Review: 2026 Io, Lupercalia Jam

Back in February, I organized the Io, Lupercalia! Jam at the Unknown Armies Fan Club Discord, and I promised to offer feedback. The same disclaimers apply from my feedback on the 2023 Halloween Jam: namely, that Unknown Armies is a game of modern occult horror, so entries might have weird and off-putting stuff in them.

Time of the Wolf by Stuart
That's me! This is a "rebirth" ritual that isn't quite as advertised. In addition to cleaving to the bloody death-and-rebirth theme of the jam, I wanted to include a trap ritual since there aren't a ton of them offered in the base game. Functioning rituals that act as promised are implied to be the rarest rituals, with trap rituals (rituals that do something unexpected and often negative to the ritualist) being more common and nonfunctioning rituals (rituals that no longer work or never did) being the most common. Trap rituals are like cursed magic items in D&D in that well-designed cursed items make you feel like you ought to have seen the curse coming, and clever parties might find inventive uses for them. In this case, the ritual is a trap for everyone involved: it doesn't return the dead to life as advertised, nor does it give a demon easy access to the material world. Smart players might notice that you could use this ritual in tandem with demon control rituals to summon and bind a wolf companion, and they might also notice that it's a great way to dispose of a body (while potentially adding an extra forensic complication down the road).

The Scarlet Woman by Katts
Katts gives us another take on The Naked Goddess avatar from Book One: Play, exchanging the idea of a woman who is more an archetypal image of desire and instead playing with the Thelemic idea of the liberated, sexual woman. If The Naked Goddess isn't working in your games as-written, you might prefer this take on it with the caveat that The Scarlet Woman could use some revision. It doesn't have an introductory write-up to say what the author's take on The Scarlet Woman actually is, and the middle channels could use some revising. Evaluates a Gauge is an unpopular feature in the community, and although I happen to like Evaluate and appreciate it being showcased here, how likely is it to show up in a game? Often enough to be useful as a second channel power? Likewise, forcing someone to say, "Yes," is a great power — it's the effect of the Red Sauce ritual in Book Three: Reveal — but I'm not sure it's all that useful as an avatar's third channel, especially when The Scarlet Woman can already coerce someone into agreeing with her. I dig the ability to teleport into dreams, though. Were this a final draft, I imagine that final channel would get wordy, delineating exactly what the dreamscape is like.

The Bitter Taste of Vengeance by Traskomancer
In this scenario, the PCs get into trouble when they ask an Etsy witch to hex a local cop and then learn that she's an actual witch and her hex causes more problems than it solves. The scenario includes brief write-ups of several characters involved, as well as a brief timeline of events. It suffers from the problem of a lot of one-shots where the action is railroady and fairly contrived: the inciting incident puts the player characters in the cops' crosshairs even though there isn't anything tying them to the scene (and smart characters probably wouldn't even be there), and police forensics are almost more efficient than magick in this scenario. But apart from those quibbles, it has the bones of a strong scenario; when the witch is inevitably arrested, she rats out the player characters, sending a group of cops and Nazis on their trail. In a full-blown scenario, you would probably want a couple of threads to juggle, or something more immediately tying the player characters to the action, but this is certainly a good starting place.

Conjugal Immortality by Stuart
Another "rebirth" ritual that's actually a trap ritual, hopefully even more obviously a trap than the previous one I submitted. While I could see Time of the Wolf being used by a player character, Conjugal Immortality is probably more of a story hook, being used by a GMC or even being an event in someone's backstory. ("I know how to pilot a plane from a past life. It's... a long story.")

Ritual: The First Robin of Spring by magnificentophat
A ritual with two effects: it subtracts a year of age from you while making a baby older and more resistant to disease. One can imagine the latter effect being the real selling feature of this ritual in the past, but these days, it's no doubt primarily used as an anti-aging ritual. Despite being a minor ritual, you can probably use it to become immortal if you find a steady supply of babies and robins. Any ethically dubious ritual with weird components is a winner in my book.

The Room of Cycles Renewed by Cliomancer
A Room of Renunciation wherein those who have forsworn child-bearing and child-rearing are seduced and sacrificed in a cycle of death and rebirth. I'd be tempted to adapt this as its own cult rather than a Room of Renunciation — although maybe that's impacted by recent thoughts about the Breeders Cryptic Alliance in Gamma World, sixth edition, as well as every weirdo tech billionaire who's bought into Camus' Great Replacement conspiracy theory — but the writing is evocative and the idea is solid. The story hooks at the end are a nice touch.

Hail, Caesar! by itsarborday
A piece of short fiction (that could easily be used as a story hook) about a heretofore undocumented film of the Naked Goddess back when She was mortal, a pornographic adaptation of Orson Welles' play Caesar. The video includes tantalizing hints of the Naked Goddess' future ascension in addition to the typical interplay of low art and high art one has come to expect of descriptions of the Goddess' videos. I'm not personally into the constant revision of the Goddess' mythology by finding yet another undocumented tape of Her performances, but if you are, you might enjoy this short story. My only actual critique is pretty minor: November 13, 1976 is a Saturday, and The Tonight Show only taped Monday through Thursday at the time.

Desolation Angels by Katts
The Plain of Peerless Fires is a Room of Renunciation wherein those without connection have an opportunity to build it. I would again be tempted to adapt this as its own weird Otherspace rather than a Room of Renunciation — it isn't entirely clear how the Room renounces its subjects, as there doesn't really seem to be a choice involved for the participants, and the powers granted to Agents are pretty different from those of other Rooms — but Rooms are among the more subjective portions of the game's cosmology, so what do I know? The writing is poetic and mysterious in the mode of John Tynes' writing, so I'm a fan. Probably the entry I'm most likely to think about after this exercise is done.

State of the Union

"Sir, a second state-run space research organization has released a tabletop RPG."

It was inevitable.

We have seen idiosyncratic weirdos and megacorporations releasing RPGs for decades now, so it was only a matter of time before nation-states became involved in the role-playing game hobby.

A couple of bits of role-playing game-related effluvia have come to my attention over the past few days, both of which were released by national organizations focused on space research:

1. Releasing earlier this week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released The Lost Universe, an adventure clearly designed for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons but simple enough to transfer to your analogue adventure game of choice. The adventure is designed to be educational, covering information about the Hubble Space Telescope and various cosmological phenomena.
2. Releasing sometime in the past six months (I found a tweet from September about this game despite only hearing about it yesterday), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan released Sandcastle, a full fantasy role-playing game system that they plan to use for outreach purposes while encouraging other organizations to do the same and likewise encouraging individuals to use the system for their own enjoyment.
   

What a difference fifty years makes, huh?

Review: 2023 Unknown Armies Halloween Game Jam

Over at the Unknown Armies Fan Club Discord, mellonbread organized a 2023 Halloween Game Jam for Unknown Armies and asked me to review the results on this blog. (Where stats appear, the entries assume the theoretical audience is using the third edition of the rules.) Whether or not that was a good idea is an exercise best left for the reader.

