The Idle Digest #2

Idle Cartulary's Digest for December 2024

It’s the second Idle Digest, and I thought I’d wish you all a happy holiday season, for those in the southern hemisphere, don’t die of heat-stroke, and for those up north, enjoy your snow angels.

Oh, if you’re writing your own blogs (or if you want to be), Prismatic Wasteland will be running another Blog Bandwagon (previous Blog Bandwagons were Vampire Weekend and Blog Friday), this time on February 7th 2025 (National Periodic Table of the Elements Day) with the theme of Elements! If the idea of writing unique and interesting takes on the elements tickles your fancy, write something down about it and share on February 7th!

Lonely Play

In December, on Playful Void, I wrote about:

• I wrote about Forsaken Easter Eggs, those little tidbits in modules that don’t lead anywhere and can never be discovered by the players, and how to find and fix them in your writing and homebrew.

• I wrote about gold, and why I think gold is a silly standard for elfgames, and the issues with large amounts of it, and the weirdness of price lists.

• I wrote five Bathtub Reviews:

  • In Saving Saxham, an entire town has lost their memories, and you have to solve the mystery. This is the strongest module by Joseph R Lewis I’ve reviewed (and I’ve reviewed a fair few of them), featuring some really interesting factions and some very tough decisions.

  • What Child is This? is a classic holiday module, that I run most years for a few friends of mine. As it’s hard to spend a lot of time on a 4 page module, I instead use What Child is This? As an exemplar of where we can focus when writing tiny modules to give ourselves the most bang for our buck, and how we can examine them through a lens that will allow us to make better ones.

  • Stalls of the Blood Queen was a surprise this month, part of the current Mausritter jam, with absolutely gorgeous art and stand-out layout. It’s great, but what does it say about the Mausritter community’s attitude towards exploring themes at a deeper level, and what could we learn about the clever things about this that were missed or handed to the referee to expand on?

  • The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak is a dungeon focused on Norse folklore. I love to see a broader range of inspirations coming into modules, as too many of ours are either incestuously inspired (I’m guilty of this myself), or directly inspired by current media (Liminal Horror and Mothership are especially guilty of this). Here, we have a fairly unique take on theme.

  • To finish of the year, I started my Introductory Extravaganza to celebrate my 100th Bathtub Review which will come some time in January, with a review of the Village of Hommlet. What does it have to say about AD&D and about starter modules as a whole? Look forward to reviews for the Sunless Citadel, Lost Mine of Phandelver, The Iron Coral and Blancmange and Thistle!

This holiday season, I decided to do a game review advent calendar, in a series called Critique Navidad! I reviewed anything I was offered, and you can find the whole series here — there’s too many for me to list, and 17 so far! If you want to see my thoughts on a wide variety of things I often don’t touch here, this is a great place to look: There are solo games, card games and more in the mix! Truly it was an embarrassment of riches, but if you simply don’t have the time to read all 20 or so reviews (with one remaining, tomorrow, of Triangle Agency), these are the ones you really should take a look at:

• Dawn of the Orcs, a parlour larp disguised as a roleplaying game in the vein of Secco Creek Vigilance Committee, in which you play bickering and ambitious sages in competition with each other, but working together to build an orc army and keep your lands free from invasion.

• Eco Mofos, an hope-punk Gamma-world-like that really impressed me with it’s use of contemporary blog and game development, smart design, and really interesting classes and magic.

• Wulfwald, ostensibly a setting for OD&D, but in fact an incredibly rules light setting in 5 small books, that does a remarkable job of making a fantasy 5th century Britain compelling, with really surprising classes, faction-building, and great setting support.

• He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More, a very strange hybrid game that is super compelling, a Wolves Upon The Coast hack that mixes an in-game timer, with a hex-crawl, tournament scoring, and the Normandy landings

Pickpocketing

In other news, December was a huge month for things that got me all excited:

• I’ve experimented a lot with Marcia’s Bite-sized Dungeons, but Root Devil has taken it a step further and made this six room dungeon generator based on them. It’s pretty fantastic for quickly generating an interesting space. It would be very easy to whip up a dungeon in half an hour with this.

