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
RPGs I’ve Played: An Oral History
In 5th grade, my first year of middle school, I joined the Dungeons & Dragons club. My first GM was my art teacher, Mr. Bennett. We played some odd hybrid of 3e and 3.5e, running through what I discovered only recently was, I think, an adventure by Harley Stroh—Tower of the Black Pearl. It lasted about three sessions.
In the months after, I tried playing some loose games with my friends and our Star Wars Legos, one on one, where I was a kind of undefined GM and they guided a single character through Lego maps and fought bad guys. I don’t remember if dice were involved, but they told me what their Lego Jedi did, and I said what happened, more or less. These only lasted one “session” apiece, but I did this several times.
A year later, I tried playing in another after-school 3.5e game, which also fell apart in two to three sessions.
A year or two after that, I convinced my friends to try playing the 2002 Iron Crown Lord of the Rings game, which I ran. The book was a duct-taped together borrowed copy of a friend’s older brother’s manual. Here was where I quickly started realizing how fast genres can bend and how convenient that could be—this campaign featured black slimes and teleportation crates, none of which fit the Tolkien vibe super well, but did make for very fun, goofy dungeons.
It was around this time, about 12 or 13, that I started getting into Warhammer, with those same friends. For many, many Friday and Saturday nights after that, four or five of us would gather in my parents’ basement, eat pizza, argue about terrain sight lines, self-importantly check the special rules section to win arguments, and occasionally play the actual game. I played Tau, then Orks, then eventually Orcs & Goblins. We played through the edition change from 5th to 6th in 40K and WHFB during the last days of 8th edition, just before the switch to Age of Sigmar. We played regularly through the end of high school. I tried more than once to convince my friends to try a “narrative campaign”—explained only briefly across 4 pages buried in the middle of the 5th edition rulebook—to little avail.
In early high school, at about 15, I was introduced to Shadowrun 4e at summer camp. We played only a session or two, but our GM sent me the PDF—the first RPG PDF I remember really scrolling through and studying in detail.
Later in high school, I ran a few short campaigns of Shadowrun for some vague friends I’d made doing theater and improv. For the longest one, there were only three of us, so they played two characters each. That game was set in a cyberpunk version of San Francisco—a city I’d never been to, and still haven’t.
It was also in high school that I (surprise surprise) ended up doing both improv theater and Model UN. Neither is quite the same as an RPG (jury’s still out on which of the three is most cringe), but both remain hugely influential in my style, especially as a GM.
When I got to college, I ran Shadowrun again for my roommate and his two friends, which lasted about five or six sessions. (It turns out that you when you go to a school full of dorks, saying “yeah I’ll run RPGs for you” is a great way to insert yourself wholesale into existing friend groups.) Then, I went to the campus tabletop game club and played 5e for the first time; this was after not playing anything officially called Dungeons & Dragons for six or seven years. Our GM was a little raw, clearly improvising things on the fly and basing his stuff heavily on anime none of us but him had seen, but it was a reintroduction.
After a half-dozen sessions in the loud, messy club game, I decided to put together my own 5e game with four players—one from my orientation group, one from the club game, one person I randomly met on campus, and one person I knew vaguely from my one summer of summer camp who’d happened to go to the same school for undergrad. This campaign ran for the next two semesters, playing 8+ hour sessions on Saturday afternoons. It too was a bit of a mess—a lot of homebrew monsters that had to be adjusted on the fly, retcon’ing the odd accidental TPK, and NPCs that suddenly jumped in to the rescue—but I learned a ton, and we all got far more acclimated to 5e. Most of us were also watching Critical Role at this point, the midpoint through the tail end of Campaign 1, and were heavily inspired by Mercer and company.
In the background, the irregular game with my roommates swapped from Shadowrun to 5e, which was vastly easier to run and at this point significantly more familiar. I set this campaign in the same world as my other game, on the other side of the continent—I’d hoped the players would run into each other, but this never happened.
The next year, my sophomore year, I ran another campaign for my same long-term players, set in the same world. One player dropped out, but we picked up a couple more over the year. This was also the campaign where my style started to clash more heavily with some of my players—I was interested in complicated factions and dangerous wildernesses, they wanted big huge action setpieces. This was before I knew what the OSR was (we were all deep in the heyday of 5e, right as Volo’s and Xanathar’s released), but my tastes were changing.
Home from school for Christmas, I ran a few sessions of 5e for my old Shadowrun and theater friends, many of whom had started playing together.
Come spring, as now second-year game development students, we all started studying and making tabletop games in more detail. I talked my way into an RPG class meant for upperclassmen, and for the final project released my first ever RPG project on the DM’s Guild, a 5e set of exploration and survival rules expanding on the stuff in the DMG. Late my sophomore year, I started running test sessions to see how these all worked. They were quite rough and crunchy at first, but moved forward slowly.
It was also at this point, in part due to the RPG course, that I started breaking away from 5e. For the class, we ran several games of Star Wars Genesys (my first time co-GMing), and my professor recommended Dogs in the Vineyard as an old favorite of his. After reading through Dogs and googling Vincent Baker, I discovered Apocalypse World and Powered by the Apocalypse books. This was the late 2010s, long after PbtA had been well-established, but it was all still totally fresh to me. Two semesters later, Avery Alder came to my school and ran an RPG workshop—the first time I really noticed myself starting to grate against some of the more cutting-edge storygame design.
