Doing a Cool Move
My roommate ty asks an important question of each game he plays. The question first emerged, I believe, during hours-long sessions of mid- to heavy-weight board games (Oath, Twilight Imperium, the big crunchy League of Legends board game, several unusual David Sirlin titles), many of which were a struggle in one way or another. The question is this:
“How hard is it to do a cool move in this game?”
Let’s consider this question in some common games:
- In chess—a game I am not at all an expert in, but have spent a lot of time watching the chess hustlers play in Union Square—a “cool move” is mostly about making your opponent miss a key observation. Chess players start to lose when they fail to notice an important play, often many moves in advance. They blunder a knight, accidentally land in check out of nowhere, or make suboptimal trades. Thus, a player’s cool move is to see this possibility in advance, slip past their opponent, and pounce on the weakness. Very cool.
- In tag, a cool move is about physically moving. You duck or twist past your friend who’s it, you make a daring leap across the playground stucture, you make some mad sprint over long distance to escape. It’s cool because you’re physically doing it. Awesome.
- In poker, a game I also don’t know very much about (but I have been reading Frank Lantz’s book, which often discusses poker), a cool move is always about bluffing. It’s about fooling and deceiving your opponents, one way or another, to get them to buy into your con. You read them, you hook them and reel them in, and then you take their money. So exciting and compelling there’s a whole James Bond climax that’s just Bond and Mads Mikkelsen playing poker, both of whom make some very cool moves.
- In Titanfall 2, a cool move is about precise timing, reflexes, 3D spatial maneuvering, and understanding how to exploit a videogame’s character controller. You bunnyhop, wall-run into a double jump, achieve max speed, then whip around two-hundred-and-seventy degrees with the grappling hook and land a cross-map sniper rifle headshot, all in mere seconds. It’s difficult to master, but beginners start trying cool moves very quickly, and learn the good ones as they play.
- In a Dark Souls speedrun, a cool move is about extreme manual dexterity and combat mastery intermixed with exploiting glitches and quirks in the game, plus a total understanding of the environments and levels design. Every speedrun gets strange quickly, but runners make bizarre and fascinating moves as they play. Jumping off a would-be lethal cliff to survive, glitch the camera at an impossible angle to convince the game you’re dead, and thus clip through boss gates? Very cool.
For a move in a game to be cool, it has to be unexpected or unpredictable in some way—surprise is an important element of a cool move. Whoa! Wild! Check it out! I exclaim to my group chat as I post the latest trickshot compilation. We love to be surprised and amazed by what we can do in a game.
A cool move is also powerful. A cool move demonstrates mastery, understanding, or talent, even on the small scale. A cool move to a total beginner is different than a cool move made by a highly experienced player—what starts as cool becomes normal, and the cool horizon expands further. When you start playing fighting games, a quarter-turn seems like some impossible task; for players climbing the ladder, the question stops being if you can do the move but rather when you deploy each of your many cool moves (including the humble quarter-turn).
Fresh and unexpected action combined with a high degree of skill together demand an open playing field, a relatively broad state space. For every cool move, there needs to be a larger field of uncool moves: regular moves, boring moves, average moves. Perhaps to a new player, every move of the experienced player might look cool, but for the experienced players there always needs to be that horizon to chase, new levels of unexpected prowess to seek.
Many games tighten this horizon in order to raise the floor. When I play, say, Assassin’s Creed, my basic attacks turn into long, flashily-animated combo chains as my dude rips through the mobs, all just by me pressing X, X, X over and over again. It looks cool, sure, but it doesn’t feel cool. I know anybody who plays Assassin’s Creed could make the same moves, since it takes next to no talent. That level of “guaranteed cool” often reduces skill ceilings as well: it just doesn’t have much depth to its combat, movement, or stealth, because the systems aren’t very open-ended. The developers need players to hit a minimum “threshold of cool” no matter what, so the field must be constrained.
When you play, say, Dark Souls—a videogame with superficially similar combat to Assassin’s Creed, but in truth far complex and more satisfying—you learn all the mistakes you make as you play. Same goes for Titanfall, or chess, or most other games with this freedom and depth. When you play the latest open-world action-adventure AAA map game, you learn primarily only how few mistakes are even possible. Cool moves demand the existence of uncool moves, and designers often seem eager to remove every possible uncool move.
Many crunchier systemic games fall into a related problem, which is having a single obvious move you should use every time, the optimal choice in every case. You run into this in roguelikes or certain deckbuilders: a flush deck in Balatro is a lot of fun the first few times, but it gets old quick. You can deliberately avoid flushes and still succeed, sure, but having such an obvious, easily-repeated, usually-optimal move gets stale quick.
Tabletop RPGs often run afoul of this issue. If I play a rogue, in say, Dungeons & Dragons 5e, I should try to land my bonus damage sneak attack every turn. Rogues don’t get any per-day abilities (an intriguing design choice that I support, for what it’s worth), so it’s just sneak attack, sneak attack, sneak attack. This gets old fast, and Wizards of the Coast knows it—one of the (good!) changes made in 5.5e was to, at high levels, give rogues alternative options for sneak attack: they reduce the damage total, but allow tripping attacks, blinding attacks, and so on. This helps rogues stay less bored, in theory, because now they have more to do.
You can see this philosophy pushed to its outer limits in something like Pathfinder. Pathfinder has innumerable options available to its players—ancestry, background, class, spells, pets, feats of a hundred varieties, dozens of weapon tags, and so on. More options, more choices, more cool moves, right? Surely, Pathfinder players must always feel like they’re doing more cool moves than their less-optionful compatriots at other tables, right? More, more, more?
In a word: no. This blind maximalism seems obviously wrong to me.
From my perspective, there are two basic ways to do a cool move in a tabletop RPG, and the difference hinges on Markus Montola’s third rule of roleplaying, the Character Rule. To recap, Montola describes roleplaying as following three rules: the World Rule, the Power Rule, and the Character Rule. They state, respectively:
Role-playing is an interactive process of defining and re-defining the state, properties and contents of an imaginary game world.
The power to define the game world is allocated to participants of the game. The participants recognize the existence of this power hierarchy.
Player-participants define the game world through personified character constructs, conforming to the state, properties and contents of the game world.
In brief, roleplaying is the act of imagining a world and how it changes, together with your friends, through only the characters you play in that world. World, power, character.
If you read the histories (Playing at the World and Shared Fantasy, mainly) most of the early wargamers that played early RPGs and proto-RPGs followed these rules to a greater or lesser extent. Most tables had one or more referees in charge of the world, and players had one character they controlled; outside of their characters, players couldn’t affect the world. Classic D&D.
This is still the model for most RPG tables, and many (most?) rulebooks simply assume it to be the case. By Montola’s three rules, much of what these players do at the table is roleplaying—except for, of course, the jokes, Cheetos, rules arguments, chatting, and so on. But when they play, these players define a world, together, through their characters.
But! at many tables and according to many rulesets, you often break this third rule, the Character Rule. That is, players regularly define the world outside their characters. In Blades in the Dark, this looks like a player (rather than a character) spending Stress points to declare a flashback—that there’s a gun under the table, or that the window was left unlocked, or even that the night watchman and the gentleman’s valet are secretly in love and having an affair. That particular diegetic Blades scoundrel didn’t do anything to trigger that Stress spend: it occurs purely at the player level.
In Wanderhome, this gets pushed further, with players writing all of the world. Wanderhome players often take inspiration and suggestion from their characters, but are never confined in their ability to affect the imaginary world by what their character can do. These rulesets often lean towards a more “storytelling” sort of model, at the far end of which lie collaborative writing exercises (which range from “Hey, let’s dream up a new short story collection together” to something like Microscope)—and improv.
By Montola’s definitions, improv is not roleplaying because improv actors often define the world outside the limits of what their characters can do. If we’re doing a scene and I say “Boy, it’s cold in here,” and you say “What did you expect, living at McMurdo Research Station?” now we, as characters, are in Antarctica. By contrast, if we’re playing Mothership and I say “Boy, it’s cold in here,” and you mention McMurdo, the Warden would very likely say “No, actually, it’s because you’re on the deserted ice moon Galicon-9-3, inhabited by heatsucking slugs.” Improv actors define their world through dialogue, the words the actors say, but the characters themselves are not diegetically changing the world.
Collaborative writing likewise does not qualify as roleplaying for much the same reason. Authors possess tremendous ability to alter the world outside the characters they write, and do so more or less constantly.
Despite Montola’s definitions (if you can imagine), many RPG books and tables embrace these methods. Accordingly, many people who claim to be playing a tabletop roleplaying game are, in fact, doing some other activity, at least some of the time. You can imagine this as a simple little scale: Microscope defaults to being out-of-character and dips into scenes only on occasion (mostly not roleplaying), while Blades usually follows the Character Rule and only steps out of the characters for a few beats at a time, like when you spend Stress (mostly roleplaying).
At all tables, much of what constitutes “a session” is not roleplaying. Those Cheetos, jokes, scheduling arguments, rules arguments, safety tool invocations, smoke breaks, and so on—all are not roleplaying. Even just when your GM asks you “Hey, you’re from the Novan Empire, right? Do you think your family has land in the Western Themes?” and you say “Yeah, probably, my background says I’m from Skiathos, so I think that makes sense”—in that moment, as you step outside your character to change the world, you stop roleplaying.
Thus, we return to doing a cool move. In these more collaborative, “writers’ room”-style games, a cool move is rarely something that your character does. Declaring your guy in Masks to be the most awesome forcefield-invincibility-triple-multiclass badass doesn’t mean very much because someone else can just say “Yeah, Dr. Deltron’s laser fries you anyway, and your armor begins to peel away, revealing your old childhood scars.” That ability to override the imaginary world via authorial fiat makes powers and features mostly useless from a goal-achievement perspective. Nearly all RPG rulesets about collaborative storytelling thus are not about solving problems in the world, and so the cool move must change.
Because the goal in these collaborative storytelling games is not “To win” (slay the dragon, solve the mystery, etc.) but rather “To tell an engaging and meaningful story, together,” a cool move is much more about how it contributes to the story, or the world, or whatever else you care to write about together. The cool move in Microscope might well be to say “Oh, wait, what if each of the psionic cyborgs had like, an astral umbilical cord situation, and sometimes those cords got cut and the cyborgs were severed from the Hive Mind and became independent? But it was like, an existential crisis each time?”—a move that solves no problems for the characters in its redefinition (indeed, it probably only creates more), only redefines the world in an exciting way.
