Recently I ran Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier in two sessions (spoilers below). I used Electric Bastionland for the ruleset, using this conversion. Tomb Robbers is an oft-recommended adventure, and for good reason: it’s a very complete module, presenting an evocative and interesting science-fantasy ‘wild west’ setting. It focuses on a main dungeon, but also provides a starting town and region, a secondary dungeon, and several setting-specific spells and magic items. Rather than pretend that tomb raiding is a heroic endeavor, the setting is a cutthroat, gold-rush frontier, and in that way uses the more amenable idiom of the western as context for adventure. Nevertheless, the actual site of adventure—a crystal space-tomb fallen from the sky—is still fantastical. It’s specifically written as an introduction to dungeon crawling, with notes on playing style and an emphasis on problem-solving. Every room is lethal, including TPK possibilities not just from the monsters but also the environment itself, either in a quick way (ceiling lasers) or slow way (crystal poisoning causing ability loss).

I think our experience was good, though there were a couple things we struggled with. Mostly these can be resolved by being explicit about the osr playstyle: emphasize that everything here is really deadly, that characters need to be motivated by collecting every scrap of treasure, that they need to describe where and how they approach the environment while searching, and that risks only lead to the possibility of reward, but must are always balanced against danger. That danger often takes the form of random encounters, which, as the module says, “are important because they embody the risk of excess caution.”

The random encounters were an area that I struggled with as a GM, and this is the topic of this post. This was not due to the module itself. Not only does the module provide advice and the reason for running random encounters (as a time pressure), there are 8 fully detailed encounters with information on how to interpret reaction rolls, omens that players get before being confronted with the encounter, and stats, all of which take up three full A4 pages. Rather, I think the problem I’m facing has more to do with the logistics of random encounters in small dungeons.

The Importance of Dungeon Size

Classic dnd rules make the most sense, I think, in the context of large and mega-dungeons. This is where the full leverage of risk and reward from encumbrance, light sources, movement speed, and time management come into play. My non-controversial hypothesis here is that the mega-dungeon was the locus of play for the early hobby, and the more you move away from that the less the particular rules make sense or at least the less they matter.

On the other hand, most of my OSR material takes the form of the A5 zine. Some of the included dungeons might be of decent size, like the Necrotic Gnome adventures which might be up to 60 rooms. Many, however, are more on the scale of 10-30 rooms, or depict regions with several locations of <10 rooms. Then there are even shorter forms, like one page dungeons or Mausritter pamphlets which also have <10 rooms. I find that running random encounters in these scenarios present several problems that would be less pronounced in a larger dungeon.

Density and Noise:

Tomb Robbers is about 20 rooms, but each one is fairly dense with things for players to interact with. There’s treasure in the walls to be extracted, sarcophagi with dangers or treasure, environmental/navigation hazards, in addition to various monster lairs. A megadungeon might have a lot of breathing space—empty rooms, corridors, large distances to be traversed. This is simply not present in Tomb Robbers. This level of density makes exploration fun, as each room presents at least one new challenge. But when one adds in the challenge of an ‘unrelated’ random encounter, sometimes the experience gets cluttered.

For example, in one room players were dealing with a lair of spiders in one corner, and a potential mummy in another, and I rolled a random encounter. While it might be fun to gauge how these different monster groups would react to one another (maybe the players could use it to their advantage!), it did present a scene where a lot of things were going on at once, which can be difficult to convey and manage for the GM. Similarly, omens/signs of a random encounter can be more confusing for players if they fail to distinguish them from whatever is happening within a given room

Distance:

In b/x, random encounter distance is 2d6x10 feet. Let’s say that’s about 60 feet on average. Again, in a sprawling mega dungeon, this allows for a party to notice a possible encounter and choose if and how to fight, evade using dungeon loops, or hide. However, take a look at the scale of the Tomb Robbers map. An ‘encounter’ at such a distance may be two or more rooms away, rooms separated by closed doors and each room containing their own lairs or traps which could affect monster movement. If you roll a random encounter and the players notice, the only sensible thing to do is to place the encounter in the next room, which might only be 10 feet away, which gives the players far fewer options regardless of reaction roll. Especially given the deadliness of the combat here, when I ran the second session I always took a beat before breaking into combat to allow for them to solve the problem in an interesting way.

Fuzzy realism:

In a large dungeon, a wandering monster is just that—a monster that is wandering. It might be two orcs from the faction clear across the dungeon’s first floor. It might be an ooze that are anyway always lurking in the shadows. Or it might be a creature from a different floor all together. In other words, the check simulates the living underground environment.

However, the environment of a dungeon the size of Tomb Raiders is far more cramped. The result is that creatures either just pop into existence, coming from previously explored areas, or are part of a roster coming from an existing lair. The latter is fine, good even! But it does add to the tracking the GM has to do. For example, take a look at the map of the dungeon again. There is a “bearowl” lairing in room 7-h at the top left of the map. However, my players encountered the bearowl in room 7-b, which stalked them as they were spending 12 turns (!) faceting some crystal in room 8 to free an important NPC. I ruled that the bearowl eventually got disinterested and walked away. But which way did it walk? Apparently north, back to its lair, because that’s where they later found it. Let’s put aside the fact that this beast is apparently opening and shutting bronze doors to move through these spaces, and that it doesn’t interact with the other monsters or traps here. The range of areas where the bearowl could go (circled in pink) is a quite small and basically linear section of the dungeon. As a GM, once you introduce it via random encounter, you have to track its movements in a dynamic way. The roll no longer simulates the living breathing environment; rather, this is now part of the GM’s cognitive load.

Solutions

I fully accept that all of the above might just be a skill issue on my part. But I do think there is at least a little tension between the random encounter roll as designed and implemented in the context of mega dungeon play, and the smaller and denser adventures featured in many OSR zines. Thus, there might be a better way to design random encounters for small dungeons. I don’t have any good solutions at this point, but here are some thoughts

• More weight on omens, signs, happenings, and non-combat encounters: One of the encounters from Tomb Robbers is a “hunting echo,” which is the dream consciousness of an important NPC. This is great, but in so far as it is a “hunting” echoes, it is an encounter that leads toward combat. In fact, being invisible and stalker-y, it leads to surprise combat, which is the least interesting option. And, of course, it’s deadly, with half the damage it takes being reflected back to the attacker, leading to the demise of one hireling in our group. This would be more effective and evocative as a social encounter, as the NPC tried to communicate with the PCs via their weird dream thing.

• Clocks: That solution, however, doesn’t contribute to the risk-reward purpose of random encounters, wherein spending time searching for treasure or secret doors comes at the potential cost of a resource-draining encounter. What if we borrowed clocks from Blades in the Dark here? Every time the PCs made loud noise, spent more than a turn doing in one space doing something, or refused to move, the GM would mark a segment on a (non-player-facing) clock. When the penultimate segment was filled, they got an omen of danger. When the clock was full, the GM rolls random encounter. It might be an anathema to ditch the randomness of a simulated environment for something that forces an encounter, but maybe this is less of a problem if we’ve determined that random encounters in cramped environments don’t ‘simulate’ much to begin with.

• Timers: For small dungeons, maybe we give up on using random encounters (and for that matter torches) as a timer to put pressure on the players. What are other ways to create timers? For this dungeon, the environment itself is described as deadly. What if players had to make a check every X turns or suffer another level of poisoning? This would mean they would have a limited time to get in, get what they need, and get out.

These are my vexations. Anyway Tomb Robbers is overall great. Would recommend, would run again. Oh, and, great art!

Necrotic Gnome adventure review boilerplate: high production value, sturdy and nice, maps on endpapers, efficient layout and keying, fun art. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way:

This is a very flawed adventure, and I probably won’t run it in my campaign, and if I do I will make significant changes. The premise of this adventure is that the party of level 2-4 PCs will be investigating a festival and party. Below this party an occult undead-raising ritual will be taking place in a crypt, and it will be up to the PCs to sneak into the crypt and stop the ritual. I don’t hate this premise; it’s workable, as I’ll discuss at the end of this review. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Hooks and Investigation

We are told there must be two days left in the festival when the PCs arrive. Why two days? Surely there must be a countdown to the ritual, along with a procedure for the GM to follow to put pressure on the players? Nope. There’s no way for the PCs to know that there’s a ticking clock, and that this clock is tied to the end of the festival. In fact, the PCs might not learn there’s an occult ritual taking place until they eventually stumble upon it. And there’s no reason for the ritual to be tied to the festival, except that the person raising the undead (Lord Malbleat, a goat-person breggle lord) thinks it would be dramatic (which, fair).

But let’s back up; how do the PCs get involved in this scenario if they don’t know what they are looking for? Via one of three very flimsy hooks. Number one is that Emelda, a singer, has been abducted (because her beautiful voice is key to the occult ritual). Here I personally have misgivings about the overuse of “missing persons” as a call to adventure, though in this case this is probably the strongest hook. More problematic is that if this is the hook, almost none of the rumors given are relevant. Or, they are only relevant because all of a sudden the GM is telling you, via various npcs, all about this festival and these crypts, and so players might put it together that that’s where the adventure is supposed to be.

Not very subtle, and yet far more subtle than the other two adventure hooks, in which the GM takes out a giant neon-lit sign reading “Adventure this way--->.” Consider the second hook:

In any High Wold location, the PCs are approached by a soft-spoken, hooded shorthorn who calls himself Clopnott. He says (truthfully) he is Lord Ramius’s “collector of secrets”. Clopnott wants “intrepid outsiders” to infiltrate the Shadholme during the Hlerribuck and investigate strange goings-on at the tomb complex. He says his spies have witnessed soldiers regularly bringing wheelbarrows of strange alchemical mixtures to the Shadholme Lodge, and have intelligence indicating they are somehow related to the Hlerribuck [festival], currently underway. Possibly also related are the recent disappearances of several Lankshorners. Clopnott offers 1,500gp for proof of anything untoward happening. His agents within Malbleat’s court add the PCs to the lodge party guest list, using aliases and identities as wealthy grain merchants from the south. He says he will find the PCs after the mission.

So, does this guy just go around the wood asking strangers to investigate local nobles? He must be very secretive, or else why would he immediately identify himself to these strangers as a rival noble’s “collector of secrets”? And what would “evidence of anything untoward” consist of? This spymaster already has insiders who have told him about strange alchemical mixtures that are specifically related to the festival, and also possibly related to the disappearance of Emelda, and has enough sway to get these PCs on the guest list. It seems like he’s pretty well positioned to get whatever additional evidence he needs. And what exactly would the rival noble do with this “evidence,” which may end up just being eyewitness testimony of the party? The remaining hook is no better, as some secretive Drune (a magic-y faction) ask the party—again, a group of randos—to stop the ritual. Why don’t the drune stop it themselves? And the adventure says they want a magic book from the crypt, but they explicitly don’t ask the PCs to retrieve this.

Now, a mysterious stranger approaching the party asking them to go on an adventure is kind of a trope of dnd, and most people would just suspend disbelief enough to take the hook. I mean, would this sort of thing be out of place in a 5e adventure? I’ll return to this point.

Time to Party

The hooks, such as they are, will eventually point the party to the festival and in particular the more exclusive party that is happening above the crypts. This part is fine, as the party can wander around the festival, meet some folk, and get some scenes that present the lore of the setting in organic ways. The party in the lodge above the crypts has a great table of 20 guests they could interact with, and in the course of said interaction these npcs will drop some secrets about the crypts. These secrets are…quite on the nose. There is, for example, one in which an npc says

this is a very special Hlerribuck (the festival). There is talk that Gnarlgruff (undead sorcerer) will rise again.

or

there are other ways into the crypts besides the main entrance in the Salon.

Ahh, you must be the heroic adventures who have snuck into this party, wink wink. Here, let me tell you something directly related to your mission. One way to make this make more sense this would be to have these guests be the spies of the rival noble who are explicitly telling the party how to sneak into the crypts. (Also, I guess this party continues day and night, or else why don’t the PCs just break in when everyone is asleep?)

There are several entrances to the crypts, so one way or another the party finds themselves there. So now I guess we are in the dungeon crawl part of the adventure. An interesting twist here is that the party might not have their normal weapons with them, depending on how they entered.

Anyway, the crawl here is pretty anemic. First, the map is very linear and not jaquaysed at all aside from the multiple entrances (two of which are sealed unless the party entered through them). More importantly, there’s basically no environmental interactivity here. There are some npcs and guards who will need to be pacified one way or another, lest it lead to a bigger fight. The funnest idea is a sommelier who has been turned into a spider, who can be cured. Otherwise, it all leads inevitably toward the ritual room.

You’ve Foiled My Evil Plan!

So the PCs have arrived in the ritual room, and wouldn’t you know, they are just in the nick of time! (Though again, it’s possible this is also the first they are learning about this devious undead-raising ritual). They see Emelda locked in a cage, in a trance, singing. They have to stop it! How much time do they have? Here are some things the adventure tells us

Upon noticing the PCs, he [the evil lord] rushes to complete the ritual.

If attacked: Uses his Ring of Vanishing to teleport to the surface

Timing: The ritual’s culmination occurs at the Referee’s discretion. Emelda’s song reaches a shrill and fearful crescendo as the sarcophagus lid slowly slides sideways, and Lord Gnarlgruff arises from the coffer.

I’m picturing the old Batman tv show.

PCs: Give it up Malbleat. We’ve got you surrounded. Free the girl!

Joker Malbleat: Ahh but you probably didn’t realize that I can just rush to complete the ritual right now, instead of taking my time as I was doing before. Come, Emelda, give us a dramatic crescendo!

The coffin lid starts to open

PCs: No, it’s too late for that! We attack!

Malbleat: You may have stopped me this time, but you’ll never catch me! Evil laugh! Teleports away

And if they happen to face the “legendary sorcerer”…well he turns out to be pretty level-appropriate for a party of 3rd level characters, though he might be able to get off a pretty deadly lightning bolt from his staff. I’m really not sure what the stakes would be of this creature being let loose in the world of Dolmenwood, unless you want to say that once he gets a chance to study some spells he would be a more serious threat. And I’m not sure how much Malbleat had to gain from raising him from the dead in the first place. Either way, it’s not really a game-changer.