• I’m more excited about the potential for Typography 201, but Typography 101 by Clayton Noteskine really summarises a lot of information from across a lot of sources really well, and if you’re anxious about getting started in graphic design, this is a great place to start figuring out how to make your TTRPG not look like a primary school newsletter.

• Employment Contracts in Mothership brings some really elegant lifestyle systems to Mothership. I could see bringing these into other games, with my main criticism simply being the idea that any player characters in Mothership being anything other than working class. In fact, I feel like a Mothership module where you play the rich, would be an interesting twist for a new module.

• Dwiz wrote the spectacular A Theory of Fear, talking about how to use fear in your tabletop roleplaying games, which goes into a lot of fascinating detail. I think this is going to impact the way I wrote modules, as well as the way I run horror scenarios.

• Dodecahedron wrote about Principles of Conflict resolution, and how you can think about conflict in terms of escalation rather than in terms of violence. I thought this was overall really strong, but also, I feel like the conclusions the Bakers came to in Dogs in the Vineyard (mentioned in this post), may have beaten them to the post. I’d love to see someone bring a more elfgamey twist on this perspective though: It would make sense as a replacement for morale and reaction rolls, in my opinion.

• Sandro wrote a compelling argument that hexes in hexcrawls should only contain a single point of interest. They didn’t quite persuade me, but I think that there’s merit here, we just need enough people to explore the method in detail.

• Hendrick ten Napel wrote about Slugblaster and how Quentin Smith was wrong about it in his review: In fact, we as referees benefit from support in how and when to dole out difficulty and consequences in tabletop roleplaying games.

• I can rarely look past Jenx’ of Gorgon Bones session reports, but this one of two sessions of Wolves Upon the Coast was full of interesting tidbits.

• These deception mechanics inspired by Jack Vance’s work are the most interesting take on social mechanics and reaction I’ve seen a in a while. If you’re playing solely as rogues, I’d adopt it whole cloth, but irregardless it’s something to keep in mind when developing social mechanics.

• And this folds Otherkind dice into an OSR framework to make for a more streamlined combat approach. Very cool basis, I think, for a mechanic, and filling a much maligned gap in Old School Essentials. I’d definitely love to see this further iterated on, because combat in OSR games is often a drudge — some argue by intent — and I’d love to see it become a joy.

Gamespotting

• Sadly, I can’t link you to any crowdfunding games right now, because they’ve all wrapped up before the end of year period. These three, though, I encourage you to pre-order them now, or keep an eye out for them on release!

  • The first is the very exciting new game from Evelyn Moreau and Sofia Ramos, A Feast for A Sphinx, but given how much I loved Goblin Mail, their last work together as a team.

  • The other is the Lost Chronicles of Oz, a Cairn hack set in the land of Oz which will definitely spur me to bring the fantastic city-crawl Oz by Andrew Kolb to the table!

  • Last month, I mentioned Dawn of the Orcs, which I then got to review as part of Critique Navidad. You can read my review here — it absolutely slaps.

• The Bloggies are coming! You can nominate your favourite blog posts (and series, for example Bathtub Reviews) here, until the end of the year, and at the beginning of the year there’ll be some kind of bracket voting! Nominate widely and generously: Last year a debut blogger one the title!

• If you liked the Painted Wastelands (which I reviewed as part of Critique Navidad on Christmas day), there’s a two-part follow up coming soon, featuring the player-facing Player’s Guide and a zine full of strange tales!

• If you followed Mothership Month last month, you might be interested in Sean McCoy’s debrief on how it went, and why it happened.

Thanks for subscribing to my new newsletter!

Idle Cartulary

---

Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.