Does this meet our former criteria of a cool move—that is, to be unexpected and effective? Yes, I think. If your goal as a table is to tell an engaging story, dreaming up exciting and dramatic narrative elements is both unexpected and effective. If other players guess what you’re about to say, well, that’s much less cool; likewise, if it’s just kind of some long diatribe that doesn’t add anything, that too is rather less than cool. It’s easy to spot a cool move in a collaborative story because we, as humans who consume media, regularly see so many uncool stories.
But let’s consider the other route—the second way to do a cool move in an RPG. In collaborative storytelling, it’s cool to have exciting ideas. In what we might call “strict” Montolan roleplaying, exciting ideas are filtered through a very specific lens: the lens of character. If my idea can’t be enacted through my character, it’s maybe fun to consider but worthless for the purpose of the question at hand. It’s fun to imagine, say, “What if goblins had hot air balloons?” but that idea alone doesn’t solve the problem of your characters needing to climb a tall cliff. In these kinds of strict roleplaying games, the cool move often revolves around coming up with an exciting or clever solution to a problem within the narrow scope of what’s possible for your characters to do.
A cool move in a post-OSR game looks like, say, using the engine block from your party vehicle to run electricity through the toxic oil seeping out of the facility, thus shocking all the techno-goblins inside. Or surveiling the vice president’s wayward child for scandalous kompromat to use as leverage in gaining access to a CIA field base. Or even just jamming a pair of sabers through the handles of a door to hold off the Imperial soldiers trying to break in. Whatever. The point is, a cool move involves using the in-world resources and options available to the characters in an unexpected, powerful way. The options available to characters and the options available to the players are, for the most part, one and the same.
This brings us to the question of rules. Earlier, I mentioned state spaces, the field of possible game states within a rules system. Are these various cool moves “in the rules?” On paper, no: most OSR and post-OSR rulesets are quite spare and lightweight, with only a few (if any) powers, abilities, or features available to player characters. But in practice, these moves do fall in the rules, because, well, it’s not like using a car battery to electrocute goblins is cheating. These odd sort of rules-outside-the-rules are a result of the different frames of play in an RPG. Old-school-ish play usually relies far more heavily on the rules of the diegetic frame—the rules of the imaginary world—rather than endogenous rules of the written ruleset. Car batteries, the conductivity of toxic oil, techno-goblins dying from excessive electricity: none of those exist in the endogenous written rules, but all clearly exist in the diegetic.
By emphasizing the diegetic rules over the endogenous, OSR and post-OSR play can get away with minimalism in their written endogenous rulesets, because they just don’t matter that much. (By contrast, this kind of play gets tremendous use out of detailed adventures, especially ones that do the legwork of fleshing out an imaginary world in detail.) The cool moves in a post-OSR game are about exploiting some unexpected—often only implied—element of the imaginary world to achieve a character’s goals. The open-endedness necessary for surprise comes from the near-endless breadth and depth of the simulated world, rather than the vast complexity of the written ruleset. (This is sometimes referred to as “tactical infinity”, but it holds true even outside of tactics.) In these kinds of simulation-heavy games, I do a cool move by employing the features of the imaginary world in clever ways.
Okay, so, two basic kinds of RPGs, two basic kinds of cool moves. Collaborative storytelling games, where cool moves are about enhancing and building the story and world, and world-simulation games, where cool moves are about wielding the contents of that world. Very different kinds of play, very different kinds of cool moves, but we can see a path forward in each.
What about RPGs without many cool moves? I get how to do a cool move in A Land Once Magic or The Vanilla Game, what kind of games make it hard to do a cool move? There are two common answers I see: constrained rulesets and confused rulesets.
Let’s start with the latter. Imagine you’re playing an RPG that, on its face, is about problem-solving—slaying dragons, political scheming, mystery-solving, and so on. You find a secret chest hidden in a wall and crack it open, excited to see what secrets lie within. But then, the rules say something like “Now you decide: what lies within the chest?” and whatever you say, it becomes true. Where we were previously all happily following the Character Rule, suddenly some rule inserts itself and asks you to break it, to step out of character.
As a player, this confuses me. If I’m trying my hardest to win using all the tools available to me—like I would in a post-OSR kind of campaign, or, you know, most other kinds of games—then I should obviously say “The chest contains a +3 sword of dragonslaying!” or “The chest contains signed documents proving the Vice President sold cocaine!” If we’re trying to win, I want to win. But, there’s a strong cultural tendency to avoid such blatantly favorable world-defining. It’s seen as crass, brutish, powergaming; it’s seen as exploitative, somehow.
I’m sure you’ve seen the opposite, too: you’re having fun playing out a collaborative soap opera of melodrama and big emotions, but then suddenly some rules-switch flips, and you step into grid combat. Where before making self-sabotaging decisions was part of the fun, now play becomes all about damage optimization and number-crunching, with poor tactical decisions being heavily penalized. That, too, is confusing.
When I play an RPG (or RPG-like game), I want to know upfront: is this a storytelling kind of game, or a problem-solving kind of game? The rulesets that try to blend both often feel like they pick up the worst of both worlds, demanding players switch between two very different sorts of minds or risk spoiling the whole affair. These overlapping rulesets make it very hard for me to do a cool move: I can no longer trust that my melodramatic self-sabotage won’t shaft us later, nor can I trust that my clever rope-beartrap-soap trap won’t be undone by the suddenly rules conjuring “an unexpected downside, hidden cost, or heavy price” into existence. It’s confusing! Why do we keep releasing these kinds of rulesets? I can’t tell what kind of game we’re trying to play, and that makes it hard to do cool moves!
These kinds of half-storytelling RPGs are but the first kind of RPG I see that makes it hard to do a cool move. The second is what we might call the overly-constrained RPG ruleset. These are the rulesets that insist on every action falling into their written rules system—that the only state space that matters is the state space explicitly defined by the rules. If it isn’t in the endogenous rules, it isn’t allowed.
This was super common in the ’90s and ’00s (and still fairly popular today), where you saw ever-larger lists of skills, items, and options to try to cover every possibility of the imaginary space (an impossible task), like the endless glut of 3.5e splatbooks. These rulesets become a “dictionary” of possible moves: anything outside that dictionary doesn’t exist. I don’t think its coincidental that many of these overly-constrained RPGs emphasize tactical grid combat—far easier to say “this is what you can do” when space is so neatly and rigidly defined.
These constrained rulesets make it difficult to do a cool move because every option must be designed by the book’s writers. Videogames get away with this because they can do far more math in the background, running physics engines and procedural generators and so on—on paper, Diablo and D&D have similar basic rules, but the sheer quantity of math being done to keep Diablo running far outstrips anything a human could do. Things can happen in a videogame that the player doesn’t quite understand and it’s fine; in an RPG, if the players don’t understand how a class feature or spell works, the game screeches to a halt. Practically zero videogames explain the full extent of their internal mechanisms because those mechanisms are so complicated they’d just confuse players.
RPG writers can’t afford to create rules of such complexity. Without players, RPGs do nothing, so an RPG ruleset must be simple to understand. But, all this rules simplicity creates a problem: how do you do a cool moves if the state space of play is very constrained? If the designer must write out every possible move, and the players must be able to read and understand every possible move, where do we get cool moves?
The typical answer for these kinds of traditional rulesets is breadth. They bloat so quickly because in order to maintain momentum, there always need to be new options available to players. If I show up to the table with an official splatbook in hand, ready to play some harebrained new class, for a few sessions, the fact that no other player knows what my character can do makes it seem cool. It’s hard to grapple and comprehend with vast quantities of options, so even simple-but-unknown actions can maintain some of that cool factor.
Eventually, though, this breadth runs out. If feeling cool relies on research, your players will hunt down every option and combination and use it to build ever-more-optimized characters. As a game designer, you must constantly supply new options to stay ahead of the diehard fanatics—who, unfortunately, are also your main market. At the table, this kind of emphasis on character-building transforms play into essentially score-tallying: how well did you build your character? Did you maximize every value, optimize every choice? Did you spend enough time doing research? Sure, you might occasionally stumble upon a cool synergy in your build, but a cool character build does not make for a cool move in play, live, at the table together.
I see both of these—the ruleset that demands all actions stay within the predefined endogenous bounds, and the ruleset that constantly breaks the Character Rule while asking players to problem-solve—all the time. They account for the vast majority of unfun sessions I’ve played, sessions where it felt like I was either being pulled in two directions at once or else utterly locked into a grind. I want to feel cool playing an RPG, and to do that, I need clarity of purpose, and I need freedom. Without these, play loses its spark.
I described two main methods for doing cool moves in an RPG (or RPG-like game): collaboratively storytelling and redefining the world for extra creative drama, and wielding an ironclad imaginary world in clever exploits. Critically, neither a videogame nor a board game can recreate these—both are too constrained, too closed of systems. And yet, because so much of RPG design culture cribs from these other, more popular mediums, I keep seeing designers trying to imitate the closed systems, and it always fails eventually.
So, the next time I sit down to play your game, I’m going to ask you: how hard is it to do a cool move in this game?
Ten Tangible Tips For Editing Your RPG Manuscript
Remove instances of “to be” verbs: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, and been. Instead of “The goblin is dancing,” write “The goblin dances.” In most cases, this also includes the added benefit of changing the passive voice into the active voice. In cases like “The goblin is wet,” instead say “Water drips down the goblin,” or simply “The wet goblin…”
Remove instances of “to have” verbs: have, has, had, and having. Instead of “The guards have the keys,” write “The guards keep the keys on their belts,” or even simply “The guards hold the keys.”
You can probably remove instances of “any,” “every,” and “all.” Instead of “The cursed flame melts all metals near it,” write “The cursed flame melts metal near it.” Instead of “Every day, the townsfolk eat 1d6 rations,” write “Each day, the townsfolk eat 1d6 rations.” Instead of “Whenever the clock strikes twelve…” write “When the clock strikes twelve…” The first case—any and all—are just unnecessary. In the second case, “each” is more precise than “every.” In the third, “when” does the same work as “whenever” with less space.
Along the same lines, avoid using “Anyone who gets…” or “Anyone who does…” Instead of “The explosion burns anyone near the door,” write “The explosion burns those near the door.” In general, those works wonders for these kinds of if/then statements.