Home from school that summer, I ran my first West Marches-style open-table campaign for my old Shadowrun friends and our expanding circle of 5e players. It was a bit rough—I learned many hard lessons in what we called the “Test Marches”—but I discovered my love of more old school play, even if I didn’t quite know to call it that at the time: big sandboxes, competing factions, player-drawn maps, weather and travel systems, random encounters, all that jazz. A much more rough-and-tumble, unplanned, dangerous mode of play compared to the Critical Role-inspired neotrad we’d all been absorbing.
That fall, I began a new 5e West Marches game for all of my college friends—my regular players, my roommates, some classmates, a couple of (un)lucky randos—about a dozen of them in total. We played 2–3 sessions per week, usually 4–6 hours. We also had occasional “raid” sessions, where I’d let them surpass the normal limit of six players to bring eight, ten, twelve players to defeat some big bad boss monster. After two years of playing, this was where I really honed my 5e expertise: we could have complicated exploration, run four or five combats, delve into roleplaying and investigation, and do it all inside four hours. I made dungeons every week, even if they were hasty, and I learned to prep quickly. This West Marches game ran for almost two years, with the highest-leveled PCs going all the way from 1 to 20.
At the same time, I started to get more into storygames. I got a copy of Apocalypse World and read it cover to cover multiple times, and started delving deeper. For another class, I and some other people released a messy, clunky system of our own—a multigenerational mythic Viking game—and that spring I ran my first Kickstarter, a lighter-weight almost-retroclone of Shadowrun, for the first ZineQuest.
That spring, my junior year, after some finagling, I ended up landing an independent study with two professors—in game design and creative writing—to run regular games of Apocalypse World for students writing game-based fiction. This was about 20 sessions total across the semester, usually one or two per week. I admit at this point I didn’t really understand anything the Bakers were talking about: I ran AW too adventurously, too close to D&D, too focused on problem-solving instead of letting players get into drama with each other. The class was a bit of mess.
Here, for various reasons, my West Marches group decided to start streaming our games on Twitch: my roommates and I built an incredibly jank set in our living room, bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of podcast microphones and webcams to mount on beer bottles, and tried it out. We averaged about 4 viewers, at least a couple of which were our own laptops in the background.
From the spring of my junior year to the fall of my senior year, I bought, read, and ran a session or three of many PbtA systems and storygames—Blades in the Dark, Monsterhearts, For the Queen, Cartel, Scum & Villainy, Night Witches, Dread, Dogs in the Vineyard, Poison’d!, Bluebeard’s Bride, Urban Shadows, and others besides.
After a lot of tactical kicking and screaming, I also convinced my department to give me summer co-op credit for running another Kickstarter campaign and making an RPG instead of doing a regular internship. I ran many playtest sessions of the game that spring and summer, a PbtA hack about grungy sci fi space truckers, mostly oneshots. The first draft of that game was submitted as a final project for another game design course; at the same time, one of my oldest players submitted a draft of a West Marches guide she’d been writing based on our game, the one she played in and I ran as GM.
Home again that summer and writing my PbtA hack, a friend from my original Test Marches game began running his own West Marches game, which I played in. It was the first time I’d played more than a session or two as a player-character in years. I enjoyed it a lot—my characters tended to die often—but I also grated against how slow and mechanistic 5e could be. I played about 20 sessions that summer, churning through a half-dozen PCs or more.
I also went to Gen Con for the first time, in August, running sessions for Magpie Games.
The fall of my senior year, as these storygame oneshots and streamed West Marches sessions still ran, I scored the same deal as the previous semester: I’d run sessions, meet with my professors regularly, and do some writeups, all in exchange for independent study credit (this time in creative writing rather than game design). That fall, I was running Scum & Villainy; the students based their writing on Star Wars—fanfiction, more or less, set in our semi-canonical campaign. These sessions went far better than Apocalypse World, and included multiple “combo” sessions in which different teams from different player groups would collide, including one final showdown that involved a dozen players, “requiring” (lol) me to run it during class time. It was this fall, my senior year, that—between Scum, the West Marches, my own playtests, and other games—sometimes the number of sessions I’d run in a week would outnumber the days in that week. Most of these Scum and other PbtA sessions were heavily improvised—such is the style they advise.
This was also when I finally discovered the OSR, starting with Knave (not through the Questing Beast channel, oddly, but rather just by happening upon it on DriveThru), and branching out from there. We only played oneshots, but it kept gnawing at me. This was just after G+ had died, so I started trawling the blogs, following Twitter users, and trying to piece together what the OSR actually was.
I’d also started playing in a game run by one of my professors: four faculty, one as GM, and two students. I loved this campaign, despite its occasional issues, and got very into the characters and world.
At the end of the semester, I ran the biggest and greatest session of the West Marches campaign, a boss fight against a super-tarrasque. Ten players piled into my living room, and we managed to pick up about 15 Twitch viewers—our most ever. The session lasted some four and half hours, almost all of which was pure combat, careening towards catastrophe and evading it at the last second many times. This, tragically, turned out to be one of our very last sessions.
That spring, my senior year, I got the same creative writing independent study deal, this time running Blades in the Dark rather than Scum. My friend and I also managed to secure another independent study to work on our West Marches guide and run a Kickstarter for it, too. We also, naturally, each did ZineQuest again, and convinced many of our friends to run their own projects, too—a kind of seat-of-our-pants game jam with questionable funding.
Of course, that spring led to March 2020. My West Marches campaign died, the Blades independent study died, the professor game died, our sense of the future as seniors in college died.
But I did get into grad school, and my friend’s and my Kickstarter, for the 5e West Marches guide, did fund.