Three disclaimers before we get started:

1. If you find yourself seriously using reviews to discern whether or not you will enjoy a work, you will achieve best results if you find someone whose writing you enjoy and whose values more-or-less appear to align with your own. Fortunately in the case of this game jam, you have plenty of choices: Frahnk, mellonbread, zomner, and 33.3 FM all have contributed reviews, and their style might better inform you whether you're going to like a given piece of art or not.
2. Reviews aside, you should read all of the entries anyway, because people worked hard on these and the longest is just shy of 1,333 words. Most are shorter than that.
3. If you are unfamiliar with Unknown Armies, it's a game about power and responsibility, set in the modern world but taking place amidst the secret occult milieu behind our everyday world. As you might imagine, that's going to sometimes involve violence, sex, occultism, and fictions being presented as truths. I will try to call out specific things in some of the entries that I think people might want to know before they read them, but I will probably miss stuff because my own view of what is and is not distressing in art is no doubt different than yours. (For example: when recommending, say, horror movies to people, a frequent refrain is inevitably something along the lines of, "Ah, fuck. I forgot about The Heathen's Stand scene." So, tread carefully in these entries, in case there's something you find deeply distressing that I overlooked.)

Without further ado, here are the 20 entries of the inaugural 2023 Halloween Jam:

Four of Chimneys by mellonbread
Every beggar knows that you put a little change in your begging cup before you go out on the street to entice people to give, so mellonbread starts the game jam with three entries to help facilitate the project. This first entry is a solid story hook including a cabal and a location. A classic of the genre, "Four of Chimneys" describes the standard "backroom occult poker game" schtick familiar to fans of Last Call. As a bonus, the scale is left intentionally vague so you could put it in any game: it could as easily cater to the local sad sack losers as it could to a table of powerful high-rolling occultists. (As written, the entry implies that all sorts of people across the spectrum may be found here, but you could easily have it cater to only one crowd.) I would absolutely drop these guys into my game in a heartbeat with no changes. My only complaint is that I would change "splat" to "sourcebook," but that's a personal preference as time (and language) march on without me in the fast-paced world of internet discourse. Since I'm an easy mark, "Crassus Belly" made me laugh.

The Greggs and the Graveyard by mellonbread
A zombie survival horror scenario featuring grad school academics who have delved into forbidden secrets. While the writing is solid and surviving zombies is gonzo fun in any RPG, this feels more like an Esoteric Enterprises story hook than an Unknown Armies one. (In the sense that this scenario has an OSR sensibility of "lots of stuff for the PCs to mess with" while ignoring the specific themes that really make Unknown Armies unique. You can use the game as a generic horror engine if you want, but I already had a couple of broad-spectrum occult horror games when I came to Unknown Armies, and I think the idiosyncratic setting sells the game.) Surviving mindless zombies in Unknown Armies doesn't really do much with the system or the setting that you couldn't do somewhere else. If Dr. Frost and Bell Breaker had ambitions beyond random mayhem, this might have worked for me, but as it stands, this is a generic horror scenario. (Stats for the zombies might also be nice, although I am sympathetic to the limitations of space.) On the positive side, I like that the instigators of this tragedy are a professor and grad students. Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green get a lot of academic horror scenarios given the source material, but Unknown Armies has been begging for more since the first edition core rulebook included that example plot of a professor tangling with the First and Last Man, and since the second edition core rulebook included that story hook about Professor Morbius and Lab Section Six.

Darla Jean by mellonbread
An NPC (often rendered as a "GMC" or "Game Master Character" in typical Unknown Armies parlance) for the canonical cabal known as the Sect of the Naked Goddess, Darla Jean typically acts as a bodyguard for members of the Sect. Since the Sect is a cult based around the worship of an ascended goddess who also happened to be a grindhouse porn star in the 1990s, Darla also has the skills one might expect of a sex magician. One of the limitations of the rulebooks and the typically-tight page counts of RPG books is that there often isn't enough space to include a full GMC write-up and plot hooks, so the comparative freedom of Google Docs gives you plenty of room for both. Darla is a little more Identity-heavy than I typically like my GMCs, but I also disagree with most conversations about character stats and rules in the Unknown Armies Fan Club Discord so take that critique with a grain of salt.

Also, since there are three more mellonbread entries at the end of this contest, this feels like as good a place as any to note that there's a certain quality to the authorial voice that I call, for lack of a better term, '90s edge. (Irreverent or flippant, often about sensitive or taboo subjects. You catch whiffs of it now and again in the first and second editions of Unknown Armies, and scattered throughout the various '90s White Wolf books.) I honestly didn't notice it in mellonbread's work until I read the other fourteen entries and then read the final three entries, but if that's the sort of thing that grates on you like nails on a chalkboard (and the various online complaints about '90s RPGs seem to suggest that it will for some of you), you might find mellonbread's writing or attitude off-putting in ways I didn't.

Alexander Head and the Undercroft by Traskomancer
This is a GMC that had something bad happen to him, but now finds that he can do something bad to other people in turn. Alexander is a solid character concept that is a pure wildcard: while he could end up as an ally to a player cabal, his prickly demeanor makes it likely that he acts as a minor antagonist, or even a major antagonist to a fledgling cabal. (Of course, if you're desperate to threaten someone but lack the gumption to do it yourself, you could probably hire him. Just make sure that he doesn't get turned against you later...) He reminds me a little of the journalist Carl Streator in Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, which of course endears me to him to no end. My one complaint is that the stat block includes a custom power that refers you to another document rather than just telling the GM what it does, but on the plus side, Me, Myself & You (which describes the Terrorize supernatural Identity) is Pay What You Want at DriveThruRPG.

STYX SUBWAY by Indigo
Short and sweet, this is a travel ritual that can take you between any places that have subway stations, even in other dimensions (called Otherspaces in Unknown Armies). No GM can ever have enough functioning rituals, and this one is short and to the point. My one edit is that, given how travel (especially to and from Otherspaces) is usually considered a potent thing in Unknown Armies, I might make this ritual a significant ritual rather than a minor one, but that's more of a "vibe" thing than a "game balance" thing. And I imagine the escalating cost in material components is meant to counteract the fact that the ritual only costs minor charges. Good luck finding more silver dollars in Ricketyland...

Otherspace Sickness by Valiant
A mystical illness that afflicts people who delve too frequently into Otherspaces. I'm partial to diseases in general, and think that interesting consequences are always of value, but as the author writes in the penultimate paragraph, "Otherspace Sickness is extremely disempowering. Be aware of the amount of control that you're taking away from your players over their ability to affect the world. Or lean into it." To keep it fair, you would have to heavily telegraph its presence before springing it on a PC, and if a GMC is infected, then you don't need the rules, just the consequences. Assuming an inexperienced GM, this entry could benefit from some design notes describing how it is used.

Of note: shortly before editing this, I saw a comment on Discord that Valiant was inspired by the Carcosa stuff in Impossible Landscapes for Delta Green, which makes perfect sense. If you see Otherspaces as an eldritch infection that's spreading, this would be a perfect entry point to facilitate that.

The Secret Saints of the Cecilites by tormsen
The title tells you exactly what you're about to read: a concise and evocative collection of heretical saints venerated by the Vatican's secret exorcist squad, the Order of St. Cecil. If you're looking to make the Order of St. Cecil more esoteric, this is clearly how you do it: add more secret histories, give additional options for church miracles, that sort of thing. (And while St. Cecil is fictional, many of the other saints described here were actual people, which I always think adds a lot of texture to a game.) My main complaint about the structure of this entry is that I don't think GMs need any special rules to describe Cecilite miracles: any recorded "church miracles" easily fit within the existing Unknown Armies paradigms of gutter magick, supernatural Identities, and avatar paths. (And the unofficial Cecilite sourcebook Thin Black Line even includes a Christian adept school.)

