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 14: GLOG Wizards

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'm rounding out Reviewn June and finishing up with the first chunk of the GLOG at the same time. Today it's The GLOG: Wizards, by Arnold Kemp / Goblin Punch. This is 21 pages of novel magic system for use with the GLOG – but, as the author points out in the source post, there's lots of content that could be excavated for use with another system.

Everything I wrote about the GLOG rules in terms of approachability also applies here, so I’ll mostly leave it out. (One example – The GLOG: Wizards assumes a certain amount of TTRPG knowledge. It’s informed heavily by what came before – the only reason to spend more than a sentence on scrolls and spellbooks, given that they’re functionally identical in the GLOG, is that other games make them instrumentally different things.)

I worked hard to write less this time! This one was a really enjoyable note to end the month on.

How the magic system works:

The text begins with a fairly short, fairly cohesive metaphysics that ties in magic spells to the rest of the supernatural. I appreciate that, as the GM can use it to infer a number of answers to player questions without having to worry about coming up with and then remembering something consistent.

The GLOG uses slot-based magic. There’s a nice old-school feel to everything, and rules for all the usual peripherals (magic item identification, transporting spells, etc) get quickly laid down. The actual spellcasting rules deviate a fair amount from other D&D-likes. It's based on a dice pool, and there’s a risk/reward tradeoff and therefore important decisions offered to the player. Having, essentially, points to invest creates some good affordances for the GLOG system, in particular the spell keywords ‘Splittable’ and ‘Sustainable’.

Investing more power (dice) in a spell increases the risk of a Mishap (minor penalty) or Doom (major penalty which eventually destroys the character, unless evaded through a quest). Mishaps and Dooms are specific to schools of wizardry. Schools of magic have perks and a spell list that goes up to twelve, but also have restrictions.

There’s a simple uncertainty mechanic; you’ll never be able to predict exactly how many spells you can cast each day (but you’ll have a fair estimate, and bounds). I like that. Another novel improvement is that wizards aren’t penalised for wearing armour (a restriction I’ve seen a hundred explanations for, none of them particularly good, and many of them nonsensical if you know anything about armour). Instead, in the GLOG a magic user is incentivised to choose to forego armour in favour of a magic robe, which increases their available power. No in-world reason given why you can’t wear armour and a robe, but for that, at least, solutions suggest themselves.

One bit confused me. The rules about scrolls on page 2 say they’re not remotely like OD&D scrolls, they’re just variant spellbooks. The rules on page 3-4 talk about casting from spells like they’re OD&D scrolls (but ones which also power the spell up). Text on page 7 might help resolve the contradiction, implying wherever the page 3–4 rules say ‘scroll’ they mean ‘scroll or spellbook’, with the exception that a scroll gives an extra casting die but a spellbook doesn’t. This implies you can burn up your grimoire in a last-ditch effort. It also means someone else can get into your tomes and destroy all your unmemorised magic by casting it. It still doesn't work, though: page 7 also includes a team ability which lets you “share spellbooks as if they were your own”, implying pretty heavily that spellbooks actually don't work like scrolls, because those anyone can pick up and use.

Wizards get access to their spells in a particular order, lightly implying an escalation of power, but generally what matters is number of magic dice in the pool. There are legendary spells. Some of them are missing their spell description. From the ones included, I’m not sure that legendary means ‘better’, just ‘not on the main spell list’.

• The Orthodox wizard has no casting restrictions, and on their final Doom, loses the ability to cast spells. Could be a lot worse.
• The Illusionist’s restriction is that they can’t cast spells unless they can currently see all six primary colours. This would be a nightmare to adjudicate (properly), but fortunate they begin the game with rainbow-coloured gloves, which reduces the question to whether the illusionist still has their clothing and can see their own hands. A Doomed illusionist becomes nothing more than an illusion.
• The Necromancer’s shtick is expending corpses and shunning magical healing. They get cool gross spells like ‘Raise Skin Kite’. Their final Doom (besieged by 3d20 undead) sounds fairly survivable, with luck and preparation.

Those are the only wizard schools included in the document, but I’ve seen others in the glogosphere.

Wizards also get team abilities, advancing a design concept I don’t think I’ve seen in a TTRPG before: “I want to encourage more mono-classed adventuring parties. A party of wizards sounds cool. So does a party of thieves.” Team abilities are meant to offset players increasing their capabilities by diversifying classes. They are little synergies that apply whenever two or more characters have the same (main) class.