Now, reading this, some of you might be saying, “but that sounds like fun!” And sure, games like Call of Cthulhu or investigative scenarios for 5e can be a ton of fun if everyone goes along with the premise and is just into play-acting their character. But as I read this adventure, I am sort of wondering, why did one of the most well known OSR publishers include a trad scenario in their flagship kickstarter?

Because that’s what this is, from the mysterious stranger to the not-so-subtle clues to the climactic scene. You can take all the advice about prepping open situations and motivating exploration and problem solving over pre-defined plot and leave it on the shelf for this one. What this adventure really does is introduce players to the drama of the setting. It’s a form of setting tourism. It’s really in the aftermath of the adventure that we get something more dynamic going on, because now the balance between the breggle factions is upset in some way, especially if Malbleat is deposed. The adventure itself, however, is just a very forced way to get the players to that point.

Is it Fixable?

As I said above, I do like the basic premise of a party with occult shit happening downstairs. I had a GM run such a session in the 3.5e days, and it was fun. Mostly because we split the party, and I can see a group have a fun time doing something similar here. One character tries to keep the guards occupied, another chats with the guests, a couple characters sneak into the crypts, the thief is distracted by stealing the candelabras (150gp each). A sleep spell here, some stolen guard weapons there, and they talk their way out of fighting the big-enough bad evil guy. Meanwhile, a fight breaks out upstairs, the whole place burns down, and everyone runs away, snagging a bottle of expensive wine on the way out. So, while I wouldn’t buy this adventure if it didn’t come with the kickstarter, I could see it being an ok time.

Here’s how I might run it

• Go with best-trad-practices. Brush up on my 3 clue rule and node based design.

• Build the characters’ relationship with Emelda so that they care that she’s missing.

• Flesh out several locations in the town of Lankshorn for the players to explore

  • The church: Father Dobey should still be around and available for questioning, but with a couple ruffians guarding him. His servant, Mabble, knows a few things, but is afraid to speak.

  • Emelda’s house: clues to her kidnapping

  • Ribblemead’s house: clues to his kidnapping. Searching his desk, they find papers related to Malbleat’s summoning ritual

  • Man of Gold Apothecary: Sydewich has been getting requests for strange ingredients

  • All these should point to the crypts and to the alchemist lab

  • Clewyd Baldricke: the party can convince him to give them his invite to the party

• Make the alchemists lab and the crypts two different spaces. Since there isn’t much interactivity in either, maybe the party investigates the lab to learn the final details of the horrific ritual. The lab could be a 5-room dungeon situation with a possible combat solution, and then contain clues that direct the party to the crypts. The lab could be located near Lankshorn.

• By the time the party gets to the crypts, the festival/party has started. Now they have to figure out how to get to the crypts and stop the ritual while also blending in. They’ll need formal wear and a way to hide their weapons.

  • Juice up the party a bit. The table of npcs are nice, but flesh them out and add some relationships that the party can learn about and possibly exploit. Maybe Raimus has spies at the party. Maybe there are members of the Malbleat crew that know about how he is messing with the tombs, and want to expose him. Maybe Dobey shows up, and seeing the party, fears for his life.

• No matter how I run it, I would add some sort of clock (“at the midnight hour, the ritual will be complete).

• Redraw the crypt map with more twists and turns, and maybe some undead encounters. This will do. The party tries to follow the sound of Emelda’s voice.

• Malbleat doesn’t teleport away. Maybe the tunnel that connects the town and the crypt leads directly to the ritual room. Whether Malbleat completes the ritual or not, he runs away via the tunnel; if he completes the ritual, he runs away pursued by the undead sorcerer. This might also be a way for the PCs to skip the investigation and get straight to the ritual if they find the secret door.

Something like that? If I do that, however, most of the Necrotic Gnome house style is lost on what actually needs to be prepared for this adventure. I don’t need the information presented as if the players are procedurally exploring a dungeon; I need a handful of interesting, fleshed out NPCs they could interrogate and maybe a couple spaces they are going to search, but for specific clues, not for treasure. I don’t really care that the space of the party has “Round, polished wooden tables (2-3 chairs each).” But I might need to know more about the intrigue between the guests that the players can exploit.

So unfortunately this one is a miss!

Or…you can just use this handy generator from Among Books and Cats. Now, supposedly Necrotic Gnome rebalanced the treasure distribution with these charts, and it does track, as the higher number for each type correspond to more and better stuff. I assume it also means that more dangerous monsters have better treasure, where it makes sense, and that this balances against the advancement of the characters, so that they don’t advance too quickly or too slowly. Maybe? And that the random rolling of treasure, including the variance of % chance, means that dungeons won’t be overloaded with treasure while still allowing a small chance of something overpowered.

Sure. To be honest, if it was not for the above generator I would probably just choose some flavorful items, throw in some coins, and call it a day. Especially because I’ll be using feats of exploration, and I’ve yet to find players motivated mostly by the logistics of retrieving 7000 copper coins from someone’s tomb.

But flavor—Dolmenwood has that in bunches. The campaign book gives countless ways to make specific art objects that are thematically tied to the setting, and includes hundreds of similarly bespoke magic items of all types. They are fun enough that I do worry about turning my game monty haul.

That said, there are also many flavorful single use items. And these are useful for extending the abilities of especially low-level characters while not giving them permanent bonuses. Rather than place them via the meticulous standard process, I threw some of them into a d100 table below. None of the below is original; it all comes from the Dolmenwood campaign book (page numbers indicated). It includes the balms/oils, potions, oddments, and scrolls. I’ll still have to roll for the specific spell for the spell scrolls, but I hope this table to quickly generate items to give to players.

Hope this is helpful!

d100 Dolmenwood Single-use Items

• 1-20: Balms, CB p. 402

• 21-40: Potions, CB p. 414

• 41-60: Oddments, CB p. 424

• 61-100: Scrolls, CB. p. 419

1 Alchemical Fire

2 Anti-Magic Balm

3 Brewmaster’s Balsam

4 Deorling Balm

5 Dimensional Solvent, Silver

6 Dimensional Solvent, Gold

7 Holy Oil

8 Hunter’s Balm

9 Morphic Unguent

10 Nebulous Ointment

11 Oil of Sharpness

12 Oil of St Signis

13 Ointment of Weightlessness

14 Orgon’s Sovereign Lubricant

15 Phantasmal Unguent

16 Salve of Repulsion

17 Solvent of Whispers

18 Spectral Oil

19 Thieves’ Salve

20 Viridescent Balm

21 Aethers of Starlight

22 Alchemical Tonic

23 Amber Nectar

24 Bottled Light

25 Distillation of Hoarfrost

26 Elixir of Mutability

27 Essence of Springtime

28 Essence of Sweet Dreams

29 Liquid Time

30 Orgon’s Scintillating Philtre

31 Philtre of Delusion (cursed)

32 Philtre of Doom (cursed)

33 Philtre of the Winds

34 Philtre of Wondrous Vitality

35 Prismatic Elixir

36 Sandor’s Phantasmal Elixir

37 Vanishing Philtre

38 Vaporous Spirits

39 Wereform Elixir

40 Wyrmsblood Elixir

41 Boggle Mask

42 Clockwork Beetle

43 Crystal Illusion

44 Dreaming Burl

45 Dust of Ages

46 Eternal Flower

47 Fairy Comb

48 Fairy Swan Feather

49 Fire Powder

50 Frozen Birdsong

51 Ghost Crow Quill

52 Gold Leaf

53 Grave Wax Candle

54 Growling Tree Face

55 Hungry Shadow

56 Jar of Seasons

57 Redcap’s Mug

58 Salamander Seed

59 Steed Stump

60 Wizard’s Pipe

61 Arcane Spell Scroll 1

62 Arcane Spell Scroll 1

63 Arcane Spell Scroll 2

64 Arcane Spell Scroll 2

65 Arcane Spell Scroll 3

66 Arcane Spell Scroll 3

67 Arcane Spell Scroll 4

68 Arcane Spell Scroll 4

69 Arcane Spell Scroll 5

70 Arcane Spell Scroll 6

71 Holy Spell Scroll 1

72 Holy Spell Scroll 1

73 Holy Spell Scroll 2

74 Holy Spell Scroll 2

75 Holy Spell Scroll 3

76 Holy Spell Scroll 3

77 Holy Spell Scroll 3

78 Holy Spell Scroll 4

79 Holy Spell Scroll 5

80 Protection Scroll - Animals

81 Protection Scroll - Bugs

82 Protection Scroll - Constructs

83 Protection Scroll - Dragons

84 Protection Scroll - Fairies and demi-fey

85 Protection Scroll - Fungi

86 Protection Scroll - Monstrosities

87 Protection Scroll - Mortals

88 Protection Scroll - Oozes

89 Protection Scroll - Plants

90 Protection Scroll - Undead

91 Control Scroll - Animals

92 Control Scroll - Bugs

93 Control Scroll - Constructs

94 Control Scroll - Fairies and demi-fey

95 Control Scroll - Fungi

96 Control Scroll - Monstrosities

97 Control Scroll - Mortals

98 Control Scroll - Oozes

99 Control Scroll - Plants

100 Control Scroll - Undead

On the one hand, Mythic Bastionland (MB) has many hallmarks of an OSR game. The mechanics as such largely build on the stripped-down rulesets of McDowall’s Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, with characters consisting of three ability scores, hit protection, a few items, and a custom background. It is a hex crawling game, with standard procedures for both map generation and movement/exploration on the map. It leans heavily on random tables to generate content within hexes. There are rules for warfare and domain management.

Combat is still a focus of the game, and has been built out with a system of feats and gambits by which players can add effects to their attacks. This was particularly fun, as players tried to collectively strategize how to use their dice to protect themselves, hinder their opponent, and control movement; yet, the whole combat procedure was simple to run in theater of the mind. I only broke out a grid for the final battle, which actually featured undead armies launching a siege attack of the realm’s major holding, with players defending.

On the other hand, MB diverges from common dnd expectations in a number of ways. Though the focus of the game is hex crawling, this is not a game that is worried about managing resources like food. Instead, the danger of wilderness exploration is balanced by the fact that ability scores can only be restored under particular conditions. Moreover, there are not really ‘random encounters’ as such. Instead, what the PCs do encounter are “omens” from a set of 5 or so “myths” that they have to eventually resolve. These myths are essentially self contained factions who progress their goals as the players explore, with each omen being a small scene of this progression. The result is that the referee is constantly feeding bits of (often obscure and quixotic) narrative to players, narrative that prompted by exploration and yet generally untethered to a particular location on the map.

This produces a somewhat phantasmagoric situation in which the drama of the setting works to envelop the PCs, regardless of what direction they go. For example, the PCs in my game encountered the third omen of “The Dead” myth, which read as follows:

“Under a Seer’s orders, a graveyard is being burned as a precaution aginst the restless dead. Acolytes scatter dried herbs. Five great red vultures circle” [with statblocks for the vultures, in case]

They did not have to march into any particular hex to reveal this scene, nor did I have to prepare the scene as a “clue” in order to railroad them toward a particular direction. In this way, MB feels more similar to story focused games that present players with scenes rather than with spaces to be procedurally explored. At the same time, the scene was introduced via an exploration procedure, and could be resolved with the familiar hp-draining, damage-rolling combat.

It’s certainly not for everyone. Players who want a standard hex crawl that takes place on a more objective terrain might be annoyed with their inability to mitigate danger via resource management, as the myths of the game constantly become an unavoidable center of attention. The way the myths are only lightly tethered to location further frustrates planning. Time can shift forward dramatically even between sessions, creating openings for character growth that essentially happen off-screen. Referees, meanwhile, might balk at the rather fragmentary presentation of the myths. They are more scenic vignettes rather than comprehensive faction summaries, and require a good bit of improvisation.

However, to me it proved that one can put a focus on narrative without abandoning procedural exploration, tactical combat, and referee-neutrality (and without linear railroading, obviously). The stakes of our MB game felt more substantive and less cloying than, say, a game of Dungeon World. MB is not about producing Arthurian stories, but much more about playing in a vaguely Arthurian world (though our reference point more often ended being Elden Ring, incidentally).

Anyway, I actually wanted to make this post mostly about the bartering system in the book, and how that affected our game in sometimes hilarious ways, but I guess that will have to wait for another post!

That’s all stating the obvious—the qualities of adventure path play are well known and form the core of the hobby. However, writing out such a description makes it rather obvious that these “linear” campaigns are, in fact, railroads. To greater or lesser degrees, the adventure decides in advance how the story will begin, build, develop, and end. You can flip to any random page in an adventure path and know the level and loadout of the characters, their location, the major events of the story thus far, and even the major decisions of the PCs, precisely because decisions of consequence will not be left to the PCs. A fair amount of trad gm advice has nothing to do with not railroading the players, but rather how to soften the rails, giving players an illusion of decision-making freedom while always guiding them back to an already-decided narrative. We can maybe call it a freeway rather than a railroad: you can choose your lane, maybe you can even stop for a rest break now and then, but you are traveling along a particular route and stopping a particular destination.

In a previous episode, the “lorecast” unwittingly made this point explicitly. First, guest Mike Shea discussed giving players a choice of three quests that all tie into the larger plots of a villain. This is not inherently bad advice, so long as the GM is also open to other activities the players want to pursue (he’s advocated such an approach before). However, then host Shawn Merwin chimes in with some of the worst GM advice I’ve heard in a while. He says

And the good part about that is if you do have a player—I’m not going to call this player problematic I’m going to call this player challenging [laughter]. The player is challenging because you set up these three quests, and they want to know who the mayor is and if they can romance them. Well, you can still then just say ‘yes, you can go talk to the mayor...’ Now the mayor, who I didn’t even think of, is a servant of the dragons who are ruling [the BBEG]. I’m going to keep putting that quest in front of you. It’s something that is going to lead you toward the north star that we’re always heading to.

In other words, railroading. Here, when a player shows even a minimum level of agency or curiosity about the fictional world or does anything other than the very limited choice the GM sets in front of them, they are immediately directed back to the plots of the singular villain, which is the only thing they can engage with. The PCs have now found themselves in a kind of Truman-show scenario, where the world is just plywood set dressing for the GM’s already made story. All this is perhaps not surprising, given that earlier in the episode he says that “stepping on player agency isn’t about taking the story where you as the game master see it going,” even though unilaterally directing the story to a particular conclusion is literally an example of stepping on player agency.

