Saturday, March 14, 2026

You Didn't Understand Triangle Agency Because You're Already "Good At Games™" (and Probably Didn't Read Homestuck)

tl;dr
(Triangle Long; Derails Reviews)

This one is gonna be kind of a long one, and because this ties to the point I'm making I'm actually just gonna give you the thesis right up front: even people who are very smart suffer from fatigue trying to process large amounts of rules text, and if they are people who have lots of experience engaging with games analytically, they may not read closely enough to see when a game is trying to teach principles to players that they themselves already understand and have formed opinions about. Additionally, I find that many people who have trouble understanding Triangle Agency's whole deal simply do not zoom out far enough to consider the metacontext - you cannot Death of the Author this game, and you need to be ARG-brained about it.

xkcd.com/917

DISCLAIMERS

Before I begin, I'd like to preface this by saying that while this post is not in direct response to any particular video review or essay, I would say that it is in conversation with the Quinns Quest review, the Dead Letters discussion, A.A. Voigt's video essay (who I would argue is probably the closest to Getting It, but we'll get to that) which I will reference in very limited capacities, plus some general rumblings that have been floating around since the game got into the world. I respect Quinns and Aaron and Sam (and while I do not know anything about Misha and Walid, if Sam keeps their company I would extend that same respect to them) and their opinions on games immensely. I feel it important to note this because I'm about to spend a lot of words talking about how I feel that all these people who are very smart completely missed the point of the game to varying degrees whereas I, known dumbass, am somehow the One True Enlightened TTRPG Blogger. This post is going to spoil so, so many things about media over the last few decades, so please be warned.

I'd also like to disclose that I've been a fan of Triangle Agency from well before I fully understood what it was going for - you will find my name in the rulebook under the list of people who had way too much disposable income at the time Triangle Agency was funding, which has led to me not only getting to play the game with Caleb but also having some personal chats with Caleb about how to run the game before I ran it for The QueerXP and then later for the cool kids over at the Tabletop Book Club for a private game after they'd reviewed the game on their podcast. I say all this because I need you to know I have experienced all three sides of this triangle - I've read the game, I've played the game, I've run the game. I'm not an expert in much, but I feel pretty confident I know what I'm talking about here. Too often, people confuse their passion for something with an understanding of it, and that point of ego is something I find to be a big stumbling block for most people in these spaces. As I have said before, none of us know where we are on the Dunning-Kruger graph, not even me.

Finally, if you've never actually played a game of Triangle Agency, I'd really like to point you towards the bonus episode of The Department of Variance of Somewhere, Ohio where the crew played Triangle Agency and which then led to two connected mini-campaigns run by some of those actors over on their D&D channel BlackwaterDnD. I think they are excellent examples of play of the game, and interestingly they represent the game at different parts in its release so consuming that entire plotline lets you see the evolution of the game itself which is its own kind of reward if you're into that kind of thing. Which you should be.

Triangle Agency? Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.

In the HBO Westworld series, one of the subplots revolves around the AI robot hosts of the park interacting with a particular maze puzzle as well as one of the human characters trying to figure out why it kept popping up around the park in all kinds of weird places. When some of the hosts figure out its purpose, they make a point to tell the human character that the maze is not meant for him - which, of course, infuriates him and causes him to go on further violent sprees against the hosts. That struggle - that is, of entitlement - is a core theme that Westworld the show wanted to highlight, but the actual purpose of the maze is something quite different. It is, essentially, a test for the AI to solve to achieve actual sentience and free will outside of their programming. The human characters don't need the maze - they've already got that built in as a factor of being a human being, and in fact them interacting with the Westworld park is the ultimate extension of this. But, of course, in a universe where you can go to a theme park and are told you can do literally anything you want, to be told that something isn't intended for them is its own clash of free will and personhood as defined within the rules both of the show and of the theme park within the show. Let's put a pin in that for now.

In China Miéville's The City & The City, an investigator is called in to investigate a murder and must go to a neighboring city to do so. This neighboring city is unlike any other - it is functionally co-terminal with the city he starts in. They are geographically the same place, and the façade of them being separate cities is held in place by cultural tradition, extensive mental programming to unsee the things present in the other city, and the threat of some kind of organization that will disappear you if happen to breach between the two cities. (Also there's some kind of weird object that might be magical involved? It's been just south of 20 years since I've read this book, forgive me. Also, oof owie my bones, I did not need to remember my mortality like that.) Much of the later part of the book involves intentionally invoking that breach to solve the mystery while dealing with the fallout of directly breaking the social contract these "two" cities have established to keep themselves "separate."

Although not seen this way by its creator Michael Haneke, Funny Games (both the original Austrian 1997 film and its 2007 English-language shot-for-shot remake) is a horror film in which two teenagers begin torturing a family on holiday and it is revealed that these characters are aware of the audience and can break the fourth wall. This is mainly the reason it's not seen as a horror film by Haneke - the horror isn't the point of the film, it's the complicitness of the audience by partaking of the film itself allowing the torture to continue. You, the audience, may at any point stop watching the film and the torture of these fictional characters will end - but you, the audience, are here to watch a film. You're not going to stop watching, will you?

So let me tell you about Homestu- no no wait! This is important! It's even listed on the Triangle Agency Kickstarter page as an actual inspiration unlike those other things I mentioned, see?

Homestuck was a piece of hypermedia wrongly called a webcomic by many that persisted over the entirety of the Obama presidency that followed an ever-expanding cast of characters as they began playing a game that gave them strange and unique powers. Throughout the run, we follow these characters as they develop their powers, understand the rules governing the world they live in as well as that of the parallel universe full of other characters whose choices influence their own lives and whose lives they can also affect, as well as multiple divergent and "doomed" timelines containing alternate versions of each of these characters, characters who exist outside of these universes, and the direct and explicit author insert character. It was also a story that was notably influenced by people outside the universe of the story by way of donations and funding the creator - while of course technically everything added to the story was done so by the person writing and drawing it, the outside impetus for certain changes or additions came from the collective agreement that if you paid Andrew Hussie for a certain thing at a certain time in a certain way, it would be reflected in the story. (Also, Homestuck carried forward the bit from Hussie's earlier work Problem Slueth where a completely innocent object was actually a very lethal weapon until it was addressed directly by the narrative. [See: the art for the Gun anomaly.] Neat!)

