration, interplay of structures, roleplaying-as-conversation, iteration, etc.
Overall, the zine doesn't align perfectly with my own conception of TTRPGs, but I found it all the more useful for that. For example, it makes some interesting points about granularity and utility, different to my usual approach of complexity is a cost you pay, and left me with lots to think about.
The scan quality had me squinting a few times. Corrections were made to the physical paper, which adds to the zine aesthetic, but a fair number of typos stayed in. Also, a lack of cite marks on the pasted text might have played well with the aesthetic, but meant the works cited list was less helpful than it could have been.
I'm looking forward to reading the 2025 edition to see how the author's approach has developed.
Sinister Hovering Orb
(Sinister Hovering Orb)
By David J Prokopetz / Penguin King Games (https://penguinking.itch.io/sinister-hovering-orb)
A single-page solo mini-RPG (plus title) which interested me because of the complete lack of strictly-flavour text: all the themes, implied goals, and flavour are purely wrapped in game mechanics. We have to learn the game to find out what it is about (to the extent that it can be said to be about something in particular).
For example, the reader discovers in the rules that they have four choices of activity/situation, used variously "when you are simply and suddenly present", "when your very presence brings down calamity", "when those who ponder you know what they must do", and "when you radiate a palpable sense of doom".
There are no player goals, high-level structures, rules about direction, best practises or suggestions to serve as connective tissue: only a series of game elements, presented with a sense of finality. I played a quick game and found it quite a compelling story generator, though a very open-ended one.
PUBLIC GUEST 5
Living With The Certainty of Death by the imminent explosion of our orbiting artificial planet PUBLIC GUEST 5
By Turtlebun (https://turtlebun.itch.io/public-guest-five)
A solo RPG on a poster, with a delightful visual style. It's about, well, exactly what the subtitle says. It's a sort of journalling game, meant to be played a sentence at a time over the course of a long real-world period (probably about a month on average).
The diary mechanics are very simple, with two dice informing how you spend a week on your doomed world. When you roll boxcars, PUBLIC GUEST 5 explodes. (I broke the rules and played through in a single sitting, for a fairly melancholy experience.)
PUBLIC GUEST 5 and Sinister Floating Orb were interesting diversions. Together they're inspiring part of my approach to some upcoming projects which will explore themes of cosmic doom, inscrutability, inevitability, and loneliness.
Writing With Style
An editor's advice for RPG writers
By Ray Vallese / Rogue Genius Games (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/217525/writing-with-style-an-editor-s-advice-for-rpg-writers)
A 44-page book of advice for TTRPG writing. It had some tips and reminders I found useful. For someone without a background in technical writing, I bet this book is absolute gold.
There's plenty of generic advice, but plenty is specific to RPGs: sins to avoid (like read-aloud text that dictates the players' choices), lists of RPG-specific overused and confused words, writing to a game publisher's specification, etc. My only criticism is with the visual design: some odd typeface choices and the line spacing is too tight.
Worth the $5 on DriveThruRPG, especially for a new writer.
Dwarf Mine
A mapping game of adventure
By James Hron / Paper Dice Games (https://paperdicegames.itch.io/dwarf-mine)
Perhaps not strictly an RPG, but a 25-page tabletop exploration game. You play as the location, and instead of levelling up, you add levels further down. It sort of feels like how Dwarf Fortress felt ~20 years ago: one plane, inscrutable dwarf characters, simple mechanics, inevitable doom, etc. But the cutaway is cross-section, not top-down.
There's a points (prestige) system for scoring, and a huge block of random tables. My trial game was quite enjoyable, and I definitely want to come back and give it a more thoughtful treatment.
The presentation has some rough edges, with typos, misplaced page references, inconsistent capitalisation, and the font size varying between tables.
A few of the rules could do with a rewrite:
- I'm a bit confused about multiple attacks vs entering combat multiple times, with persistent enemies who attack back.
- The connective geometry is mostly explained by example, not rules. Some
of the rules contradict the examples, as in: "The walls of rooms, hallways,
and ladders must all have at least a 1x1 square separating them", and also in "Rooms must be built in the orientation shown".
- Goblin invasion mechanics seem underdetermined.
- The appendix leaves the crucial word 'once' off the end of the sentence for Trap room.
There's lots of neat mechanics, especially with the big monsters. I like that the Cave Wurm can damage the map itself.
The First of the Stone Folk puzzles me. It must be entombed in a 6x6 room – internal dimensions 4x4, so you only need to make 16 squares. Using 21 dwarves per square to minimise deaths, you will lose on average 168 dwarves. But I don't get the impression that total population is ever going to be over 100. Am I off the mark there? Or are you meant to wall this monster off really slowly?
The dwarf leader ability adds a little more strategy. More inheritance tracking with the 'Bloodline' system would be interesting. I do like the idea of the Achievements list giving all future leaders a title. The room name generator appendix is clever, although wacky; you could get a barracks named "Bottom Watch" or a tomb named "New Trophy".
The author has written lots of official expansions and supporting content to keep the game fresh.