End sentences on the strongest, most evocative word. Instead of “A ghoul stands in the yard,” write “In the yard stands a ghoul.” Ghoul is a far more exciting and grabbing word than yard, so put it last. When you can, end your paragraphs on the strongest sentence (which ends on the strongest word).
Conditionals belong in the present tense. Instead of “When the water reaches the ceiling, the glass will break,” write “When the water reaches the ceiling, the glass breaks.” Almost every instance of the word will can be cut from your manuscript, changing the future tense for the present.
Avoid expletive constructions. Instead of “There is a red vulture on the roof,” write “A red vulture sits on the roof.” In general, be careful of there is when it appears.
Important game quantities (enemies, loot, precise distances) are written with numerals, but all other quantities are written out. Instead of “Six orcs attack intruders,” write “6 orcs attack intruders.” Instead of “The village contains about 15 houses,” write “The village contains about fifteen houses.”
You don’t need that bolded keyword: if it’s an important rules term, capitalize it, but otherwise leave it alone. Instead of “The dungeon contains 6 threats,” write “The dungeon contains 6 Threats.” Almost all manuscripts full of bolded words (or words in smallcaps, italics, etc.) are worse for it.
Paragraphs are your friend, as are paragraph breaks. You don’t need fancy parenthetical notation, you don’t need complicated nested bullets, you just need to write sentences. When you need to connect multiple ideas or have too many sentences, put multiple paragraphs together using regular old paragraph breaks.
Bonus tip: use the New York 1d6 for dice values. Instead of “d6 goblins appear,” write “1d6 goblins appear.” As you reach higher multiples of dice, the notation maintains consistency throughout.
If thinking about editing like this inspires fear and dread, I am available for hire as an editor.
What Does a Work Not Need?
Ten years ago, Steven Soderbergh released an unusual cut of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark: he put the entire film in black and white, then removed all the audio and replaced it with Trent Reznor’s soundtrack to The Social Network.
I watched this cut of Raiders for the first time only recently, and it struck me. It’s like watching the most exciting 1940s action movie ever made set to music that sounds like it belongs in Cyberpunk. I’ve seen Raiders before, years ago, and I know the basic plot beats, but it hit me, again and again, how tense and fun and engaging the movie remains even without the detail of spoken words or Williams’ iconic soundtrack. Even the dialogue-heavy scenes, where Dr. Jones talks with the feds or Belloq flirtily captures Marion, are still dramatic and gripping. It was stunning, shocking, to realize I could watch and fall in love with a movie that seemingly lacked so much of what, in other films, felt essential.
Before I watched this Soderbergh cut of Raiders, if you asked me what components made a film, I would’ve listed the usual things: acting, directing, lighting, cinematography, sound, costumes, set design, etc. Now, though, I feel like my third eye has cracked open just a slit, and I can see lots of other elements, things I’d never noticed before until everything else was taken away—blocking, staging, choreography, composition, props, cuts, pans, silhouettes, and more that I lack the film vocabulary to describe.
The next few hours and days were spent googling film terminology and rewatching old “Every Frame a Painting” videos with new eyes. I started to grapple less with Soderbergh’s Raiders cut in its own right and more with the academic-artistic process the film pushed me through. It’s rare for me (perhaps embarassingly) to find a work that really makes me re-evaluate my understanding of a medium, and even rarer to find a work that does that through the process of subtraction. Soderbergh’s cut is, basically, just Raiders. Sure, he removed the colors and solors and tacked on the Reznor soundtrack, but the resulting piece feels like less than the original. In reducing the work—the form, even—down, Soderbergh illuminates all of the artistry in the piece. And, indeed, reveals all the artistry that other films sometimes lack. Do you think you could watch a Marvel flick in black and white with no dialogue and still understand what was happening, let alone enjoy the experience?
In short, by removing many elements I took as necessary, Soderbergh’s cut of Raiders revealed all the depth and meaning I had previously missed. By cutting away elements I typically fixate on, Soderbergh illuminated new dimensions of what was possible.
And now, a small confession:
This post is not about Steven Soderbergh’s cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark. This post is about The Isle.
The Isle is a 2022 tabletop RPG adventure written by Luke Gearing with editing by Jared Sinclair and graphic design by Micah Anderson, published by Spear Witch. Its stats are for The Vanilla Game, but it’s easily converted to other rulesets.
The headline: The Isle completely changed the way I thought about RPG adventures. It completely changed the way I thought about writing in RPGs. It completely changed the way I thought about the work I want to make and the projects I want to release. If I had to point at a single project as the thing that made me most change my views on making RPG books as a craft and medium, it would be The Isle.
As a work, The Isle is an enigma. On the one hand, it’s basically just another dungeon. On the other, it’s unlike any adventure I’ve ever read before. When I reached the last page, alone in my room the night before my session, I literally gasped aloud from shock and surprise. The confusing thing about The Isle, the almost paradoxical nature of it, is that it doesn’t actually do anything new, really. Rather, it just strips out everything I thought was necessary, and the remaining result made me rethink what an adventure could be.
So, what doesn’t The Isle have? Well, for one thing, it doesn’t have an overview. There’s the briefest of introductions, and then it launches straight in; I had no idea what I was in for when I started reading. It doesn’t have illustrations or major graphic design elements; Anderson’s work is sparse and simple, and their cartography is equally minimal. It doesn’t have fancy typography or text effects (Cormorant body text; Neue Haas Grotesk headers; stat blocks and details done in italicized newlines; all in black and white). It doesn’t have sidebars, advice, “how to use” sections, or other explicit author-to-GM asides. And barring that very short introduction, it doesn’t have any text that isn’t a location or description of things in a location.
To put it bluntly, The Isle is basically just a bunch of room descriptions. And yet, reading the book was a continual process of repeatedly asking myself “Why did they [not] do it this way?” thinking about it for a minute, and realizing “Oh, of course.”
Why doesn’t it have an overview? Oh, of course, to make reading the book a process of discovery. I had to read the book to know what was in it so I could run it; I wanted to read the book because I was desperate to know what was on the next page and in the next room.
Why are the rooms in sometimes slightly odd orders on the map? Oh, of course, so that the most impactful, most exciting, most jaw-dropping reveals come last. Whenever I finished a floor, I wanted to go back and read the whole thing again just to pick up all the hints and connections I realized I missed.
Why isn’t there a sliced-up minimap on each page? Oh, of course, because these map files are included so you can print them out next to the book and write all over them. This is a text meant to be used at the table, and it’s vastly easier to just have another page with the map on it.
Why do all these rooms have little preview descriptions as their first lines? Oh, of course, because they’re what you can detect from another room, so when you need to scan through from one room to the next they’re easy to find and read. This is a piece of design tech that, while it requires careful coordination and consistency across the map, makes huge strides in making the dungeon a more connected place.
Why is there no bold text, no keywords, no summaries? Oh, of course, because this is a book to be read and not a reference manual to be skimmed. This is also why, I suspect, the rooms have keyed numbers but not names: if you want to know what’s in a room, you have to read it.
This goes on and on. There are dozens of minor technical choices in the writing, editing, and presentation that depart from the standard of contemporary adventures in favor of a blunter, more direct, more impactful methods.
The Isle was, I think, the first adventure I’ve read where I felt like I actually had—and yet also wanted—to read. If you want to know what the dungeon holds, there’s no other way to find out than to simply read the text and learn. In so many RPG books, the text of the book opens with a pitch (“It’s a cursed vampire’s castle in a haunted land!”) followed by explication of that pitch over the course of dozens or hundreds of pages. Sometimes the keyed locations of an adventure elaborate on that pitch in exciting, unexpected ways, but so often it’s simply more words detailing what you, as a reader and sometimes as a player, basically already knew. That the summary exists at the front encourages readers to skim the main text; it gives writers a sense that their writing won’t be read. The Isle is not like that. It plays its cards close to the chest; if you want to sniff out its secrets, you have to read the words on the page. It’s an adventure that’s impossible to wing your way through without reading it first, but at the same time, after reading the adventure you have everything you need.
And this is without touching on the words themselves, really. The imaginary dungeon described in The Isle is a text in its own right: it has embedded histories, recurring motifs, foreshadowed mysteries, overarching themes, and ideas about the world and human condition it wants to communicate. Dark, horrific, disturbing ideas, often, but ones that shine throughout. Gearing is a veteran RPG writer, and understands better than anyone how to seed key concepts early, hook the reader (and player in), then pay it all off by the end.
One of the most striking moments running the dungeon (after reading the book) was when my players made a realization—a sneaky hidden lore thing—that I myself had not. I was the one narrating the rooms they saw and the creatures and objects within, but I’d missed the secret connection between a couple different areas. As a reader, I had access to more or less all the same information they did as players, moreso even, but I hadn’t made the same realizations. By not revealing its secrets directly, by not explaining itself, The Isle places the GM in the unusual and delightful position of sometimes being more or less equally informed as the players. At the same time, when my players went to execute on that information by exploiting an enemy’s vulnerability they garnered from that lore, I found that the module had already written that vulnerability into the monster’s statblock. Despite not knowing all the secrets of the module as GM, by simply following the text I provided my players with an exciting game.
This is exceptional writing and design. It removes a layer of interpretation, of noise, between the author of the dungeon and the players at the table. Once I realized that I didn’t need to know everything, that I didn’t need to worry about patching holes or filling in gaps, I could simply relax. Gearing’s writing (and Sinclair’s editing) is such that, once I read the book, my work was done. I needed to adjudicate as referee, of course, but I never felt pressured to guide them along some intended story or deliberate outcome. Some adventures feel like they’ll fall apart if I don’t hold them together, but The Isle is the opposite—I don’t think I could break it if I tried.
The Isle is unique in that is meant to be read and meant to be played, but little else. Many RPG books seem obsessed with GM tools, resources, options, generators, and other such things. They serve up a glut of raw stuff with the expectation that a GM will pick and choose their favorites for a given table or session. By packing every conceivable feature into a book, there’s an expectation that a given GM is getting more value. These are books designed as compendiums for out-of-session; bits and pieces to use when making a campaign, but not actually seeing live use behind the screen at the table. The Isle isn’t like that. While you certainly could rip out its monsters, items, and other content, it’s not designed to do so. There are no tables, no generators, no lists of isolated content to slot elsewhere. Rather, it’s a very specifically designed adventure to be read, cover to cover by a GM, and then used behind the screen as you play a session.
