https://table46.bearblog.dev/feed

This Month on Table 46

I blogged about why hex maps need blank spaces for the Maps Blogwagon as well as attending Forge Midwest 2026. In the next few weeks I hope to present the systems I brought with me to Forge Midwest and to give more detailed play reports about what happened during my playtest sessions.

Blog Posts and Other Gaming Reading

I'm going to try splitting out posts by Bloggies category this month to see if that makes them a little easier to track.

Theory

• Mothership: A Useful Economic Baseline for Horror - INJECTOR SEAT - a look at how economic pressure can be used to produce horror.
• Is the OSR Evolving? - Tim B. - thoughts on how the OSR is changing and how it might develop in the future.
• Snakes & Ladders: The Problem of Linear Progression in D&D - Methods & Madness - what does the fact that D&D characters either get better or die mean about the game?
• Against Maps - Among Cats and Books - an examination of all the things maps are used for in roleplaying games and how they do (and don't) actually serve those purposes.
• Unbalanced combat is cool - Murkdice - an explanation of why a wide variety of difficulties in encounters enhances a game, offering players a chance to express their agency in different ways.
• Playing vs. Using - Songs of Sibylline - drawing a distinction between playing the game as the designer intended as compared to ripping it apart to do your own thing.

Gameable

• Astrology Signs for OD&D - Idraluna Archives - a proposal to replace ability scores and their associated modifiers with a table containing sun and moon signs that also provide benefits.
• Level Zeta III - Scribbles and Horrors - is this one actually gameable? I'd struggle with it, but this is a massive, convoluted dungeon map.
• Virtual Table-Top Tokens from Tom Gauld - Benign Brown Beast - a set of delightfully whimsical tokens for use on VTTs extracted from Tom Gauld's comic strips.
• Chain Stocking the Hex Map - Prismatic Wasteland - a method of stocking a hex map that makes sure hexes are tied to each other.
• Tracking the Storm - Cats Have No Lord - how to simulate a cyclone in a maritime setting.
• Magical Violence - The Foot of Blue Mountain - a relatively simple freeform magic system.
• WIZARD VIOLENCE - The Black Citadel - rules for warding, wizard duels, and summoning.
• Oathmaking: Beyond the Three Oaths in Mythic Bastionland - additional rules for swearing oaths, geasa, and boasting.
• d4 bags that are worse than bag of holding - 400 independent bathrooms - you really shouldn't let your players have these.
• Sacred Numbers: Alternative Birth-Signs - Hags - another schema for generating boons for characters based on a zodiac.
• Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources: Part 2 - Throne of Salt - further expansion of how to turn a smorgasboard of public domain stories and legends into the narrative structure of Lord of the Rings.
• the woods where the moon will be born - Was It Likely? - a forestcrawl adventure full of interesting NPCs.
• Worked Example: Secrets and Clues for Blades '68 - Viridian Void - an example of Mike Shea's secrets technique as applied to Blades '68.
• Ten Years of GLOG (and! The Tomb of the Khan) - Whose Measure God Could Not Take - a celebration of the GLOG's tenth anniversary along with a short vampire themed dungeon.
• Enhancing Gradient Descent with Memory Theft - Three Witches - how to expand MONARCH's tormenting of the player characters in the Mothership megadungeon.

Advice

• Common OSR System Questions - Beau Rancourt - a list of questions to ask yourself when preparing to run a system or published adventure.
• Triangles, Relationships & Archetypes: Adapting the Nemesis System to TTRPGs - ideas for how to run hierarchies of relationships among NPC enemies.
• Why do adventurers exist? - elbiotipo - how should you shape society so adventurers interact with it in a more interesting way than they do in default D&D?
• A faction's greatest weakness should be its own internal complexity - Dark Star Adventures - a look at how factions having complex relationships with the setting can give the players leverage to use against them.
• DM tip: write fiction - TRAIPSE - a suggestion to write vignettes in your setting to practice your prose.
• 'No' is the most interesting answer - Murkdice - why you should tell your players 'no' more often.
• Why Han Solo Was An Amazing TTRPG Player And TTRPG Players Of Han Solo Characters Mostly Aren’t - Old Men Running The World - advice for players on how to make a lone wolf character cooperate with their party members.
• In Defense of Empty Hexes - I swear I didn't know this was coming! Idraluna Archives makes the same argument I made for Prismatic Wasteland's maps blogwagon, but does it better.
• The Three Secrets of Making Games - Jay Dragon - three reasons you should playtest, playstorm, and seek feedback for your designs as soon as possible.
• Swimming Rules for His Majesty the Worm - To Be Resolved - what it says on the tin. These look like they'd be quite easy to convert to another system.
• The Door Tax - 3x5 Arcana - how, when, and where to place doors and change their attributes so they enhance your game instead of slowing it down.
• Elements of a Key 4: Rules for Key-Writing - Being an Asshole to a Goblin - more advice on how to best write dungeon keys.

Critique

• Review: The Monster Overhaul - Seed of Worlds - a review of Skerples' expansion of many classic monsters.
• Where the Work Happens - Taskerland - a review of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012 by Michael J. White, followed by thoughts on how RPG play cultures have developed over the last quarter century.
• The Riddle of Steal: HD, Attrition, and Black Sheep - Unturned Hovel - an examination of how mechanics in several classic and OSR games affect attrition and how characters are worn down by play.
• Review - Rare Bird - Cats Have No Lord - a look at a recently released free adventure for Swyvers.
• Flip Through — Fatherfog - the Dolent Chronicle - a review of Tuesday Knight Games' latest effort using the Panic Engine.
• Arden Vul - The Campaign is Cooked :( - Beau Rancourt - a breakdown of one faction in Arden Vul and how the treasure rewards they possess are completely out of whack with AD&D's treasure guidelines.
• An Analysis of Blades in the Dark Criticism - Aggregate Cognizance - a review of Dead Letters podcast's review of Blades in the Dark, along with its own critique of the game.

Meta

• Dead Renaissance - The Waves of the OSR - Snow - a musing on cultures of play and genre in the form of a Socratic dialogue.
• Searching for the free games ecosystem (and designing for desire paths) - MOMMY'S BIG GLASS OF WINE ALONE TIME BLOG MOST FOUL - how does what we can afford to access shape the way we interact with art and games?
• Roleplaying Games as an Expression of Fandom - Owl Knight Games - an essay about how roleplaying and RPGs relate to fandom.
• The Sieve - Beau Rancourt - Beau has coded what look to be some useful tools for rapidly rolling monster hit dice, easily sharing and managing party inventory, and converting Markdown docs into printable two-column adventure modules, along with some planned community features.
• Ruins & Rogues post-mortem - Tim B. offers a retrospective on his game along with some insights into what the goals of game design should be.
• THE ALIEN/MYTHIC FANTASY MANIFESTO: On the Tone of Fantasy I Enjoy - The Black Citadel - a manifesto about inspiration from fantasy that's less concerned with the mundane.

