An OSR campaign idea: A pseudo-Victorian / Edwardian society, a newly fashionable seaside resort. Coast on the west, wide and romantically desolate mudflats to the east. In summer, the fashionable gentry (the players) flock to the hotels and boulevards. Near the end of the season an aether storm struck and the train line home has sunk into the ooze. Now you are all overwintering in the cold and spray-splashed streets.

Various activities – dancing, reading, cold sea swimming, shell collecting – are employed to pass the stormy season, but soon a mania for archaeology/tomb robbing grips you all. Fueled by an collection of manuscripts left by a gentleman who died some years ago, you investigate maps of island ruins and barrows in the mudflats. Soon, this is augmented by ghost stories and rumours of pirate treasures extracted from the common folk.

Characters

Imperial Hotel, The Mall, Waterford, September 8, 1903

Characters have a frivolity score, which is the extent to which they fashionably insist on treating everything as a marvellous jape and an excuse to make witticisms.

Frivolity is rolled to impress people at the end of an adventure, at the next meeting of the society: this is what grants XP. And you can also use it to make light of horrors when exposed. But conversely, low frivolity (high sobriety) allows you to prepare better for the next expedition: it determines how much of downtime is “wasted” in pleasure-seeking, dissipation, &c.

The unseen world & the world war

Gremlins, boggarts, fairies and shrieks: Monsters have always lurked in dark, in the forests, in the bogs. The empire has pushed them back and back, until many city dwellers in Europa believe them no more than old wives’ tales.

Then with the industrial revolution came blasting powder and man’s insatiable hunger for coal. But we delved too deep and broke the barrier between our world and one far more dangerous. The old creatures surged back, and new terrors emerged.

A total war ensued, humanity vs the horrors, that raged for 15 years. The Brittanic Empire’s modern weapons were of limited use. Many of the empire’s conquered peoples had magical traditions that were far more help. The British were first forced to rely on ‘native’ help, which led then to respect and, over the course of the war, relinquishing most the empire. In the younger generation, at least, this humbling experience has resulted in a seachange in racial attitudes.

Many of the characters’ frivilous exteriors are a response to their service experience. But beneath it they harbour deadly competence.

“Her Majesty Empress Eugénie dressed as an amazon (in riding dress)” by Jules David

Meanwhile, the monsters that were not slain have fled into the uninhabited nooks and crevices of the world – including the romantically remote coast of England.

Gender

You could just construct a Victorian-themed world with total gender equality, and if that’s what you’re in the mood for, go for it. (Ditto, the previous section is an attempt to have a less rascist and colonial setting without just imagining the British as shining heroes – they’ve had to be forced into enlightenment. But again, you could just handwave all that).

An alternative approach: only women can use magic. For most of history magic has been a poorly understood science and most practitioners never rose above minor cantrips and charms. The rare exception were mighty sorceresses who terrified and conquered, but they were unable to pass on their understanding of magic. It is only in the last century, as the scientific method has made sense of chemistry and physics, that similar strides have been made in magic. Suddenly the old fashioned ‘women’s talent’ has become a powerful and rapidly advancing tool and is reshaping everything, including warfare and women’s role in it.

In other words: all wizards wear dresses. For now.

I have now been actively using Mastodon for approximately one year. Time to gather together the best things I’ve found there, and also archive some of my own thoughts so I can find them again later. This is everything up until May 2025; more to follow when I have time to curate.

Fediverse / IndieWeb

• Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (via @dave)
• A helpful way of orienting myself within Mastodon (via me)
• Shellsharks scrolls newsletter / blog
• Can accessibility be whimsical? (via Shellsharks newsletter)

Cool links 😎

• 4000 free icons for your games (via rivetgeek)
• Deluge at Drizzle Distillery by Munkao, “a 44 page, puzzle-lite, escape-the-dungeon-ish adventure module. A magic storm threatens to destroy the distillery making the best holy water in Kala Mandala.”
• breadwizard wrote 52 reviews in 2024, here’s the last one.
• Alas (a comic) (via sajan)
• The Edge of Known Space, “a short, single room metroidvania/puzzler with a engaging sci-fi story” (via me)
• Dragonsweeper “is such an elegant and enjoyable puzzle game. It’s minesweeper but also a dungeon crawler, and it somehow manages to capture the essence of both. You can play it for free in your browser and it works well on mobile.” (via me)
• @gbsteve has been posting little snippets of the games they have played in 2025, including Mothership, Cloud Empress, Mythic Bastionland and more.
• Glowburn & Radscars a free rules-light game of post-apocalyptic roleplaying attempting to combine Cairn and Mutant Crawl Classics, via breadwizard.
  • And also this awesome, moody playlist to go with it, or any other post-apocalyptic gaming. (via breadwizard)
• Kron’thul, a free font for alien monoliths, mysterious inscriptions, and ancient AI cults by Umut Comak (via me)
• csp_kris’s Dungeon-in-a-box and other videos.

