Capsule Reviews #10: Kala Mandala Zines

I grabbed the set of Kala Mandala zines after the Hey Centaur shop went online. These are great zines of the old school OSR glory days - easily earning their shelf space beside any of the greats. We get a great setting in the Playbook and two Art Research zines, further expanded by three juicy adventures - all site exploration with a twist for each.

Six books existing in the core set at time of writing:
Kala Mandala Playbook - 42 pages, system
Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya - 26 pages, adventure
Deluge at Drizzle Distillery - 42 pages, adventure
Tragedy at Zaya's Theatre - 26 pages, adventure
Earthly Beings - 38 pages, gazetteer
Heavenly Bodies - 38 pages, gazetteer

Plus the Paper Minis set. As a whole this is the character generation and system in the playbook, three adventures (Het Thamsya, Drizzle Distillery and Zaya's Theatre) and two world-books/gazetteers (Earthly Beings and Heavenly Bodies)

I did have a minor logistics issue in that I ordered the stickers collection and got a second playbook - strictly this has worked in my benefit because the playbook is a touch more expensive than the stickers. From a point of view of trying to get Kala Mandala to table, having a second playbook might end up being more helpful. So I am going to call it a wash, all to the good.

Actual Play: The Hole In The Oak

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon, menace telegraphed by the corpses of adventurers, bigger than it seems with lots of secrets that can get missed even when players pry into things.

Another of the adventures I got when Attronarch sold them off - I did a capsule review of The Hole In The Oak a while back and wanted to expand on the running experience.

As per that capsule review - The Hole in the Oak is an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.

Session Report: The Hole In The Oak

Party of three - Mountain Dwarf Rogue, Halfling Fighter, Elf Ranger

At the request of the town Arcanist, some wandering adventurers set out to find the wizards lair by a big oak out in the swamp and see how dangerous it might be. After considering enlisting some henchmen and deciding they would rather not split the loot, the party hiked out past the old skyburials, out past the mudpool shrine and after some tense negotiations with a tabaxi hunter, found a mysteriously dry patch in the middle of the swamp with a great gnarled old oak growing on it.

[DM Commentary - to this point the players were hexcrawling out to the adventure site, I was still working out whether wrapping these stand-alone adventures before and after with some hexcrawling was fun or a time sink. It increases the risk of people getting distracted or side tracked but does make the world feel more real with not everything being about the one thing they are looking into. Also in the course of the evening before they set off it became apparent that the halfling was a mighty local athlete of some reknown.]

Venturing down into the hole they found by it they squeezed past some grasping vines, argued with some root faces, trading a famed discus for some answers. The root faces told them that to find the wizard they needed to go back through the roots and the other way. They ranger was unwilling to hazard the roots again and so they set out to find another way around.

They trekked on to a big cavern and thence to a mysterious carved arch with a corpse in front of it. Searching the corpse and archway found the corpse was definitely dead from a big slice and the arch had nothing obvious to it. Some wandering troglodytes struck up a shouted conversation through the archway but with neither group will to cross it, our heroes wandered off to find another route.

[DM Commentary - the wandering monster tables came into play quite interestingly here - the party was semi-stalled out in front of the arch, intimidated by the obvious trap, when some troglodytes turned up - also very much disinclined to deal with the trap. Running into a group that is not inclined to be baited into screaming and charging an obvious death-trap, where the correct answer is to tell them to sod off and go around is pretty iconic for old school dungeon crawling.]

They found a room full of mysterious sand, a spectral fight between man and giant lizard and then arrived into a big hall full of work statues with many doors. Searching there yielded little beyond trails.

The next door they tried revealed another corpse and another arch - they rummaged through the corpses pockets, found some coins and then decided to leave this arch alone too. They decided to try the door on the other side of the hall... and found another arch! A sharp eyed party member spotted the glint of eyes above it then the ferocious halfing charged into combat. Some unlucky misses by the giant spider and a critical hit from a longbow led to a resounding victory and the party pressed onwards through this arch.

Marching past a statue and some mirrors they came to a large room with a big rug - and decided to head north, away from their stated goal of the passage beyond the roots. A careless step and the rogue vanished, snatched away to the bat cavern by an unseen magic circle. The ranger and fighter press on a little, finding a locked room with some troglodytes and after a tense but informative conversation around a scarcely opened door, they too decide to step on the magic circle to follow and find their comrade.

[DM Commentary - this is one of the eternal challenges for how to handle surprise party splits - tell the player who just vanished 'I'll get to you in a minute' and make the rest of the party make suitably uninformed decisions, that at least everyone can listen to? Pull the vanished player to one side and play things out with them while the other cool their heels - the fact that time is required to deal with it being information in itself? Just continue play for the vanished player and let the mystery collapse for the rest? I did the first but pushed pretty hard for a decision from the rest to keep the vanished from getting overly bored.]

