New Blogwagon!

RANDOMNESS! All of the details are outlined in this post, but I encourage all of you with blogs (substacks count as blogs) to throw your hat in the ring over the next month. Blogwagoning is fun!

For those of you afraid of hyperlinks who just want to type it directly into your browser of choice: https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/random-blogwagon

Old Blogwagons!

My last post on this substack was another Blogwagon call to arms for a Christmas-themed hexcrawl, and that resulted in a massive 60-hex hexcrawl. Go read the full thing, spread across nearly as many blogs. My own entry was a full dungeon that ended up as a finalist for the Bloggies, Castle Claus.

There was also a very long-running Blogwagon on the topic of maps, which resulted in 52 blogposts from around the blogosphere! Go read the full roundup here. I am quite proud of my own entry, which is a new method for generating the terrain for a hexcrawl map. I clearly have had hexcrawls on the brain (lately but also always).

Weird Writer also hosted a blogwagon on the topic of sex. I participated with my own set of six sex-related (loosely) spells, randomly generated and then detailed out.

Oddish!

I crowdfunded a print run of three books of a Pokemon-hack of Into the Odd this year in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the original Pokemon games. It went really well and the books are currently being worked on by the printer and I anticipate being able to ship them out next month, which I think is a pretty good turnaround compared to a lot of TTRPG projects in our currently crowdfunding-obsessed sphere where projects sometimes take years. But because I couldn’t use a traditional crowdfunding platform, a lot of the way I promoted this project was through blogging, including my hottake that Pokemon is OSR, a design diary about Bringing Accuracy Back to Into the Odd systems without adding a to-hit roll, and (my most popular blog post so far this year) Rating Every Room in White Plume Mountain, which is related to this whole Pokemon thing because one of those three books is a dungeon called Vileplume Mountain.

Other Postings!

I had a few other blogposts since last we spoke that aren’t covered in the set above, namely:

• I’d Rather Be a Mouse Than an Elf

• Review: Honey in the Rafters

• PAX Unplugged: How to Cram a Month’s Worth of Gaming into One Weekend

• Playtest Early, Playtest Often

• All Along the Clocktower

• Play Is Canon

• Review: Canal of Horrors

Okay, now you are entirely caught up. Time to get to blogging for that new blogwagon! Go! Go! Go!!!

It is blog bandwagon time once again, but this time with a bit of a twist. We (that includes you, yes you) are each going to write the contents of a single hex. Simple enough! But then in your post, you list any hexes other bloggers have written that are connected to your hex, including which direction and a link to their post. When someone links to your post, it would be nice to update it with the connection they suggested going in the opposite direction. Also, if this is your first time of hearing about a “blog bandwagon”, it is a call-to-arms for bloggers to all write a post loosely on the same theme and post them roughly at the same time.

For example, Rudy writes a hex containing a bunch of skeletons who are disguised as snowmen. Vixen then writes a hex containing a cave full of carnivorous reindeer where the half-eaten remains of Mrs. Claus can be found, and notes in her hex that it is just south of Rudy’s snowman hex. Rudy sees it (maybe Vixen even messages him somewhere, if she is feeling polite) and updates his post to show that Vixen’s reindeer cave lies due north of his hex. Volia. And future bloggers may riff off their ideas further, e.g., perhaps Donner writes about Archibald the Elf, a disgruntled employee of Santa Claus and (now former) lover of Mrs. Claus, and how he offers adventurers a reward (mastercrafted toy sword that does +1 damage to bearded men) if they can find his beloved Mrs. Claus.

As you, astute reader, may have inferred from the above and even from the “Merry Hexmas” title, the concept of this bandwagon is that the hexes will be united by a theme. The theme is that this area exists (very very loosely) within the Rankin/Bass Christmas cinematic universe. For those unaware, Rankin/Bass (the production house behind the Last Unicorn and The Hobbit cartoon animations) produced a metric frost-ton of stop-motion claymation holiday schlock for children. If you haven’t seen them, I will include my recommendations for which to watch to get a sense of the cinematic universe. Content warning: they are very hokey. Note that you don’t need to have seen any of them and go purely off the vibes you think they have if you feel or based on the Christmas slop you’ve absorbed by osmosis.

In terms of system, feel free to use whatever system you are most comfortable, if one needs to be used. OSE and Cairn seem to be good linquae francae, but we are all used to converting things to our preferred system anyway. Also, one other piece of guidance: don’t feel like you can’t use an iconic Christmas character like Santa, Frosty, or Sweet Baby Jesus Christ out of fear that they might appear in someone else’s hex. If Santa is in multiple hexes, maybe that just means he is a recurring character (as Strahd is to Ravenloft, Santa is to the North Pole). Or maybe one is real, and the others are all fakes like you’d find in shopping malls back when those weren’t blighted slop warehouses dotting the husk of suburbia. Also, feel free to write multiple hexes, in one blog post or one hex per post, whatever floats your toy boat.

Let’s build a winter wonderland together! I will be on the search (but feel free to DM me on discord, tag me on Bluesky, or whatever) for any posts for this bandwagon between right NOW (or, if you are a bit more traditional, after Thanksgiving) and the end of December 25. Then I will try to do a roundup of all of the posts shortly thereafter. The more posts, the larger our collective north pole will become. And don’t wait to the end to post yours—the earlier you post, the more likely others are able to connect their hexes to yours!

Appendix R/B:

Here is the order in which I would recommend you watch the Rankin/Bass Christmas cinematic universe. I’m also going to break them into tiers (all of this involves my own editorializing, of course). Helpfully, there turned out to be 20 in this list, so if you want to watch at random, take out your trusty d20!

The Essentials

1. Rudolph the Red

2. Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town

3. The Year Without a Santa Claus (this is the best one, with the best music and characters fyi)

4. Rudolph’s Shiny New Year (not about Christmas but essential for the LORE)

Still Quite Important

5. Frosty the Snowman

6. Jack Frost

Wait, Jesus Exists in This?!

7. The Little Drummer Boy

8. Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

I Haven’t Even Seen These and Don’t Plan to

9. Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July (after googling it, maybe I should watch this one)

10. The Cricket on the Hearth

11. The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow

12. Frosty’s Winter Wonderland

13. The Little Drummer Boy: Book II

14. Pinocchio’s Christmas

15. The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold

16. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

What the Hell? These Aren’t Even About Christmas!

17. Here Comes Peter Cottontail

18. The First Easter Rabbit

19. The Hobbit

20. The Easter Bunny is Comin’ to Town

My blog posts are shared early as a reward to all of my Patreon supporters. If you want to support my blog, games, and get early access to all such endeavors, then get thee hence to my Patreon. You can also support my efforts by buying any of my games from my shop.

SMALL ANNOUNCEMENT: In the future, I won’t be using Substack for these announcements and roundups. I describe some of the reasoning in my prior post on this Substack. So you can instead keep up with future Bandwagons from my blog at prismaticwasteland.com. If you love getting blogposts in your email inbox, good news, my blog already has that capability! Sign up here and get my latest posts in your inbox (including when I announce the next blog bandwagon): https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/mailing-lists

Using the Bandwagon as an Excuse to Give Unsolicited Advice about Inspiration

• Prismatic Wasteland: Pick Two Inspirations and Combine Them

• The Foot of Blue Mountain: Appendix M: Thoughtful Inspirations

• LootLootLore: Making your Appendix N table ready

Project-Specific Inspiration Lists

• Idraluna Archives: A Bibliography of Antarctic Lore

• Table 46: Jewelsea RPG - Inspirational and Educational Reading

• The Dododecahedron: Appendix K

• Towards the Black City: Appendix N for my Mythic Bastionland

• World Building and Woolgathering: Appendices N

• Path Unending: Appendix O

• To Be Resolved: TBR Appendix N Bandwagon - Hellbenders Playtest is Live!

• A Knight at the Opera: Appendix T&T

• Valeria Loves: From Whence Yonk Juice is Squeezed

Inspirations from Childhood that Endure into Adult Gaming

• Fail Forward: Appendix A

• DIY & Dragons: My Earliest Childhood Fantasy Inspirations

• Bommyknocker Press: Appendix K - Kids Books I Like

• Seed of Worlds: Own Personal Appendix N

• On Unnamed Horizons: Appendix O

• Fallen Constellation: Appendix S: Make-Believe

Syllabi for Your Next Book Club

• Advantage on Arcana: The AOA Fiction Bookshelf

• The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm: 60 minutes of thoughts: Appendix JHGW

• Githyanki Diaspora: Appendix JK: my own Appendix N

• Billhook Blog: Appendix P: The Deed of Paksenarrion

• Patchwork Paladin: My own Appendix N

• From the Sorcerer’s Skull: Inspiration Excavation

• XP Rolls: Session Two: Leading With the Appendix

Games Inspiring Games

• Binary Star Games: An (incomplete) Appendix N

• Viridian Void Productions: 3 Important Games: My Appendix N

• Pointless Monument: Appendix N: The OSR of the first level of Deus Ex

• Harpoon Cannon Thoughts: Appendix N: Epic Duels

A Whole Mix of Media that Inspire Games

• [Missed this one originally!]: Cerulean Citadel: In Search of an Appendix M

• [Missed this one originally!]: Archon's Court: Archpendix N

• Ashes Under the Feet of Titans: Appendix A

• Dungeon Doll: Appendix Alice + 1 year of Blog

• Stigmata Profana: Anno Tenebris

• Chronicles of an Adventuring Bearwere: Appendix N: Bearly Considered

• Connecting the Fictional Dots: The Works that Made Me

• Grendel’s Stepdad: Appendix N à la Crow

• Creative Wronging: Appendix DaN

• Uncanny Ramblings: Appendix D(omopunk)

• Among Cats and Books: Appendix Elmcat

• Fight in the Shade: BandwagonN.append(self)

• Blog of Forlorn Encystment: Appendix N of Forlorn Encystment

• Love Will Find: Appendix G

• Kyward: Appendix G

• Farmer Gadda’s TTRPG Hayloft: Obligatory Appendix N Post - Gadda’s Inspirations and Reference Points

• Lonely Star: Appendix H

• Hobloglin: Appendix N, The Game Master

• Toasted Bagel: Appendix J?

• Gorgon Bones: Appendix J - Inspirations and Influences

• The Play Reports: Appendix K

• I Cast Light!: Appendix L(IGHT): Vanitas, Lightly Annotated Later

• Garmondia: Appendix L

• Magnolia Keep: Appendix Liz

• Traverse Fantasy: Appendix M, Part 1 and Appendix M, Part 2

• 1999 A.D.: Appendix M for Michael

• The Greatest Poster in the World: Appendix M

• Nobody Has Bad Ideas: Appendix N(obody)

• Oysters & Oubliettes: Appendix O(rdinary)

• Personable Thoughts: Appendix P: A very Personable Appendix N, for games both written and not

• Velvet Inks and Crystal Fires: Appendix P

• This Vorpal Coil: Appendix R

• Heroic Geology of the Limestone Obelisk God: Appendix R

• Sultan’s Musings: Appendix S

• Playthings of Mad Gods: Appendix S

• Archons March On: Appendix S: In-Flamed

• Seeding Games: My Appendix N (Appendix S?)

• Fluorite Guillotine: ==>[s] appendix

• Mediums and Messages: Appendix V

• Wayspell: Appendix N

• Roll to Doubt: Appendix W: Fantasy Edition

• Lair of the Dusk Witch: Appendix W

Appendix N in Collage Form

• The Nothic’s Eye: Appendix L

• Spiceomancy: Appendix S

• The Lovely Dark: Appendix V

Don’t Forget That Blogs Are Their Own Medium

• Rise Up Comus: My personal Appendix N

Taking the “Alternate” Prompt of Riffing on the Other AD&D Appendices

• Wandering Diejack: Appendix[Daemons]

• Sean F. Smith: Appendix F, cont.: Gambling in AD&D+

This is neat as it is an an appendix of all the appendices. Something I would be interested to see but not interested enough to do the legwork to actually collate would be to determine, for those inspirations mentioned across multiple of the above posts, what inspirations are listed most frequently (and how frequently). If you are also curious and also blessed by an abundance of time on your hands, tag me when you post your findings as I am very curious about what is the most widely shared inspiration among this collection of posts.