Trad? Neotrad? A secret third option?

If you're here, I'm going to make the assumption that you already have at least some kind of broad understanding about what Triangle Agency is. Whether that assumption is actually correct is something we'll get to in time, but at the surface you know that it's a game in which you play a character who works for the Triangle Agency because they have bonded with a supernatural entity called an Anomaly that gives them weird powers and that you're tasked to go and neutralize other Anomalies. Cool, right?

Actually that's already wrong: you're not playing a character in the world of Triangle Agency, you're playing a character who works for the Triangle Agency who is playing a game of Triangle Agency in which they are playing characters who work for the Triangle Agency. We're never actually introduced to this intermediary character you play - it might even be easier to think of them as a Gamertag Profile because there's a little bit of information that sticks to them as you play: how much of the rulebook you've read, and the Demerits you gain from reading them. Aside from various entries that give you Demerits for reading them, just based on the instructions on page 30 where it tells you you earn a Demerit for every "illegitimately observed page" you see between after reading what's in Playwalled Document A1. Depending on your interpretation (although remember: per the rules on page 4, you're not allowed to interpret rules), that might just mean any other Playwalled pages (there are 92 other pages aside from A1) or it might mean literally every other page in the book if you decided to look at anything else before coming back to page 30 (there are over 300 pages in this book). If you decided to just decided to read the book through in one shot rather than following the instructions, you'd start accruing Demerits once you hit page 201 and just wouldn't stop until you eventually ended back up on page 30. That would apply to you any time you played Triangle Agency, forever. That is, as long as you remember to alert your GM when you make your next character - and you'd tell them, right? Right?

There's also the point of order about the GM - because, again, it very explicitly says that one of the members of your Field Team assumes the role of GM and dictates the story, meaning that the person facilitating your game is just as much a player as anyone else at the table, but the GM (player) is playing the GM (character) who is playing all of the NPCs on that layer of reality. This isn't me wanking about the game being deeper than it is - this gets called out in the rules, explicitly in the beginning of the GM Tool Kit section:

And this character isn't safe from harm either - aside from being explicitly called out as never leaving the Triangle Agency branch office, which means they physically exist inside of the world of the game, there's also a result on the Weather Events table which just kills them!

The Weather Events table, by the way, is the table you roll on when your players start leaving too many Loose Ends after missions - reality begins to unravel. This all ties into the metaplot of Triangle Agency, which also ties into where I feel like I always see people starting to get things wrong.

Here are some things that are true:

Players, when advancing their characters (or their characters' characters, as the case may be), will make choices and unlock abilities and trigger scenes that allow them to focus on seeing that character's personal story advance in a way that they want that the GM does not plan ahead of time - although, depending, the player may not know what those changes are ahead of time either (unless they've been reading ahead...)
GMs are creating missions for the character('s character)s to go on, using either their own writing or pulling from pre-written missions to tell the story they want to tell and which all of the character(s' character)s have no real say in - and at the GM's whim (and Chaos expenditure), may involve or outright kill any character in the game to keep the plot moving, including ones important to the players/characters/characters' characters.
There are meta influences on the state of the characters' characters' game world - the Weather Events table, any abilities they may have unlocked and directives from the Agency or the Urgency or the secret third narrator, but there are two more: the desires of you, the player, and of your character. Not your character's character, your character. Remember, information you learn from the book sticks to your character - which means if you go play with someone else, all those Demerits come along with you, which might trigger a conversation with everyone right there about what's about to happen in game.

There's one more point I want to make before I get into the topic of conversations at the table, and that's the OTHER thing I see most commonly misinterpreted: the Ask The Agency roll, also known as the way your characters' characters interact with the world when they're not using their Anomaly powers. I'm actually just going to yoink these two pages directly in here for a second:

Ask The Agency allows you to rewrite the reality of the game world by defining something that has not been established previously and making a roll. To put that another way, it gives the Field Agent characters the just about same degree of narrative control over the world that the GM's character has. And again I do mean the Field Agent characters, not the characters' characters - because they live in the same layer of the world that the GM character does. Ask The Agency is those characters and their players going "Hey, we think this is a reasonable chain of events and you haven't said anything about it, so we're establishing it now." While this can technically fail, it still ends up establishing something about the universe. If a GM wants to have more control over the world, they simply have to be more detailed in their descriptions of the world - but by the same token, if players want to use this ability rather than the Anomaly power their character's character has, it means they need to be clever and work on some on-the-spot worldbuilding. Honestly, extremely clever players may not ever have to engage in any kind of appreciable combat at all if they're able to tell a convincing enough story - and it's not like this game really encourages combat anyway considering Anomalies don't really have HP or anything like that.

Actually, hang on a second. A game that encourages problem solving collaboratively, one that encourages you to find answers that aren't on your character sheet, one that actively disincentivizes players from rolling/encourages GMs to get players rolling since when they do, more bad stuff can happen? A game that lets you declare something and then make what is essentially a luck roll to see how true it is? Where have I heard all of that before? Why does all that sound familiar?

I can tell you why: it's because...

TRIANGLE AGENCY IS
A DEPROGRAMMING TOOL
FOR TRAD/NEOTRAD GAMERS

One of the reasons I think that One Night At The Shelterwood Inn is the perfect introductory module for Triangle Agency is that it ACTIVELY makes you look at what is different from more traditional games like Liminal Horror. It's adapted from an old module for the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and it does very much feel like a dungeon crawl - in Liminal Horror, you're a bunch of folks - whether paranormal investigators or just hapless fools who stumble into spooky nonsense - who have to go explore and try and stay alive when weird stuff happens. You've got your standard loadouts, you're managing items and health and all that stuff. Classic dungeon game things, even if it's a modern setting. Meanwhile, the TA side of the adventure flips this on its head - you are Field Agents who need to neutralize and contain an Anomaly and some civilians have stumbled in with camera equipment, which means you need to manage both containing the problem and making sure they don't turn into Loose Ends - by any means necessary. Of anything else in this ramble, I legitimately don't want to spoil too much of this one, but I do want to show you some creature stat blocks out of context to see how you can use them to understand the differences between games:

The LH stats are exactly what you'd expect - basic stats you need to know to try to fight it, and what it does to fight you. Meanwhile, almost everything in the TA statblocks is focused on the narrative - because while both games tell you what it's doing to interact with the world, one of them tells you mechanical effects and the other tells you the narrative effects and I think on the player side of things, if you were to play the Liminal Horror version of this and immediately play the Triangle Agency side to see how things are different, some very big gears would begin to turn if you'd never played a more narrative focused game.