The rogue appears elsewhere - in a new part of a familiar bat-stinking cavern - and choose between three doors ahead of them. Skirting some beetles feasting on a kill they squeeze arduosly through a tight, slimy crevasse. By the time they had emerged into an cavern full of stalactites with another door they heard noises on the far side and opened it to find the ranger and fighter just appeared.

They made their way back down the bat cavern, retracing their steps past the sand, the dead spider and carefully around the rug until they entered a passage where an illusory image of the wizard sprang to life with a halting and partially complete welcome. Deciding they had fulfilled the letter of their mission by finding out about the place and being right beside the entrance, they climbed out and hiked home to be paid.

The party netted 2 gold, 14 silver each as their share of the coins found on the dead dwarf; plus payment from the Arcanist that far outstripped that.

[DM Commentary - the route the party took missed pretty much everything valuable; this was poor, hazardous pickings from their point of view. The 'pry up everything, poke in every corner' mentality of real old-school dungeoneering was absent so traps and treasures were missed as the party remained very wary of traps.]

Session Report Ends

It was a little tricky to navigate the book - because it is so Jayquaysed you have rooms connecting which are far apart in the book which drives a fair amount of flipping about. The many corpses of unlucky previous adventures kept the tension very high and inculcated a healthy respect for the traps and hazards they suspected were about. As I previously wrote "The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display."

This venture was a scouting run - the players declared they had enough to get paid and bailed leaving extensive blocks of the dungeon untouched and without real clues to what might be there beyond a sense the place was definitely bigger. I am not sure the players were even left convinced there was anything worth going back down there for - they missed clues to treasures - and it would pretty much need new rumours to get them to go back.

Overall great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim and densely packed with lots of directly adventurable content. There was way more thaan I used for this four-hour slot, probably another two similar sessions could be wrung from this, lots of adventuring.

Actual Test: Dungeons of Knock #1

I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.

I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.

Running through them in order encountered by the players:

Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.

On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.

The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.

The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.

My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.

The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.

They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.

My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.

Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.

The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.

The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.

I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.

In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.

The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.

The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.

This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.

From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.

I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.

In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.

Review: Kala Mandala Playbook

tl;dr: a draft system with a setting soaked into its bones; PC's as "meddlers". Light-weight and stuffed with gorgeous art.

I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I bought one of everything including this playtest version of the Kala Mandala playbook; a system to go with their flavour-forward, south-east Asian inspired setting. The base premise of Kala Mandala is that you belong to a meddling association. You are meddlers. Just wandering around sticking your nose in because, to quote it, "You are a professional meddler. You are an adventurer with a legitimate career path. You have monetized your irrepressible nosiness by joining a meddlers guild" - I love it, just fantastic stuff.

Cover art by Munkao

This is a full first draft - it has gorgeous illustrations throughout already. The artifact of the playbook is fully baked but it acknowledges that the system is not necessarily fully there. Notes in the back on what has been omitted from focus (balance, economy) also provide email addresses to send in your feedback. I think it is still certainly good enough to get going - I am far happier to have it in my hands in the state it is now than to wait another chunk of time to get those aspects ironed out when they will only sometimes affect your game at all.

So what is all this stuff you get in this book?

Review: The Long Road Home

tl;dr: card-draw based storyteller, potential for great pre-campaign party cohesion or post-campaign epilogues.

I cannot recall where/when I first heard of this - probably the kickstarter in 2024 - but when I spotted this in London (the mighty Orc's Nest or maybe The Arcanists Tavern?) I decided I had to go for it. I clawed the time to scuttle over there from the City on a long lunch and have a good rummage - this and Minions were two that particularly caught my eye. It felt like a good 'support your local games creators' opportunity so I did.

What you get is a card-based story telling game that all told reminded me of For The Queen with hints of Microscope, moderated by the card-draw. I slightly misunderstood what I was getting here in the 'what happens when the quest is over?' tagline - that made me think it was wholly focussed on the consequences side of things and not infact the telling the whole tale of the journey/quest.

Nicely laid out with clean, spare art. I ripped through reading this in a single-seating (admittedly on an airplane but still end-to-end in a go).

So what do you get in here?
8 pages covering 'how to operate the book'
22 pages on creating your story including genre and setting creation
20 pages on creating all the things in the setting - locations to threats and PCs
20 pages on running the scenes of the game including worked examples
14 pages of support material - references, character and story sheets and inspirational maps

Expanding on all that; what you have in here is the neat idea a campaign in retrospect. You start off with deciding genre and creating things to be encountered along the six-act journey. These can be locations, treasures and threats, and maybe you have some supporting characters that come with you.

There are lots of scene setting tables that you use to set up the locations and hazard, treasures and threats, NPC and atmosphere. These are great quick campaign generation tools and would be useful for lots of games or in a DM's toolkit in general. Each set of tables is split out by the different campaign flavours (grim, heroic, kids, horror) - though I imagine one could substitute in some other sparklist (such as from Worlds Without Number) to get sci-fi, western, etc.