It’s also not surprising that his advice is framed around a player who is “problematic/challenging,” because railroading is essentially an adversarial style of play. The player is ‘challenging’ to deal with because they insist on the premise of TTRPGs, namely that the characters exist in a living world and can do anything within the physical and metaphysical bounds of that fictional world.

Feels like

The podcast where Haeck makes the above claim is explicitly about published adventures, and in that way is not about the merits of linear adventure but how to write them. Indeed, I think that adventure writers are more canny in how they present linear adventures than they were back in the days of OG Dragonlance. The mistake, however, is thinking that these techniques make the linear adventure something other than a railroad/freeway. Rather, the focus is on how to make the railroading “more palatable,” as Haeck says.

Their examples are mostly taken from video games and interactive fiction, modes of storytelling that do not feature a live human being that can dynamically respond to the audience and invent new fiction as a result. Rather, GM prep is treated like a questline would be in a crpg, with only so many branching options possible. Guest Erin Roberts compares a linear adventure to “choice models” in interactive fiction where “the left and right [choice] are the only ones available and they are different enough that it feels like you got to make—because you did—actually got to make a substantive choice, but in the end those branches eventually get you back to some major stream.” The interruptive slip is interesting, because it is almost like Roberts hears herself describing a false choice that merely “feels like” a real one. Haeck similarly discusses how the gameplay of Breath of the Wild makes players “feel like a genius” for solving a puzzle. Host Ben Byrne then describes running a Witcher-style monster hunt in a ttrpg,

you will find the monster, you will fight it, and because, talking in a 5th edition context, your characters are generally all pretty good at fighting things, you will probably defeat it. But, if you engage fully in the story, and you succeed the checks that are put along the way, you discover [a fuller backstory]. That’s the skill of players engaging with the game fully. That’s not mandatory to get the entire story, [but if you do] you feel like a frickin genius…it’s not hard, it’s not particularly difficult to figure out, it makes you feel really proficient and really skilled to engage in those systems, but you don’t have to to be able to complete the narrative.

That is, the choices you make to research the monster or not, or to take path A or B, are ultimately immaterial, as success is guaranteed (and they insist on including enough choices that the PCs can always ‘fail foward’ to the next moment in the plot). But one must still include the illusion of choice, because it is important the players feel like their actions and decisions are impactful.

Trad icon Matt Colville has expressed similar sentiments in the past about the value of linear adventures, but interestingly, rewatching his video on the topic indicates a point of view that is clearer and more nuanced than what the Lorecast crew provides. For one, he calls out much of the above (e.g. a branching path that leads to the same end point) as what it is, i.e. railroading. It shows how, when one accepts the premise that constraining choice is necessary to tell a satisfying story, you can easily slip to a situation that Merwin describes, where any attempt to engage as a fictional character in a living world is “problematic.” A few steps further, and we have what Justin Alexander calls a cargo cult adventure.

But Colville too uses gentler terms to describe a similar activity; in his parlance, the GM “guides” or “herds” the players back to the prepared content. In fact, that there is prepared content ultimately leads to a metagame question: do you want to play dnd tonight or not. The adventure path GM ought to try to resolve this question subtly in game, by guiding the players in a particular way, but ultimately it’s a question of there being nothing to play without (often extensive) prep.

Here we are now, entertain us

Perhaps I shouldn’t say the above is bad advice, however. I’m sympathetic to the refrain from the trad community that linear adventures are different than railroading because of the severe connotations of the latter. Railroading at its worst suggests a kind of anti-social behavior, a GM on a powertrip who insists on imposing a singular vision on a shared activity. Whereas, many people love adventure-path play, and they are not wrong to love it. They perhaps experience such play as collaborative and challenging even if at some level they know or even expect to be led from plot point to plot point via encounters that they will overcome.

The adventure path is like a magic trick then. We know that magic isn’t real, but we suspend disbelief long enough to be entertained. The role of the GM is be the entertainer. World building may help the GM be a convincing entertainer, but ultimately their job is to provide fun set piece moments that allow for character expression. OC-style character expression, meanwhile, is where the player has the most fun. It doesn’t matter that we know, in advance of the hour long combat, that the divine smite will kill the hobgoblin, because the fictional act is a way to express character. The plot that happens after can be left to the GM’s perhaps overworked. imagination

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Spoilers for The Estate below

I jest. Given that the players in my online 5e group are very much goody two-shoes, I appreciated the degeneracy and shenanigans of this group. More to the point, while Mausritter has a cosy and cute theme, it is very much an OSR game. You get experience for treasure, which motivated my players to explore the map and the dungeons therein. Moreover, the game does an excellent job helping the GM manage factions in a sandbox setting, and as the PCs become wealthier they have a significant capacity to recruit hirelings and warbands to help take on those factions. Overall I had a fun and surprising experience running The Estate. Here is my mini-campaign retrospective.

The Product

The Estate is a beautiful and well put-together product. Inside the sturdy box there are eleven colorful tri-fold pamphlet adventures with item and condition cards, as well as a campaign overview booklet. The adventures are written by several prominent OSR designers, and each has an evocative and playful theme. Overall, it’s probably one of the best uses of color in almost any RPG product that I’ve seen.

What happened: A Campaign Report

skip to the next section if you just want to hear my thoughts on The Estate

We played five 3-hour sessions, more or less getting through one adventure per session along with downtime. In total we played through four of the adventures: The Ember Tree by LF OSR, Tower of Soot by Lazy Litch, Fruit of the Orchard by Madeleine Ember, and Science of Sorrow by Nate Treme. I had given them hooks to start for all eleven adventures, and they chose The Ember Tree to start because it seemed like a promising way to make money. They were able to do so in the end, mostly through rescuing a caterpillar nobility, though one mouse was killed by a lightning elemental. They then proceeded to Tower of Soot to rescue another prince (for money), Prince Ansel of Brambletown, which they barely did after navigating various dangers contained within a fireplace. They sought to return Prince Ansel to Brambletown, but found all was not right there, leading to a confrontation with a magpie in Fruit of the Orchard. Through the combination of returning the prince, dealing with this threat, and taking the magpie’s treasure hoard, they managed to get fairly wealthy in this adventure. They proceeded to buy some real estate in the town of Brickport and hire a bunch of mice-at-arms for their next adventure.

Here’s where things got interesting. One, I made up a hook that the bone rats gang was looking to partner with them to smuggle drugs into Brickport, in an effort to put the factions of the adventure more front and center. They decided to take this hook, thus entering their Breaking Bad phase. They navigated Science of Sorrow to find a rat named Two Skulls, and made a deal with him for a supply of some of his chemicals. Then, the group decided that the quaint monarchy of Brambletown had to fall, and they wanted to take over to use the town as a base for their own smuggling operations. This was rather unexpected! But it meant that our final session was spent playing through the attempt to off the rulers of Brambletown.

For the final session, I made up a group of collectivist rebels in Brambletown called The Green Apple Network. Rolling randomly on the Mausritter NPC charts, however, I discovered that the leader of this group was secretly working for Sabrina, the cat witch. I also made up a bunch of other NPCs using those fantastic tables, preparing for what I thought would be an intrigue-filled social crawl.

The pcs decided to go in a different direction, allying both with the magpies faction and with Sabrina to take down Queen Madriga of Brambletown. As a result, a final confrontation played out among these 4 factions and the pcs. Basically it became a multi-directional war with the PCs trying in real time to keep playing factions off each other for the sake of their own survival. Astonishingly, it worked! I kept trying to think of ways to have one of the warband-scale participants off the pcs, but every time I considered their motives, there was always someone else that was better to attack. I let the players take turns controlling the faction actions and take over some of the dice-rolling.

In the epilogue, one mouse decided to leave the Estate, living a life of regret. The other three mice decided to being servants of Sabrina as a path of attaining more magic and power. They took the Ember Tree as their home base. After this war, the balance of power in the Estate thus swung toward Sabrina, inaugurating her dark reign. Cosy!

Thoughts on Mausritter and The Estate

Tactile, but lots of bits

In Mausritter, your inventory comes in the form of small cards that you place physically on your character sheet. Conditions, too, are small cards that take up inventory slots. I love this tactile element to the game and simple approach to having a limited inventory. It makes the six slots you do have in your inventory super important and tactically limiting without being complicated to track. On the other hand, once we started playing item and condition cards started flying back and forth across the table, and I soon had a little, increasingly chaotic pile of them in front of me. The fact that each adventure came with its own bespoke card of items and conditions only added to the chaos of this pile. I think some people do make organizers for all these cards; for me, I just resorted to tossing everything in a series of ziplock bags. If I ever replay these modules with a different group I’ll have to sort it all out then.

Theme

As mentioned above, the adventures in the estate each have a unique and evocative theme. I did learn that I prefer low fantasy mice gaming. In this game, you inhabit a world where ordinary animals talk, wield weapons, and cast spells. Mice are adventurers and cats are like dragons, and this fact escapes the notice of the oblivious humans. That’s fantastical enough for me. I preferred the adventures that kept their expression of this fantasy world more straight-forward. The adventures that were more high fantasy were not only less to my liking, but threw me for a loop, in a way that they might not have in a more traditional game. Simple things: like, the setting of The Ember Tree is a tree perpetually on fire…but wouldn’t the humans notice that?

Interactivity

Being confined to the front and back of a tri-fold pamphlet, these adventures are very brief. These are essentially one page dungeons, with space for only a few succinct bullet points per room. I discuss this dynamic further here, but what this led to was a different expectation on how to think about interactivity in an adventure module. Compare these tri-fold adventures to the longer dungeons published by Necrotic Gnome, like The Hole in the Oak. Those adventures, too, feature an efficient layout of room description, making use of bullet points and bolding to help the GM run the scenario at the table. Yet, each room might be allotted half an A5 page; this is enough space for the author to include several interactive elements per room, sometimes elements that are in interesting tension with each other. The tri-fold adventure, on the other hand, only has space for each room or area to have one ‘thing’ going on. It takes a lot of skill to present an interesting challenge to the player in such little space, and the adventures were uneven in how they accomplished that.

However, some of the adventures do feature more interactivity at the scale of the entire scenario. That is, the key to resolving an encounter in one area might be located in a different area, thus affecting the way that the PCs engage with the scenario as a whole. The campaign booklet for The Estate does the additional work to tie the scenarios together in this way, such that treasures or information that might be helpful in one adventure are to be located in a separate adventure, leading potentially to the PCs traversing back and forth across the map to achieve their goals. This makes the sandbox nature of the campaign much more dynamic; it’s not simply a matter of choosing and then playing through scenario A or scenario B, but seeing how these scenarios are interlinked. Granted I think the results are mixed; some of the interconnections are weak or hard to telegraph, but I appreciate that the effort was taken to stitch these separately-written modules together into something more cohesive.

Usability

The compactness of these adventures in general made them extremely usable at the table. I did read through all of them before starting the campaign, but didn’t necessarily memorize them. I was able to pull the pamphlets out based on what the PCs choose to do, and in general I could quickly scan the summary and bullet points to jog my memory of what was going on.

In general. There were places where the brevity of description got the better of me. This wasn’t so much when the brief description led me to improvise room or area details, NPC names and personalities, or anything like that. That’s all fine and was easy enough to do. But there were places where the module writers definitely had a lot more that they wanted to say than they had space.

Tower of Soot by Lazy Litch was the most difficult here. On the surface, this module is about rescuing a mouse from a cage. But they add to that a slightly forced escape through a chimney, a chimney whose map was (to me) complicated because it seemed to be illustrating both the chimney’s interior and exterior with unclear connections between some locations, and an area that had a subspace requiring a separate mini-map. There was also a timer of events instead of a normal encounter table. Finally, the scenario had a whole subplot revolving around some creatures made of soot: a soot-king that had been displaced for some reason, a crown that was in the possession of a random centipede for some reason, and soot-ghosts there were angry for some reason. The reasons for this whole mini-drama had to be supplied by me, the GM, and because of my own lack of preparation I had to do this on the spot as my players asked me question after very-reasonable question as to what the hell was going on with these soot-people. This is really when the brevity of these modules gets in the way of running them. A GM improvising room details is one thing, but having to interpret a complicated subplot based on fragmentary clues, and doing so in real time, was difficult for me.

Density of adventure sites and faction play

The Mausritter rulebook suggests 2-4 adventure sites per ‘hex flower’ of 19 hexes, yet The Estate has eleven adventure sites. As mentioned, I initially gave my players hooks for all eleven adventures, on the idea that they could choose which hook to pursue and that all the material was in this way made available to them. However, in retrospect I think I would start with hooks to only a few adventure sites, and might even run the campaign excising half of the sites. As it was, we only got through four adventures.

If I run this again, the adventures I would be sure to include would be Fruit of the Orchard, The Ticking Tower by Josiah S Moore, The Chapel of Eternal Peace by Diogo Nogueira, and maybe Giant Snake is in the Sewer by gnarledmonster, only because those four deal with the factions outlined in the campaign booklet. In addition to that, Science of Sorrow was a fun adventure, and I am drawn to Workers Work, Rulers Rule by Skullfungus and The Wizard of Arms and Armour by Amanda Lee Franck; NPCs from those adventures could easily be factions as well.

Even though some of those adventures touch on the factions listed in the campaign booklet, only one (The Ticking Tower) details the lair of one of the named factions. In fact, though Mausritter’s faction system is extremely elegant, I found that The Estate largely leaves the process of presenting factions to the players in meaningful ways to the GM. The lairs of Sabrina the cat and the magpies are not detailed, and the bone rats gang, while mentioned often, have only a lair that is deeply compromised if not completely taken over by a snake. Meanwhile, several of the other adventures do have interesting NPCs that could serve as good antagonists (or allies), but we don’t get faction goals for them. I found this to be an odd choice; if I were making my own Mausritter campaign, I would make at least half the adventure sites lairs for the various factions.