That summer, in the midst of the pandemic, I started running the first playtest campaigns for Seas of Sand—one with my roommates and the others online, three or four in total. These ranged usually between 3 and 7 sessions, iterating and expanding each time. It was in these campaigns that I truly got into the OSR, running Knave, GLOG hacks, and others. I played in an online half-PbP GLOG campaign for a few months before classes began.
That fall, 2020, as I was taking grad school classes online, I ran an open-table Blades campaign for the fellow grad students, which quickly fell apart. It’s difficult to run an open table where you as the GM don’t have a core of reliable players you already know at least a bit.
Instead, I started two longer-term Seas of Sand playtest campaigns as I kept working on the project through grad school: one with four of my undergrad friends, another with four of my grad school friends. These both ran weekly, online, until summer 2021.
Come summer, as one of my Seas campaigns wrapped up, I ran Band of Blades for some grad friends. We finished a whole campaign, about a dozen sessions, the last final battle played in our new apartment in New York (many of my new roommates being formerly-online players of the campaign). Band of Blades kind of works, but straddles an uncomfortable line between the improv of Scum or Blades and the more focused prep of an adventure. I changed a lot to make it work.
That fall, my online undergrad group swapped through a dozen hacks and new systems as I experimented with new ideas: storygames, PbtA stuff, ultraminimalist post-OSR shenanigans, weird systemic videogame-y ideas, aborted exploration projects, and others. I also played many newer storygames and itch projects for a class, some of which I’d already played and some I hadn’t—Lasers & Feelings, Dream Askew, Star-Crossed, Thousand Year Old Vampire, Fall of Magic, the Quiet Year, Ex Novo, You Will Be Liquid, Alone Among the Stars, Wanderhome, Beak Feather & Bone, and others. It was this fall, as I started reading game studies more deeply and exploring the limits of RPGs, that I found my favorite kinds of games, in the “post-OSR” space. Most of my current fringe ideas started here, after playing many storygames and others.
In the winter, I started running a heavily-modified Blades in the Dark campaign, shifted into a much more OSR-ish “street crawl” faction-y mindset, which ran for about 15-20 sessions in-person with three of my friends from grad school.
In the spring, as the end of grad school approached and my work ramped up, my online undergrad friends requested more familiar territory, something they didn’t need to learn all over again and could just play. (There’s an odd problem that comes from playing with game designers: as soon as someone makes a suggestion or critique, whole sessions can devolve into just doing game design instead of actually playing—fun, sometimes, but inertia-killing.) After discovering E5 and hacking it further, we went back to a now-almost-unrecognizable 5e, which we’d all played so many hours of back in the West Marches. This campaign, the Heresy campaign, still runs every week—we’ll hit our two-year anniversary in a couple months.
That summer, I tried to run an open table megadungeon campaign for my grad school friends, which faltered—I didn’t prep enough and was doing too much improv, I made some poor structural choices with regards to a castle and a dragon, and other issues. After a dozen-odd sessions, it died at the end of summer.
That fall, I started running games at a local-ish game store, mostly Mothership. I ran bits and pieces of Dead Planet, Pound of Flesh, Gradient Descent, Ypsilon-14, and others of my own making. Truth be told, this was among the first times I really ran an adventure entirely out of a book; I’d read plenty of adventures before, and stolen things out of them, but almost never was I running as-written from a book. (This deserves a longer post, but I think Mothership adventures have the somewhat-unique quality of being actually pretty good, and thus more pleasant to read than, say, a technical manual of 5e jargon.) I ran probably a dozen sessions of Mothership total.
Periodically throughout this period and to this day, about once a season, my roommates and I get stoned and play UVG. This game is messy, only half-remembered from the previous session, almost totally improvised, very off the wall, and extremely fun. In the fall of 2023, I started running what we called “the Mean Game:” a vicious OSR hack using my own Lowlife, set in a fictionalized turn-of-the-century Appalachia, where players fought coal barons’ gun thugs and explored haunted mines. This ran for about a dozen sessions off and on, online, before ending.
This spring, 2024, I rebooted the megadungeon campaign from the summer before last, which is still running—Pandemonium.
There are other short-lived campaigns in here I’m forgetting, too: a drunken late-night college Gestalt 5e campaign, a PbtA summer playtest, a Lowlife test dungeon crawl, a gothic horror Victorian Mosh-hack, a ’90s-trad style monster game, probably more I can’t remember.
I’ve been playing RPGs regularly since about 2016, and releasing my own work since 2018. I estimate I’ve spent about 2,500 hours playing RPGs, some 500-600 sessions, the overwhelming majority of which were as GM. I feel old.
Pandemonium Megadungeon Session Report #6
Hello again! You can read previous session reports here: #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5.
2nd Day of the Month of the Imperium
Today, the party consists of:
The Eldest Orphan of Forsaken for Eternity by Birth, Fighter 4; mohawked noble with aristocrat’s boots, a miser’s flute, a necklace of fireballs, and a ghostly right leg to match Sōt’s left.
Sōt III, Butcher of Bugs, Roller of Rugs, Squandering Hugs, Fighter 4; a knight dressed in bone mail-and-plate, missing his left ear but blessed with a ghostly left leg, carrying a silver Pike of Warning, his nonmagical but heavily-notched longsword Righty, dust of disappearance, a cursed jester mask of Nidaros, and a camera from now-MIA comrade Erasmus Karl.
Snuffet the Twisted Pointer, Magic-User 3 (having leveled up since last session); a stoner transmuter with a feather of Hieracon, many new spells, and a ghostly left arm.