What I'm Reading

• Beyond Corny Gron
• A Deadly Education
• The Herbalist's Primer

What I'm Playing

• D&D 5e
• Under Fantastic Skies
• SETI
• Imperator: Rome

Forge Midwest ran April 24-26 this year, so I'm quite late getting this report out. I had a blast as I do every year. I'd planned on running one session for each of my playtests, but we ended up short on pitches Friday evening, so I ran a bonus session of Jewelsea RPG. Without further ado, here's what I got up to this year.

Day OnePits of the Curse Lords

Pits of the Curse Lords was Mike Holmes' newest playtest, a sort of story telling game centered around a dungeon crawl into the titular pits. We played as a group chasing after Vashkar the Thrice Promised, a general who had disappeared into the pits with his entire army.

Characters each had five stats, Fight, Sage, Tricky, Magic, and Wild, along with a reason they were cursed and thus had to enter the pits to seek a way to break their curse, a profession along with two freeform abilities that profession gave them, and an Oath which breaking would mean advancing their curse. We also each started with a magic item.

My character was Marcus, Procurator of the Treasury of the Missing God. He'd been bitten by an asp and the driving out of the poison had cursed him, but he'd made an oath to retrieve the Spear of the Smiling God from where it had been lost in the pits as payment. He could physically hold conceptual things and had perfect knowledge of the laws of heaven, along with being the holder of the Signet of Openings, which could open any door or container when stamped against it but would never allow anything so stamped to be closed again.

We played a series of scenes in a way that felt quite reminiscent of Eat the Reich. I used my powers to steal the voice of a guard dog trying to alert an enemy camp, but other players ended up deciding to fight the whole army anyways. Ultimately it felt hard to meaningfully interact with anything other players were doing. There's a spark of something here, but it's going to need more work.

Wulfwald

I first played in a Wulfwald playtest at Forge in 2016 or 2017, so I was an eager backer of the Kickstarter in 2022. It was good to get another chance to play. This time I went for a scinnlaeca, the game's necromancer, as my character.

It didn't take me long to figure out that we were playing through The Rose War of Wigwell, one of the adventures in the boxed set and that I'd playtested back at Forge pre-pandemic, so I stepped back a little bit and let other players who hadn't seen the scenario before take the lead. We had fun playing through and ultimately climbed down the well to destroy the creature infesting the town.

Jewelsea RPG #1

I showed up to Forge this year with an updated draft of the Jewelsea RPG, incorporating some of the updates I've blogged about over the past year and incorporating several new systems for invocations and rituals. This year I also brought my own draft adventure, Tempest Kettle, rather than using Trilemma Adventures like I did last year. I'll go over my new rules and play reports in more details in a later post.

Day TwoMaskers

Maskers is my other draft game, much more story game inspired than Jewelsea RPG. It's a game about desperate people seeking occult power to achieve their goals. I've pitched it as Breaking Bad meets Majora's Mask in Unknown Armies. This was an extremely rough draft that I threw together two nights before the convention as a few discussion I had on Discord coalesced in the back of my mind into something I thought could finally realize this idea that's been stuck in my notebooks for most of a decade. Like Jewelsea RPG, I'll detail this more in a further blog post.

Den of Wolves

This was the first time I'd ever played in a megagame, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Den of Wolves: New Eden takes very clear inspiration from Battlestar Galactica - the players are the officers of a fleet of ships fleeing Wolves (the game's equivalent of Cylons) through a dangerous region of space, trying to stay far enough ahead while managing supplies and the unrest of the civilians aboard their ships.

I ended up as the chief engineer of the fleet's fuel refinery ship. Every turn, I was managing the allocation of power between our ship's various systems. Unfortunately, on the first turn of the game, the fleet was ambushed by the Wolves. Our military commanders decided to attack them head on, a decision which ended disastrously for our fleet, knocking out both most of our military capacity and ending up with most of the crew of the flagship dead. We spent the rest of the game fleeing any engagement with the Wolves.

It wasn't long before unrest started building, both mechanically and between players. We were all aware that there were a few Wolf plants within the officer corps and there was a lot of time spent trying to figure it out. The President was acting suspiciously and it wasn't long before a posse arrested and deposed him. This caused more problems, however - we'd already been bad at communicating and coordinating the target of the next jump, and while we were attempting to coordinate the election of a new president, the Wolves ambushed us. This led to the fleet getting split between systems as different groups of ships had different jumps planned. One of the ships failed to jump at all and was destroyed. Fortunately, we were able to process enough fuel to get the rest of the fleet assembled again and jump away before we could be picked off one by one.

At about this time, I started to become suspicious of my own captain. She'd been taking our engineering shuttle to distribute fuel to the rest of the fleet. I knew how much fuel each other ship should be consuming per jump, and with the fuel she was taking away, there should have been more than enough for the whole fleet. Despite this, I had multiple engineers on other ships telling me that their reserves were short. When the captain came back to the ship and accused me of being a Wolf spy, I knew I had to act. I rounded up a posse and committed her to the brig.

Now both Chief Engineer and Acting Captain, I proceeded to manage the entire fleet's fuel supply by myself and the issues immediately cleared up. We figured out one of the Wolves' plants and spaced them, managing to stay one step ahead of the Wolves until we finally reached a sector where we believed we could jump to a safe planet. We sent out scout teams that were able to plan a route, but it was going to be a risky jump and we didn't have enough fuel for every ship to make the attempt. We chose to abandon the flagship and one other as we packed everyone into ships with the most crew capacity relative to fuel consumption. We lost one more ship in this final jump and ended the scenario getting about 1/4 of our starting population to a safe destination.

I had a lot of fun with this one! By far our biggest mistake was when no officers were present on the civilian ship that had the largest population during our attempt to organize an election. We lost a good quarter of our population in one fell swoop there. The case of the missing fuel was also solved in the wrap up - my original captain had pocketed the fuel, thinking we had to distrust everyone and that meant concealing how much fuel the refinery had available. She then promptly forgot she'd pocketed the fuel, so a significant amount of fuel spent the rest of the game hidden from everybody. We definitely learned that trying to accurately coordinate and trust each other while looking out for betrayals was a much better strategy than trying to keep the inner operations of each ship secret.

Jewelsea RPG #2

I ran another session of Jewelsea RPG on Saturday evening - details to come in a future play report.

Day ThreeSETI

I brought SETI, the board game about exploring the solar system and finding aliens, for the Sunday morning session. I'm usually pretty quick to figure out at least basic strategies for this kind of game, but after two plays I'm not sure I'm there yet. We didn't quite make it all the way through in the slot, ending partway through the fourth turn of five, but I was not well positioned to win this one. I look forward to getting it back to the table.

Into the Odd

This was a sequel to a game I didn't get the chance to play in last year, though I don't think it suffered from my lack of context. I got a brief recap - last year's group had been seeking after a relic and failed after encountering the Finite God. As the successors and allies of that group, we'd been recovering in the sanctuary of Dorema, the goddess of uninfested mattresses, before we moved to complete the contract given to us by the Brotherhood of Scientific Supply to recover the Mantle of the Stars.