All that being said, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the campaign launched itself into faction/domain-play territory. This was undoubtedly part due to my ambitious and power-hungry players, who were not content to just play through each pamphlet adventure, but wanted to make serious plays to take over part of the estate map. The default prices for hirelings were barely an inconvenience given how much wealth they quickly accumulated; the more serious barrier was just finding enough hirelings (per the rules for finding hirelings, you can often only find d6 or fewer of the kind that you want). One lucky roll meant that they entered Science of Sorrow with six mice at arms and one knight, in addition to a guide and two torchbearers. Yes, some of these died, but honestly that group could have made short work of that whole dungeon, had they wanted to. (By the way, for this reason I recommend using Electric Bastionland’s rule for group attacks, in which when several characters attack the same creature, you only take the highest damage roll.) Moreover, even by level 2, they had enough money to hire a warband.

Together, this really felt like how people describe playing OD&D—as a little wargame in which a retinue of hirelings and retainers are led by the adventurer PCs in the search of greater domains. Yet, the Mausritter/Into the Odd system for hirelings and warbands, including warband-scale creatures, made this process more seamless and elegant (granted, the bringing of 10 hirelings into the dungeon did lead to a lot of rolling, even with no attack rolls). Due to both their own tastes and the incentives of the system, the four adventurer-mice quickly surrounded themselves with larger and larger entourages (through hire and alliance), and directed those resources toward waging a complex all-out war, all for the sake of expanding their domain and influence.

Mausritter, the wargame!

Final thoughts

Overall, I had a great time playing The Estate and Mausritter in general. What was especially pleasing was the way that Mausritter hit all of the keynotes of OSR play: a deadly and dangerous start, the acquisition of treasure and hooks into a setting, culminating with the leveraging of that treasure to obtain a domain via warfare.

In terms of The Estate specifically, despite some of the above problems, the adventures on the whole are interesting, creative, and playful. So if the campaign looks appealing to you, I would pick it up.

That said, I think I would have had an equal amount of fun making my own campaign and my own adventures. I’d be able to tailor such a campaign to my preferences, for example by keeping the theme low fantasy and focusing from the start on the faction play. And however brief I wrote the adventure sites, I would be able to fill in the blanks at the table, because they would be my own ideas. So if you are interested in Mausritter, don’t feel like you have to buy The Estate. The core Mausritter book is free, and the website has all the printable sheets and resources for making your own items, conditions and adventures.

To explore this claim, I’d like to present an admittedly-simplistic example. A fighter attacks a minotaur. The fighter is 3rd level. For this example, we will be considering a Shadowdark fighter against a Shadowdark minotaur, an OSE (stand in for b/x) fighter against and OSE minotaur, and a Shadowdark fighter against and OSE minotaur.

Shadowdark fighter vs Shadowdark minotaur.

• I will assume the 3rd level fighter has +2 in Strength and +1 from weapon mastery, so a +3 total to hit.

• The minotaur has an AC of 14.

• That means the fighter will have to roll an 11 or higher to hit the minotaur, a 45% chance

OSE fighter vs OSE minotaur

• The OSE fighter has +0 to hit

• The minotaur has an ascending AC of 13

• The fighter needs a 13 to hit the minotaur, a 35% chance

Shadowdark fighter vs OSE minotaur

• Shadowdark fighter with a +3 to hit, OSE minotaur with a 13 AC

• The fighter needs a 10 to hit, a 50% chance

So is Shadowdark compatible with b/x?

Yes: Of course it’s compatible. If you are using a b/x adventure that has a minotaur in it (like Keep on the Borderlands), simply pull up the Shadowdark stats, and everything will be rebalanced for your Shadowdark game. Yes, the Shadowdark fighter hits a little bit more frequently, but does that small variation really matter that much? The basic point is that the mechanical categories, like HP, AC, to-hit, are the same in both systems, so they are basically compatible. Plus, it’s not like OS adventure designers were really making encounters balanced on a knife’s edge, or anything. If you are playing a ‘rulings over rules’-style game, you have to get used to plenty of on the spot statistical variance in task resolution anyway.

No: I’m sorry, but different numbers are different. If you use the minotaur stats from the module, which is the easiest thing to do, with your Shadowdark fighter, the latter is 15% more likely to hit the former than if you were playing with OSE. And that’s just with the to-hit roll. When one takes into account damage, hit points, saves, and everything else, the variance in gameplay ends up being significant. I mean, we are just talking about to-hit in this example; consider the differences that will result between spellcasters rolling to succeed against their intelligence vs the classic 5 saves in OSE. Across all these differences, the adventure module itself plays quite differently, either easier or harder.

This isn’t just a Shadowdark issue. Knave proclaims the following: “High compatibility with OSR games. If you have a library of OSR bestiaries, adventure and spell books, little or no conversion is needed to use them with Knave.” Yet, when put to the test by someone who really knows what they are doing, these claims fall apart (seriously, read that blog post). Whitehack claims in its second sentence that “it is designed to run just about any material from 1974 onwards with little or no conversion.” Yet, dissatisfaction from the community about the truth of this claim has led to the creator making a somewhat defensive post, writing that if you want 1:1 conversion, “you should use a clone or the original system instead” (he continues, “finally, I'd also like to question the ideal, for any tabletop RPG, that you pick up a module for that game, and then run it without thinking about it.”).

So let’s unpack what we really mean and what we really want when we talk about compatibility and conversion.

Similar mechanical categories: The AC might be 16 or it might be 12, but the important bit is that both games use the same mechanical category, armor class, to gauge chance to hit on a d20 roll. From that point, the specific numbers can be altered and adjusted, but the basic idea of what you are doing when you roll dice is the same in both games. This leaves open the difficulty of converting the 5 classic saving throws, which vary across different creatures and at different levels, to modern OSR systems that tend to rely on universal resolution via ability score. Still, it’s not like we are trying to play the game using a system with wholly different categories, or different dice probabilities (e.g. 3d6 vs d20) to resolve similar tasks.

Toleration for variance: If monster X has an AC 10 in one system, but an AC of 20 in another system, it doesn’t matter that both use AC; those two numbers represent a meaningful statistical difference that make the two systems incompatible. Meanwhile, if monster X has an AC of 13 in one system and an AC of 14 in another, that’s basically compatible. A certain hand-waving attitude is inevitable particularly in the OSR, where the GM might simply decide what a player has to roll based on nothing but their own whim at the moment. Games like ICRPG codify this disposition to a degree, making everything within an an entire room/scene share the same target number.

But in this case, where do we draw the line? How much variance is tolerable?

Approach to running the game: Old school games famously don’t care about encounter balance. The point isn’t whether the minotaur is a little bit harder or easier to hit. It’s about how the PCs can navigate the challenge posed by the minotaur, and that might mean avoiding combat all together with a creature that, no matter its AC, is a difficult foe. Thus, compatibility fundamentally matters less in these kinds of games.

So what do I think?

Well, both things can be true. On the one hand, the details of probability do matter, especially if they extend in one direction or another across different types of rolls. For example, perhaps using Shadowdark but playing a b/x module out of the book makes for characters that have an easier time in combat (it would take more sustained analysis to show this, but let’s say that’s the case). This might affect player behavior, in that combat becomes less of a ‘fail state’ as PCs find that they are more likely to win combat scenarios. That potentially takes away, in a sense, alternative problem solving (negotiation, sneaking, hiring backup, etc). Or, the PCs will level faster or slower with different systems, again affecting the way they approach the module’s encounters.

On the other hand, the systems are similar enough, that if you are playing the game using OSR principles, you will hopefully have more or less a similar experience. Those principles and the way you apply them will matter more than the mechanical details, in other words. In the details, you’ll get a slightly different experience, certainly, but in the aggregate, you’ll get the same emergent story.

B/X has often been described as the ‘lingua franca’ of the OSR. But any lingua fraca creates its own dialects. And that’s a bit of what we have with these ‘modernized,’ universal-resolution systems like Shadowdark or Knave. Ultimately you can certainly play Keep on the Borderlands with those systems. So I think it’s both worth being skeptical of these claims of compatibility, while at the same time realizing that the experience of the participants at the table is not dependent on any particular statistical variance.

I entered the hobby in the early 90s with the “Black Box” basic set, followed by the Rules Cyclopedia, followed by AD&D 2e, so my dnd was never Gygaxian dnd. I never had to read Gygaxian prose (though I did steal the library’s copy of the 1e PHP…). My first adventure wasn’t The Keep on the Borderlands. And I certainly didn’t go to any conventions where Gygax & co. would be present. In other words, I knew who he was, but escaped that particular cult of personality.

When We Were Wizards makes clear that Gygax, as a personality, was extremely influential to the development of the hobby—in Lake Geneva, in the pages of Dragon magazine, and at various conventions (and, I suppose, in Hollywood). In the end the podcast is nostalgic for Gygax’s TSR, that small games company that could, as it is eventually taken over by more savvy Lorraine Williams.

This was actually surprising because most of the episodes show Gygax in a much different light, even through the voices of those who admired him. To me he comes across as not just inept at running a business (a befuddled gamer’s gamer, as popular history would have it), but as much worse: narcissistic, selfish, deeply arrogant, exploitative (even of friends and family), and a terrible partner and father. It’s not clear for the entirety of TSR’s run that he ever cares about anything or anyone but himself. One example is that he always insisted that he be paid royalties for his work (by his company that was also trying to make a profit), but always denied his impoverished creative staff the same deal, and in fact never stood up for them or the game he supposedly loved. He seems someone forever lost in his own delusions of grandeur, such that William’s takeover of the company is revealed to in fact be its salvation.

Apartheid Clyde Weighs In

Now, as an adult I have read (some) of the 1e DMG, and Keep on the Borderlands, and other modules, and I can say they are not for me. Meanwhile, everything I learn about him as a person doesn’t endear me to him either. Perhaps, to learn more, I could pick the recently published The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977, a coffee table history book of some-500 pages published by Wizards of the Coast. Quite daring, I might say, for Wotc to publish such an expensive book on so niche a topic. While I have nothing positive to say about Wotc, you’d think this would at least please the Gen X gamers, to see themselves be catered-to in this way.

You’d be wrong! Apparently this massive book (which includes the entirety of OD&D) also has a page or two disclaimer that some of the material “may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudices that were commonplace in American society at that time.” Of course this is going to immediately make some people defensive, even if, on the face of it, saying that a fantasy imaginary inspired by early and mid 20th century adventure and pulp fiction might have some problematic bits is not so surprising. From it’s founding assumptions, to its portrayal of otherness, to Gygax’s own antiquarian views of gender, there is a lot from the classic era that would have to at least be modified to be seriously published today.

In any case, the far-right-element-of-the-OSR (also known, arguably, as the OSR) got a hold of this on twitter and decided to turn it into a thing, sparking a sudden and oddly-timed condemnation from one Elon Musk, the billionaire whose most recent purchase is the entire U.S. government:

What’s interesting about this is that Musk and others online frame this as an attack on Gygax in particular. And they are vicariously attacked through their attachment to the great Gygax. The king is dead; long live the king: now deceased, Gygax can serve as a means to politically consolidate an entire segment of the hobby around an ‘anti-woke’ stance. I’m not saying this is necessarily a misappropriation of Gygax—doubtless he would have the same reaction were he alive—but rather speaks to the way this segment is itself caught up in a cult of personality. To speak of Gygax now is to invoke not only a whole era of the hobby, not only a stance toward or against ‘old school’ or ‘modern’ dnd, but an entire set of political attachments and positions, in sum a whole political-cultural identity. For some.

Old School Reactionaries

This reactionary segment attaches itself not only to Gary Gygax but to all the “founders” of the hobby (largely friends, family, and a few new hires who happened to be around in TSR’s early days), including Gary’s son, Ernie Gygax Jr. Ernie was someone who has been somewhat in the RPG news the last few years, mostly due the reacquisition of the TSR trademark in 2021. He was working with two individuals, Justin LaNasa and Stephen Dinehart, along with involvement with other ‘originals’ like Jim Ward.

This “NuTSR” positioned itself in the “anti-woke” space in quite an aggressive way, including an interview with Ernie himself making transphobic remarks. The company also worked on a game called “Star Frontiers: New Genesis,” a draft of which was leaked in 2021; as it turned out, it’s pretty white supremacist! In 2021, Wotc also sued TSR, and from this suit we have direct references to some of the language used:

To repeat, the above is not subtle: this is a white supremacist document.

This has come up again recently, because Ernie Gygax has passed away, and thus some have posted to social media calls to honor his legacy. Yet, in some venues (most notably, Reddit), many users have questioned what his legacy amounts to, given how he spent the last several years of his life. Others, like the rpg news site ENworld, have gone full liberal-civility, shutting down any attempts to account for Ernie Gygax’s legacy in a way that isn’t straightforwardly positive.

On those boards, some have defended Ernie by pointing out that it was not he who wrote Star Frontiers, but his collaborators. That’s fair enough, but neither did Ernie Gygax condemn the white supremacy of his business partners in the three and half years since the Star Frontiers draft was leaked. And here, his defenders turn only to platitudes: he ‘had faults like everyone,’ you see, he ‘wasn’t perfect, no one is.’ Or better: he had a child-like innocence, and was duped and used by his nefarious, scheming partners. Or best: he was beginning to turn his life around.

Yet, the lack of accountability is telling in its own way. Because these defenders don’t seem to think that it is particularly problematic to have white supremacist friends or business partners. Doesn’t everyone, they seem to be saying, know someone from work or their friend group who is a little bit of a white supremacist? That Ernie Gygax didn’t immediately condemn this content coming out under his name is not so surprising to them; after all, he wasn’t the one writing it.

As a person of color, the ‘tolerated white supremacist’ is an extremely familiar figure. And forums like ENworld, that choose to pursue what they think of as civility, are ultimately choosing civility over accountability and equality. They are saying that the problematic, bigoted White man is always recuperable and recoverable, even if it has to be at the expense of the minorities who, at the end of the day, are the more expendable parts of their communities.

Drama within any hobby, much less one as small as RPGs, is ultimately stupid. I suppose what I find interesting here is how all this somehow mirrors the brokenness of our larger politics, with its reactionaries, its polite, condescending liberals, its rampant consumerism. No exit, indeed.