RPG blog posts

• All about the Eye of Vecna (via me)
• Sandbox Settlements: Prep, Run, and Thrive (via elmcat)
• The Monstrous & Terrifying Wild Pigs of Hampstead’s Sewers (via david_castleton
• Why Orcs? Or, Why Do I Love Orcs? (via lyme)
• The Seven souls of Shadoom. “An old post that I love dearly. It embodies my favourite aspect of Arnold’s writing: this sense that instead of performing fantasy world-building from a 21st century perspective, he is able to peel back the enlightenment and see through medieval eyes.” (me)
• Modules as touchstones (via squishymage42)
• Revisiting GNS (via LeviJornelsen)
• Rules, retcons, and rightsholders: The tough road for superhero RPGs (via cannibalhaflinggaming)
• Prep Preferences & Interpretive Labour (via thomas)
• What’s a Thieves’ Guild and Where Did it Come From? (via me)
• Reflections after finishing Zozer Games’ Far Horizon (via cybergoths)
• Dragon Kobolds - The Drak (via juergen_hubert). “The dwarves of old knew how to summon dragon servants, and could provide these to others. But those who own such a dragon should be careful to always heed the feeding instructions…”

• Pulp Adventure Location: Trinadade & Martim Vaz. I posted some quotes here and then went on to read a book he mentions, The Cruise of the Alerte, leading to these thoughts: 🧵 Some quotes I rephrase slightly because character limits are a hard master.
  
  “I accordingly procured a bill of health for Sydney; not that I had the slightest intention of going there, but I knew that this document would satisfy the authorities of any place at which I was likely to call for stores: every harbour on either side of the Atlantic can be considered as being more or less on the way to Australia”.
  
  This feels very relatable to buying train tickets in Britain. Buy a ticket for London and you can probably argue for any route!
  
  The author receives many other reports of treasure. I like this Nigerian prince-level one: He “modestly asked for 1,000l. down before the slightest hint as to the nature of his treasure or its locality; but there could not be the slightest doubt as to my finding it, and as 1 item alone of this pile consisted of ten million £ worth of golden bars, it would be the height of folly on my part not to send him a cheque for the comparatively ridiculous sum of 1,000l. in return for such information.”
  
  This is just lovely: “A huge green roller, very high and steep, suddenly rose as if by magic from the deep; then swept over the shoal, and, when it reached the shallowest part, its crest hung over, forming a cavern underneath, through whose transparent roof the sun shone with a beautiful green light; and lastly, the mass overtopping itself fell with a great hollow sound, and was dashed to pieces in a whirl of hissing foam.”
  
  What an encounter! “Rolling easily on the green ocean swell, near the shore, lay a small schooner at anchor; her crew were engaged in stowing her mainsail. A quantity of barrels were being quickly landed here from one of the schooner’s boats, and several other wild-looking men were carrying these up to a cavern a little way up the rocks. And who, we wondered, were these people, and what were they doing; these were mysterious proceedings for a desert island!”
  
  “We then set forth to explore the island. We climbed the narrow path that zigzagged up the bare cliffs, and in the construction of which a considerable amount of labour must have been expended, a proof in itself that the rare visitors to the island were Portuguese, for these people alone take the trouble to make roads on desert islands. They seem to love for its own sake the arduous work of cutting paths up difficult precipices, and very cleverly they do it too.”
  
  RE the previous quote: obviously it’s a racist stereotype, especially the idea that the Portuguese just thrive on difficult road building (as opposed to it be a result of different policies, priorities, etc.). But at the same time, it’s so oddly specific and mildly complimentary that I find it more amusing and bizarre than offensive.
  
  “Here the mountains rise sheer from the boiling surf—fantastically shaped of volcanic rock; cloven by frightful ravines; lowering in perpendicular precipices; in places over-hanging threateningly…the mountains have been shaken to pieces by the fires and earthquakes of volcanic action; huge landslips of black and red volcanic debris slope steeply into the yawning ravines and loose rocks large as houses, ready on the slightest disturbance to roll down, crashing, into the abysses below.”
  
  “On the summit of the island there floats almost constantly, even on the clearest day, a wreath of dense vapour, never still, but rolling and twisting into strange shapes as the wind eddies among the crags. And above this cloud-wreath rise mighty pinnacles of coal-black rock, like the spires of some gigantic Gothic cathedral piercing the blue southern sky.”

• Are fewer rules actually less complicated?. “The debate about rules density in roleplaying games is a bit of a mess, frankly.”, via @cannibalhalflinggaming
• The Tenchi Muyo! RPG is my Carcosa (via me)
• Seven-Part Pact: Time. “A solid post by Dwiz about speeding up and slowing down time in RPGs” (via me)
• Haters Welcome. “I think collaborative creative games help you become a better human, so I want everyone to play them.” (via benrobbins)
• Shorter, more freqent sessions (via JasonT)

Funnies

• When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth (via kottke)
• Gasoline car review (via beej)
• This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii (via me)
• The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch (via me)
• “Wait, like… WHALES whales? The BIG things?”- me, on my 2nd day on a whaling ship, about to have a long 4 years at sea (via @signalstation)
• “I was trying to get into wizardry during my recent visit to Roke, but this guy called Master Finder Medra was being a real gatekeeper about it :/” (via periaptgames)

RPG thoughts

• Often unfilled dungeon niche: The chihuahua. @LeviKornelsen Small, hair-trigger, extremely loud, roving alarm system.
• Idea: RPG in a post-apocalyptic desert. 🧵 There is so little water that the only way communities survive is (Fremen-like) living in sealed habitats where 99.9% of water is recycled; food grows in hydroponic racks.
  