Leaving the sanctuary, we headed to the Shrine of Lost Things, a sort of library/monastery where anything that was lost might be found. We walked in and then quickly broke into a restricted area, searching after the Eyeglass of Piercing, which we should be able to use to pierce the illusions hiding the Finite God. Heading into the basement, my companion Caul followed me into a locked room while Edgar and Mylah took off running and pull the guards after them. Caul and I found the Eyeglass and escaped into the sewers, but we heard a great boom up above. After we emerged in the temple of Lusk, the Uncaring God, we were able to link back up with Mylah outside. We learned that Edgar detonated a grenade to get away from the guards of the Lost Things, but that soon afterward he'd been taken by the Brotherhood of Scientific Supply, unhappy that we were in arrears on our contract.

We met up with Sven, another of our compatriots, and used the Eyeglass of Piercing to pick up the Finite God's trail, following it to the edge of Bastion, confronting some aggressive atheists along the way. We found the Finite God living in modest but well-appointed house and he invited us to stay the night before leaving to return to his temple in the morning, bringing the Mantle of Stars along. As the evening passed, we began to forget why we were there - the Mantle was altering out minds, making us forget the wearer in the same way that the Finite God's temple had forgotten him. We tried writing ourselves notes, but these were wiped clean as soon as we weren't looking at them. The only thing that worked was staying in the Finite God's presence.

The next morning, we rode in the Finite God's steam carriage back toward his temple, but it soon broke down and we had to walk the rest of the way. As we passed through a back alley, we were confronted by collector aliens who wanted to abduct us, but we were able to defeat them when they decided not to accept our refusal. We returned the Finite God and the Mantle to his temple and got our debts to the B.O.S.S. forgiven, along with acquiring the deed to the house we found the god in.

Conclusion

Another successful FMW in the books! As always, I'm grateful to Willow, Tim, and Shari for organizing the event and I'm glad I can help with it in what little ways I can.

When I was first reading The Dark of Hot Springs Island, one of the things that struck me was that the density of points of interest on the island was almost completely uniform across it. As an OSR novitiate at the time, I didn't think too much of it, but nearly a decade of play onward, I've come to realize that there's a popular style of hex map that I don't like very much - the kind that puts a point of interest in every hex.

Exploring a hex map isn't so different from exploring a dungeon, especially if you are (as I think most of those who play hexcrawls are) using abstract hexes rather than representational hexes. Each hex functions as a room in a dungeon, where you can have random encounters or interact with the contents of the hex and move through the hex border just like you would a typical exit to a dungeon room.

One of the earliest bits of advice about dungeon stocking was to leave empty rooms. As many of us have learned over the years, empty rooms don't mean there's absolutely nothing of interest inside, but I do believe that in order for a dungeon to have texture, there needs to be significant variation in how interesting each room is. This helps the dungeon feel more like a real place and it means that moving through the space feels more like how I remember my day when I look back on it — the boring drudgery is compressed and the important bits (good or bad) stand out more. This sort of spatial texture enables moving smoothly between close and distant playstyles, which is one of the things I enjoy about RPGs.

I think that an overland map benefits from the same sort of texture that a dungeon does. My favorite hexcrawls to run or GM involve moving through days in a minimum of playtime until something interesting happens, while when a group stops every few miles to faff about at the next point of interest the game starts to feel like a series of loosely linked vignettes rather than a campaign. The connective tissue begins to fail because there's too much strain on it - it could be weeks of real time cover the few days of travel between setting out on an expedition and finally arriving at the intended destination, by which time the passion that the players had for the objective there may have cooled. A map like Hot Springs Island or Dolmenwood, while packed with great ideas and encounters, is overwhelmingly dense and prone to derail play.

By letting the map breathe and giving things more space, you give more space for random encounters and travel time to give your world texture. You let the players experience the game world more like they do the real world. Leave some empty rooms on your hex map.

This post was written for Prismatic Wasteland's Maps Bandwagon.

Welcome back to my monthly newsletter, the first of spring! Now that it's been a going concern for four months, I'm curious what people find useful, what they'd like to see more of, what could be improved on. Are folks interested in an email version of the newsletter? Should I try to split up the blog post roundup by categories? If you have any suggestions or ideas, reply to this post's thread on Bluesky (or hit me up on Discord if you know where to find me).

Rootring is a new RPG blog webring! You can see my webring page in the header above. I encourage everyone to go poke around and give other blogs some love, and most of all to let Elmcat know how much his work is appreciated in the community!

This Month on Table 46

Only one post this month - my recap of my time at Gary Con. I had a good time, but Gary Con has been my bubble con for several years now - I go if the mood strikes me, but it lacks something to keep me coming back every year. Forge Midwest is coming up next weekend, and that's probably my favorite con of the year. I'm hoping I'm able to get the new version of Jewelsea RPG and a starter adventure ready in time to throw them at some willing playtesters, but it's not looking good right now. Hope springs eternal however, and I may have time to crack down and get it done this coming weekend.