If you want to talk with lots of blog enthusiasts (and have read this far down), you may want to join my discord server. To ensure only those most worthy find it, an invite is hidden in the header links on my blog’s homepage. The level of discourse there looks an awful lot like The School of Athens.

Keep on bloggin’.

Adventures for (and against) Systems. The answer to the age-old question of whether to make an adventure system agnostic, and what system agnosticism even means, was proffered by Playful Void in Got no game: Should your module be system agnostic? I saw some interesting discussion of the topic across the balkanized landscape of P/OSR discord, but Symbolic City shared their response, System neutrality or creative solidarity, on their blog (a better, more fruitful way to respond than discord messages, for what it is worth). On this topic from my own Prismatic Wasteland blog is an older piece of advice on Universal, System-Neutral Stats.

Super Mario & Its Rules. Jay Dragon is at it again! This time making people argue about the nature of rules with a pithy bleet, then expounding on it all in a longer post on the Possum Creek blog. A choice quote from the piece: “A lot of games care a lot about the materiality of their toys, and bake a lot of the assumptions of their game rules into this materiality. It would be cheating to fill a football with helium, but that’s only because the codified rules of Football via the NFL outline the expected dimensions of an American Football.” There has not yet been a series of blog posts responding to these insights, but it did remind me of the hoary old post from the A Knight at the Opera blog, Game Design vs Level Design.

Payment Processors Punish Platform. If you somehow didn’t already hear about this whole mess, Rascal News, as usual, does a good job of detailed the who, what, and why in Itch.io Delists, Bans Games Under Pressure From Payment Processors And An Australian Anti-Porn Group, but there is a lot more to read on the topic from the wider blogosphere: the Indie RPG Newsletter wrote Censoring Itch, the The Virtual Moose brought us Fighting Censorship of Games on Itch.io and Steam, and from Harmony Zone you have the itch.io adult content ban.

Blogging is Dead (Long Live Blogging). The venerable Grognardia looked around the blogosphere and saw Ruins all around. In typical blogging fashion, it elicited a few responses from both The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms who wrote Lost in the Ruins about reports of their blog’s death being a great exaggeration, and Grumpy Wizard who waxed poetic on their own Nostalgia for the OSR Blogs of Yore. My two cents, for what it is worth, is that blogs continue to be quite vibrant! In my discord, we track new blogs and so far 2025 has at least 50 or so the last time I counted, averaging about 2 new bloggers every week. Yes, blogs do go dark all the time, but others flicker into existence. The blogosphere is an ocean and we are all but mere droplets in the sea. Tides rise and fall, but there is no ocean without a multitude of drops. The complaint isn’t a new one either—see for instance one of my favorites from the modern (i.e., post-me-becoming-a-blogger) era of the False Machine: The Crypt of the OSR. And perhaps OSRish bloggers are just likely to dwell on ruination. After all, Against The Wicked City (which has unfortunately been dark for a number of years) pointed out nearly a decade ago the prevalence of the OSR aesthetics of ruin. I just hope that, when the day comes that I no longer post (likely because I have been imprisoned for the crime of writing directly into layout), some blogger ten years my junior is around to mourn me and beat their chest and decry the ruination all around them. It’s all ruins, baby, and it always has been.

So what do all of these cheekily have in common? Platforms! A system can be a platform for modules (or, arguably, the reverse). Super Mario is literally a game in the “platformer” genre. Itch is a digital platform for commerce with all the attendant ills that seem to arise with commercial platforms. And blogging is the most pure platform of the bunch, and it is always rotting and dying, just like you and me.

And Now, an Announcement…

Platforms are inherently fraught, for lack of more choice phrases you could use. I started this Substack as a bit of an experiment (the reasoning behind which I wrote about here) because the fact is that there are a lot of people who do not read blogs, which require their own, more antiquated habits, but do read Substack. Basically, there was an audience out there that I wasn’t reaching with my blog alone and I wanted to cast as wide of a net as possible. The reward has been nothing to shrug at! But, I continue to chafe against this platform in particular. It was only after I signed up here that I learned the full extent of Substack’s Nazi problem. That is just part of the fraughtness of being on a platform—you are often alongside repugnant stuff. But recently, Substack has actually sent push notifications for explicitly Nazi (self-described, this isn’t simply Godwin’s law) newsletters to users. Everything is sort of a trade off of risks and rewards, and it is just no longer lining up for Substack, especially when I have my own blog.

The bottom line: I am going to let this substack go fallow. For my subscribers, I will find a substack alternative (and please do feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t want to join me on the journey to my next step) in the near future. I will see out the current Blog Bandwagon on Appendices, but then will be donezo.

One thing that began (in full force, there were earlier inklings) here was the organized Blog Bandwagons. They have been a lot of fun, have encouraged a lot of great posts, and even inspire new people to start blogging! I don’t think that should end just because some Illinois Nazis logged onto Substack. So I will continue hosting those, but will move said hosting to my own blog. Maybe managing two blogs simultaneously was a fool’s errand from the start, but I hope you got at least something out of it. You’'ll hear from me again in September when I do my final roundup on this platform. Then, onto bigger, better platforms!

Mini-Roundup:

This month, I wrote about Killable Peoples on the Prismatic Wasteland blog, what types of humanoids are valid targets of violence in games and what it says about the setting of those games. This inspired a few responses: Monsters, Metonymy, Metaphor from the aforementioned Traverse Fantasy, Equal Footing Monsters from Seed of Worlds, and Are irredeemably evil creatures necessary for D&D? from Hexed Press. Here are some other fun posts about monsters I’ve read in the past month or so:

• You Fell for the Great Drow Psyop from Crypickeyway

• Weird Horror Investigation: Vampires Aren’t Real from Githyanki Diaspora

• Thoughts on Undead from Grinning Rat

• Let's create a monster in Cairn 2e! from Delving Wolf

• And of course: so many posts about dragons

Also in the monster theme, my Lego Rock Raiders as Space Horror post featured the Rock Monster as an entity for Mothership RPG. Just a reminder, you still have a month to write and release something (anything really, the criteria is quite broad) for DIY & Dragon’s Second Summer LEGO RPG Jam. Go do that, then get cracking on your Appendicitis Post.

I have a simple trap I’ve used many times to great aplomb, and I want anyone to be able to steal or remix it. There is no shortage of bad traps in D&D-inspired RPGs, nor of articles bemoaning them or giving advice on how to make traps that don’t suck. This is no such article. For good guidelines on traps and 33 more good traps than you’ll find here, I direct you to a classic blog post from Chris McDowall: 34 Good Traps.

The players enter a room with a pool of water, at least eight feet deep and preferably a lake. It is important that the water is crystal clear, and I like to pepper it with some idyllic lily pads. The glint of a sword, embedded in the lake bed, immediately catches the player’s eyes. It doesn’t have to be a sword, but should be something the players want. For most games in which I’ve played, players want swords. But a plain ol’ sword may not be enough. The following table presents some idea of how to make this bait a bit more tantalizing.

WHAT’S SO COOL ABOUT THIS SWORD (D12)

1. The sword’s blade is on fire, even under water.

2. It’s actually one of the player’s swords. They just now realized it’s missing from their inventory!

3. The sword’s blade is as dark as the night sky and flickers with distant starlight.

4. It’s made of bones, which is fucking metal (but not literally).

5. It’s a sentient sword but is possessed by a demon, which is itself in thrall to a vampire, who is a devoted supplicant to Cthulhu.

6. It’s edible.

7. Retrieving it proves the wielder’s divine right to rule in the eyes of some nearby yokels.

8. If you show it to a pretentious elf, they’ll tell you about how it is the legendary such-and-such, forged in the First Age for King So-and-So and lost in the battle of yada yada yada.

9. A skeleton’s fist is wrapped around its hilt. The skeleton wears important-looking clothing.

10. It’s one of the player’s grandpop’s trusty sword. Ask the player what famous foe the grandpop slew with it. Ask them what foolish bet did they make that caused them to lose it.

11. It’s pommel is a fist-sized eye, blinking occasionally.

12. Two words: laser. sword.

In my near-decade running games, I’ve never had an entire group just shrug their shoulders at unguarded loot. They may be suspicious and think it’s a trap, but that’s good. They’ll scheme and try to predict what is going to happen and how they can safely get the sword. Anything that makes players scheme together is good. The “trap” itself is fairly simple, so an appropriately paranoid party may overthink it entirely.

The sword is covered in a strong adhesive that isn’t soluble in water. Elegant. Why? The danger is immediately obvious—water can drown you. But ordinarily, it isn’t a danger for players unless, for instance, it’s quickly filling a small room in which they are locked. But when your hand is stuck to a chunk of metal embedded in the bottom of a pool of water, the realization comes quick. Your hit points won’t save you from drowning.

I don’t like traps with solutions determined in advance. When you are a player facing such a trap, it feels like the GM is just waiting for us to read their mind and isn’t open to creative problem solving. As a GM, I want to be surprised by the players’ solutions. I want to sit and listen to their ideas and determine if it works based on that amalgamation of dice rolls and common sense. But to assist in determining what solutions might work, the GM should consider the extent of the problem. How adhesive is the sword? The adhesive isn’t water-soluble, but can something else dissolve it? How deeply embedded is the sword in the lake bed? Can a strong enough player pull it out with sufficient effort? Can it only be pulled out by the rightful monarch? The GM should answer these questions ahead of time, so they can properly evaluate the players’ attempts to free their drowning friend.

A simple trap can be remixed easily. An easily remixed trap can be reused and reused. If you have a trap that can be re-flavored to fit various genres, it is especially useful. Diving headfirst into a body of water to get something shiny, as a core concept, is applicable to plenty of situations. The following table is just a few of the ways to remix this simple trap.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THIS TRAP (D12)

1. It’s a deep wishing fountain in a derelict and abandoned mall. The sword is wedged in a large pile of tarnished coins.

2. A rival adventuring party arrives at the same time. Their barbarian member, oiled muscles rippling, goes wide-eyed upon spotting the sword.

3. The top three inches of the lake are frozen solid.

4. A couple of ne’er-do-wells skulk nearby. When they hear the splash of a diver, they give it a few seconds before ambushing the diver’s friends.

5. Bones sit motionless in the lake. The lake is a gelatinous cube.

6. A lifeguard sits on a big chair outside the pool. They admonishe any horseplay, roughhousing or tomfoolery. No running!

7. It’s a koi pond in a corporate waiting room. The receptionist tsk-tsks if they see someone jump in. The koi aren’t too happy either.

8. The sword is a mimic. The pommel has teeth.

9. The lake is on the ceiling and filled with anti-gravity water.

10. Freeing the sword triggers a structural collapse of the dungeon containing the lake. The players best boogie on outta here.

11. The lake contains electric eels. Or sharks. Or electric sharks.

12. The pool contains highly flammable liquid, not water. A red dragon slumbers in the next room.

Do you have a simple, elegant trap that you remix and reuse often? Please share it! I’m always looking to expand my repertoire; good traps are hard to come by.

On July 16 (give or take), the blogosphere participated in another blog bandwagon, this time around the prompt of “holes”. I’ll give you a rundown of the posts first, then I’ll try to explain how this prompt came to be. I am going to order the posts based on how directly they related to the prompt.