To actually run the tale players get dealt a card per chapter plus three and then assign a card per chapter as they play. Each card suit dictates the tone of the players contribution which they start with "do you remember when..." and then tell a physically or emotionally enriching or disturbing/detrimental happening for that place. The overall tone for the chapter is determined by the majority suit played.

It is a more prescriptive, structured game to focus story-telling and shape the action into the set forms of the chapters. There is advice to chop out the second and fifth chapters for a short session, or loop through additional third-to-fifth chapters to extend the session.

What is in here is a cool potential game played within ~ 2-3 hour slot with a nice balance of rules & freeform to bridge out of classic TTRPGs and intro people to storygame type things. It follows a six act structure that could be customised or free form as well.

It could also be great for a shared backstory generator ~ session 0.5. Run a session of The Long Road Home and you've got a party with a true shared history to start a big campaign with.

You could also adapt it to be a post-finale tool for a standard campaign by doing a sweep up of campaign major events and running multiple "homecoming" scenes to see how things play out in the end.

Review: Green Corridor

tl;dr: an eco-restoration-themed map-crawler pamphlet game with some interesting resouce balancing mechanics.

I looked at this as a part of Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle but a chance draw from a review round-robin has geas-ed me to take another look - so let us delve deeper.

GREEN CORRIDOR has up to five players be agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aiming to reconnect them by exploring a hex-map and rebuild the world one ecological pathway at a time.

A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, print it out and fold it, works well - good contrast, clear layout, nice piece of art for the front cover. So what do you actually get?

Review: Chapter Serf

tl;dr: delightful game to play the lowliest of servants of the grimdarks mightiest warriors.

This dropped on tumblr and I snatched it up, both expecting great things but also in fear that the scouring eye of Games Workshop might not be far behind.

This is a system light game of being one of the myriad servants who toil in the background, that the Space Marines might fight for the Emperor. After all, someone must ensure all the candles we see in every piece of art stay lit.

Zedeck wrote their thoughts in a neat blog on the genesis of the game, well worth the read. The game itself is 75 landscape pages, bright text on dark background, very much in keeping with what we have seen for in-universe technical read-outs.

Opening cinematic of the Space Marine game by Relic Entertainment

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
4 pages of lead in - where, who, why - in general
5 pages of 'system' - split around the roles
31 pages making a d66 table of roles
14 pages of major NPCs
37 pages of setting - the Warmask of Gloriana
2 pages of thanks and 'why play this'

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Review: A Home Reforged

tl:dr; a game of dwarves delving the dark to restablish outposts; tight old-school style with some nice mechanical twists.

Where did this come from? Zinequest 2024. I had it on my shelf but recently managed to get bits to table thus a review.

Art by Michail Papanchuk

Nice little book, focuses on a theme and while first impression might be 'oh, dwarves, have we not done this' - this is actually a neat compilation of all the things you would need for a dwarven delving campaign that are often scattered across lots of books and need legwork from the DM. Here we have everything you need in a single package.

The book itself is a fat zine or a small book - 92 pages - with about ~ 1/4 of the book made up of 'ready made scenarios' that make this ready to go out of the box. I am more of a fan of the 'adventure that showcases the system' as time goes on and these are good examples of that.

Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle

Friends of the blog Swan and Raven Studio are hosting the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid - I grabbed my copy and am facing the same challenge as with every itch.io bundle - how to even get your arms around the treasures within? By my count 203 items from 114 creators - it is a lot for $15.

I already looked at the Hello/Goodbye zine itself - you can read that review here. Trying to get my arms around 'what is even here' I come back to my classic approach to all these bundles - are there at least a few things in here to justify picking it up and then everything else is bonus, gems to be slowly revealed over time.

I draw on the wisdom of crowds somewhat here - the thinks I have seen others rave about as reasons to pick this up are Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying, Rosewood Abbey, Arkyvr and DNGN + DRGN. If you want back up for those recommendations you can see the reviews of others here:
Playful Void reads Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast
LunarShadow Designs gives a quick review of Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying
Burn After Running reviews Rosewood Abbey
Rob Wieland reviews Arkyvr on Enworld
Deathtrap Dungeon reviews DNGN

Ones that I have experience with - mostly from the local crowd here in Vienna -

Worldbreaker by CrowberryCake - the serpent Jörmungandr grows, waters rise, villages vanish and the players are those who remain. A one-page of mechanics plus bonus second page bestiary and third page of character sheets. Characters have eleven stats split into two groups (pillars and virtues) with dice assigned to them - combine two for your roll to resolve challenges. Failures in a roll advance the 13-step 'clock' of serpent growth until the world is wholly taken over - complete your goals before that. A whole system with plenty of flexibility to run different things, lots packed into three pages.

GREEN CORRIDOR - MixUpPixels - players are agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aimiung to rebuild the world one ecolocial pathway at a time. A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, agents have three stats, challenges are resolved by roll under system. Designed to be played with a hex-map where the players travel, face down challenges and to create 'green corridors' across it. Pithy and stripped down, a good seed that lends itself to inspiring a GM to pick up and run with it.

