On Myths, Bastions, and Lands (Remaining)

 

Go listen to this podcast here.

    If you have gotten the Mythic Bastionland brainworms like so many of us have, you've likely been stalking around into the deep places of the Internet wilderness trying to find other people talking about the game. Maybe you've stumbled onto the many excellent actual plays, like the ones done by Mystery Quest, 3d6 Down The Line, or My First Dungeon, or certainly you've dug into Chris' own podcast and videos on the subject (to say nothing of his blog where so much of it began and still lives to this day). If you somehow have done all of that and not come across The Smiling Fox, I would highly recommend it as they are to my knowledge the only folks out there actually speaking about their experience with the game rather than just writing it down - because look, I love blogs, but reading blogs while driving is much more broadly discouraged than listening to podcasts, and that means I've listened to way more of this podcast than I have read blogs on the subject.

    But you're here, which means you're either better at reading and driving than me, or you simply prefer to absorb knowledge via your eye-meats rather than your ear-meats, so that's fair.

    Anyway. 

    While the folks over at The Smiling Fox have done a lovely job talking about the game and their experiences with it so far, they brought Chris McDowall on to chat in Episode 11 and a few things they got to chatting about got me thinking about how Mythic Bastionland fits into the sort of greater milieu of modern games trying to tell the story of knights (or knight-adjacent weirdoes) going on quests while desperately trying to avoid falling too heavily to Monty Python references. Part of what I'll be referencing for my own thoughts I've talked about here and here if you want to go read, but the tl;dr is that Mythic Bastionland interests me specifically in a few ways:

1. How does the game present its plot threads and how do the players and the GM interact with them?
   
   
2. How do other games playing in a similar design space handle certain player expectations for the kind of story they're trying to tell with their mechanics?
   
   

Limiting Scope

    Now, you can likely assume that if I'm here writing a blog post, I've got many other things I'm supposed to be doing and am desperately attempting to dopamine farm to get back to doing those things. If I don't zoom in on a single game to hold up against Mythic Bastionland, I'll be here until the end of time by nerd sniping myself. I'm going to compromise with myself and limit myself to a game family that, much like the Bastionland games, has been iterating on its own core premises as each new game comes out focused on a slightly different genre - the Carved from Brindlewood games, and most specifically The Lands Remaining.

    If you're here and somehow don't know about The Lands Remaining, right around this time last year Jason Cordova began musing about what a fantasy version of a Carved from Brindlewood game could look like. While much of the core premise has carried through to where the designs are now (the game is, as yet, still unpublished, though there are several playtest APs and PDFs up online), the schtick is that each of the characters you play is the Platonic ideal and emblematic version of whatever type of Weird Little Guy they are - and the Weird Little Guys are thrust into a dark fantasy world many centuries into the future from when they lived in it as they must pick through the ruins of a world that refuses to change. It's intentionally playing on tropes popularized in FromSoft's ludography - your Bedarkenèd Souls, your Very Old Rings, and your Hematologically-carrieds if you will. It's also pulling from a design choice made popular in Dungeon World that has been a throughline in I would wager 90% of Jason's games - the characters are the only one of whatever they are: Not a wizard but The Wizard, for example.

    I come to this specifically because this comes up in the The Smiling Fox episode - Chris says he'd briefly thought about having all the characters being their own special kind of Weird Little Guy but landed on them all being knights that had strange little powers. Meanwhile, this design choice does still remain with the Myths - each creature that has its own myth is the only version of that creature that exists. I find this fascinating, because while on the player side of things this is roughly a similar experience (i.e. the player is handed a named character with a short list of abilities and things that clue everyone else in to who they are that they are then able to customize a little bit and will grow over time, but each character also has a Very Obvious Expiration Date), the actual execution is vastly different which leads to some very strange divergences. To be more specific about that though, I need to hop back and explain the other point first.

Solving Problems

    The Lands Remaining, as do all CfB games, have characters gathering clues about the mysteries that they're interacting with as well as a metaplot about a Big Bad. As the game progresses through its phases of play, those clues can be cashed in to solve those mysteries either outright or via smaller questions which can shape the final form of the mystery (for example in another CfB game, establishing whether someone can or can't be cured of lycanthropy before unlocking the "how do you deal with them" question). Clues in CfB games are evocative but lightly described items/ideas/situations which the players will string together to establish some kind of continuity to the mystery - and it's done this way to make sure players don't ever get stuck by a breakdown in communication between GM and player. As the players continue through the phases of play, more mysteries unlock, and as more time passes without them being solved, some can escalate to cause more problems for the characters or even end up aiding the Big Bad, or sometimes just get weirder. If the players resolve the mysteries, they get some thematic rewards from them.

    

    This should, of course, sound very familiar to folks who have played Mythic Bastionland - you've got multi-phase play, you've got Situations That You're Supposed To Deal With that progress as time passes that can become weird or bad for you if you don't, you've got players trying to piece together a continuity from the weird clues (i.e. Omens) they come across. There are some notable differences, though - for one thing, Myths in Mythic Bastionland don't really have a set way to resolve them and a clever group may accidentally skip some of the Omens via rendering them irrelevant. While both leave most of their mysteries up for interpretation, the fact that CfB games mechanize the actual resolution of each story and provide explicit (but still up for interpretation) rewards rather than Mythic Bastionland's choice to just leave everything up for interpretation means that the kinds of stories told in CfB games come off as more active storytelling rather than Mythic Bastionland's reactive stories.

    And I say all of that to say that this is really weird! Because having played both game families (admission: I've played The Between, the previous mainline CfB game, as well as Beach Blanket Body Bag which is a much smaller and tightly focused CfB experience, but I've yet to play any of the playtest versions of The Lands Remaining - if you want to help me change that, hit me up), I would argue that CfB games feel so much more reactive than Mythic Bastionland! In CfB games, because of how a single failed dice roll has the potential to obliterate your character and everything important to them I felt so much more like each roll would cause me to rethink everything I was doing. In contrast, Mythic Bastionland technically has new stuff happen every phase if you're traveling, but it felt so much more planned out - we would consult the hexmap, chart a course to whatever place we'd heard about that might be where a Myth resided, and then play that out. 

Yes, I Know, I Can Hear You Screaming

    "But Carved from Brindlewood games and Mythic Bastionland aren't even the same genre!" you cry. "Of course they're going to produce different game experiences, they come from different game traditions! They're not the same thing at all! Carved from Brindlewood games are storygames! Mythic Bastionland is OSR! I mean, NSR! I mean, post-OSR?"