Juicy content:

Everything is flavourful and hardcore:

A wizard’s number of spell slots “is limited by their ability to flex their brains into mindscapes that better accommodate the spell they wish to lure into their brain-trap. It is not knowledge that achieves this, but rather visualization and self-delusion.”

A wizard’s memorised spells disappear from the encoding in their spellbook. Therefore, to learn spells from a dead wizard, you might acquire whatever was in their spellbook unmemorised, but getting at the ones in their head involves “bisecting the wizard's skull and balancing it atop a golden needle. The memorization of spells causes the brain to carve grooves on the inside of the skull, and the skull now moves over these grooves like an Ouija board. With a compass, water clock, and brain almanac, these movements can be deciphered.”

The Wizard Vision spell can have permanent effects, both good and bad. “You suffer a permanent loss of 1d6 Wisdom (as you reject the impossible reality you are looking at, and go a tiny bit insane) or 1d6 Charisma (as you accept this transcendental truth and become forever alienated from your fellow humans, who will never understand the truth).”

You might escape a particular Doom by eating the heart of a high elf, or by journeying to hell and cutting a deal “with the Underpope or one of the Satans”.

The GLOG spells:

The spells are designed to “lend themselves to clever uses”. To this end, they are mostly adaptations of old-school spells – broader and more powerful, but my impression of the system maths is that wizards won’t typically be able to cast as many spells in this system.

I like the spells, especially the deviations from the classics. The implementation of False Life makes it an interesting tactical tradeoff. I love that the (Diablo-inspired?) Explode Corpse spell works on undead creatures, working particularly well on friendly ones. Revenant only works on dead PCs, turning them into a temporary resource. Fade seems to let a target walk through any solid barrier (which might not be intended? But it is a legendary spell).

I'd modify the necromancer spell list to include Speak With Dead, given that one of their first spells is  Essential Salt(s, sic), which is only useful with Speak With Dead.

There's a missed opportunity in that none of the listed spells actually use the ‘Sustainable’ keyword, even though some would have been a good fit. The wording of ‘Sustainable’ does mean you can just end the spell before going to bed and then wake up with your dice refreshed, so maybe there was a concern that it’s too powerful? That said, it's not quite a no-brainer to use on every spell which permits it: there’s a 50-50 chance that each dice invested in a spell comes back immediately, so if you don't need to extend the spell's duration, you're better off with the chance of getting some power back.

Minor text quibbles:

Various grammatical errors (‘off of’); various typos (‘calss’); various terminology errors (‘MP’ for ‘casting dice’).

My main plaint is that spell names like ‘knock’, ‘entangle’, and ‘illusion’ don't get any emphasis when mentioned within a sentence (not even an initial capital), making the text unnecessarily hard to parse.

My favourite bit:

There's lots that's great, and it's hard to pick. Even if you don’t use The GLOG: Wizards in play, it’s inspiring from a design standpoint. If I have to choose just one thing, it's Dooms which wait at the end of every wizard's career. “Every apprentice knows that if they travel down the road of wizardry long enough, their doom will eventually claim them.”

Where to get it:

https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-glog-wizards.html

Reviewn June 13: The GLOG

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.

It's finally time for The Goblin Laws of Gaming (GLOG) by Arnold Kemp (Goblin Punch). So far I’ve read the GLOG rules (Version -1.0) plus Goblin Guts: The Martial Classes (Version -1.0) plus Death, Dismemberment, and Insanity (Version 23). Together that’s a lot of rules compressed into 24 pages.

Calibrating expectations

I’ve dipped into the GLOG before, in the form of Lair of the Lamb. To quote the source blog post:

Everyone has a homebrew ruleset, and everyone wants to show it to other people, or at slap it around until it's presentable.

But no one is interested in your fantasy heartbreaker.  This is because everyone is up to their ascending colon in retroclones and besides, they're busy writing their own.

It's like trying to tell other people about your dreams.  No one cares.  Give them content, not another retroclone.

I know these things, and yet here I am.

The post collecting these three bits of the GLOG refers to it as a “painfully incomplete ruleset”. That’s true, and important for the reader to understand. The GLOG is (a) incomplete, (b) unpolished, (c) sprawling, and (d) assumes knowledge of classic D&D-like systems; if you are looking for a whole finished game, you are not going to get that.

Incomplete - There are plenty of missing bits, including whole subsystems (NPC Morale) and tables (‘roll one random item’). The game mentions things in passing without defining how they are meant to work in the GLOG, such as critical failures and misses on a natural 20. Various class abilities key off rules that the GLOG doesn’t include: falling, jumping, and wall running; surprise rules; situational bonuses on attack rolls (for surprise, elevation, etc).