M is for Muscle - Wasbart - a 4-page game where a group of enormously bulky giants must drop their adopted 5-year old off at day-care in a world was made for puny weak people. Grapple the world with your squeeze, think or feel muscles with d6, d8 or d12 assigned. Take on challenges with a roll-over system and chance inflating your muscles to bump your die to a d20 or fail and deflate to d4. A page of tables at the back provides sample challenges for the gang to encounter on the way to kindergarten drop-off. Looks good for quick one-shots, a great beer-and-pretzels game.

Rockpool by Jubal Barca - is a "tiny RPG about tiny Rockpool creatures" with their own aims in the bounded, busy world of a rockpool. Twelve pages gives you a page to set your aims, two to build your character with their three stats of Tidefast, Shelltwirled and Spinethrown, two pages of 'occurences', five pages of bestiary, a half page of things to find in the rockpool and some flavour text to close. Self-contained and a distinct vibe of striving to achieve small goals in a world in flux.

Also throwing in Just Make Shit - Diogo Nogueira - a 13-point manifesto and guind on getting things done and making the things you want to make. Useful.

Honorable mention to:
Songbirds an eldritch fantasy game.
The Lyric Game Manifesto-Essay on "Why you should make a lyric game"
The Obligatory Fishing Minigame is a system agnostic Tabletop RPG about going fishing!
Begin Transmission - A planet exploration letter-writing game for 1-2 players
Galaxy Black - Space Fantasy Adventure in the collapsing universe
Sprouts is a family-friendly game of hand-drawn creatures traveling across real-life terrain.
Tea & Toadstools: a solo GM-less journaling game in which you play as a hedgehog in a twill vest who just wants to be left in peace!

All of which just scratch the surface of this bundle but I hope provides confidence that there is enough in here to justify the price - and lots more to provide future pleasant surprises.

Actual Play: Waking of Willoughby Hall

tl;dr: lessons learned from bringing a good adventure to a bad open table.

I did a capsule review of Waking of Willoughby Hall a while back, noting I got good use out of this interesting haunted house - but while the adventure was great as an input to the session, the session itself annoyed me and I am going to try and unpack that.

I ran Willoughby Hall for one of the 'off week' sessions of my dual-mode hex-crawl. This meant I had a start point tavern, village, campaign etc. that I was dropping an open table of gamers into for a one shot. This was my first live-fire test of this but subsequent successful uses of the same model (for Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter) showed this frame for a session works.

System was 5e, since this is what the local open tables run so I doubled all the hp listed for the monsters and NPCs and otherwise used the 'HD = roll bonus' rule of thumb. Immunities and special abilities remained as written.

Session Recap

I got the usual pot pourri of races/classes.
Human Warlock (apparently a farmer)
Dhampire Illrigger (apparently a scholar)
Elf Rogue (apparently a sailor)
Yuan-ti Wizard (apparently a snake trader)
Leonin Barbarian (appears as they are)
Goblin Artificer (appears as they are)

I slotted the adventure in under a request to go investigate a commotion down near the outlying fields; there they found the flattened shrine with missing bell tower and a cowering attendant who pointed them towards the abandoned manor. They arrived to see the Bonebreaker Tom peering in the windows and shouting for his lost goose, Mildred.

The party decided to dash in past the giant to get in - I was pleasantly surprised at their biting on the hook as intended rather than fight or bamboozle the giant. One PC did decide to try and engage the giant, I warned them subtly, then told them it was death to face this monster and yet they persisted. Flexing a number of defensive tricks let them dodge-and-weave one round while Bonebreaker Tom tried to stomp them flat and everyone else got to fling themselves through various doors and windows into the Sitting Room or the Great Hall. The 'distractor' managed to dive in after them and we were inside the house.

After a brief pause to search the sitting room and find the snuffbox they regrouped in the Great Hall and headed upstairs. They eplored the western rooms - poking about the oddments in the Museum and encountering the NPC adventurers at a distance. The NPCs ducked away and the players progressed. They moved on to the gallery and ran into Bonebreaker Tom again - at this point the Death Knight woke and they ended up in a strung out fight between the Death Knight in the Museum and trying to negotiate with Bonebreaker Tom on the balcony. They defeated the Death Knight and its skeletons - meanwhile promising to fetch Mildred for Bonebreaker Tom. From here the party splintered and things got a bit slow - people headed off to different floors, interacted with different things and were poking around all over the place.

Enough seals were broken by now to shift the hall to 'Restless' and they were properly spooked. They managed to corner Mildred the Goose after a lot of running around, and 'nova-ed' their way out of fighting the taxidermied owl-bear with some ability that tosses something into the feywild. They faced down the NPCs and convinced them to try and run for it - it did not end well for the NPCs as the players tipped off Bonebreaker Tom who outpaced the NPCs and messily dealt with them.