  Adventurers search through ruins and underground caves for all kinds of useful loot, but the holy grail is water: a litre carefully transported back to the habitat is as precious as gold.
• Thinking about rooms in dungeons with unstable footing: 🧵
  • walking on tops of stacks of mouldering books metres tall (man-sized bookworms cause surface ripples as they slowly chew their way)
  • the scree slope of an underground river that leaves only a small space to the cavern ceiling
  • football-sized fungal blooms that burst into dry powder when you step on them
  • platforms of loose junk forming islands sticking up from oily water (slippery pipes lead to higher levels)
• I think it would be fun to run an OSR campaign where the goal, known from the outset, is to slay a dragon before it emerges and lays waste to the kingdom. 🧵 The dragon dwells at the bottom a megadungeon under the city, which has been sealed for centuries to prevent the underworld spewing forth horrors.
  
  Now the King is forced by augurs of doom to break the seals and grant licences to any who would dare the darkness beneath, seeking the power to defeat the dragon...
  
  Pressure to beat the dragon as soon as possible leads to players having multiple goes at it, starting before they are really powerful enough, learning and adapting as they go.
  
  Some crews specialize in recovering bodies and selling them for resurrection (like Dungeon Meshi). Also, giant spiders that creep around the lower levels and drag bodies off to be preserved in webs, including those left by the dragon. So corpse recovery doesn't involve fighting the dragon.
  
  Partly I just really want to have the "dragon" in D&D, as we hardly ever manage that. Partly, I love the idea of the party really needing to gather information and plan tactics against a single terrifying foe.
• I am rereading The Hobbit. Here is Thorin talking about dragons... 🧵 "Dragons steal gold and jewels ... and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value" (pg 28 in my Harper Collins paperback).
  
  I love the idea of monstrous dragons who hoard valuables for no reason... But of course know how much it goes for on eBay. 😂 It really makes sense of D&D groups that award XP for loot even before selling it - clearly all denizens of fantasy worlds can just see the value of treasure hovering above it in yellow numbers.
  
  Also the next sentence is "[Dragons] can't make a thing for themselves, not even mend a little loose scale of their armour." Which suggests that Tolkien's thought is maybe that dragon's scales are not grown but built??
  
  In Chapter 12, Smaug says "I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems". All of which may just be poetic language from Tolkien. But what if it isn't? What if dragons commission armour from master smiths?
  
  It suggests an opportunity for an enterprising party to act as a go between dwarven smiths and a dragon, taking a cut of the vast sum charged - another way of "looting" the dragon. Or pretend that you are there for legitimate business, but instead scouting out weaknesses or just stealing treasure.
  
  But then if these deals happen every few centuries, these tricks will have been played before, and so even honest parties will meet suspicion from the dragon.
  
  Also, to defeat the dragon: first produce an accurate sketch of the dragon's armour. Take it to a sage to identify which mastersmith's handiwork it is. Track down the (presumably) long ruined dwarven kingdom. Fight through it to find the secret plans, and identify the weaknesses deliberately installed by the dwarves as a safeguard against draconic aggression.
• It was deep, deep, dark, such as only goblins that have taken to living in the heart of the mountain can see through... 🧵 This resonates with the idea of the mythic underworld. It's less about this race can see in the dark and this one can't, but that deep darkness is a thing you become part of, and then it becomes part of you - that creatures are changed by becoming denizens of the underworld.
• Easy quirk for a flavourful magic item: inversion of the norm... @periaptgames A cloak that hides you from perceptive creatures and points you out to others. A resizable rowboat that is weightless at full size, and incredibly heavy when shrunk to pocket-sized. A hammer that smashes through steel and granite but is worthless against glass. A lantern that makes bright light and pitch darkness alike into shadowy gloom.
  
  An oil that opens locks really, really loudly. A box that turns nutritious food into potable water. Paired rings that make one wearer float and doubles gravity for the other. An animal statuette that comes alive and panics.
• Studying a book of magic in #NineTalesOfRaffalon by Matt Hughes: 🧵 "The relationship between tome and reader was far more complex, combining elements of the prickly way confreres of the same profession might work together, along with the pupil/mentor axis, overlaid by the complex sentiments longtime players of a subtle and demanding game gradually developed toward each other. It was a mix of collegiality, rivalry, testiness, and the ancient human practice of upmanship."
• Conundrums in the dungeon: 🧵 Should the weaver either heave the lever to cleave the reaver, or believe the diva, that deceiver, and beaver to retrieve her - or neither: cool the fever, have a breather?
  
  The bragger swaggers: he nabbed the hag, grabbed the bag. But you could be laggard, sneak up on the blaggard, draw the jagged dagger and stab, make him stagger, grab the swag. Is it worth the hazard?
  