Old Iron Grip, Magic-User 2; an illusionist with an iron left hand, iron left peg leg, and no left ear.
Runpril the Crunty, Magic-User 2; a smiley translocator with a ghostly right arm, now clutching a pouchful of poison darts.
The Luggage, a chest fitted with magical wooden donkey legs (now wearing socks, to keep it quiet).
The party descended through the monument hole found at the previous session to a shadowy catacomb. Almost immediately, something snuffed their lights, and they had a spirit-telepathy (all but Old Iron Grip able to communicate telepathically with spirits after defeating Bolokhiv) in the dark. The creature was a servant of the Judge of Kings, and hated the light. Suddenly, after a flash from Sōt’s camera and a miscast invisibility, lights appeared and the creature was revealed as a shadowy ghostly skeleton wrapped in cloth: a brief fight ensued, and the thing scuttle-flew away into the dark. Chains were heard rattling in the distance.
After encountering walls of shadow and hearing scuttling things in the dark, the party retreated to the surface.
Using Runpril’s magic, the party teleported down to the far edge of the goblin encampment, skipping the stairs. They: ran into a merchant named Kitus, Quartermaster; descended the back stairs in the goblin camp to the dwarf territory; quarreled with dwarf traps; and got into a long slog of a battle—dwarves wear heavy armor and fight in defensive positions, using attrition to their advantage.
Retreating from the dwarves, the party: went back to the goblin camp; met a somewhat friendly multigoblin; got a voucher from a tour from Bokho, the Great Pedant, one of the goblin splinter faction leaders; tangled with some skeletons; and went down to the second level to find Tonus, Master Alchemist, a now-familiar potion merchant.
The party purchased a black bottle imp from Tonus, which answers one question: the party asked to learn the Celestine activation phrase for a teleportation circle nearby, which the imp told them, then vanished. The party committed this phrase to memory, practicing the choral Celestine phrase.
They sold some claimed dwarf heads to the local orcs, who paid a pittance, then retreated to the surface.
3rd Day of the Month of the Imperium
Completely turning over, the party today consists of:
Lord Tarkus Two-Fingers, Magic-User 3; an aspiring dark lord necromancer with a ghostly right hand (with three ghost-skeletal fingers), an amber comb, and a Lagash sapling.
Paparazzo Vetch the Orcbreaker, Fighter 3; a tourist-turned-chef with a belt of cat imprisonment and an oilskin bag holding an imprisoned air elemental.
Gunko, Magic-User 1; a goblin illusionist, a former pickpocket.
Ketchup, Magic-User 1; an orphaned translocator.
(Plus the Luggage, who accompanies most trips.)
Descending, Tarkus almost miscast death ward but managed to land it regardless; he then animated six skeletons to serve him. The party then: ran into Curus, Master Peddler, another merchant; triggered many dwarf traps; snuck into orc territory via secret passage; clambered over a paddock full of leather-eating worms; and found their way to orc territory proper.
After killing some orcs in a forge-tannery-hybrid, the party discovered a secret chamber behind a huge tanning barrel, holding coins, jewelry, ambergris, a prayer of the seal, and a +2 hauberk made from phynox (which prevents the wearer from being disarmored).
Moving further, they discovered a large ritual combat arena, where two orcs hacked each other to pieces, watched by a dozen more. Seizing the opportunity, the party ambushed the orcs, and a vicious battle ensued: the party slew most of the orcs, but all of Tarkus’s skeletal minions were slain, and at the last minute two orcs broke ranks and attacked Tarkus directly.
Tarkus collapsed, lungs punctured, dying. To buy time, the party fit Gunko’s air bladder into the hole while Vetch, a butcher, opened another hole between his ribs to drain the blood and fluids. So long as Gunko kept manually pumping Tarkus’s lungs with air bladder, he remained alive but unconscious. Hauling him back to Curus, they bought a vial of nightshade, which Curus explained would separate Tarkus’s spirit from his body. Pouring it down his throat, a translucent ghost-Tarkus emerged, and the body went into a coma. As a spirit, Tarkus only speaks the Ghosttongue, but all the party members who defeated Bolokhiv possess the ability to telepathically communicate with spirits, and thus can translate despite not understanding his spoken words.
Back on the surface, the party brought Tarkus’s body to the temple and paid a hefty fine, where the priest managed to save him—though his ghost remained separate.
4th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Sōt, Tarkus (still a ghost), and Ketchup ventured forth, now joined by:
Keviin, Fighter 1; a burglar and main tender-to of the Luggage.
Before that, though, Tarkus flew down the side of the cliff that the town of Forsaken sits on to examine the stone disc set into the cliff-face, which Vetch noticed a few days earlier. Sticking his ghostly head through the disc he (climactically!) found himself staring into darkness.
Descending to level 2, the party: ran into Tonus, Master Alchemist, again; went back to dwarf territory; triggered many traps via Tarkus holding a silver coin (as ghosts can touch and hold silver normally); and Ketchup miscast telekinesis, suddenly opening a teleportation portal to an unknown location beneath their feet. Sōt, unfortunately, fell into the portal: Ketchup and Keviin, unwilling to abandon a comrade, leapt in after him. Ghost-Tarkus, however, assumed that they were dead meat and stayed behind.