And it's this particular point - the "if you've never played a more narrative focused game" point that I really want to hammer down on, because it ties into why I believe I understand Triangle Agency in a way that many of the people who reviewed it simply do not. In the Dead Letters episode, there's a whole big discussion about halfway through where Sam and Misha and Walid all go "Yeah, I like the premise, but actually I would just remove all of these things in it that I find unnecessary so I could play a grounded game because I don't need this." And then right around the 59 minute mark, there's a comment about a game that teaches players to break the rules can be useful even if you can't actually break the rules inside of it and Sam goes "I don't agree, I don't think that works in practice" and as I was listening I just started screaming at my phone because yes, that is precisely what this game is for because I HAVE BEEN DOING THAT SINCE I READ TRIANGLE AGENCY. As someone who had up to the point I played Triangle Agency essentially not interacted with anything that one might refer to as a "story game" (or even any OSR content really, and I'll come back to why that matters in a bit), realizing that Triangle Agency was teaching me how to have conversations both with the GM and with other players about collaborative storytelling was mind-blowing. I had been a GM for a very long time at that point, but the idea that players who weren't the GM could - and SHOULD - have narrative control over a game? The idea that yeah, actually maybe it's fun if people suggest something that might be beneficial in the universe and to roll with it rather than just ruling with an iron fist and not letting anyone suggest changes while we were playing? It seems stupid to me now that I'd never realized it, but once I saw it in action it was so painfully obvious and I literally have not stopped doing it in any other game I've played in or run - because once you learn how to have that conversation in a way that isn't annoying (i.e. you're not bugging the GM about something to bail your Special Little Guy out of trouble, you're talking with the table about something that would be narratively plausible and interesting even if there are consequences for it) it's something you can use to enrich every game you're in.

And it was precisely at this point that I realized why it was that Quinns and Sam and all the rest of them bounced right off of this - because they didn't need the kind of lesson that this game can teach. They already have their thoughts about game design - they don't need to be given permission to challenge the text of a game, to navigate negotiating with a GM in a productive way. They've already played thousands of hours of different games! They've already got successful careers as people known for being good at games. You know who does need this kind of handholding to learn this lesson? People who have not played games where they have any degree of control over the narrative outside of character creation. The maze was not for them. It was for people like me.

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym

On the subject of challenging the game, I'd like to pull in one more point that ties to this and which I feel was the only stumble in A.A. Voigt's very excellent video essay - the purpose of the third narrator, the "yellow voice." As a reminder, The Agency speaks in the text with red text (or white text on a red background), The Urgency speaks with blue text (or white text on a blue background), but then there's a third voice that speaks in yellow (or black text on yellow background). The yellow voice is tied to your Reality track - and it unlike The Agency or The Urgency, this voice isn't talking to your character or your character's character, it's talking to you, the player. To keep with the naming scheme, and to reference the final ability on the Reality track, we'll call this voice The Emergency.

While pursing your characters' Anomaly or Competency paths, you may receive certain abilities that instruct you the player to do them for a certain amount of time, or forever. These are, basically, things that get stuck to that intermediary character that I referred to as your Gamertag Profile. These can be anything from permanently altering your rulebook (a la many legacy games) or forcing certain things to happen within the game world, but some of these (like the Sponsorship Die ability in G3) are now supposed to take place in any game you play that requires use of the die granted from that ability. What I find fascinating about the Reality track unlocks is that in contrast to Competency's tendency towards giving a character new doodads to play with from The Agency or Anomaly's tendency towards giving your character new abilities to push them towards becoming a character like The Urgency in your own right, all of Reality's focus on protecting the story that you've played out with your friends. The Emergency gives you abilities that are selfless - whether they involve you literally borrowing a d100 from someone not playing the game with you to protecting your favorite in-game characters from coming to harm from The Agency or The Urgency. They are the reminder that when you are playing a game that demands you choose between two factions, you can Kobayashi Maru your way out of it and do something else - and in doing so may even be able to save some of the other characters in the game world by going so far as to literally rewriting everyone else's character sheets. It is your reminder to touch grass. It is your reminder that it is too easy to get caught up in character optimization and following upgrade paths blindly without thinking about the story you're playing out.

A lot of this makes sense when you realize that Caleb was a professional GM before writing Triangle Agency. A lot of design decisions feel like things that would frustrate you if you played with a bunch of random people all the time - how do you make people care about each other? How do you give people enough things to keep them interested? How do you somehow cater to every playstyle while also giving them one game to play together? The answer is: you teach them. You give them the tools, you let them make discoveries however they see fit - whether they break the rules by reading the rules, or whether they discover things organically through play. But you hold your hand, you teach them, and you elevate those players to become more thoughtful contributors to the games they play. And if these players don't want to buy into what you're selling here (as it seems perhaps that the players in Quinns' game did not)? That's okay too - because like I said in "Stop Just Playing Games You Know You Like," sometimes you'll try something out and you'll find you just don't enjoy what it's trying to do, and that's good because it means you're able to better articulate the things that you do like. Not everyone likes secretly being taught how to be a GM. Some people don't like games where you keep secrets from other players. Some people don't like games where you are forced to care about NPCs because they are plot relevant to you. Some people just don't have the capacity for mentally juggling several characters at once. But you don't know unless you try.

OTHER GAMES OF THIS ILK

While Triangle Agency is certainly the first game I personally interacted with that challenged me to think about the act of playing TTRPGs in the way that it does, there are many other games or genres of games I've come to love in the intervening time that do similar things. I think Ryuutama, as a game also written by someone who had been a professional GM for many years, does a similar job of trying to distribute the GM's duties to the other players in a way to encourage them to be courteous to one another and to the GM. I think His Majesty The Worm use its Bond systems to a similar effect by different execution - Worm uses Bonds with other player characters to encourage certain kinds of roleplaying and is rewards them with recharging powers rather than Triangle Agency using a more esoteric approach by tying you to NPCs. Belonging Outside Belonging games similarly encourage roleplaying with the other player characters by way of generating tokens by being vulnerable or selfish and spending those tokens on abilities that affect the narrative (lookin' at you, Hellwhalers). Many OSR games explicitly include a "Die of Fate" mechanic for when you propose something that hasn't been established to see if it can be true. Trophy Dark and its many cousins have Devil's Bargain mechanics that involve the whole table in crafting the consequences for invoking it. And finally, I think for reasons I cannot in good faith discuss but which will become obvious, Deathmatch Island is probably both graphic design-wise and meta-design-wise the closest game you'll get to Triangle Agency. There are all kinds of games out there that can teach you the same things that Caleb and Sean were trying to, and if they're more accessible to you and your playgroup, I encourage you to go take them for a spin.