Ultimately, this one fell flat for me. There's a perennial conversation in the Unknown Armies Fan Club Discord about making the Order of St. Cecil weirder to bring them in line with the more esoteric factions of Unknown Armies. And while I applaud any efforts to make a role-playing game one's own by hacking the rules or altering the setting, I think a lot of the "Order of St. Cecil is boring" discourse ignores the role the canonical Cecilites play in the game's ecosystem. I'll spare you the details on why I think the Cecilites are a clever subversion on par with the other occult horror deconstructions in Unknown Armies, as that's a little outside the scope of these reviews.

Obviously, if you're one of the people who thinks the Order of St. Cecil needs to be weirder, this is a good place to start. If you're not, give it a pass. (But maybe still steal the secret saints for a splinter sect, or another esoteric cabal of Christian mystics.)

Felix Kaufman, Not a Medium by Ben
Felix Kaufman is a normal guy who imagines conversations with the dead as a coping mechanism. He's not a medium, but some people think he is because of how vividly he imagines these conversations. That makes Felix a great target for paranormal investigators who think he's just a medium in denial, and an even better target for cabals who know just enough to be dangerous and think he can help them talk to ghosts or demons. I am always a huge fan of mundane GMCs who are going to intersect with the occult underground badly, as well as potential hoaxes for player groups operating in the paranormal investigator mode. The writing is evocative, and the character is up for grabs. Is he going to become the subject of inquiry for a high-level cabal who sees occult symbolism everywhere? Is he going to be the (accidental, unwitting) push for a street-level cabal to fall into the occult? Will his coping mechanism explode into a full-blown supernatural power when he finally intersects with the occult underground? Some rumors or story hooks might be useful, but sometimes you just need a guy who isn't quite supernatural but might be interesting to someone who is.

University Street by Justin Miland
Those who know the secret paths can enter the secret Otherspace beneath the rail station at 3rd and University in Seattle, finding their way to an alternate Seattle where University Street is still part of the University of Washington campus. This was one of my favorite entries: clean, evocative prose describing an Otherspace with GMCs and story hooks! This is the sort of entry that should make a GM start scheming as to how they can get their players' characters to Seattle. Justin does a lot with the limited space, and this is practically begging for a full treatment as part of DriveThruRPG's Statosphere program. I want more, but such are the vagaries of a Game Jam. (And it's better to leave an audience wanting more than to tire them before they reach the ending.) 

The Cleaners by Kate C and mellonbread
The PCs are shinkansen cleaners (and obsessive sorcerers based around cleanliness called Katharomancers) whose union is being undercut by a bunch of scabs working for some company called Mokusouji based out of Tokyo. But the secret is that CEO Rin Maeda can afford to underbid the competition because his workforce are ghostly slaves pushed into earthly shells!

If you liked Sorry to Bother You but thought the plot could use less gonzo science-fiction and more necromancy, you'll like this one. While I think this is a clear candidate for expansion into a full pdf on Statosphere, it bites off a little more than it can chew as a humble Game Jam entry. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious, of course, but if the authors left this as "asshole manager and his weird necromancy scam" without turning it into a full-fledged scenario, I would probably want more in the good way rather than the bad one. An experienced GM can figure out stats for the dummies (I'd probably start with Phasma from Book Two: Run) and sort through the group creation of a cabal of Japanese Katharomancers, but including those dummy stats and pregenerated characters would make this complete and ready-to-run. (If the authors have to omit something, I could even live without Rin's stats, since in my experience, a GM is more likely to need the minions than the boss. Especially since he's just a rich guy with one supernatural gimmick; if I'm pressed for time, that's the sort of character who might not get full stats, only a couple of notes.) Given the limitations of space, the authors chose to include four different ways to differentiate the PC Katharomancers rather than include pregenerated characters, which is a nice compromise.

On Discord, mellonbread mentioned that the secret way to defeat the dummies would be culturally known to the characters and Japanese players, but likely obscure to players from other countries. (And of course, just volunteering that information gives away one of the scenario's secrets.) If one were to expand this into a full Statosphere thing, that's probably an important problem to solve, especially for inexperienced players; experienced players will probably either already know enough Japanese folklore, deduce that the clues are adding up to something and either do research or ask about it (which might prompt a Knowledge check or some other GM contrivance), or determine some other solution.

Galatea by Valiant
An AI startup in San Francisco has been training their large language model on occult texts and is getting some weird results.

Unknown Armies has the occasional cyberpunk flavor, given the millennial timeframe and the focus on postmodern magick. From the books themselves, the second edition core book includes a story hook about the dot com bust that sounds similar to Galatea (or at least what will probably happen to them within the next couple of years), while Book Two: Run for third edition includes GNOMON as one of the factions. (And that ignores other cyberpunk elements like The Hacker from Book One: Play, or the fact that Alex Abel employs a private army of troubleshooters like some sort of Cyberpunk 2020 CEO.)

If you have space in your game for that sort of stuff, this is a solid fledgling cabal concept with plenty of story hooks to get characters involved. (Or you could just as easily take these notes and play the characters given, fleshing out their stats and backstories during your group's initial corkboard creation.) As you've no doubt noticed by now, I'm a big fan of wildcard GMCs and cabals who are ultimately clueless rubes about to unleash a serious problem beyond their ability to control. (And in this case, they clearly have some in-the-know dark money behind them, meaning they could tie into any other faction in your campaign.) My only complaint about this one is that I could use a little more: since the author is 400 words below the word limit, there is plenty of room to define the computer acronyms used, and anything that makes an entry easier to use gets it on tables faster. Likewise, that extra space could probably be used to give an additional detail or two for each character in the cabal to make them pop. (Although if a GM were to use this as the template for a character creation corkboard, less detail is likely a little better.)

Bartlett and Sprouse, College Thaumaturges by Traskomancer
This entry describes three rituals left behind when a budding college cabal violently imploded. Given that, let's start with my complaints about this one: the author really buries the lede, as my initial assumption was that this was going to be about two collegiate wizards rather than three rituals. The title and opening page describe two thaumaturges, but you don't learn until the end that one is dead and the other is missing, having left behind these rituals. (If I were editing this, I would probably start with the final paragraph letting the audience know that the pair is dead or missing, then put the rituals, and then give their backstory.) Aside from that jarring bit of authorial legerdemain, I liked this entry: one of my other biases is that I think no GM can ever have enough functioning rituals, and the thematic links among the three rituals are strong. (They're all based around college tropes.) I imagine the time dilation ritual (designed for studying, naturally) would get the most use, although that's probably more revealing about how I run games than anything else.

Ultraflat by Cliomancer
Sometimes, buildings with non-sequential numbers—like places that omit the number thirteen for superstitious reasons—grow an extra room. (But watch out!) This is a magickal trap, and while I'm often wary of traps because it's easy to telegraph them too little, I like this one because it does three things I enjoy: it gives the victim plenty of chances to realize something is wrong and escape (I would probably allow at least some of that without rolling, but I tend towards fewer rolls anyway); it does something cool with non-sequential numbers in buildings; and it's a pun! (Flat and flat, get it?) Besides, I ultimately suspect that it's unlikely that a PC would get trapped in here. It seems more likely to be used as a story hook: someone important to the PCs goes missing and they were last seen at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel...

CÁBALA DEL REY DEL INVIERNO by Mechristopheles
Based out of Los Angeles, Oscar Fuentes is a refrigerator repair man who has also developed a way to trap las lloronas in old refrigerators. (Which is good, because the ghosts are a plague across the city.) Mechristopheles had the absolute gall to release a truly excellent Los Angeles story hook a mere three months after my seven-year-long Los Angeles game ends. Tight, evocative writing with solid hooks and ties to existing folklore. (Unsurprisingly, this was one of my other favorite entries.) The entry even ends with a sample scenario that is almost ready to use. The only thing I would want out of this one is some structural stuff to make it a little more friendly to a new GMs: take another editing pass or three, because I bet Mechristopheles can cut some of the word count and make this even tighter; and then use that reduced word count to put the ghost the PCs are hunting into the scenario. Unknown Armies stats are simple enough that a sentence of background and a sentence for the revenant's Urge would make the included scenario ready-to-run right out of the box.