Straight-Forwardly About Holes

• Billhook Blog: In Praise of the Pit (arguing that pit traps are good, actually)

• Magnolia Keep: Fear of Holes (With Due Apologies to Jacob Geller) (arguing that holes are actually fucking scary)

• This Vorpal Coil: Yearning For the Mines (presenting a streamlined subsystem for digging for use in dungeon delving games)

• The Dododecahedron: You Fall Down a Hole And… (listing 1d100 things that might happen after you fall down a hole)

• Carouse, Carouse!: Bonus Post - What’s in the Arm Hole? (listing 1d100 things that might be in an empty “arm hole” [which implies a Lego person anatomy])

• Personable Thoughts: On Treasure in Holes (asking who exactly is leaving all this treasure in holes anyway)

• Semitext Games: Suddenly a Hole in Two Parts (musing on the duality of holes; also a spark table for what you might dig up in Vaults of Vaarn)

• Bommyknocker Press: A Leak in the Hole Factory, Pt. 1 (detailing an absurdist, industrial adventure in a malfunctioning premium hole factory that sprung a leak)

• d4 Caltrops: What’s At The Bottom Of This Pit? (listing 1d100 things at the bottom of a hole)

Conceptually or Metaphorically About Holes

• XP Rolls: Session Zero: Down the Rabbit Hole (introducing himself as a late bloomer TTRPG hobbyist who has dug deeply in the rabbit hole in the past 6 months) [NEW BLOGGER ALERT]

• Wayspell: [SWS] Hole in Your Soul, or Lack Thereof (detailing ways that gaining cybernetics can complicate a character’s life without the usual ableist framing)

• Farmer Gadda’s TTRPG Hayloft: Holes-Posting: I Find An Excuse to Talk About Digimon (describing how Digimon World 3 for PlayStation repurposes holes in its levels to later take players into the code of the world)

• Binary Star Games: The hole at the center of the mech, or: why isn't it about the people? (describing how people, and the players, are at the center of Apocalypse Frame, an in-development mech game)

• Sultan’s Musings: Stop Worrying and Love the Hole (advising you to not worry so much about plot holes in your games)

• Harpoon Cannon Thoughts: Holes of the Systemic Variety (lamenting when TTRPGs have holes where a rule is implied but then does not exist and how to avoid these)

• Table 46: Jewelsea - The Hole in History (outlining a forgotten, fallen empire what lacks a concrete history and theories thereupon)

The Holes Are Implied or Ancillary

• Behind the Helm: Dwarf Ecology (sketching out a fantastic reality where otherwise unexplained geological phenomena are the result of generations of dwarves)

• Viridian Void: This Is a Triumph (detailing a scenario for Triangle Agency involving a Portal gun)

• Golem Productions: Running OSR Dungeons: Turn-by-Turn vs. Narrative Exploration (reminiscing on running The Hole in the Oak and how it made them learn to stop worrying and love the procedures)

• The Novel Game Master: The Hole in the Wall: A Magical Tavern (presenting a tavern where the walls are covered in extradimensional holes with strange signs and effects)

• Blog of Forlorn Encystment: The Hole in the Wall Lounge (presenting an entirely different [or perhaps just from a different dimension] tavern that is mostly accessible by portable holes)

• The Play Reports: Bandwagon - Death Drop Delve (describing the method for Death Dropping deeper into a dungeon)

• Benign Brown Beast: Time Capsules (listing the possible contents of the time capsules that have been scattered across the world by an ancient empire of moles)

Tenuous Relationship to Holes, At Best

• Prismatic Wasteland: Lego Rock Raiders as Space Horror (presenting a subterranean sci-fi setting based on an old Lego theme, and the monsters that dwell within)

• Slow Loris Press: Potter Wasp (a mini-adventure about a baby-stealing monster and her medicine, which is made in pots, which have holes)

• Seed of Worlds: Distinguishing mirror world with house-rules (providing some guidelines for dimension hopping)

• No Foes, No Traps: Y2k/25 Jul 16 Elf Rogue (describing a pirate whose name, location, ship, and captain’s name are all reminiscent of the name “hole”).

• Valeria Loves: I Do Not Like Horse Women (ruminating on Uma Musume: Pretty Derby and the “yawning pit of loneliness within each of our souls”)

• Pointless Monument: Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole: The Case for Pitcher Planet Dungeon Entrances (pitching dungeons that are easy to enter but hard to leave)

• Wandering Diejack: GMing (Mal)adaptive A.I. (designing a method for running A.I. [the fictional kind, not the kind that is trying to steal and repackage your thoughts and sell them back to you] as a NPC that is fun to outsmart)

• LootLootLore: Roguelite campaigns and fishing my white whale out of a hole (describing the difficulty of roguelite TTRPG campaigns and also reasons why the hole is everchanging)

When I issued the challenge for this blog bandwagon, I expected a lot more bafflement than ever actually manifested. Why “hole”? The blog bandwagon about clerics made sense—it’s a classic part of D&D and also related to a current event. So what is the deal with the hole thing? Well, it originated on my own watering hole, my discord server, where there is channel for blogs. The server is still small enough that no heavy-handed moderation has been necessary (knock on wood), but sometimes I will check in on it and the conversation has gone chaotic and hard to follow, rendering me like that well-loved .gif of Donald Glover holding pizzas in the television show, Community. It was one such day that all manner of chaos was happening and, frankly, I don’t know what all was said because when I see 100+ messages anywhere, I am going to skim (if even skim) just to preserve my own sanity. But somehow the topic of “Steve Harvey posting hole” came up and… well, actually, here just have a snippet of the conversation. You’ll probably be able to make just as much sense from it as I can, and I was there.

If there is a moral to this story, it’s that blogging isn’t a terribly serious endeavor. Go and have some fun with it, write silly posts and read silly posts! But always blog.

My incredibly humble blog, Prismatic Wasteland, is nominated for an Ennie Award for Best Online Content, and my book, Prismatic Wisdom, is nominated for an Ennie for Best RPG Related Product. Voting is currently open to the public (e.g., you) through July 20 at this link: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

If you haven’t heard of the Ennies, they are the Oscars for TTRPGs, if the Oscars were a bit more like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards with marginally less slime. Voting takes only a single combat round of your time but would mean a great deal to yours truly.

How to Vote: Voting is easy and I bet you’d figure it out without my help, but here is a procedure just in case:

1. Follow this link to the voting page: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

2. Scroll to the “Online Content" Category

3. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wasteland Blog”

4. Vote “1” from the options to rank my blog as your top choice

5. Once you’re done ranking your votes (you don’t have to rank them all, but I encourage you to rank the others you like), just hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

6. Scroll to the “RPG Related Product" Category

7. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wisdom”

8. Vote “1” from the options to rank Prismatic Wisdom as your top choice

9. Same as above, rank your other choices if you want, then hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

Simple as! I really appreciate your support, whether that takes the form of reading my blog, reading my book, and/or voting for both.

I think the occasional planned blog bandwagon (speaking of which: post your holes posts on July 16!) are great, but they are but pale imitations of the uncoordinated instances where lots of bloggers end up approaching the same topic from different directions. That just seemingly happened in connection of that most iconic of creatures: dragons. Legend has it that it all started at the Blog of Forlorn Encystment where it was argued that Your High-Level NPCs Should Ride Dragons, but it certainly didn’t end there (although it did continue with there with their One Hundred Thousand Dragon Encounters AND Gang of Teenage Dragons Roam the Wilderness: The Implied Lifecycle of Dragons in AD&D—the last of which prompted me to ask, in the comments, “Are dragons monogamous?”). Dice in the North provided their own Note on Dragons while Whence Came the Lightbringer continued with the dragonriding theme with To Approach a Dragon. The aptly named Dragon Peak Publishing wrote about the difficulties of Creating Draconic Adventures. To round it out, in a very neat use of literal interpretation of The Hobbit’s text and faithful translation thereof to Old School Essentials stats, The End of All Things gave us The Smaug Dragon.

Also riffing off the works of Tolkien, Weird Wonder wrote about the Lord of the Rings character whom I most resemble: Tom Bombadil. More particularly, they use Tommy Bahambadil to illustrate how they approach lore in their games and adventure design. One concluding thought in the piece was how with lore, less is more and to allow players to pull on threads to learn more about the world rather than dumping it all on them at once. This brings to mind the recent advice from David B.’s Newsletter to Not Write Lore, Write Tables. All this good advice that keeps bubbling up just goes to show I apparently did not present the definitive hot-take on the subject when I wrote Lore! What Is It Good For? a few years back. And that’s good.

Tolkien wasn’t the only piece of non-TTRPG media that bloggers have been drawing inspiration from recently. From the Sorcerer’s Skull made The Case for Planetary Romance like Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars, or (more recently) Scavengers Reign. Dreaming Dragonslayer told us how to get back, back to the past and play a TTRPG inspired by Samurai Jack. Rise Up Comus even listed all the badass lines from MacBeth that you can use as headers in the combat section of your rulebook. That’s the kind of rulebook advice you would expect for someone who is at this very moment nominated for “Best Rules”! (And will hopefully win, with your assistance).

My incredibly humble blog, Prismatic Wasteland, is nominated for an Ennie Award for Best Online Content, and my book, Prismatic Wisdom, is nominated for an Ennie for Best RPG Related Product. Voting is currently open to the public (e.g., you) through July 20 at this link: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

If you haven’t heard of the Ennies, they are the Oscars for TTRPGs, if the Oscars were a bit more like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards with marginally less slime. Voting takes only a single combat round of your time but would mean a great deal to yours truly.

How to Vote: Voting is easy and I bet you’d figure it out without my help, but here is a procedure just in case:

1. Follow this link to the voting page: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

2. Scroll to the “Online Content" Category

3. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wasteland Blog”

4. Vote “1” from the options to rank my blog as your top choice

5. Once you’re done ranking your votes (you don’t have to rank them all, but I encourage you to rank the others you like), just hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

6. Scroll to the “RPG Related Product" Category

7. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wisdom”

8. Vote “1” from the options to rank Prismatic Wisdom as your top choice

9. Same as above, rank your other choices if you want, then hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

Simple as! I really appreciate your support, whether that takes the form of reading my blog, reading my book, and/or voting for both.

Yes, the Ennies are good even when not a single game I know or like is nominated, purely by virtue of it highlighting games that may otherwise go under everyone’s radar. It also serves a legitimizing influence for the tabletop medium, if you care about that (and there are compelling reasons to not care or even to be against legitimization if it comes with increased professionalization). There are ways in which it could be better, but I mostly consider those as quibbles rather than an attack on the entire industry awards concept. My current position is that they are low-rent, somewhat slapdash awards, but they’re our low-rent, slapdash awards, damnit.

However, this year more than previous years, I have seen more praise for what games are actually seeing nominations. Here are some things people were saying on my Bluesky feed when nominations dropped last-ish week: “Did the ennies get really cool all of a sudden??”, “What a good slate!”, “Great list this year”, “Why do this year’s Ennie nominations seem so much more interesting to me?”, “It definitely feels like there’s more stuff I’m familiar with and/or more interested in. And it seems like there’s hardly any 5e stuff which is nice”, “I don’t think I have ever been more excited by an Ennies slate!”, and “The Ennies appear to have chosen an excellent crop this year.” I don’t usually see this level of enthusiasm for Ennies; I more often see at least a handful of upturned noses, scoffs, and side-eyes. Sometimes, I see those in a mirror especially. But not this year.

And not just because I was nominated. I mean, sure, that is obviously a sign of great taste, but I wanted to highlight just some of the great nominees that made it to your ballot this year. Lots of stuff that is great that I’m not shouting out (like, apparently the Monty Python game is surprisingly well-designed and hilarious in a not-just-cheap laughs way?), but it is worth adding my voice to the crowd in the cool stuff that is getting their due this year.

His Majesty the Worm by Josh McCrowell is nominated for both Best Rules and Best Game. I have been slowly stealing ideas and rules from Worm even before it was officially released. Theft is the highest praise that a game and ruleset can receive, but it would be nice for ol’ Joshy to get some medals as evidence of the great game he built and will continue to build on in the coming years.

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast from Possum Creek Games is nominated for a handful of awards: Best Art - Cover, Best Family Game/Product, Best Writing, and Product of the Year. It’s a great game which I have had the pleasure of both playing and running since it’s been released. I would love for the deluxe version to one day see its way back to print so that I could get a second copy to keep pristine until my own family is old enough to play it (I think 5th/6th grader age kids would REALLY dig it), so I had already said last year that this was my early pick for Best Family Game, but all the other nominations (up to and including Product of the Year) are well-deserved for this groundbreaking game.

Mythic Bastionland by Mr. Chris McBastionland himself is nominated for Best Art - Interior, Best Layout and Design, and Product of the Year. Even though my physical copy is still (as of this writing, maybe not by the time I post it) making its way to me, I’ve already had a chance to play it, and it is more than worthy of the Product of the Year nomination (and the others too, it is a pretty book, but I think all that aesthetic comes second to McDowall’s standard for excellent, succinct design). And you don’t have to take my word for it: in an obvious display of British Solidarity (rigged!), Quinns Quest put out a glowing review of Mythic Bastionland just a couple of days before the Ennies dropped.