GURPS "Discworld Also"
A companion book for the original GURPS Discworld RPG
By Steve Jackson Games, Terry Pratchett, Phil Masters. Generally good, but most of the best stuff made it into the new edition (which I already read, and wrote some reviews for last year). So because I'll focus on the stuff that didn't, this review may sound more negative than I feel!
Sean Murray's illustrations feel quite
Discworld-y, sketchy pen/pencil pictures that don't try to rip off
Kidby's or Kirby's style. I like them. I'm not a fan of the book's layout, though. There's weird stuff going on with the kerning and text wrap. The column breaks are terribly confusing when there's a subheading (e.g., p 48 reads left to right then top to bottom, but p 49 reads top to bottom then left to right).
It's poorly copyedited for a professional product. For example, on just one page (29) I noticed
- A mangled seven-clause sentence
- "almost" should say "always"
- "could" should say "would"
- "fall off" should say "falling off"
- "unaging" / "ageing" spelling inconsistency
- "They not" should say "They are not"
The alternative troll stats, and the
extra information on elfkin and gnolls is good to have. There's a nice robust peasant character template, with various background skills. We
get a 'sentient animal' template, a disappointing miss on terminology (it should of course be 'sapient animal').
Translation of Discworld magic is done well. The additions are a bit uninspired, e.g. a magic item which replicates an air conditioner, with maybe a subtle joke about Maxwell's Demon.
The book provides some campaign settings. I mostly already read this content in the new
edition GURPS Discworld RPG, with a couple of exceptions: Smarlhanger
and Fourecks get more space here.
- Smarlhanger
is a frontier boom town in sheep country. It doesn't commit to some details ("there may or may not
be changes made", p 86), which is frustrating in a setting guide. Lots of other details to work with though.
- Fourecks cart races is a new subsystem, a spin-off of the GURPS Vehicles rules. The Mad Max pastiche from The Last Continent is fleshed out to a whole societal thing here. (It doesn't say so, but Fourecks definitely has a
bunch of ultra-hardwood trees that would be used for the highest tier of
armour.)
The book also has three adventures and three 'adventure seeds'. Again, I mostly already saw these in the newer edition. These seem pretty good, barring some vague patches.
'Walking the Spiral' is an adventure with an excellent idea: druids come to look for megaliths in Ankh-Morpork. (I really liked that the mouldering records were in the form of an ancient school
essay.) The problem is that the implementation is painfully linear, with very little for the PCs to actually do until the setpiece fight. Especially if the druid emissaries are NPCs. The adventure also implies that the University's NPC wizards are perfectly capable of saving the day by themselves at the end, making this an adventure that doesn't need player involvement at all. The adventure premise is good enough that it's worth rescuing by redoing the structure, though.
Highland Vice
System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl
By Strange Ian (https://ianstrange.itch.io/highland-vice)
A 'kitchen sink' futuristic setting that meshes well. The concept: Mars has been scarred by poorly-thought out terraforming projects. It's reminiscent of Red Dwarf and Fallout and Futurama and Borderlands and Charles Stross, with extra Tibetan, Mongolian, Peruvian, Japanese, and Weird West elements. The goal is to find and retrieve a chunk of computer megabrain.
A 100-entry hexcrawl in 28 pages. With four hexes per page and system-neutral style, Highland Vice favours high-level terse description over gameplay details.
There's a great density of evocative ideas, which is what I want most out of content like this. An algae plantation heiress hunting with an overtuned laser rifle. The electromagnetic rail launcher used by wire-crowned shamans to send captives into orbit. A buried chest full of mismatched halves of different treasure maps. A hillbilly cyanobacteria moonshine shack guarded by a truck-sized amoeba. A monk riding a solar-powered robot turtle terrarium. An android executive assistant living for years impaled on a mammoth's tusk. A colossal mining engine meditating in the middle of a mountain, trying to free itself from the material. Gauchos duelling over a holographic pop idol in a field of cherry blossom. The primitive town built by a crashed trainload of plush robotic cuddle dolls.
Many of the hexes are linked, but some of the conceptual through-lines could be highlighted. For example, 'satellite shamans' come up in 0006, 0104, 0107, 0307, 0408, etc. If I ran this I'd make a quick setting overview using key concepts as subheadings, and add relevant pointers to/from each hex:
- Satellite shamans
- Teratorns, poebrothers, and other revived megafauna
- Robot prosthetics
- Hive drones
- Sky bandits
- The Spinal War
- Sindovar
- The Maze
- Josung (game)
- etc
Definitely worth a look. It's recently published and free on Itch.
In progress
By my quick count, I have six different rulesets and splatbooks bookmarked and partially read. Possibly there's more, lurking in browser tabs or forgotten on the desktop.
I'd like to put some real effort in there. My ambition is that when I next fling reviews together, my "unfinished list" will be completely different!
Reviewn' June 2025 comes to a close.
So how'd I do? I didn't read as much as I hoped, but overall, not bad. For me, reviewing is ultimately about self-accountability, but hopefully you got something out of it.
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