Update: here’s where we are with regards to ENworld, I guess…

It’s interesting, I suppose, as a bookend to the 5e era. Though, Gus L did hit the nail on the head in his review of Lost Mines:

Forgotten Realms was the worst thing to happen to D&D, a terrible setting that reeks of bathos and takes itself far too seriously. It plunders everything cliched and overused from Tolkien but abandons all the strange sadness and the mythological references. It fills the land with huge civilized bastions of good/order like Waterdeep and exhaustively defines their systems of governance, but allows these nations to be plagued by trifling enemies like goblin tribes. Forgotten Realms embraces a pedantic faux-medievalism, but then uses a contemporary positivist understanding to explain magic that allows for cutesy magical technology to gloss over the inconvenient aspects of the pre-modern. Most offensively, most objectionably, Forgotten Realms is a dense, full, world - so steeped in cliched lore and laid out so extensively in dull gazetteers that there is no room for a GM's creativity without excising some of the existing setting and map…This is really the first example of the core problem with Lost Mine: every situation, encounter or description that could be drained of weirdness, mystery and wonder has been and most have instead been remade with the dullest versions of standard fantasy tropes the designers could find.

Anyway, I have not read the module, so this is more an account of what it has been like to play through it. Specifically, I’ve noticed something about the quest structure.

Our quest chain began by us PCs guarding a caravan. We were then asked to recover missing person A. That NPC, one rescued, then asked us to find and save his friend, missing person B. That NPC then asked us to find his brothers, missing people C and D. In between these adventures, our downtime in Phandalin had various individuals ask us to save others: missing person E who ended up being trapped in a windmill, and missing family F who had been captured by the “Redbrand” gang terrorizing/ruling the town. My fellow players took all of these hooks.

Very few and quite paltry rewards were offered for completing these various tasks; in fact, upon saving the friend, missing person A gave us half the reward in the form of an IOU! Instead, all of these adventure hooks basically appealed to what Gus, again, calls the “strange assumption of character goodness” in the adventure. Whereas a game like b/x assumes the characters are risking life and limb out of desperation to make some money (via finding treasure), 5e is a game that pins its heroism on the good-hearted nature of the characters, to the point where a scenario like Lost Mines would start to fall apart without it.

Saving a missing person is, in that way, an easy quest hook for a designer who just needs the PCs to get to the next bit of content. 5e PCs are, after all, almost superheroic even at level one, and in the background is the metagame assumption that every combat will be ‘balanced,’ i.e. easy (we have only faced moderate danger in one combat). This assumption not only means that the PCs are not risking anything much by volunteering to save a random missing person, but that it would almost seem unbecoming to refuse these calls to adventure, or even to ask for a tangible reward.

What this devolves into is a version of what Justin Alexander called a “cargo cult” adventure structure: “An NPC tells you where to go, you go there, and you find another NPC who tells you where to go.” In our case the NPCs we encountered had basically one message for us: go save missing person X, be a hero, level up, and when you need to get to the next level’s content, don’t worry, there will be another person that needs saving. In other words, the linearity of the adventure is not just in the sequence of events, but in the assumptions it makes about how the PCs will negotiate those events and situations.

This sits rather awkwardly, by the way, with the means that 5e gives PCs to be heroic, namely a series of tactical combat encounters that, when viewed at a slight distance, sure seem to be borderline war crimes on a 5x5 grid. But something about the heroic mission of saving this or that person seems to do the magic trick of obscuring that fact, so that wiping out a cave of goblins is justifiable as long we rescue the one human.

Granted, it would be unfair to label this simply a 5e problem. In fact, I’ve been preparing a Dolmenwood campaign, and noticed that the ‘missing child’ is also an easy hook for that campaign setting, in part because of it being a trope in fairytale-type stories. I don’t think it can never be used, but perhaps, like all hook types, should be used sparingly.

What’s needed for the missing person quest hook, then, are for the stakes to be raised so that there are tangible drawbacks to simply doing the ‘right thing.’ And, there could also be complications after the fact that change the context of the situation. In sum, taking on the quest needs to be a player choice with both benefits and drawbacks.

Here are some ideas to complicate the “random missing person” hook for one’s game:

1. The missing person is happy where they are and does not want to be saved

2. Deception: someone is trying to lure the PCs into a trap. How can this be telegraphed?

3. The missing person is someone important to the PCs plans, but their absence comes when the PCs don’t have time to spare

4. The quest giver, perhaps an anxious parent worried about their child, is actually an NPC antagonist in disguise. They are trying to get the PCs to do their dirty work for them in some way

5. There are two abducted NPCs, and they are in separate locations. The PCs can only save one of them.

6. The missing person cannot be rescued without at the least the potential for harm to come to others. For example, perhaps a prince has been captured, and his rescue will necessitate the sacrifice of ordinary soldiers.

Well, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. Please put any additional ideas you may have in the comments!

I have a high opinion of Mausritter. I essentially agree with Playful Void:

Mausritter (plus the Estate) is the best game I’ve ever bought. It might be the best game I’ve ever played (that’s a complex beast). It is nigh perfect. It is a better fantasy adventure game in the style of D&D than any game that has ever been called D&D, and any game that has attempted to better it before.

The conceit of Mausritter, in which one plays as a mouse, perfectly communicates the danger PCs face in a dnd-esque world without having to be grimdark; in fact, tonally it’s quite the opposite of grimdark, even though it can be a very punishing game. It’s wonderfully tactile, encouraging resource management in a way that feels intuitive and fun (though, a con might be all the bits and pieces one has to collect and save after a game session). Finally, it’s the best expression for me of the Into the Odd ruleset because of the integrated ways it deals with inventory, equipment and spell usage, and conditions (where conditions take up an inventory slot). I also like the idea of warbands, which naturally encourage mice PCs to find pips to pay an army if they want to successfully take on…a cat, or something similar in danger (this alone is a great idea to port into a ‘normal’ fantasy dnd game: dragons require armies to defeat).

It’s also a very brief game. It packs into 42 pages really everything you need to run an OSR campaign—as in, not just run a one shot, but to create and stock a little world with settlements, dungeons, and factions. To accomplish this, it is extremely successful at being succinct. Player advice + GM advice + all the rules for combat and exploration take up basically two two-page spreads, so four A5 pages. I know some people hate the minimalist trend in OSR games, or find this to be too lightweight, but looking at the rules it really gives you all you need to resolve procedural adventuring (though as a caveat, I’m not sure how all this lands with a new GM, or someone new to the OSR). There are undoubtedly some gaps: for example, the one area where I wish there was something more formalized would be zones for movement and encounter distance).

Also brief but perfectly succinct are its GM tools, which take GMs through creating a small hex map, with settlements, adventure locations, NPCs, and factions—with examples. It doesn’t seem unrealistic, either, that your mice will be traversing hexes, engaging with dangerous factions that slowly pursue their goals, improving their community, building strongholds, and recruiting armies—i.e. mid-high level domain play—and there are (brief) rules for all of it!

Is brevity always a virtue?

This brings me to the adventure scenario that my group choose to pursue for our first session, “The Ember Tree” by L.F. OSR. All of the trifold adventures from The Estate boxed set are beautiful, well-designed, and evocative. I read all of them in preparation for running the campaign—an easy thing to do when they are so short—but didn’t, like, memorize them. This proved to be ok though, because the way the module was written I could quickly scan individual locations or even all of the locations to know what to present to players and answer questions that players had. It was very helpful to have, instead of sprawling pages of notes, just my mausritter GM screen, the trifold module, and the turn tracker sheet in front of me (especially when item and condition cards were flying all over the place).

The one main rules adjustment that I made was making it possible for the players to speak to the creatures of the modules, caterpillars and termites, because social interaction is fun. But this is not a play report; play reports are boring. Suffice to say, the players went through a bunch of the locations, got some treasure, saved the caterpillar prince, and one mouse died.

Rather, I’d like to note some of the ways that brevity proved frustrating to running the module at times. I should emphasize that it’s not a bad module, we had fun, and I was able to figure things out on the fly, but there were some cases where the module was maybe too compact and the writing too succinct, which is probably more a function of the trifold form of these adventures then the fault of the author.

• Interactivity: locations were easy to scan…but on the other hand, there was sometimes not much of interest in them due to the compact design. For example, there is a location with a “hot sap river,” with the only challenge being that the mice have to cross the river, and with that challenge most likely breaking down to a dex save at some point, or the PCs take some damage. Even if it doesn’t come down to a roll, it’s the most interesting challenge. There are also d6 “molten silverfish” playing in the sap, a sort of magical creature I guess that has no listed motivation to interact with the PCs at all. Some more ideas would be helpful here to provide more interactivity and make these locations feel more full.

• Telegraphing: there were several potentially valuable items that show up in the environment, but no text guiding the GM on how to describe these items. For example, there are something called Emberleaves, that are valuable to a specific NPC in another hex. But how do I describe these leaves as different from other leaves; it seems like either the GM is saying a mundane thing—there are leaves on a tree—or has to point a big flashing sign at one particular facet of the environment so that the players pick up on it. It didn’t seem to reward player creativity in exploring the environment.

• Combat: there is a lightning elemental that my players encountered that has “d4 Charge, then next round, d12 Shockwave (damages DEX, area effect).” Is that a charge as in “charging up” or a charge as in running at someone? What is the area effect in a game without spatial distances, even zones? After the charge+shockwave, is the lightning creature expended, or do they still exist? The lighting elemental “wants to be freed,” but in one of the rooms they are freed by the players taking the item in which they were imprisoned, so why are they attacking? I figured it out, but there was a lot of questions that needed to be answered in a short period of time.

• The magi-metaphysics of the world: different authors have different ideas about what this mouse-fantasy world is all about. Some have a quite down to earth conception of what your mouse adventures are; it might be about mouse using a spool of thread to climb some rafters while avoiding bees. In this module, L.F. OSR has created a more high-magic setting. The entire premise is that lightning struck this tree, but that some of the energy was trapped in a gem, and now this gem “radiates energy” turning the tree into an inferno of heat and lightning. In fantasy settings, this kind of thing will always raise questions about how the magic works in consistent ways, but this is not possible given the brevity of the module.

  Like, seemingly the gem itself is not hot, or maybe it is? And the tree is on fire, but also not burning down? And wouldn’t the humans do something about a tree in their yard belching black smoke? And how can any creatures even exist inside this burning tree? For that matter, where are these termites coming from? Again, not unanswerable questions, but at odds with situation of a GM like myself who pulls this module from a box and tries to run it with little prep.

In sum, the design aesthetic of Mausritter is all about brevity, and in the main rulebook, that is leveraged to more or less great effect. Issac Williams (the author of the game) manages to succinctly include all the rules for adventure gaming in just a few, compact, two page spreads.

The brevity in module design makes them both easy and difficult to run. Easy, because one can quickly scan and find all the important information during a hectic game session. This is not a game that is going to ask the GM to prep a huge binder or an Obsidian vault to be ready for their games.

On the other hand, the brevity includes a lot of unexplained or incomplete ideas. I think the incompleteness doesn’t bother me at all in the ruleset, because if I’m making my own adventures I have an intuitive sense of how something is supposed to work. I could write a brief one line item description, but have a memory in my head of what that’s supposed to look like at the table. However it is more of a problem running someone else’s module, when they don’t have the space to elaborate and explain all their ideas, or even the space to include more ideas to make a really full, interactive adventure.

Skimming all of the trifold adventures in The Estate, I don’t think this problem is unique to the contribution by L.F. OSR, and I’m sure I’ll have to think on my feet in different ways in running all of them. Nevertheless, as I said above, they are beautiful and evocative, so I still can’t wait for my next session.

There was a lot that went well.  First of all, the game was perfect for a group that plays for two-three hours, online, sometimes with inconsistent player attendance.  It was easy to run a score + downtime, and for characters to miss any given score.  As a group, we really liked the interlocking mechanics, and the way that advancement in general always came with complications and entanglements (which returned in later episodes).  The most important thing we learned was the idea of using fictional positioning to contextualize rolls.  The concept of greater or lesser “effect” was a little bit harder to grok, however.  

As a GM, I enjoyed both the undefined quality of the setting elements and the fact that I could be a player and “play to see what happens.”  The tumbling fail forward mechanics, and the improvisation they necessitated, produced genuinely surprising results for each score.  I surprised myself at my ability to just think of what narrative consequence would entail from a given fictional positioning.  As a player, I could even strategize with the group of how to handle a situation, suggesting flashbacks or particular actions, highlighting not only or primarily the likelihood of success but whether it would make for an interesting narrative.  It felt the fictional situation was something that was a bit independent from my presentation of it.

This idea of the GM as player is usually contrasted with the notion of “GM Fiat,” attached to classic and OSR styles of play.  It seems many people purport to use the term as a neutral descriptor, but like so much storygame jargon I find it that it contains it’s own judgement of that style of play.  “Fiat” connotes a sense of absolute power that is arbitrarily wielded.  Obviously there are plenty of RPG horror stories out there, but I have not found this to be the case in practice.  So we can turn to a game like Blades in the Dark and appraise the role of the GM within it.  On the one hand, as described above, I did feel like the fictional situation was something independent of my will, and I was playing to see what would happen through the alchemy of setting a reasonable fictional position and the players rolling the dice.  On the other hand, any game with a GM still relies on copious GM adjudication.  Both in determining the specific consequences for rolls and in presenting and framing new obstacles and scenes, there is still a concentration of narrative authority in the GM’s hands.  The fact that this is improvised based on what happens during any particular score is merely a different articulation of power; I found myself, for example, of only having a hazy idea of what ghosts could or couldn’t do, or what kind of supernatural power was available to NPCs or not.  It always made narrative sense, but from a different perspective is also “unfair” to the players in its mutability.

In conclusion, playing Blades was a revelation in how the GM role could be different, but also did not convince me that that difference was as fundamental as some make it out to be.  Just as in general, playing avowedly narrative-focused games is different but not so fundamentally different from playing traditional games (and the narratives they also produce).  If one is so concerned with GM authority, the best solution is to play a game that removes the GM entirely.  Otherwise, there is always some measure of necessary adjudication and arbitration that resides in the hands of the GM,

Unlike the short zines of A Thousand Thousand islands, Reach of the Roach God is a large 300 page tome.  More than setting material, Reach presents a campaign structured around the creeping malevolent influence of roach-folk.  As should be obvious, using roaches as the antagonists is brilliant.  We’ve all dealt with roaches, and we know them to be horrifying, chaotic evil beings.  Similar to the zines, however, is the fact that Reach features lush illustrations and poetic writing on each page. This post is not a review of Reach per se.  Rather, I want to think about what this book is doing at the level of scenario design.  How is Reach similar to or different from the low-level dungeon- and wilderness-crawls popular in the OSR? What cues does it take from classic scenario design? And where does the -crawl style of gaming clash with the aesthetics of the A Thousand Thousand Islands setting?