CLOSING REMARKS

So there we go! That's why I think people who review Triangle Agency get it wrong - they've already learned the lessons it is trying to teach, and thus they come at it unable to perceive exactly what it is doing and layer their own assumptions atop it. I probably could have just said that and left it, right? Hah! Oh well. It's taken you a few minutes to read all that, it's taken me a few days to write all that while I should have been doing something else, but I guess we're done now. Don't look at your scroll bar, you can >Go Back to what you were doing before this. Thanks for reading!

No really, that's it! You don't have to read anything else! There's nothing else here for you.

Alright listen here you little shit. You really want to know why I think people don't get Triangle Agency? It's because none of you motherfuckers want to play games with people who openly admit to having read Homestuck. Sure, you can point to Control or The SCP Foundation as key touchstones to what makes Triangle Agency be what it is, and that's certainly not wrong. But it's all a ruse! A sneaky bit of misdirection! Because Homestuck is what REALLY makes up the bedrock of this game, and since you're here now I have to tell you why.

Like I mentioned earlier, the plot of Homestuck, such as it can be shortened into an easily digestible sentence, involves a small group of characters sitting down to play a game together which very quickly leads to them finding out that they are in a simulation, that there are other people also in the simulation (although they are not "people" as they understand them, but instead are Trolls who all seem to be hyperbolic versions of Types Of Guy From The Internet), and that in addition to the weird powers they unlock outside of the generic "interact with the world" kind of game powers that appear both in the game they start of playing but then also very quickly manifest in their reality, they are given a dedicated support character that they are able to shape the manifestation of, plus they have to maintain relationships with all the other player characters, PLUS they often have alternate timeline/universe versions of those characters that they're forming relationships with. (Yes, that is the shortened and easily digestible sentence version of Homestuck, believe me.) On the specific note of those alternate timelines/universes, there are certain actions that they can take in their world which functionally soft lock their timeline - meaning that that particular timeline becomes "doomed" since it cannot fulfill the "win" conditions of the game which allow the creation of a new universe. There's all kinds of instances of characters latching onto random NPCs and making them important, there's a whole major point in the last part of the plot about other players from outside the established game universe trying to destroy it, there's a particular toy that just keeps bouncing around through the universes, there's explicit retcons and things that are permanently changed about the comic panels from the day that they happened so you can no longer go back and experience the comic in its unchanged state (ignoring the current state of preservation of the media I mean - I'm talking about John putting his arm through the window which made it show up in a bunch of previous scenes specifically, but there are other things).

I'm just barely scratching the surface here, but yeah of course Homestuck is an inspiration - if you actually start playing the game on its terms, you find out pretty quickly that in order to achieve any kind of satisfying ending for your specific playgroup's instance of Triangle Agency it's going to take you multiple playthroughs, damning multiple characters to awful fates except for the ones you manage to smuggle out via what powers The Emergency provides. In fact, in the GM's advice section presented by The Urgency says as much and details a number of ways listed that the game can end (though, of course, because The Urgency cannot see the words of The Emergency, what happens in N2 isn't listed below):

Just like in Homestuck, you and your players learning the ins and outs of Triangle Agency is what will ultimately let you close the book on your game world, literally. You can all cheat and read the book cover to cover, you can discover it all through emergent gameplay, or you can take the third option and never play the game at all. The only winning move is not to play - because also just like Homestuck, once you start reading, this game is a part of you forever.

A FINAL NOTE ON TABLE BUY-IN

One of the things that really, truly bugged me about the QQ & Dead Letters reviews of Triangle Agency is that it's pretty obvious that neither group was really bought-in to the game. And I don't say that because that's their fault - if you haven't caught on by now, this is a game that will by default become tainted by a sufficiently informative Session Zero. The game is, to borrow a term from the SCP Foundation, an infohazard. You cannot properly explain the game to players without spoiling the game, and you cannot ensure that you will have the requisite buy-in on the full premise of the game without explaining the game. This is why I think it gets miscategorized as "a comedy game" or "a corporate horror game" - because without sufficient explanation, you can absolutely just play the game that way. If you are completely uncritical of the world of Triangle Agency because you don't understand it, you can absolutely just play all the Anomaly abilities for laughs. If you have no reason to critique the people giving you your assignments, you can absolutely just do a bunch of one-shots that rotate between mundane scenes at a kind-of-weird office to going to a frat party to try and capture an Anomaly fueled by one person's fear of peer pressure to do keg stands. It's not bad to play Triangle Agency that way, necessarily - to quote Brian Flaherty of My First Dungeon, if you're having fun you're already doing it right. But I think that perhaps something that prevents some tables from wanting to pursue the game further, or what makes people think they won't like and therefore prevents them from ever playing in the first place, is when players find out that the game isn't just a funny haha game, or it's not just doing missions to take down weird stuff. There's so much more to the game than that, and if you don't have the kind of players who are going to go all Pepe Silvia about your game then maybe they're just not going to get as much out of your time together as they would if you just played something like Liminal Horror or Delta Green or Monster of the Week.

But who IS The Emergency? Why does it keep talking in a plural voice?!

THE TRUE ENDING

OK, that's actually all for now. Again, many thanks to folks like Quinns and Sam and Misha and Walid and Aaron for getting your opinions about this game out into the world - and thank you for being willing to play games you may not immediately understand. You don't have to like everything or agree with everyone, but as I keep trying to drive home to people, the more things you come into contact with that challenge you, the more you're able to refine your own tastes and opinions.

Stay weird out there.

Sunday, February 22, 2026

This Place Is Trying To Kill You: Revisited

"The View Through The Gate," by Evangeline Gallagher, as printed in One Night Strahd.