Eventually, the Death-Knight reconstituting and coming after them got them to return Mildred the Goose to Bonebreaker Tom and then fleeing the manor, much of the ground floor left un-surveyed.

DM notes

The players came to it with the 5e assumption of all combat is survivably through their suite of abilities - and so the 'plot forcer' of Bonebreaker Tom needed a lot more pushing from me to emphasise that they could not just fight them, nor hope to stand against them.

I missed a trick with counting a seal broken every time Bonebreaker Tom flails the hall with the bell - that would have accelerated things.

The adventure gave me a good template that let me pull an enjoyable game out of the whole thing. Despite being statted and designed for OSR, it survives contact with 5e the system pretty well; if I had more motivation I might have tried to make it a 'teach the old school ways' session but I decided just to see how it would get approached by relatively frequent 5e players doing their usual thing.

As the open table filled up, the first block of sign-ups were all people who had expended my goodwill with them previously and up to the evening before I was strongly contemplating just yanking the table. Three were folk that ground my gears, one I had no problems with but only when the last two joined did I figure the nonsense was dilute enough that I was happy to run. I had tried to catch the old school vibe by pitching the game as 'think hobbit or lord of the rings' and two players rocked up with a yuan-ti abomination and a dhampire illrigger. I sat to table with very low expectations, I should have cancelled.

I run these open tables to decompress after my work week so a session like this where I leave frustrated is too costly a use of my limited free time. I am aware that others similarly do not get to play that often so TPKs have a high opportunitiy cost. On a similar vein when I get a table of players who are just going to argue with me if things are run to their expectations, it is not worth the effort of having the fight to uphold the principle of the thing - because while I am arguing with those folks, everyone else is having their session frittered away.

I took other old school adventures - Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter - to newer groups of players and to other of the 5e players they leaned into the old-school style a bit more, maybe did not poke and pry at things like real old-school OD&D folk might have but they treated hazards as hazardous. Here we had a table steeped in the 5e tradition of 'I can fight my way through anything' and it showed in splitting up, charging into threats alone which slowed things down as I had to juggle multiple people tripping things at the same time and then decide to either run through a time-consuming proper consequences version of what could happen or skip the consequences of some of it to try and keep the table as a whole rolling.

Waking of Willoughby Hall was fun to run despite all that; the lesson learned to me was trust my gut and just pull the session when I see sign-ups I know will be annoying to deal with.

Edit: as I saw the question posed elsewhere - did the players have fun? They said they did at close of the session.

Review + Actual Play: Winters Daughter

tl:dr; fun old school dungeon with a romance-story core, solid recommend.

Attronarch was selling off some adventures and I seized the opportunity - got a bunch of the OSE classics - completely forgetting I had a copy of Winters Daughter on the way as part of my Dolmenwood order. All to the good, I will probably pass on my extra copy as a raffle prize or the like.

I thought I would run it against my Friday night open tables on the 'off weeks' of my dual mode game. This was an experiment on how old school adventures survive contact with 5e players - in short pretty darn well, would solidly recommend.

So what do you actually get in the book?

Review: Hello // Goodbye

tl:dr; an arty zine with a range of articles, likely something inspirational for any gamer.

The founder of the local DM Supergroup, also founder of Swan and Raven Studio, a pal, set this up as a fund-raiser for legal aid in Virginia. Folk getting snatched off the streets and disappeared is some bullshit. I have been detained by unaccountable national security forces on a fair few occasions so I am perfectly happy to support someone who shines a light and fishes for people who get vanished in the hope that noone cares enough to see due process done.

The zine itself - Hello/Goodbye is 'An Ekphrastic Collage Tabletop Roleplaying Anthology Zine' - and to answer the immediate question I have gotten by folk I have shown it to - "Ekphrasis is a Greek term meaning "description", and ekphrastic writing is a vivid, creative, written description and response to a work of visual art" to quote the introduction.

This zine is an interesting beast because it has a different 'recruiting angle' that what I typically see out there - the closest I guess would be an itch.io charity jam aligned to disaster relief or the like where you get a grab bag of absolutely all sorts. Typically when things get bound within covers there is a tighter systems restriction - all old school D&D or Mork Borg or Troika! or what have you. The common thread here are the art pieces provided by the organiser and that personal connection - which gives a much broader range of contributions within than you might otherwise typically find.

descriptor, artist

First impression - hot pink and yellow makes it stand out on your shelf! The art within is mostly collage work by the author and as per the concept of the zine, the various articles are responses to or inspired by those pieces.

So what is all this stuff you get in this zine?

Capsule Reviews #8: Recent Old School Adventures

Attronarch was selling off some adventures and I seized the opportunity - got a bunch of the OSE classic and thought I would run them against my Friday night open tables on the 'off weeks' of my dual mode game. This was an experiment on how old school adventures survive contact with 5e players - I also had Waking of Willoughby Hall on my shelves so threw that in too.