Tarkus, on his lonesome, decided to explore down the large pit near them. The party had seen this pit many times, and knew it was full of water, but never dared explore. Going down, he found an underground lake in a huge cavern. After scouting the exterior of the cavern—some two hundred feet across, with a few exits—Tarkus found a second, smaller hole in the cavern’s ceiling with sunlight at the top. Ascending upwards, he found himself emerging in the center of Forsaken, coming out of the town well. Before returning to town, though, Tarkus instead floated downwards, into the water of the lake, moving down further and further until there was no light. There, as he felt the water move through his incorporeal form, he called out into the water. He felt the waters churn, and something whispered back to him in Elvish, a strange slithering voice. Nervous, he flew back to the surface of the lake and back to Forsaken.
Meanwhile, Sōt, Ketchup, and Keviin emerged from the portal to find themselves in a familiar circular chamber: four doors, and a raised circle of polish stone in the center surrounded by seven concentric rings of writing. Poking around, they realized that Ketchup miscast teleport had taken them to the closest fixed teleportation circle—not far at all.
Backtracking to where they fell through the portal, the three failed to find Tarkus. Instead, they: contemplated opening a mummy sarcophagus; ran into some orcs (who hadn’t seen Tarkus); tried to talk to some skeletons (but nobody speaks the Corpsetongue); swung a lantern into the pit looking for Tarkus; and eventually headed out of the dungeon.
Back on the surface, Tarkus was immensely surprised to see his three comrades alive and well: he said he expected them to have gone to the Hells, or something even worse.
5th Day of the Month of the Imperium
Sōt, Ghost-Tarkus, Ketchup, and Keviin went down once again. They: smashed a skeleton; met Huntus, Master-at-Arms, and Keviin bought six lifestealing arrows made from porcelain (which lets the slayer learn the last thoughts of the victim); baited the mummy from its tomb so Tarkus could steal its most prized posession (“that which binds the universe together”)—a pot of glue.
Sōt tried dabbing the glue against his thumb and finger and immediately found them stuck together. Returning to the surface, he had the temple priest delicately saw his fingers apart, losing a millimeter of thumb-skin in the process.
As they were tired from the days’ adventuring, they opted for a different path: lowering Sōt down on a rope and using Ghost-Tarkus as a lookout, they hammered a series of pitons into the well-shaft and hung ropes between them, making a ladder. The last 40’ dangled freely, a rope-ladder that could be pulled up on their ascent.
Ladder installed, the party lowered down their folding boat and dropped it into the water, clambering aboard. Ketchup, excited by the idea “mermaids,” convinced Tarkus to try to retrieve the Elvish-speakers from below. Tarkus went down again, and using a combination of ghostly hand-gestures and calling in the Ghosttongue, managed to lure the creature up to the surface of the lake.
Breaking the surface, it was a roughly humanoid creature, pale and clammy, with webbed hands and feet, long pointy ears, a slitted gill mouth, and smooth skull where the eyes should be—a pale elf, which the party had only heard rumor of but never seen. A second one, undetected by Tarkus, broke the surface as well, and the two swam in lazy circles around the ship.
Ketchup, excited, spoke with them, and they learned that the pale elves dwelt far below, at the bottom of the lake. They worshiped or followed someone known as the Deacon of the Dusk, and hated most of their neighbors—in particular a dragon called the Emerald Nexus. If the party were to slay the dragon, the pale elves might find themselves generously disposed towards them. At that point, someone said the possible name of the Deacon aloud and the pale elves grew furious—one nearly attacked, but they departed in peace.
Then, three bloated zombie-things swam up to the boat and tried to climb aboard. The party attacked them and were sprayed with filthy water. After, they returned to the surface.
6th Day of the Month of the Imperium
In the small hours of the morning, Old Iron Grip realized he had more cash than he thought and spent it all, leveling up to become Old Iron Grip the Dying.
He, Vetch, and the Eldest Orphan descended, joined by:
Donkers, Fighter 1; another brother of Chonkers and Bonkers, this one a disgraced champion long-jumper (he rolled an 18 for agility). Before going down, Donkers grabbed Bonkers’ backpack, still filled with a pack crab, now swollen to a nearly-spherical shape.
Knowing that Vetch’s scheduled appointment with the myconids was tomorrow, the party opted for something milder: they decided to test the teleportation circle. They headed down to level 2, spoke the Celestine phrase followed by the Goblinoid phrase (from one of the six other surrounding rings of text) to illuminate the polished disc with light. They stepped through and found themselves deep in goblin territory, a place they’d already been.
From there, they: cashed in their voucher for a tour with Bokho, the Great Pedant; slew a water elemental that laid in ambush; robbed a tomb too heavy for the goblins to open; met one(ish) friendly multigoblin; and accidentally miscast hypnotic orb onto the most spherical object around—the pack crab inside Donkers’ bag.
Tour completed, they talked with the goblins, learning that a nearby room held some monster that the goblins were trying to convert into a goblin (via psychosyringe through the ear), but kept killing them. The party made a deal: they get the monster to the point the goblins can syringe it, and they get all the loot in the room. The goblins agreed. After some investigating, the party realized the inside held a manticore; using the hypnotic crab and Vetch’s belt of cat imprisonment, the party threw the door open. While the manticore resisted the hypnosis, it did stay within the belt, and combined with an illusory barrier to hide their path, the party scouted the chamber while dodging manticore barbs—no treasure, only corpses. They emerged having suffered only one casualty: the hypnotic pack crab, which caught a barb as the Eldest Orphan held it aloft. Frustrated and feeling betrayed, they began arguing with the goblins—until some rival goblins showed up and the Great Pedant and its followers took off. The party took their leave, heading back to the surface.