INTRO

I have a lot of complicated feelings about my time with One Night Strahd. It is the thing that got me into game design in anything even approaching a professional manner, and yet for all its relative success, very little of that had anything to do with me. We won the "Best Digital Book" silver ENNIE in 2022, but a lot of that is thanks to the absolutely stellar art by Evangeline Gallagher (who, already fantastic in their own right with their own work, has now gone on to be beloved by many horror TTRPG creators, authors, and apparently even The Cure?!), the layout & graphic identity by Angie Knowles (the Director of Design and Production at Oni Press, already well decorated by the time she came to work with us on the project), and the battle maps from Ripley Matthews (whose work I don't see mentioned anywhere near enough considering how extremely good it is, please go commission her). While Jake and I wrote and playtested most everything together, much of the book is in Jake's voice with my editing followed by further developmental and tonal edits from M Ebel (already known for their work on Rime of the Frostmaiden at that point). We put out an extremely good product that I truly am proud of - but it's hard to feel like I contributed anything to it that still remains, y'know?

I started thinking about it again thanks to a chat in the Prismatic Wasteland Discord the other day, mainly in the context of how much easier of a time we'd have had writing it had we been familiar with the OSR community. Jake and I actually met via the Giant In The Playground forums at the same time the G+ OSR boom was happening, so as a result while I spent a lot of that time talking about D&D 3.5 and understanding that game, there was a lot of old-school play that I was just never introduced to. It's also critical to note that despite being a forum kid, I completely missed The Forge, which meant that I also completely missed out on the games and theory that came from it - particularly anything that Vincent/Meguey Baker had to say. I tell you all of this because, working with what we had at the time - me, mostly being versed in D&D 3.5 and then 5e, Jake having played older editions of D&D and being familiar with that style while also wanting to make a game that we could run for our friends on Halloween 2019, we knew that the primary hindrance to getting the game done in a timely fashion was how 5e's combat worked. We knew we had to keep combat in the game: so much of the narrative of Ravenloft (at least in the 5e Curse of Strahd game) was expressed via its many random encounters, we wanted the game to still feel like you were playing a full campaign without it feeling like a boss rush in a videogame - but how do you keep the narrative intact to show off the setting, the combat present but not only not slow down the game with its presence but make sure that the Big Combats (TM) felt more weighty than the random encounters? My solution, which I think was my some of my best design in the book, was to honor what the setting was trying express to the players: This Place Is Trying To Kill You.

TPKU

"This Place Is Trying To Kill You," or TPKU for short, is the first part of Act 2 in our game and is one that recurs as long as the players are in Act 2. It's the random encounter table, legally, but it's a random encounter table with a series of metacurrency procedures surrounding it. D&D's two primary metacurrencies are HP and XP, which random encounters function to reduce one to increase the other. Since One Night Strahd is intended to be done in one day (both in and out of game), things like leveling up your characters or taking long rests to heal aren't really on the table here, that means that unless we did something, all random encounters would do would tax resources and take time away from the more spectacular (in the traditional sense of that word) bits of the game. My proposal was that if we acknowledge that they just exist to tax resources, why not just be up front about that and save a whole lot of time by having players narrate the encounters instead? If a fireball would toast a group of werewolves anyway, why not just narrate the scene, have the player spend the spell slot, narrate a conclusion and move on with it?

This evolved into a series of tables sorted by difficulty of encounter, and then assigning them a value of which the players would need to spend resources to meet. HP and XP weren't 5e's only metacurrencies - you have HD (at that time only spent for healing during rests), Inspiration, and spell slots that are all usually spent as a consequence of combat. This was just a more direct way to spend them. This also allowed for certain story beats that happened through play to allow a "discount," meaning that there was incentive to do certain things to allow easier traversal - because at the end of the day TPKU was there to symbolize the players traversing Castle Ravenloft and its surrounding grounds, so completing objectives should necessarily make things easier.

We balanced ONS for parties of 4 level 6 characters - hence the
consideration for Expected Levels/number of PCs.

An example and a half of the entries.

I still think a lot of the writing in these prompts is good (Jake took a lot of prompts I had written and jazzed them up very well), but you see how close we were to doing something resembling what would eventually end up in the Carved From Brindlewood games? You see how much easier our lives would have been if we just...hadn't used D&D, and instead made some kind of spooky vampire castle game in some other system? This is one of the reasons why I am so vocal about people playing games outside of the one you really like - most of the time, someone somewhere out there has had the same problem as you and has found a way to solve it. But by the same token, had we known about games outside of the D&D ecosystem, would we have even tried writing One Night Strahd? I can tell you that if we had known how other people approached things like this, at the very least we could have saved ourselves hundreds of pages creating new procedures, explaining them to the reader and doing everything we desperately could to get these 5e players to be okay with their characters dying while also trying to make sure the DMs had all the tools they needed to keep the gameplay pace moving. We could have been a lot more judicious with our use of tables, space, and explainer text to get the point across - again, we joked a lot about the fact that in order to condense a campaign into one 12-14 hour experience, we in fact had to almost triple the number of pages in the original book.

WHAT TO DO WITH TPKU TODAY

I am still pretty proud of TPKU from a game design standpoint, but I realize that the issue I was solving in 5e is essentially just a non-issue in lots of other games. I do think that adding more narrative framework to handling random encounters is good - again, this is why I've grown fond of both the OSR "the answer is not on your character sheet" ethos to make players engage with the narrative space of the world they're in. But I also love things like the Belonging Outside Belonging games' system of earning and spending tokens through play to keep conflicts moving forward, keeping all the players engaged and giving your character rewards for engaging with their character's core concepts. I could say the same for His Majesty The Worm or Triangle Agency, each of which encourage players to pull on their character's bonds to resolve conflict in the moment, though each in vastly different ways. As I mentioned before, what I was stabbing towards also gets close to how Carved From Brindlewood games handle things by spending a metacurrency to resolve a threat accompanied by narrating something off of a prompt - though TPKU sits in a weird place between CfB's "Paint The Scene," "The Unscene," and marking a Mask to get out of a bad roll. TPKU is somehow all of these things and none of these things - and while I would have appreciated a broader understanding of game design at time of writing, I'm still glad I blindly stumbled into territory well traveled by people whose design sensibilities I now know and respect.

Honestly, the only game I could think of trying to remake TPKU to fit with today would be maybe...Daggerheart? But hey guess what I'm not going to - not only because I don't have that kind of time, but also because good ol' Jack DNGNCLB has already done something that fills a similar void for that game.