Wonderland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting from Andrew Kolb is also soaking up praise with nominations for Best Monster/Adversary, Best Cartography, and Best Layout and Design. Kolb has been doing great work on all his public domain settings to date, but I do appreciate this year’s judges for having the discretion to not put him up for “Product of the Year”, saving that for the culmination of his public domain project when he finally gives us all the adventure setting that I know Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood can be. Perhaps he will stat that one up for Cairn instead of pseudo-5e?

The Shrike by Leo Hunt and published by Silveram Press is nominated for “Best Adventure - Long Form” and The Dream Shrine (which I actually played a small bit of before it was released during last year’s GenCon) by Brad Kerr and Skullfungus is nominated for “Best Adventure - Short Form”. I also love that the Best Adventure category is broken out like this–good move by the Ennies. These are both great adventures from great teams of designers. I would really like to see adventures get more acclaim in these types of things, but it is at least time to see a dollop of praise applied to some of the best writing in RPGs.

Mothership: Deluxe Set is nominated for Best Production Values, The Mothership Companion App is nominated for Best Aid/Accessory - Digital, and the Warden’s Operations Manual is nominated for Best Supplement. I’ve actually used this, and it did aid my sessions of Momboat! And I, of course, have the Deluxe Set, and it is one of the fanciest things on my RPG bookshelf (which is a stacked category, frankly). The Warden’s Manual is also probably the best dungeon master guide type product in existence and is useful for anyone planning a campaign of anything, not just Mothership. I love how it guides you through creating a notebook for your game or all the ways it is able to reinforce concepts with its visual design.

Dungeon Cats is also nominated (along with Yazeba’s) for Best Family Game/Product. Is this the best category? I mean, Break!!, Wanderhome, and Mausritter all cleaned up in this category in previous years, and all of those are great. Maybe we can just forget about the PbtA Avatar game also winning. But I digress. Dungeon Cats is really fun, and its art is a highlight. It is definitely the kind of thing I could see a youth seeing the cover of at a bookstore and picking it up, not knowing it is a game, based on the art and concept alone. I think that is a big part of what makes a game a good game for kids. Adults are the ones who want a game because of nostalgia value, not kids. Kids (and discerning adults) are looking for something that sparks imagination.

I am beginning to get a sore throat from singing so many praises, but I think you get the picture. Ennies good! Or at least a LOT of good games are nominated this year; my above list is just a smattering of some of the ones I know are great from first-hand experience. If I kept going too long, we would be here all day.

I will also toot my own horn in saying that my blog is actually pretty good (and in particular had a good year during the nomination period for this year’s Ennies), so I was delighted that the masked judges of the Ennies agreed and put my blog up for the coveted Best Online Content category this year. Yes, last year’s post, Overloading the Random Encounter Table, won a Gold Bloggie (now THAT’s a damn good award series), but I also published The TTRPG Cooking Minigame, did investigative journalism about Whether GenCon is Worth It, put out the definitive non-TTRPG book and non-dice gift guide for TTRPG obsessives, declared the Year of the Beta, interrogated the use of female-coded monsters like the Medusa in TSR’s adventures, wrote about my Calvinball Experiment of making up rules only as they were needed, and spurted out a couple dozen other posts that I could list out but refuse to do out of respect for your time. Aside from the output, blogging is simply a blast and I am glad to continue to proselytize blogging as an end-in-and-of-itself that keeps the DIY spirit of TTRPGs alive. All of the nominees in the Best Online Content deserve their roses for fostering that DIY spirit, but I would like to shout-out my friend Nova’s blog, Playful Void, which is also nominated. Nova is not only one of the most prolific reviewers in the scene (vital work for the adventure ecosystem, and adventures are vital to the rest of the POSR ecosystem) but those reviews are also quality, not just quantity. Since Ennies voting is ranked-choice, I would encourage you to rank Playful Void as #2 if you are ranking me #1 (or vice versa). Luckily, we are not running against a disgraced former New York governor, so whoever wins will be highly deserving, but it is nice that ranked choice voting allows less sharp elbows even when angling for votes from the TTRPG populace.

The other category that I up for this year is Best RPG Related Product for my Prismatic Wisdom book that was gorgeously produced by Games Omnivorous. I don’t know all the entrants in this category as well as I knew those in the Online Content category (although I do now think I will pick up Chaosium’s At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers for my own beginning [charitably] reader), but it is surreal to be nominated alongside a legitimate academic work like MIT Press’ Playing at the World by Jon Peterson (who was very kind during a brief encounter at last year’s GenCon) and also comic books, children’s books and cassette tapes. A real hodgepodge category. I am super happy with how my book, Prismatic Wisdom, turned out, and I wrote earlier this year (Remember Books? They’re Back, in Blog Form) about why it was important to me to undertake it as a project.

Is all of that just a sixteen-hundred word way of saying “please vote for me”? Yes, of course. I am a blogger and am incapable of just saying “vote for me” when I could instead say that except much longer with many, many parenthetical asides. But I’d also like to say that’s for reading my blog over the last almost-five years–every time you read a post on my blog, I gain one XP.

My incredibly humble blog, Prismatic Wasteland, is nominated for an Ennie Award for Best Online Content, and my book, Prismatic Wisdom, is nominated for an Ennie for Best RPG Related Product. Voting is currently open to the public (e.g., you) through July 20 at this link: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

If you haven’t heard of the Ennies, they are the Oscars for TTRPGs, if the Oscars were a bit more like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards with marginally less slime. Voting takes only a single combat round of your time but would mean a great deal to yours truly.

How to Vote: Voting is easy and I bet you’d figure it out without my help, but here is a procedure just in case:

1. Follow this link to the voting page: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

2. Scroll to the “Best Online Content" Category

3. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wasteland Blog”

4. Vote “1” from the options to rank my blog as your top choice

5. Once you’re done ranking your votes (you don’t have to rank them all, but I encourage you to rank the others you like), just hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

6. Scroll to the “Best RPG Related Product" Category

7. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wisdom”

8. Vote “1” from the options to rank Prismatic Wisdom as your top choice

9. Same as above, rank your other choices if you want, then hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

Simple as! I really appreciate your support, whether that takes the form of reading my blog, reading my book, and/or voting for both.

It is one such game that is getting something akin to a traveling roadshow pre-release that is giving all who play it Wizard Madness and all who haven’t settle for Wizard Envy. The game is Seven-Part Pact, the next opus from Jay Dragon. The Many Sided Newsletter wrote about The Joys of Being Overwhelmed, Old Men Running the World called it “the First Actual GM-Full Game”, and Dr. Em Friedman provided a Guide to Organizing a Seven-Part Pact playtest. These all roused my appetite, but my wizard envy was truly roused by my surprisingly youthful pal at A Knight at the Opera in another multi-part (but not seven-part, sadly) series detailing how Time, Companions, Combat, Consequences, and Authority work in the game. The neat part about Dwiz’s series is that he details ways the innovations from Seven-Part Pact can be brought to bear in other games. It is probably the sprawling nature of the game, as if it were an elephant being witnessed by several blinded participants who think they are interacting with a snake or a tree-trunk, that most appeals to me, but I am also intrigued by how it incorporates so many elements from modern board games in its design. There is much that board games can learn from TTRPGs and vice versa, and ultimately the distinctions between the two categories are hazier than is commonly believed. I suppose once the Seven-Part Pact rolls into my backwater, I too will be consumed with Wizard Madness and blog about it. So, this likely isn’t the last you will hear on this front.

The other big game that is attempting something very different but getting a lot of blogging buzz is Daggerheart, the team at Critical Role’s attempt to dethrone D&D while it is a state of decay after the mixed (to be kind) reception to its latest edition. I actually played an early form of it back in January and came away from the experience surprisingly impressed. Now that it is out (and apparently also sold out), it is being talked about more widely. The Walking Mind asked What to do with Daggerheart and provided some answers and also provided Their Read on Daggerheart. Unboxed Cereal did not review Daggerheart, although they didn’t not review it either. Dozens and Dragons unpacked their (mostly positive) First Impressions of Daggerheart. But 1999 A.D. was less positive in their Dumping on Daggerheart. Just yesterday, the blogosphere’s reviewer of record, Playful Void, Read Daggerheart and…she liked it. So the POSR blogs like both Seven-Party Pact and Daggerheart?! That’s only surprising if you aren’t super familiar with the state of the play culture in 2025.

For my own ever-forthcoming, ever-in-progress game, I have not yet decided whether I will do an international roadshow tour like Seven-Part Pact or if I will simply create the next mega-streaming sensation, hire the lead designers of the latest edition of D&D, and market Prismatic Wasteland off the backs of that notoriety. Both valid options, both very doable. What I have decided, and detailed in my Advantage by Default post, is that I am going to bake in an ability to get Advantage on rolls very easily, to reward being under-encumbered, not just punishing being over-encumbered. Another tool I use when using any system with difficulty classes is to declare the DC before the players roll. The Drolleries blog agrees and lays out solid reasoning for this method in Always Tell Me the Odds. This Vorpal Coil and Bommyknocker Press are fiddling with dice mechanics in different (but neat) ways with (respectively) The Dice Bank and Die Drop or Drop Dead. Both are worth looking at and, if they strike your fancy, stealing for your owl sinister designs.

Speaking of my blog, it is nominated for an Ennie and Prismatic Wisdom (based on the blog) is also nominated for an Ennie. Voting has not started as of this posting, but during the week of voting, I will be blogging like I’m being paid to do it, in the hopes that you’ll remember to toss a vote or two my way. It won’t be just begging either, I am just going to unleash a furry of bona fide posts on the blog and here on the substack. Stay tuned, mother fuckers (said appreciatively and respectfully).

Mausritter isn’t the first “sword-and-whiskers” TTRPG, but it approaches it with solid OSR rules and robust tools for GMs. My introduction to the genre was Mouse Guard, but not the RPG. I picked up Book 2, “Winter 1152”, while killing time in a bookstore. To this day, the ominous presence of and climatic confrontation with the owl in that issue is my goal for a dragon encounter in a traditional fantasy RPG. I was hooked and flew through the rest of Mouse Guard, in no particular order. But this isn’t a review of Mouse Guard, it’s about the first sword-and-whiskers TTRPG that made me immediately begin planning my own campaign: MAUSRITTER.

Mausritter is a roll-under system with 3 stats (STR, DEX, WIL), largely derived from Into the Odd, familiar to those who enjoy fast, compelling games. Character generation is quick and heavy on random-generation (a big point in its favor for me, but your preference may vary). Two highlights of play that distinguish Mausritter from its OSR forebear is its arts & craft inventory system and magic system, inspired by Last Gasp Grimoire and Goblin Punch, respectively. The inventory system is the bit of mechanical eye candy that makes me most curious to try it. The tangibility of managing items in physical slots turns encumbrance into a type of minigame that may entice (or at least appease) players who roll their eyes when I say that inventory bookkeeping is fun, actually. It is an especially neat way to integrate conditions like Exhausted or Hungry, each of which take up a slot. And if players want to share gear, they literally hand an item across the table and the other player adds it to their character’s inventory. This has a lot of potential. But as much as I like this way of tracking inventory, I am worried that it may have some snags outside the Platonic ideal world of reading RPGs. Is it burdensome for an ongoing campaign for players to keep up with their character sheet and all their little knicks and knacks? Will the minigame be as fun for the players as it is in my head? However, Mausritter is an ideal game to experiment with such an inventory system because the inventory art serves as world-building. From the inventory on their sheet, the players will know that mice use thimbles as helmets, buttons as shields and d20s as maces. The inventory system puts that art upfront at the gaming table instead of hidden in a rulebook only the GM consults.

The gamemaster resources is where Mausritter really shines. It has plenty of random tables to assist a GM in creating a hexcrawl full of adventure and hijinks. Random tables are one of the best ways to communicate implied setting. If the inhabitants of a settlement have a 1-in-20 chance of being "Lab escapees, naive about the world”, it tells me just as much as a chunk of text about how nearby humans perform research on mice. Mausritter has faction rules that help in making the setting feel alive and are similar to fronts in Dungeon World but with more concrete guidelines for when to advance a faction’s progress toward its goals. One of the most inspiring tools in this toolbox is Mausritter’s bestiary. Each of the creatures is packed with inspiring details that makes each stand out—Cats are cruel despots, owls are powerful sorcerers and frogs are gallant knights. Finally, the Mausritter core book has a starting hexcrawl and settlement, so you can easily pick it up and start a campaign ASAP.