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I think this actually enhances the degree of impact that Gearing has over play. Because The Isle is just a series of rooms, of content, it means that players moving through it necessarily engage with his work. As a complete imaginary space, the Isle—the literal island—defines the possibilities of the game being played vastly moreso than any ruleset or series of touchstones could hope to.
People love to talk about the importance of vibes in an RPG book, but I think The Isle makes the opposite case: if your technical foundations are solid, if the writing is clear and the content exciting, then you don’t need to know the vibe at all. The GM just needs to read, and the players just need to play. Will their vibes match the adventure? Will their character smoothly fit into the world Gearing made? Will they get the “intended experience?” No, of course not, but that’s the point—Gearing’s monsters and locations and setting simply exist. What you do with them, as players and GM alike, is up to you; nowhere in the text does the trite RPG declaration of “The Isle is a game about [X]…” appear. The Isle isn’t a game, and it never claims to be one, and yet rests confident in the strength of its content. If you want to play in the pseudo-historical Viking-horror mode that most of The Isle exists in, you certainly can—but you never have to, and Gearing makes no claims regarding the best way to play.
Herein lies the contradiction of game design in RPGs and the adventure: the author of the adventure presents the world, the contents of the space the players move through, and thus many of its diegetic rules. At the same time, the adventure makes no assertions over what players want, or how they might go about fulfilling those desires, or indeed even the means available to players to achieve those goals. A typical RPG book offers a thousand options and variations, none of which need be followed, but in their width and breadth ensure that every table more-or-less follows in the designer’s vast footsteps. The Isle—and adventures in its style—forcibly inserts a spare few elements into the imaginary world that demand action and reaction by the players, but offers nothing beyond. No player can avoid Gearing’s influence when playing through The Isle, but Gearing’s work never escapes unmarked: no two tables will play through The Isle in the same way, and none will play like Gearing. By presenting direct authority over the imaginary world, he imposes more than a ruleset ever could; by presenting nothing else, Gearing ensures the players need never respect his wishes.
This seeming-paradox, this ultimate enforcement of the diegetic world-rules combined with total abdication of the exogenous and endogenous game-rules, presents a solution to a question that’s vexed me for years: how can I be a game designer without being an authoritarian? That is, how can I make games and game-like things without needing to enforce my whims and will at every turn? Most RPG scenes are filled to bursting with designers very eager to dictate their exact intended experience, but that mode of design has long left me cold.
The answer that The Isle opened my eyes to is the adventure. Adventures present a world, but no constraints. Good adventures present a playground to romp through, but have no intentions. In the medium of imaginary worlds that RPGs play with, the adventure is not the game but rather the toy. Players can do whatever they please with a toy; in all likelihood, they’ll invent new games to play with it that I never dreamed of.
But adventures are also full of game design! Really classic game design, even—building a dungeon that’s fun and exciting and engaging to navigate through uses every skill of what we call “game design.” So much of what goes into RPG books comprises less active game design than a kind of meta-instructional game design: there are myriad books that tell a GM how to play and run a campaign or session, but far fewer that present the content needed for those same sessions. The Isle contains no explicit advice, yet presents dozens of extremely deliberate examples of stellar design in action, ranging from the information NPCs possess to the floorplan of the dungeon levels to the symbolism of recovered magic items. The Isle is not a book about good game design but instead is a book of good game design.
The Isle contains almost none of what I expect an RPG book to have, yet remains among the most playable RPG books I possess. Gearing, Sinclair, and Anderson stripped out the shiny components that sell an RPG book and instead present merely the most basic elements of their medium: words, maps, and the imaginary world.
What if every movie, stripped of color and sound, looked as good as Raiders?
In Praise of Legwork
A question: you ever try to run a campaign with a city in it? Not just a town or settlement or fort, but a proper city, one with an actual street map and whole neighborhoods and thousands of people living within the walls? I certainly have, many times. It’s hard! It’s really hard.
I live in New York—one of the biggest cities in the world—and the complexity of the streets and the depth of the city itself is just staggering. Every time I think I understand a neighborhood, or even a couple streets, I find new nooks and crannies tucked away. I often wonder, when my players reach a city, how I can best replicate that feeling. How can I create that particular impression of unfolding layers of people and places, where there’s always something new to discover just around the corner?
The answer, I think, lies in City State of the Invincible Overlord, the ’70s-era Judges Guild city module. It depends a little which version you read, but more or less all City States share a common feature: huge lists of NPCs, in their hundreds and thousands. Crack open the PDF, and seemingly-endless quantities of people leap out at you, all sorted by their main locations—shops, apartments, temples, and so on—which in turn get sorted by the street and neighborhood.
On some level, City State overwhelms. Its ancient graphic design and information ordering certainly doesn’t help. But at the same time, once I started digging into the book, I found myself getting acclimated. There’s a learning curve to the text, but once I started climbing the curve, I realized the huge breadth of information and content available. Here’s an example, from By-Water Road (“PROB 60% Run Off Road by Horse Racing Pages”):
Three example locations from the 1977 Revised version of City State
The horizontal line of numbers is the stat block: class, alignment, level, hitpoints, armor class, save level, strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, charisma, and weapon. Rhino Rudigore, the innkeeper of the Blue Dolphin Inn, is a neutral level 2 fighter—not particularly powerful in combat but quite physically fit.
Below his statblock, the book details the bartender, Koris Brightips, also with her compressed statblock (which you’ll notice, uncomfortably, includes an extra keyword at the start: “FEM”) and the note that she “sings.” From there, it mentions the Blue Dolphin’s customers—freemen, sailors, and nobles (with stat blocks)—the contents and dangers of his chest, the prices of the food sold (snakes fried in bear fat!), and gambling rates. I admit I’m not quite sure what “Legend of the Flying Citadel: Storm Giants Castle in Harridan Gap” is; I’d wager it’s a reference to another Judges Guild module.
Rhino, Koris, and the Blue Dolphin form just one entry of literal hundreds that the book includes. All this info is, of course, very geared for the particular sort of slash-and-burn ’70s adventuring style, but even sans stat blocks, these entries contain loads of exciting information. Just look at the next two entries: Jolly Naben, the (chaotic evil) smith that works behind the Dolphin, is close to broke and thus probably happy to sell you his “unicorn,” but also possesses valuable information about the Dwarven Mines; Squeaky Werter, the local racketeer, is the Thane of a Senator and thus mostly immune to prosecution, and so accordingly is loaded to the gills. The text could use a sharp editor’s pass, of course, but this is good stuff, ripe for adventure, all contained in just a few lines. Across an entire city’s worth, the book brings enough content to run a dozen campaigns, each unlike the other.
Which brings me to my original point: City State of the Invincible Overlord is, as far as I’ve ever seen, the closest thing to a city module that’s actually ready to run. GMs need to get through a lot of reading, obviously, and the book is more than a little painful to our modern eyes, but it does present a whole city. Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen, the two writers, really did just take the time and effort to detail more or less every street there was. I’m sure it took a breathtaking amount of time and effort on their part, and for all its flaws, I’ve never seen anything quite as large or as detailed as City State.
This is what I call legwork: the long, slow, detailed, sometimes painful process of going through to figure out and then write down all the important details of everything that’s supposed to exist in the imaginary world of the game.
Consider a starker example, using John Harper’s Blades in the Dark (of which I’ve played dozens and dozens of sessions over the years). In the original Blades, Harper included a map of Doskvol, the city in which Blades is set; here’s a lightly-interactive digital version of Harper’s map. It describes about a dozen districts, each of which includes a few key locations and the basic outline of the major streets.
A few years after the release of Blades, Tim Denee released his “Detailed Doskvol Street Maps” with Harper’s blessing. Denee’s maps are huge: they include detailed maps of the streets, almost all of which Denee named, along with the canals, bridges, and rooftop crossings of each of the (also now named) neighborhoods within each larger district. A tremendous amount of effort went into these maps, but the difference at the table proves immediately noticeable. The ability to say “Oh yeah, our gang runs Fishmarket, with our headquarters located on the roof of Pike Court between Sharktooth Alley and Roe Lane” and have those be real places on the map feels immensely cool and exciting. (In my old campaign, players would war with other gangs and redraw turf lines according to the canals and streets—“Who gets tolls on the Moon Bridge?” was a hotly-disputed question.)
You can, of course, just name the streets and neighborhoods in Blades yourself, without these detailed maps. The option always remains there. But that takes time and effort, the kind of time and effort that I as a GM maybe can’t or won’t spend—the legwork. I was more than happy to spend the $10 that Denee charges just to avoid doing all that legwork myself.
Legwork is hard. It’s basically all the boring or fiddly or tiring parts of writing up an imaginary place. It’s pretty fun and breezy to say “Ooh, what if there was a city that was, like, on an island in a lake full of blood, and the blood came from the monster under the city, and the sewers, like, turned into its veins?” It’s even pretty straightforward to start coming up with names of important places and people in that city—the Fanged Gate, the Sanguine King, the Crimson Keepers—but sooner or later the going gets hard. Sewers that turn into veins is an exciting idea, but… what’s the map of those sewers look like? Which streets have manhole covers, and which buildings’ basements include access? For that matter, what exactly do the streets look like? And when the Crimson Keepers carve off chunks of the regenerating beast below, where do they store it, and how much do they carve per day? Once the text hits the table, cool concepts demand legwork, and legwork is a lot harder than dreaming up mere ideas.
In many cases, GMs who (quite reasonably) don’t want to do all this legwork just decide to wing it. I employed this strategy for a long time when it came to cities—draw a simple overview map, write down a dozen possible street names, then just slot them into place as needed when they came up during the session. This works basically fine, it’s enough to run a session or two (particularly if the players don’t spend long in the city), but it starts to fall apart when players start needing persistent details. And winging it really doesn’t work for dungeons, which, as more zoomed-in locations, demand a higher level of detail on a room-by-room basis. Unless you’re an expert improviser, sooner or later you’ll find yourself wanting the details that only legwork provides.
I come now to my sharper point: legwork is so hard that sometimes it feels like RPG writers and designers aren’t willing to do it at all.
