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Midnight Hunt

I got really inspired maybe a year or two ago when watching the Castlevania Netflix series. I started putting together a setting module for it but it lingered in a half started state – as do most of my projects. 

But I picked it up again at the start of the month – I wanted something to run for Halloween.

As it’s the last thing I was working on – and I didn’t want to spend too long on it – I’ve built it for Rove.

It started as one card like Tomb of the Gilded Dead but I had too many ideas and wanted to give them some space. So its 3 (soon to be six i think). Perhaps one day I’ll return and flesh it out fully – I have many more ideas than I could fit. 

Anyway – it’s kind of three things. 

Monster Hunters

The first is just some evocative classes and monsters to fight with them. I wanted a monster hunting vibe – so the core abilities of the classes make them better at killing than normal Rove Characters. 

This is the core idea of Rove – modular rules you can just add to to create the vibe you’re after.

The monsters are supposed to be nasty – but made much easier if you can research and gather the right gear to take them on (Silver, Wooden stakes, etc) 

80% of the monsters aren’t finished – i’ll add them to the itch page in the next few days hopefully.

Setting Generator

Velorain is the setting. Everyone knows what it is – generic dark fantasy eastern europe kind of place. Dracula country. I wanted a generator so that it can fit on a business card but also so that it could create unique relationships each time. 

I think I succeeded. The main relationships are

  • The Castle & its villain
  • The Villains & their Horde
  • The Temples/Villages & their Oppressing Castles
  • The Villages & Nearby Dungeons

As with all my work (and especially Rove) a lot of the connections and setting info is pretty implicit and relies on an experienced Referee and a general knowledge of tropes. I should probably write a post about my thoughts on that sometime. 

Anyway – here’s an example of what it can do:

Take your dice and roll them – I arranged mine to be a spread out nicely:

The Village rolls were a little duplicated – so i retcon-ed a couple of them to get some more variety. 

Then you link them up. The rules say all neighbouring dice are linked – but as always – take that with some creative liberty. Then the closest dungeons to the castles determine what kind of a force the villain there is mustering – and Voila! My Velorain: 

I think it looks pretty sick. Obviously heavily inspired by the legendary In Cörpathium by Logan Knight https://lastgaspgrimoire.com/2014/10/08/in-corpathium/

I’ll see how running a game with it goes. 

Castle Generator 

Lastly, this one felt necessary for a Vania-esque setting. This time I was inspired by the derelict ship generator from Mothership’s Dead Planet. Figured i’d try and fit a similar table into a business card. Obviously I made some concessions but I think it worked out. 

Heres what I rolled to give you a flavour of what it can do:

Ill hopefully give this a proper go in the session I run with it later this month. 

So that’s Midnight Hunt. Pretty speedy production on this one so I don’t think it’s my finest work – but you have all the images – feel free to run it! I dare you! 

If you do, let me know how it goes. If you like it – consider throwing me a buck or two on itch.io – thats also how you can get a more convenient PDF of all the pages. 

I’ll try and put together the cards for the remaining monsters soon. I’ll stick it all up on the itch once it’s done.

See you next time.

Olobosk

Rove Devlog #3 – What is an Enemy?

  • Rove

This next card was difficult to design. It’s been the most difficult one so far to condense into two sides of a business card, yet perhaps has resulted in the one with the most “at the table” utility. 

Enemies, or opponents, encounters – Monsters – are one of the core pillars of OD&D and the majority of all TTRPGs since. They make up a good portion of the content in a typical session. 

Most TTRPGS provide you with a good list of them to pull from, or rely on adventures and supplements to provide them. I think Rove ultimately will do this too, but I wanted to provide a Referee with the mechanical stuffing necessary to run them in as best I could. 

My goal with this card when I set out was to create a list of example monsters, some of your generic fantasy creatures, to illustrate what to aim for. Here are my 3 tiers of basic beasty I came up with initially:

Skeleton

4 HP, Rusty Sword (d4)Dusty bones held together by ancient curses, covered in the tattered remains of what it was buried in. Hobbles menacingly toward any living creature, envious of what it lacks. 

  • Paralysing Glare: Focus Save or reduce Grace to 0 for d6 Turns.

Orc

15 Might, 12 HP, 1 Armour, Serrated Blade (d8, Bleed)A hulking brute of greenish grey skin, fitted with battle scarred scalemail. They only respect strength, using intimidation and violence until put in their place by a more powerful foe. Is ultimately a coward.

  • Bleed: After causing Damage, victim takes 1 Might Damage per Turn until the wound can be treated

Dragon

20 Might, 15 Grace, 15 Focus, 24 HP, 1 Armour, Teeth & Claws (d10), Fire Breath (d8, Blast)An enormous winged lizard, bright red scales and gnarled spikes cover its serpentine body. Covets its vast hoard of gold and jewels hidden in its lair. Intelligent, vain, manipulative and above all rapacious. 

  • Swallow Whole: Grace Save or be consumed in a single bite. Take d6 Damage from stomach acid each Turn. If not rescued within 4 Turns, suffocate.

I think doing this helped define in my mind what an Enemy is in Rove. So I produced an actual template:

[Might] Might, [Grace] Grace, [Focus] Focus, [HP] HP, [Armour] Armour, Weapon/Ability ([Damage])[Motivation] 

  • Ability: [Ability]

Ultimately this let me break down how I design monsters into 5 key aspects; Stats, Survivability, Damage, Motive and Abilities. 

The first three are fairly basic, but require some fine-tune balancing to make them fun and easy to use in the system. These are effectively what dictate the challenge of the enemy. 

Bigger number mean badder foe, mix to your liking. 

This is kind of my philosophy for all RPG combat. These numbers are largely arbitrary but understanding what each does to a combat encounter is key to providing appropriate challenges to a party of players. 

Stats are effectively resistances to Player abilities/machinations/etc. The exact flavour of Stat can give a sense of weaknesses/strength and provide some opportunity for Players to plan and optimise their strategy to exploit/avoid them. I am always wary about making these numbers high however. They only add opportunities to say no to your Players or deny them opportunities to shine. They should be used judiciously to give a sense of fairness or verisimilitude. 

HP/Armour only serve to either elongate or hasten combat. The bigger the numbers, the more rounds of combat there will be. With the variance in player HP/Armour and Damage output, it can never be an exact science, but its the dial you play with. The distinction between HP and Armour is largely of taste, but large HP can give Players a sense of size whereas Armour more of a sense of “unstoppability”. Sort of. It’s definitely subtle and in reality just gives a Referee something to anchor mid-battle descriptions off of.

Damage also serves as a timer to combat, but more importantly, it serves as punishment for poor planning and decisions. This is how a Referee maims and kills the Characters. Bear that in mind when making these numbers high.

Then we get to the interesting aspects. The things that truly distinguish enemies in the fiction of the game. 