Mausritter’s accessories are high quality, the mark of a good boxed set. The character sheets come in an entire pad of sheets, so you can have 100s of mice without having to print a new sheet. Also, psychologically, having player’s pull off a sheet from a thick pad of sheets implies that the world is deadly, the mice expendable and their lives short. The item do-dads are sturdy, and I hope will stand up to use and abuse from players. The boxed set also comes with a little Mausritter-branded erasable marker for writing on the inventory cards. The GM screen achieves the only purposes I have for a GM screen: the exterior evokes the setting for the player’s and the interior is a cheat sheet for the GM. Tables for randomly generating mouse NPCs, an evergreen GM tool, gets an entire quarter of the GM sheet real estate. Even once I’ve memorized the rules for overland travel, it’s always nice to have a random table of names.

Honey in the Rafters is a location-based module that is more toolbox than adventure. And I prefer that. I don’t need an adventure with beginnings, middles and ends, so popular with games like 5e D&D—my players and I supply those things. This, instead, is a collection of factions, encounters and locations. It can be plopped into any Mausritter adventure. In fact, it is already slotted into the example hexcrawl in Mausritter’s main rulebook. Especially neat is the custom spells and items in this module. I absolutely know that at least one of my players will be replacing their sword with a lollipop as soon as they find one.

A great TTRPG product inspires you, and Mausritter’s boxed set has inspired me to start a campaign. My wheels have already begun to turn, and I’ve decided to set it on the campus of my alma mater. All of my players either attended the same school or lived in the surrounding college town for a number of years, so we are familiar with the environment (from a human perspective). What I would do is draw a simple hexmap of the portion of campus (and adjacent downtown area), and then the players, and I would start placing landmarks on the map from the perspective of mice. Where are the mice settlements and the cat lairs?

Once, when I was in the library late at night studying with some friends, a mouse scampered by us. The quiet library immediately exploded into action. After an hour of a handful of us chasing the poor mouse around the three stories of library, someone finally caught it in a cardboard box lid. We decided to set it free outside. No sooner was the mouse freed than a hawk swooped down and spirited the mouse away. This story, combined with Mausritter’s implied setting, was the germ of my setting idea: imagine the Hobbit, but instead of dwarves journeying to a mountain to reclaim a treasure guarded by a dragon, it’s mice journeying to a library to reclaim a treasure guarded by a hawk. Am I just inadvertently feeding more mice to a ravenous hawk? That’s up to the players.

My Top Performing Posts of 2025 So Far:

1. You Don’t Need a Game System Before You Play: The Calvinball Experiment: if this turned out to be one of my more popular posts of all time, I would be pretty happy with it because it documents both an interesting thought-experiment-as-game, but also details a short campaign I had a lot of fun running late last year.

2. The Languages of D&D Imply a Specific Setting: that people enjoyed this post so much proves that you are all intellectuals.

3. Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa: this is another post for the intellectuals but also a post I have been stewing on for a couple of years now ever since my initial deep dive of Keep on the Borderlands. Luckily D&D 2024 and the discourse around it (wow, throwback to when anyone was still talking about that game) gave me the final push to type this up. It is one of my more researched posts, but I think has some good, widely applicable conclusions for game designers.

4. Divine Magic Works in Mysterious Ways: a lot of (I hope) interesting ideas, but I think this one did as well as it did largely because of all the buzz around the Blogclave, which is the real star.

5. 2025 is the Year of the Beta: this inspired a lot of cool stuff! I do wish I was brave enough to follow my own advice though.

You Personally Hated These Posts:

1. Remember Books? They’re Back, in Blog Form: this was written as a bit of promo for Knock #5 but also for my own book Prismatic Wisdom (I have already sold through the majority of my stock, so thanks everyone!) but I think is also a genuine call-to-action.

2. Sharing the Spotlight is Insufficient: c’mon, guys, this is good advice! You should read it, and do it!

3. Playing Card Initiative: did I post this just to get more mentions on the Knight at the Opera blog? Yes, yes I did. And it worked.

4. Steal This Idea: Cardinal Sins: obviously I have had Pope Madness in 2025, but this was actually written pre-Pope death. Some suggested it may have caused it, but I won’t dignify such accusations with comment.

5. Babies in Dungeons: a very silly post, so I am not surprised it didn’t garner a ton of interest. That said, I did actually get a lot of responses to this one with people pointing to media with “protect the baby” aspects that seemed like fun fodder for games

I did not count my latest post “What Is a Roleplaying Game: The Roleplaying Game” mostly because it is brand new but I assume it will end up in the bottom five at the end of the year regardless because it is very much a joke-post. I gave it the “ashcan” tag for a reason! I am allowed to be a little silly. Although I am posting more and more stuff that I give the ashcan tag, and some of them, like Slush Magic, actually do pop off. Ya just can never tell what people want to read, which is why you should absolutely post every single thought you have online, just in case.

What about posts from this Substack? Well, I’m gonna be honest, this ol’ thing don’t do the numbers the Classic Blog does (which honestly, feels kind of good). The top substack posts would be solidly in the bottom five from my blog. Why is that? I think that it is mostly that these posts tend to be ephemeral, whereas blog posts are forever. People go back and revisit old blog posts. Even just counting hits from this year, my #1 post written in 2025 is only my 4th most popular post. And that’s beautiful.

People have strong opinions on the ideal method for generating stats. Strong enough that when I absent-mindedly tweeted “When rolling up stats, do y’all prefer 3d6, 4d6 drop lowest, or some other more baroque method?” after discussing the question with my players, I was bombarded (from the perspective of an account with a modest following) with enthusiastic responses. I hope no one expects scientific rigor from tweets reported on an RPG blog, but if you do, have a salt shaker handy as I report my scientific findings and then muse on why I use 3d6-in-order (with some baroque tweaks).

4d6 drop lowest is incredibly popular. The donut above is a bit misleading because I categorized any response other than 3d6 or 4d6-drop-lowest as “baroque,” which we will see is a thoroughly Balkanized category. 4d6’s ubiquity was, however, unsurprising. As @Unenthuser stated, it is ideal “[f]or a ‘zero to hero’ game where you’re expected to spend a substantial amount of time with a single character.” Or, more simply put by @ifrit80541, it “makes some beefy boys.” When discussing 4d6-drop-lowest, it seemed to be assumed that players would assign the results to their stats. I did not see any advocates for 4d6-in-order.

Baroque methods are fun and inventive. The methods by which people roll up characters are endless. Some are really cool ideas, like the “18d6” method suggested by @BrianBinh. In this method, you roll 18d6 then assign 3 dice to each stat. I really like this method because it achieves two philosophical goals of rolling stats: choice and chance. It is random in that you are rolling 18d6 (such a gratifying feeling to roll so many d6s at once, a feeling any high-level rogue can appreciate) but the player gets to choose what stats to put them in. Do they put all the 6s into one stat and leave the others lower or do they try to build a well-rounded character? Another honorable mention is the method suggested by @miraleaps: “I normally like waiting until the moon is at its peak and then using the entrails of a sacrifice to determine stat array.” This method wisely eschews the false dichotomy of choice-vs-chance in favor of the far superior cosmic fate.

3d6-in-order is unfairly maligned. Not only were there fewer 3d6 responses than I expected, they also elicited responses like “3d6 in order?! What monster requires that... Thats a recipe to play a class not a character” (sic). Even those who chose 3d6-in-order playfully acknowledged that it was the hard-nosed option. As one commenter said “3d6 in order, or else rocks fall and everyone dies!” For me, these criticisms of 3d6-in-order fall short.

3d6-in-order vs 4d6-drop-lowest is a philosophical difference. 3d6-in-order isn’t just some hard-mode for D&D-inspired games. It merely reflects a different approach to characters than the more popular 4d6-drop-lowest method. This approach is born from the choice-vs-chance dichotomy. 4d6-drop-lowest allows player choice (while still retaining random chance). The idea is that you don’t have any terrible stats and you get to choose which stats get which scores. 3d6-in-order maximizes random chance. It’s just a product of rolling the dice. 3d6 isn’t, however, “a recipe to play a class not a character.” It is a different relationship between player and character. With 4d6-drop-lowest, the player builds their character. This is ideal for players who come to the table with a character concept in mind. With 3d6-in-order, the player discovers their character. This is ideal for players who get a thrill out of emergent gameplay.

The Prismatic Wasteland (my nascent system-cum-setting) prescribes 3d6-in-order, with a twist. I am first and foremost of the view that characters should be created together, at the table, during session zero. That way the rest of the players get to know your character at the same time you do. I have a whole set of session zero procedures, inspired largely by Perilous Wilds and Freebooters on the Frontier, that assist in this that maybe I’ll discuss in another blog post. But the bottomline is that I greatly discourage players from rolling up characters at home, unless it’s for the pure joy of rolling dice (guilty). To generate stats in the Prismatic Wasteland, all players generate an array of stats by rolling 3d6-in-order. This includes the GM, they are a player too. Here is the twist. All such arrays are then placed in the center of the table (or are in a screen-shared spreadsheet if being played virtually) and non-GM players take turns picking score and their associated stat in snake draft order. Because the GM also rolled an array, this has the effect of rerolling the lowest stat. It also is a balance of chance and choice while adding in an element of collective play. This results is an array of unselected stats. The GM is urged to take these and let them inform a character that exists somewhere in the Prismatic Wasteland, perhaps harboring an unspecified, cosmic grudge against the Heroes for reasons they can’t explain. This character is likely incredibly flawed, but I love the idea of this highly incompetent enemy simply existing somewhere in the world. It’s a bit of fun for me.

You should use whatever method you and your group find most fun. Whether you want to build your character or discover your character, you should discuss the stat-generation method with your group and come up with a consensus. With so many options, there is bound to be one that is exactly what you are looking for.

• July 16 - Post something on your blog related to the theme “Holes” for the next blog bandwagon. The full assignment information is in the link below:

• Before August 29 - Submit your entry to the Second Summer LEGO RPG Jam, which is being hosted once again by the DIY & Dragons blog. Last year, I released a summer-themed murder mystery adventure, Trouble in Paradisa. Still thinking what I should do this time around, but not sure I can one up Paradisa as least-expected-Lego-theme for an RPG setting.

• Before School is Back in Session - Your book report on Prismatic Wisdom is due. 10 pages, double-spaced with 1-inch margins. No Chat GPT allowed; I will know! Actually, forge the book report, just get the book (copies still available as of now at my blog’s webstore). Report whatever you like, I’m not actually your teacher, merely your parasocial internet chum.

As a final note before I get to the eagerly awaited blog roundup, if you are like me and need to fill every moment of silence and possible self-reflection with talking heads, I was recently featured on a couple of podcasts: Blogs on Tape and Reading D&D Aloud. Both are worth a listen, not simply by virtue of their association with me but that certainly doesn’t hurt.

Blog Roundup!

• Languages! I recently wrote about how The Languages of D&D Imply a Specific Setting over at the Prismatic Wasteland blog. It has been well-received (and quite thoroughly commented upon, for further reading). It also received the second-highest praise a blog can receive in the form of a respond from Delving Wolf on Languages in a recently dead Empire.

• Monsters! In a prior issue of this here substack, I reviewed a review of a compendium of monsters in Michelin Star Monsters, but of course there is always plenty of other monster-based writing on the blogosphere. Musings on Monstrousness mused on Lesser Draconids, Meg Zone has an entire mystery scenario around The king of all beasts and inhuman violence, and What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse writes about Monsters in Flying Swordsmen 2e. In a similar vein, I have been enjoying my read of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings (of which you can find a blog-review from Books & Boots here).

• Calendars! The blog that was the subject of my aforementioned monster meta-review, Save Vs Worm spilled some lore across the web with Moon Men and a Calendar System for King of Kings. In response, Dirty T Nerd Games wrote their own advice about how to Make Your Calendars Interesting, Not Impenetrable. This is a topic I think about an inordinate amount of time, as evidenced by my own past postings from Calendars, Not Just Maps to my more fleshed out Tempus, Fudge It post.