Gert by Dennis Kearney
There's a booze wizard who haunts the last train before the rail shuts down: give her a drink, tell her your troubles, and she'll unburden your soul. This is as simple as it gets: terse, tight writing for a GMC that could fit into any game. While I normally would ask that a short background on a GMC also includes stats since there's plenty of space, that feels hypocritical, since I might never actually give a character like this any sort of numbered statistics. I wouldn't say no to a bit more, though: What does she do with the secrets? What happens if someone takes a stress check for telling her a secret? (I guarantee there's someone who would take a Self or Helplessness check for telling their secrets.) But I also don't think there's anything wrong in this case with leaving that stuff for the GM.

Urizen Shaft by Cliomancer
An urbex tour guide in the London underground, Urizen Shaft is a hair's breadth away from the occult underground. By this point, you can probably guess that I liked this one, as it's another character who is just on the cusp of the occult underground, and so is likely to intersect with PCs at any level of activity. (Plus I'm a sucker for a GMC with both a William Blake reference and a pun in the name.) It's complete, it does what it's supposed to do, and it makes me wish I was running a game in London (or at least in a place with a ubiquitous subway system). Including a ritual in his stat block as "something this guy has seen several times but hasn't performed himself" is an excellent bit of color.

The Mascot by Gatto Grigio
The Archetype of The Mascot. If "The Secret Saints of the Cecilites" is an entry that I thought was good despite not personally liking it, "The Mascot" is an entry that I personally liked despite thinking it needs more work and not even being sure if I would ever use it. Real talk: making an avatar Archetype or adept school is hard. With rituals, GMCs, story hooks, and maybe even simple scenarios, an experienced GM can probably eyeball them and expect them to work without much downstream processing. It's conceivable that you can develop them during the span of a week-long game jam. But Archetypes and adept schools really need time, lots of eyes, and playtesting to get the flavor just right, so dropping one for a game jam is a gutsy move.

(An aside: Although adept schools require much more work, I might argue that Archetypes are harder, because you're theoretically limited to concepts that are universally applicable, and getting folks to agree on those is a tall order. Of course, you have a little wiggle room: a given concept might always be deliberately placed into the Statosphere by a sufficiently dedicated wizard.)

So with that preamble, it's a decent concept and I generally liked the channels. (And connecting the modern mascot or fursuit to the Commedia dell'arte is a bonkers connection in the best Unknown Armies tradition.) I don't know that The Mascot is likely to appear in my own games, but I have a handful of changes I would consider if it did:

1. That "never appear outside of the suit" taboo is too rigorous for an avatar path. Having to spend a certain amount of time each day in communion with the suit, or never becoming recognizable outside of the suit is a more reasonable taboo for The Mascot. If a GM loosens the taboo, I believe mellonbread suggested that the powers don't work outside of the suit, which is a good limitation.
2. I keep waffling on the "original character" only bit. That's probably right—there's a clear differentiation between, say, Gritty and somebody in a Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland—but I don't know if that difference is enough for the Statosphere. Then again, it's probably just a question of dedication: if you're just putting on the Mickey Mouse suit for a paycheck, you're probably not dedicated enough to become an avatar of the Archetype anyway. If you're putting on the Mickey Mouse suit because doing so makes you feel different, it probably still fits.
3. I would tighten the wording on that first channel to make it clear that The Mascot can walk around in the suit without people feeling weird about it. The avatar still needs an invitation or a reservation or whatever, but nobody is going to tell you to take off the suit once you're there.
4. I would likewise tighten the fourth channel to be more in line with the coercion rules. Making the fourth channel something like, "You have to pay attention to the Mascot avatar or else take a Helplessness (9) stress check," feels more appropriate than eating a random Violence (9) check because SonicFox glared at me. (I would probably change the targeted meters from Violence and Helplessness to Helplessness and Self.) I'm also not sure about this channel only being used three times per day; a lot of fourth channel powers just work, or work with higher limits. I'd probably let it work indefinitely with a successful avatar roll. (But in such a case, the avatar would do well to remember that attention is not always good, so you don't want to use it all the time.)

Samuel Pin Bone by mellonbread
A GMC who owns a tribal lending company. Here we end as we began, with three more mellonbread entries. As noted back in the "Darla Jean" entry, after being away from mellonbread's writing for several entries, I only noticed The Dreaded '90s Edge™ when I returned to it. And I mention this because mellonbread's flippant tone about an indigenous hard-boiled loan shark might rub a reader the wrong way, so dive into this entry with your eyes open.

By this point in the narrative, my "GMC who is mundane but is positioned to stumble into the occult underground" bias is probably now well-documented. This guy isn't anywhere near the occult underground (apart from being marginalized, which admittedly describes a fair number of Unknown Armies characters), but he clearly operates in adjacent spaces—someone's scumbag player character probably benefited from a shifty payday loan scheme, and now this is the poor schmuck who came to collect. (Although it's easy enough to flip that script if the PCs are native, in which case they could easily be the people he calls when expecting trouble. "Cabal that formed after some really angry occultist appeared at the Steelhead Lending offices," has a lot of potential as an inciting incident.)

Uncut Gems by mellonbread
A genital mutilation ritual that enhances the caster's athletic prowess. This is the entry that reminded me that I should probably put some sort of warning on these, so once again: this is the genital mutilation entry. My well-documented bias toward functioning rituals—especially including rumors and story hooks—means this one was a winner for me. An onerous minor ritual is a good hook for any PC or GMC, especially since the benefits are potentially quite tangible for any party. (And I disagree that the timeframe is too long for a PC to see real results, but then again, I typically run long campaigns.) My only change is that I'd add a casting cost, probably just 1 minor charge.

The Midnight Screening by mellonbread
This scenario describes a midnight screening of Night's Templar (originally described in Lawyers, Guns, and Money) that is likely to turn into a free-for-all with plenty of factions and chaos. This is the entry that reminded me to talk about The Dreaded '90s Edge, because I bet the glib, goofy tone of this entry will offend somebody—especially in the case of cabals like the Challah Cost Deniers and Living Zabiha Loca.

Nevertheless, were this entry sitting in my back pocket months ago, this is probably another scenario that I would have dropped into my overstuffed Los Angeles game. It's a solid premise with colorful GMCs and vibrating with potential energy, all the things one would expect from an Unknown Armies scenario. The more goofy or gonzo elements might not fit in your particular conception of Unknown Armies, but there's a consistent authorial voice and a clear target audience in mind, and so hopefully this will reach the right people. (And I guarantee someone reading these reviews is in that meaty Venn diagram overlap between "people who know Kin-dza-dza!" and "people who know what The New Inquisition is.")

The Obligatory Dungeon23 Post

In case you haven't heard the good word, there's a community project this year. (Already in progress!)

Sean McCoy posted about this on Twitter and his Substack, but the gist is that you make a megadungeon by writing one dungeon room per day. At the end of the year, you'll have a twelve-level megadungeon with 365 rooms.

I've seen a lot of folks doing a bunch of pre-planning for this project, but as Sean himself says in another post, keep it simple. Divine your megadungeon via random tables and free association. (And in my personal experience, front-loading too much of the work makes it seem unattainable.) This is a brainstorming exercise more than anything else, so get ready to get weird with it.

