The Idle Digest #13

Idle Cartulary's Digest for November 2025

Because of the chaos of this time of the year, the 13th Idle Digest is late, and so Critique Navidad has started! I shall endeavor to review a game a day for the whole of December, as a gift to all of the game designers out there who wish they’d had a thoughtful critique of their work! I currently have a few days free, so am still accepting submissions, but you’ll have to email or DM me on Bluesky to get into contact as I’ve closed the submission form.

Lonely Play

In November, on Playful Void, I wrote:

• I wrote five Bathtub Reviews:

  • The Rolling Coast, a Mausritter setting by an all-star team set in a waterpark.

  • A Feast for A Sphynx, an excellent Mork Borg module by the team behind Goblin Mail

  • Rakehell, a randomiser-driven setting with luxurious writing

  • Oubliette, the first two parts of an ongoing megadungon that I like a lot at this stage in its incremental development.

• I published How To Write A Module, a play-by-play of my writing process written in real time. Honestly I think this is great and was slept on, everyone should read it if you’re interested in figuring out your design process!

Pickpocketing

This month was absolute fire for new writing:

• Martin makes Mothership stimpacks more interesting.

• Clayton looks at the new edition of Affinity Studio.

• Xaosseed talks about how Elmcat’s visualisation helps to tell us more about what the OSR actually is.

• Rascal talks about the fascinating work of localising Mork Borg

• Fari talks about what good layout is. I’m not sure it’s comprehensive, but it’s worth considering

• There’s some interest in high trust games going around both from this ‘Hudless Play” post by Joey and this play report of Gradient Descent.

• Most importantly, Directsun is running the Puzzle Dungeon Jam, accompanied by a workshop on how to write your own puzzle dungeons — this is an exciting one, and I hope it gets as much uptake as the Appendix N and Zungeon jams got earlier in the year!

Gamespotting

Things are quietening down, but a few choice picks still ongoing:

• The Castle Automatic, the first official dungeon for His Majesty the Worm, is preorderable now.

• This Mork Borgian fable, King Morg, seems wierd enough to be good

• You have a few days left to back Tales from Pwyll by Josiah Moore (author of the best Mausritter module, Tiny Fables), and Soul Food by Diogo Barros (author of the excellent Isle of Hex).

Enjoy the holiday period and Critique Navidad! Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter!

Idle Cartulary

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