  Hsst! Basilisk - 'twixt obelisk and bricks. Nix on your tricks! or you'll be transfixed, sent across the Styx. Now, be brisk: with the picks, whisk onto the disk and we'll take a risk, lunatics: frisk its sticks, nick the chicks - quick!
• In 1782 in a gold mine in Transylvania people found a strange silvery metal. 🧵 Rarer than platinum, it was dubbed "paradoxical gold".
  
  Now 988 crystals of this metal are arranged in towers, buried a mile beneath a mountain, bound in copper and ancient lead from a 2,000 year old shipwreck. Protected by an immense metallic octagon they sit, colder than the space between stars, colder than anything else in the universe.
  
  A Call of Cthulu scenario? No, a physics experiment
• World-building idea: The sun is a ball of literal fire, burning heavenly coals. 🧵 Over the course of the month it burns more and more dimly before guttering out. Then, moon dragons bring more coals and ignite it again.
  
  From time to time coals, still burning, tumble to the ground. They start forest fires and burn cities. They also contain strange eggs that birth into fantastic or horrifying creatures, and veins of super hard gold that never fully cool.
• Thoughts about my cheese caves module: 🧵 The cheese is very precious: sold to nobility for gustatory delight; can induce prophetic visions. Nighttime caretakers have gone missing. The PCs are hired to sit with the cheese at night and figure out what's going on. All this is complicated by the owner being very suspicious of her workers (the cheese is worth a lot more than their wages) and in conflict with the union, who refuse to work until this is resolved.
  
  The simple solution: a family of mimics is in the caves - some of the big wheels have been devoured and replaced by mimics. But there's more going on that confuses the issue and offers other opportunities.
  
  A few months back: The owner's husband realized that the door in the lower level was a dwarven ruin and went questing for the key. He found it but was infected by deadly spores and died just outside the door on his return. That level is now full of deadly mushrooms and sealed off.
  
  oh, also there's some carrion crawlers that live stuck at the bottom of a well, fat and contented on the cheese scraps that get dropped to them. The workers know there's something down there, but they refer to them as "cave puppies" and would be horrified to know what they're really feeding.
  
  Finally, the dwarven ruin is haunted by an ancient ghost; it entrances people to come open the door to the ruin.
  
  Red herrings: Are the disappearances the fungus? The ghost? Is the ghost that of the owner's husband?
  
  If the party want to loot the dwarven tomb they will need to do it while convincing the owner they are still working on the disappearances and get the treasure out past the shakedowns designed to prevent cheese theft by employees.

Other thoughts

• Continuing my unplanned Vorkosigan re-read: 🧵

  "The Warrior's Apprentice" and "Mountains of Morning", the two first books about Miles Vorkosigan, and establishing very different aspects of him. In the first we get his brilliance, his ability to inspire loyalty, his unstoppability - but also some of his greatest failures: all the deaths and lies spiral from his overconfidence and unwillingness to admit defeat. At the end he feels ashamed of the cheers of "Admiral Naismith", despite his successes.

  In "Mountains of Mourning" he is much less showy and impressive (despite some piercing insights into the people around him) but we see clearly his honour, his self-sacrifice. This short novella (which won a Hugo and a Nebula) is key to who Miles is, and it's his personal commitment here to a dead child that ultimately turns out to be so important many books later.

  Continuing the Vorkosigan reread: In "The Vor Game" Miles' genius is blended with more awareness of the stakes - more humility - and I find him much more appealing. The part where he and Gregor are playing off each other to manipulate the crazy mercenary had me jumping up and down with excitement! So good 😁

  Pretty much everything Miles achieves through this book is through him talking and putting himself at risk, and it's thrilling throughout.

  Plus there's this moment 💛

• I recently finished reading "The Deed of Paksenarrion", a fantasy trilogy by Elizabeth Moon published in 1988. 🧵 It's a perfectly fine fantasy yarn, filled with tropes but still engaging and a satisfying read. Here's some things I found noteworthy:
  
  The first book takes place not in an adventuring party, but with a mercenary company, and is very low-fantasy. The author's bio mentions her sevice in US Marines, and I think there is versimilitude to the heroine's time as an ordinary foot soldier.
  
  There's a serious attempt to take the kind of religious "magic" of #dnd (clerics, paladins, etc.) and think it through with a religion that makes sense.
  
  The later parts of the trilogy deal convincingly with disability and depression.
  
  Overall, a solid fantasy adventure that I found quite moving in its conclusion.

I am interested in the theme of fatigue in fantasy adventuring – that there are limits to perserverance, to maintaining constant vigilance. In general I am interested in simple rules that can bring the characters more to life and make them more than perfect automatons. And in particular, given my chronic fatigue syndrome, I am interested in tiredness.

Here are some rules.

“The most desirable quality in a soldier is constancy in the support of fatigue; valor is only secondary.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Fatigue

Every character has a Fatigue penalty. It starts at 0 and can increase to -3. If your fatigue would increase beyond -3, you fall unconscious for 1d6 turns.

Some exceptional characters can be tougher, by having one or even two extra “0” fatigue box to tick off before they start feeling the effects.