The three adventures run through so far are:
Waking of Willoughby Hall (for Knave)
Winters Daughter (for OSE)
The Hole in the Oak (for OSE)

Overall, all of these were pretty easy to use at table and supported a good session.

So what do you actually get in these?

Review: Roguelike Megadungeon

tl:dr; a neat dungeon creation toolbox driven by a fun buckets-of-dice-drop method

I got an early access copy of this grace of the author and I liked what I saw. At time of writing it is now live for itchfunding during Zine Month '25.

Art by Roque Romero

This is a really neat toolkit for creating dungeons rapidly - I have always been a fan of dice drop methods but giving that and an alternative? *chefs kiss* I had no idea what to expect cracking the pdf but then as I scrolled through each section it was 'oh, thats a good idea', 'oh I like that' and each new section was a further 'ah-ha!' As soon as I finished my quick skim, I was keen to carve out time, chew through it and give the methods within it a shot.

Review: Goblin Mail

tl:dr; neat troika zine about a chaotic goblin post office - a short-ish kafka-esque run-around, drops nicely into settings or adventures.

Backed on the Kickstarter - had a surprisingly chunky feeling 40 page zine turn up. Art by Evlyn Moreau, text by Sofia Ramos, layout by Luna P. I got great mileage out of the Kobolds Art Exibition (play log part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, part VII and part VIII) and hope this replicated that 'goblinoids at work' model.

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

First impression - artwork is as ever a joy. This is all statted up for Troika / Fighting Fantasy but is fairly system neutral until you get to the NPC states in the Appendix. A bit of work calibrating off whatever a goblin stats as in your system of choice will make this useable for whatever you care to run.

In the zine you have three sections really with the central one being split into four.
First you have 8 pages of set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place
Next you have the largest part with 20 pages covering the four floors of the post office
Lastly you have a 12 page Appendix with a bunch of useful miscellany

Running through this chunk by chunk:

STarting with the set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place. The mission is always the same 'get your package back from the clutches of the goblin post office' but what the package is and who you are doing this for can vary. We get six example patrons in the intro then the rest is, in no particular order, what the goblins will sell you, what they think their workflow is and then what you will probably have to do to track down your missing package. These are really helpful for setting up the place and knowing what will be happening where as your players get there. We also get the general table for 'goblin mien' once you enter any room and the map of the whole place. Each level has two to three locations within it.

The floor guides - mostly room descriptions take up most of the zine. Going floor by floor we get
First Floor - reception, customer 'service' and delivery/triage area.
Basement - treadmill triage and customs desk.
Second Floor - first break room, letters room, rented room
Third Floor - second break room, boss' office, special storage room and the roof

Each of these locations comes with some flavourful illustrations and random tables of things you can find there. Given the likelihood you may traipse over and back through a few of these more than once trying to make sense of the goblins chaos, these are good tools to have to refresh locations on a repeat encounter. I found it suffered a little by not having a pithy one-liner of what each room was at the top of each entry - when flipping over and back between rooms during play, along with juggling the chaos of a table, that killer one-liner of what the impression of the place is was buried in the text sometimes.

In this section there are no stats, just numbers of things encountered at most. It is pretty clear how things connect, especially with the whole site map in the intro, so it all feels pretty playable straight out of the book. It bears careful reading at least once to spot where all the bits and bobs can be found - one person is missing a thing and it is mentioned in the description of another place but if you were skimming you could miss it and be confused.

The Appendix contains the Labyrinth, generators for packages, clients and goblins and finally a bestiary/stats for everyone to be found in the post office. When I took this to table they ended up arguing with everything so never got in any actual blade-drawn fights - which meant I was not going for the nice little mien tables attached to each of the entries. The random package generator tables got a work-out, especially when players got sticky-fingered while searching for the package themselves.

All in all this went over well at the table when I played through it - they got into the spirit of things and argued with the goblins as opposed to getting violent and killing everything. There is a ton of stuff packed in here, worth marking up with sticky-tags or something for the random patron table and the page with all the maps as you will end up flipping over and back to those a lot. A neat addition to the shelf and potentially re-useable in-game if the players return to the post office or encounter another one elsewhere.

I took it to a 5e table, that worked fine despite it being statted for Troika.

For another view, see Playful Void.

Review: Feather, Beak + Bone and Claw Atlas

tl:dr; awesome map-labelling game, build a city together, perfect for a collaborative session zero.

So I got Feather, Beak + Bone and the Claw Atlas expansion as part of the 'Details of our Escape' Kickstarter. I picked them up as add-ons but it can also be found on itch.io. I recall it seeing it crop up with people saying "hey yeah this is cool" a fair few times and particularly talking about map making so I thought "sounds like my kind of thing". A slimmer pamphlet than I was expecting, definitely in the zine class of game, really punchy, with nice presentation.