Motive I truly think is the core of any good enemy design. A good motive and random stats trumps intricate balanced stats and no motivation every time. The motive provides the Referee with everything they need to run the enemy. Knowing what drives it, lets you extrapolate to any action they might take, often without too much imagination or real thinking. The closest TTRPGs have to NPC AI. 

Finally Abilities. This is what makes enemy design and running fun. Cool things for them to do not only helps distinguish one encounter from another, but provides endless opportunities for thematic reinforcement and tactical challenge. 

So what does this mean for the Rove card? 

Well I tried fervently to turn all this into a series of nested tables. I broke down every type of ability I could think of into its core components. I think I actually did a fairly good job. However, tables are terribly inefficient with space, and in Rove, space is my main limitation. So I scrapped the confusing nested tables with my frankly inscrutable notation system for a much more straightforward list of ability types to add challenge to an Enemy. The tables did survive in the form of my tiered challenge table to help guide the Referee when picking numbers. 

Vulnerabilities naturally evolved from thinking about the opposite of abilities. If you can increase an Enemies potential challenge, you can also decrease it. 

The result

The first side was a more straightforward rules reference, pulled pretty much entirely from Trash Planet. 

The second I am much more proud of.

Here I crammed as many examples of what I mean in as possible, so in theory you could pick from these lists to construct a perfectly feasible beasty from these alone. 

I by no means think these lists are exhaustive, but they are pretty comprehensive. I have already had a lot of success keeping this card on me when I run any RPG now. It serves as great inspiration when I need a quick random encounter.

If there is any card I am particularly keen to hear feedback on, it’s this. So if you do use it, be sure to let me know!

That’s it for this time. Catch you for the next one.

Olobosk.

Rove Devlog #2 – Gear

  • Rove

Rove Gear.

Of the indie “OSR” TTRPGs i have come across in my time in this scene, I feel like one of the main areas of innovation has been in equipment and encumbrance. 

The Black Hack has a number of items equal to your Strength score, Into the Odd has Bulky items, Knave has slots, etc. Tracking individual pounds and ounces, while “immersive” in theory, is a huge pain to actually do. What these games figured out is that to have fun, tracking inventory needs to be simple and intuitive, otherwise players will basically ignore it. 

But “Simple and Intuitive” can also be a bit boring, another way to lose player attention and cause them to ignore/forget the rules. Whenever i think about making encumbrance fun, I always think to Logan Knight’s fantastic “arts & crafts” solution. 

Logan’s work here was a big inspiration for Rove in general. I want lots of things to play with. I want to take advantage of the physicality of playing with business card sized things at the table. 

With that comes the first rule for this new card:

Carrying Capacity. Players write all their Gear on their Character Card. If it fits they can carry it (at the Referee’s discretion), unless it’s Bulky.

Simple and straightforward. This utilises the physical limitation of the Character Card itself. I have kept the Bulky rule from ItO, its elegant and enables the Referee to give the players some engaging decisions when given too many big things to carry. 

Then, we take a bit of a tangent. 

The cart is inspired by the Caravan sheet from Luka Rejec’s UVG. A shared resource for all the players to manage. Making them printable paper items gives the Referee even more opportunities for mischievous fun! I love the idea of a player losing their backpack and getting to tear it up at the table, or keeping hold of a lost cart and presenting it back to the party dramatically when they recover it. 

This is the kind of unique direction I think Rove can take that other RPGs can’t. Put a pin here, we will return to this idea in later cards I am sure. 

The rest of the Gear card is fairly straightforward. Rove uses a simple gold standard:

Gold Standard. Commerce is conducted with gold coins (g). Guide prices for common items & services are overleaf. 

I toyed with using Gold to silver to copper or similar like I have seen in many other ItO style games but I always find coin counting like that busy work generally, and only adds to confusion. One number to keep track of money is simple. A bunch of coins is a fun challenge to present the players but this system does;t stop that necessarily, just puts in on the Referee to do the economics. 

I have a little advice on how to utilise treasure:

Treasure. Should be hard for Characters to move. If its not Bulky, or outright impossible for 1 person to move, it should present some other logistical challenge.

Another rule coalesced from the incredible advice from Electric Bastionland.

The rest of this side of the card has some common tags I like to add to gear, as well as the main place where the Bulky rule will be:

Bulky. Awkward to carry and/or requires two hands to use. A Character can only carry 2 Bulky items at once. Any more and their HP is reduced to 0. 

Reload. Takes a Turn after firing to ready.

Area. Damage all targets in an area. Damage is rolled separately for each. If it’s unclear how many targets are affected, roll the weapon’s Damage dice to determine the number.

Breach. Weapons that ignore Armour. 

Bleed. After causing Damage, victim takes 1 Damage per Turn until they Rest.

Vorpal. Cause immediate Death at 0 HP. 

Then the entire rest of the card is example gear, like that found in ItO books. 

The biggest challenge on this card was the balancing of prices. I think I have done an okay job but I would treat these prices as guidelines rather than hard rules. I have certainly erred more on the side of making things too expensive rather than cheap. I really dislike that in most games, my money only really matters when gaining XP or buying absurdly expensive things like magic items. I want to provide some degree of choice and characters “saving up” for better gear.

I also categorised things in a way that is somewhat consistent between armour and weapons. I have seen this in a couple of other ItO Hacks. 3 Categories, Simple, Martial and Heavy. I think this helps when coming up with gear for NPCs or new Characters to know the numbers/tags of the items they have, you just have to add flavour. 

I think this list is fairly comprehensive to 99% of mundane items your likely to encounter in Rove. I want to leave it open to creating unique and more interesting gear in future modules. 

On that note, I do have some exciting  ideas in the works…

Just a tease, but I’m excited to see where I can take this project! 

That’s all for this month. Checkout my Patreon for access to the Print files for Gear and the other cards.

Olobosk Out. 

Rove Release & Devlog #1

  • Rove

Officially introducing Rove – my take on the micro RPG.

I have been wanting to create something like this ever since I stumbled upon Damnation of the Judgement Kings by Vandel Arden and his subsequent Microblades.

Those drove me to create Milliamp for Electric Bastionland after finally getting Silent Titans to the table and seeing how fun and easy it was to run an Into the Odd game.

So those are probably my biggest inspirations for this project. Milliamp proved to me that what I wanted to do was feasible, and actually really convenient. 

So these first two cards are laser focused on the main two design goals for Rove:

  1. Short, concise rules, in your pocket.
  2. Goodies for your players.

For the referee, just an overview and a quick reference guide to the most common rules you will need. Honestly, this first card is probably more of a formality than anything else. We need a basis from which all the other cards come from and that lays the foundations for how this game works. It does that job but in reality once you know these rules you won’t be needing it often.

But that’s fine, there are plenty more ideas I have in the pipeline that justify having the card with you at the table. At the end of the day, you still don’t need to carry a kilo of book with you to the table for the odd rules dispute. 

Here is the pièce de résistance of Rove – the player card or character sheet. Why has every RPG I have played never given me a rules summary on the reverse of my Character sheet? It’s so simple and is a massive quality of life improvement. 