A short list of some things that don’t take much legwork to make: rules; lore; character options; generators; “inspirational” material; and faction descriptions. By contrast, a short list of things that do take quite a lot of legwork: hexcrawls; dungeons; cities; and all the NPCs that actually go in a faction. There’s obviously some gray area between these—monsters, items, spells, and so on—but take a quick glance through DriveThru or itch or Kickstarter and tell me which you see more of. Is it the stuff that takes a lot of legwork to write, or only a little?
Once I saw this pattern, this avoidance of doing the legwork, I started noticing it everywhere. In OSR-land, depthcrawls and other generators provide shortcuts to making huge spaces (megadungeons, labyrinths, etc) without needing to do all the legwork in between. In storygame-land, the onetime rallying cries of “don’t write a story” and “play to find out” have become code for “just make the players (or GM) come up with everything themselves.” In trad-land, established companies and studios churn out books full of extraneous systems and new character-building options instead of adventures. All of these, one way or another, allow writers to skip doing the legwork.
I talked about all this a little with some friends, and they brought up an important question: is this actually an issue? What’s the problem with having lots of other non-legwork stuff on hand and just winging it? Is legwork actually all that useful?
The short answer to this question—and many others—is that a writer can afford to take the time and effort to come up with better content than somebody improvising it live at the table.
This isn’t true in every single case all the time (there are many great improvisers and even more bad writers), but in general, particularly when it comes to adventures, writers have the ability to work at a breadth and depth that GMs who wing it simply can’t. Yes, GMs can tweak things to enhance them for their specific table in a way that writers never can, but a GM can’t improvise a whole dungeon, let alone an entire campaign. When the imaginary world of the game brings a real breadth and depth, when there truly is something over the next hill and the hill after that and the hill after that, new dimensions of play emerge. Many campaigns and books claim to be a sandbox, but unless the world proves rich and detailed across the board, can players truly explore and do what they like?
Legwork proves its value to games even in cases that may appear less than obvious. Take, for example, solo games—a genre and form arguably about players doing the legwork. One of the most enduring and popular solo RPG books, Tim Hutchings’s Thousand Year Old Vampire, stands apart from many others in that it includes hundreds of prompts. And not just a random list of prompts, or prompts on any topic Hutchings could think of, but carefully-crafted prompts that nest and loop and feed into each other. The rules themselves of 1kYOV are simple enough; the juice, the reason that I and many others keep coming back to it, lies in its prompts—the legwork. If Hutchings hadn’t taken the time to write a couple hundred pretty good prompts, sure, we’d have a cool pitch and some neat vibes, but actually playing the game would be far more difficult and far less engaging.
Here lies the key message, the axiom I want to impart: the more legwork the writer provides, the less GMs and players need to do themselves.
It’s for this reason that I largely stopped buying RPG books that aren’t adventures. I can come up systems and vibes and inspiration myself, that stuff’s all exciting, but what I don’t like coming up with is legwork. In fact, I’m very happy to modify and adjust my own systems, or even my own campaigns, to accommodate a bunch of good legwork from another designer—like Denee’s maps. My Doskvol looked a bit different before, but suddenly acquiring an entire of Doskvol vastly more complete than my own made for an excellent reason to change those previously-established details.
My recurring example here, the city, proves only one case. Many recurring popular daydreams really can only be solved through lots of long, slow, fairly draining writing.
Ever wondered about a campaign of rusty space truckers who constantly need to swap and repair parts of their ship? You can of course just improvise it, or abstract it, but to really run that space trucker campaign, you need lists of hundreds or thousands of parts that interlock with each other—legwork.
Ever mused on a system of magic with different magical languages and mysterious components and complex rituals? You can do it on the fly and use a bunch of system math to simulate, but to really make that magic work you just need hundreds of texts, components, materials, and ritual processes—legwork.
Ever daydreamed about a real, proper heist, with guards and disguises and alarms and everything? You can retrofit and improvise it (like Blades does), but to really run a heist, you need guard patrol routes and workers’ weaknesses and camera locations and power lines and a million other tiny fiddly details—legwork.
The answer to my original question—how do you make a city feel like a city?—seems to have only one real answer: make a city, a big one, that’s broad and deep and includes all the pieces. There is, as far as I can tell, no other substitute.
Historically, we designers typically use clever math, rules, and out-of-character solutions to run these kinds of games. These work, sure, but they aren’t the real thing. To truly get down in the weeds of an imaginary world and still have it maintain consistency and excitement, you need a ton of legwork in the background to support your moment-to-moment play. You need the ironclad backing of a great deal of content, ready to hit the table without further preparation or improvisation. To play in a fantasy city, we needed City State of the Invincible Overlord; to play other dreams, we need more legwork.
Pandemonium Megadungeon Session Report #7
Hello again! Sorry it’s been so long—life’s been busy. You can read previous session reports here: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6. This report comprises some eleven sessions.
8th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Today, two convenient new recruits appeared:
Zit, Fighter 1; a goblin burglar.
Khib II, Fighter 1: another goblin burglar (no relation, of course, to Khib I).
The two goblins headed down, bound for the second floor, and immediately ran afoul of some skeletons—skeletons who many other party members encountered many times, and often were friendly, but very much disliked goblins. The two fled and managed to find four other goblins, who they convinced to join them. Together, the now-six goblins defeated the skeletons and proceeded downstairs. One of the new recruits, passing by a conspicuous lever on the stairs, pulled it, causing the stairs to turn to ramps and sending the whole band sliding down.
From the second floor, the goblins proceeded directly to the fixed teleportation circle they’d heard about, and spoke the Celestine and Mechanian incantations correctly (very convenient that Zit and Khib just happened to read and speak each), teleporting all six goblins to an unknown location, which the circle simply called the “Transgressor’s hidden respite.”
The goblins emerged into a large room plated with steel panels, with a chest in the corner and a pair of sealed sliding double doors (like an elevator). They immediately looted the chest, finding various treasures including a pot of Sovereign Glue. The goblins rejoiced with their newfound wealth, but discovered a problem: there was no way out.
Over the next several hours, Zit and Khib: attempted to pry open the doors (failure); watched the other four recruits descend into panic; killed the other four as they turned violent; unscrewed a steel panel and discovered stone wall beneath it; tunneled through the stone wall; experimented with various steel-door hydraulics; tunneled through another stone wall; and then eventually emerged into a new room, a wide semi-circular chamber made of stone, but with a flat steel opposite wall. Poking around, they found no exits, but realized that the flat steel wall was slightly elevated, like it was a raised piece of hallway running crosswise.
Brandishing their tools, they: spent the next dozen-odd hours carving a tiny tunnel through stone under the steel hallway-wall; boiled goblin carcasses in a steel-panel box for water; ate their former comrades; and eventually emerged into another, mirrored semi-circular stone chamber. This chamber, however, had another set of double doors, which the goblins knew how to get through (that is, by tunneling through the stone around it instead). Emerging into a new chamber for the first time in over 24 hours, Zit and Khib found a fountain!
They rushed forward, joyous and thirsty, splashing it everywhere and laughing, only to realize it was not water, but acid! The acid, unfortunately, melted off Zit’s leg, causing him to collapse unconscious, losing acrid blood quickly. Khib II, sorely burned, staggered from room to room, eventually finding another fountain—he drank, brought some back to Zit, fed it to him, and then started to feel sick—poison. In his last fleeting moments of consciousness, Khib staggered to another chamber and found a large upright cylinder decorated with images of a geometric skeleton, then collapsed. Thus ended Zit and Khib II.
9th Day of Month of the Imperium
Today, four familiar faces went down:
The Eldest Orphan of Forsaken for Eternity by Birth, Fighter 4; our classic mohawk’d noble, dressed in aristocrat’s boots, and a necklace of fireballs while bearing his miser’s flute and a ghostly right leg.
Sōt III, Butcher of Bugs, Roller of Rugs, Squandering Hugs, Fighter 3; our beloved haggard knight, still clad in bone mail-and-plate, still wielding his notched longsword Righty and a silver Pike of Warning, still carrying his dust of disappearance, trusty Polaris-demon camera, still bearing a ghostly left leg (but tragically missing his left ear).
Paparazzo Vetch the Orc-Breaker, Fighter 3; tourist-turned-chef, clad in duralumin mail, bearing his belt of cat imprisonment and an air elemental trapped in an oilskin bag.
Runpril the Crunty, Magic-User 2; a now-noseless translocator carrying a bag of poison darts.
The party descended down the recently-revealed staircase revealed beneath the ancient monument at the north edge of town. Below, in the darkness, they: tapped around with their poles, very cautiously; accidentally bumped a statue that screamed very loudly; fought some skeletons; and found a pit filled with magical darkness and scuttling sounds. Descending below, they discovered the scuttling sounds seemed linked to the magic dark, and the party retreated. Skeletons and more shadow-things ambushed them, and a savage fight commenced.
After the fight, they discovered the shadow-projection scuttlers were spider-like skeletal creatures, a human ribcage expanded to limb-like lengths. Runpril also took an axe-blow to the head, and so the party rapidly retreated, doing their best to get Runpril to safety. They survived, barely, but now carry a nasty scar.
Hours later, they went below again. They: advanced until they heard chains clinking and the whispers of Ghosttongue, so retreated; ran into a very rude decapitated ghost carrying its own head; slew said rude ghost; and eventually ran back into the chain-clinking-Ghosttongue-speaking being. In pure shadow, they couldn’t see it, but using Sōt and the Eldest Orphan’s psychic-spirit-telepathy (gained from defeating Goblinscholar Bolokhiv), they spoke with the creature: it identified itself as the Judge of Kings, and it desired judgement over the whole of the dungeon—and that it despised light. In particular, it wanted the crown of one of its hated enemies, the Cannibal King, who dwelt far below.
In exchange for a promise to retrieve the crown of the Cannibal King, the Judge of Kings granted a boon to the party: the location of a secret ladderway down to the third floor, accessed in the Judge’s territory. From there, the party explored a little ways further without light, found some treasure, and headed back to the surface.
10th Day of the Month of the Imperium
The Eldest Orphan and Vetch went out, joined by another:
Sriracha Ketchup, Magic-User 2; an exiled translocator (having leveled up in the background since last session.)