Blog Posts and Other Gaming Reading

• Teaching Cairn to Kids - Widdershins Wanderings - useful for teaching more than just kids, this is full of examples about how to get people up to speed on a new game.
• Referee Sabotage - Papers and Pencils - a look at how to GM player plans for a specific situations and avoid wasting everyone's time.
• More Ways to Die: Getting Old - Archbrick - some light aging rules for OSR games. They look very playable, even though most campaigns don't take place over the requisite scope of time for them to be useful. It's the kind of thing I like to dream about for a grand campaign.
• MIGHT DICE: New House Rule for Fighters - a light implementation that boosts Fighter damage in OSR games.
• Dolmenwood Campaign Goals & Bib- and Blogliography - Dungeon Merlin - this is a great list of principles for a Dolmenwood campaign combined with a bunch of links to other wisdom.
• Minimalist treasure 2: generating hoard types - Methods & Madness - part of a running project on how to make TSR D&D's treasure tables simpler. This one looks at how bulk relates to the practical value of a hoard.
• Seven-Part Pact - The Wizards (Chapter 2) - Jay Dragon - I'm really looking forward to this game. I love wizards and the wizard's council is something that has heretofore been hard to represent in RPGs. I haven't yet read the entire playtest draft, but both Dwiz's series last year and Jay's current deep dive into her work are very encouraging!
• Designing Location Blocks - The Play Reports - I like what Kati's done here to expand Clayton's lore blocks idea into something useful for locations as well as monsters or NPCs.
• Role Playing for GMs - 3x5 Arcana - a great look into how to quickly create interesting NPCs - make them want something and believe something.
• Elements of a Key 3: Actual Keys - Being An Asshole to a Goblin - a review of a bunch of different keying styles and how they help and hinder the GM's use of the information they contain.
• stop writing like a robot! - Was It Likely? - a manifesto about worrying less about fitting your writing into what your idea of what the scene wants and doing more to make it your own. https://thecrownedcomiserate.blogspot.com/2026/03/npc-knights-for-mythic-bastionland.html
• I Yearn for the Spire - Hags - a moodboard that's a great source of inspiration for buildings on top of big pillars or cliffs.
• untitled - David J Prokopetz - a musing on the nature of why people think System Doesn't Matter (and why they're wrong).
• System Doesn't Matter as a Sales Strategy - Deeper in the Game - a response to the above post going deeper into why some RPG publishers want customers to think that System Doesn't Matter.
• FĒONDAS - Madman's Menagerie - a wonderful set of monster reenvisionings in the style of Luke Gearing's Monsters&.
• looking for the fingerprints on GURPS - Fluorite Guillotine - both a campaign recap for a science fantasy game set in a Dyson sphere and a musing on the purpose of "generic" RPGs.
• Work, Shortcuts, and Shortcomings - TRAIPSE - a forceful argument in favor of resource tracking and against abstraction. I don't agree with all its particulars but it is worth keeping in mind what you give up when using something like the hazard die.
• What Cookbooks Can Learn from RPGs - a lighthearted April Fool's post taking the usual advice about cookbooks and RPGs and turning it in the other direction.
• Announcing My New Kickstarter 5(e) Part Pact - Loot Loot Lore - a jape at Kickstarter marketing copy in the RPG space.
• Coffee Review: Drought Dragon Desolation - Golem Productions - a review of the latest from Merry Mushmen including some bits on the right level of detail for OSR adventures.
• Classic Traveller: Expanded System Generation - Alone in the Labyrinth - an adaptation of a system from Mongoose Traveller 2e back to Classic Traveller.
• Read the Dictionary - Dice in the North - how to use a dictionary for inspiration and vocabulary building.
• How to Talk About Difficulty - A Knight at the Opera - a look at the various meanings we can talk about when we discuss difficulty in games.
• AAJ Reflection 2: The Future of the Antarctic Adventure Jam - Idraluna Archives - I think Idraluna Archives' Antarctica setting is cool and collaborative work is ongoing to expand it.
• Developing the Sandbox: The Town - Blog of Forlorn Encystment - this one combines two running efforts - an exegesis of AD&D 1e and a project to expand and enhance B1 In Search of the Unknown.
• Light the Way! An Alternative to Tracking Torches - Pseudodragon - the debut post from a new blog that goes through some ways light tracking has been done and proposes an alternative.
• I made a weird list - Murkdice - a list of themes (don't call it a manifesto!) for the moods that Murk's designs are trying to evoke.
• Errant: The Mid Levels - Deeper in the Game - I don't see much about Errant, which is unfortunate because it's a great game. This post looks at how the game evolves as characters level up and are more able to throw their weight around.
• Taking time to play - A Telling Ellipsis... - ruminations on the time we all spend discussing, reading, and playing roleplaying games and how each respective step in that chain has less available time for most of us.
• Guards! - Thea Adora - not quite as recent, but I missed this when it was published. Some rules for how to use mercenaries to guard cleared areas of a dungeon and prevent restocking.
• Fiends You Know and Fiends You Don't - Numbers Aren't Real - building on Madman's Menagerie's post above, this adds more monsters in the Monsters& style.
• Using Folklore to generate cool myths in your TTRPGs - Grog For Games - a few examples of mythic creatures that don't involve fighting along with some tables to generate your own mythic creatures.
• [Every Angel is Terrifying... - All Dead Generations] - Gus L's take on a reworked beholder.
• Bathtub Review: The Waking of Willowby Hall - Playful Void - Nova reviews Ben Milton's classic module.
• Who was Woodes Rogers? Pirate Borg World Building - Domain of Many Things - a look at the man who became the British governor of the Bahamas during the Golden Age of Piracy.
• Play is Canon - Prismatic Wasteland - this builds on Sandra Snan's Blorb Principles to discuss the tiers of truth Warren uses in play.
• Let's Talk About Player Skill and Equipment - Patchwork Paladin - a look at how players new to the OSR playstyle can often miss what's important about mundane gear and a useful resource to show them how useful their kit is.
• Old School Police: How to Run an OSR Crimecrawl - Cavorting Whorl - thoughts on how to run a classic police procedural style investigation using OSR principles.
• 5 Rpg Ideas from Urban Design - a look at how urban design principles can influence how we use space in dungeons and the wilderness.
• Fullstack Refereeing - Among Cats and Books - a great analysis of how different elements of prep and play match up to aspects of software design and deployment.

What I'm Reading

• The Woman Who Would Be King
• Corny Gron
• Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World
• 3 Weeks in the Streets/Ra Power
• Time After Time
• An Apple Pie from Scratch, Part Vb: Tectonics: Alternatives to Plate Tectonics
• Persians: The Age of the Great Kings
• Beyond Corny Gron

What I'm Playing

• Imperator: Rome
• D&D 5e
• Under Fantastic Skies
• Warhammer 40k: Wrath & Glory
• Camel Up
• So Clover
• Just One
• Telestrations
• Ares Expedition
• SETI

Last weekend I (officially) attended my third Gary Con. My first was in 2020, which was unfortunately moved online for obvious reasons, and I also attended in 2024. In 2022 and 2023 I went to the con without a badge on Saturday and met with out of state friends. Here's a recap of what I got up to, plus some thoughts about the convention at the end.

Thursday

I got up way too early on Thursday morning and drove to the convention so I could save on a night of hotel costs. I arrived at the Grand Geneva at about 8:20 AM and got in line at will call for my badge, but we were quickly told that anyone who had a 9 AM event should just go without the badge, so I headed off to the Puzzle Dungeon seminar. I was lucky to run into Amanda P (read their post-con report here) in the hallway and they were kind enough to introduce me to Skullboy, Yochai Gal, and a few of the other Cairn folks. It's always nice to meet people you know from online discussions face to face!

Designing Puzzles for Adventure Games - Seminar

First on the docket was directsun's seminar about designing puzzles, featuring Joseph R. Lewis and Brad Kerr (I think there was a fourth panelist as well but my recall is failing me, alas!). I've read adventures from all of them before and played Lewis' Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow. They had a great presentation and I had fun with the panel.

After this one wrapped up I ran down to will call, where the lines were greatly reduced and managed to get my badge.

Diffusion Theory and the Spread of D&D - Seminar

Next up was my friend Victor's seminar about the spread of early D&D. I enjoy listening to Victor lecture, but this one unfortunately did not contain any new information for me - it essentially remixed some of what I've learned in other seminars Victor's given about early D&D combined with a lot of what I learned in Jon Peterson's Playing at the World.

A Familiar Tower - Old School Essentials

I was a backer of the crowdfunding campaign for this one, so I was eager for a chance to play it with Chris/directsun. The table was provided with third level pregens and I ended up with Serbar the Dashing, an elf. Warning - spoilers abound!

We opened with the party sailing in a small boat to the island tower of a wizard who hasn't been seen in a decade. As we neared the island, the sky suddenly went dark, the only light provided by a dim green glower visible on the door of the tower. We waded ashore on the small island and saw that the light came from a gem seated in the knocker on the door. We were also reasonably sure that something was watching us from the water.

As we approached the door, the knocker animated and began to speak with us. It told us that the owner hasn't been around much recently but that we still had to knock before it will let us in. We tied our boat to the knocker and then knocked very softly before entering the tower.