What this card does is legitimately let you just sit down with a group of people and just begin playing. Hand these out to players, and just ask them to make a character. At the end of the night, stick it in your wallet and you’re sorted. It’s a little thing, but this is ideal for one-shots or convention games I have found. It just cuts down so much on the bulk I feel weighed down with when running anything else.

Why so smol tho?

It’s a psychological thing, and it might be personal, but having a physically small object defining the box with which you are playing in, just gives me so much more space and mental freedom to do what I love – running the game! It’s why I find running games from one-page dungeons and their ilk so freeing. I don’t have any page flipping to do, or have my nose in a book while I’m playing with my friends. I can look my players in the eyes and improvise anything that isn’t immediately available to me or not memorised. 

That to me is the peak of this hobby – and I think Rove goes a good way to getting you there, I hope. 

You can download the print files for Core and Player cards on Itch.io or over on Patreon for free.

More coming soon! I have already added the print files for Travel on Patreon. Print versions are in the works and I have many more ideas in the pipeline.

That’s it for now.

Olobosk

Character Compacter

So I wrote this digital character generator forever ago for Trash Planet Epsilon 5, but i couldn’t get it working exactly how I wanted. I have since fixed the major defects in a burst of interest in perchance.org again.

Its also on Itch.io for convenience. Perchance.org is really cool – I have seen a few RPG tools on it before and had a lot of fun diving into creating stuff with it.

Its by no means perfect! I might revisit it in the future as the layout isn’t great I don’t think. Its also basically useless on mobile which is a shame. I am really bad a responsive CSS so I’m going to park that one for now!

This generator is a pretty good template now for producing other similar Mark of the Odd games so I might experiment in the future. I will likely put one together for Rove soon.

That’s it for now!

Olobosk

Rove Devlog #0 – Into the Horizon

I am in the process of writing my modular, micro format, Into the Odd Hack – called Rove. I have been coming up with concise and practical – at the table – rules for things I have never found satisfying solutions for.

One of those things is travel. I think my unwritten rule for travel is to simply avoid doing it if you can. If it’s not interesting, doesn’t serve a purpose or isn’t the point of your game, why do it? Players just arrive at the entrance to the dungeon, just outside the town, etc. Job done!

But if the need for some sort of survival/travel arises – can I have rules I could whip out and run with on the fly? (TL;DR Yes i can and here they are)

So let’s explain my design goals and constraints:

  • Map independence – I don’t want to have to rely on hexes, a properly scaled map, a fully mapped point crawl, etc. But I don’t want to exclude them either. These rules should try to accommodate all.
  • Quick & Practical – I don’t want a multi-step procedure I have to follow. It must be simple and quick. It should feel like combat in ItO games – you find out the results of the players choices quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean deadly. Unlike combat you can’t avoid travel with clever positioning.
  • Short, concise, modular – The design goals of Rove. 

Quite quickly I came up with 3 core tenants of wilderness travel that I needed to fulfil, each relatively independent of each other but could be used in some combination:

  • Travel – The actual movement part.
  • Survival – Not dying along the way.
  • Obstacles – Things that make it difficult getting there.

Travel

So my first constraint – the map problem. I think you can do away with issues of distance and travel times. They can be abstracted like they are in combat. Not important, but its part of your job as the Referee to try and remain consistent. When players travel, they do so between two points, that is all the rules need to cover at a fundamental level. As long as players get interrupted at semi-regular intervals with some game mechanics – you are good. So the first rule:

Distant. Exact Travel times & distances are unimportant but should be fairly consistent. (Roughly equal points on a map, a hex on a grid, 6 miles, etc)

Wherever I have run travel – the main problem I have is meshing the rules and my players desire to problem solve around them – like I want them to do with combat. They want to find a shortcut, travel at night, travel a more direct route, etc. Unless the map itself has been designed with this in mind I never find good way of tackling that mechanically. I tried to do this in the Will of Rot with the Rottwood getting in the way a bit but its not easy and I don’t think I succeeded.

So How about a sort of push your luck mechanic? A depleting resource of the potential travel you can do every day. You can go slow and steady and have a fairly hassle free time, or you can belt it and maybe hit more challenges. This way the players desire to problem solve can be funnelled into a discussion about what is worth risking.

What I settled on was a depleting dice pool that you roll each time you travel. You use the dice pool to determine if your attempt the travel was successful, your chances of which decrease as the dice pool depleates:

Travel. When Characters travel to a Distant location, roll 4d6. If the total is ≥7, they make it there unhindered. Reduce the number of dice rolled by 1 for each consecutive roll per day. Sleep restores Travel rolls to 4d6.

Delay. If the total is <7, the Characters are waylaid by an Encounter or something else, determined by the Referee. 

Every day the players have 4d6 to start with. Your rolling to beat 6 and each subsequent roll your more likely to fail and get waylaid by something. I think these probabilities are just right! Your almost guaranteed to succeed your first roll of the day, then that drops off slightly to a 9 in 10 chance which is still pretty good. But then you have a sharp drop off to just over 50%, a gamble, fairly close to that sweet 70% chance that feels “fair” to our monkey brains. Great! I am happy.

So what delays the characters? Again, I want to be loose but give my advice. It’s ultimately down to the Referee who will have context to inform them, but generally it just needs to be a new or different challenge for them to overcome instead:

Encounter. Can be an Enemy, Hazard, non-hostile NPC, etc. It should in some way challenge or disrupt the Character’s progress. 

With just what I have covered so far – you have a simple push your luck game for the players to engage with. Do they risk a roll on 2d6 or just setup camp already? If the area is dangerous, they could go very slowly and only move once a day. Perfect opportunity to push a time pressure on them somehow to make that choice difficult! 

But we can keep going. We need another level for the risk averse and another for the bold and stupid:

Mounts. When Travelling on horseback or equivalent, begin each day by rolling 5d6 instead.

Forced March. When 1d6 would be rolled for Travel, Characters can forgo Sleep and instead roll 2d6 again.

Now we have a reason for horses, you basically can travel twice a day effectively risk free. So twice as fast (sorta?). And if you really want to, you can wander around in delirium. Maybe worth the risk if players are running for their lives from something nasty in the night. 

The only other thing missing for me is navigation. What if the players are going somewhere they don’t have a map for, or can’t see where they are going? I still think this is another trapping of common tropes. Generally Characters have a map and can discern direction. Getting lost generally isn’t fun or interesting. The interesting parts still are what happens along the way, the encounters, the locations, etc. So satiate my need for “complete” rules, I think its still useful to have something for if the Referee does deem it relevant or important.

Navigation. It is generally assumed Characters have a map and can discern their heading. If not, when Travelling one Character makes a Focus Save. On a failure they stray: Roll d8 for direction: 1;N, 2;E 3;S 4;W 5;NE 6;SE 7;NW 8;SW

Darkness. Makes Navigation harder. Always require a Focus Save, with Disadvantage for Characters with no map or direction.