    Statistically speaking, if you're reading this blog, you already know exactly how befloggèd of a deceased equine the "OSR and Storygames Overlap Actually?!?!?!?" topic is, so we can just go ahead and scoot past that. You're also pretty likely to know that prior to Jason's Brindlewood renaissance, they (along with many other folks who were a part of The Gauntlet gaming community) produced Codex going back all the way to 2016 which explored the spheres of OSR and Storygame play, as well as producing the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast that is explicitly about reviewing OSR modules. I realize it's a little superfluous to sit here and list Jason's bona fides when it literally isn't necessary (mainly, I just don't hear Codex of FoaBD talked about much these days and that's a shame), but what I'm stabbing at is that all of this game design was bathed in the same flames and hammered at the same forge (pun intended). 

    Broadly, both games pull from the same deep well of inspiration, and despite slotting into different taxonomies of game, they're still attacking the same kind of problem - and the more you drill down on that, the weirder it gets. TLR choosing to have the players have so much immediately tangible agency in the world means that it can feel like every choice has world-warping ramifications - it helps reinforce that the world the PCs are in is stagnant and that their actions are potentially the only things that can make meaningful change within it. MB does give its players similar levels of agency, but only in specific situations such as during a time skip - otherwise, most of the world curation is left to the GM which in turn can feel like the players don't have as much understandings of the machinations underpinning the world. In fact, they explicitly don't in a few cases: the big one being that players generally don't know what Myths are happening at any given time, and certainly have no confirmation what Omens go with which Myths. That means that unlike in CfB games where you know what the next question you need to answer to move the story along is, MB just throws you into a world that you need to come to terms with that your actions will affect, but it may take your character's whole lifetime to see those effects play out. The world of MB is constantly in flux, and so it's not that the players' actions are insignificant - it's that their actions simply join an already vibrant tapestry. To put it another way, if the world in TLR is a black and white drawing and the actions of the players are brutal red highlights, the world in MB is a Magic Eye Puzzle and the characters and their actions form the hidden image within.

    A further point on the presence or absence of randomness in these games - both games contain a looming metaplot that can shape how players interact with the game world, but again they're both realized in ways that produce strange results when viewed together. All the main CfB games have Mastermind Plots, which give the game a central Big Bad behind the scenes pulling the strings. Their story will come in to play if players roll double 6's (the highest roll in these games) while gathering clues, and once they're in play they will begin to haunt the narrative until boxcars are rolled again (or when suitably dramatic). A campaign of most CfB games might not ever resolve their plot, but TLR draws them in as being the bosses of the realms the players must traverse through on their ultimate goal to save(?) the world. Let's contrast this with The City Quest in MB, the quest that everyone is told about but you're not allowed to attempt until you've achieved an amount of Glory (from solving other myths and being generally heroic) that is nearly impossible to obtain in the natural lifetime of a character - and even if they CAN begin in, due to how Omens are distributed it's entirely possible that that knight may not finish it. AND EVEN IF THEY DO, the "reward" they find might only bring more questions rather than leading them to their promised land.

    One might assume that because Masterminds are a much more present and immediate threat, they might have a greater influence on how players engage with the narrative. And they do, kind of - but despite The City Quest basically existing to taunt players, its mere existence can keep a campaign on track in the moment in MB as players try to push their characters to further heights of Glory to have a chance to undertake it. Outside of TLR (and even then, still true for a portion of it), everyone knows Masterminds are in play, but their existence is largely treated as irrelevant until they show up to dominate the narrative and Cause Problems. 

But Where Are My Trophies and/or Gold?

    Neither TLR or MB care particularly about currency or the day-to-day particulars of your characters' inventories nor the currency to buy them. That makes what both games care about tracking super interesting and indicative of the playstyle they want you to slot into. It was interesting to hear Chris say in the The Smiling Fox episode (hey, remember that? we were talking about a podcast at one point) that he'd almost put Conditions into the game because despite leaning more into his well-worn system of Hit Protection & spillover damage attacking the character's life points ability score directly, the way that characters heal that damage still maps very closely with how CfB games handle clearing Conditions - use a limited resource, be in a safe place and have a scene involving it, or indulge in your character's special interest. CfB games give you more consumables to burn to stave off negative impacts to your character, but Bastionland games are (often) less lethal since in CfB games the consequences of an action are established via conversation with the GM vs. just raw numbers - in other words, the impact of similar actions in CfB games from turn to turn may vary wildly in impact due to the needs of the narrative, but Bastionland games are almost always raw numbers. CfB games - and particularly TLR - provide character advancement via the provision and improvement of signature weapons and moves as well as (in some games) a sort of global enhancement by upgrading your home base and befriending side characters. You technically do some of those in MB: earn enough Glory to become ruler of a domain and you'll technically get an army, though you'll need to dedicate time to upkeeping your realm; you could always a town or a local lord for better weapons or equipment, but outside of a Myth it's unlikely you'll get anything noteworthy - and even then, most Myths resolve in such a way that your only reward is the Glory of getting it done or, if you're (un?)lucky you might gain a beneficial Scar as a reward for taking some damage in a fight. 

    In yet another "opposite of what I expected" situation, I find it fascinating that the way CfB games utilize items and moves as a form of diegetic advancement (as well as getting to chat about your character's backstory exclusively when you burn a reroll resource or when with another character clearing a Condition) which tends to use the game scenario as a way to tell the story of the characters - yes, you're resolving these mysteries, but in doing so each character becomes more focused and defined either as a reward for completion or as a cost to avoid losing the character. In contrast, the only way you're advancing in MB is by however the game world is shaped by your actions. MB's gameplay loop necessitates the characters traveling to various places when they need to heal or find information which will then trigger more Omens which leads to the advancement of the Myths which leads to forming more bonds...it's doing the opposite thing, because while there's time for character moments every step of the way, almost every action will use the characters to tell the story of the world. 

An Outro, For Now(tro)

    Last year, I wrote about meeting games where they are. I like trying to pick apart game design and understand why certain design choices were made. I don't even just mean this as (someone who LARPs as) a game designer, I mean this as someone who wants stories to be told well: by sitting with a game and trying to parse out what its intent is, how it's achieving that via the mechanics, and really examining any parts that chafe me when I use them to verify if they're designed in a way I don't like or if they're just tools I don't know how to use yet. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters and infinite time may be able to produce the works of Shakespeare by accident, but I'm just one very over-stressed and under-medicated bag of mostly water with too many ideas and too little time - sometimes, it's worth it to sit down and get new tools to make your work more efficient even if it feels like you're not learning anything in the moment. 

    I really appreciate the communities around Jason and Chris' work, and how extremely prolific and transparent they both are about their design processes. Being able to watch or read so much of a creator's actual thoughts and intentions behind their design is truly a blessing, and the people who have taken their work and run with it in all kinds of new directions and further iterations continue to show what other people pick up on and think is significant is a truly fascinating and enlightening thing to watch unfold. 

Stay weird out there.