Inside was a shag carpeted room where a giant key was wrapped up in vines growing on the walls. We heard a catlike yowl coming from outside and something banged loudly on the door. The vines grew agitated and lashed out towards us when we approached, so we left them alone for the time being.

We opened a door in the side of the room and headed down a spiral staircase into the cellar. It smelled like rotting fish down there. The storage barrels in the room were mostly empty, but when we moved them we discovered a decorated, foot-wide hole leading through one of the walls. I could also see the outline of a secret door, but no mechanism to open it. At this point, a large pink cat came down the stairs to the party's immediate delight. We all gave it a lot of pets and attention and then decide that the way to deal with the hole in the wall is to strip our halfling naked and grease him up so we can push him through. There's a pool in the next room, which opens up to the sea outside through a tunnel. The halfling managed to lure the sea dog we had seen hints of outside onto a large switch in the room, but even the beast's weight wasn't enough to trip the switch.

As we tried to figure out what to do next, a pigeon-rat arrived and led us to its dying mother, who requested a potion from the wizard's workshop. We returned to the main floor, where we saw a giant cockroach sniffing around. We tried to talk to it, but it proved to be an unthinking beast and quickly attacked. When it tried to flee after being injured, we chased it upstairs and killed it.

On the second floor, we arrived at a landing full of taxidermied animals. We entered the room off the landing, which had a freestanding door sitting on a platform, not obviously leading to anything. Next to it was a table with circular depressions labeled Wardrobe, Vault, and Exit. A black marble sat on the table and a citrine marble floated above it. We played around with this for a bit, but experimentation proved fruitless, so we moved into the next room.

This room contained five vertical cylindrical vats filled with vaguely humanoid shapes. A table was covered in dead pigeon-rats. One of the creations in the cylinders awoke and attacked us. We tangled it up with ropes, but it proved invulnerable to non-magical attacks. I borrowed our fighter's magic sword while he held onto the ropes and cut the mutant down.

We grabbed a potion from the tables here and returned to the mother pigeon-rat. She tells us that we need the green marble to be able to leave this place. Returning to the lab, we looted potions, a spray bottle full of magical perfume, a potion recipe, and some miscellaneous valuables. We also found a jar full of marbles that looked like TV static. I also took advantage of a clue that Chris gave in the morning's seminar to look some secret treasure from inside one of the taxidermied animals on the landing.

We headed up to the third floor where there was a door with a lock matching the motifs of the giant key below, though unfortunately it was far too small to be used with the key. We could hear a psychic entity behind it - through that we learned that this was the library and this psychic had eaten all of the spellbooks contained within. We proceeded up to the fourth floor after agreeing that we'd let the entity out if we could.

The fourth floor had a basin table with what looked like a model of the tower in the middle and a ladder leading up to an attic. As we moved around within the room, it became clear that the model sitting on the table was in fact the tower itself - we were stuck in a sort of recursive loop. We were able to reach inside the "model" tower and retrieve the key, now normal sized, and also used the tower to make the marbles we'd looted much bigger so they would fit the large depression next to the freestanding door. We also found miniatures in the rooms cabinets, which we were able to embiggen and then take as loot.

We returned to the third floor and opened the locked door, where we found Carbuncle the spell armadillo. We led Carbuncle outside and the purple cat we had met earlier chose to attack this juicy prey. I intervened and grabbed the cat out of midair. Due to the wonder of the claw/claw/bite routine, I was very swiftly slain thanks to some lucky damage rolls. The others rushed Carbuncle away from the cat and gave him his wish to watch something small die - himself. They grabbed the spell gem he'd been carrying within his forehead.

At this point we conveniently had Hamez, the magic-user, show up so I'd have another character. We headed up into the attic, where we found the wizard's kitchen and bedroom. We looted some more treasure and decided to shrink down our thief to find the green marble which we were reasonably sure was in the cat's den up here. We used a Removable Limb spell to detach my arm, stuck it to the end of a ten foot pole, and I grabbed the shrunken thief and guided him to the cat tree where he was able to cut the green marble free of the tie it was on.

Unfortunately, we had to cut here for time. I had a good time with this one, but it was a little frustrating to have a third level character very quickly die to something I had not thought was a real threat in that way.

Eat the Reich

This is Grant Howitt's game about vampires eating Nazis. We played a scenario in which we were coffin dropped into Paris with the goal of finding Hitler at his zeppelin moored at the Eiffel Tower and drinking all of his blood.

We moved through a series of set piece combat/action scenes where we used increasingly over-the-top descriptions of how we defeated the Nazis, including super science weapons and dark magics, fighting through a church, the German Technology Pavilion, the Nazi Pleasure Garden, and the Eiffel Tower and Zeppelin. Coming up with the descriptions of the ridiculous action was fun, but honestly I felt like the rules got in the way of these descriptions while not adding much to the experience. I'll have to see what I think about the game when I get around to reading my copy.

FridayThe Friends We Made Along the Way - Empire of the Petal Throne

Victor was running Tekumel, as he always does at cons. In this session, we were playing the pregens from his upcoming Egg of the World, escorting one of our number, Amau the priest, from Jakalla to Thraya where he was to take up a new post in the temple. We jointed up with a caravan led by Senjallu hiMekrane along with a cast of interesting characters.

As we journeyed, we worked on introducing ourselves to our fellow travelers. When we arrived at Setnakh, where the road forks, Amau was attacked on the streets. At this point, he revealed to us that he was also carrying a secret package for the temple and he believed others had found out and were trying to steal it. We pressed on, but a few days later one of the other travelers coordinated with a large gang of bandits to attack the caravan. We were able to drive them off and safely arrive in Thraya.

As always with Victor's adventures, there was a lot of politicking and trying to sort out who we could trust in this one. Obviously, this is something I enjoy so I keep coming back. There wasn't a lot going on in the first half of the travel, but I thoroughly enjoyed the back half.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Odd - Into the Odd

My friend Matt has been running absurdist games at cons for as long as I've known him and this was no exception. We were playing as 1930s-ish bank robbers trying to escape to Peru with our ill-gotten gains, one step ahead of the sheriff. As we drove through the forest, the environment began to look strangely fungal and before we knew it, we'd rolled the car trying to escape the cops and were firmly entering a strange fantasy world.

We fled through the mushroom forest and came out near a greenish, sugary pool with giant crawfish on the shore. We ended up following the stream exiting the pool and eventually saw a strange, candy-striped steeple ahead. As we approached we saw a sign reading "HOUS OF SALVATION" with a giant squirrel dressed as a cardinal sitting below it. He greeted us warmly and several of us agreed to confession with Bishop Squirrel.

After that was sorted out, we continued south to some more normal-looking trees where a monkey riding a gorilla wearing wooden armor came out to challenge us. The monkey said he would let us pass if we brought him ice cream sandwiches from the mermaids in the sugar river, but since we could see the cops following not too far behind, we demurred and rerouted around the stand of woods.

We ran into some tiny stags guarding a castle that looked to be made of gold, but proved to be foil-covered chocolate. Inside the castle was a golden hind and a silver doe. We talked about his mortgage and he began to get upset that some of us were eating his house, so we left somewhat hastily.