He posted this on Bluseky, which I linked above, but you can
buy it in his Heartbreakers Itch product which is also linked above.

OUTRO

Despite One Night Strahd being pretty successful (at time of writing, we've sold just south of 2000 copies since it was released on 11/11/21), I'm honestly not sure if it has broken even yet. Jake funded the project entirely on his own and aside from the few promotional copies I've requisitioned over the years, all of the money has gone back to him to help pay back the costs of commissioning so much wonderful art, the layout, the project management, the six episode AP we got Jasmine Bhullar to run for us that stars some really cool folks, and the ads we commissioned from Denkles, Superdillin and Eleanor Morton. We also don't make any money from the POD copies of One Night Strahd since DTRPG charges over $80 to print the 525 page book at the high quality we wanted it at and we knew nobody was going to pay that (if you did, please come find me at a con and I'll sign it or something because YOWZA that's a lot of money for a single book), so that means all the money it made came from people buying the PDF. While it would be super neat to maybe see some money from that project, what was much more important to me was seeing what the actual design process was like, learning how to manage the feelings about other people getting to decide what happens with content that you wrote, and figuring out how to solve problems in a way that makes sense to people outside your friend group. While starting at this scale is absolutely not a thing I would recommend for anyone and has absolutely ruined my sense of scale for all other projects, it was an extremely valuable experience that I feel very thankful and privileged to have had. It has opened some doors for me, sure - case in point, if you're reading this then I'm well enough known on the Internet for anyone outside of my friend group to care about what I'm saying. But for all that, maybe the most important thing for me was realizing what parts of game design I actually excelled at, because knowing that about myself has made it easier to recognize the things I struggle with in solo projects: I'm pretty good at encounter design and understanding the procedures games want you to interact with, but if being able to describe something in way more detail than necessary was an Olympic sport I'd be bringing home the gold every year.

I guess my closing point here, which I am saying as much for you as I am for myself, is don't downplay your contributions to a project. Be proud of what parts of you shine through, even if it's not as much as you thought would be there in the end. And most of all, remember that working with and learning from other people will always help you become better at what you do. Or to put it another way:

Stay weird out there.

Sunday, January 4, 2026

On Understanding & Adapting System Neutral Modules: Ave Nox

Ave Nox: Guaranteed to be a blast!

INTRO

Most of my RPG-running career has led me far astray from system neutral modules. Not out of spite - rather, that so often the things I would play would be rife with modules pre-made and ready-to-roll for what I was playing. Even as I transitioned out of the D&D ecosystem and into indie titles like The Electrum Archive, there were still plenty of introductory premade modules included with the various games I'd try out, or else they'd be packed with how-tos for making your own dungeon like literally half of the His Majesty The Worm book or roughly 90% of Down We Go. Over the last year as I've found myself trying out more systems and understanding the nuances of what each system is trying to tell you the kind of story it wants to tell based on the rules it has, I've found myself ending up with more and more modules that advertise themselves as system neutral and wanting to try them out - and that means trying to fit these modules with systems that will play well with them.

As a quick aside - my first time playing an adventure that bills itself as being for use with multiple systems was actually the three-part promo stream for Duginthroat Divided - and what's interesting here is that while Daniel very clearly does put the "Designed For Use With OSE" logo on there, the promo material indicates that it can be used with "other games" - which makes sense, right, because OSE is one of the many repackagings of pre-3e D&D, and so any other game that basically does that thing would make sense. I appreciate this kind of shorthand, because it'll tell you what it wants - even if you're not running OSE, it expects you to have those kinds of player principles in your mind: resources are limited, you should be looting as much as possible if you want to become stronger, and careful play and thoughtful problem solving will take the bite out of the harshest encounters because if you're rolling dice you've already messed up. This isn't just a vanity link - we'll come back to Duginthroat in a little bit.

While some system neutral adventures may include a list of conversion/equivalence information to assist in translating jargon between systems or use generic terms for certain things (armor, etc), unless the module catches the eye of one of the few review channels out there that covers this stuff, it's unlikely that you'll be able to tell at a glance what you're getting into outside of some general stereotyping from what you can glean from the cover and the item description page. Likewise, while some systems (like Down We Go) may give you help in converting statblocks that are shaped a certain way into what that particular system demands, depending on exactly how many things are different from the base assumptions of the module you may end up having to rewrite massive portions of the adventure on the fly - not just in terms of difficulty, but also in terms of just making sure things like the economy of the system works the same way.

SIEZE THE NIGHT

And so we come to Ave Nox, a 250-room megadungeon. I've been in the process of reading through this for a few projects I've got planned for this year (and also for fun - I think everything I've touched published by Feral Indie Studio has been excellent in terms of art & writing), but one of the interesting things is that since there's not a lot of coverage for it and the lone one-shot of it up online runs it in Down We Go, a system that does not use many of the basic mechanical assumptions written in the first two pages of the text (more on that in a minute) yet is still interesting to play in, I thought it would be useful to me and the few folks who have taken to asking Reddit over the years and gotten minimal response to see if we can parse out exactly what the dungeon wants you to do and what things will make that easier or harder to achieve.

Now We Have To Talk About Math, Unfortunately

Right off the bat, there's a glossary of terms that are used in the book as well as some inter-system translations. From this, we know that the basic listed assumption of the system is that you're using a game that treats rounds as 6 second intervals, you're using a d20 system that has the standard 6 D&D stats. Interestingly, there's a note about challenges, indicating that systems that want you to roll under a stat to succeed at a test can be used as is, but roll over systems should treat Easy challenges as something that succeed roughly 50% of the time, whereas impossible challenges only succeed 5% of the time - except that's ALSO kind of not true, because that's just the d% column - the d20 column lists an Average challenge as a DC15 versus an Impossible at DC30, and if you recall my Mathematically Average Challenges post you'll know that in D&D 5e (which is what much of the terminology in here points towards) characters with average stats and no bonuses can only succeed a DC15 check 50% of the time once they're extremely high level (in the level 13-16 range) - a character has to have minmaxed to get a 20 in a stat to be able to be able to succeed a DC15 check at least 50% of the time (technically 55%). On the other hand, a much more intentionally brutal game like MÖRK BORG treats DC12 as its normal difficulty but in reality characters only hit that 40% of the time with average stats, meaning that DC15 to an average character only succeeds 30% of the time.