Personally, I'm excited to see what develops. Hopefully everybody takes this opportunity to figure out how a megadungeon is put together and what they like to see in dungeons.

I don't plan on writing about my own #dungeon23 project too much on the ol' hobby blog, but I plan on keeping up with it. My dungeon is tentatively called The Crucible, although I don't know what it will become with the fullness of time. For starters, I don't think "The Crucible" is what the locals call it; they don't know that the nearby cave systems are actually connected into a megadungeon complex. (In fact, I'm not even sure anyone — including the inhabitants — has ever discovered the main entrance!)

In the meantime, here are a handful of additional community discussions around dungeon23:

Ben L.'s dungeon23 tag on the Mazirian's Garden blog

Better Legends' #dungeon23 tag on Tumblr

Zedeck Siew's #dungeon23 tag on Tumblr

Don't Punish the Players

A couple of months ago, The Alexandrian made a post about OneD&D in which he took issue with "bounded accuracy," the idea in 5e and some older D&D and OSR variants that the character's statistics for attacking, skills, and the like are going to remain within a narrow range throughout a character's development. (Contrast with a game like 3e, where a character's statistics can theoretically scale infinitely such that lower-level threats do not meaningfully concern higher-level characters.)

Among his other points, Justin Alexander argues that bounded accuracy is a myth, that certain abilities in the game break it by making characters too good at certain activities. I'll let him explain:

"The more fundamental problem is mechanical: There are a handful of class abilities which trivially — but hilariously! — break bounded accuracy.

"The rogue, of course, makes an easy example here. Expertise doubles proficiency bonuses, changing a range of +2 to +6 into a range of +4 to +12. Combined with ability score modifiers, this almost immediately turns most reasonable DCs within the system’s bounded accuracy into an automatic success for the rogue, and it gets worse from there.

"Reliable Talent then comes in for mop-up, making the rogue’s minimum die roll 10. The rogue is now auto-succeeding on every proficient check, and in their chosen Expertise any DC that could challenge them is probably impossible for every other PC.

"Of course, those are exactly the DCs these hilariously broken abilities pressure the DM to assign. Partly because they want to challenge the PCs. Partly because it just makes sense that these PCs should be able to achieve things the PCs without the hilariously broken abilities can’t do."

This, in turn, reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend years ago, in which he was talking about running D&D and worrying about the fighter's armor class and hit points. He posited that one has to ensure the monsters are tough enough to routinely hit said character's high armor class so that they deduct hit points, otherwise the players are not properly engaging with the rules system.

But I don't think those approaches are the right way of looking at things. It's perfectly acceptable — and likely even good — for player characters to be good at certain things. If the rogue can pick almost any lock with a single action, or if the fighter routinely doesn't have to worry about being significantly challenged in melees, that's fine. As a Game Master, if you seek to "challenge" your players (whatever that means to you), making the numbers scale infinitely is the laziest way to do it.

You can only begin to challenge the players when you establish real stakes for success and failure. My oft-mentioned high-level D&D game could defeat any fair challenge I throw at them (and quite a few unfair ones!), but they could still be challenged with stakes: retrieve an item, save the prisoners, delve the dungeon on a time limit. Your rogue can pick any lock and disarm any trap, but can she disarm the traps and pick the locks before the room fills with water? The fighter can stand tall against any challenger, but what about a distant wizard lobbing fireballs and mind control sorcery? Your diplomat can talk his way out of any situation, but can he stall the unfriendly cultists long enough for your allies to arrive before the cult starts executing hostages?

What if one of the hostages is a beloved and trusted hireling?

I have had plenty of Game Masters in the past who seem to like to punish players for their choices: they invalidate your character abilities, steal your resources, threaten every ally you have, and turn every victory into ash in your mouth. And while that sort of game can be fun with appropriate buy-in — Black Sun Deathcrawl, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, and Ten Candles all come to mind as fun games when you learn to embrace the catharsis inherent in nihilism — that often turns a fun, engaging game into a grimy slog. (Incidentally, that's usually about the time when I lose interest. Always winning is just as much a bland and uninteresting railroad as always losing.)

Don't punish your players for smart choices they made, and don't make a hard game harder for everyone. If a character is good at something, you know you're only going to target that thing with luck or by making the game unfair. Instead, challenge something else. Employ distractions, challenge multiple abilities simultaneously, play foes as intelligent and reactive forces who adapt to changing circumstances.

Establish real stakes, then build on what you've established. Character stats don't make mistakes, but players certainly do when the clock starts ticking.

You might be able to support yourself and maybe even your allies, but can you accomplish your goals?

Can you save everyone?

The Orc Problem, redux-upon-redux

Not to beat a dead horse too severely, but Dwiz at A Knight at the Opera wrote a post about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little bit ago, and it's a far more salient examination of the issue than I can muster.

(I know I already said the included links ought to be the final word on the subject, but well, here we are. Despite the vaguely sensationalist title and the fact that I'm probably still allowing demihumans in my dungeon-y, dragon-y elfgames, it's very, very good.)

Read it, won't you?

I Don't Think I'm Going to Allow Elves to be Playable Anymore on A Knight at the Opera

The Orc Problem, redux

I wrote about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little over a year ago, and like most of the things I write, you probably shouldn't read it.

However, vagabundork wrote a post on the same subject about seven months ago, and he said it far more eloquently than I. (To the point that it should probably be the last word on the subject, at least until the situation radically changes.)

Go read it:

Can racism be fixed? on Chaos Magick-User

Review: NEUROCITY

Several months ago, Argentinian game designer Gavriel Quiroga asked if I would take a look at his then-new RPG, NEUROCITY. Now that I have a spot of time and he has a new Kickstarter called WARPLAND (already funded with forty days remaining!), it seems like as good a time as any to dig into it.

What you get: One hundred twenty-six pages of post-cyberpunk dystopia. Gavriel clearly loves the genre, and puts loving detail into making a tech-noir mélange in the way that D&D provides components for a fantasy kitchen sink or World of Darkness makes an urban fantasy/horror kitchen sink. The best way to describe it is with the genres it emulates: you get shades of 1984, Brave New World, Dark City, Judge Dredd, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Robocop, The Prisoner, and THX 1183. In terms of the game's "feel," it has similarities to Black Sun Deathcrawl, Cell Gamma from The No Press RPG Anthology, and Paranoia. (Longtime readers will recall my love for Black Sun Deathcrawl, and so should be unsurprised to learn that I similarly enjoyed NEUROCITY.)

Gavriel's writing is terse and clinical without being overly cumbersome, and despite the lack of fancy layout, I found it easy to read. (By way of example, I read the whole book in an hour or so.) Art and white space are used as effective pacing, the art largely comprising '80s-style cyberpunk comics and collages done by Sol Olweder. The overall style looks like a mimeographed zine from the '80s, something someone would shove into your hand at a political meeting or a punk show. Whether that's a style of art you enjoy, it's a stylistic choice that works well and fits the game's tone.

The Setting: I'll let the author himself give you the gist:

In order to delineate the setting it could be said that we are in a Post-Cyberpunk era where we can find configurations that refer us to aesthetic (Tech-Noir) and functional conceptions of the 80s. This is mainly due to the technological involution society has been forced in order to maintain its functionality in a closed environment.

Due to rigidity in administration and the constant fear of reprisals for evading protocol procedures Neurocity is slowly sinking into a bureaucratic swamp. Behind an apparent efficiency that satisfied I.S.A.C's gaze we find the vicissitudes of a technocracy deprived of the freedom to act according to common sense.