(Focus is WIL or the mental stat basically)

Survival

Onto survival. ItO does have its own rules for this in the form of being Deprived where you cannot Rest effectively and thus regain HP. However that does not incur compounding detriments which I think should be a feature. If your out in the wilderness there should be tension when you get down to those last few rations. 

Hunger. When a Character goes a day without a meal, they lose 1 Might.

Thirst. When a Character goes a day without water, they lose half their Might. After 3 days a Character is Dead. 

Might being Rove’s STR from ItO or your “real” health. This way you can push past hunger if you’re out of supplies, but you risk being an easy meal for some beasty should you come across one. Also I only separate hunger and thirst because I like the idea of Players being stuck in a desert and being far more desperate to search for water than anything else. In most other environments I would probably treat them as one. 

Sleep. When a Character goes a day or more without at least a few hours of sleep, their Saves suffer Disadvantage. 

I think sleep should be relatively optional. Plenty of times I have run games where players explicitly want to push on into the night and I don’t want them to be immensely dis-incentivised from doing so. I certainly want it to be the risky option though. 

Lastly I wanted to simplify supplies. What I settled on is a fairly common pattern (I was inspired specifically by Into the Wyrd and Wild here). I expect players to track supplies but it should be straightforward. Very little actual accounting to do, just tallying really. I toyed with separating foraging and hunting, but if the Referee wants players to roll on an wildlife chart to discern exactly what they find that’s their prerogative. The results would effectively be the same – you get more supply. Also, like in my desert scenario, you may just not be able to find food/water easily. 

Supplies. All the food, water, etc, a person needs to survive for one day in the wild.  1 Supply = 1 Day = 1 Gold (G).

Hunt/Forage. Counts as Travelling. If the total is ≥7, Characters find 1 Supply each. <7 and they have an Encounter. May not be possible in all environments.

Obstacles

Finally we have problems the players face along the way. This is absolutely driven by adventure context here for the specifics of what the players come across.

Hazards. Environmental problems for the Characters to overcome. (Cliff edge, river rapids, quicksand, landslide, etc.)

I do want a way to distinguish mountains from plains, but I don’t want a list of a million different terrain types and their disadvantages. Specifically in my games also I like having weird scenery with specific effect (See The Will of Rot again). In general there are two types of terrain: It’s easy so it doesn’t matter, or it slows you down:

Difficult Terrain. If the terrain is difficult to traverse (mountains, swamp, etc) Delay occurs on Travel rolls <9 instead.

Now difficult terrain just nudges players to slow down and have more dice to roll during Travel. But regardless its now more likely your guna come across something along the way; monsters hidden in the reeds or crumbling cliff faces.

To end off this section, just my advice on weather. Like with all obstacles, it should only be included if its going to create some problem for the players to solve. If the adventure already has enough of that, it can be forgotten I think. 

Weather. Depends on environment and terrain, but should only be included if it can present some challenge to the Characters. Example: 

Roll d6 each day:

~ 1-3: Mild and uneventful. 

~ 4-5: Torrential rain; Difficult Terrain.

~ 6: Freezing fog; Darkness & open water freezes solid.

And that’s it! I have put it together in a business card format like all Rove rules will be:

I have tested it a bit and it seemed to work how I had hoped. Quick to use, straightforward and hopefully covers 90% of the circumstances you are likely to come across as a referee. 

If you end up using these in your game, let me know. Id love to hear how they worked out. Likewise if I have missed something glaringly obvious to you I want to know!

Until next time,

Olobosk

Breaking the Trash Crust

I’m absolutely blown away by the support this zine has seen. When I started putting this project together back at the start of national lockdown here in the UK, the idea of seeing it through into physical form was but a lofty dream I rolled my eyes at. I’d never thought i’d be doing a zinequest, let alone one that’s almost at 350% funded & over 200 backers! So thanks every single one of you for helping make this fantasy a reality.

Anyway – that’s enough of my soppy thank you’s! I thought i’d give you a bit of a peak into the inner workings of the zine, its inspirations and a bit more detail into what it’s aims are. 

Let’s take a look at what I think is the most vital spread in the zine, the first part I wrote and the first part I layed out. If the zine has an origin point, this is it.

Just two pages, but i have a whole lot to say about them.

I think character creation is the most important part of any TTRPG. To start, it’s the first hurdle you have to get your players over. If this process is not smooth and clear, it can give players the wrong impression. This is especially important if it’s a player’s introduction to the hobby! 

I think this is also a missed opportunity in most games. It sets the stage for the session, adventure or campaign to come. It should communicate tone, setting and motivation if possible. I stole this whole cloth from Electric Bastionland and for good reason. 

So with these two points in mind, how does this spread achieve this?

First things first, it’s a single spread. No page turning, no consulting other parts of the book. It’s all here. 

I toyed with the idea of making more than 9 (Packages? Classes? Concepts?) but there wasn’t a neat way to fit them in a single spread. So I didn’t, 9 is enough. This is only a short adventure intended as a one shot or campaign starter so it doesn’t need to be extensive. There are enough here for each player in your average game to have a unique one, with plenty left over for the odd dead PC. 

The bit of intro fluff that this section starts with is intended for players to read, or to be read to them dramatically by the game runner. This does a lot of the heavy lifting to get the players invested. It introduces the setting, sets them a clear initial goal and provides the Facilitator with a little bit of pressure to apply, should they need to get the players moving.

Next are the actual rules themselves. I want a player to be able to pick this up with no context and make a character without asking the Facilitator anything. The steps are literally numbered, in an order that makes the most sense, and leaves the most exciting step for last.

I cut a couple fiddly rules here for clarity and for space. There is no explanation for what to do if two players get the same Tragic Past, or what to do if a player has multiple highest Stat rolls. It’s maybe incomplete, but does it matter? If two players do have the same Tragic Past, the descriptions are so open ended that they will likely be totally different in play. If you have multiple highest stats, do you just pick? Are you an amalgam of multiple? Something else? All of these feel like things I would have fun making a ruling on at the table.

Finally, there are the Tragic Past’s themselves. I’ve tried hitting as many sci-fi tropes as I can, with a little twist. I didn’t want any of these to be nice people. They are desperately rummaging around a planet made of trash, they probably arn’t in the best place in their lives. With such little space to work with, they needed to be punchy and evocative, I think some hit better than others but that might be personal preference. 

You might notice a distinct absence of your “Hacker-man” archetype. I toyed with adding this, but without a slick hacking rule, and including it as part of all monsters, treasures and locations it would feel half finished. So I abandoned it fairly early. Also, like in System Shock (a key inspiration), I imagine hacking being a whole separate game set in cyberspace. Who knows, maybe that’s yet to come…

I’ll stop myself there. I could talk about this stuff forever, I’d probably fill another 36 pages with my thoughts and opinions on whats in this zine and why if Jacob let me! Did you find this interesting? Do you want more? Leave a comment and let me know! 