Classic Scenario Design: Against the Cult of the Reptile God

Of course, among the thousands of dnd adventures there is a huge variety, from simple 5 room dungeons to sprawling, linear adventure paths.  To examine classic scenario design more closely, I’ll take as an example a classic module, N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God by Douglas Niles.

This module offers the key elements of an adventure scenario, particularly for low level characters: a starting town (two, actually), a small wilderness area, and a dungeon, all placed within a larger campaign setting that can be used to locate the next module.  In many classic scenarios, the PCs will need to find their own motivation for visiting the dungeon, the most obvious and well-rewarded one being finding treasure before returning to the safety of town to rest and level up.  Against the Cult of the Reptile God adds an investigative layer to this: the safe haven town (Hochoch) is separate from the cult town (Orlane), making the latter essentially an adventuring site (with several mini dungeons).  In addition, the module adds a time pressure as the activities of the cult ramp up the longer the PCs take to investigate, offering a risk/reward that is not just to do with treasure, but with defeating the BBEG.  It is successful as a module because it invites exploration and problem solving, both for the built-in xp-for-gold reasons and for ‘narrative’ reasons.

The Zine Setting: A Thousand Thousand Islands

The ATTI zines are, obviously, a very different sort of product.  First of all they are pieces of a setting, not modules.  But even beyond that, they differ from the gazetteer-style setting overviews popularized by TSR and other publishers.  The latter tend to take an expansive, comprehensive, and omniscient view, providing a zoomed out perspective on both the space of the world (as represented by the big map of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, etc) and its time (as indicated by the exhaustive histories).

ATTI, by contrast, presents fragments and vignettes, individual locations/regions whose spatial relationship is left undefined, and whose past is presented, when it is, as myth, folklore, and hearsay.  A page might be devoted to a particular character, location, or item, without a sense that these descriptions add up to the totality of the larger region introduced.  “Adventure” is possible on these islands, but the information presented does not go out of its way to hook PCs cast as “adventurers.”  Rather, it seems that the setting and its characters exist on its own terms, at times with problems and dramas that may invite PC intervention, but at other times existing in their own fantastical mundanity.

Together, ATTI has a somewhat desultory feel, but in a good, carefree way: it’s more about hanging out in a fictional world, meeting people, seeing the things they make, learning about their everyday hopes and worries than it is about adventuring per se.  The fragmentary character of the islands subvert the typical modes of exploration in dnd, modes that focus the acquisition of that gazetteer-type of objective knowledge that the PCs use to solve problems (problems that typically involve killing monsters and gaining treasure).

When I first read these zines I was a bit flummoxed by this aspect of them.  What am I supposed to do with this? I thought.  How can I introduce this world?  Where is the game-able content?  But after some time, it seemed to me that the zines allowed players to make characters to go to this fictional place and just hang out.  If adventure was desired, the zines had threads that the GM could pull on to provide something classic.  But just as likely, the PCs might be happy exploring the islands in a different mode.

The Contradictions of the Late OSR: Reach of the Roach God

As mentioned above, Reach of the Roach God is styled as not just an adventure but as a campaign.  It includes three adventure sites, two chapters of other locales/peoples, two chapters of bestiaries, and a final chapter that brings it all together with some cavern generators.  Aspects of Reach adhere to the norms of classic modules.  The adventure sites are each a series of interconnected dungeons, and each has the theme of a roach entity or cult slowly infiltrating a society and causing chaos.  Each adventure has a timer of things that happen as the PCs investigate/explore, usually keyed to the random encounters. The first adventure site simply adds more roach incursions the more encounters the PCs have, the second asks the GM to keep track of roving guardians that move about a temple complex, while the third has five factions each with their own clocks.  These are interesting mechanics that all drive the PCs further into the underground world and further into confrontation with the roach god’s minions.  It’s an adventure.

However, in other aspects, Reach’s presentation prevents or even subverts its qualities of adventure.  Superficially, the layout employs the fragmentary, deliberate style of the zines: single NPCs take up as much as a whole page and information is spread out in a way that would require (for me at least) some utilitarian prep to effectively bring this to the table.  Material that is important for the GM to know up front might appear in the middle of a section, and related bits of information are spread out and in different areas.  For example Chapter 2, “Spider Mountain Temple” starts on p. 51, but waits until p. 70 to give the GM an important and useful rundown of recent events, including the incursions of the roach god.  The map of the entire site only appears 6 pages later, while  the source of the incursion, Odoyoq’s Agent, is only introduced on the last page of the chapter (p. 110), and only briefly.  This kind of jaunty storytelling works for the zines, but here frustrates usability.  Similarly, Chapter 3, “City of Peace,” contains five factions, each with their own agendas and clocks, but this information is spread out throughout the chapter instead of presented together, meaning that the GM will have to collate these agendas together in a reference to efficiently keep track of their progress.  Especially in this chapter, the roach threat doesn’t necessarily seem more important or take up more space than all the other interesting elements.  The bestiary chapters are evocative and interesting but contain creatures not referenced in any of the preceding chapters (unless I missed something).    Finally, the last chapter creates a fun but convoluted mechanic for connecting the various sites together and adjoining more caverns with more roaches.  Anti-cannon worldbuilding and random dungeon generation are both hallmarks of the OSR, but if/when I run this I’ll probably just label the included example map. 

But those are all review-style nitpicks.  Reach subverts the classic adventure conventions in more interesting ways too, whether intentionally or not.  Namely, there are many characters, locations, and situations among these pages that seem to invite the more slowed-down hanging out we see in the ATTI zines.  For example, we meet characters like Dee Wee Shree, a batfolk ascetic who conjures a “underwear-model ogre” to have trysts with a girl that he likes.  Even NPCs that connect more directly to the roach “plot” invite slower interaction; for example, Manya, an axious cat with “fur like a storm cloud, voice low like discouraging thunder.”  These npcs take up a whole page, half of which is a beautiful and intricate illustration.  Further, Siew’s writing presents information in a clipped and fragmentary way, for example through a quote.  The text seems to invite the GM-reader, and by implication the game, to slow down when interacting with these characters, to flesh them out through play and extended interaction, to perhaps get distracted.  Siew provides plenty of more examples of this dynamic: other bat folk that have Karen energy, a girl that is as “annoying as a cat stealing a fish from your plate,” etc.  Even the roach antagonists sometimes let the veil drop, like “Pa Ippodo” who has “the grace of your fanciest girlboss wearing a mermaid swim-tail.”

In sum, in Reach, the norms of adventure writing and the style of ATTI clash, at least in part.  It is both a big, damn adventure and a place to hang out, and these things are in some tension.  I could see this tension be annoying for GM’s trying to prepare to run it, but also might result in interesting things that happen during play as the players engage with the material and become attached to particular characters or places.  In other words, if there is always a chance that PCs will get “distracted” from the “main story” by a random npc, that chance is greater here, where the npcs are so evocative. It is an interesting thought experiment to imagine Reach presented in the OSE house style: all the maps together in one place, followed by random encounter tables, followed by faction details.  Npcs taking up one or two lines instead of a whole page.  Instead we get a sprawl of rich-but-dense description and vivid, detailed illustration.  It feels like, and is, an indulgent pleasure of a book.

One of the mainstays of the ttrpg hobby has been the engagement in and criticism of “lonely fun.”  Lonely fun is the hobby of “not playing” ttrpgs, due to lack of time, interested friends, or both.  It’s how many enthusiasts engage with the hobby, often out of necessity.  Yet, there is a strong trend of criticizing such activities, even by some of these same people.  This makes a certain amount of sense: the purpose of ttrpgs is to play them, not read them.  If you just wanted something to read, you could pick up a novel.  It would be like people reading board game manuals for fun.

This criticism takes various forms.  “System Matters” fundamentalists not only look askance of the 90s trad gamer, shelves full of supplements, but disdain any aspect of a rule system that doesn’t reinforce the game’s theme in play.  Plenty of dnd and trad gamers, meanwhile, roll their eyes at the GM who is a ‘wannabe failed novelist’ with an overly written setting.  The focus on usability in the OSR is a manifestation of this, with any ‘bloat’ in adventure modules being ripped apart by critics (who write, ironically, overly lengthy, poorly edited reviews).  Finally, I see a lot of dismissal of products for lacking in substance, either due to their ephemeral character (eg. 5 page games on itch.io) or due to their foregrounding of art.

I write the above as if I never had those same feelings about ttrpg products and the hobby.  In particular, I’m quite critical of the consumerist wing of the hobby, the people who buy product after product and take “shelfies” of their collection with no hope of playing most of it.  Yet, I’d like to take a less judgmental stance here and think about what’s good about “lonely fun,” and what it says not only about how we engage in the hobby but what ttrpgs are as a mode of creative expression.

The Anonymity of a Shared Imagination

What does the ttrpg, as an expressive medium, do?  Why does one express oneself by writing a game, or setting book, or adventure module?   One answer is that these works provide material for players (GM included) to use at “the table.”  By this understanding, anything that is not usable at the table is extraneous.  What that means, however, is that any such material, including the GM’s own homebrew, is incomplete.  Their completion lies in actual play, through the shared imagination of the participants

At the same time, one could apply the above dynamic to any work of art.  Literature may seem more complete, but it requires readers, and these readers have a way of interpreting and imagining texts in their own way, often spawning fan adaptation (which also gets criticized as less substantive than the ‘original’).  In this sense, a campaign setting that will only be read by a would-be GM and never used in any actual play is still a work of shared imagination, it’s just a shared imagination between two people (the writer and the GM) who don’t know each other.  Just like a novel.

Moreover, and especially when it comes to a GM’s homebrew, the “failed” in “failed novelist” is a curious expression.  It suggests creativity that is low in quality; in this context, perhaps railroaded adventures, settings overwritten in purple prose, stories that make no sense.  Yet, the implication is that, if a person was actually creative, they would write novels instead of engaging in desultory world building.  This ignores the fact that novelists are also world-builders (not to mention that “successful” novelists are not necessarily adept in the written word).

So, sure, is there something indulgent about Planes of Chaos or in the shelf full of unplayed adventure paths?  Yes; so what, indulge.  

“Art Books”

Ttrpgs merge game mechanics, ‘incomplete’ setting material including character archetype descriptions, and visual art.  I think the OSR is at the forefront of this merging, with works such as Mork Borg conveying theme through artwork and layout.  Yet, a common criticism is that such work is not usable at the table, that these are “barely games” and more “art books.”

Again, this sentiment implies that if an author were really creative, they would be producing high art, compiled in those expensive coffee table books that no one buys in the museum gift shop.  Moreover, they mistake a stylistic preference for something that has inherent substance.  What’s missing is an understanding of how art and layout are not just secondary adjuncts to these texts, but a fundamental part of their expression.  Just as fantasy settings might have some purple prose, there might be a style that is a bit ‘purple’ in its layout.  Nonetheless, what both represents are people trying to anonymously share their imagination, to bring into being—through words, images, and arrangement of both—an interior world.

A recent blog post I read (but can’t find now) suggested that ttrpgs should think about digital-only products in fundamentally different ways, for example as ebooks rather than as pdfs.  I don’t fundamentally disagree, but this take does again ignore the importance of particular graphic design.  

Further, who is all this for?  The images, the double-spread layouts, the maps?  I would argue that these are all hard to present to the players in an easy and consistent ways.  The person who sits most with all of this visual material is the GM, and all ostensibly for the sake of allowing them to better communicate the theme and spaces to the players, who mostly use their imaginations.  That is, these are works that, even if played and played often, are spending a lot of energy communicating with just one person, the GM.  This is a shame in some way, as players should get to see all this cool art also, but also indicates the way that ttrpg products are a mode of creative expression even in the absence of actual play.

Lonely Fun vs the Curse of the Collection

I’ve criticized the consumerism of ttrpgs on this blog in the past, in favor of the “folk” character of creating/sharing/playing.  Suggesting that some ttrpgs are meant to be read and that that’s ok seems to contradict this criticism.  What problem should I have with the gaming shelf if these books are just for reading?  How is it different than any other bookshelf?

Well, most books don’t come with kickstarter fomo and stretch goals, for one.  And I think the kickstarter mentality is really the issue here me, and the constant cycle of new systems that do the same thing as old systems, 5e supplement plushie grift, and projects that arrive years later.  There is also an emphasis on particular kinds of book ‘quality’ that strikes me as precious.

But aside from that, yes, perhaps I should ameliorate or rethink how important playability and usability for things that might never be played/used.  I don’t have a super extensive ttrpg collection, but I recently made a list of games that I have that I want to play and campaigns I want to run.  It was overwhelming.  Given the real world constraints of my gaming group and the fact that other people in this group like to GM, it will take years to play all the things I want to play.  In the meantime, they sit on the shelf/hard drive, to be read and not played.  There is still joy, and yes, fun, in such sharing of imagination at a distance.

All good questions, with no easy answers.  Obviously, people get defensive around these issues for a variety of reasons.  One is the idea that once a trace of something problematic is found in a text, it contaminates the entire work for forever.  That’s extreme, and removes a lot of context and nuance.  On the other hand, there’s an insidiousness to cultural stereotypes and exoticism; because they fall below the line of being outright slurs, some forms of exoticism and orientalist exist as culturally acceptable and ‘not a big deal.’  Therefore, nothing in the following critique is meant to suggest that you do or not buy and play Yoon-Suin, but rather I would like to see what this attempt at non-western fantasy is doing and not doing.

“It’s just Fantasy”

Before I read the setting, I had already read this quite defensive and dismissive statement on the blog the of the author, which was an inauspicious beginning.  His main point is that the setting is not an analog in any meaningful sense of the term.  He writes:

Yoon-Suin is not an analogy for anything or anywhere. Words actually have meanings, and an "analogy" does not merely mean something which just takes inspiration from another thing, or which happens to superficially resemble another thing in some way. 