He describes a world that was once ours until we developed an AI called the Intelligent Singular and Artificial Consciousness (I.S.A.C.) re-ordered the world, developing a class system and a physiological regimen to keep the population docile. (As in Brave New World, the population medicates with soma, and has been rendered sterile; sex is frowned upon, but is still a common form of recreation, especially among the lower classes.)

There is only one settlement remaining and it is Neurocity, an enclosed mega-structure with artificial sky and weather. The outside world is dangerous, the boundary of the city marked by increasingly-abandoned and dangerous districts until giving way to the wastes beyond. The city itself is a retro-futuristic dystopia, where the common folk increasingly use old-school technology while only the upper crust has access to the truly futuristic stuff. (For example: mobile phones and flying cars are practically nonexistent, as both might inspire humanity to something approaching freedom.) As with most post-cyberpunk settings, cybernetics are rare, but genetic engineering is exceedingly common. Nobody ever dies in Neurocity; clones are regrown and imprinted with the previous person's memories. The population in Neurocity is completely static.

Zero population growth.

Rounding out the setting is a collection of tables for random encounters for the city's districts. I'm a sucker for random tables, and could see culling entries from some of these for other cyberpunk or science-fiction games. Even though they are specific to Neurocity, you could still mine them for inspiration in adjacent genres.

The System: The rules are pretty straightforward. Characters determine their role in society and their motivations, and also determine five stats ranging from 5-10. To perform an action when the outcome is in doubt, the goal is to roll 2d6 under the relevant statistic. There are a handful of complications and modifiers to this base rule — situational modifiers of -3 to +3 can be applied to the base statistic, successful rolls above 8 are critical successes, double 6s are critical failures, snake eyes or single ones are successful but might cause complications — but they're relatively straightforward.

(I'm personally not a big fan of overly fiddly modifiers, although the author recommends to just make sure they feel right. I would imagine in play the modifiers are rather like the shifts in Unknown Armies, and are meant to be applied with common sense rather than a strict tally of bonuses and penalties.)

Characters also have two derived scores, Tension and Wounds, which determine their capacity for mental stress and injury, respectively. Even though this is a game where violence happens, Tension is the true meat of the system, as PCs constantly have to balance the egregious psychological harm caused by this soulless system against the need to medicate or discuss their troubles. Tension also acts as narrative currency, as characters can choose to gain tension to reroll dice. If a character goes over their maximum Tension, they have some manner of psychosis as they lash out (and will probably be disciplined in some manner for acting in an unmutual fashion).

However, characters who are currently at maximum Tension and roll snake-eyes develop psychic powers, granting them superhuman attributes and an additional use for Tension.

As noted by the author, NEUROCITY is designed for short campaigns of roughly three to four sessions in length. (Before I read that note, I was going to guess five or six.) Although you could deviate from this basic formula, the basic gameplay loop seems to involve receiving a job from a superior (probably to do something about a terrorist cell comprising unmutual elements of the underclass), and in the process, ranging farther and farther out before learning the dark secrets of Neurocity.

The secret origin of Neurocity and the nature of I.S.A.C. provide the game's replay value, as these are designed to be randomized or altered every campaign such that no two versions of the city will be alike. (So while a campaign might only last four sessions, you could easily run a couple of campaigns in sequence to see if things turn out differently.) These secret backstory options also form the meat of the game and its central philosophical tension: how does one live in an absurd, dysfunctional future society where life is mandatory? How does one find meaning when life is meaningless? And is it possible to escape this prison, or is the prison preferable to what lies beyond?

The Verdict: We'll start with the bad: I found the rules a little fiddly and there are a few glaring typos that could have used another editing pass. (I don't speak Spanish and haven't read the Spanish version, so I don't know if that one is better edited.) Likewise, the book ends with some sample characters and other notes, but I might have liked a summary of some of the charts, like the example modifiers and the wound tables.

Beyond those minor complaints, I would recommend it. It has a neat setting and poses some interesting existential questions about finding meaning amidst the absurdity and existential dread of endless drudgery. (Contrast with Black Sun Deathcrawl, that offers no such philosophical musing, only the catharsis of nihilism.) The style of the book really fits the tone, and although the concepts are dense, Gavriel handles them fairly well. Even if the post-cyberpunk tech-noir setting or the rules don't interest you, you could probably use the random encounter tables and setting bits in your own cyberpunk or science-fiction games.

Given the game's replay value, either over multiple campaigns or as a source of random encounters for other games, I'd say the pdf price of $6 is more than justified. (The print-on-demand book is $30, and while I'm usually a physical copy sort of person, I don't imagine this will hit the table often enough to justify the price. On the other hand, if you planned on playing it multiple times, using the random tables, and taking it to conventions and such to run repeatedly, it would totally be worth getting a physical copy.)

And if NEUROCITY interests you, check out Gavriel's WARPLAND if you have the chance! It looks to be roughly the same price point with similar rules and philosophical attitude, this time in a fantasy setting.

Tales from the Dungeon #1

A couple of my dear, old friends released a zine yesterday. Designed with fifth edition D&D in mind, Tales from the Dungeon #1 focuses on the concept of death, featuring mechanics, magic items, NPCs, and a dungeon adventure based around the theme.

You can find it (and Name Your Price!) in pdf on itch.io, or buy it for $11 in print+pdf on gumroad.

The mini-review: It's rough. It's their first published work, and it could have used more attention on layout and editing. You can tell the authors are passionate, but aren't terribly comfortable with the writing part of the zine.

But the art is top-notch (I'm a sucker for sweet lineart, and Andrzej Rybus provides), and there are bits of brilliance in there: I love the hangman's rope cursed item, and the included dungeon, Temple of Vanth, has some neat ideas.

And the whole thing is pay-what-you-want over on itch.io.

I'm particularly keen on seeing where they go with this zine as they get more comfortable in their writing and acquire more contributors.

Go support new art!

Up and Around

The horrible paradox of running the ol' hobby blog is that times of heavy gaming mean less time to maintain the blog.

Do you find that sort of thing happens to you? I'm in... let's just say several games at the moment, and while that means I'm constantly generating content, I don't have enough time to polish those plans for public consumption. (For that matter, unless I've planned a whole dungeon or something, those "plans" might just be a list of names and a vague idea of what sort of trouble the PCs are about to encounter.)

So it goes.

Anyway, I have a couple of half-formed posts floating in the aether, but haven't had much time to write them. In the meantime, the RPG Archivist put out a review of No Rest for the Wicked last month, and I have been meaning to post it here. He's been running an RPG review channel on YouTube for just under a year, and although I've not yet had an opportunity to watch much of his stuff, he seems like someone whose channel could use some more love. (Also, near and dear to my own heart, it seems like he focuses on OSR and modern horror. Which, as you'll no doubt notice, comprises most of the content here.)

Without further ado, enjoy!

Ynnian Changelings for 5e

(Skip my chatter and download the race here, if you want.)

My players fled the frozen waste by drawing a door in chalk upon a garden wall...

That's right, you heard right: one of my rotating 5e groups thought fantasy mythic Norway sucked so hard they fled into Emmy Allen's The Gardens of Ynn. Those poor goddamn fools.

Well, last session, there was an incident with some Splicing Vats, and the extremely gross goblin assassin turned into a grotesque plant monster before the rest of the party finally put him down. (Or did they?)