• Knights! My friend, Amanda P. (who blogged their own review of Mythic Basionland on the Weird Wonder blog), recently ran a session of aforementioned game for me and some other comrades, and it was a ton of fun! One of the other players, Josh bleeted about the experiences. It was a one-shot (but will maybe have a sequel?), for which Mr. Bastionland himself recently offered some guidance in Mythic One-Shots. But you are also legally allowed to play more than just one session, as illustrated by 3 Sessions of Mythic Bastionland with Thomas and MadJay, Sunday Mornings in July from Githyanki Diaspora. You should also check out Mythic Walkingland or my problem with overland procedures from Beneath the Moon of Ancient Balansiya for a mild critique of one aspect of the game. My only critique so far is that the book has not yet, as of this writing, landed physically in my grubby hands.

• Innovative Games! I am very jealous of all the people who have gotten a chance to be a wizard in Seven Party Pact. At least I get to learn more about the game vicariously from Knight at the Opera who wrote about The Shapeshifter's Duel and For Want of a Silver Bullet who wrote A Day With Jay Dragon's Wizard Madness Simulator: 7 Part Pact. Another game that tests the limits of the roleplaying game medium is Sam Sorensen’s Cataphracts game, a war game about logistics and verisimilitude, which they blogged about in two design diaries, which inspired further blogging from Ms. Quixotic Talks About Games. Board game elements are clearly in the bloodstream as of late, because I also wrote about using a makeshift boardgame for TTRPG purposes earlier this year in A Game to Generate the World History for Your Campaign. Perhaps it is simply a renewed interest in the toyetic aspect of roleplaying games, in the sense used by Toys Vs Rules in a recent post from Jay Dragon.

I had a list of a lot of other blogs to round up, but we are already at 24ish posts. Surely that is enough to clog your browser of choice with open tabs.

It’s #GoblinWeek! I am, unfortunately, not much of an artist so my contribution is detailing how goblins fit into the Prismatic Wasteland. This wasn’t something I’ve addressed in my in-progress rules or setting guide, so this is equal parts challenge and thought experiment. This post follows up on my earlier post on ancestry, which discusses those staple ancestries of fantasy and how I incorporate them into the Prismatic Wasteland. My first thought was that goblins, like orcs or elfs, are yet another flavor in the Neapolitan ice cream that is humanity in the post-post-apocalyptic future. But, that is just boring and far too easy.

Goblins are an alien meta-species. Like humanity, they expanded across the stars, developed a variety of cultures and phenotypes. Unlike humanity, they hail from some far-flung planet on a distant star. The goblins in the Prismatic Wastelands are just the descendants of those left behind on the continent of Ro on the planet that was once Earth. This might be a good time to bring up the continent of the Prismatic Wastelands, Ro.

Ro is a supercontinent that resembles the letters R and O pressed together. Ro was created by an impossibly ancient and advanced pangalactic empire that mastered planetary engineering. A member of this ancient civilization used the planet we call Earth as an elaborate prom-posal whereby the planet’s continents were shifted to spell out “Prom?” The intended recipient declined. Over the eons, the continents have shifted somewhat, and Ro, if viewed from above, has a vaguely cranial appearance.

Goblins are not a monolith. In fact, not all goblins are goblins. There are retro-goblins, those closest in resemblance to today’s goblins (as they exist in a far-away solar system), hobgoblins, bugbears and nilbogs. There is no more of a pan-goblin culture than there is a pan-human culture, and even among the subgroups, there are all sorts of ways goblins identify. Bugbears and hobgoblins are just as likely to view each other as kin as are dwarfs and elfs. As I stressed in part I, there are no mechanical impact of ancestry. I prefer to avoid bioessentialism, please and thank you. Like with humans, players with goblin characters get to determine what this ancestry is like, aided by rolling on the below table:

Retro Goblins: Roll 1d6

1-3: Far Travelers. Their home planet had a lower threshold for abuse than Earth, motivating earlier space travel. They toured the galaxy before humans landed on the moon.

4-5: Logicians. To prevent the irrational use of ancient combat rituals, they developed a sacred devotion to logic and reason and expelled those clinging to guns or god.

6: The Empire. A holy war swept the galaxy, and those responsible claimed totalitarian control. Soon, the emperor became an unspeakable monster, which is typical.

Hobgoblins: Roll 1d6

1-3: Clone Army. They were bioengineered to be perfect soldiers in a galactic civil war. They were such great soldiers that they kept fighting long after they won the war.

4-5: Overlords. Through superior force of arms and an honor-bound devotion to violence, they crushed their enemies into submission. They cannot be negotiated with.

6: Galactic Patrol. They are a cosmic police force that maintains law and order. Their primary mandate is to enforce a strict law against the use of time travel in the galaxy.

Bugbears: Roll 1d6

1-3: Space Pirates. Exiled from their home planet, they put their talents to use by ambushing cosmic boxcars or burglarizing planets using their makeshift space galleons.

4-5: Gladiators. After many eons of galactically-syndicated gladiatorial combat on a remote planet, the best fighters begat better fighters until they escaped the planet.

6: Elite Troops. A harsh prison planet develops fierce, hardened goblins. The fiercest and most hardened became the personal fighting force for a corrupt emperor.

Nilbogs: Roll 1d6

1-3: Living Plants. Descended from carnivorous plants capable of mimicking prey, they are now identical to goblins. It is easier to devour an unsuspecting retro goblin.

4-5: The Collective. After the molecular machine injection, a goblin host begins cybernetic assimilation. When goblin colonies go missing, fear spreads. Resistance is futile.

6: Gremlins. Born beneath a full moon lit by a dying sun, they seem like their retro goblin parents. But if they eat after midnight, they become bloodthirsty monsters.

Goblins lean more in the science direction within this science fantasy setting. A lot of these are “inspired” (i.e., lovingly ripped off) from science fiction classics. Because each goblinoid ancestry is “alien”, i.e., not immediately tied to Earth, I would definitely have more follow up questions for a player with a goblin character about how their family or ancestors arrived on Ro. Their answer would also help inform how I use goblins throughout the campaign; are goblins rare because a few goblins were stranded here centuries ago or are they prevalent because of mass migration of goblins millennia ago? When I ask players questions, I like to meaningfully incorporate their answers into the setting. This is something I picked up from running more narrative games like Dungeon World, but I don’t think it should be taboo in OSR-style play. The great thing about this type of collaboration is that the players immediately know a lot more about the setting than they would otherwise. This is much more effective than trying to get players to read setting material (gross).

I hope everyone had a happy Goblin Week!

• Part 1: Aarakocra to Astral Searcher

• Part 2: Babbler to Bunyip

• Part 3: Carbuncle to Crypt Thing

• Part 4: Dakon to Dune Stalker

• Part 5: Cryonax to Eye of Fear and Flame

• Part 6: Firedrake to Frostman

• Part 7: Galltrit to Githzerai

• Part 8: Goldbug to Guardian Familiar

• Part 9: Hellcat to Iron Cobra

• Part 10: Jaculi to Kuo-Toa

• Part 11: Lamia Noble to Mite

• Part 12: Necrophidius to Osquip

• Part 13: Penanaggalan to Qullan

• Part 14: Retriever to Sheet Phantom

• Part 15: Shocker to Symbiotic Jelly

• Part 16: Tabaxi to Tween

• Part 17: Umpleby to Yellow Musk Creeper

Glad she was able to wrap up on a nice, even number of parts.

My first inclination, as a major sicko, was to put the whole thing into a spreadsheet. The average score, across ~165 monsters reviewed, was 2.98, which makes means they were on average about what you’d expect if they were all just assigned random scores from 1 to 5. Interestingly, the scores got lower over time (first half hovered around 3.08 while the latter half averaged 2.88), likely representing higher standards as the project chugged along. The 2.98 overall average is because, while the bulk of monsters (87 of 166) fall into the middling categories of 2 or 3, there are a lot (36) of 4-star monsters and slightly more (22) 5-star monsters than 1-star monsters (20). But the numbers honestly don’t tell us much, other than the fact that there was a wide variation in monster quality across the book. It is more interesting, after reading all of these, to ask what makes a good monster or a bad monster (using the criterion from Mars, the blogger at Save Vs. Worm)?

Mars clearly has a preference for undead, creepy-crawlies and monstrous humanoids, but there is more than unites a 5-star monster as opposed to a 1-star entry. Aside from simply making it a centipede made of skulls or a frog person or something (the series betrays an abiding preference for insects, amphibians, and undead), the main criterion for what makes a monster work is how distinctive it is. Like, sure, Mars may give full marks to the Tirapheg for being “one of the creepiest looking creatures that one could imagine shuffling out of the darkness”, but it doesn’t earn five stars from creepiness alone: it is their freaky veneer paired with their supernatural abilities and status as scavengers that make them an overall appealing dungeon encounter. The Sheet Phantom may be goofy, but it is a piece of cloth that suffocates you to death and turns you into a ghoul that shoots acid from your nose. the Flail Snail isn’t just iconic, it has a unique way it must be fought (incapacitating each tentacle), attracts more monsters when it dies with his death rattle, and leaves behind a powerful piece of treasure.

Maybe these examples of what makes a monster great become more clear when viewed alongside all the ones that stink. That is actually part of what makes Mars’ project interesting and helpful: she could have easily wrote “here are my top 20 monsters from the Fiend Folio” but that would not have given us as fulsome a picture of her monster predilections as spending nearly 5 years (nonstop; I’ve been told that Mars has done nothing but contemplate the fiends since she began this journey) detailing her feelings on the good, the bad, and the many that are simply mid.

Compare the beauty and inventiveness of your average, workaday flail snail against the Gorilla Bear. Mars notes that the entry for the gorilla bear has nothing that makes it unique even from an ordinary bear other than noting that it has the head of a gorilla. (And this is bad, unlike the owlbear, which is good.) Or even the Fire Snake, in the same part of the series as the flail snail. As Mars says, “[t]hey’re just snakes that happen to live in fire”. Also, tribal humanoid monsters that dwell underground like the Quaggoth? Sorry, but it’s been done before. We already have morlocks at home!

The lesson I draw from this is that monsters should be unique and do more than just what you would immediately expect from hearing their name. In fact, if you can hear the name of the monster and immediately know all of its details, I would go so far as to say that is poor monster design. Leave something to be discovered, be it a wailing death shriek or the valuable magic shell the monster leaves behind.

Do you think Mars should publish her own bestiary? I do!

As an aside, while filtering through the Fiend Folio tag on Save vs. Worm, I found the only other post that is not a part of this series: Product Identity Schmoduct Schmidentity, where Mars discusses the Kuo Toa and Slaad. Like I said above, Mars clearly has a preference for the amphibian monsters. But whomst amongst us doesn’t? Was not one of my favorite characters a bullwug knight and do I not always prefer to play as Parish in Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast? This post was in response to one of my posts, riffing on the Goin' Through the Fiend Folio series format, Here Be No Product Identity Monsters, where I rate some of the monsters that Wizards of the Coast purportedly “owns” and giving them alternative names that anyone can use. Mars isn’t the only one fond of toads, as Knight at the Opera, in his rebuttal (Product Identity? In MY Monsters?) to my aforementioned post spoke of Kuo Toa as well as Bullywugs.

There has never been a better time to stock up on Knock, the favorite “magazine” (magazine being either a lie or mistranslation from the original français, as the issues of Knock are clearly books). Knock #5 is currently funding but not for much longer. By the time I post this, you have about a day so get moving if you want to catch the last train out of Fomoville). I have seen it expressed before that the Knock series are among those that one would save from their burning home or would bring with them to a deserted island, and to me those seem like only slight exaggerations. The experience of reading Knock, which truly lives up to its bric-a-brac credo with such a wide variety of gameable ideas jammed inside each volume, is unparalleled.

Now is the best time to stock up for two reasons: the first is that one of the pledge levels allows you to get all the past issues in a single fell swoop if you had missed out on previous campaigns, but the second is because if you say “no, but maybe next time,” then even if the same “catch-up” bundle is still being offered, you would have to back at the 6-book version instead of the 5-book version, which if my math is correct would be approximately one book more expensive. You will never find a more economical way to finish your Knock collection baring being so fortuitous to attend the estate sale of a fellow OSR aficionados just as they are being put in the ground (but not me, as I will be donating my body, and my vast collection of books, to science; by which I mean the immortal science insofar as my taxidermied corpse will lie behind a glass case inside Lenin's Mausoleum). If, like me, you got on the Knock train as soon as it left the station with issue #1, you are of course obligated to get the latest so as to not be without one of the numbered issues. This is a lifetime commitment, and I for one shan’t be shirking it.