That said, all ideas come from somewhere, and the root of what became Yoon-Suin did begin as me idly wondering one day why there were fantasy versions of most places in the world (Europe, China, Japan, India, and so on) but not Tibet or Nepal. I used that initial seed of an idea to create a campaign to run games in which became the Mountains of the Moon area of the setting. Yoon-Suin kind of spread from there. It sort of looks like the geography of the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal because that's what I was looking at when I made up the map. It has some monsters loosely based on folklore from Burma, Bengal and Tibet and many which aren't. It is a fantasy version of that region of the world to the extent - probably less than the extent - to which Greyhawk is a fantasy version of Europe. In other words, it's nothing like it but has a little bit of the furniture.

The Fear of a Black Dragon podcast favorably reviewed the setting, and used the same argument for why the setting was not an example of orientalism.  The argument seems to go that though the setting is inspired by the geography, culture, and aesthetics of a given culture, it is not an analog of that culture.  Analytically, this does not make a lot of sense to me.  What constitutes an analog for a fantasy world?  Would anything based on or inspired by real world geography, culture, and history count as an analog by this definition? 

More to the point, if we are using Edward Said’s Orientalism as the theoretical frame, the question of analogy is not really relevant.  Orientalism is about the topos that Europeans create about the ‘East.’ That is, it is about the fantasy of the East, not the East itself.  Perhaps this fantasy is an analog in the way that it mapped onto real world geographies (with devastating consequences).  But the salient point of the critique is the way European scholars and artists leveraged a set of tropes, ideas, and representations to create the ‘Orient’ as an object of knowledge.  In other words, it was a fantasy ‘inspired by’ a vague appropriation of real world culture.  Perpetuating those stereotypes—the mysterious East, decadent and cruel—reproduces that topos and the control over its representation.

So it’s a cop out and very lazy when McGrogan writes “Nor is it similar to the real world. It has slug-men in it, for goodness' sake.” I’ve heard versions of this sentiment online countless times—“it’s just fantasy.  Look there are fantastical creatures in it.  Relax.” Stories of the exotic East that have fascinated the curious West—Aladdin for example—have fantastical elements, and yet despite those (or really because of those), their refashioning does the work of orientalism in establishing and controlling the narrative of what the ‘East’ is.

So…is Yoon-Suin orientalist or not?

In a word, yes, unquestionably.  Is it therefore offensive?  Not entirely.   The first edition of Yoon-suin starts as a frame narrative written by “Laxmi Guptra Dahl” and containing a hodgepodge of 18th and 19th travel writing hallmarks.  Most of the really explicit stereotypes are here, and yet they are voiced by a character who is explicitly an explorer (and one implicitly from a non-Western non-analog space in this fantasy world).  The knowledge that this character introduces is thus unreliable, quasi-ethnographic, and involves further frames as he quotes other characters. (This style of frame narrative, by the way, was also a hallmark of 19th c. British colonial adventure fiction, such as the pulp writing of H. Rider Haggard.  For this reason, it was taken up by Conrad in Heart of Darkness as a way of providing ironic critique).

The writing of Dahl is replete with stereotypes, as mentioned above.  For example, Dahl writes

It never fails to impress a visitor to the Yellow City that its citizens are by turns the wealthiest, most refined, and most educated people int he world, yet at the same time capable of the most malicious cruelties and and licentious depravities.  Like all those whose societies are ancient and rich, they are also cynical and filled with ennui.  The most singular feature of their life, which strikes any visitor the moment he arrives, is their strict hierarchical stratification, which all inhabitants obey without question. (3)

This is an ancient but decadent civilization, exotic and yet filled with ennui, and marked by an oppressive power structure.  The text continues in this way, describing a caste system or the native people of the jungle in ways that present a simplified otherness.  

This is followed by a main text written McGrogan’s voice and consisting mainly in random tables.  There are places around the edges that suggest that not everything in the initial exposé should be taken as truth; this could be expanded upon in clever ways, ways that actually require the reader and potentially players consider how they are understanding the ‘strangeness’ of this strange place.  To the extent that the text does not interrogate the opening’s supposition, I would yes, it repeats orientalist cliché.

Why is it not that offensive?

I find such clichés not totally offensive because the setting is very DnD, and DnD, by containing elements from Euro-American pulp fiction, also carries over much of that fiction’s stereotypes and aesthetics along the with the colonial sensibility of “exploration.” And a big part of Yoon-Suin’s “problematic” bits have to do with the way that it is actually very much a bog-standard dnd setting with, as McGrogan says, a bit of oriental furniture added to ‘spice things up a bit.’ This gesture of turning to the ‘exotic’ is problematic an annoying, certainly. However, if you’ve signed up for dnd, you’ve signed up for some version of this, and Yoon-Suin provides.  

This is to say that while voluminous, the setting strikes me as bland.   Where a writer like Zedeck Siew makes creatures that are evocative of a different way of thinking about and inhabiting a world, McGrogan provides statted-up baddies for the PCs to kill.  The hooks are similarly about investigations, monster hunting, and faction play in a very typical dnd way. In other words it doesn’t do more than provide some ‘exotic’ imagery and decoration for what is, at its core, a pulp fantasy experience. It’s orientalist in a bland way, that is, in a way that barely conceals what is a very generic and uninteresting dnd setting.

Final Thoughts

In the end, this setting is just dnd.  Whereas I thought I would be uninterested in playing in a Yoon-suin campaign one day because of its orientalism, I find myself turned off by its unimaginative presumptions.  I will say that any setting that models a caste system—a violent institution that very much still exists—will be a turn off for me.  Neither do I love some of the mid-2010s OSR-isms (calling sex workers “whores,” etc. (and yes of course Zak S. was consulted for Yoon-Suin)).

Honestly, what’s more offensive is the above quoted statement.  If you are from the UK, as the author is, there is room to ‘be inspired by’ particular cultures and be thoughtful and self-reflexive at the same time.  Instead we get a statement that is dismissive to the point of being insulting.  He writes

You might think it is illegitimate for me to have made it that way, maybe because you have read online summaries of Edward Said's Orientalism or half-paid attention to his writings as an undergraduate; if so, there's probably no getting through to you, except to resort to an old but sensible cliche: sometimes imitation is just the most sincere form of flattery. And only that.

He implies here that those of us concerned about representation in the ttrpg hobby or in fantasy more broadly, many of us including myself being people of color, do so because of our poor understanding of Said, itself a product of our lazy study habits.  I happen to be a person of south Asian descent, and a postcolonial scholar to boot.   And I happen to think that McGrogan should maybe be more inviting of this discussion than defensive, more self reflective than condescending in this manner.  Hopefully he will be with the second edition.

At times, however, the amount of structure can be overwhelming.  The Between, by Jason Cordova, is a game I really wanted to like, having enjoyed playing a few one-shots its sister-game Brindlewood Bay.  The main innovation in these games is that they are mystery games, but with the solution to the mystery being non-canonical, meaning that the players have to narrate found clues into a coherent story, and then roll the dice to see to what degree they are correct.  It’s a brilliant ‘play to find out’ mechanic, especially when contrasted with mystery scenarios that either fall flat or involve railroading.

The Between is a game about Victorian monster hunters, inspired by the show Penny Dreadful.  As a PBTA game, it nominally eschews the railroading tendencies of trad mystery games like Call of Cthulhu along the lines mentioned above.  In its place, however, it provides extensive structures for (re)creating Penny Dreadful scenes and mysteries with your friends.  

Intrigued by the premise, I bought and read the game before I had watched Penny Dreadful, and found that many parts of it simply did not make sense.  For example the playbooks are extremely specific, with the players basically taking on the role of characters in the show, with some wiggle room of course.  These aren’t “Victorian monster hunters,” these are the specific monster hunters we find in the show.  Further, the game is very deliberately paced, with four phases each with its own procedure.  Along the way, players roll dice, which essentially cues up prompts from the GM’s threat sheet or the players’ playbooks, which are then contextualized and somewhat elaborated upon.  The GM, in providing opportunities, is continually putting narratively-impactful pieces in front of the players, leading to the inevitable acquisition of clues.

Moreover, the text of the game places extremely—and to my mind awkwardly—explicit constraints on players.  For example, “the most important thing” tells us that

The hunters are intentionally occluded; the game is called The Between because we find these characters caught between a very dark, mysterious past and an equally dark, possibly tragic, future. We aim to explore these dark pasts, but only at the right time—dramatically-speaking—and only when the game’s rules tell us to.

As a player, you must always try to avoid speaking about your character’s past—in character or out of character—unless a specific mechanic in the game demands it. If a side character asks your character about their past, you must always demur or change the subject; if a player asks about your character’s past, you must remind them that you’re not allowed to say, but they are welcome to trigger The Vulnerable Move in order to get you to talk.

I don’t see how that is not a clear instance of a removal of player agency.  Similarly, if the the PCs might defeat the main threat of the mystery…they…can’t?  As in, they are simply not allowed

it does not matter if the hunters have the Threat cornered or otherwise are in a strong—even logical—position to defeat the Threat if an Opportunity to do so has not been unlocked by answering a Question; the Threat will always escape. It might seem weird or unrealistic for that to be the case, but The Between is a game and games have rules. Furthermore, the Threat can only be resolved in the manner indicated by the unlocked Opportunity.

Well, so much for fictional positioning!

The result of this amount of copious structure is a game that feels as on rails as any Call of Cthulhu game with a keeper scheming to hit the right narrative beats behind a dice-obscuring screen.  Gameplay consists in following prompts provided on your sheet, with agency limited to lightly sketching scenes and characters around these specific prompts and within extensive constraints from the game.  Thinking of it now, I did find Brindlewood Bay to be a bit like this, but the silly and cozy nature of the game made it playable nonetheless.  For example, the “cut to commerical” in BB felt spontaneous and nostalgic whereas “the unscene” feels laborious.

Genre as Structured Play

That’s overly harsh criticism to make my point.  I do wonder, however, at the work genre does for so many PBTA games.  These games often try to create mechanics (through moves, etc) to help replicate a sometimes very specific genre drawn from some other media.  The idea, as I understand it, is that if the game doesn’t have a mechanic to create a certain style of narrative, then it has no rules to do so and it won’t happen on its own.  Thus games like Call of Cthulhu or Vampire the Masquerade might claim to be producing certain kinds of stories, but lack the means, besides mere aesthetics and tone, to actually create those stories.

Yet, I personally find narrative games, with all their mechanics, to still rely on knowledge of the ‘primary’ material in order to replicate them.  As mentioned above, I struggled to understand The Between before watching Penny Dreadful.  Similarly, I would direct players the appropriate touchstones before playing any other narrative game.  The reason for this is that genres have their ‘invisible’ rules.  Mechanics in a game might make those explicit, but any reader or viewer picks up on those rules implicitly.  You already know what elements you have to include if you wanted to make a noir or horror film, as long as you are decently steeped in the genre.  Similarly, you would know how to play with, subvert, or satirize the genre because of that knowledge (like, say, in the movie Scream).

It reminds me of the classic post about FKR:

“You play worlds, not rules. Have you read Brideshead Revisited? The Wizard of Earthsea? Foundation and Empire? Any captivating novel, regardless of timeframe, setting, or genre? Well now you can run a full FKR game based on that book. You don't need an RPG sourcebook because all books are now sourcebooks. All television shows are sourcebooks. All movies and songs and comics and memes and medical brochures are now sourcebooks.”

To extend the thought, one could ask, has your group seen Penny Dreadful?  Are they familiar with Victorian gothic horror and pulp?  Are they enthusiastic about these themes?  Then I think they would know how to play a Penny Dreadful-style rpg with far less structure that we find in The Between.  The game might make the logic and rules of genre explicit, but I don’t see how that is necessary to play within a genre.  This is especially the case when the game itself does not quite make sense unless one is familiar with the genre!

Part of my general reaction here is that I find the criticism of trad games as ‘railroads’ to be somewhat in bad faith.  Yes, overly strict GM-guided structure can be a problem in trad games.  But overly prescriptive structured narrative games can also constrain participants, even when their stated goal, on balance, is to increase player agency.

That said, thinking about how to emulate a genre of fiction in a game does force us to break down that genre’s already-existing internal rules, as if we were writers and directors.  We have to look critically at how these texts create and situate characters, move plots forward, and create emotions and meaning for readers/viewers.  In that way, it can be a worthwhile endeavor, even if one finds the results to be overly baroque.

1. Hype

Shadowdark’s success should perhaps not be as a surprise.  It’s a very polished product with great art, made by a creator with an established 5e fanbase who clearly had a good viral marketing plan.  Is it a good game? Reading the quickstart,  it seems like it will do fine as a rules-lite dungeon crawler, though at $30 for the pdf it is far more expensive than many similar games like Cairn ($0) or The Black Hack ($6).  As a game, it reads as the “factory preset,” as this one critic calls Mausritter (and Shadowdark is far less innovative and evocative than Mausritter (one of my favorite OSR games, also available for $0)).

What I would like to think about what its success says about the hobby.  The $30 digital tier of this game, expensive as that is, was not the most popular by far.  A plurality of backers opted for the $109 “Shadowdark complete” which included all the physical and digital rewards, with a substantial number backing at the $129 and $159 levels.  Those prices are eye-popping considering the game occupies the same niche as the games mentioned above.  

The game was accompanied by a truly impressive amount of hype online.  Indicative of the general tone was the “Dungeon Masterpiece” youtube channel, which proclaimed, after a two-hour gushing read-through, 

“We have reached a new chapter for what it means to be in the OSR.  This is a turning of the tide.  No longer are we doing the regurgitation of retroclones. In the future, we will look at Shadowdark as this pivotal moment of what it now means to be OSR.  This is the new path going forward.” 

Of course, that’s laughably hyperbolic, and moreover strongly ignores the plethora of OSR rulesets that are not retroclones.  Personally, I wonder less whether this is a “turning point,”  but whether people, including the backers, will playing or talking about Shadowdark in a year, or two years.  It seems as though the author is cultivating a community and will continue to support the system with her own adventures; that’s good, and it points to a best case scenario of a core group of enthusiasts, like for Runehammer’s ICRPG.  But I wonder if for the most part the $109 worth of material will be played a few times and then put on some encumbered shelf.  I wonder if the superficiality of the 5e elements fail to convince trad players to play OSR games for anything other than one shots here and there.  In sum, I wonder whether the enthusiasm for this game speaks to the fomo of kickstarter and the idea that more consumption lead to more fulfilling games.