But that means the player needs to make a new character, and as per the rules set forth in The Gardens of Ynn, that character must be a Ynnian changeling, a person lost for so long in the Other Garden that they adapted. In The Gardens of Ynn, there's a custom race-as-class for it, but since we're playing 5e like a bunch of corporate sell-outs, I made a custom 5e race for it.

(Hey, we're not sell-outs, it's just cut-up! Truth be told, after dying repeatedly in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, my players voted to switch to 5e. Honestly, it has only seemed more kind because they're higher level. They're still mutated and mutilated, and we've had two deaths since the switch.)

If you care about balance, it's probably a little weak compared to other races at lower levels, but might get more potent depending upon which mutations you roll and which layer of the garden on which the changeling is found. Not that it matters; you can only play a Ynnian changeling if your replacement PC shows up in the Other Garden, otherwise you pick a standard race.

I considered having fixed stat modifiers (probably +1 Wisdom, +2 Charisma), but left them customizable on the theory that changelings can be from any initial racial stock. Otherwise, it looks like standard 5e races. As always, I welcome your feedback.

Anyway, enough chatter:

Download the Ynnian changeling for 5e

Old School vs. New School: A Visual Representation

A short blog post, but I keep thinking about it.

About two and a half weeks ago, Critical Role released a one-on-one game between Matthew Mercer and Stephen Colbert for Red Nose Day.

Watch closely: people made all sorts of comments, but the most striking thing I noticed is the clear line of demarcation between old-school and new-school play.  Mercer is all about heavy description and relying on die rolls, whereas Colbert is all about careful, tactical decision-making.  The old OSR debate about player skill vs. character skill in microcosm.

There are probably a few circumstances where Mercer ought to have let Colbert's preparations stand without a die roll, but it's still a sweet little piece of dungeon burlesque.  Check it out if you have an hour to kill.

Basic Red's Monster Draft

Haven't just posted random stuff from around the blogosphere as much as I used to, but I can tell this is going to be a sweet project.  Basic Red is instituting a monster draft where he recruits the 100 best monsters across all D&D-ish things and makes that his Monster Manual henceforth.  He'll eventually clean them up, give them basic stats and whatever write-ups they merit, and stick them in a big pdf.  The first entry is here.  Berserkers rather than orcs?  A strong choice.

It's not really an opinion I've expressed on the blog, but I fully support this, because most monsters are just slight variations of other monsters.  Like, once you have orcs are rampaging hordes, goblins dig hierarchies, and kobolds dig traps, why do you need other humanoids?  (Although, to jump on the LotFP bandwagon, why do you need humanoids at all; human cultures can rampage, dig hierarchies, and love traps, and sometimes do all these things at once!  Humanoids are just there to look weird and let the GM do silly voices, which is admittedly its own reward.)

Watch this space, is what I'm saying.

Flailceratops for D&D 5e

Since I've been running fifth edition a fair amount, my version of the Temple of the Snail is likely to be there, located in the Heathwood of the Sorrowfell Plains.  Since it gets referenced, here's a fifth edition-compatible version of the flailceratops from Vornheim:

This time with sick Aeron Alfrey art!

Flailceratops
Huge monstrosity, unaligned
Armor Class 14 (natural armor)
Hit Points 152 (16d12+48)
Speed 30 ft.
Str 22 (+6), Dex 9 (-1), Con 17 (+3), Int 2 (-4), Wis 11 (+0), Cha 5 (-3)
Senses blindsight 60 ft., tremorsense 60 ft., passive Perception 10
Languages —
Challenge 10 (5,900 XP)
Trampling Charge.  If the flailceratops moves at least 20 feet straight toward a creature and then hits it with a flail head attack on the same turn, that target must succeed on a DC 15 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone.  If the target is prone, the flailceratops can make one stomp attack against it as a bonus action.

Actions
Multiattack.  The flailceratops either makes three flail head attacks against any targets of its choosing, or a stomp and a tail attack against different targets.
Flail Head.  Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature.  Hit: 25 (3d12+6) bludgeoning damage.
Stomp.  Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature.  Hit: 22 (3d10+6) bludgeoning damage.  The target must make a DC 15 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone.
Tail.  Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature.  Hit: 19 (3d8+6) bludgeoning damage.

OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire

It's the latest thing in the wake of the G+ exodus, all the cool kids are doing it.

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:

How to Awesome-Up Your Players

2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:

The player characters aren't special in the world, but they are the stars of the show.  Let them do what they want, but show them no unearned mercy.

3. Best OSR module/supplement:

Veins of the Earth, probably.

4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):

As much as I want to say carousing, it might actually be Penny, Nickel, Dime, Quarter, Dollar.

5. How I found out about the OSR:

It was a perfect storm of factors.  Seven-ish years ago, I used to run mostly modern horror (largely Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness), and hadn't really ever tried D&D.  (I'd read the rules, though.)  A friend on Facebook told me the Escapist had some show about porn stars playing D&D.  I don't know what I expected, but I figured that might be amusing once.  It turned out that it was just a group of people playing D&D, and their gaming experience looked a lot like mine.  From there I found D&D With Porn Stars, then Vornheim, and then the cool stuff coming out of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  Coincidentally, this happened to be at just the same time some friends asked me to run D&D for the first time.

The OSR was the first time I really "got" D&D.

6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:

I tend to use the fantasy book generator at Abulafia a fair amount.  (It's not explicitly OSR, but Donjon is my most frequent reference when fantasy gaming.)

7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:

I tend to lurk more than talk, but you get some neat discussions over in the DCC G+ and the LotFP G+ groups.  (And now they're in one place!)

8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:

The Tabletop Dungeon and Unknown Armies Fan Club (both on Facebook) are where you'll find me talking in communities.  (I'm also at Tabletop & LARP RPGs Advice & Inspiration, but it's not as active.  More's the shame.)  If you just want to corner me in a digital back alley and have an old-fashioned cyber-knife fight, I'm on Instagram, MeWe, Tumblr, Twitter, and probably some other platforms I'm forgetting.  I'm PsychicMayhem#4596 over on Discord.

9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:

I don't understand why we're still arguing about whether or not we should like Zak S. when we should all be able to agree RPGPundit is pretty insufferable.

10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:

Unknown Armies.

11. Why I like OSR stuff:

The rules are simple enough to stay out of the way, and the ideas are innovative enough to keep my attention.

12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:

Last Gasp Generators should be in your Bookmarks.  You should be reading Goblin Punch — if you play a druid in my campaigns, I will invariably force you to read 7 Myths Everyone Believes About Druids.

13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:

That's some Sophie's Choice bullshit, but the correct answer is always Jeff's Gameblog.

14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:

My name generator based on U.S. Census data is the thing I wish I had when I was fourteen.  The Hundred [mass]Acre Deathcrawl is more explicitly OSR retrostupid.

15. I'm currently running/playing:

D&D 5e, LotFP, and Unknown Armies.

16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:

I'm not a fucking coward.  Also, I usually keep this printed on an index card:

Click to enlarge!

17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:

Free RPG Day on Saturday (June 16, 2018)

Don't forget: Free RPG Day is tomorrow.  Plan your trip accordingly.

Review: Frostbitten & Mutilated

I haven't posted in a while or done a review in even longer, but here we are.

Despite unabashedly enjoying Zak S.'s work, I'll freely admit: I didn't love this book.  Not at first, anyway.

It took a bit to infect me and implant its wriggling parasites under my skin.  So this review is as much a description of that process as it is an actual review of the book.