Cover by Austin Breed

So all told this is a nice straightforward game with the usual zine high content to weight ratio in here. Fully self-contained with good line art that gets the whole feel across. Good stuff.

It comes bundled with three blank maps and you get another example of the map inside the front and back covers of the book - so strictly five blanks of the map come with it and then you could photocopy for further versions.

Actual Test: Oldskull Adventure Generator

tl;dr: a great big adventure generator that gives you enough for even wild player side-tracks.

This came into my hands through a bundle of tons of Oldskull stuff from Kent David Kelly. They sure are prolific, full marks for that - 30 odd files came in the bundle and it was just a selection. I found myself running out of published adventures for my Friday night Brancalonia one-shots so I thought I would take the Adventure Generator for a spin and see if it served.

First, this thing is a beast - 702 pages - and a self-declared 'mega-supplement' to serve as the 'Rosetta stone of the Castle Oldskull system' - a 'massive unified imagination engine' with a workflow of 16 steps spread over 10 chapters. There is a fair bit of background and philosophy of adventure creation in there but I focused on just generating adventure seeds for now.

This 'imagination engine' comprises many, many random tables within a 16 step workflow:
[1] Adventure Title Creation
[2] The Framing Event
[3] The Benefactor
[4] The Promised Reward
[5] The Adventure Journey
[6] The Adventure Destination
[7] The Chaotic Descriptor Tool
[8] The Quest Designer
[9] The Secondary Quest Designer
[10] The Complication Generator
[11] The Ally Creator
[12] Tasks Before Departure
[13] The Abstract Weather Tool
[14] The Villain Generator
[15] The Unexpected Adversary Tool
[16] The Monster Selection Tool

The first block of steps are pretty quick - varying between d1000 and d100 you roll up the adventure title for inspiration then the situation, person providing the hook and the reward for getting involved. Nice and neat. I cam up with 'Tomb of the Screaming Skull' as our title where the Elder Sign is our inciting vent, the benefactor is a Reborn Marchioness (a famed one) and the prize at the end is an illusionist henchman. Interesting! I can work with this, let us proceed.

The next block of things addresses the journey required to resolve things - we roll up that our overall environment is Temperate Forest, that the destination itself comprises echo chambers and wind tunnels and then things get a bit more complex. We roll up a number of locations cross referencing the Temperate Forest table then a number of 'descriptors' on the Chaotic Descriptor Table to get a spin on each of these locations. These should all then be dropped into a 3x3 grid around the target. I ended up with about an equal three way split between Redwoods, other 'normal' forests and 'weird' forests.

After this I got a quest of 'poison a [person/critter/faction] at [place]' and some further rolls got me a fighter in a corrupted forest - a location that fit well. The fighter was qualified as a 'battler/skull-crusher' which was a really helpful little detail to make them pop.

The Secondary Quest designer was another four rolls getting me a 'compete in a tournament/game of honor', 'repair a bridge/door', 'decipher an inscription' and 'find a hidden locale/dungeon level'. I patched these into the locations where they seemed to fit - bridge repair at the 'Terrifying Brushwood Fall', tournament at the 'thundering copse'.

The Complication Generator gave me three more twists - abduction of a PC, fog getting people lost and a race against time. Given this was for a one shot I was hesitant to further complicate the session with these but held the fog in reserve as something to do if things were moving too rapidly.

Next the Ally Creator turned out to be some Lower level Illustionists - which harmonised nicely with the illusionist henchman reward - perhaps they came along on the quest too?

Next Tasks Before Departure gave me five elements - waiting for an astral event, listening to a survivors account, researching the locale, researching the journey and acquiring a sidequest to slay a monster. This was another element I was wary off given the one-shot nature of the session I was planning - however it turned out to be really handy because when the table derailed and struck out for the distant horizons of side-tangents. All these secondary activities provided ample landing zone for all sorts of shenanigans to reconnect back to the main adventure.

The Abstract Weather Tool came up with a nice 'clear, wind in their favour' which was a minor boon. Other weather conditions could definitely change the tone and it is often something I forget to properly bring into play on my own.

The Villain Generator rolled up a Thief, Lock-breaker, motivated by vengeance for a slain sibling, suffering from memory gaps and fond of working through blights and plagues. This came a little late in the process for me - I already had a decent view of what was going on with the skull-crusher fighter in his forest lair needing to get poisoned - so this villain became more of a background villain not an active player. It was good to have them though, as knowing them and thus the flavour of their minions became handy during the Great Derailing.

The Unexpected Adversary rolled up a 'Benefactors Envious Disciple' - obviously another illusionist which plugged in nicely to what we had already.

Finally the Monster Selection Tool got me some Goblins and Beastmen so I split them up into a relatively hapless bunch of goblin foresters working the Redwoods, territorial beastmen in the rest of the forests. A bunch of the location qualifiers from the Chaotic Descriptor tool implied the presence of celestials so I added them as a third group.