2. Entitlement

I don’t think Shadowdark is unique in the above respects within the OSR.  Certainly games that I’ve backed on kickstarter and played--Mork Borg and Old School Essentials—speak to the consumerist desire for “official,” consistently-designed and branded game products, along with the idea of buying into a community with your purchase.  Which is to say I get the fundamental desire involved in consumption, retail therapy, and lonely fun.

The other side of hype, however, is that the desire for uniform brand consistency leads to a kind of entitlement among people who purchase gaming products.  This was clear when Necrotic Gnome recently decided to package Dolmenwood with a house-ruled BX, adjusted to match the setting.  As someone who has played in the setting, this makes sense; it’s not strictly necessary, but the pulpy tone of early dnd is not a perfect match for the whimsical and sinister faerie vibe of Dolmenwood.  The changes seem minimal in any case.

However, this was met with a backlash from some online.  Most curious were people who backed one of the OSE kickstarters—dropping $100+ on the recent box set KS for example—who say they backed that product specifically to play in Dolmenwood, a setting that hasn’t even been completed and released!  For example:

These individuals were somehow content to spend all of that money on a retroclone—a product explicitly created to play the massive archive of TSR-era + OSR adventures—only for it to patiently sit on a shelf until the setting was released.  Or, they expected their purchase to be used only with official Necrotic Gnome modules, which could be placed on the shelf next to the box sets for their next shelfie.  And then, what happens when this Dolmenwood campaign is over?  Back to the shelf to gather dust.

Certainly, I have games gathering dust on my shelf, or digital dust on my hard drive.  So I get it.  But I think these two examples show how we become enamored by the idea of a game, and with it the long, rich campaigns we are going to run, only to be met with the reality of scheduling conflicts and groups that fall apart or never form.  In the face of this reality, the gaming shelf is a “lonely fun” comfort, at best, but at worst, a reminder of carelessly spent money and the failure of certain social and creative ambitions.

To whom it may concern.  This goes out to anybody who’s doing the bullshit, straight up.  Yo, everybody’s calling me, my lawyer, everybody on this, ‘yo did you scratch such n such name? Or this, that, and the third on the record for a hook?’ Y’all keep calling me on that shit and y’all supposed to be hip hoppers and all that, and letting the industry control the rules of the hip hop world that we made? Y’all need to knock that shit off, that’s some greedy-ass, fake bullshit!  And when that shit come and slap you in the face, that greed, I’ma be right there laughing at y’all…

Word up, man, I’m sick of this shit. Y’all muthafuckas really don’t know what this hip hop is all about.  So while you keep on faking the funk, we gonna keep on walkin' through the darkness, carryin' our torches.

Underground will live forever, baby, we just like roaches, never dyin', always livin’

And on that note, let's get back to the program…

Thinking about it more, however, I realized that underground metro stations would be perfect locations for dnd-style dungeons.  It is oft noted that the architecture of dungeons, especially megadungeons, does not really make sense, unless designed by a mad wizard.  Why are all the rooms separated by long, circuitous hallways?  Why do they sprawl out horizontally with no rhyme or reason except to perfectly fill a rectangular shape (like that of a piece of graph paper)?   A Jaquaysed dungeon may make for challenging exploration, but it’s not really what you are going for if you want a functional building.

The architectural features that make little sense for a building like a ruined castle, however, work perfectly well for a metro station.  I occasionally spend time in London for work, and I never fail to notice the circuitous nature of tube stations.  Often when you want to transfer trains, you are shuttled down a seemingly idiosyncratic connections of twisting tunnels, moving up and down stairs and stairwells in a way that can be confusing.  This is particularly noticeable if one is encumbered, e.g. with large suitcases.  Consider these “axonometric” maps of London Tube Stations:

I’m of a mind just to use those as dungeon maps!

Or this map of Shibuya station in Tokyo:

These infrastructural spaces (along with similar ones like airports and rail stations) are not places made for living or for stationary working (vending booths and such notwithstanding).  They are spaces made to connect other spaces, and this functionality requires its own architectural logic.  For this reason they are well suited, perhaps, to be “dungeons,” in that their layout can be confounding and difficult to comprehend as a whole (as opposed to the layout of a house, for example).

Meanwhile, the tone of an abandoned station—one in ruin or perhaps occupied by some faction or weird creature—makes for a potentially interesting environment.  Spaces may connect and loop back to either other in a variety of ways (platforms, escalators, stairs, lifts), but individually the spaces can be eerie and claustrophobic, with no where to run.  Surely if you’ve taken the NYC subway late at night you are at least minimally aware about your surroundings.  

Anyway, here is my week 1 Dungeon 23. Ignore my overly inked and unreadable map. I started to draw some water but then it looked like scribbled, so then I kept filling in water puddles and such but it didn’t make it better. One thing I did learn: this Rhodia paper can take a lot of ink! There was minimal ghosting on the other side of the page.

This station features:

• A skeleton ticket agent that will screech if disturbed.

• Water pooling on still-electrified tracks creating a dangerous situation (after some research this situation would not be dangerous in real life, as water drops all the time on electrified tracks, but…this is special magical water! or magical electricity! It’s a trap and you have to avoid it. Switch is in the room with the skeleton. Challenge based play ftw).

• Four Escalator Mimics, of differing dispositions: Kiet is a trickster, Haru is hungry, Cindy is playful, and Apsara is just lonely

• Hill Canton’s - Pointcrawling Sigil’s Undercity. In this (classic?) series of posts about pointcrawling, Chris Kutalik deals with the challenge of trying to create a truly vast space, one that can’t be reasonably mapped in 5’ square increments (any more that an entire above-ground city could be mapped to that level of detail).  That said, pointcrawling also works for Sigil’s “mythic underworld” type undercity, as spaces can be connected by portals or warped space.

• This Web DM episode about traveling around the planes, specifically the Infinite Staircase, one of my favorite aspects of Planescape. I was of a mind, in fact, to do an infinite staircase megadungeon with a bunch of planar locations.  In that video, Jim Davis makes a somewhat off-handed remark about the map for an infinite staircase campaign resembling a flowchart or subway map.

So, I want to do a point crawl dungeon, with the points being 52 7-room dungeons/locations.  Pointcrawls work well for overland travel, where you can overlay the points and paths onto a traditional map (just like you might overlay hexes onto a map).  And they should work reasonably well for exploring a large underground complex, like mines or a series of caverns, especially where the characters might not have an easy intuitive sense for how the spaces fit together.

However, a pointcrawl map can produced a map with a warped sense of space (e.g. where two locations seem close but are not). This is especially true when you are trying to represent both horizontal and vertical space.  Kutalik addresses this problem by making a point-based sideview map; however, I don’t really see what this adds to a traditional sideview map aside from just being easier to draw. 

Putting the above together, it strikes me that designing a pointcrawl map that expresses both horizontal and vertical connections is a solved problem, in a sense:  The metro map!  Or subway, tube, underground, etc.  Take a look at London’s underground map:

I’m imagining that each line (identified by color) can be a different layer of the dungeon.  Connection between underground lines can represent spaces where multiple layers connect.  Using a metro map for a dungeon in this way would mean that, horizontally, your dungeon layers are more simplistic, often more or less a straight line.  But the vertical space is thoroughly Jacquaysed.  Imagine a party trying to get from Green Park to Holborn, both on the Piccadilly line (dark blue).  They could just travel along the Piccadilly line, but perhaps they want to avoid the faction at the Leicester Square location.  So they drop down one level to the Victoria line (light blue) to go to the Oxford Circus location, then drop down, say, six levels to the central line to go all the way to Holborn.  But! at the Tottenham Court Road location they discover a huge pit that takes them down to the yet-undiscovered Northern Line, another 4 levels deeper.  Do they come back to explore that layer?  Will it reveal other connections between locations that could make their life easier? 

Underground maps are also useful for expressing undercity connections because they literally traverse and connect the entire city.  There’s even space for a river or other water features that one can place below ground instead above.  An actual metro system isn’t miles and miles deep, of course, but this where we are megadungeoning the metro map. 

But isn’t that too many locations?  Yes.  My plan is for the connecting points to be fully developed locations (i.e. 7-room-ish weekly dungeons).  “Locations” on a map that don’t connect to other lines could be places to roll a random encounter.  This might also lead to a decision point for players: do they take the level 3 line that has a ton of random encounters, or do they take an alternate path that involves vertical travel but with fewer encounters?

• Full Pointcrawl series:

• More metro maps. Imagine these as megadungeons!

  

  

  

  

Exploration Gameplay

The idea of xp-for-gold, of course, is that it drives the exploration-driven gameplay of classic dnd.  One risks venturing further into the dungeon for the possible reward of gold, and that dynamic is expressed as experience and used for leveling up.  Any story that comes out of that loop is emergent and can be engaged with on the PCs terms.  This can be contrast with xp for killing monsters, which transposes the risk posed by combat into balanced “combat as sport”; and milestone leveling, which in my experience leads to leveling at random times just because.  Character motivation becomes a concern in the latter, with players having their characters go on the adventure because that’s the adventure the GM prepped/bought, and if players choose not to be railroaded in this fashion, they are breaking the social contract of the table.

So far in my OSE game, has xp-for-gold driven exploration?  Hard to say.  Being that this group was primarily used to 5e, they sort of had to be taught to be always seeking treasure as they explore.  As sessions went on, they’ve started to take more risks and interact with things for the sake of getting treasure.  At the same time, however, they’ve been guided in each session by some overarching quest.  When we played Winter’s Daughter, we started with one of the given hooks  that they were looking for a specific ring; as they played through, they took on the quest of reuniting the knight and princess.  When they entered the Gardens of Ynn, they did so looking for a missing child.  If they found any valuables that were too inconvenient to carry (a full size mirror with a silver frame, a set of fine plates and dishes, etc), they just left it.

However, they *are* motivated to find magic items.  The Wizard wants spell books, the Knight wants weapons and armor, everyone else wants any magic thing they can find.  In fact, most of the interactivity has come from them wanting to find something magical.

The World-building Implications of XP-for-Gold

However, the focus on GOLD in classic dnd has world-building implications that are potentially difficult to deal with, including

• Tomb-Robbing:  classic dnd adventurers are figured down-and-out fortune seekers who are out to take everything not nailed down (and even then…).  They are both representatives of the forces of law and in ambiguous relationship to that law  Gygaxian-dnd foregrounds the settler-colonial tropes, though various people in the OSR have built worlds with different kind of assumptions to accommodate this style of gameplay: for examplecharacters starting with debt in Electric Bastionland or tombs falling from the sky in Gus L’s Crystal Frontier.  But I don’t think it is very motivating in my OSE game.

• Bloats and Sinks: the sheer amount of treasure collected in classic dnd gets out of hand very quickly.  *If* it is the case that the characters are neerdowell treasure hunters, they likely get all they need and more from one dungeon expedition.  At most, they would have to organize an expedition every year or so.  As it is, already at level 2 my PCs are at a loss for what to spend money on beyond copying spells.  They’ll have to remove some curses, but in general they’ve shown no interest in new equipment or buying real estate.  One can invent, as in AD&D, all sorts of gold sinks for them: taxes, strongholds, theft, etc.  First of all, this adds a lot of bookkeeping to the game, and in many ways the DM must devise their own systems.  Second, it shifts gameplay away from the dungeon.  Finally, it doesn’t really motivate players to seek out gold when that gold just gets drained away in mundane expenses whose maintenance requires further dungeon exploration.  Especially when my players are content to have their fictional characters sleep in a barn.

• It’s the Economy, Stupid: if taken seriously, the political-economy that results from classic dnd would be a classic goldrush situation.  As soon as one person came back from a dungeon with 100x the average salary in gold, there would be a) a huge influx of migrants also seeking gold; b) local powers sending in small armies to deal with the monsters (not independent teams of 4-6 people + 2-3 hirelings); and c) rampant inflation.  Again, the crystal frontier setting manages to include all these elements in a non problematic way.  But the Dolmenwood setting tells us that “a thread of rustic civilisation runs through the heart of Dolmenwood, with hamlets and inns dotting the handful of roads that penetrate the Wood. The people of the forest are a quaint and superstitious lot, but welcoming of outsiders.”  Certainly it can be a setting where money and power exist and drive conflict, but I feel making it into a goldrush would somewhat ruin the fairy-tale feel.  I think we all just want to hang out in the cozy town of Lankshorn and smoke some pipeweed.  Also, as a DM, I’m not here to create inflation models for fantasy economies.

Other Issues

• Bookkeeping: I keep a google sheet that contains all PC character sheet and a running total of their treasure.  It’s not too bad, and I would probably like to keep track of that anyway, but a simpler xp system would be nice

Tentative solutions

• XP-for-magic items: a small amount for potions/scrolls, a larger amount for permanent items.  They are motivated by magic items anyway, so this seems like it could serve the same purpose as xp-for-gold.

• Group quest XP (where most quests involve finding a specific item or person):  This would hopefully motivate exploration in ways similar to xp-for-treasure.  One difference is that once a group finds the macguffin, there isn’t built-in incentive to keep exploring (unless there’s more than one macguffin).  But they still could be motivated by finding more magic items, and it’s not like they won’t also want to find mundane treasure, and by the time they find said macguffin they might get wrapped up in the faction politics and story of the dungeon.  The group can also determine their own goals and I can assign XP rewards accordingly

• Individual quest XP: if a character can achieve an individual goal, they could get a set amount of xp.  They would define what their goal is, in conversation with me to make it concrete and adventure-able

What I like about all of the above with respect to OSE is that I can keep variable leveling.  I like that some classes level faster than others, and especially that the more powerful classes level slower.

Further Reading

DM David - Why D&D characters get tons of gold and nowhere to spend it

B/X Blackrazor - B/X D&D - A Flaw of Design

All Dead Generations - Classic vs Treasure

Mazirian’s Garden - XP for GP and Retro-Gaming: What are the Alternatives?