Next up on our journey was a group of horses at a skate park. I attempted some cool tricks and then Zeraglio, the hostage we'd been dragging along, tried to escape on horseback. Our goon Max immediately shot the hostage and we bandaged him up and continued to keep him with us. As we continued to flee south, we came to a slow, shallow river. At this point we saw a battalion of ambulatory carrots and celery armed with muskets marching toward us. Our driver, Woody Earle, lost his shit and decided to charge them, but was cut down in a hail of fire. The rest of us hid, only coming out after the army marched past.

We found a nearby cave where we're greeted by a young goat with a tommy gun. The kid told us that the Carrot Brigade rose up a few weeks ago and killed all the adult goats and also informs us there's a road across the river. We waded across and found a sign that said "Welcome to Indiana." A strange beaver with wings and snakes for legs happened by and offered to light our campfire, saying Peru was just over the hill. We saw the cops just on the other side of the river and thought better of camping. We crossed the hill and found ourselves in Peru.

Can't say that's a route I though was possible to take to South America, but anything that gets us away from the cops!

Dawn Patrol

I originally had a Doomsong session scheduled, but unfortunately it was canceled, so I looked on the Gary Con schedule to see what still had tickets available and landed on Dawn Patrol. I'd never played before and I appreciated the old hands there being willing to teach the several new folks at the table. Unfortunately, my dice were ice cold so I missed my shot the first three rounds before both of my guns jammed and stayed that way for the rest of the night. I'd probably give it another shot, but it wasn't quite as interesting as X-Wing Miniatures was for me.

SaturdayBrunch

We had the semi-annual meal with the pandemic Tekumel campaign crew, meeting up as we do at Gary Con and Gamehole Con every year. It was good to share some laughs in person!

The Tomb of An-Rah Nassak - Vaults of Vaarn

I played a True-Kin because the Mycomorph pregen got snapped up very quickly! Our group was sent to the Tomb of An-Rah Nassak to recover the Manifold Box, with a secondary objective of acquiring some Friend Fungus.

The first day out from the Eigin Oasis, we encountered a pack of phthalo wolves chasing a cacklemaw woman. I tossed a smoke grenade to cover her retreat and the others let off a few warning shots, which scared off the wolves. The woman introduced herself as Jall and told us a bit about the tomb before agreeing to lead us there. We found a nearby campsite where we could get a bit of water from the inside of a tree and spent the night. It took another day and a half of travel to arrive at the tomb, during which time we had to dodge some lizard/lion creatures.

The tomb proved to be a 50 foot tall cube of blue stone with faces on three sides and bright orange fungus running down the sides. DAVE, our synth, scaled the side of the tomb and found a corpse on the top that seemed to be the origin point of the fungus. Once he returned, we put some luminous paint on our weapons and headed into the darkness of the tomb through one of the faces.

Inside, we found plexiglass cylinders holding mummified warriors with prismatic blades. Smaller cylinders held orange goo that puffed out spores when DAVE touched them. One of the corpses began to wake, so we skedaddled into the next room. In that room, cybernetic hounds were mummified in a tank on the wall. Fearing further animation, we headed upstairs to a room with a crystal cylinder reaching from floor to ceiling with a bulge in the middle.

The central bulge was filled with the orange fungus wrapped around a core. Four plinths were lined up on the edges of the room. Two contained canopic jars and the other two were empty, with red light glowing from their rims. A pile of fungus in the corner of the room occupied the same space that a fifth plinths should be located. As we fiddled with these, two fungus creatures wearing the missing jars as hats approached. We tried to talk to them, but they proved hostile so we beat them up and then stuck the jars on the plinths. This opened a door in the glass pillar.

DAVE and Bleet (one of our mutants) went up the pillar to the fungus sphere, quickly learning there was no gravity inside. As everyone else piled in except for me, the fungus animated and attacked. Staying in the gravity section, I acted as an anchor to stabilize everyone else's movement as they fought the fungus, which fled after it took enough damage, revealing a sarcophagus. Inside the coffin, we find the Manifold Box and a synth-hunting dagger along with An-Rah Nassak's skeleton. We returned to the oasis and received our rewards.

I enjoyed this one - I'm looking forward to VoV 2e and feeling slightly guilty that I haven't done more than skim my copies of the 1e stuff.

Reading D&D Aloud with Jeff Easley and Erol Otus - Seminar/Podcast Recording

This was a fun recording session involving Easley and Otus reminiscing about their respective times at TSR, their inspirations, and the current state of art. I think it will end up on Ben Riggs' Patreon feed at some point and it's worth a listen if that interests you.

Operation: Jumbotron - Top Secret: New World Order

I had another open slot with no plans, so I grabbed a ticket for this game. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much fun with it as I hoped.

I was playing a street magician who was part of the international spy organization. All the PCs were summoned to Lake Geneva where we were told we needed to go to the Paris Olympics and recover plans for an unjammable artillery drone that the FSB was buying at the Olympics. It was believed that some of the athletes might be enemy agents in disguise.

In Paris, we worked up backgrounds on many of the athletes, turned a few, and were able to work out that the handoff would be taking place at the team gymnastics competition. When we identified where the drop was to take place and headed to intercept, a gunfight broke out and chaos erupted among the spectators, but we managed to recover the thumb drive holding the plans and complete the mission.

SundayBlue Cheese Left to Rot - Swyvers

I named my character Tuppence for your Thoughts for this one. I was lucky enough to be able to read. Our group of scoundrels got a tip about an abandoned manor we could rob, so we headed there posthaste.

Arriving at the Lindsor Estate, we discovered it to be in poor repair and headed in the unlocked front door. It smelled like acrid shit inside. We immediately split up after one of us made a dare to the others to try to find the most valuable item they could in the first five minutes. Two Times and I rushed into the lounge, where I grabbed some bottles of brandy. I then opened a door to the cellar where I found a rat man waiting. He attempted to recruit us, saying his people could give us title to the house if we'd kill off the inhabitants.

He tailed us as we returned to the foyer to meet with the others and extended the offer to everyone, but we were noncommittal. Pony Trap had managed to loot some occult books and I was forced to tell them that they were better treasure than my brandy. After we get away from the rat man, some of the others admit they met a mother and son upstairs who asked us to rescue their daughter/sister from the rats below. We returned to the library where Pony Trap found the books and looted it and the adjacent smoking room for all they were worth before we headed down to meet the rats.

They took us to their leader, the Big Cheese, who demanded that we kill Cecilia, the daughter. We agreed to his face and headed to the larder she'd barricaded herself into. Persuading her to let us in, we looked around and discovered that the meat within was came from humans as well as more typical sources and that Cecilia's teeth were filed to suspicious points. We agreed to help her against the rats anyways, charging out and slaying the Big Cheese, which caused the rest of the rats to scatter. We headed back upstairs, Cecilia in tow.

Her mother refused to reward us directly and we began to get agitated. At this point, her grandfather arrived and began to draw up some hostile-looking magic. The mother then offers to give us an immediate reward if we kill the old man, so we do, but I end up getting cursed with age. The mother is true to her word and hands us a bunch of jewelry, along with a promise that she'll have more work for us in the future if we're willing.