If you simply cannot wait – I will be appearing as a guest on this week’s Humpday RPG Show over on the Thought Eater Blog & Podcast so be sure to check it out!

Anyway, thats it for now. Keep shouting and sharing wherever you can, every link is greatly appreciated.

Olobosk.

Spiral Isles Review

Spiral Isles is an OSR pointcrawl adventure successfully kickstarted at the beginning of April this year. It was co-written by Jere Hart and Lazy Litch (Shane Walshe), the latter of which also created Woodfall. Given I also backed Woodfall back in August last year, and was pleasantly surprised with what was delivered, I was more than happy to put down the money to get my hands on this new project!

Let’s take a look at what got delivered…

The Product

Like Woodfall, Spiral Isles was delivered as a PDF, with an at-cost print on demand code (for hardback or paperback) from Drive Thru RPG. I opted for the hardback, so I cannot speak for the paperback but, as is expected of POD, the quality isn’t “premium” to put it lightly. It’s perfectly serviceable, and Spiral Isles does make use of coloured printing which is one minor improvement over Woodfall.

I’ve tried to make it look as pretty as possible!

As you can tell from the pictures, the book has a landscape format. This is an odd choice for a book intended for use at the table. I much prefer my novel size supplements that are compact enough to carry around and easy to flip through when I’m running them. There is no practical way to “flip” through this without laying it flat on a fairly large table. What makes this choice even more frustrating is that the layout doesn’t even take advantage of this in any way! And no, the “Die drop tables” don’t count, we will be discussing those later…

It would have been nice to see a project from Lazy Lich delivered as a more bespoke product. It’s perfectly serviceable don’t get me wrong, I’m just not filled with glee upon opening it like I am with other OSR adventures on the market. Having said that, this is far cheaper than those fancy games! At $22/£17.50, it’s cheaper than your standard WotC affair, which aren’t really any better quality…

The Content

Moving on, the content is really where this adventure shines. The basic concept behind the Spiral Isles is that they are a location you can take your players after a TPK, when they want to bring someone back from the dead without magic, or otherwise visit the afterlife. It’s a great adventure to have in your back pocket so that a session (or even a campaign) does not have to end at a party wipe. Certainly it’s something I have not seen explored before.

The Rules

Lets kick off with the rules that this supplement provides. As advertised on the kickstarter, the whole module is compatible with both the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e) and Swords and Wizardry (S&W) rules sets. What this really means is that Monster/NPC stat blocks are written with all the details required for a 5e monster, which as far as I can tell, means they are also compatible with S&W.  It also means that the ghost conversion rules are written for both systems. Ah yes, ghost conversion!

Going Ghostal

So the core conceit within this adventure is that players are ghosts while in the Spiral Isles. What this means is that players basically file away their character sheets, and role up a blue ghost. A blue ghost is basically a level 0 character, with all Ability scores at 9, no skills no abilities and just 1 hit dice. What you do get are a special new Power and a new pool of points to keep track of on top of HP; Life points. There are 4 “ghost levels” you have access to. In ascending order they are Blue, Green, Red and Purple and are basically levels 1-4, except you have no class, and you will only ever have at most 2 special Powers. You get some skill bonuses, proficiency bonuses and get to add a few points to your abilities, but your always going to be under powered, low level characters.

Re-rolling by another name

Before we get into what the Life Points and Powers are and if they are any good, lets first address this conversion idea as a concept. It’s kind of weird. On the one hand it’s quite clever, because it allows the designer to basically write a mod for the game your group is already playing. If your running 5e, you use all the 5e rules, your just playing with slightly different character rules. The same goes for S&W. On the other hand, there is very little that connects this new character, to your previous one that is supposed to have died. Nothing in the rules actually links them in any way other than their name. They are a class-less blank slate that your free to progress in an entirely different direction to your original character.

While this does give a sense of disconnection with the original characters, perhaps this is intentional! In a sense, perhaps these spirits the players now control, are the most basic distillation of their original character. The only thing that remains are their memories and personalities. It’s kind of poetic I guess, and it’s at least thematic. If I were to use these rules at my table, I would probably add my own on top, only allowing players to raise ability scores to the values of their original character, or allowing them to regain spell casting abilities in place of powers. I do largely like the idea though. It allows this portion of the game to play out potentially faster than the original game. Certainly, simpler characters will hopefully encourage more inventive play, and stop players looking for answers on their character sheets in true OSR fashion! It’s probably a good way to gently introduce players unfamiliar with the OSR to its ideas and playstyle. Neet.

HP 2.0

So the new stuff you get is basically two new systems that feed off each other. Life points are a revamped version of HP, and Powers are spells you cast using these new fangled Life points. The Powers themselves are fairly mediocre. D&D spells by another name for the most part, nothing really very interesting. From what I can tell at higher levels they can be cast at different Power levels like in regular spells in 5e, but this isn’t actually made clear in the rules. There are about 3 paragraphs about how the Powers work, and two of those are how they work in 5e vs S&W. I’d probably come up with my own.

So while the game asks you to do away with all your original abilities and spells from the original game, it provides you with a little replacement system, and a new number to track. It’s a little more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist. The new Life Points are also a universal currency throughout the Spiral Isles. They can be transferred between characters (and monsters for that matter), and they are also used in place of XP to level up through the ghost colours.

This is… cool… sort of. I dunno, I can’t help feel the designers have only gone half hog with this idea. Why do we still have HP? I get it, I guess. They probably don’t want damage to remove Life points, but still, it’s kind of frustrating that you now have two HP-like point pools, that if either are depleted you die for good. I really like the idea of a universal resource for buying stuff, leveling up and using cool abilities. I think this will lead to lots of really difficult decisions on the part of the players, balancing buying cool gear, using cool abilities, and gaining enough to level up. It’s something I would love to steal for a micro-RPG project.

What’s even more interesting is the whole political landscape of the setting revolves around them as well. Characters judge you based on your colour, which is effectively how rich you are. Fantastic! There are even certain areas and events in the Isles where your colour affects what NPC attitudes and if you’ll be shunned or accepted without question. I can already see a mountain of potential drama setup with this mechanic. Very nice.

So in summary, I think the rules are pretty cool if a little half baked. I think they are a clever way to invoke some old school play in a new school game, and I think the life points add a really interesting new resource management mini-game I think would add new dynamic to your 5e game.

The Setting

Moving on, let’s look at what the majority of the book focuses on; locations, NPCs and Monsters.

Colourful Locations

The Spiral Isles are split into 4 regions; Blue, Green, Red and Purple quadrants. There are 22 individual islands, each with 2 – 4 locations.

The writing is fairly matter of fact. There is very little in the way of flowery descriptions. In some ways im actually a fan of this style. I wouldn’t say I prefer it to more evocative writing, but it serves a very different purpose to me as a GM. Instead of inspiring fantastic visions and unique atmosphere, it provides you with a wealth of specific details with which you can rely on while running. This frees up your GM muscles, allowing you to focus more on setting tone and detailing the landscape yourself.