Why am I even talking about this kind of thing, especially since many non-D&D dungeon-crawling games care so little about numerical balance instead opting for more narrative balance/encouraging the OSR-style "the answer is not on your character sheet" kind of approach? It's because the farther away what your preferred system and what the module consider "average" challenges to be, the rougher of a time you may have - and not just in a "I'm willing to throw characters into the woodchipper until we finish playing" way, I mean in the "is the system you're choosing going to allow you to succeed" kind of way. It hurts my writer's soul to reduce genre into math, but being able to interpret what the game world considers "average" versus what your system of choice considers "average" is a great way to figure out what kind of fantasy those systems support. Modern D&D & its clones support a more heroic fantasy where the characters are superheroes, whereas MÖRK BORG and its cohort want you to feel doomed from the start - and both of those things are reinforced by how hard it is to get successes from your dice rolls. Ave Nox seems to be shooting for somewhere in the middle - something where success is achievable, but you're going to have to either take it slow or facetank your problems.

We are not done talking about math yet, I am afraid, because now we get to move onto...

Value, Hit Points & Trade Goods Explained By Someone Bad At Economics

So the NPCs in Ave Nox very much do not use money in a traditional sense - like, things still have coin values, but it's called out that this is very much a barter economy even among the other non-local factions in the area and that the coin values are mostly an abstraction to help you keep track of relative value of labor and goods. OK, this is cool, in theory I like this. The issue comes to when you're running a game like OSE that really wants you to care about loot, because it ties directly to how you level up. Putting the actual calculation of experience points aside from a moment (Ave Nox does not mention them, nor do I think it should), the literal scale of how money works in your system is something to keep in mind because what money can do for your character vastly incentivizes or de-incentivizes certain actions like "looting literally everything." This is where we return to by experience with Duginthroat - having come from later editions of D&D and then other rules light OSR-y games like Down We Go, I didn't realize that securing loot was the #1 way to advance your character until the last session we did - I was getting all kinds of cool story out of the session, but my poor little magic user was never gonna level up.

As a quick point of order, let's compare the values of a few things you can purchase in Ave Nox versus their equivalents in some games I've mentioned so far:

In Down We Go, a weapon is 100 coins across the board, and all attacks do 1 HP of damage - one or two hits takes down chump enemies in that system. In MÖRK BORG, weapons range from 5-35 coins doing between d2 and d10 damage but mostly in the d4 or d6 range - meaning you'll need 3-5 hits to take out most chump enemies in that system. In OSE, weapons go from 10-150 coins, dealing between d4 and d10 damage, but mostly sticking in the d6-d8 range, putting it back in the 2ish hits to knock down a chump enemy range. Ave Nox doesn't list weapons for purchase, but many of the weapons held by chump enemies do between d4 and d6 and many have around 11HP - meaning that it could take 3-5 hits on average to take them down with their own regular weapons, and then based on the system you're running in those weapons could be worth somewhere in the 20-30 coin range in OSE, and about the same in MÖRK BORG. This means, at least in terms of potential violence from these examples, MÖRK BORG is most aligned with Ave Nox.
All the games mentioned so far have purchasable light sources that function for various lengths of time. OSE gets you six Torches for 1 coin (1 hour each) & a lantern for 10 coins + oil for 2 coins (4 hours per use, oil flask has 4 uses). MÖRK BORG has torches for 2 coin (no listed duration, strangely) or oil lamp for 10 coin + oil for 5 coin (lasts 6 hours plus your Presence stat, so between 7 and 26? wild). Down We Go has candles for 10 coins (good for one room, which if we do conversions for exploration turns is probably...10 minutes?), three torches for 40 coin (3 rooms each, so 30 minutes each), and an oil lantern for 80 coin plus the oil flask for 100 coin (last 6 rooms, so an hour).
Lastly, let's look at some non-magic loot. Down We Go says small loot is 3d6x10 coin, 3d6x50 for medium and 3d6x100 for big loot. OSE is wildly granular as is to be expected and mostly wants you to be finding magical, high value items, but jewelry is worth 3d6x100 coin which is interesting to line up with Down We Go. In Ave Nox, most loot items are either jewelry (usually lumped under "trinkets") at 50 coin, art items (small statues, paintings, etc) go in at 75 coin, and other bigger art pieces usually around 100-200. Ave Nox also includes payment amounts for labor in town - tending a furnace for a day gets you 5 coin or 10lbs of charcoal, tending to the greenhouse for a week gets you 40 coin or a dose of medicine. You can also sell remains that you find to one particular vendor for 100 coins each but uh...don't.

What I find particularly interesting here is that while a megadungeon might lead one to think that you're going to be constantly doing the grind/loot/repeat loop with Ave Nox, the supposition of this dungeon is that you will be much more likely to find lore as loot rather than actual saleable goods - and that means that games that treat loot as XP are going to be particularly difficult until later parts of the dungeon when magic items start to appear (and those are few and far between, even if they are very cool). Likewise, it means that some games are going to prioritize certain playstyles - for example, because of how cheap light is in OSE, players can go deeper into the dungeon before coming back - or at least won't have to prioritize managing light management as heavily as in Down We Go. The flip side of that is that Down We Go WANTS players to be coming back to town fairly often as coming back to town after clearing dungeons is how you level up in that game. ~~And, of course, in 5e, everyone has darkvision so it doesn't matter anyway.~~ Ave Nox is designed such that many of the major sections have their own themes and specific dangers to them - so having players come back to town fairly often isn't a bad thing by any means, but it DOES mean that in addition to the literal money economy, you also need to look at the game's economy of powers (i.e. does this game have spells that obviate certain hazards, and how many do you get per day) and what these characters can carry to resolve these conflicts.