Effects of fatigue

Fatigue affects sustained concentration and alertness when no immediate danger threatens – for example, studying complex tomes, watching for minute signs of danger, reflexes. It’s easy to drift off and lose the thread. Any rolls that come under those categories receive the fatigue penalty, and some activities may require a roll that otherwise wouldn’t. For example, if your fatigue is severe (-3) you may need to save to stay awake if you are waiting with nothing to do.

Once danger arrives adrenaline kicks in and drives away tiredness. Apply the penalty to the initiative roll, if you use individual initiative, but not to anything else in combat.

Causes of fatigue

When exploring a dungeon we roll for fatigue every time we make a wandering monster check (normally every 2 turns). I use the encounter stew system by Arnold K, so I just toss these extra dice into the pot along with dice for torches and spell durations. I colour code my dice to tell them apart.

We roll:

One white encumbrance d6, plus 1 die for each character who is overburdened, and 1 die for each character wearing heavy armour. For every 1 rolled a character takes -1 fatigue. Assign each fatigue to a different character if possible, and assign first to the most encumbered characters.

Persistent uncomfortable or difficult conditions (such as stifling heat, wading through deep water, deafening racket) add additional encumbrance d6s to the pool.

One white sentry d4 for every character on sentry (more on this below). For every 1 rolled a character on sentry takes -1 fatigue. Assign each fatigue to a different character if possible. If the party are on full alert skip this roll and just assign -1 fatigue to a character.

Outside dungeon exploration, characters also sustain fatigue when keeping watch through the night and when doing a forced march to travel further than is normally possible in a day.

Sentry duty

In general, when GMing I provide description and the players describe what they do, and through this the players can discover treasure, monsters, traps, etc.

However, what if the clues to these things are subtle? A depression in the ground due to a pit trap, a crack in a corridor wall that hints of a secret passage beyond, ichor dripping from the fangs of a giant spider lurking above.

When the players are exploring a dangerous environment one or more characters are on sentry. When the GM needs to know if the characters have spotted something subtle, all sentries roll. A successful roll reveals those subtle clues but it is still up to the players to use normal interaction to see what these clues mean.

If four or more characters are on sentry then the party is at full alert and they automatically notice these clues without need for a roll.

Recovering

Characters recover 1 fatigue when they get a night’s sleep, or 2 fatigue if they have a fire (implying also cooked food) or are sleeping in a proper bed in a house.

Commentary

Being vigilant (via the sentry roll or keeping watch through the night), pushing your character’s endurance (by burdening yourself or doing a forced march) has a cost in fatigue. This both gives us interesting choices (how dangerous do we think this is? Who do we need to prioritize keeping well-rested?) and also makes the characters more human.

The difficulty of recovering fatigue while sleeping rough and keeping watch makes the comforts of civilization and safety more palpable.

Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing is an ENNIE award winning OSR adventure based around a hex crawl in the titular swamp. First published in 2017 it received a second edition in 2024.

Let’s take a look at what’s changed.

All art in this post is from Fever Swamp, and is copyright Luke Gearing & Andrew Walter.

New art

Scumboggles slink through the waters. The only thing they love more than manflesh is cheese.

There are 27 new pieces of artwork, most in vibrant colour using a greeny-yellow palette. These add a lot: nearly every monster gets a full page colour illustration, but there are also quick portraits of important NPCs in the village of Clink, as well as a few pieces depicting some adventurers exploring the swamp. Nice!

The House of Banish

There is a new dungeon: the House of Banish. I like the flavour – a decaying manor house, unsuited to the clime, now rotting into the swamp, a metaphor for the owners: depraved rich colonialist types who destroyed themselves with dark magic.

“The swamp has invaded the interior of this home and tarnished the generational wealth ported here at such great expense. Paintings swell in their frames, and books return to the earth.”

The dungeon ties into the wider swamp in some neat ways: a magic item that makes you invisible to one of the swamp monsters; a quest hook that sends you after the Ur-corpse. However, it would need some work to run: The house itself has no map, only the caves beneath, and those are a vertical affair rendered from the side; the practicalities of traversing these steep tunnels are left vague.

Swamp witches

The swamp-witches have gone from generic wandering monsters to six distinct witches bursting with delicious and gruesome flavour.

“The Toad-Mother did not flee here – she chose her mantle and her batrachian kin. Her body swells with toad-spawn, and gobs of it escape her mouth when she speaks. Her approach is preceded by the cessation of croaking – none of her family dare speak in her presence.”

They each have brilliant snippets of backstory and motivation. However, I feel like we are missing some kind of grim portents or table of random faction moves. That would really help the GM to make the witches shine.

The People

The People, those native to the swamp, are improved in 2E. A misgiving I had with the original was the use of rascist stereotypes for the locals. As far as I can tell (as a white British man) this is better handled in the new edition, and it goes hand-in-hand with better content for a game.

Shamanic summoning

The previous “tribe” table presented traits that played into stereotypes of uncontacted people (e.g. pygmies, cannibals) and didn’t give any insight into their internal lives – they were inscrutable and monstrous. Here’s one entry from the 1E table: “All bear open wounds, deliberately inflicted and left to fester in the swamp’s humid air”. The swamp itself was described thus: “no one in their right mind would ever visit”.