Once all this was rolled up I shoved the pieces around a bit and re-wrote it into
* A renowned bard, the Marchioness - killed by Skullcrusher, now reborn
* They want you to go to a corrupted forest and poison the screaming skull with holy water
* They have a troupe of illusionists who can support you now, and one might stay with you after as a reward
* Skullcrusher lairs in echoing wind tunnels, trust nothing you hear there
* Skullcrusher is the primary minion of the Gatebreaker - a deranged thief, driven mad by grief for their slain sibling, now they spread blights in vengeance and kill by breaking in with plague-ridden knives
* One of the Marchioness disciples, an illusionist, is envious the party has been sought for assistance and seeks to see them fail
* The woods are full of goblins and beastmen

Lots of the elements of preparation for the journey and secondary quests were initially set aside and only came into play when the party set off for the horizons. The whole illusionist ally and then potential rival thing never came off because the players left them at home when they set out on the quest. The Gatebreaker was never seen but his minion network was stumbled over then sought out and I was able to ad-lib them effectively knowing who they were working for.

All told, what initially seemed like way too much stuff with multiple independent threads actually turned out to be handy at an open table session where they took an age before engaging with the wilderness part of the journey. A chunky system to work through but gives you a wealth of stuff - even if not all of it will come into play, it was good to have it to hand.

Tribute to Collaborative Dungeon Creation

tl;dr: trying to recall a genius blogpost on collaborative dungeon creation as 'forces of nature'

This is an attempt to replicate a genius blogpost I found years ago and has eluded me since. Hopefully the original author will rock up and go 'hey, thats my idea' so I can finally link it. In the absence, let me tell you a tale of a genius idea, gather round the campfire comrades... The inestimable DIY & Dragons questioned if it might be Tom Dowlers "How to Host A Dungeon" - and from that tip I found the post I was thinking off - Dyson Logos doing a test of How to Host a Dungeon. So I am actually mis-remembering this as a multi-player experience which perhaps could be another way to do it. Anyway, all that follows was written before I found this out, please view it in that light.

Fado, fado, there was an idea that if you were a DM with access to multiple pools of players, you could use some of them to set situations that would then serve as challenges for others.

The original post addressed dungeons but in the hope of appeasing Joesky's ghost I am going to generalise it a bit to make it a tool for any setting.

So breaking that down into a procedure:
1. Kick it off by picking a base location type - a temple, dungeon, cavern, etc. Sketch out some part of that to get things started.
2. Everyone around the table then chooses to act as a force that has altered the space over time - dwarven miners, burrowing dragons, lava flows, a wizard (there is always a wizard).
3. Go around the table adding to or modifying the base location in a way that matches thematically to that force.
4. Repeat #3 until you have a sufficiently large or interesting location

Review: Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit

tl:dr; a shiny new iteration of the go-to urban generator for Suburbs, Buildings, Guilds, Foes, Dungeons and Quests.

Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit by Gorgzu Games is the current iteration of a toolkit I have been gleefully using for years - in its first iteration as it was released in parts on the Lizard Man Diaries blog to create cities for my Lizard Kingdoms campaign and it has remained my go-to whenever I want to get granular and creative in an urban environment. Books like World Without Number give you great high level stuff but Infinigrad is the one that takes you down through the suburbs to the room by room.

Conceptually, I belive this sprang from the authors desire to have a toolkit that would support random generation of episodic weird fantasy heists or cyberpunk style 'runs' - each session would see a newly diced up location in the infinite city complete with atmosphere and opposition and off the players would go. What it is now is a hugely detailed set of urban location generators from the suburb scale down to the people and things in the rooms which can be deployed to support any urban setting from fantasy to far future.

The book itself is, to my mind, a solid improvement in useability on older versions, cleaner text layout, easier to read and same great content expanded in useful places. The art through is AI, by "the Daemon Midjourney", as has been the Authors style for years. This may or may not sit well with you but for the vibes of Infinigrad it works as a dreamy, twisted place where people *do* have the wrong number of fingers and generally look twisted, warped and uncanny.

The DriveThru package also includes a bunch of HTML generators - Building Stocker, Guild Dog Generator, Job Generator, Suburb Generator, Suburb Street Stocker and Universal Stocker - which you can just click-to-use instead of rolling dice to look things up. I think I will be sticking with dice on the table and the pdf but these are a nice quality of life inclusion for those who want them.

Review: Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya

tl:dr; evocative 25 room dungeon packed with factions, puzzles and threats set in a fantasy world centred on Southeast Asia.

This comes straight off the internet - I spotted Munkao had dropped this new adventure - Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya - and better yet was doing a launch sale and I'm not so proud to deny I slammed that 'Add to Cart' button as quick as I could. This is the launch adventure for the Kala Mandala setting - a meditating abbot in grave danger and needing rescue.

This is a good old zine - 15 pages that looks like I could be a 32 page booklet - with the clean layout style and wonderful drawings that have always characterised Munkao's works. What you get is a big site - 25 rooms - and an intriguing heist/rescue.