Sicko Implementations of Bespoke Tradeable Rulepacks

I should be writing about GenCon. I should be writing about the Appendix N Jam, or like, reading other peoples' entries and rating them. Instead, after talking with people about the ideas I was noodling on in the last post (which I will summarize in a sec, hold your horses), I have stumbled into some maybe real sicko mode things that we could be doing at every event or even FOR specific events.

Last time around, I had brought up the idea that there are a few disparate movements I would like to see function together at one time: people making business card dungeons, or bookmark tables, or just regular one page rulesets, or people still tooling away on their GLOG hacks. There's any number of ways these things could combine, but my big point is making sure that however they do, they would be 1. not mutually incompatible and 2. made to be traded around. In my mind, there's basically two flavors of implementation for this kind of thing: fully virtual or IRL collect-a-thon.

Fully Virtual

Basically, what we have right now is the fully virtual version of this even if we don't have it coordinated in such a way as to be a logical way to deploy it - people are already doing things like collecting 1-page RPGs or specific mechanics and the like via Itch or from blogposts or - dare I say it - YouTube and writing them down or printing them out for their own use (or, y'know, bookmarking them online). People create something and blast it out into the ether, someone else finds it and picks it up and puts it in their pocket. Game jams provide a way to sort of localize this kind of stuff, but it's basically an unlimited resource once it's out there - there's an infinite time scale, and people really just have to hunt around for what they want.

IRL Collect-a-thon

The other way to do this is something that I alluded to folks like Shing Yin Khor doing in my last post with their "a short rest" booster packs, and is what is the thing that fascinates me more - in this case, you have people designing and printing things ahead of time, then bringing them somewhere and trading them around (or, in Shing's case, selling them - I know this kind of movement is generally anti-capitalist, or at least anti-money, but bear with me on this one, it'll make sense in a sec) with other people. This can be done in a few ways: either you're giving out your business card that has a dual purpose of providing content; you're including it as a bonus as a part of a sale or some other interaction; or you're just trading stuff around for the love of the game. This also overlaps with things like stamp rallies at conventions - a group of creators could come together to create things that are related, so if you go to all of them, you can make some kind of greater project - whether that means it's a full dungeon, or a zine, or whatever. Likewise, you can swap stuff with your friends - if your one friend is really big into spaceships but you're into writing fanfiction about your original character Blonan the Blarbarian, maybe you make a business-card-sized space hulk and your friend makes a d66 table of Cursed Sword Generation and you swap them. Cool, right? 

Getting Perilously Close to LARPing

I don't really get LARPs - like, conceptually, sure, but from what I've heard from a few friends of mine, it seems a lot like there aren't any concrete rules written down anywhere to make these kinds of things a replicable experience - yeah, there's different schools of LARPs, but mostly it seems like someone assigns you a character ahead of time, you go make a costume and show up and improvise a whole character and most of the games end in you banging your friends for real but also definitely in character but also definitely not in character. Maybe I just know a bunch of the horniest LARPers, I don't know - regardless, that's not really my thing so I haven't looked into it. BUT, I bring this up because in the context of these bespoke rule and dungeon creation things, it occurs to me that there's a whole other tier of LARP that exists that DOES do what I'm talking about, it's just all oral tradition - immersive experiences like you get at Wasteland Weekend, Omega Mart, and that kind of thing. See, rather than writing down rules and trading them around, you DO have a staff of people who understand the rules and who act as questgivers and whatnot, and they convey those rules to people who choose to interact with them...but unless you're somewhere that gives you little trinkets for whatever you do, there's not, like, a tangible marker of the rules you've interacted with outside of the totemic representation of the questline in the form of said trinket. 

Do you see where I'm going with this? 

It's Not An Alternate Reality Game if it's Actually Reality

With a concerted effort, one could, were one so inclined, get people together under a shared premise (say, like a game jam), give people parameters to work inside, then all agree to meet up somewhere (say, PAX Unplugged) to share their inventions around. Essentially, everyone gets to build a bespoke set of rules that they have access to. Meanwhile, if there were another group of people, say, some sort of group of facilitators that provided dungeons or additional rules, then as people traded around their little bespoke rule cards they might encounter these facilitators who, if people had rule cards with mechanics for overcoming whatever dungeon they had on them, could win a copy of the dungeon and maybe a special mechanic card which could help them overcome other facilitators. It's not LARPing, necessarily - you're still you, it's just that you might need to have a rule on you for doing something like climbing walls in a dungeon, and if you find one of these roving facilitators and they tell you that the dungeon they're running has a wall you need to climb, then you can use that game mechanic (however it's written) and once you beat it then you can proceed. Or maybe you have something else - that wall is still there, but maybe you've traded your buddy for a mechanic card that has rules for creating explosives that can blow up the wall!

What I'm saying is, you could have groups of roving Game Masters with their own little mini dungeons, and you can have people who go and make mechanics about stuff they think is cool, and you could trade things with your friends and complete the little dungeons and get them as rewards and at the end of the day you've not only had a fun little live gaming experience, you also HAVE ALL OF THOSE MECHANICS AND DUNGEONS TO USE IN YOUR HOME GAMES. And maybe you stick all of those little cards in a binder or a Pokemon card binder or whatever and you bring it to the next meetup and you can show off all the stuff you can do and maybe you trade for something with your friend or maybe you replicate little booster packs of your favorite mechanics and hand them out to people but the point is that YOU are making all of these things, YOU are sharing all of these things, and each thing you make and share is unique to interacting with YOU even if it's something you copied from someone else because you thought it was useful enough to want to share with people!

Maybe I just have the post-con madness, but I really feel like this could be something. And then, you can invest in nice things to keep all your business card rules in - whether that's what I did with the A5 notebook with all the pockets or if you go the fancy route and get a padfolio that has room for all your fancy pens and notebooks and stuff and you can show THAT off to your friends too! Or go oldschool and slap all that mess in a Trapper Keeper! Whatever works!

OK. That's all for now. Get at me if this is also giving you The Madness.

Stay weird out there.

The Razor Thin Edge Between The Desire for Community vs. Commodification

    You're getting multiple posts in the same month, that's how you know I've got way too much to do and how badly I need to free up mental computing power. Sorry not sorry. Also, a quick heads up: I am sponsored by literally nobody in this post, and in fact am quite the opposite - I would argue everything I'm about to talk about is stuff I've paid for myself or received as an inclusion with something I've bought with the notable exception of The Chair, which Zach Hazard Vaupen literally hunted me down and handed me at PAX Unplugged like the world's most helpful Terminator. This will become relevant, but I'm also letting you know because hoo boy am I about to namedrop a bunch of people and supplies and I'm doing that because they're relevant, not because someone's paying me to do it.

Also, this is going to be yet another long one - if you'd like to cut the crap and get right to the actionable content without all the context, just CTRL+F "What Is Adam's Actual Vision" without the quotes and you'll hop to the end.