Now, the swamp is instead “inhospitable to those not born beneath the spirit-heavy canopies”. The six new “houses” organizing the People’s society are more humanising and better for gaming. They provide motivations, needs and wants. They’re still deeply weird; the difference is that the weirdness is compatible with them being real people that the PCs can gain some understanding of.

Here are snippets from three of the Houses:

“Clad in wood-fibre cloaks, the Tree-Wearing House can petition spirits for easy passage through the swamp…”

“They are happy to trade with outsiders for weapons, and many have steel weapons. Their warriors covet the guns of Nilfenberg.”

“They have seen the horror of Nilfenbergian interest, and the disturbances to their homes. They paint themselves white in recognition of their coming death… Eventually they will burn Clink.”

There are still plenty of creatures filling the monstrous/twisted human role (scumboggles, candlethieves), but the humans with an actual society are now presented as fully human, rather than subhuman.

The Encounters

The text of the encounters and dungeon entries is largely unchanged – but where it has been punched up the change is really worth having. An example: for the scumboggle hive we get this delightful new detail:

“Within their hive, suspended using vines, a single cow, hand-fed the rich vegetation of the swamp. If recovered, the cow’s cheese is of excellent quality – the cow is worth 350gp.”

Emaciated humanoid

The swamp-witch fused with a tree also gets great new details, but my favourite addition is to the ruined settlement. Previously this was just a place to roll to find loot while risking wanderers. Interaction was either abstracted away or entirely the GM’s to improvise. Now we get just enough to run exploration of these abandoned houses. Contrast the old:

“A Shaman-knife, effective against spirits.”

with the new:

“Hidden in the rafters but betrayed by dangling rope, a varnished box hides a long knife of bone, the handle crocodile-belly leather. Property of the shamans, it can strike the intangible. If worn openly in the presence of the People and not returned, -2 to all Reaction rolls.”

Quality of life

There are some great practical changes that make the GM’s life easier:

• Four new player-facing maps: a simple sketch of the rivers, the same with a hex-overlay, a painting of the rivers and, my favourite, a sketch with illustrations of some monsters added, to give your players the fear.
• A really useful extra page and a half about navigation in the swamp, mapping and example boats (with simple but effective art).

“The choked watercourses of Fever Swamp are uncertain and obscure, changing over time in defiance of cartography.”

• Daily events (disease check, corpse pile movement, encounters) are consolidated at the beginning, instead of scattered in multiple places.
• All twelve diseases now have names (Would you rather have earworms or boglung?)
• The rumours have had a slight rewrite. One of them now points the party towards the locals to find diseases for cures, which is great, but I would have liked more of these hooks in the other rumours.
• Numbers appearing are included in the encounter table

Layout & design

Ur-Corpse ruins. 1E (top) vs 2E (bottom). Click to enlarge. Hexmap. 1E (top) vs 2E (bottom). Click to enlarge.

This is the one area where the new edition makes a misstep. The original’s design had a distinct voice and conveyed information stylishly. The new layout is much more “OSR standard” with less flair and a more predictable approach. Various tables use a poorly chosen serif font swimming in a sea of whitespace.

For an example, let’s consider the Ur-Corpse ruins, one of the mini-dungeons. In both editions we get the full map up front. However in 1E the key reproduces the relevant portion of the map next to each location.

I also loved the original’s choice to have checkboxes for monsters with a limited number appearing, reproducing portions of the hexmap within the hexmap key and many other thoughtful choices. The hexmap is more colourful and has better font choices in the original. Removing the watery background effect of 1E was almost certainly a good move, however.

Closing thoughts

There are a few other little changes – the hexes are now 6 miles instead of 18, there are minor rule tweaks to one of the PC classes and to the monsters, etc.

There are a handful of problems in the original that are not addressed here. The spirits are repeatedly emphasized as very important - the People have dedicated shamans whose job is to intercede with, summon, and banish the spirits. There are items to help you deal with them; a class about summoning them. But in practice, only one entry on the wandering monster table includes spirits, and they only show up in a couple of keyed locations. If I ran this I would want to hugely bump up the spirit count - perhaps at night?

As other reviewers have complained, the monastery lacks a map, and without it the location would be quite hard to run. This wasn’t adressed in the new edition.

Fever Swamp was already a brilliant module and the new content and the judicious application of juicy detail where it was needed makes this still better. I would love to see a third edition that had more of the original’s attention to usability through layout, but this is still perfectly functional.

You can purchase Fever Swamp at DriveThruRPG.

An iridescent centipede, four foot long and six inches wide. Skitters on walls and ceilings as easily as on the floor.

Emerging from the top of its head is a slender human arm, which it daintily uses to reach into its own mouth and bring out handfuls of silver sand. It throws these into the eyes of prey (save to dodge). If afflicted, a creature gets one round of yawning and staggering action before succumbing to deep sleep.