Taking the newly-gained information from the Judge of Kings, the party went down to its territory, to the newfound ladderway. After some negotiating with ropes and pitons, the party went down. At the bottom, they found a small chamber leading to a long, low wooden tunnel with an odd ridged pattern on the right side. They heard sounds coming from outside the tunnel, and quickly realized that they were, in fact, inside a long low counter—the ridges were cabinet doors. Stepping out, they encountered some unfamiliar faces: humanoids dressed in huge dirty robes cinched at the face, ankle, and wrist, skeletal appendages emerging, that sloshed like water; and huge suits of welded-together rusty armor carrying tower shields that also sloshed like water. The robed individuals had huge stacks of filthy paperwork they constantly sifted through; the armored tower-shielders did not speak.
Nobody in the party spoke Deep, but after some clever chalk-drawing, the party communicated that they were looking for the Cannibal King, and then Deep-speakers pointed them further into the dungeon. From there, the party discovered a large underground canal; stole some treasure from a shrine; found several huge cylindrical tanks full of eels; met a friendly wraith named Creon; and found some gross little crickets, black with too many legs. In a clever move, Ketchup used telekinesis to lift a full gnashing swarm of eels out of their tank and drop them onto the crickets, causing a two-sided feeding frenzy and buying the party time to run.
From there, the party investigated a little further, raided a shrine and found a map of the dwarves’ camp(!!!), and then headed back up to the surface.
11th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Once again the Eldest Orphan and Vetch went below, this time joined by:
Lord Tarkus Two-Fingers, Magic-User 3; an aspiring necromancer carrying his amber comb and Lagash sapling, still bearing a ghostly right hand with three skeletal fingers but returned from his brief jaunt as a ghost separate from his body.
Dwarf map now in hand, the party went below, straight to the second floor. They: raised some skeletons; experimented with a shrine reading “Unkillable,” which seemed to turn a single blow when prayed to; passwall’d into a chamber with a ladder upwards(!) and angry earth elemental; barely managed to defeat the elemental, which had a load of gemstones within; and scrambled up the ladder. It led back to the surface, to the tailor’s shop of Forsaken—three bloody, dusty, heavily armed adventurers bursting out of a basement trapdoor the tailor didn’t know existed gave them a right shock.
Cashing in their gems, Vetch leveled up, becoming Fun-Guy Paparazzo Vetch the Orc-Breaker, in honor of his recent promises to the myconid Ministry.
Hours later, they went below once more, now straight to the dwarf territory. They: snuck through dwarf territory ambushing its denizens, their heavy armor masked by the dwarves’ loud machinery; lost some weapons to dwarf engineers casting shatter; avoided a large ceiling-crusher trap; and discovered the control panel to the conveyor belt that ran through the whole dwarf area, containing options like “speed,” “direction,” and “heat.” Deciding to not alter the belt just yet, the party instead clambered aboard, using it to launch their ambushes.
In the midst of this violence, they: found a very scared dwarf hiding in a tunnel holding a hexagonal key and learned he “went below;” questioned some dead dwarves and learned they had a sacred elevator leading down; killed the two dwarf leaders and claimed two more hexagonal keys (along with the leaders’ heads); looted some shrines, including a large free-floating shield shaped like a dwarf’s head, which Vetch claimed; and found the aforementioned sacred elevator, with three hexagonal keyholes, but declined to go down. Instead, they took their winnings and headed back to the surface.
Tarkus leveled up, becoming Lord Tarkus Two-Fingers the Treacherous. The Eldest Orphan leveled up as well, reaching level 5 and becoming The Eldest Orphan of Forsaken for Eternity by Birth yet Alive, and then retired to unlock advanced gear for sale—the Eldest Orphan now runs a new section of the general store, selling things like air bladders, dynamic rope, and chalk.
12th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Sōt, Tarkus, and Ketchup recruited two newcomers and a rookie for the day’s adventure:
Nouh, Fighter 1; an ex-butcher adept, believing himself to be cursed.
Nan the Black, Fighter 1; an ex-smuggler turned burglar, borrowing the phynox hauberk +2 from the community chest.
The Youngest Orphan, Fighter 1; a noble from same orphanage as the Eldest Orphan, recently having inherited most of his stuff.
Deciding to confirm an earlier theory, the party descended down Forsaken’s well, clambering down a rope ladder to a large lake. After deploying their folding boat, they sailed up a waterway they saw earlier, which they eventually confirmed was the same canal that Ketchup saw earlier with Vetch and the Eldest Orphan.
Exploring this watery domain, they: went a short distance up another smaller, branching canal, only for it to descend quickly into a closed pipe; met with one of the large watery skeletal robe-wearers, who insisted they fill out the proper paperwork (the Youngest Orphan speaks Deep, so this was straightforward); found a chamber with the signature blue blanket of a merchant, but no merchant; found a statuary of hollow statues and recovered some treasure from inside a few using ghost-limbs; realized that the canal-pipe they saw earlier must run under some dungeon rooms and hallways; avoided a poison-dart trap; and, by carefully tapping their 10’ poles, discovered an illusory wall.
A hall led past the illusion, leading to a large chamber. Sticky goo thinly coated the floor; at the far side stood a chest. Rather than gamble with whatever this devilry was, Ketchup used their telekinesis to lasso the chest with rope, and the party heaved. At this point, four gelatinous cubes fell from the ceiling and began moving towards the party. Tarkus attempted to inspire fear within them, but failed—instead causing the cubes to positively adore him. Working quickly, the party dragged the chest out and slammed the door shut, barricading it, buying themselves time.
Inside the chest, they found a deal of treasure and several magic items: a seemingly-empty pot, a pink saucy potion, a heavy wooden club, a pink potion, and a red candle inscribed with runes.
The party continued, and discovered a chamber filled with copper coins, tens or hundreds of thousands of them. Immediately, Ketchup began ritually casting teleport, and the party spent the hour carefully stacking copper in the circle. After an hour, they all teleported to the surface with tens of thousands of copper, emerging right outside the inn—at which point the copper pieces surged, forming into a huge bipedal copper-monster! A brutal fight ensued as they hacked off coinage; at the apex, Nan the Black took a giant coppery fist to the head, shattering his skull. Thus ended Nan the Black.
But the party carried the day, and (after being chided by the elderly innkeep for bringing monsters to the tavern) cashed out. Nouh, leveling up twice, became Humble Great-Eared Nouh; the Youngest Orphan, also leveling up twice, became the Youngest Copper Entitled Orphan; Ketchup, leveling up just once, became Sriracha Ketchup Aioli.
13th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Tarkus, Vetch, and the Youngest Orphan went below, grabbing two others:
Old Iron Grip the Dying, Magic-User 3; a veteran illusionist with a peg leg, cast-iron prosthetic hand, and a missing ear, now carrying a load of mushrooms from the myconid territory.
Jim, Magic-User 1; a goblin transmuter carrying a porcelain bow.
Before going below, Tarkus interrogated the dead heads of the lead dwarf engineers, learning some cryptic information about beings called the Titan Mason and the Tectonic Artificer, supposed allies of the Slumbering Clanweaver, the dwarves’ leader.
The party proceeded straight down the tailor-shop dwarf ladder, only to discover that the conveyor belt (which the passage directly connects to) was no longer running, and surged with heat. After the deaths of their lead engineers, the dwarves locked the area down. With some clever reduction from Jim to shrink the slats of the conveyor belt, the party moved forward, only to suddenly run into two dwarf-shaped metallic robots, who claimed they had come from below to investigate what was happening in the dwarf territory. The party convinced the robots to help them, and the robots opened a passageway through the walls, straight to the elevator. Using their hexagonal keys, the party descended.
Now on the third floor, the party found a rusted, broken set of rooms. Cables peeked beneath damaged iron panels; clay and mud coated in the corners. A high-pitched ringing echoed. Pushing deeper, the party: found and looted a shrine; discovered a huge machine-sculpture made from geometric blocks of metal that talked and, when body parts were inserted, transformed them into clay; met some odd misshapen clay-dwarves; failed to negotiate a few times; and discovered a huge room with a very large upright hexagonal prism standing in the center of the room, like a tower, cables feeding into the top and humming with energy. Three hexagonal slots, long as an arm, stood on every other edge of the prism. With some further questioning, they learned that this strange hexagonal column was indeed Naachtun, the Slumbering Clanweaver.
Exploring further, the party: discovered that the metal not-quite-dwarves inhabited one side of the floor while clay not-quite-dwarves the other; found a matched talking machine to the other, this one made of huge slabs of clay, that converted inserted body parts into metal (which took some convincing, along with the help of indigo empathy-mushrooms); and found a strange hovering orb in a room full of cables that the dwarves called a “dream.”
Between the two great machines—metal, which turned parts to living clay; and clay, which turned parts to articulated metal—the party acquired several new parts. Vetch got a full metal arm; Old Grip replaced his missing hand and foot with new metal ones; Jim turned his entire body to metal; and the Youngest Orphan split himself down the middle, half-clay and half-metal. The machines took some convincing—the clay-dwarves and metal-dwarves do not like each other—but they managed it.
14th Day of the Month of the Imperium
After some deliberations, Sōt, Tarkus, Old Grip, and Nouh decided to take on the Judge of Kings, the shadowy many-bladed chain-clinking figure beneath the town monument, in a zone that hates light. Tarkus believes that he can take the Judge’s place as lord of the undead—this remains to be seen.
Going down into the dark, they went to the Judge’s maze-like catacombs (the secret monument entrance being quite close to where the Judge resides), and Tarkus asked to be judged. The Judge, drawing close, led Tarkus farther into the dark, glittering blades tracing along Tarkus’s body. The Judge named some of Tarkus’s misdeeds—including naming him an impostor from another world—then attacked. The party lit their lanterns fast, but struggled to maintain them as the Judge flickered in and out of shadow. Now, the party grew worried, as they faced the full wrath of Ny Varberg, Judge of Kings, a grandchild of the dungeon. The Judge’s blades whipped back and forth, materializing in many places, their lights winking out one by one. A golden knife scalped Tarkus, and the necromancer passed out. Realizing their foolishness, the party grabbed Tarkus and hastily retreated back upstairs.
After paying for Tarkus’s medical bills, the party took a different tack. They went down the ladder beneath the general store, to the myconid territory, now filled with a deep green haze. Advancing forward, they: talked to some mushrooms in a fountain in Imperial Common that previously only spoke Mycologue; ran into a giant brain-eating moth named “Mothmothmoth,” who attacked them and was slain by Sōt; kept seeing bugs skittering at the edge of their vision; ventured into sleep-inducing blue haze; rescued a long-slumbering former adventurer named Pantaleon; and then realized that green mushrooms containing hallucinogenics, and perhaps some of what they were seeing was not real.