An Introductory Diversion: The Return of the Convention Go-Bag

    I know not many people read it, but one of my first posts here was about my convention go-bag and how I'd fine tuned it for anything I'd conceivably need at a convention, because after one year at GenCon lugging around my huge heavy duty backpack with room for my laptop, extra screen, big wooden GM screen, all my books and more I had had enough. It's been long enough since my days in marching band playing sousaphone, my body just ain't built for that anymore. The thing is though, when I'm not at cons but AM running other IRL games, I find myself longing for something with a bit more storage space - not as much as the heavy duty bag, but more than the go-bag. That leads me to opting for a messenger bag and the old classic: the Trapper Keeper. (Yes, that's the South Park Trapper Keeper Akira/Terminator/2001: A Space Odyssey homage. I usually hide some link gags in these posts but I figure I'll throw a content warning out for cartoon body horror on this one. Let's not think about how long ago Season 4 of South Park was, okay?) 

Enter The Trapper Keeper

Don't you give me lip about falling for nostalgia. Just let me have this okay?

    This is great. I've got basically all the space for everything I need, I could throw dice in the pencil bag if I wanted to, the interior pocket can comfortably fit a few zines inside it (if I'm taking it with me on a trip, I will often throw game design zines in there to get me thinking, or sometimes a worldbuilding game if I think I'll need to entertain friends). It's great, and it's specifically great when I know I've got plenty of prep time to bring everything I might need with me at once. But I don't really like taking a messenger bag with me everywhere I go these days, and if I want to write notes down to keep with me for upcoming game things, it's not the most convenient. I mean I GUESS I could type them into my Notes app on my phone or throw them in a private Discord chat to myself and then copy them down later, but that's a lot of steps AND reliance on technology/my faulty brainmeat to remember to sync things up before the game. Part of the reason I wanted to get that go-bag ready is to have everything in one spot at all times, and so that got me thinking about something a little more compact. 

    In the go-bag, I've got the little utility bag that has the e-reader, mechanical pencil, and two Field Notes journals in it, and that's honestly just about perfect - but with the e-reader in it, it's a little fragile to just throw in any old bag/cargo pants pocket and go. I like a lot of the options the little utility bag gives me though - just like the Trapper Keeper, it's got pockets to slide things into, space for a writing utensil, and is otherwise of the correct form factor to slide into my bag without taking up much space. But also, I've found out that I write like a caveman and cannot be trusted not to constantly break and/or jam the lead, so I want some kind of durable pen and I'm not quite ready to commit to the world of fountain pens yet - I was gifted one, but I use it so rarely I have to clean when it I pick it up to use it since the ink dries on the nib. While hunting around Richmond for advice on cleaning that fountain pen, I stumbled onto a happy compromise which would spiral out into the real reason I'm writing this post. But first: the compromise.

Yo Dawg, I Herd U Liek Journals

    In the not-too-distant past, I had also started trying to use some of the journals laying around the house to help create a physical backup of my Google Calendar. I like to joke that I'm the most extensive Google Calendar user that's not in a polycule because thanks to your friend and mine ADHD, I can't remember when anything is in the future. I also plan my life out many months in advance. You can see where this might begin to present a problem. So, I try to make physical backups of my schedule since it helps me visualize my upcoming time commitments and I can also do things like physically map out my days to combat time blindness. I had been getting better about this, but had also been trying to keep one journal as just my scheduler and one for all the random things I'd need to work out during the day and come back to, and this arrangement was just bulky enough that it was causing me to forget to take it with me places, which was again beginning to defeat the point. 

    While I was bouncing around various stationary stores in town trying to get advice about cleaning the pen (spoiler, I was basically just told to use soap and water and to just dry it thoroughly and quickly after cleaning so it didn't rust), I began to see certain accessories pop up in multiple stores and one in particular caught my eye and really started locking this into place for me - the stickable pocket. Leuchtturm 1917s have a pocket in the back already, but it never occurred to me that someone might make replacement pockets - or, for that matter, pockets for journals that didn't have them in the first place. The fact that it also came with a pen loop was all the better - I had gotten a nice Sharpie gel pen during a trip recently as well as some tiny Bullet Journals to use for keeping inventory for merch at a music festival, and THAT meant I could slap one of those in one of the pockets, stick a second pocket into the journal just in case, and as long as I could find something I could use to make a straight edge with when I needed it I'd be good to go. I ended up grabbing a brass stencil and another slide-on holster for it - overkill, sure, but until I find another one that can go in one of the pockets it'll do. I've managed to keep this with me every day when I've gone to work and it's always nearby at home, so I consider this a success. But we're not here to talk about my journaling habits - at least, not exactly. Put a pin in this because what we're actually here to talk about is...

Gameable Ephemera

An assortment of games of various formats, plus related bookmarks & business cards.
I have more, but lord knows where they are

    I loathe single-use objects. I rarely use bookmarks, but they're always included as special bonuses with books when you order from places because hey, it's free promo right? Usually, they end up in the garbage can. Likewise with business cards - after I've made contact with the people after the event I've received them from, unless they're really spectacular I very rarely have a need to keep them. This is something the TTRPG community has realized and has thankfully started to combat - whether you're Yochai squeezing whole keyed dungeons into specially formatted business cards, Reilly Qyote including instructions and some statblocks on a bookmark so you don't have to keep flipping What A Horrible Knight while you're using it, or the birdman himself giving you optional IRL drinking game rules + some cocktail recipes to go along with the in-game drinking game rules, these can serve as anything from additional marketing for yourself to standalone gameable content. They sure can be troublesome to keep up with, though, especially if they were to fall out of the book or zine you're keeping them in. Sure, you can just paperclip them in I guess, but unless you're stealing them from your office job who has paperclips these days? Plus you run the risk of damaging them or the book.

    All-around cool kid and well-known maker of keepsake games Shing Yin Khor has an answer to this in the form of their a short rest series of randomized game-enhancing booster packs. These have long-since sold out, of course, but the idea here is solid - you take your little bonus stuff, slap it in something labeled to keep it safe and then you just keep it with whatever game materials you want to use it with. This is the more minimalist approach to something rather than, like, one of those huge packs that Beadle & Grimm's sells, and significantly more system neutral. 

    Actually, hang on a second. The cool thing about all of these bookmarks and business cards and booster packs is how interchangeable they are. In fact, I know I've seen people put whole games on business cards and bookmarks before, to say nothing of just the abundance of one page RPGs. And what are all these microRPG elements if not basically the same as the joesky tax? People love writing little things to stick into games. Hell, people love writing little games to twist other games. Once you become enough of a gaming sicko, you practically have to start making little bits of homebrew or you start to lose your grip. It's like some kind of law of g-

Ask Not For Whom The GLoG Calls To...