Stats

HD 2, HP 6, AC 14, Atk throw sand (see below) or bite 1d6, Move 60’, Morale 6

Behaviour

Roll 1d4-1 to determine how many slumbering or dead creatures currently hang from the ceiling (you can roll on your wandering monster table to determine their nature). If it has at least 2 in the larder it will avoid conflict.

Once all prey are asleep it vomits up sticky goo onto their limbs and then drags them up a wall and affixes them to the ceiling, out of the reach of scavengers. It feeds on their spirit as they dream and, when they die of thirst, devours their flesh. They take 1 point of Wisdom damage for every day they sleep.

Waking sleepers

Sleepers can only be awakened by removing every trace of sand from their eyes; this requires 1 pint of water per sleeper. Effects of waking:

• When they first awaken they are groggy and confused for one turn.
• They have vague memories of terrifying nightmares (disadvantage on save vs fear and morale for the next week).
• Twice the player can declare that they remember a nightmare fragment that is relevant to the current situation. The GM describes a terrifying way in which they died in their dream in this exact situation. 50% chance (GM rolls secretly) that this reveals true information; otherwise it is misleading.

Treasure

Each creature in the larder has treasure as per their own stats. Each has a 50% chance of being alive.

Some thoughts about travel in old school RPGs. This is part of my work on my own homebrew rule set. I wanted something that captured a little of the risks and discomforts of roughing it in the wilds; made proper preparation for a trek in winter vital; led to interesting choices; and, crucially, was very simple at the table.

As the party travels they keep their eyes open for a good place to stop and make camp. If the party has sufficient equipment for the current weather they always find something adequate.

For example, on a dry summer’s evening all they need are cloaks to wrap around themselves. Or even a cold snowy night in winter: if they have an insulated tent and blankets we can assume they are fine.

However, if their equipment is inadequate, roll for campsite. Add 1d4 to the pool for each of these problems (and perhaps others I didn’t think of):

If any 1s are rolled they have not found adequate shelter. The party then has three choices:

1. Sleep badly – at a minimum, each member of the party takes 1 fatigue. However, the GM will also apply effects as dictated by the fiction. e.g. if it is freezing you may be in danger of death.
2. Go to the old castle – the GM will offer you shelter that the characters previously avoided due to its risky nature: an old ruin with a skull on a spike, a dark hole in the ground, an ordinary house when you are trying to pass incognito.
3. Push on – you can travel on for another stage and then roll for a new campsite (incurring the usual penalties for a forced march - in my system, extra fatigue).

Commentary

So obviously many problems you might run into are resolved by just having a good quality tent. Still, this can lead to interesting situations if the party’s equipment is damaged or stolen; if they have to skip town without adequate preparation; if they are just flat broke, or if their greed compels them to leave the tent behind in order to carry more loot. For this to have impact, tents should be bulky - take up several slots.

CON/TEXT is a “a one-shot of cosmic horror for use with Mothership. A britpunk nightmare set aboard a failing research station”. Created by Ric Wood.

You’ve been sent to investigate the deep-space research station, the Lachesis. The station has been reporting system malfunctions and the crew have gone radio silent. It’s up to you to retrieve the valuable research stored there.

This blog post has a content warning for implied torture and implied execution. The module itself has other content warnings, but I will not touch on any of that material here.

There are no spoilers for CONT/EXT in this post.

As written, the players in CONT/EXT are balancing retrieving very valuable data discs against their own lives. However, in a one-shot I did not think that credits would be sufficient incentive for the characters to go into extremely dangerous environments. “Why not just leave?”

Ric writes in his blog post “The Shiftless Horror of Mothership” about the horror of institutions: that they are inevitable, utilitarian and implacable. So combining what I know about CONT/EXT with Charles Stross’ The Laundry Files, I present a table of alternative “rewards” for CONT/EXT:

OVERSIGHT

At end of session, roll Xd10 and take the highest result to see how CONT/EXT OVERSIGHT rewards you, where X is the number of gold laser discs recovered. If you have recovered none, roll d6.

Agendas

With the updated OVERSIGHT system we can give the agendas real bite. Who can blame you for the betraying your friends when even completing the mission well is no guarantor of success?

You can either roll d6, in which everyone has a secret objective; or roll d10 for a little less infighting.

(An expansion of this Mastodon post)

One or two meetings of this kind had taken place, without affording Elinor any chance of engaging Lucy in private, when Sir John called at the cottage one morning, to beg, in the name of charity, that they would all dine with Lady Middleton that day, as he was obliged to GM at a convention in Exeter, and she would otherwise be quite alone, except her mother and the two Miss Steeles.

The young ladies went, and Lady Middleton was happily preserved from the frightful solitude which had threatened her. After the removal of the tea-things the gaming-table was then placed.

Poor little Annamaria’s space marines

“I am glad,” said Lady Middleton to Lucy, “you are not going to finish painting poor little Annamaria’s space marines this evening; for I am sure it must hurt your eyes to work fine detail by candlelight. And we will make the dear little love some amends for her disappointment to-morrow, and then I hope she will not much mind it.”