And when I say a wealth of specifics, I mean it. Every location has a treasure to find, a trap to trigger, an NPC to exploit or an adventure seed to follow. Often a combination of multiple of these. While the treasure is often meager (I think it caught that disease from 5th Edition), the NPCs are dynamic with clear motivations. Often the author will explicitly explain what the NPC would want from the players, and how they may go about getting it. They may have different attitudes towards the players depending on what information they have uncovered, making the world feel reactive.

Not only are these locations brimming with great content, but its very varied and often quite unique. Your standard fantasy adventure bread and butter is here too, with plenty of caves, ruins, cities and hideouts, but some of my favourites are the really weird and wacky locations. There is a roman casino island with greasy loan sharks, various dice games and a fighting pit where players can gamble, fight and get into debt. One island is a geode filled with crystal amphitheatres hosting theatre toups where players can buy masks and props and try their talents in their own shows. Another is a huge tree hotel constantly celebrating a different festival from creepy cult ritual to drug fueled party. Amazing!

The Bad Ghosts

The Monsters are a variety of weird ghosties and fairly standard guards/bandits/cultists. I like the weird monsters, they have some interesting abilities and unique flavour, but they aren’t revolutionary. Nothing would be out of place in a vanilla 5e Monster Manual. The rival NPC party provided is especially uninspired. I feel like the art portrays far more interesting characters than the stat blocks portray, another symptom of the 5e-itis that this whole book suffers from. I like the idea though, the rival party slowly stalks the player characters the more they uncover the Spiral Isles’ secrets.

Functional, and handy to have if your running 5e and don’t want to thumb through another book i guess. However these monsters are nothing terribly special.

The NPCs and factions are another story however. We see the return of the faction table which was used in Woodfall. This time, it’s also provided for the major NPCs as well. This is incredibly useful, and really helps a GM should the players want to get involved in some political manipulation and intrigue. Im generally quite impressed by the details provided for the NPCs, and I do get a good sense of their unique personalities from their descriptions.

Anyway, we have said far too many positive things for a review, it’s about time we tackled the unfortunate elephant in the room with this adventure…

The Layout

To put it bluntly, it’s awful. I would even argue it isn’t even a taste thing, it’s genuinely, objectively, poorly laid out. Its difficult to reference, it’s often hard to follow where the text flows when reading, and it’s near impossible to work out some sort of hierarchy of sections in paragraphs. Just to really drive home the volume and severity of these problems, here is a vicious list of blunders and the issues they cause when using the book:

Font size is inconsistent. 

This in itself is not usually a problem. Plenty of books do this to differentiate sections, tables or on a map text. However the text size here has no rhyme nor reason I can see, other than to ensure all the desired text fits on the page? It just creates confusion when determining the context of a paragraph. Take this How to Use page as an example. The table text is a different size, fine, but its not the same size in all other tables in the book, that varies considerably. The text at the top is slightly larger than the text below. Why? It makes me think the texts might are unrelated, but they aren’t!

Also why is the spacing between text and table not the same above and below? It just looks bad.

Table formatting and implementation is inconsistent. 

Sometimes information is presented in a table, but sometimes it’s just a numbered list, and sometimes that numbered list is in a paragraph of text! Some tables are numbered, others are not, some provide a dice size to roll in the header, others are just numbered. The formatting is woefully inconsistent. Font size varies, text alignment doesn’t fully make sense, and some column headers don’t seem to align properly. This makes using them often more difficult than it needs to be. The rules for how to use one table are different from the last. Having to read through a paragraph of text to find a list to roll on is just not practical at the table, but putting that aside, it’s not even a consistent feature I know to look out for.

Just a brief selection of the various table heading formats…

Also, on a related note, the treasure table is split into 4 seperate d20 tables. They don’t seem to be in any way split in a logical fashion, just randomly. Why? Is it so that the basically pointless drawing of a generic treasure chest chat fit in? Could the designers not come up with another 20 entries for a d100 table? It’s just shoddy, and causes more inconvenience.

Paragraph columns are inconsistent. 

The book broadly follows a three column layout for text. I say broadly because it’s in no way consistent. These columns vary in size and position page to page. Some pages only have two, or one. I’m also not counting where text sometimes spills over multiple columns, which is fine, but still looks bad in my opinion. Especially where the text lasts for only one or two lines. This is what causes you to get lost on pages. The Quadrant summaries are a great example of this. They are intended to be the first things you read but are often found half way down the page with a title smaller than the one for the island titles! This confused me for at least the first 3 quadrants.

This layout is egregious!

There is even on instance of a list just slapped bang in the middle of the page, and it just looks out of place. They have tried to make up for it by providing a border (something which we see nowhere else in the book) but it doesn’t help, it just makes the page look too busy.

Its ok, this column follows no rules, its in a box!

The art positioning is awkward.

A lot of it gets cut off at the borders or by text. Some of it overlaps with other elements of text or tables. This largely has no practical problems, it just looks bad. One thing that is a problem are the map labels. All of which are nearly indistinguishable from section titles, making navigating the location pages especially painful.

The die drop table is largely useless. 

This one is a huge shame because its contents are great, and each has their own piece of art as well. However as a “Die Drop” table it’s basically useless. Firstly, it’s not a “Die” drop table because you don’t in any way require dice. You could drop anything, you don’t use the number, so what is the point exactly? Why not just a rollable table which would be infinitely more useful. Also, because this thing is POD, its NEVER gonna sit flat. So im never going to be able to use it. Just look at that bow…

Yea useless. Also, its across 4 pages, which is worse! I cant even roll for everything at once. The real nail in the coffin for this, is that they aren’t even numbered, so I can’t roll even if I wanted to! What if I only have the PDF?!?!? It’s a horrible oversight that really throws the at the table value of this book out the window.

The Mirrored Isle Dungeon Description.

Most of the dungeon description is provided in a numbered list on one page. The last two rooms are awkwardly half in and half outside the map, some of it squashed between the border and map. What possessed them to do this? It looks bad and is really hard to read. It just looks unprofessional.

The maps are basically pointless.

They are just coloured blobs. Why don’t they have even simple icons and routes or any details at all? They just look out of place on the locations pages.They may as well not be there. All they do is clog up the pages, and push the text around making it even harder to read. I don’t mind a simple map, but a simple map slapped in my face every time I turn the page is not helpful when im running a game.

What does this really achieve?

But does that mean it’s bad?

I don’t want this to come across as a negative review, because it isn’t! I’m not unhappy with the Spiral Isles. I will certainly keep it ready to go should I ever kill my players. I’m also really keen to try out the Life Points system of linking HP/XP/Money/Powers to see how that plays out. I think it will be really cool. I’m also going to mine some of it’s coolest locations for other games for sure.

The biggest issue is obviously the layout, which basically makes it something I simply can’t use at the table. It will require me to either memorise bits or make my own notes if I’m gonna run it. Combine this with the relentless infection of D&D 5th edition-ims that flavour all its monsters, powers and treasure a very generic and bland flavour of standard fantasy +1’s to boring numbers, means the adventure would require work from me to get it into a state where id be happy to run it. Not much work, but more work than im usually willing to do!