    I'm not explaining the Goblin Laws of Gaming. You can listen to the Dead Letters folks talk about it if you really don't know, or you can read Arnold Kemp's original post linked above, or you can visit the subreddit, or go watch Hexed Press or any number of other YouTube people talk about it. There's probably a thousand other online communities for the GLoG I don't know about, and it's because

People

Like

Making

Weird Little Stuff

And

Sharing

It

Particularly those of us with terminal cases of can'tshutthefuckupitis.

A Tangent About Convergent Evolution: Artist Trading Cards

    Whilst chewing on everything that has/will go(ne) into this post, I discovered a whole other community out there - artist trading cards. I knew nothing about them before today, but this video goes into the whole ethos behind them as well as some basic techniques for making them - and since so many TTRPGs I know involve altering playing cards, I thought this might be a welcome inclusion for those of you who also might not be aware since there's a lot of overlap in goals. But this, too, appears to be a scene who loves making things for making things' sake and trading them around with other creators. Also, critically, according to this video the scene is staunchly anti-compensation - that is to say, the goal of these is to make a thing and spread joy, not money. Again, if this video is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it, of course, other than it's the first thing I've seen about this scene so I haven't gone and done further research because holy shit this post is long enough already), buying or selling ATCs is a pretty big taboo, and I want you to put a pin in that as well.

Capitalism Is Always The Bad Guy

    So, let's thread all this together. While trying to find a way to minimize the number of notebooks I'm carrying around while also making sure I've got enough supplies with me at all times that I can jot notes or run a game at a moment's notice, I simultaneously realize that I've got a bunch of random gaming ephemera that I don't really have a place for but does seem to be made to be stored in something like what I'm slapping together. I also realize that people love making these kinds of things, they can either be pure game mechanics or gameable content plus marketing, and that if someone were so inclined they could create little packets instead of just single objects but ultimately you could still keep everything together to mix and match however you liked, and if these things were made cheaply but abundantly enough they could be traded around, collected, and allow people to have whole bespoke systems unique to each person depending on what you did and didn't want to keep in your notebook folder. All at once, I saw three possible futures: a world in which I started Yet Another Game Jam and maybe got people trading things around at events or maybe even encouraged creators to start making event-specific content to pass out as promotional material; a world in which I worked with people to make some seed content packs (i.e. a pack of fantasy rules, a pack of sci-fi rules, a pack of system neutral monsters, etc) and sold them as little collectible doodads; and the world where I walked up to John Leuchttrum or Mr. Simon Schuster and went "Hello, I have an extremely marketable idea that already has a community around it, please give me your big time printing money to coordinate a product about this." With visions of gaming communities and dollar signs dancing in my eyes, I did what any reasonable person should - drove 8 hours to talk to Shing about it.

    Disco Business

    OK actually I drove to NYC to see Nicky Siano DJ, BUT Shing was happy to get lunch and chat with me. They had a lot of really good community-centric ideas - things like having LARPs codify event-specific rules in little cards along with your character-specific rules, or creators at cons collaborating ahead of time to create a multi-part adventure that you'd only see the full version of if you visited each of them not unlike a stamp rally. They were also super into the idea of, if the form factor was more in the playing card size, having binders of rule cards to show off and trade with people like Magic cards. I brought up the idea of the game jam and providing people templates so people could print at home, and they mentioned if a bunch of people ended up wanting to go in on it, getting bulk printing made of each of the projects and then distributed to the creators either by mail or at events would be a really fun way to encourage people to trade things around and keep costs generally low while keeping the quality consistent.

(Also, I sadly did not get to see Nicky DJ, the venue lost power. I did take the time to finally visit the Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, however, and ran into quite a few people I knew as I was buying games, so that was an unexpected delight. Also Shing gave me some of their games?!)

 

He Is A Real Blogger, Not A Real Worm

    As luck would have it, Mr. His Majesty The Worm Josh McCrowell visited Richmond very recently and I also had a chance to talk about this whole concept with him. As someone who's much more tapped into the Blogosphere (and the GLOGosphere, for that matter), I figured he'd have some thoughts about this. We had as many intelligible ideas as soju and fast-casual Korean food would allow us that evening - mostly in the context of His Majesty The Worm. I feel like the way the GM builds Wormgame's behind-the-scenes functionality could work very well with something like this - whether that be detailing whole floors of The Underworld or just single encounters. And as I type this out, I realize that as long as your entire stack was the same form factor, this would be a really fun and tactile way to stock your Meatgrinder table for each level of the Underworld - with players getting to keep certain cards once they defeat them/find the item on them/otherwise remove it from active use. But regardless - I think that if you're the kind of sicko that loves making dungeons and fiddling around with little bespoke mechanics, as I know you have to be if you're running HMTW, this kind of thing would be right up your alley. The quasi-official HMTW fan Discord already has all kinds of projects on it including bestiaries and converting various megadungeons to be usable with it, there's no way an IRL meetup of Adherents of the Worm wouldn't be made better with swapping around tiny pieces of homebrew.

What Is Adam's Actual Vision 

(And More Importantly, Do We Need To Beat The Capitalism Out Of You)

    OK look, as cool as it would be to have like...bespoke A5 notebooks with art that I've commissioned from people with enough pockets and accessories that you could carry one notebook stuffed to the brim with gameable content from everyone I meet at conventions and get to quit my job because everyone paid me to be the middleman to get all of this done for them, that's not actually the thing I want. That's just the dream of being able to bring joy to people without having to worry about finances. And in the unlikely event that one of the like three people I know who could somehow begin the process of making something like that happen both read this blog post this far AND wanted to get a project like that going, it's something that would still largely have to be free and open source regardless, so no need for the pitchforks yet.

    No, what I'd actually like to see and maybe can try to facilitate would be something like a series of interconnected, themed jams to start - giving people specific prompts as well as templates to allow folks to start building up a body of work and then organize meetups IRL to trade them around, maybe coordinate with some friends who have their own companies to get them to give out little booster packs of event-specific content to encourage people to come to those booths, and if I was feeling like a real sicko, maybe get some buttons made to denote people who have stuff to trade at cons. I uh. I have a reputation with giving out buttons.

    The thing is, this kind of thing could absolutely be co-opted and monetized and turned into a whole corporate...thing. Like, Field Notes has a goddamn partnership with Dungeons & Dragons now. The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book (I linked it earlier) inexplicably has perforated tearaway pages, and though they're WAY too huge to paste into an A5 notebook, there's no reason they couldn't release a smaller edition in the form factor of the Ultimate RPG Campfire Questions or the Worldbuilding Guide - which, again, no shade to James D'Amato, he's out here proving this kind of thing has a market which is exactly my point. On the one hand, I'd love a premade kit of supplies to get out and mass produce this kind of stuff on the fly - like, could you imagine going to the store to pick up a kit that had one of those thermal printer sticker machines that has the app that links to your phone, a bunch of paper perforated to the right size, and just being able to snap a picture of something you sketched, print stickers of that sketch and stick them onto that paper and then just write your contact info on the back, and then that person takes it and shoves it into their Bullet Journal branded with their favorite AP series? The convenience would almost make up for the fact that you've got to use a proprietary app, and proprietary paper, and of course there would have to be a monthly subscription and you know there would be a way to sneak AI tools nobody but corporate wants into it and suddenly what started as a community project ends up tasting of ash to anyone involved from the beginning.