We headed out and found a fence and some buyers for our loot, ending up invited to a party where a buyer is interested in the occult tomes. Prudence Garland meets us and we complete a deal for the books. We use our funds to improve our gear and clothes and rent some better accommodations.

I loved this one. I'm now regretting not going in on the Swyvers campaign and I'll probably pick up a copy when I have a chance.

Thoughts on Gary Con

Gary Con makes me a little uncomfortable. While I think OD&D was a fascinating, interesting system that spawned an enormous number of good things, I also think Gary's racism and sexism harmed the hobby. The con makes no attempts to grapple with the shadier side of Gary's legacy. It simply ignores any idea that there's a problem. I'm not sure there's any delicate way to resolve this, but it feels like some sort of public acknowledgement would be appropriate.

The transportation and food situation at Gary Con is the worst of any convention I've been to. The con is awkwardly sprawled across the Grand Geneva resort and is stretching it to its limit, with events across the length of the sinuous main lodge, at the indoor waterpark, and in the ski chalet. Shuttles run the mile plus distance from the main lodge to the other two locations, meaning that you could easily be looking at needing a buffer of 20 minutes or more to make it to an event on time.

Parking on site is now paid as of this year, but the convention was running roughly hourly shuttles to many of the hotels in the city. Unfortunately, as I discovered after I took the shuttle in one day, the last round of the shuttles departs at 11 PM, well before the last events end at midnight. Even on the final day of the con, the last shuttle left at 3 PM before the 4 PM close of the latest events. This makes the shuttles useless to anyone actually attempting to get the most out of the con.

I'm not a big fan of downtime at conventions. I'm there to play games, so unless I have a group I'm hanging out with, I like to have just enough time to grab a quick meal between events. Unfortunately, the food available on short notice at the convention is pretty abysmal, mediocre room-service food that's been kept warm in catering pots for hours and sold for highly inflated prices. Even if you are parking at the convention, the lots are far enough from the resort that taking a shuttle back to your vehicle, driving in to town, getting fast food, driving back, and taking the shuttle back to the main lodge can easily take an hour or more. I ended up going to Walmart the first night of the convention and buying the necessary ingredients to make sandwiches I could pack for the rest of the con.

I'm not a particularly gregarious person when it comes to people who are new to me, so games are a great way for me to add some structure to interactions with new people. I've met a number of folks at cons over the years that I still keep in touch with. I don't know who that might be from this year's con yet, but I hope to find out in the future. This year's Gary Con was a mixed bag for me, but I will likely be back again at some point in the future.

A month has passed yet again and I have continued to track my favorite blog posts from across the RPG blogosphere this month. There's a lot of great writing to read, think about, and use in your games. I'm really grateful that so many talented folks share their wisdom freely in this hobby.

Also, happy Ides to all who celebrate!

Blog Posts and Other Gaming Reading

• I've Been Thinking of Starting Things: Lessons in starting open world campaigns from Skyrim - Orthopraxy - I, of course, was comparing Morrowind's opening sequence to Skyrim's while reading this, but it's a good look at how to hook players into a sandbox quickly.
• Depicting Violence - The Garden Below - An interesting analysis of the cover art for Luke Gearing's latest effort from Juniper, the artist.
• The Player-Drawn Dungeon Map is a Fast Travel Hack - Blog of Forlorn Encystment - if you want an in-depth analysis of what the rules of AD&D imply and encourage, the ongoing series at Forlorn Encystment is great. I particularly like this look at mapping for the ongoing blogwagon.
• Daggerheart - a Dishonest Review (full of Lies) - Valeria Loves - don't let the title fool you! This is a great review full of truth.
• Designing Lore Blocks - Explorer's Design - an examination of Zedeck Siew's monster format from Reach of the Roach God along with an expansion and extension to further the goals Clayton laid out in the The 1 HP Dragon.
• Lockpicking Minigame - Tree Climber - a fun minigame for lockpicking.
• Squirm - Dungeon Mecha - a look at what it means when the conversation stops at a game table.
• Threaten Me with a Bad Time - BASTIONLAND - an argument for why rules that don't get used much and may be actively avoided can still be good for a game.
• Pokémon is OSR - Prismatic Wasteland - an interesting look at how OSR principles can be seen in the Pokémon series.
• Make Better Encounter Tables - Pikliz Dungeon - meditations on what the encounter tables of Pokémon imply and how you can build similar implications into your own tables.
• Talking about Pokémon 2 Much: The Implied Setting of Kanto (Generation 1) - Pikliz Dungeon - a fun examination of what elements of the early Pokémon games imply and how you can use those implications in your own game.
• final fantasy tactics could have been a ttrpg - Flourite Guillotine - I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics and this is a great analysis of how it works and how it could be ported into tabletop form.
• Rating Every Room in White Plume Mountain - Prismatic Wasteland - a fun, in-depth review of the classic module. Funhouse dungeons aren't my jam, and playing this one was one of the ways I discovered that!
• Failure with Gradient Descent - The Usual Tongues - a review that goes into issues that came up in actual play of this classic Mothership megadungeon.
• learning spells - Joe B - a review of how new spells are acquired in a few different systems, along with a suggested new variant for Troika.
• Three More Mapping Game Paradigms - Idraluna Archives - what if a dungeon game was more focused on exploration than combat or role-playing? This post proposes three ideas for the how and why of that type of game.
• 3d20 Fairytale Character Creation Tables - Sheep and Sorcery - it's exactly what it says on the tin. There's a lot of fun options on the tables!
• Stranger that Fiction: Fun with Maps - Magnolia Keep - an examination of not just what maps depict, but what they can mean and what they tell you about the people who made them.
• For the Last Wolverine, a Myth - Bommyknocker Press - a Mythic Bastionland myth along with an essay about the inspirations for this myth and what myths mean.

What I'm Reading

• Awaiting the Burning Gods
• The Smuggler's Guide to 1365
• Secret Vault of the Windswept Island
• The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization
• Fantastic Medieval Campaigns
• The Woman Who Would Be King

What I'm Playing

• Under Fantastic Skies - we continue to explore the island long dominated by the great dragon
• D&D 5e
• Warhammer 40K: Wrath & Glory - we've secured the succession for our Rogue Trader and now move back to learning the mysteries of the local sector.
• Imperator: Rome - I'm working on conquering the Erythrean Sea as Mosylon
• Touhou Luna Nights - I've played through two bosses. This one is interesting, but I find the mapping a little frustrating as there's no way to easily mark items I see but can't reach so I can come back later.

The Bloggies wrapped up this week. Congratulations to the winners! Now I'm here to tell you which posts I thought should have won in each category. We are all very fortunate that I am not in charge.

I look for two things when I judge a nominee: utility, or whether it provides me with an actionable idea that I can put to use in my play, and novelty, meaning I'm usually going to be more interested in an idea I haven't seen before than I am in an excellent refinement of an existing idea.