Conflict Resolution

Briefly touched on in places above, the way that Ave Nox intends for you to interact with its game world means that paying attention to what systems are in place in the given game system you choose is important. Again back in that beginning two pages, we have explanations of the difficulty of various tasks, the kinds of stats it assumes you to have as well as the ways to avoid perils it assumes you to have. Looking through the adventure itself, it expects you to have a system that differentiates various levels of armor (for combat reasons), it expects you to have a system that has magic (though not necessarily leveled magic), a system that cares about specific effects of poisons and diseases, and a system that has methods for the creation of medicines. (Optionally, the ability to interact with ancient languages/history.) The bit about the medicines is particularly interesting: while there are certain effects that call out needing to be healed magically, there are exactly two sources of magical healing in the adventure: an NPC you might befriend, and some NPC spellcasters you definitely will not. Otherwise, there are many places to find healing herbs throughout the dungeon, and all the diseases explicitly say what kind of medicine cures them, but otherwise if you don't have any magical healing, your options are either 1. whatever kinds of potions your game system lets you buy, or 2. taking your character back to the healers in town and having them out of commission for weeks. Personally, I think this is fascinating - but on the other hand, I think it points out to the problem kind of endemic in modern D&D of the absolute abundance of magic that makes certain problems go away. "Oh, did you get this curse that says you can't heal? OK well I cast Remove Curse." "Oh, is there some kind of extraplanar creature that has been summoned causing trouble? OK, I cast Banish." I'm not saying this to be wholly negative - I find it legitimately interesting that the spellcasters in D&D have evolved such that they're supposed to just be the toolkit that solves every issue and the ramifications that has for system neutral adventures, but that's a chat for another day.

This being a dungeon crawler, there are expectations of solving issues via combat, disabling/avoiding hazards, and general skullduggery to avoid being noticed by inhabitants of the dungeon, which I would venture most or all games you'd think to pick up for this will offer you. This is, however, a dungeon that has an absurd number of factions packed into it and therefore all kinds of roleplay opportunities and/or places to use social skills if your game includes them (though there aren't any hard and fast rules about doing so in Ave Nox). Not only do you have the citizens of Shear (the town above the dungeon), you've got all of the merchants and mercenaries nearby that have their own interests, you've got several domains inside of the dungeon itself each with their own mini-bosses to go along with the big bad of it all, but you've also got an over-faction that affects the difficulty of the adventure itself and that does have procedures attached to it - the ghosts of the people who died in this place. Without getting too much into spoilers, you learn pretty quickly than having a good relationship with the spirits in the dungeon is a good thing to have - and sometimes a hard thing to maintain, as certain dungeon mishaps can result in angering the ghosts and resetting your progress. The procedure for tracking your reputation with the ghosts is the first thing that feels truly system neutral - and not just because it's a procedure that is written explicitly in the book, but rather because it tracks not so much what players are doing, but how they do it. It is somewhat explicitly a play culture checker - if your players are going to go full colonist and exploit the land and dungeon for ANYTHING that can be sold without respect to the people who lived there and if they help the shitty people who remain there continue to exploit the people who are left, then congratulations - they're going to get some more money, but their life is going to be much harder for it down there.

Perhaps a better way to say that, and a way that is inclusive of the other ways to solve problems that don't use dice rolls, is that Ave Nox rewards thoughtful play. Rushing into any situation will likely get you killed, or worse. Meddling with things without understanding them will likely get you killed. There are so, so many ways to just immediately accidentally die - but when you do, it will be your fault and the dungeon will tell you that. Did you choose to fight something when you could have talked it out? Did you walk into a place without checking it out first? Did you go poking around somewhere without protecting yourself? Again, these are all playstyle choices which may or may not be reinforced by the system in use - again, certain systems present options to simply ignore certain hazards which means that certain parts of the dungeon just turn off for you, which is fine, because that's still problem solving. But the less "get out of jail free" powers you have, the more the players will need to engage with the game world as it is written, both with and in spite of whichever system you use.

The tl;dr Conclusion

As with basically every post I make here, I think the conclusion is that understanding multiple systems rather than just "that one system you really like" is key to being able to enjoy playing games. By having an understanding of what games prioritize what kinds of play, you can look at a system neutral adventure, see what kinds of problems it wants solved and how it rewards you for solving them and then compare that to games you want to play. The more you understand the expectations of the module itself, the more you'll know what you have to do to make a given game function for it (and, importantly, how much time you're going to have to dedicate to a conversion for it).

In the case of Ave Nox, the systems I most want to try running it with (and their most glaring chafe points) are:

Down We Go - doesn't have the correct number of stats, any thing to do with damage and/or defense will have to be recalculated, prioritizes short excursions due to light resources unless clever use is made of NPC merchants, may need to rebalance magic items.
Cairn 2e - also doesn't have the right number of stats, damage will need to be rebalanced across the board. Otherwise probably ok? There are some items that interact with the world in a way that do not appear in Cairn but also like...it's fine maybe?
The Electrum Archive - obviously the established lore doesn't really line up with this dungeon, but taking the basic rules and principles would be fine. Magic & general tech level present a concern.
OSE - an obvious choice. As mentioned, character advancement will be roughly non-existent, but aside from that most things line up well. Would need to figure out a reasonable level to run this for, which means more MATH.

I've got a few more system neutral adventures I've grabbed over the last year or so that I'm excited to try to apply this methodology to to pick games I think will be most cohesive with them, but that's later on down the line. I've also got part 3 of the "In Praise of Print TTRPG Zines" post to get out here soon, but at the moment I'm in deep prep for running the MAGFest Indie Tabletop Showcase next week so it's just gonna have to hold tight.

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

A Second Digital Post In Praise Of Physical RPG Magazines

INTRO

In the first post in this series, I covered publications with print editions that covered either the TTRPG play culture broadly, or else covered multiple games per volume. This time around, we're focusing in on publications that just focus on a singular game system. This is something I find fascinating because while some of these are still fan zines like much of the last post, a lot more of these are put out by the companies that actually produce the games in question. Although I never owned any copies, I entered the hobby right near the end of Dragon Magazine (not to be confused with the Japanese publication of the same name) before it went online as Dungeon Magazine - as far as I knew back then, that was the only magazine ABOUT roleplaying games, period. Shows what 17 year old Adam knew, Alarums and Excursions had been around twice as long as I had before I ever picked up a D&D book!

Please know that this cannot be an exhaustive list - and, much more than last time, this set pulls from a list of publications largely unknown to me because it was only in the post-Pandemic years I really started getting into non-D&D games. I hope you have as much fun on this journey of discovery as I did! It does mean that a lot of these entries are going to be much more raw information than the lightly editorialized entries from the last post, but I hope you'll come along with me anyway - you might find out about some zines for your favorite games you never knew about!

EDIT 12/21/2025: I had intended to share a few more zines in this one, specifically ones about Draw Steel, and because I was too sleepy I forgot to do so. I've added them in at the end.