    I'm exaggerating and invoking a lot of negative buzzwords for effect here, but the point remains that I guess somewhere in the heart of this idea, there's grappling with the fact that the closer something like this gets to mainstream viability, the less it feels like there's a community behind it, and frankly I don't know how to grapple with that. It's something that seems to be in all the other parts of the hobby, and it's so easy for a new idea to succumb to being morphed and changed in ways that seem good at the beginning only to have them secretly be cursed the whole time. I'm gonna chew on this for a while - I'm certainly not in the place to start a whole jam movement right now, but maybe someday soon with some thoughtful help from other folks who know what they're doing. Is that you maybe? Reach out.

Outro & Citations

    I've talked about a lot of people here today. I try to be meticulous about in-context hyperlinked citations on these things, but from my old college chiptune blogging days I still have the urge to provide a bibliography for these things, particularly since a lot of folks whose material showed up in pictures didn't get talked about. If you're interested in anyone whose stuff you've seen me reference but you don't want to try to flip back up for it, never you worry.

In the meantime, stay weird out there, and if you're not already working on an Appendix N Jam entry, maybe you should go look at some of these other jams.

Stay weird out there.

Mentioned Above:

• Zach Hazard Vaupen/Emo Sludge: Bsky | Website
• Josh McCrowell: Bsky | Itch | Blog | editor for KNOCK! mag
• Reilly Qyote: Bsky | Itch 
• WF Smith/Prismatic Wasteland: Bsky | Itch | Website
• Bo Ryan Crum/Gravy Press: Bsky | Beneath The Muckfort on Itch & Cairn Press
• Adam & Jamie/72 STATIONS: Adam's Bsky | Jamie's Bsky | Infinity of Ships on Itch | Website
• Yochai Gal: Blog | Ludography | Between Two Cairns | Cairn Press
• Shing Yin Khor: Bsky | Website 
• Arnold Kemp/Goblinpunch: Bsky | Blog 
• Dead Letters Podcast is Sam, Misha, and Walid
• Feral Indie Studio: Charlie's Bsky | Alex's Bsky | Into the Wyrd & Wild Itch | Website
• Johnson² is available through Peregrine Coast Press, which has all the links
• Thrill of Dracula is by Kenneth Hite via Pelgrane Press

FEMA ICS/CRM as TTRPG SOPs: or, Using Government Strategies In Your Game Design

    Y'ever just get a thought in your head for one of these here blog posts and go "No...no, I can't write that. There's no way that people will read this and not think my head is lodged so firmly up my own ass that when they call EMS to save me, not even the Jaws of Life will be able to pull it out?" This is one of those posts.

Not pictured: my head or ass. Use your imagination.

Get Me Those TPS Reports

    I do not and will not talk about my dayjob as a general rule - not because I'm ashamed of it nor out of any particular degree of personal safety (my name is my brand, after all, if someone's going to come and kill me there are much easier ways to find me than indulging my ramblings on this blog) but this one time I will say that during my training for a new position I've taken, I was introduced to the emergency response procedures used by the federal government here in the United States (at least, in theory, when those organizations aren't being defunded): specifically, FEMA's Incident Command Structure and Comprehensive Resource Management principles. Now, I'm not going to just re-teach you what I learned in my training - if you're really interested after you read all this, there's actually plenty of information up on FEMA's homepage and on YouTube. But after watching many, many hours of instructional videos, I began to realize a few things:

1. The people who came up with these principles designed them to be broadly adaptable to any number of situations that could arise
   
   
2. Adventuring parties are, functionally, national disasters 
   
   
3. Understanding and mapping the effective flow of information during An Event between the people in charge and the people who need to act on it is not unlike writing an adventure module, complete with the fact that optimizing that flow can highlight actors that are underperforming/can be reassigned
   
   
4. High level tactical play in certain RPGs both on the PC and GM side mirrors threat responses 

    With this in mind, and with the Appendix N Jam deadline looming ever closer and only my cover page being properly mapped out, I sought out to see if I was completely full of shit or if I might actually be onto something here that could help me write more effectively. My apologies to anyone who works at FEMA or who has had to implement any of this in an actual emergency - I'm going to be butchering this for my own needs here, but please know I think your current training is very nice.

Incident Command Structure

    Pictured above is a sample ICS diagram - at the very top, you've got the person taking ownership of the entire situation, below them you've got the people who interface with the public and with other people working The Event, and then below them you've got four separate branches: Operations, who are responsible for getting everything set up and making sure things go smoothly throughout The Event; Planning, who handle documentation before/during/after The Event; Logistics, who make sure things get where they need to go; and Admin, who manage expenditures of time and money. While not everything maps 1:1, if you start looking at the writing of an RPG adventure as An Event, you could use that map to separate things into the following categories:

• The very top level is The Author - the person responsible for shaping the flow of the game.
• The roles that report directly to The Author are basically Marketing, Art Direction, and The GM. 
• Operations would entail any NPCs or story beats that are responsible for the interstitial movement of plot - that is to say, the driving forces, the things that interact directly with the player characters to provide input on what is going on in this adventure.
• Planning would be any critical things that the players need to progress through the adventure - your MacGuffins, your Things The Players Should Already Know, the Things Your Players Must Learn To Make Meaningful Choices, things like that. 
• Logistics would entail how any information from the other sections is delivered to the players and to the GM - the "Service" side being the players, the "Support" side being the GM.
• The Admin section is the least directly analogous in shape but still looks the same in functionality - it's the ephemeral blob of levers and dials the game provides and the GM brings with them to control the flow of the adventure itself

Let's take last year's Appendix N Jam winner, The Knight Errant. Ignoring the meta elements (i.e. the Marketing, Art Direction, and The GM), an oversimplified ICS flowchart of The Knight Errant could look like this:

    You could spend a lot of time breaking down each element of the game beat by beat, which is probably what I will do when applying this to my own work, but for demonstrative purposes (and without spoiling too much for those of you who have somehow not already gone and read it/listened to the Between Two Cairns review of it) you can kind of see how this plays out - you've got your main named characters responsible for moving the plot along as well as the big random events that cause time pressure in Operations, in Planning you've got all the things that the players explicitly need to find/interact with/know about, Logistics shows how the information gets to who it needs to get to, and Admin details things that depending on how you implement them will either speed up or slow down the game - but likewise, depending on how much people players interact with them, may affect the overall "value" of the experience or perceived efficacy of the writing/GMing of the module itself.