 

Unpolished - The text has a brusquely informal tone. There are terminology disparities, like class features with two different names, or a ‘Trauma Point’ being conflated with an ‘Insanity Point’. Some of the rules the GM needs are buried in the character classes, like wandering monster rules appearing within the ranger class. There’s assumptions that monsters variously have HD or levels.

 

Sprawling - Finding the right order to present information is always difficult in TTRPGs, since pieces of systems interlock. The GLOG does it fairly well, but there are a few gaps where things like starting skills are scattered about. Entire novel mechanics are buried in bullet points in the skills system and never fleshed out. Shields are nowhere near the armour/defence rules. The GLOG itself is a collection of documents rather than a single work. (In fairness, there might be a collated GLOG somewhere, but a quick search didn’t turn one up)

 

Assumed knowledge - The GLOG isn’t for a beginner GM. There are plenty of assumptions, e.g., shortenings for ability scores. Things like ‘standard action’ and ‘round’ aren’t defined, only tacitly constrained in meaning. Phrases like “modified by Dexterity” are ambiguous without TTRPG familiarity.

So the GLOG is best treated as something to hack a gameplay experience out of.

The core system

There are design notes, which I appreciate. The GLOG is meant to be low-powered, semi-generic, and favour ‘simplicity over realism’. The design is meant to prevent players achieving system mastery, which goes against my expectations so hard that I think I must have an entirely different understanding of the phrase.

The GLOG is a d20 system, mostly defaulting to a +/- 2 modifier, which is a good chunky number. It’s organised around subtractions, which takes some getting used to, and the players make almost all the dice rolls. Usually systems which do that take the opportunity to make the maths asymmetric, e.g., by giving monsters more abstract characteristics than PCs. The GLOG doesn’t: characters and monsters instantiate essentially the same mechanics, but then there’s an extra layer of interpolation to have the players roll attacks against static monster defences but roll defences against static monster attacks. It seems more complex to do it this way, but maybe it’s something that you just need to get used to.

My impression is that everything is trying to stay compatible with other old-school/OSR with minimal effort. There are ability scores, and they're only slightly different, rolled with 4d4. Compared to the classic 3d6, the probability distribution looks like this:



4d4 results in a slightly lower average ability score and a tighter spread, with proportionally more characters having average or near-average scores. You also can’t roll a PC with an ability score of 3, 17, or 18.

One of the things I like best about the GLOG is the handling of character advancement. After level 4, you mostly switch to found advancement (‘questing’), which is a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Characters ‘test’ a stat per level to try to increase it. Because it’s easier to level up worse stats, there could be a drive for PCs to become generalists or risk ‘missing out’ on stat increases (but I don’t think there will be enough total opportunities for that to be a problem).

There’s a claim that stats “don’t matter much”, but I’m somewhat sceptical. The dice roll is not only affected by the whole stat, rather than the smaller ability score modifier, but it's only affected by the stat, whereas a system like D&D 5e adds a flat level-based proficiency bonus. Also, note that a level 1 character with great Constitution has the same HP as a level 8 character with terrible Constitution! Because HP is useful [citation needed], and most of the built-in character progression has petered out by level 8, Constitution seems extremely important.

The GLOG makes Wisdom more useful by keying initiative off it. It also rewrites the meaning of the word ‘Charisma’ to cover ‘willpower’ and ‘destiny’, so that it can be the basis for all saving throws / magic resistance. Without that redefinition, I think Charisma is the least appropriate stat for a generic saving throw; conversely, without giving it this role, it’s a dump stat. I suspect having it at all is just for the cross-compatibility design criterion.

Overall, the GLOG core mechanics have an appealing simplicity.

Skill system

GLOG skills are quite open-ended. The text spends a long time on what a skill isn't (by implicit comparison to other games). I like the idea that “since no skills give a clear tactical advantage, players will have to be creative if they want to use their skills to gain an advantage.” It makes it clear this a RPG, not a maximise-the-numbers game.

The GLOG sometimes has to contort to fit everything (stat checks, saves, attack rolls, defence rolls, initiative, opposed rolls) into its roll-equal-or-under-target-on-d20 mechanic. So it’s strange that for skill checks, it switches to a relatively more complex roll-equal-or-under-target-on-the-absolute-difference-between-two-d12s. The 0/1/2/3/4/5/6 skill ranks could instead be 2/4/6/8/10/12/14/16 and then use the established d20 mechanic for a mathematically very similar result! The GLOG version does permit a smaller ‘critical skill success’ chance than you can do with a d20, but there aren't actually any rules provided for critical success.