At this point, a being emerged from the fountain, a snake-like man with bright skin, who named himself “Wisdom.” Wisdom, slowly extending from the fountain as he spoke, answered many questions: that the Judge of Kings held sapphires in his chest, that truth was written on the walls of the dungeon, and that diamonds were located just through the opposite wall. Wisdom, while very wise, also struggled to get names right, and kept referring to Tarkus as “Torkus.” Eventually, the party retreated from the myconid territory to sleep off their possible druggedness, though they still wonder about Wisdom’s words.
That night, back at the inn, Tarkus awoke to a horrifically loud crashing and banging in his right ear, a catastrophic cacophony. After thinking he was perhaps dying, he tried sickle-cursing himself to no avail. After waking the others and trying several other attempts, Sōt eventually grabbed a pair of bellows and reversed them over Tarkus’s ear, at which point the crashing stopped. With some extrication, the party found a tiny pink fluttering insect, which the town magician identified as a “brainwig”—a myelin-eating insect that chews through adventurers’ ears to get to their grey matter.
15th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Deciding on a different tactic, Sōt, Tarkus, Old Grip, and Nouh took the main entrance down, heading for the elevator on level 2 that, as they understood it, went to level 5—same as the myconid level—but in a different direction, in territory controlled by many-armed berserkers.
Before reaching the elevator, the party ran into a new merchant named Garbus, Master Armorer, who dressed in many fine clothes and many layers of armor, topped with a huge conical metal helmet.
Post-Garbus, they took the elevator down, to an area with stepped walls and fungal moss growing between the flagstones. They charged out and attacked the two berserkers in front of them, who proved fearsome foes—berserkers grow more deadly as they lose HP. Fighting the initial few, the party stumbled upon a very large chamber, where green torches burned and a huge many-armed figure stood. More berserkers attacked, and the party fought them in tight formation. After defeating the next round, Tarkus sent in his skeletons to attack the huge figure; the figure did not defend itself, just laughed and beckoned the skeletons onwards. The skeletons struck, blood sprayed, and suddenly they all turned on each other, slaughtering each other to a one. The figure laughed all the while, unfazed by the wounds.
Nervous, the party closed the door to that room. They interrogated a dead berserker, and learned the huge figure was Nidaros, the Bloodbound Brigand. Now worried, they only explored a little further—looting a shrine for some pink rage-inducing mushrooms—before returning to the surface.
16th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Tarkus, Vetch, and the Youngest Orphan went below again, aiming to continue their quest below the dwarf’s territory. According to the Harbinger Rock, the prophetic stone just beneath the Forsaken Inn, the party knows that they must “awaken Naachtun, or ensure it never wakes again,”
Employing clever use of ghostwalk, they slipped past the dwarves’ super-heated conveyor belt, raided the last few dwarven treasure troves, and took the sacred elevator down. After some negotiation with the clay not-quite-dwarves (who don’t fully trust the Youngest Orphan, being half-clay half-metal), they met with the Clayshaper, the inhumanly tall and elegant maker of these clay dwarves, and thus their leader. After more negotiation—demonstrating Vetch’s magical freefloating dwarven shield, the Youngest Orphan’s half-and-half nature, promises to keep faith and cut down those who would break oaths—the Clayshaper reached inside itself, produced an elongated hexagonal prism of strange metal (about the right size for the slots on the side of the Clanweaver), and then dissolved into wet clay. Amidst the clay, mechanical bits of machinery clattered, wet and disused.
Slightly shaken at the sudden dissolution but feeling more confident, the party crossed to the other side of the floor and made the same deal with the leader of the metal not-quite-dwarves, called the Ironmonger. With the same assurances and promises, the equally tall-and-elegant Ironmonger produced another hexagonal prism, and then collapsed into iron parts—parts that, as they cracked, spilled out wet clay.
Neither Ironmonger nor Clayshaper knew where the third piece was. The party searched the floor, finding many treasures and secrets—Ekallatum’s muffin, which reverses gravity; a winged black cat held in stasis; a scroll in an unknown language—but no piece.
On their way back up, the three once again demonstrated their devotion to the dwarvish cause—magic shield, hexagonal keys to the elevator, secrets from below, half-clay half-metal forms—and made a deal with the dwarves: recover the third piece from the orcs, where the party believed in awaited, in exchange for safe passage in and out of dwarf territory.
With the treasure gained, Tarkus leveled up, becoming Dark Lord Tarkus Two-Fingers the Treacherous. He opted not to retire (and thus upgrade the company), instead sticking around to fulfill a grander scheme.
17th Day of the Month of the Imperium
The Youngest Orphan, Old Grip, Nouh, and Jim went down, bringing with them a newcomer:
Skira-na-Nog, Magic-User 1; a goblin conjurer fresh from the dungeons.
The party went back down the well in the center of town, to the watery dungeons below. They immediately ran into Curus, Master Peddler, buying several items: an indelible pen, a length of animate rope (which Nouh named “Galvina”), four pairs of magic snails, and a portable hole.
Exploring further up-canal, the party found a little chamber with an ornate sarcophagus with the name “Creon” written on it. While a few of the party had met Creon the ghost and found him friendly, they opted for treasure and looted the tomb, including Creon’s cursed silver greataxe.
Overcome with excitement at the portable hole, Grip persuaded the party to return to the surface (if only to break the curse on Creon’s axe) and then go back to the first floor to suss out additional hidden chambers using the hole. They did this for a time with little success; the rookies were growing bored, so Grip shelved his desire for total map-knowledge and they returned to the third floor.
There, they: met Huntus, Master-at-Arms, a weapons merchant, but didn’t buy anything; ran into another watery robe-clad clerk and were registered once again; ran afoul of Creon the ghost, now very angry, but slew him using the axe he wielded in life and a single lucky silver coin toss from Skira-na-Nog; and, poking around with the portable hole (“Wall inspections!”), found a hidden room with a chest and a grille on the floor. Looking further, the party realized the grill led to one of the canal-pipes below, the pipes that lace throughout this whole part of the dungeon. Opening the chest, they heard a snap, the grille closed suddenly, and water began to fill the room through three new holes. Had the party not accessed this room via a portable hole and instead through the pipe, they would have been in serious trouble. But they weren’t, so they happily looted as water rose to their ankles, and then hightailed it out.
With the winnings, three party members leveled up: the Youngest Orphan became the Youngest Entitled Copper Deep Orphan; Jim became Chrome Jim (in honor of his metal body); and Skira-na-Nog became Princess Skira-na-Nog.
18th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Two newcomers, both duelists, fought to the death outside the Inn. Their names were Tiresias and Gazal—for a moment, it seemed as though Gazal would win, severing Tiresias’s wrist and hacking off an ear, but then Tiresias swapped to his left hand and scalped Gazal, leaving him to die in the mud.
Stepping gingerly around the body, Old Grip and Nouh went below, bringing with them another rookie:
Ohokh, Fighter 1; a goblin soldier, eager to join the winning team.
Grip, determined to read a spell off a dead comrade’s old spellbook, checked every merchant location he knew of. Merchants in the dungeon come and go, each selling different items. After a quick run down to level 2 yielded only Garbus, Master Armorer, they headed down the well once more, and there found Textus, Master Scrivener, who sells scrolls and translations. Grip paid Textus to translate comprehend languages into Elvish (which Grip reads and casts in), and then returned to the surface triumphant, suddenly learning many new spells.
Nouh, meanwhile, continued to teach Galvina, his animate rope, new tricks. Ohokh, bemused, watched as the two veterans engaged in their strange practices.
19th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Grip, Nouh, and Ohokh went to the third floor, exploring deeper, near where the others had found gelatinous cubes and mountains of copper. They: skipped a few hallways using the portable hole; met a large octopedal automaton, who served something called the Eight Tombs; fed the automaton an indigo empathy mushroom, causing it to feel feelings for the first time and have an existential crisis; discovered access to a water pipe via a fountain; found an armory full of giant snails that use helmets as shells, like hermit crabs; fled from a gelatinous cube; and found a shrine in a metal-paneled room, which, upon opening the altar, sent an electric hum throughout the room.
A great deal of planning and options ensued; the portable hole was the only means of access to this room. After flicking some coins in and seeing them arc with lightning, Nouh decided to dual-wield backpacks, shuffle in on a bedroll, and load the coins that way. As this happened, however, the gelatinous cube returned. Thinking quickly, the party grabbed a length of chain, jammed one end into the cube, fed the other through the portable hole to the electrified room, and dropped it. Lightning ripped across the chain, arcing across space, and detonated the cube. As electricity continued to thrum and the chain fell, however, it began to singe the black silk of the portable hole—the party almost panicked, but managed to save the hole with only a few singes (and recover a great deal of treasure).
20th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Sōt, the Youngest Orphan, Nouh, and Ohokh led an expedition down, joined by two others:
Snuffet the Twisted Pointer, Magic-User 3; long-absent but now returned. A transmuter, Snuffet’s hat bears a feather of Hieracon, which points towards danger.
Lady Thiana, Fighter 1; a new recruit, an old ally of Vetch’s, borrowing his magic floating dwarf shield and wielding two others for absurdly high armor.
Urged on by the Orphan’s hunch that the orcs held the last piece of the Slumbering Clanweaver, they set out to destroy the orcs. They went down to the second level and pushed deep into orc territory, ambushing a few, only to find themselves suddenly outnumbered. Orcs regenerate, and keep large hound-like collections of mismatched spawn matter as shock troops—roiling morasses of limbs, teeth, calcified bone, and hunger.
They portable hole’d into a secret chamber, nearly fell down a trapdoor, and began stealing treasure, but the orcs knew of this way (it was their treasure) and the assault continued. Panicking slightly—Sōt lost a foot to an orc magician’s spell—the party retreated. Snuffet used perspectival shift to enlarge a chunk of flesh to bar one door, but the orcspawn kept eating, and a party of orcs blocked the other way. Trapped, Ohokh attempted to negotiate, but it broke down; eventually, the Youngest Orphan used a fireball from the necklace of fireballs inherited from the Eldest Orphan to wipe out the orcs, and the party retreated back to the surface.