    Is this basically just a different way to outline? Yeah, of course it is. But we're not done yet!

Comprehensive Resource Management

    What really strikes me about the layout of CRM is that this really does detail a strong approach both to playtesting as well as for players actually playing a game. From the creator side of this:

• Before running the actual module you're writing, you sit down and lay out the plot (the Incident Objectives), your interactable set pieces and/or intended solutions (Strategies), and how you envision the Platonic Ideal Run of your module going (Tactics).
  
  
• You then test your hypothesis: take stock of what the player characters have at their disposal, throw situations at them, see how they react to them, talk about what went well and what went poorly with your playtesters, then try it again with another group while making changes and documenting the new results.

From the player side of this, however, this is kind of the unspoken calculus underpinning every adventure:

• See what your party has at its disposal 
• Learn what the adventure is going to be about & stock up on supplies/information 
• Start dungeon delving, and 
• After each encounter assess if you're still able to keep delving or if it's time to pack up and go back to town.

    Obviously that just describes a very particular kind of play mostly common to the OSR (and, statistically, if you're reading this you're probably an OSR-head with a lot more experience than I have anyway so what are you doing here?) but I think it's broadly applicable to more story-focused games as well. Who among us here, after your PbtA game of choice, hasn't looked at the playbook you've chosen at the end of a session and thought "Y'know, I bet I'd be more effective at getting across the point of my character if I planned towards this move next/focused on this aspect of my character/roleplayed out this condition I've taken" or the like? I think there's real room to be explored here by people who want to quantify what they're doing - and not everyone would want to, of course, but for those who do having a standardized format to assess the choices you're making means that you have a repeatable methodology across your gaming career to help you play the kinds of characters you want to play/have the kind of gaming experience you want to have.

In Conclusion

    Was this mostly a way to try to relate the things I was learning back to something I care about that is immediately relevant to me so as not to fall asleep during training at work? A bit. But do I stand by this? Yeah, I think so! I'm going to try out the ICS breakdown once I've got March of the Eld Kin written out, and if I have a chance to do a playtest of it I'm absolutely going to be using the CRM-inspired methodology I detailed above. Do let me know if this ends up helping you at all.

Stay weird out there, and good luck to everyone else scrambling to get their Appendix N Jam submissions completed!

Mid-Year Gamer Checkpoint: Mythic Bastionland & The Electrum Archive x Ave Nox

 

    Since roughly the beginning of 2026, I've been in two consistent TTRPGs in my spare time - one being a player in Josh Domanski's Mythic Bastionland game along with two of their other friends, and one being my home group where we rotate games and GMs periodically where I've been running the adventure Ave Nox using The Electrum Archive. With the MB game having wrapped up recently (much later than we originally projected, oops) and with the AN x TEA game getting into the endgame, now's as good a time as any to reflect on these two experiences.

Mythic Bastionland: or, Three Weirdoes Keep Stumbling Into Danger

    I am always incredibly grateful when other creators, especially ones I consider actual professionals compared to whatever it is I'm doing out here, invite me to their game table - and yet somehow it took me months before I actually had time to sit in on a game with Josh. It turned out I picked a great time though - Josh had been gearing up for Mythic Bastionland, and I had just recently read it with my local TTRPG bookclub so I was ready and raring to go. At the table were myself and two of Josh's regulars - one of whom I learned had taken several decades off of playing TTRPGs, and the other was someone who ended up being responsible for dragging me into a Caraphracts game where I ended up being a silly little lizardman jester for what turned out to be the Cartoonishly Evil Empire. So. Y'know. Vast breadth of skill levels, experiences, and general expectations for how this game would go.

    I ended up with the Weaver Knight, and I also ended up with what we might professionally refer to as "absolute fucking dogshit" stats for my young knight. This meant that I was leaning heavily on gimmicks to stay alive because boy howdy was this guy not getting in combat. To my delight, the Weaver Knight got a fun little magical swapperoo ability as well as a horse whose super power was the ability to unerringly smell fruit. This meant that in our First Age (i.e. before we did our Shonen Anime Time Skip To Power Up) I accomplished something that I feel will be a high point of my gaming career for quite some time, which if you'll forgive some screenshots was documented and commentated on back when it happened (and includes a seal of approval from Daddy McD himself).

    In our Second Age, my Weaver Knight thankfully rolled way better and could actually contribute in ways that involved rolling dice. And I know what you're saying, "if you're rolling dice you already fucked up" and yeah, yeah, I know, but sometimes it feels good to be able to roll the dice without fearing for your character's immediate death. All in all, over 16 total sessions we completed three myths, partially completed two more, and had elements of a few others thrown into the world. There were also a few side mission days - the very first session, which I missed, Josh ran folks through What A Horrible Knight, one of the other days when we didn't have everyone Josh pulled in something from Valley of Flowers, and another week we were down we played through a thematically related scenario in an unreleased game of Josh's called In Residence which was somewhere in the general space of Silent Hill and Trophy Dark. Obviously, given the GM, many of the things we interacted with were horrifying in some way, which made me all the more apologetic when I pulled some absolute clownshoes nonsense out to get us through a situation. That said, even I had plenty of opportunity for heartfelt roleplaying with the other characters and even when myself or one of the other players took a more bombastic swing narratively, it always felt like we were being supported both by the GM and by the game itself. Our final battle involved the three of us + a warband versus two enemy knights + their warband, and it truly felt like a clash of superheroes slowly wearing each other down as the enemy knights used the same tools we had against us. Truly, the only thing that won us the day was the fact that our third knight and the warband were able to punch through the enemy warband and come just in the nick of time to weaken the enemy knight commander such that the knight who had been fighting with me was able to harm the enemy knight commander and disintegrate him with his cursed blade. Legitimately epic stuff.

    So obviously, Josh is a demonstrably competent writer of games and scenarios, so anything they were running was going to be good, but knowing what I do about how absolutely little the Mythic Bastionland book does in terms of spelling out concrete situations, from the player side of things it still felt like there was always an answer for any time we had any kind of weird scenario come up which meant that there were very few situations where Josh was left struggling for a ruling. We might have played a little more cautiously than some groups, but it still felt like the game was progressing at a pretty decent clip, and we never succumbed to my great fear in hexcrawls - a terminal case of "wherethefuckdoIgo-itis." No matter where we traveled to, things happened - and not in a funhouse kind of way where it felt like the important stuff was just waiting for us to show up, but rather that we were in a living and changing world. I am both curious and terrified to get on the GM side of this for a full game, but to dip my toes in I'll be running a few sessions of What A Horrible Knight at GenCon this year so hopefully I'll be able to carry what I learned from Josh forward.

Ave Nox x The Electrum Archive: or, Just How Deep Does This All Go?