I really like that there’s the chance to improve skills with actual use in play as well as ways to improve it in downtime. It strikes a very good balance of ‘fun game aspects’ and ‘plausible simulation aspects’, more than I expected to get given the ‘simplicity over realism’ design principle. Players might end up vacillating over whether they have better odds trying to improve a mid-ranked skill in the field (testing via a skill check) or in downtime (testing via a stat roll). It’s another reason to hack the skill system to use the d20 mechanic.

Character gear

The GLOG uses an inventory slot system, in which negligible items are those that are “small enough to put inside your closed mouth”, which is oddly specific but memorable. Wealth expectations seem lower than for other old-school games; coins and gems never take up any encumbrance, and 230 gold coins will get you from level 1 to level 5 (if the table is meant to be cumulative, it’s even less – 100 gold coins). If you start as a noble character, you are in debt to the value of your decrepit city mansion, ~250 gold coins.

The GLOG’s homebrewish style sometimes results in a fascinating mix of the specific and broad. Weapons and armour are just categorised by light, medium, or heavy, but there are specific details like that slings can “share an Inventory Slot with up to 3 stones”. There’s a surprisingly complex system for when and how weapons and armour can break, and the consequences when they do, but no rules for repairing them.

Armour is doubly encumbering, both taking up slots and giving an encumbrance penalty directly. There are optional piecemeal armour rules which work very neatly with both the armour breakage system and the encumbrance system (but need repair rules otherwise they're strictly better than the default armour).

Combat and injury

The combat system is fairly conventional. I like that the penalty for (loosely-defined) combat manoeuvres is orthogonal to their overall success or failure.

There are classic restored-daily hit points, and in the GLOG they’re overtly luck/stamina points, which I respect. Arnold K also thought about the ensuing problems with magical ‘healing’: actual, non-HP injuries take a much longer time to heal and applying magical healing for N hit points also reduces the healing time of an injury by N days. I love it, very elegant. I’m not sure about the rule where magical healing can’t completely remove healing time; if powerful magic is being expended, it’s a bit lame for your leg to be left a bit lame. I might have that last day of healing require an extra 10 HP worth of magical healing, or something.

The text says “I think it's fun to sometimes start with 1 HP”. In fact, if you roll minimum Constitution (4, for a modifier of –2), your PC will have 0 HP at level 1. Fortunately, in the GLOG, being stuck at 0 HP just means that you have no buffer before you risk lethal injury.

The Death and Dismemberment table is great. Weapon(-like) damage has hit locations, and more ‘elemental’ damage affects the whole person with special effects. The consequences are heavily penalising (you can’t wear armour if you’re burned, etc). There’s an implicit possibility that permanent injuries will accrue, resulting in tough decisions. Do you keep playing a fighter who’s lost an arm? What about a leg? How much permanent ability score loss is too much?

I’m unsure of how serious a ‘fatal wound’ is meant to be: on the one hand, a fatally wounded character dies after three rounds without treatment. On the other hand, literally anyone can try to treat a fatal wound as a single action, with no interaction with the skill system, and on success the wound simply disappears. And there’s a small chance that a fatal wound just disappears. The whole thing feels surprisingly like being at 0 HP in D&D 5e.

There are optional insanity (‘Trauma’) and morale (‘Doubt’) subsystems, always a tricky thing to impose on player characters. I do like the idea of angels striking directly at your resolve, which you could interpret either mystically or as an extreme morale effect. Too much Doubt results in either the loss of your character or just a change in one of your Convictions. The Trauma subsystem is a bit heavy-handed for me personally, but it would make a serviceable backbone for a mythos-esque horror game (note there’s no provision for reducing trauma and madness).

Convictions

Characters have personality traits called Convictions, somewhere between GURPS flaws and 5e inspiration in that they give a spendable dice roll bonus when a character pursues them to a negative outcome. The text contradicts itself a bit here, for example going back and forth on whether you get points just for following Convictions or when they get you in trouble.

I’m not a big fan of meta-currencies which don’t map onto anything in the game world, because it leads to players having to reason at the system level instead of roleplaying. In the GLOG, for example, you can only acquire one ‘point’ between your two Convictions, so their effect on gameplay disappears once you have an unused point. Worse, you need to reason about which one of your Convictions you’re going to fall prey to, because the point gives a greater benefit to (or only works for; it’s ambiguous) a dice roll related to that Conviction.