7th Day of the Month of the Imperium
The party descended, not through the main stairs beneath the Inn but rather through the secret entrance beneath the general store, down to the mushroom territory. Speaking with a slimy sporous fountain, Vetch informed the myconid hive mind that he had arrived for his appointment. Two myconids arrived shortly afterwards to guide the party to the Council.
As they walked, they passed: another mossy fountain with a shrine in it; a room full of giant moths (which the myconids put to sleep); myconid mushroom-growth meditation circles; pits full of growing mycoslime (same as in the first fountain); a huge mushroom called a myconid titan; and eventually to another shrine, where the myconids stopped. As the party got deeper into the mushroom territory, a golden haze filled the air; Donkers inhaled too much of it and felt all his aches and pains fade away, totally blissful and numb.
The myconids began the ritual process of preparing Vetch’s brain to speak with the Council: painkiller and paralytic fungi for the surgery, trepanning the skull, psychedelic mushrooms, and an injection of slime beneath the skull to tap into the hive mind. Vetch felt his mind transcend, connecting slowly to an ever-expanding network of consciousness, a magnificent organization of cooperation and purpose. Seeing himself from many directions at once, he left the party (who sampled mushrooms and politely waited) and entered to commune with the council.
Inside were seven huge fungi, each different—an enormous cap, a sprawl of brain fungi, mycorrhizal fibers, and so on—with vines and tendrils interlinking with gold and treasures, forming one huge magical entity. This, the mind said, was the Council of Mehrgarh, the Magnificent Ministry. Vetch asked many questions, not so much speaking as simply communing in concepts and emotions, and received many answers: the Ministry had been growing for 900 years; they were once each something different than fungi; they had some allies (the Judge of Kings, the Castellan of the Depths); and many enemies (the Bloodbound Brigand, the Heart of Many Hearts, the Cannibal King); that the Magnificent Ministry truly was pacifist and would never harm anyone; and that to join them, which Vetch desired, he would need to expand and increase the power of his mind, and gain understanding of some subject or medium they lacked—they recommended animalia, flesh, non-fungal matter.
His transcendental high fading and his connection slowly ending, the myconids returned Vetch to his comrades, most of whom had now inhaled the golden spore haze to also numb their pain. Upon leaving, the myconids gifted them many other mushrooms: blue mushrooms to cause sleep, yellow mushrooms to cause cataplexy, and indigo mushrooms to induce heightened emotional awareness and empathy.
From there, the myconids guided the party back to the surface, and they returned to Forsaken.
Where will the party go next? How will Vetch expand and increase his mind? Will they ever find a big haul of treasure again?
Find out next time.
Does the MDA Framework Apply to Tabletop RPGs?
Does the MDA Framework Apply to Tabletop RPGs?
No, it doesn’t. I’d argue it doesn’t even apply to videogames.
Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics is a self-professed formalist approach, a “framework,” to games created by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek, three videogame developers; Zubek also teaches game design at Northwestern. Since its publication in 2004, MDA has been quite influential—4220 citations on Google Scholar as an easy statistic, at time of writing.
MDA, notably, has the same quirk that many game studies articles written by developers do: it’s very interested in practical problems. That is, MDA is extremely focused on addressing problems that appear in [video]game development rather than making more theoretical or philosophical claims about what games are or do. To me—granted, as someone who has never worked at a professional game development studio—it scans as a bit desperate, a bit cloying. It feels like the article appeals to theory in at attempt convince some producer breathing down the designers’ necks. Which is important! From the stories my friends in AAA tell, directors and producers often lose sight of what makes a game fun in pursuit of some grand vision.
While I can certainly appreciate game studies as a tool for fending off overbearing producers, I don’t think that makes MDA any more correct, nor do I think it justifies the acclaim the article has received over the years. If it can convince your producer to agree with you, godspeed, but I don’t think that means it must be right.
To begin with, MDA makes a pretty bold claim, one that’s baked in to its assumptions: that games are artifacts. That is, that games are a good, an object, something that can be created and consumed. The designer creates the game, and the player consumes it.
This is… wrong. It’s wrong on an academic level, and I think it’s also wrong if you just look at games we play as people.
There are basically two arguments in [academic] game studies about what a game is: that a game is an activity (held up by the likes of Abt (1970), Avedon & Sutton-Smith (1971), and Suits (1978)), something you do and actively engage in; or that a game is a system (from Crawford (1984), Costikyan (2002), and Tekinbas & Zimmerman (2004)), a set of rules and regulations that interact with each other. I happen to favor the former over the latter—a game doesn’t exist until it’s played—but I think there are strong arguments for both. Note that neither of these are an artifact or product: yes, you can charge people an entrance fee to play a game (paintball), and yes, you can sell a book with the rules written down (charades), but in neither case is the game actually contained in the thing being sold. I can play paintball for free if my friends bring their own guns; I can memorize the rules of charades and play them without the book.
This game-as-artifact argument also really starts to break down in the context of folk games: soccer is not an artifact. You use artifacts to play soccer (a ball, a net) but soccer itself is not actually any single object. I cannot put “soccer”—whether as a played experience or as a system of rules—as a complete thing into a box.