This is a shame because I really like the content, the weird ideas that can be found throughout the adventure and the really fascinating mechanics that the authors have baked into it. Not to mention the substantial amount of NPC and faction guidance to help GMs like me who struggle with intrigue and politics in their games. Its especially frustrating because a lot of these problems, are not problems in Woodfall! Perhaps its to do with the odd choice of dimensions, but whatever it is, I know Lazy Litch can do better.

I want to love it more than I do, and I think with a rethink of its layout, I would be able to for sure. If your not bothered by the layout, or are willing to put in some effort, there is a great setting and adventure to pull out of this supplement for sure.

Silent Titans Review

Silent Titans is the latest adventure module written by Patrick Stuart, delightfully illustrated by Dirk Detweiler Leichty and published by Jacob Hurst.

The game was Kickstarted in December last year (2018), and is now available in print and pdf. I backed this as soon as it became available. I’d like to think I backed it based on the prestige of its creators in the OSR community, but if I’m honest I think it’s the art that sold me. Rightly so I’d say, I mean just look at it…

Digital images don’t easily convey how bold and colourful this is in person.

This stuff would not be out of place hanging in on my wall or in an art gallery, even the maps look this good! Before we get into the content though, let’s start with a quick overview of the physical product that was delivered..

The Product

The book is near identical to the mock-ups displayed on the Kickstarter page, which in itself is an impressive feat. This is even more impressive because the book is just such a beautiful object to behold. Jacob has spared no expense in making this thing top quality, and it pays off in spades with the bright and bold colours in Dirk’s work.

The book sits flat on the table, uses thick, high quality paper, and fully utilises its inside covers. Even the dust jacket has a search the body table and a gorgeous map of one of the dungeons of Wir-Heal on the inside.

If your splashing out on the book, I would recommend getting the bonus pack too if you can. It includes a map book and a booklet of cut-out minis (yes a battle maps and minis in an OSR artsy game). Also a bunch of index card character sheets for the Into the Odd rules, a bookmark with most of those rules on it, and some stickers, all as good a quality as the book itself. The minis are very thick cardstock, the battle maps are thick glossy paper and everything is as vibrantly colourful as the book itself. Absolutely A+ job from Jacob here, I cannot praise it enough.

Everyone likes a few goodies!

What little I can fault is fairly nit-picky. The front map appears to be missing some labels. I’m unsure if this is intentional as something of a player map, but as the pdf isn’t missing those labels I suspect it may be a mistake. Not a huge issue, but it is slightly inconvenient when these things are referenced in the text. The Map book is staple bound, and while will sit flat with a little bending, it’s not perfect for using with paper minis. What may have been nicer is simply each map printed as a poster, and folded together. The bonus pack comes in an envelope anyway to hold it all. But none of this can take away from the shear beauty of what has been produced here.

The Content

Now let’s take a look at what’s inside. At time of writing, I haven’t run Silent Titans as is. I have run one of its dungeons as a one shot however, so I have a feel for the game.

The Rules & Characters

The game is pitched as “…a bizarre nightmare adventure setting … built to run on the ultra-light Into The Odd rules”. What this means is the game provides stats, challenges and effects for the Into the Odd rules by Chris McDowell. These  “ultra-light” rules are based largely on D&D so converting everything  to something like 5th Edition D&D could be done on the fly without much trouble, though your mileage may vary.

What wouldn’t be such a simple job would be converting it’s pre-generated characters. These are a part of the Into the Odd rules, whereby a character’s randomly rolled stats determine what equipment and abilities they get. Silent Titans takes this one step further and this also determines your name and rough personality. This is an interesting choice, one that certainly helps fit player characters neatly into the setting. Each character is very distinct, and Patrick states; “Anything not specified you can make up yourself.”

This is the first of many design choices that run contrary to conventional OSR wisdom, but I like it. I think is speeds up an element of the game that is usually quite slow and challenging for some players. This does make Silent Titans much harder to drop in to an existing campaign however, though considering how the rest of this game is written, I think that’s probably intentional.  We will get into this later, but suffice to say for now, If you’re going to run a Silent Titans game, it’s certainly most effective to use all the included rules.

The rest of these rules are presented in the mechanics of the dungeons, environments and NPC factions. They mostly consist of telling you which stat to use for saves, something a GM could make a judgment call on themselves, should they be using another system.

Everything else comes in the form of narrative or roleplay effects. Things that affect a character’s senses, damage over time effects or things that affect character memory. None of these are really defined explicitly by Into the Odd, which makes the majority of the supplement fairly system agnostic. Whole dungeon’s, locations and factions could be pulled out and run in any system without much trouble. A lot of the mechanics are neat, and I can certainly see them producing some pretty fun situations to play out. Certainly the ones I came across in the dungeon I ran were great.

In summary, what rules exist in Silent Titans fit nicely, and tend to get out of the way, allowing the GM to focus on why we are all really here, the fiction!

The Fiction

With the fiction, I feel like i have about as much criticism as I do praise.

Firstly, Patrick’s writing reads like GM notes. Lists of things and ideas, with sub-points branching down as you read. They do a great job of sparking ideas, and imagination, but are pretty poor at conveying a scene at a glance. At the table, I like to be able to flip to a page, read a thing and get a good sense for the situation, but that is pretty impossible for the most part in this book. You really do have to read the whole thing, and only then does the world coalesce from Patrick’s flowery descriptions and Dirks abstract drawings. To be clear, the rooms are well described, often with inspiring details that can help you describe these bizarre location to your players. However, they are not very descriptive of the activity within, nor of their connection to wider whole. To really get a sense for what is going on in this bizarre place, you need to read the lot.


This seems to be a step back as well for both Patrick and Jacob, both of which have produce two of the most gameable books that exist! (Maze of the Blue Medusa & Hot Springs Island respectively) Silent Titans does use the repeated information trick used in both previous works, one short summary on a general dungeon map, and another in a more detailed description on a following page. However, unlike the previous books, these summaries are rarely anything other than description. No wider interweaving narrative is conveyed between the moving parts, everything feels independent until you have a picture of the whole in your head.

Also, it’s really quite hard to parse. On many occasions, I would read a passage, totally not understand it, read it several more times, look at the art, still not get it and move on, only later to discover a key piece of information that made the whole thing clear. Patricks advice at the start of the book of “Like all my stuff, read it front to back first” needs to be taken quite literally, and even then will take multiple re-reads and flicks through to really solidify in your mind.
On top of all this, once you do get to grips with what is going on it’s… kind of a railroad. It reminds me a lot of the “choices” in many modern open world video games. A multitude of mostly unrelated side quests are available along with the main “plot” quests (the dungeons) available to be done in any order, but you still have to hit all those same beats. The conclusion is going to be mostly the same for everyone. I would even argue that in all likelihood your going to do the dungeons in order, because they are laid out on after the other on the map!