There has never been a better time to be in Knock than now, by which I mean whenever you are reading it, even if it is months or years after its original posting. If you are a blogger, or even a wannabe blogger, you can submit your post to be in a forthcoming issue of Knock. I’ve submitted no shortage of posts over the years and even have gotten accepted a few times! (Including in this upcoming issue!) As Knock’s current editor-in-cheese advised, “rejecting isn't ‘We don't like this’ it's just ‘Need to make this puzzle piece fit’”. But also, there is truly no downside to rejection. And rejection is not permanent; I submitted one very old post on traps long ago, and after much silence, the Mushmen on high have deemed it worthy so it will be in the upcoming issue. At last, a puzzle with which my piece fit.

Rejection does not sting so bad, but acceptance sure is sweet. Is it commonly known that my first TTRPG publication credit is Knock #2? If it isn’t memorialized elsewhere, let it be known here. I still remember it fondly. It was the ides of April 2021. I had only started my blog a mere five months prior and was finally starting to get some readership, largely off the back of some well-timed and duly-appreciated retweets from my then- and now-TTRPG idol, Luka Rejec. It was a beautiful day, and I remembered I had just that week discovered the “Blogs on Tape” project (a new season is out now, by the way) so was listening to its backlog and sitting outdoors enjoying one of the few days of pleasant weather before it would become unpleasantly hot when I received an email. Actually, let me go look for it–hold on just a moment (although you can immediately read on, I hope that you will at least pause for one beat to signify yourself patiently waiting for me to locate an old email to show you).

“Sorry to have kept you waiting! I'm interested in your gear post - really liking. Would you be able to send me a odt, rtf, or docx file of it, with any changes you deem relevant?”

What news! I’ve hit the big time, baby! Time to quit my job, grow out my hair, move to Los Angeles and finally live the life of a bona fide RPG blogger! Or at least, that is how it felt. Blogging is mostly, in my view, an internal mission, a journal of ideas for yourself that you feel compelled to share with others. We bloggers tend not to be showered in external validation, except mostly by our fellow bloggers. But seeing your post in print alongside giants of (our corner of) the hobby like Arnold K. or Gus L. makes you go gee whiz, I did good huh. There is also financial remuneration, but it doesn’t redound to your benefit so much that you’ll be able to quit your job, unless your job is driving for Uber for one hour per year. That’s all sprinkles. The real reward is having that book on your own shelf.

Once you have been accepted, prepare to get fit. Not physically fit, of course. Lord knows I don’t qualify in that regard and frankly my sojourns to gaming conventions have given me the anecdata to back up that I’m not alone in that regard. No, I mean your post will need to fit within so many exquisitely laid out two page spreads of Knock. For some posts, shorter ones, like my post on gear that sneaked its way into Knock #2, little trimming is required. Mostly it’s just grammar correction, fixing my abundant smelling errors, and things of that nature. But in issue #5, the Mushmen set their sights on publishing my top post of all time (it isn’t close): the Hexcrawl Checklist. However, it is long. So long, in fact, that I have it on good authority that putting it in a similarly highly beautified, laid out book would bring the article to a whopping 18 pages. There is no way in the kingdom of heaven that the Mushmen would give me that kind of real estate in an issue of Knock. So I worked with the editor to narrow the scope and increase the focus. It is still frankly incredibly dense and detailed for a mere two page spread, and something that is perhaps more appropriate for a refresher when you have Knock #5 in your bag and are waiting for the game you are running to begin. No one has time for 18 pages of advice in such a situation. I am quite proud of my inclusion in the latest Knock (the modified post of hexcrawl advice is given a new title more befitting of its format: Sandbox Seasonings. I don’t recall if that was suggested by me or by Josh, such was the highly collaborative process whereby for a brief moment over google docs, our two souls became one). If every other contributor (50+ of us at least in the upcoming issue, but who is counting? Not me, clearly, I couldn’t even be arsed to count for the benefit of this parenthetical) is as happy with the final version of their contribution as I am with mine, it is set to be yet another stunning book in a series of stunners, and some of the best examples of the ethos of DIY elfgame production. I tip over an entire rack full of hats once again to all the Mushmen.

Okay, but if you, like me, prefer reading blogs on paper rather than on a screen or are otherwise interested in books like Knock, I am afraid you must keep your wallet open before Knock merely opened the door (heh) to this phenomenon. False Machine, an iconic blog if ever there were one, was first to the idea with Speak, False Machine, a 652-page hardcover collection of over ten years of regular postings. Even at that size, the pages are thinly sliced, giving the impression of one of those portable bibles. I backed it immediately and, when it landed at my door, read it cover to cover. Although I was familiar with the False Machine cannon, I was surprised at how much I hadn’t read. Even rereading old favorites on ink and paper was a delight. No marketing I could do for this book would be better than what Mr. Machine wrote himself: “This one is really for fans curious rich people and/or those who fear Robot Rule. If you have begun to understand that everything written online is written in water, and you want a solid memory that will last a little longer, and be a little more real, then this is for you.” Robot Rule dawns ever nearer, certainly closer today than it was when Pat Stu of False Machine launched this project back in 2022 (my how time flies).

The latest entrant into this genre is my own. Prismatic Wisdom just recently landed on my webstore and you can buy it right now! Assuming, that is, you aren’t reading this too far into the future, because this was a somewhat limited print run. It is 200 pages and less austere in presentation than Speak, False Machine, veering more into the essays-cum-artbook direction that Knock is at, although it is a bit less Mörk Borg in its layout and more Into the Odd Remastered, if you require a Free League frame of reference. Within the pages, you’ll find 35 of my best posts, nicely laid out and edited. And by edited, I mean more in line of fixing aforementioned grammar and smelling errors rather than any truncating. The few material changes are largely additive but not majorly so. These are no Star Wars special editions. The posts were already good, now they are just good in a different format: a book. It is, of course, beautiful, as it is from the same layout (Guilherme Gontijo) and publishing (Games Omnivorous) team behind such other incredibly aesthetic books such as the Haunted Almanac (which is maybe the closest comparison to Prismatic Wisdom) and the first collected edition of Vaults of Vaarn. It is also, I understand, the last book to be published by Games Omnivorous in a completely publishing capacity, so I feel very fortunate I got a chance to work with one of my favorite publishers of all time. One of my first posts, before I was even published in Knock, was extolling the virtues of their work! And now my writing gets to exist alongside those, and gets to hopefully sit on your bookshelf, next to your copies of Knock (issues #1 through #1,000) and Speak, False Machine. There has never been a better time to load up your escape pod from the cesspool that is the Internet and become a hermit with a collection of arcane tomes.

“write something in anyway related to clerics (perhaps particularly their hierarchy and rituals?) and post it between when the conclave begins on May 7 and when the smoke emanates from the chimney indicating that a new Pope has been selected.”

By my latest count, 44 blog posts were nailed to the church door—only 55 short of the amount of posts necessary to cause a religious schism. Even though I actually already blogged about how gameable a conclave could be a couple of months ago, even I threw my mitre into the ring with a new post on popes. The participation was in fact double the previous non-emergency bandwagon on the elements. Maybe if another high profile public figure dies (in Minecraft [the movie]), we can have another EMERGENCY blogging bandwagon. Or maybe everyone just had a lot to say about clerics and finally someone gave them permission to speak their truth.

I have read and digested all of the applicable posts and have made a feeble attempt to slot them into rough categories where they seem to be speaking to, or perhaps past, each other. I urge you to read them all and to comment below which your favorite is. Perhaps we will claim that poster as the new Blog Pope. If no 2/3 majority is achieved, however, the title of Blog Pope will remain with Skerples.

THOU SHALT MAKE CLERICS INTERESTING

Prismatic Wasteland: Divine Magic Works in Mysterious Ways (a priest’s prayers should work differently from a sorcerer’s spells)

Slow Loris Press: Priests Of Want (reinterpreting clerics as an Asia-centric misreading of Christian missionaries, complete with a 1d100 advancement table)

The Rogue's Wallet: Clerics in Begone, FOE! (give them a resource that can be spent on doing various clerical stuff)

Fallen Constellation: Rites of Castage (Making clerical spellcasting more dangerous)

The Socratic Dungeon: Faith (faith and miracles, as opposed to mere magic)

Wandering Diejack: Justifying Failed Careers in Electric Bastionland (presenting the HR clergy for your next Electric Bastionland campaign)

THOU SHALT FIND CLERICS INTERESTING ENOUGH ALREADY

Blog of Forlorn Encystment: Clerics Need Spellbooks Too (putting a spellbook in the nightstand drawer of your hotel room [or: perhaps just interpreting some OD&D])

From the Sorcerer’s Skull: Weird Revisited: Further Ideas on Clerics (offers various possible explanations of D&Dish clerics based on real world analogs)

VDonnut Valley: Clerics from the Archives - Blogclave (reviewing three former posts on the topic of clerics)

THOU SHALT ABANDON CLERICS ENTIRELY ACTUALLY

The Dododecahedron: Classless Clerics (you don’t need a class to be a cleric but you do need to curry favor with the god(s))

LootLootLore: Splitting the cleric into the Holy Trinity (killing the cleric and giving away all their stuff to the other core classes)

This Vorpal Coil: The Secular Cleric (cleric as therapist)

Alex Schroeder: I am not interested in clerics (playing a cleric? I’ll show you something interesting. The two types of classes are fighter and wizard)

THOU SHALT CRAWL DUNGEONS

Wayspell: Cardinal Goons (tunnel goons hack where you play as one of ten provided clerics, with stats of pious, devotion, and sin)

Patchwork Paladin: Trade and Be Blessed (a subterranean temple to the Coinmaiden with a table of adventure hooks)

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet: Oaths and other divine favours (reaction rolls for swearing to god and a tree-based dungeon god)

LootLootLore: Dungeon Pope and Other Jobs (religious goals for dungeon crawling)

THOU SHALT PERFORM HOLY RITUALS

I Cast Light!: BRING OUT YOUR DEAD: Ossuaries & Reliquaries for Your Clerics (building ossuaries and reliquaries and their benefits)

Ramming the Dungeon: Common Rituals for the Common Cleric (they heal, they exorcise, they baptize, they wed, they mourn, they preach, they forgive)

Creative Wronging: The Blogclave: A Cleric Without Religion (clerics should be more like social workers)

Beneath the moon of ancient Balansiya: A procedure for divine intervention - Conclave Edition (time to bond with your god)

A Swamp in Space: The Gift of Revelation (staring straight into heaven and not blinking)

THOU SHALT CREATE GOD IN THY OWN IMAGE

Gem Room Games Blog: The Divine Faction (what are gods but intelligence agents with their competing networks of influence? The CIA works in mysterious ways)

Fluorite Guillotine: begun, the blogclave has (you play as god, the cleric is your pawn)

Kate Plays: The Cargo Cult Pantheon (Forgotten AI gods and their tech support clerics)

Bommyknocker Press: Clerical Error - 9 Gods to Sin Against (plenty of theisms to be poly- for)

Semitext Games: Devotion to the Daemon (what if we worship demons instead?)

Seedling Games: On Religion (Belated Conclave Blog Edition) (gods for Cairnish settings)

THOU SHALT BUILD THY WORLD

Rise Up Comus: Embedding Lore in your Classes (getting around the lore problem by making classes more world-specific—sort of a follow up to this post)

Magnolia Keep: The Implied Apocalypse of the Cleric (okay, Josh, but what if the default cleric already says a lot about the world of D&D?)