What about videogames? You download a game off of Steam, surely that’s a game, right? Right? No, I don’t think so. Yes, you download a bunch of code, 3D models, audio files, and other stuff, but those aren’t the game. How can you tell? Because you can play multiple games with the same piece of software. This is exceptionally obvious with something like Minecraft, but consider a narrower example, like Dark Souls. I can play Dark Souls in a lot of different ways: I can just try to get to the next area, defeat the bosses, and see the credits; I can speedrun, to try to see those same credits as fast as possible; I can do an SL1 build, where I never level up and impose extra challenges on myself; I can do a low-level PvP gank build, where I don’t actually care about seeing the credits but instead try to murder a lot of helpless players and skyrocket my Darkwraith rankings. Each of these activities, each of these systems, uses Dark Souls-the-software, but each follows different rules—the “intended” rules, the rules of a speedrun, the SL1 restriction, and so on. The game is the goal you set for yourself and the means by which you achieve it; Dark Souls is simply the software you use to do it.
You can do this with any game. I can play soccer, sure, but I also could use that ball and try to kick it as high as I can, and the winner is whoever kicks it the highest. I still need the soccer ball—much as a speedrunner still needs Dark Souls—but the game being played is fundamentally different. In the words of Stephanie Boluk & Patrick Lemieux’s excellent book Metagaming: “There is no cheating in Super Mario Bros.” I can cheat at a speedrun and I can cheat at soccer, but I cannot cheat a soccer ball and I cannot cheat software. This is, I think, where a clear distinction between”mechanics” and “rules” emerges (particularly when remembering that really we should be calling mechanics mechanisms): a mechanism is a physical property of an object, like a ball’s bounciness or a videogame’s health bar; a rule is restriction or other condition agreed to by players, like foul lines or going snipers-only. You can cheat at rules, but not mechanics; you play games with objects that possess mechanics, but it is the agreed-upon rules that define how we use those mechanics, and thus what the game itself is.
Okay, so, MDA thinks that games are artifacts, and I don’t. So what? What if we just pretend they didn’t say that, and move forward with the rest of the framework?
Next, they discuss the three components of games: rules, system, and “fun;” followed by their “design counterparts” of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. Here’s their diagram:
Diagram of game components, per MDA
The article immediately elaborates on those three terms:
Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms.
Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others’ outputs over time.
Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.
As MDA describes it, designers create the mechanics of the game, which determine the possible dynamics of the game, which creates the aesthetic experience of the player. On some level, this makes sense: designer makes game, player plays game, that play informs how player feels. Nice. Tight. Simple.
Except that this doesn’t make any sense at all! A game is not the thing the designer makes, a game is the thing that the player decides to play.
Here’s an example to illustrate: imagine I boot up The Last of Us and then spend the next twelve hours jumping up and down in a corner. My friend does the same thing on the TV next to me, and we take studious notes to see who can jump more times in this twelve-hour marathon: whoever jumps the most times wins. Let’s call this game Jumpy Jumpy Joel.
Now think about playing The Last of Us the “normal” way: the long journey from coast to coast, the fights and dangers along the way, the friends and foes met, the difficult decisions made, and the eventual goal of the player to reach the ending. Let’s call this Joel & Ellie’s Big Sad Adventure.
Both of these are games: they have a goal, they have constraints. Both of them use The Last of Us as an important game piece. The difference is that Joel & Ellie’s Big Sad Adventure is the game that Naughty Dog “intended” to be played using The Last of Us, while Jumpy Jumpy Joel is a game that my friend and I made up together.
This is where the primary building block of MDA, mechanics, starts to break down. The article describes mechanics twice. The first is above—components of the game as data and algorithms (also like, oh my god, you can’t define a component of a game as component again?? huh??)—but the second a page later. Here’s what it says:
Mechanics are the various actions, behaviors and control mechanisms afforded to the player within a game context. Together with the game’s content (levels, assets and so on) the mechanics support overall gameplay dynamics.
So on the one hand, we have mechanics as the components of the game, the data and algorithms. To me, that sounds like software: it sounds like The Last of Us, or Dark Souls. But then, the article flips, and says mechanics are the “actions, behaviors, and control mechanisms” available. To me, that sounds like rules, like system—the more conceptual set of interactions that exist as ideas rather than concrete objects, Joel & Ellie’s Big Sad Adventure or Jumpy Jumpy Joel. To use my earlier distinction, MDA’s first definition of mechanics sounds like mechanisms, but the second definition sounds like rules.
The article’s odd double-definition becomes obvious in their examples: they describe the mechanics of shooters as “weapons, ammunition, and spawn points” (which are mechanisms set by software), but the mechanics of card games as including “shuffling, trick-taking and betting” (which are rules agreed to by players). These are two very different concepts being housed under one umbrella term.
This is a critical error. Mechanisms, the physical properties of an object (be that a beach ball, a chess piece, or Halo 3), are more or less ironclad. You can change them—pop the ball, mod the game—but until you do so, their properties are set. Rules aren’t. Rules are always murky, always mutable. As Stephen Sniderman writes, “regardless of what game you’re playing, you cannot know all the rules.” There are a thousand subtle minor implied variations in any ruleset, and trying to nail down all of them is impossible. Players must agree to rules, while mechanisms exist whether you want them to or not. Conflating the rules of the game with the mechanisms of the object ignores essential differences between the two.
But it is very convenient. The article emphasizes iteration; the authors mention over and over again the value of playtesting your game to create its intended aesthetic outcome. If it’s true that the designer creates both mechanisms and rules, and that those now-united mechanics create dynamics which create aesthetics, then you only have three possibilities as a result of a given playtest session: the game working as intended (nice!), the game not working as intended (a problem to fix), or players intentionally playing it wrong (not your problem).