The martial classes

Goblin Guts provides ten character classes: the acrobat, assassin, barbarian, fighter, knight, noble, ranger, ‘really good dog’, tactician, and thief. One of these things is not like the others.

Classes play the game in different ways. “Fighters track their kills. Rangers only track their biggest kill. Acrobats have a once-in-a-lifetime ability. Assassins can use a storygame mechanic to vanish so thoroughly that not even their player knows where they are.” I was hyped by that introduction, and I found the implementation to be good, too.

I like how character abilities mostly build upon the relatively simple GLOG rules: characters might have particular skills which always improve when tested, or get free combat manoeuvres, or have extra capacity for Conviction, etc.

I’m not a fan of non-magical powers which have arbitrarily limited uses rather than a chance to succeed. There’s a few of those: the acrobat has a daily escape, the fighter a daily parry, and the tactician a daily rally. Having established that HP is a luck/skill/stamina sort of thing, just make them cost HP!

I can also take or leave the story-game abilities. Almost all of the classes have one of these, like the ranger drawing the terrain map for where an encounter occurs, or the tactician inventing an 'opportunity' they or another PC discover against an enemy. I think people who are into this kind of thing would really like the GLOG ones, which are simple, focused, and likely to spur experimentation. Conversely, they’d be easy to replace if they’re not to your taste.

• The acrobat and assassin are very reminiscent of the old D&D classes, although much simpler.
• The barbarian is a bit silly, but not much more than it is in other game systems.
• The fighter has a customisable skill-tree-ish feel, which I think will really speak to some players. It’s refreshing for the martial class to be the one that needs to track extra stuff!
• The knight is a zealot; the class feels like a paladin without the magic powers. I think it would be interesting to role-play.
• The noble stands out as having various abilities which seem like they’d be cheese-able, in a way that the GLOG definitely doesn’t intend. I like the flavour though.
• The ranger and thief might be my favourites; they're good simplified implementations of their oldschool D&D equivalents. GLOG ‘pets’ have major downsides, such as infighting and requiring actions to direct, so the ranger’s otherwise-weak powers over them should be game changers. The thief's story-game ability is the kind of ‘quantum equipment’ ability that you see occasionally in games; fun, but might harm immersion.
• The ‘really good dog’ class creates a bit of tonal dissonance. It has a very silly feel, and such complex abilities that the font goes down a size. Its powers are somewhere between overt magic and sappy-film-logic: its fur is almost as strong as chain mail; its lick heals the dying; it detects magic by smell; its proximity buffs its best friend. It has much more implied setting than any other page: all dogs speak Canine, there are Dog Barons and Cat Princes, organised Dog Clans roam the cities, etc.
• The tactician class at first glance appears to be a specialist fighter, but is really a dedicated support class with non-magical buffs, which is refreshing.
  

Overall, a great set of classes.

Thumbs up from me

I feel like this is a case where I got really enthusiastic about what I was reading and ended up well in the weeds writing thousands of words picking at little aspects of the design. If I’d liked it less, I would have just reported a few of the best ideas and then moved on. Taken on its own merits, as a messy incomplete system with lots of community content, I enjoyed reading the GLOG a lot! I'm definitely going to check out more GLOG-related works.

 

Minor text quibbles:

I mentioned some contradictions and terminology slip-ups in the text. The GLOG also switches between addressing the GM, the player, and an abstract third person. It has a big dose of textual errors (it’s / its, you / your, comparible / comparable, see below / see above, burgler / burglar, amount / number, etc). Nothing that an editing pass couldn’t fix.

My favourite bit:

The active character abilities. For example, the acrobat and thief can escape from restraints including “grapples, lynchings, and awkward social situations”, and the acrobat eventually acquires the chance to escape death once in their lifetime.

Where to get it:

At https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-glog.html

Reviewn June 12: The Undercellars

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

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

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

The dungeon’s contents:

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

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

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

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

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

Minor text quibbles:

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

My favourite bit:

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

Where to get it:

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

Reviewn June 11: Olaf hits the Dragon with his Sword

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

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

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

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

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

Minor text quibbles:

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

My favourite bit:

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

Where to get it:

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

Reviewn June 10: Fey Critter Tea Party

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

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

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

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

The game system:

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

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

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

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

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

The tone and feeling:

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

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

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

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

 

The adventures:

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

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

 

Minor text quibbles:

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

 

My favourite bit:

Playable mushrooms!

Where to get it:

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