One of the dungeons for even takes this to the next degree. It’s all about players waking up from dreams, and Patrick advises you to use unfair rules, scene shifts and “naked railroading” to keep the players on track. I think I get what Patrick is going for here, the idea behind this dungeon about going mad, and imprisoning the characters in these dream scenes until they go along with them. The problem with this  is that it ends up making any player choice pretty meaningless and I can see players getting frustrated when they have to replay through the scenes if they mess up. This does not seem fun to me. The first time they encounter each scene I think would be a fun roleplaying exercise, but once you have figured out how to “beat” the scene and navigate around it, it become more of a mundainity than something enjoyable.

This seems very odd when looking at MotBM and Hot Springs Island, both very much open world adventure settings that really can be explored any which way, and produce exciting unforeseen situations as a result. This is another element of the game that goes contrary of common wisdom in the OSR. A defined and pre-determined story just feels dirty to me. I suspect this is intended, but one quote from the dungeon described above makes me question this, when speaking about the “naked railroading” in the dungeon, Patrick writes; “This [Dungeon] is completely different to the rest of the game, where you should absolutely not do this.”

One of the battle maps provided in the booklet.

So is this intentional? The front of the book does state that this game is about loops, about time travel and the player characters almost having a “do over” of their previous mistakes. I really don’t know. However, what I do know is that this, all of it, the art, the fiction, the mechanics, they WORK. They work really well. They are effective at conveying a very particular and compelling aesthetic and this is…

Why Silent Titans Is Actually Incredible

What makes Silent Titans special is how seamlessly the art, the fiction and the rules interweave. To the point where I cannot fathom what inspired what, and I’m starting to question if there is even such a distinction to be made.

While fascinating, this is a marvel to behold in game. Mechanics, art, and rules align perfectly into what i can only describe an an Aesthetic, with a capital A. What Patrick asks you as a GM to portray and what your players to envision, match toe to toe with what Dirk has drawn.
In fact, at first glance, Dirk’s illustrations seem chaotic and meaningless, like abstract doodles. However, once you read Patricks writing they come to life, you recognise characters, monsters, even “architecture” so to speak.

The reason I would recommend the bonus pack so strongly is that this game presents a GM and their player a very distinct, and pervasive aesthetic to the game. It’s really what I think makes Silent Titans a groundbreaking supplement. Everything works so well together in creating a very unique and immediately recognisable look and feel. One that doesn’t rely on fantasy tropes and a common understanding on what a dungeon, medieval village or even person is!. As Patrick has done in his previous works, he takes the limitations of the tabletop RPG as a medium, and instead of fighting them, embraces them and builds them into his setting and game.

The clearest example of this is the nature of Wir-Heal (the name of the land in Silent Titans) itself. The idea being that this land is distorted and nonsensical. Space doesn’t totally make sense here, and it’s difficult for characters to get a clear sense of space while exploring these bizarre lands. That is exactly how it can feel to a player when exploring imaginary spaces. Everyone has their own internal model of a scene, no two of which are going to align perfectly. Thus, Patrick has worked this natural limitation into the fiction of his world. This is again complemented by Dirk’s abstract isometric art style. The art provides exactly as much spatial information as is important in the rules, no more and no less. Patrick’s room descriptions provide the GM with high level details and more descriptive information for the GM to riff on. Dirks room drawings provide the players with visual analogues to those key elements. The minis then provide visual reference for the player characters and enemies for combat and navigation, where exact distance is unimportant, only relative positioning and distance matter. This is true both fictionally, and mechanically!

I have yet to be brave enough to take scissors to the minis…

In play this is perfect. Showing the whole dungeon map to the players doesn’t spoil anything, because the art is so abstract that its nonsensical to them at first glance anyway, it serves only to tease them with possibility. Then, when they enter the room and those elements are described, they pop out. Suddenly they can see, “Oh, that mass of tubes there is the Cephalopod Prime!”, “All those red circles are Face Crab Keys!”, “That pillar is a GUN?!?!”.

This marriage of mechanics, fiction and art is something I don’t think has been done so fully in a supplement before, and I doubt will happen for a long while yet. All that Silent Titans provides, pushes a GM into using them in a certain way, a way which is emphasised by the fiction, codified in the rules, and conveyed in the art. Total unity, something modern game designers both in digital and tabletop struggle with consistently.

I truly think Silent Titans is something special. It has its flaws, yes. As mentioned earlier, it’s going to take a certain kind of GM to be able to use what Patrick writes, and a skilled one at that. It also requires players be willing to not necessarily be railroaded, but certainly guided in a certain direction, and have compatible motivations with the setting. I would argue this is true for almost every adventure anyway, but I don’t think its something OSR players will be so keen on. Push past those initial reservation though, and I think its aesthetic, outshines all of them.

I’ll certainly be bringing Silent Titans to my Table at the next available opportunity.

The Forgotten Abbey

For the past year I’ve been toying with ideas for using decks of cards in RPGs, but none of them have ended up condensing into anything usable. That is until this years One Page Dungeon Contest roused me into putting my ideas into action!

The Forgotten Abbey aims to provide a GM with a simple procedure for tracking four core components to a good dungeon delve; the map, random encounters, treasure and time.

The idea is to use the physical properties of the cards to track these elements mechanically. The club cards can be laid out on the table to map the rooms. Discarding the spades keeps track of what monsters have already been dealt with. A hand of hearts and diamonds that the players pick from at random simulates rummaging amongst the ruins, revealing treasures or simply wasting time.

A perfect excuse to show off your fancy decks of cards.

To ensure the time wasted has consequences, the dungeon itself reshuffles if the players dawdle for too long. This has an additional benefit of providing the players with a difficult choice. The deeper they go into the abbey, the more treasure they may find, but the more likely it is that the dungeon resets and the dangers they faced on the way in ressurect.

It has a couple other cool things going for it I hope! The dungeon is broken into three levels, each getting progressively more spooky, dangerous and lucrative. I think the magic items are pretty neat, if nothing else!

The whole idea kind spawned from putting the three decks along the right edge there.

This this was a layout challenge for me, having a lot of idea and very little space! I’m trying to get better at it, but i’m pretty happy with the final result. The page is busy, but the intent is that all the information is just there, and hopefully it’s clear where to look for the bits you need as you need them. Feedback from better minds that mine is always appreciated!

I feel like this system might lay the groundwork for a dungeon delving card system. I’m keen to experiment with this idea on another dungeon and see if it works outside of this specific theme.

As mentioned above, I have entered this into this year’s One Page Dungeon Contest. The contest is still open until Midnight on the 1st of May, so get writing and you can still get that entry in the door!

Otherwise keep an eye on their site or Twitter for when they release all the entries into a compilation, it always produces a mountain of fantastic material for your game!

P.S. I’m trying to become more active on Twitter following the death of G+. I have even written a little bot that tweets out the latest blog posts from across the OSR blogosphere if that sounds useful!