Behind the Helm: D4 Cardinals Coming to the Conclave (Blogclave Bandwagon) (4 cardinals from a new city-setting, Theocastrum)

Among Cats and Books: Kill Clerics, Become Warlocks (using clerics as an onramp for worldbuilding)

Seed of Worlds: Insectfolk elementalism (Conclave Bandwagon) (who did the insectfolk worship, in the ages before even the illithids, much less you or I)

Garamondia: Difference and Repetition and Magic (first there was chaos, then god, then law)

THOU SHALT MAKE FANTASY RELIGION MORE INTERESTING

Mindstorm: Biblically Inaccurate Religions (a framework for creating your own religion [in your made-up world, not how to start a cult])

Widdershins Wanderings: Rethinking Religion in RPG Settings (what if polytheism made sense)

Conghal: Everyone is a Religion (forget race-as-class, now its religion-as-race)

Personable Thoughts: A Link in the Great Chain: Clerics in the Religious Hierarchy (making religious hierarchies gameable)

Big Bite Games: Emergency Bandwagon: Smoke, Saints, and Sigils (on religious hierarchies and rituals and incorporating those into adventure)

Binary Star Games: Religion is too good for Clerics (the cleric is holding back the fantasy religions in your games)

Lich Factory: Faith Without Faces: Divine Power Without Divine Persons (forget gods, we worship Stoic conceptions of cosmic forces now)

THOU SHALT BE A LITTLE SILLY

Explorers Design: What's Under the Pope's Hat? (its like one of those “I loot the body” tables, except the body is the pope’s)

The Play Reports: The Blogging Cleric (a cleric class based on the lowly blogger)

Web of the Gigantic Spider: Games That Are About Choosing the Pope (To Me) (three-way factorial analysis about which games are most about choosing the pope [includes a fun graphic])

Even our (my) friends at the Between Two Cairns participated, releasing a “audio blog” that some call a podcast, reviewing the adventure Kidnap the Archpriest. Admit it, Brad, you love blogs! Look at you, participating in an emergency blog bandwagon. Bloggin’ Brad, they call him.

A funny commonality that you’ll see as you read through all of these posts (which you will, as it’s going to be on the final exam), is that so many start right out of the gate by saying “I don’t even like clerics!” My post included. But then they go on to write paragraph after paragraph on clerics? Doth thou protest too much? Clearly there is something fascinating, or maybe frustrating, enough that so many people had a rant in the chamber, ready to be fired.

Character Background: Antipope

Speaking of popes, I had forgotten until all this went down that I actually had a pope-related background in an earlier version of my Prismatic Wasteland’s rules for character creation. While my patrons are already privy to that (and much more stuff that lacks the polish for publication), I’ll at least share that background with you so you can use it for your next cleric character’s background:

Antipope

During the last conclave, the current pope was elected nearly unanimously, except for one vote where a cardinal misspelt the pope’s name and wrote yours. You weren’t clergy, but the stubborn cardinal refuses to admit their mistake. Their diocese now recognizes your divine authority.

Adjust Stats: +2 Wisdom, +1 Constitution

Start with: Pitch Black Mitre, Faux Leather (1 Slot), Mace (1 Slot), Heavy Crossbow (2 Slots), Anti-Popemobile (Vehicle, Armored Monowheel), Used Holy Book (1 Slot)

Starting Ability: EX CATHEDRA. When you sit in a chair and make a pronouncement, you may spend 1d6 Wisdom to cause all who hear it to believe you are telling the truth. In addition, when you find a Chem, it can be a holy wafer instead of your result.

Do you feel left out because you foolishly forgot to post about popes or even more foolishly don’t (yet) have a blog? Good news! You have over a month until the next, non-emergency blogging bandwagon on July 16. The prompt is “holes”. Dig it? The best time to start a TTRPG blog (besides 2008) is always NOW.

A new challenge for bloggers: write something in anyway related to clerics (perhaps particularly their hierarchy and rituals?) and post it between when the conclave begins on May 7 and when the smoke emanates from the chimney indicating that a new Pope has been selected. As with past bandwagons, I will try to catch all the posts I can and assemble them after said Pope is picked. Get to writing now because while the conclave begins soon, there is no sure time for it to end! (The Internet tells me that it typically lasts for 3 days).

Around the Blogosphere:

Sometimes I put out a post that I assume will appeal to no one. That’s fine! I am the primary audience for my own blog and all y’all are secondary or even tertiary. I thought this was one of those, but apparently a lot of people shared my belief that Babies in Dungeons could be fun! I would like to thank the many lone-wolf-and-cub media that proliferates these days but also Yoshi’s Island.

Typically, I’ve been congregating the blog posts I round up into nested categories. However, there aren’t many other recent posts on a similar topic as my latest, so instead, and in consideration of the favorite mode of transportation for babies (after ~8 months), I am going to round up a blog of posts about crawling!

Dungeoncrawling:

• Grinning Rat: Building Dungeons (the Tetris Way)

• Pathika: How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design, Part 1: Pre-Jaquays Dungeons

• The Foot of Blue Mountain: The Mythic Underworld is Gygaxian Naturalism

Pointcrawling:

• New School Revolution: Pointcrawls & Emergent Play

• Widdershins Wanderings: Player-Facing Pointcrawl: Regional Sandbox

• Onslaught Six: The Pointcrawl vs. The Hexcrawl

Hexcrawling:

• Blog of Forlorn Encystment: The 100-Hex Sandbox

• Cats Have No Lord: A Southeast Asia Hexmap

• Cats Have No Lord: A Philippines Hex Map

Depth- and Nodecrawling:

• Cats Have No Lord: Convoluting the Depthcrawl

• Harpoon Cannon Thoughts: The Nodecrawl Post

Spacecrawling:

• Save Vs Total Party Kill: A Hazard Die for Mothership

• Cats Have No Lord: Hazards In Space! Adapting the Hazard Die For Mothership

Swampcrawling:

• The Ash, The Elder, and the Hen Elm: What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, or, More Mud Please!

• Unturned Hovel: Some Places in a Swamp

• Bommyknocker Press: Encounter Table - Bandit Blood Swamp

“Race” and all of its attendant baggage has rightfully weighed down those coastal wizards in recent years. It behooves any game designer to think long and hard before simply porting in stock fantasy races into a game. Without any other context, harmful tropes, racial essentialism and all manner of bugbears (not the fun kind) will creep into your game. To those who argue, “Orcs aren’t real; racism against orcs isn’t a problem!” I would direct you to a really well-researched history of the racialized past of orcs by James Mendez Hodes. There are various topics within this field that can be and have been explored, but here, I want to talk about how I approach ancestry in the Prismatic Wasteland (the first approach is simply calling it ancestry instead of race, but relabeling is only a first step).

Ancestries are defined collaboratively at the table. My style of running RPGs is highly improvisational and collaborative. During Session Zeroes, I begin to nudge the players to flesh out what it means to be, for instance, a cat-person (rest in peace, Meow Treatkins, wizard and martyr of the revolution). This approach is identical to how Luka described it in his article on Anti Canon Worlds:

Players’ input on their character’s ancestry may surprise you—and that’s a good thing. Even when my games use the classic lineup of dwarfs, elfs, orcs, who are caked in tropes and baggage, there are basically two directions players will take it. Some players are not very interested in the collaborative world-building and are fine to rely on the standard tropes. Others relish the agency to define the world by defining their character and, although informed by tropes, will develop a history and culture all their own. In a Dungeon World game I ran virtually at the start of the pandemic, a friend played a dwarf paladin. Dwarfs were still stocky mountain-dwellers, but they were also neurotically courteous, disgusted by gnomes (it was later revealed that gnomes were a sort of prototype for dwarves), and obsessed with commerce and free trade. It was a fun character, and the player had fun shaping the world.

The Prismatic Wasteland is a science-fantasy setting, and draws on both science fiction and fantasy for the listed ancestries. The fantasy element is that characters might be dwarfs, elfs, halflings, or orcs. However, the sci-fi spin (inspired by the UVG, oft-touted on this blog), is that all of these ancestries are technically “human,” encompassing all descendants of modern humanity, which diverged slightly as they spread across the stars. First, I have players choose their ancestry. I also have a table for those (like me) who would prefer to let the dice decide. Other, non-human ancestries are implied by some of the factions (also determined in Session Zero, but that is a different discussion), and players are welcome to choose those, but the default is to play as human characters.

To prompt player imagination and discussion of the cultures, histories and aspects of their respective ancestries, grounded in an anti-canon history of the Prismatic Wasteland, I provide a d6 table for each ancestry (reproduced below). Each description is enough to spark ideas without boxing-in player creativity. Some combinations may suggest relations between the groups (i.e., Dome Dwellers & Dome Defenders; Lower Class & Upper Class; Warrior Caste & Planetary Invaders).

Retro Humans:

1-3: Dome Dwellers. They fled their cities beneath the crysteel domes long ago to avoid the demon plague. When the domes cracked open, they left to rediscover the world.

4-5: Bomb Worshipers. They worship broken tech with ancient combat rituals which they don’t understand. The steel gods represent peace after eons of calamity and warfare.

6: Endangered Species. In humanity’s last days, the few remaining either keep to themselves in hidden enclaves or are invaluable to the communities in which they’ve integrated.

Dwarves:

1-3: Lower Class. Workers in the earth’s bowels maintained ancient machinery powering the society above until the dwarves either unionized or overthrew their oppressors.

4-5: Warrior Caste. After a protracted guerrilla war against planetary invaders, they developed a strict warrior code and established isolated military bastions hidden underground.

6: Stellar Smiths. They built the cosmic subway to connect their factories across the galaxy. This galactic supply chain was severed when the dragons began to malfunction.

Elves:

1-3: Original Wizards. At their zenith, they discovered all possible magic permutations. One notorious spell didn’t cause the apocalypse but it certainly didn’t help prevent it either.

4-5: Tree Huggers. They protect the mushroom forests, which produce cookies enabling the elves to commune with the mutant flora and fauna telepathically and spiritually.

6: Toy Makers. They were oppressed laborers in a far away, frigid climate, forced to ceaselessly build toys. After the revolution, they fractured and migrated across the world.

Halflings:

1-3: Upper Class. Their ancestors lived decadently because all labor was performed by machines they forgot how to maintain. When the machines broke, they adapted.

4-5: Leprechauns. These green-clad redheads are often hunted for the apotropaic magics they produce. Portals awash in prismatic rays lead to their hidden enclaves of gold.

6: Puppets. A sentient arts and crafts factory built these humanoid simulacra in hopes of creating a very loyal customer-base for pipe-cleaners and other crafts products.

Orcs:

1-3: Dome Defenders. TThey volunteered to stay outside the crysteel domes and fight the demon incursion. Their close contact with the demon plague left them irrevocably altered.

4-5: Planetary Invaders. They invaded planets and sold their conquests for profit. In retaliation, enemies destroyed their home planet, leaving those invading earth stranded here.

6: Uplifted Killer Whales. Either a science experiment or a fluke of evolution infused some humans with killer whale DNA. Like their marine relatives, these apex predators are matrilineal.

Ancestries provide player opportunity to contribute to shared world-building at the table, not mechanical benefits. Elfs don’t get +2 Intelligence, nor are they born knowing how to handle swords and bows. Dwarfs don’t have an in-born ability to eat rocks. Elfs are no better at being wizards, and orcs are no better at being fighters. The ancestries are simply what the players make of them. They should be fun and give the players agency. They shouldn’t pigeonhole players or demonstrate racial essentialism. Having all ancestries be essentially human assists in not having to tack on mechanics. If some ancestries could fly or breathe under water, it may be different (N.B.: If orcs are infused with orca DNA, this doesn’t allow them to breathe under water. Killer whales breathe air too).

Any good rule should have exceptions. In the Prismatic Wasteland, there are 96 starting backgrounds a character might have. A few of them call for the character to be a mechanical simulacra of a human. In these cases, their starting ability states:

Because all backgrounds have starting abilities, I have no qualms with giving a bit of mechanical advantage to the mechanical people of the wasteland. I also am fine not having machine human as an option for ancestry outside of these few backgrounds: focusing on the standard fantasy array of ancestries helps foreground the fantasy elements in a world of ray guns and robots. Striking the right balance of fantasy and science fiction is as important a design principle for my game as striking the right balance of chocolate and peanut butter was for Mr. H. B. Reese, father of the peanut butter cup.

In Prismatic Wasteland, ancestry doesn’t define a characters, players define their characters (and the world) through ancestry. Hopefully, there were some morsels for thought here, but I actually have a more sinister goal for this blog post. It’s #GoblinWeek! So this is part 1 of my thoughts on ancestries. Part 2 is ALL ABOUT GOBLINS, hopefully forthcoming this very week!