Advice

This was a tough one for me, as there were four posts I thought could win the crown here. Ultimate, I think I have to go with Aboleth Overlords' Action-Oriented Interaction. It's short, sweet, and makes a strong point that the game world is almost always more interesting if the players are learning about it by having their characters interact with it rather than simply asking questions about it.

Honorable Mention - Writing Rooms in Pairs, Treat Illusions As You Would Any Other Lie: No Rolls, A Lock With No Key: Designing Obstacles for OSR Play

Critique

I have to give the nod to Prismatic Wasteland's Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa in this category. I like the way Warren analyzed the Medusa encounter in Keep on the Borderlands using his encounter checklist, and the look at how gender has influenced several monster designs over the last half century is another reminder of how far our hobby has to go.

Honorable Mention - B1 and Toyetic Dungeon Rooms, How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design, Part 1: Pre-Jaquays Dungeons

Gameable

Valeria Loves' Promises, A Mythic Bastionland House Rule was the clear winner in this category. This takes something like the boasts from Wolves Upon the Coast (which I admit I have only heard about second hand, having read some of Gearing's blog posts and discussion elsewhere but not Wolves itself) and expands the idea into something I really love. Promises, Lessons, and Deeds all expand MB's Knights in interesting ways, both making them into more fully fleshed out people and hooking neatly into the mechanics.

Honorable Mention - 1d20 Diegetic Rules, 1d20 Hypo-Diegetic Rules, Wilderness Stocking - Expanded, Stacking The Deck – Mining Fallout: New Vegas for TTRPG Setting Ideas

Theory

Ben Robbins' The Star-Pattern: a Pitfall of GMing got at a problem I see so often when playing but lacked the vocabulary to describe previously. Games are so much more interesting when the players interact with each other rather than just the GM, and this post and its sequel are helpful in learning to break this negative pattern.

Honorable Mention - Books [Verb] Play, The 10 types of special rooms, Does Super Mario Bros. (1985) Have Rules?

Meta

There are an awful lot of "What is the OSR?" posts out there, and The Dodecahedron's The OSR Onion is my new favorite. It's got all the principles, it's got history, and it's got analysis of how those principles feed into one another and spur interesting play.

Honorable Mention - What is an OSR?, Mapping the Blogosphere, Don't wait to create, don't wait to learn, Same's Three-Question Taxonomy

Debut Blog

It's me! I'm the real winner here! In all seriousness though, I absolutely loved Dungeon Scrawler's Dungeon Room Index. It's been open in a tab for most of the last year, so it gets my vote.

Honorable Mention - Valeria Loves, The Garden Below, Afraid of Encounters

Blog Series

The voters got it right on this one. I loved several of these, but the Designing Dungeons Course walked away with it. This thing should be a published book! I can't believe they gave it away for free.

Honorable Mention - The AD&D Series, The Dungeon Room Index, The Seven-Part Pact

I was reading Pikliz Dungeon's most recent post and thinking about one of the contradictions of the Jewelsea that I haven't yet resolved - why does a world full of states and empires have a wilderness full of monsters? Why hasn't one destroyed the other?

The Monster Age

One of the reasons so little is known about the old empire is the complete collapse of civilization following its fall. Monsters roamed the world, breaking, burning, and butchering all they could. Societies only rose again once people learned techniques to repel the monsters. Two primary means ward the peoples of the Jewelsea against the malign forces that still hide in the dark places of the world. Neither are unfailingly effective, but they do enough that to most people, monsters are something present in scary stories for children rather than an ever-present threat.

Ritual

Rituals direct the natural forces of the world in ways that benefit the ritualist. Most pertinent here are the rituals that reinforce the boundaries of a settlement, creating a sort of barrier that monsters hesitate to cross. The more elaborate and permanent the boundary, the harder it is for a monster to pass. Some rituals are so elaborate as to involve inscriptions stamped into every brick in a wall.

Charms

Amulets, talismans, and other forms of charm are made to not only hide people from the notice of monsters but also to guide them away from places of danger. They act as effective wards against minor curses and rituals like the evil eye as well. They are more effective the longer they have been in someone's possession—they are most often given to a child before they learn to walk. Their protection is slow to build and slow to fade. Because it is not easy to turn on and off, these forms of protection are not very useful to those who seek to find treasure in ruins and the wilderness which is often surrounded by monsters. Those protected by charms will find that dungeons are hidden from them as much as they are from monsters.

Written for the February 2026 Blog Carnival.

Giants only enter the Jewelsea rarely. The low latitudes are unpleasant at best for these relics of a bygone era, bitter paranoiacs with skin of bronze who blame humanity for cooking the world in a long-past War of Many Suns well outside the reckoning of any reputable history. They are a broken people, so distrustful of others that they refuse to work even with their own kind except for those they have shackled to their wills.

Their eyes sparkle like rubies or sapphires from a height twice that of any human. Few among their kind are anything less than meticulously groomed. Giants are fit, but not slim - insulation is essential in the far north. Someone foolish enough to attack a giant may create a trickle of verdigris blood before the giant strikes them with enough force to send them flying.

Giants in the Jewelsea wear few clothes, only carrying what's necessary to bring their supplies along with them. Belts, backpacks, or bandoliers are common. A giant can accurately hurl a spear or throw a rock hundreds of meters. Most are also expert users of spell devices, particularly a set of three metal spheres favored by the giants who have mastered telekinetic disciplines. Some suggest that spell devices were originally invented by the giants, given their mastery of those ancient tools.

The paranoia of the giants is not natural. They are cursed to hate and distrust each other. The giants blame the old empire for shattering their once-great civilization that lived in cities carved from the ice that once covered the world. They say humans were once giants; they traded their fundamental essence for the luxuries of civilization and turned on their former fellows. The giants refuse to speak about the exact deeds of the old empire, but the curse of mistrust does not apply to humans. It's possible for human and giant to work together, but cultural prejudice means it is unlikely.

A human that drinks giant blood gains a bit of that giant's puissance and grows slightly in size until the blood wears off. The rare giant who is able to overcome their prejudice will occasionally recruit servitors that they supply with their own blood, granting a modicum of their power to their servants. Long-term use of giant blood may make some of its effects linger.

Giant children are produced by sculpting them from clay - one giant creates the sculpture and the another breathes life into it. The curse of mistrust means that they most often do this in pairs, each creating a sculpture for the other. Only after this is completed do they reveal the location. Children gradually succumb to the curse as well, until their parent no longer trusts them and drives them away to live on their own.

The giant homeland is said to be in the Broken Lands, the places of legend beyond the Isle of Shivering Dawn where the Frost Age never ended. None foolish enough to visit have ever returned to the Jewelsea to tell the tale. Those giants who do travel south rarely share their reasons.

Last week, there was some discussion on the Prismatic Waystation Discord of how high danger or lethality in OSR-inflected play combined with the ease with which a character can be replaced can lead to a lack of investment in said character. My modest proposal for correcting this disconnect and aligning player and character goals follows:

Every time a character dies, the player of that character must make a contribution towards the table's snack fund. Five, ten, twenty dollars—decide on the amount as a table. Use the snack fund for whatever you'd like—pizza, beer, chips, soda, candy, pretzels—at the next session.