This hint was enough, Lucy recollected herself instantly and replied, “Indeed you are very much mistaken, Lady Middleton; I am only waiting to know whether you can make your party without my knowledge of the grappling rules, or I should have been at my painting already. I would not disappoint the little angel for all the world: and if you want me in the game now, I am resolved to finish the company after supper.”

“You are very good, I hope it won’t hurt your eyes—will you ring the bell for some working candles? My poor little girl would be sadly disappointed, I know, if the company was not finished tomorrow, for though I told her it certainly would not, I am sure she depends upon having it done.”

Lucy directly drew her work table near her and reseated herself with an alacrity and cheerfulness which seemed to infer that she could taste no greater delight than in painting 43 figures for a spoilt child.

Lady Middleton proposed Tomb of Horrors

Lady Middleton proposed Tomb of Horrors to the others, with herself as master of dungeons. No one made any objection but Marianne, who with her usual inattention to the forms of general civility, exclaimed, “Your Ladyship will have the goodness to excuse me—you know I detest dungeon crawls. I shall go work on Thousand Year Vampire; I have not touched it since your new copy arrived.” And without farther ceremony, she turned away and walked to the writing desk.

Lady Middleton looked as if she thanked heaven that she had never made so rude a speech.

“Marianne can never keep long from solo journalling you know, ma’am,” said Elinor, endeavouring to smooth away the offence; “and I do not much wonder at it in this instance; for you have the very best games here.”

The remaining players were now to roll their characters.

If I should happen to fail my death save early

“Perhaps,” continued Elinor, “if I should happen to fail my death save early, I may be of some use to Miss Lucy Steele, in mixing her paints for her; and there is so much still to be done to the marine company, that it must be impossible I think for her labour singly, to finish it this evening. I should like the work exceedingly, if she would allow me a share in it.”

“Indeed I shall be very much obliged to you for your help,” cried Lucy, “for I find there is more to be done to it than I thought there was; and it would be a shocking thing to disappoint dear Annamaria after all.”

“Oh! that would be terrible, indeed,” said the elder Miss Steele. “Dear little soul, how I do love her!”

“You are very kind,” said Lady Middleton to Elinor; “and as you really like the work, perhaps you will be as well pleased not to roll a character until we reach a deeper level, or will you take your chance now?”

Elinor joyfully profited by the first of these proposals, and thus by a little of that address which Marianne could never condescend to practise, gained her own end, and pleased Lady Middleton at the same time. Lucy made room for her with ready attention, and the two fair rivals were thus seated side by side at the same table, and, with the utmost harmony, engaged in forwarding the same work. Marianne, wrapped up in her own solo RPG and her own thoughts, had by this time forgotten that any body was in the room besides herself and was talking to herself out loud, luckily so near them that Elinor now judged she might safely, under the shelter of that noise, introduce the interesting subject, without any risk of being heard at the gaming-table.

From Chapter 23 of Sense & Sensibility, by Jane Austen

1. Cursed. Anytime it leaves your person dreadful luck befalls you, escalating day by day. Who or what do you think is responsible for the curse?
2. Blasphemous & illegal. Anyone found with it in their possession will be executed by the authorities. Why did you make it?
3. Hunted. It is known that a powerful and unscrupulous individual seeks it for their own; no one else dares own it. Which of their agents do you fear most?
4. Promise. You promised to give it to someone and you utterly refuse to break that oath. Who is it promised to and why does your oath matter so much?

It is worth 1d10 x 100 silver.

Alternative awkward items (d6)

1. Gilded mirror
2. Hand bell with very recognisable sound
3. Twenty foot rope of pearls
4. Gorgeous stallion
5. Velvet brocade wedding dress with long train
6. Cranky and talkative thumb-sized imp in a cage

Notes

This was part of my work on Fierce & Futile Backgrounds but it didn’t fit well there. So rather than kill my darling I’ve instead sent it to live in a nice farm upstate (this blog).

Goblin Punch’s latest post introduces a monster that can make lights become “thin” and “greasy” and eventually die so that the party can be consumed by the darkness. What I love is that the thing affecting the torches and candles is a disease that lights can catch. This harkens back to his idea of rust being a disease that infects metal.

What other phenomenon from our world could be reimagined as a disease in our RPGs? This was originally a thread on Mastodon.

Knots

Ropes, hair, chain can contract a tendency to tie themselves in ever more complex knots when left alone. In the advanced stage, all such materials wriggle free of the backpack and start entangling everything nearby.

Lies

In addition to mundane problems of rot & mildew, the written word can contract virulent falsehoods that spread through a library.

The virus understands humans poorly, and mostly changes random details. Its only consistent effect: clumsily encourage the reader to consume fragments of the book, hinting this will grant transcendent power. Instead, it causes fever, hallucinations, and eventually vomiting up blank (infected) tomes.

Locks

Infected doors slowly grow locks, typically baroque in decoration. No key grows. If the door is opened the door will gradually shut and lock itself again.

The disease spread from door to door on your hands; it can only survive more than 24 hours on metal or wood (e.g. lockpicks).

Creatures that regularly feed it by pouring blood into the keyhole can win the door’s affection. It will then open for them, unless frightened.