    As I identified in my post back in January, running AN with TEA presents a few weird issues. For one thing, the lore of the two games doesn't necessarily line up, but it's not wholly incompatible. 

• TEA's lore says that the underdark is home to a number of bug-people kingdoms and that humans are wholly extraterrestrial to the planet Orn, and that any super high tech ancient stuff is from the old precursor race that abandoned the humans there. 
• AN is built on the premise that meets somewhere between Dark Souls and Fallout with an ancient civilization having gone underground and now explorers have found evidence of that civilization and want to find out more.

There's also the combat elements:

• TEA, as an "attacks always hit, armor is damage reduction, and spells are WEIRD" kind of system means that any situation where PCs are taking damage can spell the doom of one or more PCs
• AN, legally being system neutral but functionally being built on an OSE chassis, means that it kind of expects PCs to be a little bit tankier when it comes to combat and while it tends to omit random encounter tables in all but a few areas (which both serves as a storytelling point as well as a way to teach people how to engage with the dungeon), it means that some challenges are functionally impossible without a high degree of mastery/cheesing of the base game system

And perhaps most interestingly is the economy:

• TEA has kind of a unified economy of "elder ink" - a kind of magical gasoline that can be found in tech abandoned by that precursor race I mentioned - being both used to buy and sell things but also to teach spellcasters new spells (and to cast the spells in the first place). What we consider precious metals are functionally worthless due to them being present in the sands of the planet Orn. 
• AN, presuming a normal fantasy world, obviously still occasionally has coins as treasure - but more bafflingly presents a situation in which very little random loot appears paired with very few places to spend it as the locals in the area of the dungeon (the folks living on the surface, that is) don't really use money and basically only use it to trade with the few outsiders who have set up shop in the area.
• Both games present some vaguely similar items at wildly different price points - this was such a head-scratcher I went and harassed a friend of mine who's an economist to try to help me put together a blog post explicitly on fantasy economies but you'll just have to have the version of that I allude to in my original Ave Nox post I linked earlier.

    There are a few choices in Ave Nox that chafe a bit, and not just because of trying to make the module and system speak the same language - and what's interesting is which of those chafe points are intentional and which are not. Having talked to Charlie, I know that one of the things I wish the module had was something that got left on the cutting room floor and which I know still exists (which means hopefully someday we can get it as an extra zine or something to help out): what the goals of all the NPCs in town are! The factions in the dungeon itself are all well defined, though most of what the players learn is sparse and can leave them confused. This is an intentional chafe point, and it pays off later on. But there's all these NPCs in town that have little descriptions, and then there's all these mercenary companies around - but none of them have any goals! And when you've got a game like TEA that has a lot of systems that depend on the wants and needs of NPCs - carousing, hiring minions, etc. - not having clearly defined goals for them can be a struggle. That's not to say that that void is completely free of fruit - for example, one of my players really wanted to set up something of an adventurers guild which eventually pivoted to a bathhouse, and so while following the rules for making an institution we ended up getting results showing that some other local group was pissed at them, and so we got some of the other mercenary groups involved and it was fine - but otherwise, you've gotta really work to figure out where to slot these guys in in places that feel natural. Setting up some objective clocks for each faction, or even just some wants and needs for them to match similar things in the dungeon itself (see: Knife Man and his list of goodies he'll trade you for particularly hard-to-procure meats) can fix this, but it's a shame to know that that kind of thing was intended to be included but cut last minute.

Sketch of "The Snapdragon" - a monster without official art in Ave Nox, by my player Krysta Collins

    To get back to intentional chafing that pays off - a few sessions in, one of my players remarked that the first two levels of the dungeon feel really sparse. Like, there's almost no loot, there's almost no random encounters, and the few obviously story-relevant things hanging around kind of don't mean anything to anyone. This is all by design and pays off once the players get down to the third level and they figure out why everything is so sparse - it's because those top two levels were the most easily explorable by other adventurers. Sure there's almost no cool loot - people already grabbed it! Sure there's only a smattering of random cultists going around and hunting - they're just trying to get some easy food! All the juicy stuff is down in the bowels of the dungeon itself - and in the "final zone" which my players stumbled into after realizing that they had the macguffins necessary to access it without understanding what it was. This was fine - the module punishes those who delve too deeply when unprepared and they got their shit REKT. All of this to say, it becomes painfully obvious where the active story is once you get there - but if you play too cautiously and keep returning to town after every encounter (which is something that TEA can sometimes push you towards thanks to limited inventory and torch guttering, which is not a bad thing but is an unintentional chafe point when combining these things together), you might just think there's not actually anything going on.

    At this point, the players have learned a lot of the secret hidden backstory of the adventure, although there is so, so much more for them to find. Some of the characters are approaching max level, which is an interesting situation - the Vagabond currently has a golem arm grafted to his back and is basically wrecking any corporeal enemies that get in front of him, yet he still dares not hunt King Linnorm (one of the several world bosses in the dungeon which may actually be functionally impossible due to the aforementioned auto-damage of combat). One character has found some shards of an obsidian mirror with a particularly interesting spirit within (weirdly, a piece of lore that works both in TEA and in AN!). One character was writing an adventure novel, only to have it be destroyed by a Rotgeist and to have had his entire character motivation shift to becoming the most deadly motherfucker in the dungeon as revenge. And one character (who is the second character for this player) is desperately trying to level up and keep pace with her companions who are all becoming more twisted and horrible the longer they stay in the darkness. It's a lot of fun. And it's only going to get wilder once they start moving into the bottom floor of the dungeon where the big-time run-enders are - things like...well, you know that one scene that Comedy Central cut out of reruns of Dogma back when they played it super late night in the 00s? If you do, you already know what kind of time this party is about to have - and that's not even including the options they have to go down into the mines, or to the oubliette, or to become HVAC repairmen.

Art by Worthikids. Both Bob Hoskins lives are available to you in Ave Nox.

    I'll probably come back and do a final post-campaign roundup for this one once we're really done - I'm guessing depending on how quickly the players start plowing through the final areas (assuming they're not overwhelmed by the things that truly can just wipe a team) we may have somewhere between 4 and 10 sessions left.

Outro

    GenCon is coming up, and I'll be running some sessions of What A Horrible Knight and something for Moonlight on Roseville Beach with the folks at PlusOneEXP - come out and find me if you can! I also threw my hat into the Appendix N Jam this year to force myself to actually finish something, and if I can get that done then that bodes well for my other pending projects - the vastly overdue Kingdom of Slime splatbook for Down We Go, finishing all the tables for The Ballad of Johnny 45-Dicks so that can finally be complete, and a few others I've got rattling around. I've also started playing in a small game of Stonetop where I am once again playing a weird little guy, but at least this time I also somehow managed to opt into the version of weird little guy that gives me a bunch of magical spirit friends that absolutely aren't going to murder me once I help them achieve autonomy.

    Stay weird out there!