First things first: the core stuff.  Size A4, 144 pages.  Written and illustrated by Zak Smith, published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  There's little wasted space: it starts with a short introduction to both the book and the setting, and then launches into the bestiary, which is about 44% of the book and forms most of the world-building.  (If you just want cool monsters to throw into a winter-themed hexcrawl like the Kraal, which I think is partially this book's spiritual ancestor, it's here.)  The next 15% of the book is the "plot," such as it is: featuring a map, a couple of dungeon maps, and a timeline of events, this is the structure your PCs will roam if you're using the book as written.  (If you want a ready-to-go sandbox campaign, that's where you'll find it.)  The next 14% of the book is new rules: new classes (Amazon and Witch, both set up in the random advancement system style that so many OSR people like to use), new spells (for Witches or maybe Magic-Users), new substances (a magical metal and two chemicals), and new survival rules for use with the Bushcraft skill (because you're traveling across inhospitable territory).  The rest of the book is rounded out with an essay on running sandbox games and then a host of random tables to assist that process.

All this stuff is presented in a straightforward and concise manner, and once you get your bearings, the book is very spatially oriented, so you can find stuff without consulting the Table of Contents or the Index.  Even if I don't remember something offhand, I can flip to it in a couple of seconds, because it's exactly where it's supposed to be.

Basically, he took his own advice (as he usually does), and instead of giving us some boring historical litany like some Tolkien reject, you just get stuff like, "Ovv was the ruler of the forgotten civilization that built the Dim Fortress in aeons so remote even the sister-witches recall it only as you remember the texture of the first carpet you crawled. His kingdom was awful, and he was a despot—the kind of man who inspired gods to invent death by old age. But he got in under the wire. All his subjects and enemies long dead, his stronghold entombed, he sits still atop the Darkthrone, ten feet tall, clutching his sword, waiting for someone to be a bastard to."

That's all we get about the king, and that's all we need.  He's a jerk.  His stats bear this out.

But as noted, I didn't love it at first.  (Don't get me wrong: I still liked it, but would have called it the weakest of his books.)  Despite having some great ideas and solid world-building, this initially fell flat for two reasons:

1) Of all of his books, it feels the most like his blog.  While there are some great products that are basically just gussied-up blog posts — Veins of the Earth comes to mind, although it's so jam-packed with extra stuff that you don't notice you already read half of it — this one basically just felt like throwing down Euros to re-read posts I'd previously read for free, only with fewer typos and prettier art.  For that matter, a small portion of the material here previously appeared in another form in the Vornheim book.

2) It also feels like a setting I might create.  Vornheim feels 50% like some setting I'd create: a drunken orgy of ideas from Borges and Leiber and Peake, formed into a sprawling, decadent pulp city.  Twisted spires and political masterminds are totally my jam, but I'd probably never invent brilliant bits of color like homunculus assassins that hide in human bodies, or the fact that the world was created by medusae using the lithified remains of demons.  Maze of the Blue Medusa and Red & Pleasant Land are 100% things I'd never create — tone-wise, they fit right in, but a baroque dungeon of ancient, sad ladies and a vampire Wonderland are probably outside my wheelhouse, and that's totally rad.  On the other hand, a mythic Scandinavia of eternal snows where beasts and women run free, unfettered by the chains of Man, sounds like an idea I could have, and if I did have it, it would probably look similar: all idiosyncratic beasts and weird magic and berserkers like Maenads.

The first thing that changed my mind about the whole thing was Rushputin's comment that F&M has an excellent layout and is very usable (as described above).  I hadn't noticed at first because that's just assumed.  LotFP books in general and Zak S. books in particular are going to be very usable at the table and easy to find what you need.  That's just assumed at this point.

The second thing was that a friend of mine requested I run it, so I had to start working with the text to prepare the module.  And that's usually a chore, but this was super-easy.  I don't have a full hexcrawl of the entire map prepared yet, but I have some adventures around Rottingkroner prepared, and then some other stuff out in the wilds.  Random encounters can handle the rest until I have to stock hexes.

So, you ultimately get a highly-usable sandbox setting full of black metal Scandinavian goodness.  It deviates from the facts of Norse myth, instead drawing its inspiration from the feel of Norse myth, as well as fairy tales and pop culture.  And plus there are marauding Amazons that might try to kill or recruit you for intruding upon their lands.  It's a solid book, although it seems more restrained than his other work.  On the other hand, perhaps that makes it more accessible to readers from more traditional fantasy RPG backgrounds.  If you're looking for an Arctic/winter-themed sandbox setting, or you want to put some mythic flavor in your games, this is a solid pick.

(As for the weird things I want to inject directly into my veins, there are a couple of gems in here.  Of course, I love the bleak setting, the mythic feel of the animals, and the weird spells, but special mention goes to the owls.  Owls are weird in the Devoured Land, possibly in a way that refers back to Ken Hite's "The Owls' Service" from The Monolith from Beyond Space and Time.  If you are familiar with how snakes work in Vornheim, owls are anti-snakes.  Definitely worth a look.)

One last thing: We still haven't started the campaign.  We were supposed to start Friday, but one of our players had to cancel at the last minute.  Since I was ready to go, though, I did run a one shot set in the Devoured Land.  It was beyond stupid, but we had so much fun that it led me to write this post in the first place.  As with so many things, RPGs are meant to be played, and are probably only best measured in light of that activity.  After all, using the Devoured Land at the table is where Frostbitten & Mutilated truly shines.

I started the first party in square H7 on the Devoured Land map (pages 82-83).  Having taken the road from Rottingkroner and camped for the night, they set out first thing in the morning, traveling upriver along the River Slith.  A light snow is falling.  A couple of hours upriver, I roll the first random encounter, a lost traveler.  I consult one of my own random charts and determine she is a lost noblewoman.  That suggests her backstory: she was clearly traveling these lands to seek the Amazons in the hopes they could perform an embryoctony, and she was separated from the adventurers who escorted her out here.  She seems frightened and starved, and very wary of this party of three strange men before her.  They're not heading back to Rottingkroner as that would blow their profit margin, but she's welcome to travel with them as they explore this land.  Perhaps they can help her find her companions?  Another two hours, another random encounter, and they find a twisted tree, big enough to provide shelter.  Since they have another mouth to feed, the halfling decides to hunt; he finds nothing, but that takes up the rest of the day, so they make camp.  As the party begins to bed down and take watches, I roll another encounter and get fucking Blasphemer and his rat swarm.  I flip to his page, read, "Blasphemer may utter an Unholy Word (as the spell) once per week. So be careful out there," and then flip to the Holy Word spell and read that.  There is a short pause as I re-read it several times to ensure I'm reading it correctly.  It... instantly slays characters with fewer than 4 HD?  Just like that?  Based on my read of the spell, I rule it doesn't affect the wizard, but with everyone else dead the rat swarm finishes him off.  Total Party Kill #1.

Since that was very short, and I have more pregens, I give them a second chance.  The second party also starts in square H7, but this party of pregens has the Summon spell.  One player convinces the wizard she should cast it the night before they head into the Devoured Land, so that if she binds the demon long-term, they have a servant.  She agrees.  She rolls — the demon is more powerful than expected, and she blows the binding roll.  It possesses her.  The PCs go to bed.  She pretends to sleep.  On her watch, she massacres the rest of the party, then goes off into the wastes to do whatever permanently-incarnated demons do.  They never even leave the road.  Total Party Kill #2.

I've been laughing about this all weekend.  On the one hand, my players are aware there might be a small fortune in noblewoman's jewelry only a few miles upriver from the road in the Devoured Land; on the other hand, there's now a demon-possessed wizard somewhere out there.

A++, would run again.