With the treasure gained, three party members leveled up: Ohokh became Ohokh the Spear; Nouh became Abu-Habal Humble Great-Eared Nouh; and Sōt, reaching level 5, became Sōt III, Butcher of Bugs, Roller of Rugs, Squandering Hugs, Home & Garden Department—but he opted not to retire (and thus upgrade the company), instead staying on the roster (at least after getting a prosthetic foot fit).
21st Day of the Month of the Imperium
A mighty party assembled to deal with the orcs: Sōt (F5), Tarkus (M-U5), the Youngest Orphan (F4), Vetch (F4), Nouh (F4), and Snuffet (M-U3).
They took an alternate path to orc territory, following a series of secret passageways near the dwarves. In their explorations, the party had recovered several maps, and they believed they held all of the maps of orc territory. Combined with Snuffet’s feather of Hieracon to point towards danger, it proved a fast path forward. They fought a few orcs, looted a few small hauls, and beelined for the leader of the orcs. Other than a brief run-in with an unexpected fire elemental (defeated via a droplet of water expanded with perspectival shift), they advanced forwards rapidly. Tarkus raised many corpses along the way, amassing a small army of undead to serve him.
After less than an hour, they emerged into a huge chamber: blood, offal, and twitching muscle coursed across the ground; orc magicians covered in ritual scars stood by. In the center sat a huge mass of flesh, some 20’ in diameter, blue-green like orcs, covered in appendages and wounds. Glittering chains draped across its form, jewels winking in the apertures. Periodically, an orc would emerge from a wound or aperture, fully-formed. This is Telja, the Allmother Brood, creator of the regenerative orcs. After a brief discussion in which the Allmother mentioned her hatred for other factions (and a briefly-considered option of joining her), a battle commenced!
Tarkus threw waves of undead forward, doing tremendous damage to the Allmother and carving her body to pieces, but her flesh re-knitted itself. Orcs began to crawl from the wounds, naked and bloody but full of fury, tearing the skeletons aparts. The fighters charged forward, hacking and slashing, but still the Allmother lived. Her claws gnashed and scythed even as they cut them apart, the skeletons and zombies began to die, more orcs crawled out of the offal, and the fight wore on.
The scarified orcs, the mages, suddenly returned, bringing with them two huge orc-giants, each standing 15’ high. Realizing that orcs thrive on attrition and that the Allmother’s flesh still healed, they opted for a new plan: they doused as much of her form as they could in oil, spilling it everywhere, then fled. As the orc-giants closed in, the Youngest Orphan threw his last fireball from the necklace, they slammed the door shut, and the room went up in a blast of flame.
When the smoke cleared, the giants still stood, but all others lay still. The fighters quickly dispatched the giants, and the party sifted through the burnt gore. They found a great deal of treasure and loot, including many valuable metals and machinery stolen from the dwarves—but no hexagonal prism. However, as they stood in the defeated remains of the Allmother, changes wrought themselves in their flesh: the party grew thick, broad, and strong; missing parts regrew as orcish parts, like Sōt’s recently-lost foot and long-lost ear; the start of new limbs emerged from their sides. The Youngest Orphan, half-metal and half-clay, shed his entire form to emerge as a whole new orc.
To carry all the treasure back, Tarkus raised more corpses, including the orc-giants, to lug it to the surface. After a long trek back past many orcs struck with fear and confusion, they returned home, flush with treasure.
Where does the last piece of the Slumbering Clanweaver lie? What lies in the steel-paneled chambers on the third floor? What secrets yet await?
Find out next time (hopefully sooner than the last!)
Art Pressure
About four years ago, my friend and longtime collaborator nuclearobelisk and I made a campaign guide for running a West Marches-style game, specifically for 5e.
At the the time, we were game development students in college, seniors about to graduate. I’d been running a campaign that she played in (one of about a dozen players) for close to two years. We ran a Kickstarter and raised about $25,000, but really needed that cash ourselves and had lots of shipping and printing to pay for, so our actual budget for the project shrank fast.
But we wanted it to look good. This was a 5e book, which meant we needed quite a bit of art. Commissioning all the art we’d need—or even a tenth of what we’d need—was completely out of budget. While nuclearobelisk is a brilliant illustrator, she didn’t have the time or willpower to go draw a hundred full-color pieces.
After hunting around, we eventually found a solution: stock art. Go onto Adobe Stock or Shutterfly, sort by illustrations, and search for something like “fantasy landscape.” There are hundreds of thousands of results, available for—when you buy them in large enough quantities—only a few bucks apiece. So, we used stock art. Dozens or hundreds of pieces, a couple on every spread.
(Most of these were by a single artist, grandfailure, the bedrock and secret unsung hero of RPG art for low-budget projects. Spend enough time looking at indie RPGs on itch, DriveThru, and the DM’s Guild, and you see their work everywhere.)
The book came out okay! We had enough experience with Photoshop and InDesign to tweak and modify the pieces so they didn’t look too generic, and we spent a lot of time curating down the firehose of options that Adobe Stock offers. While certainly not a radical departure from the 5e standard in terms of visual design, it was definitely good enough. We got more than a few compliments on how well it looked compared to other student projects, or books of similar budget.
Stock art saved our project, basically. Without it, we would’ve either had to produce a book with very little art or gone massively over budget. But instead, we used a bunch of cheap stock art, paid for one nice big piece of commissioned art for the cover, filled in a few gaps ourselves, and walked away with a few grand apiece. As students, we counted it as a huge win.
Last year, more than three years after that book, I picked up a graphic design gig working on a third-party 5e project. This was not an official Wizards of the Coast project, nor was it from any of the biggest players just below them—Critical Role, MCDM, or one of their types—but it was from a significant and influential team, only a step or two further down. These were the kind of people who’d been making RPGs for decades, had an official WOTC sourcebook of their own, and made hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue every year, mostly from the DM’s Guild. If you’ve been in RPGs for a while, you’ve probably heard of them.
I met with their project manager and got the rundown: a big setting splatbook, standard 5e two-column layout, a mixture of key and spot art. All very standard stuff.
But then, we got to the interesting part: the project manager linked me to their Google Drive folders with the written plaintext and art in separate files, as normal, and I noticed something. While they had plenty of commissioned art custom-made for this particular project, there was lots of other art, too, more generic stuff.
At first, I took it to be recycled art from previous projects. WOTC does this all the time, especially from old editions, and many other publishers and studios follow suit.
But then I dug a little deeper, and I realized: it was stock art. Some from the DM’s Guild, some from Patreon artists who license it out, and some from Adobe Stock and Shutterfly. This team, with a budget in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for this project, couldn’t afford all the pieces they wanted. Even though they’d sell thousands of copies in the first few months, they still had to use stock art.
This leads me to my next question: what are we doing here?
I mean it! How is it that we’ve gotten to the point, as a hobby and an industry, where one of the most successful and influential teams of the past 20 years, people worked on literal actual Dungeons & Dragons, can’t afford to pay for the art to go in their new book? How have we priced out full-time professionals making some of the most popular products in the world? What strange confluence of conditions brought us here?
The answer, I think, is one of culture, rather than medium. There’s nothing about an RPG book that demands more art; illustrations are nice, and diagrams are sometimes necessary, but ours is a written medium. It’s entirely possible to write an RPG book with no art (just look at your own campaign notes), while an RPG book with no words is more or less incomplete. Provocative and inspiring, maybe, but illustrations alone cannot sustain an RPG in the same way they can sustain, say, a game of Dixit. You don’t need art to play an RPG.
And yet, if you looked at, say, DriveThru, or Kickstarter, or even just your FLGS, I suspect it’d feel different. It’d feel like art was this vital necessity, something requisite to be an RPG. The popular RPGs you see for sale are filled to bursting with illustrations.
Why? Why is it like this?
Mainly, I think, because consumers expect it. Demand it, even. The best-selling RPG books are ones loaded with illustrations and overwrought graphic design. The RPG books that raise the most money on Kickstarter do so on the basis of their gorgeous visuals, not on the quality of their writing. Think about it: when was the last time you bought an RPG because the writing was great? When was the last time someone recommended an RPG to you because they loved the words themselves?
We, as the audience and market for RPG books, seem to consistently value illustrations and graphic design over everything else. Publishers know this, and are so scared of releasing an RPG book without art that they’ll load it full of discount stock art, stuff that looks wildly inconsistent from page to page and clashes heavily with the project itself, just so they can avoid the accusation of being a book without art.
I call this art pressure. The indelible and sometimes ineffable pressure that consumers place on publishers—and publishers place on themselves—to create bigger books with more art.
It is a consumptive desire; books with more art indicate higher budgets, more production value, more “bang for your buck.” They look nicer sitting on your shelf and in the background of your “shelfies;” books with more art are pleasant to page through, to skim over and daydream about rather than actually sit down and read. An RPG consumer who owns many beautiful books displays their dedication to the hobby, proves themselves a genuine fan, regardless of what they actually play—or, as the case may be, don’t play.
And it’s killing small projects. Commissioned pieces are expensive—rightfully so—but only gigantic corporations like Wizards of the Coast have the budget to pay. That small indie RPGs compete in the same market with largely the same expectations as corporate brands like D&D only enhances this pressure. If you’re an indie launching a project on Kickstarter, more better art is the surest path towards selling more copies, and all that art paid for ahead of time is a huge risk. You can use stock art, sure, but do you really want your book to like everything else? Is that what we want our medium to become?
This competition, this pressure to beautify the pages of your book more than you can afford, will continue until we as consumers decide to change. Until the audience for tabletop RPG books decides it is willing to pay for projects without illustrations and deluxe graphic design, the art pressure will continue. It will continue until drains smaller artists—and I say artists here in the broader sense, writers and designers and editors along with illustrators—entirely dry.
This is my challenge to you: go out and buy an RPG book with no illustrations or fancy graphic design, then read every word.
Look around and you’ll find them, on itch or DriveThru or the small online retailers. They’re cheap, cheaper than they ought to be, so you can definitely buy them at full price. Take the time to remind yourself what exactly it is that makes the games you play.
Some of my favorite RPG books with no or almost no illustrations, if you’re looking:
- 1,000 Statues, blark
- Black Manse, Micah Anderson
- Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, Chance Dudinack
- Empire of Texas, Luke Gearing
- The Haunting of Ypsilon-14, D.G. Chapman
- Mike’s Dungeons, Geoff McKinney
- Reivdene-Upon-the-Moss, Chris Bisette
- Songbirds 3e, snow
- Thrift23, Thriftomancer