But in real life, there are myriad outcomes from a given play session: a player gets really excited about one part of the game and ignores everything else; two players decide to be rivals and spend the game trying to screw each other over instead of trying to win; all the players deciding to work together instead of competing; a player who gets bored and starts coming up with new games inside the existing one; a player who misinterprets some rule but in a way that’s actually much more exciting than the designer intended. Players constantly pursue subtly different goals while using a given mechanism-object, and assuming that the designers have any real control over that is folly.
(This is why, as a sidebar, my videogame-developer roommates emphasize gamefeel over almost all else—if the object is fun to play with and encourages players to make their own games, the developer’s intentions don’t matter and don’t need to. Make a fun toy, and players will have a great time more or less regardless of what they decide to do with it.)
From here, dynamics and aesthetics mostly fall apart or don’t matter. The article comes up with eight fairly-arbitrary aesthetics and discusses how various designer and player decisions might convey those. “The designers’ decisions impact play” is, I think, such an obvious conclusion that it doesn’t bear much talking about (nor indeed, I might say, writing an article about. But again, if you need to fight your producer, go with god).
Okay, so. MDA makes a bunch of incorrect assumptions about what constitutes a game, and as such allots the designer far more control over the resulting play than they might have otherwise. What does this have to do with tabletop roleplaying games?
The short answer is that RPGs don’t actually have any mechanisms. There are rules, endless rules, but no ironclad physical properties. There’s no toy you need to play RPGs, no required object in the same way that soccer requires a ball or a Glitchless All Bosses run requires Dark Souls. You don’t actually need pencil and paper, or dice, or the rulebook—it’s entirely possible to play an RPG without any of those.
The physical artifacts that RPG designers do make, the rulebooks, are merely books. Those books contain some written-down version of an imagined ruleset, or a map of an imagined world, but they aren’t the games in their own right. I can memorize the rules of D&D and a map of the dungeon and play just fine without the book—or do neither, and play a different RPG, also just fine.
Okay, sure, but what if you take the assumptions of MDA as true (which I don’t) and hold that the rules of the game are also mechanics? Well, then there’s also the fact that most RPGs don’t have goals. Players play RPGs for lots of different reasons, and pursue endless different goals, even at the same table: slay the dragon; reach level 9; romance a hottie; tell the story of a tragic downfall; escape the dungeon; get to know the latest boblin; try to sequence-break the adventure; die in a heroic way; make one million gold pieces; act as your character would; finally learn astral projection; reach the city of dreams; whatever.
Each of these goals forms its own new game, and accordingly the constraints placed upon the player—be those constraints the number of hitpoints you have or the presence of the Imperial Wardens in High Falls—vary significantly in the degree to which they actually impede a player’s pursuit of a goal. We all might be using the rules written in the Player’s Handbook, but the player chasing the heart of the hottie prince is going to have a very different experience from the player trying to unlock fireball as quickly as possible.
(This is, of course, still ignoring Sniderman’s (correct) argument that no written ruleset can contain all of its rules.)
Okay, but what if you do give players a goal, and what if they really do all honestly genuinely try to pursue it? Unfortunately for MDA, you still run into the twin issues of indefinite state space and the GM. That is, RPGs’ state spaces are impossible to completely define: we can’t simulate an entire imaginary world, and thus exactly what is and isn’t allowed is quite flexible. I can pick up a flower in lots of games, but only in an RPG can I pick off a petal, rip that petal in half, feed one half to a dog and take the other to a lab, then examine the molecular structure of that flower petal. Basically none of those actions are “in the rules,” but all are allowed because it’s possible within the imaginary world. Defining exactly where the state space of an RPG ends is basically impossible because of this flexibility; accordingly, designers lose a lot of control over what is and isn’t possible, what is and isn’t in the game.
In both of MDA’s definitions of “mechanics” and the eponymous dynamism of dynamics, there is an assumption of relative fixedness. The designer may not be able to control exactly what the player does, but they provide the playing field. In an RPG, this just isn’t true: an imaginary world is too big, too complicated, and too easily zoomed-in and -out of to be constrained by any one designer (assuming the designer even creates an imaginary world, which many don’t). Because a GM issues rulings, the game is played by an ever-changing ad-hoc ruleset, one determined perhaps partially by the designer but also by the imaginary world—a world which, again, cannot be determined in its entirety. Even if we take MDA’s umbrella definition of rules and mechanisms together, those rules aren’t actually fixed. While you could probably make the argument that a specific table’s specific GM’s specific ruling functions as a mechanic which informs dynamics and aesthetics, now we’re back to “the designer’s decisions impact play”—a conclusion I don’t think we had jump through all of these hoops to reach.
To summarize, MDA mistakenly conflates the rules of the game being played with the mechanisms of the object used in that play. Because of this, it assumes that designers have more control over players’ behavior and play in general, which is false. Rather, players constantly determine their own games, both implicit and explicit, while using the same toy-object. In tabletop roleplaying games, this only becomes more true: RPGs do not have toy-objects or mechanisms, they lack goals and thus complete rulesets, and those rulesets are endlessly flexible due to the indefinite nature of the imaginary world. Thus, while MDA is perhaps occasionally applicable to videogames with multiple qualifiers and adjustments (though it usually isn’t), it is not applicable to tabletop RPGs, and we should look elsewhere to explain the aesthetics and ontology of the games we play.
Thank you. And thanks for sticking with me through this long-ass post.
Pandemonium Megadungeon Session Report #5
We’re back! You can read previous session reports here: #1, #2, #3, and #4. This is a particularly long one, since I’ve been so late on writing these—this covers some seven sessions.
20th Day of the Month of Grief
Today, our party consists of:
The Eldest Orphan of Forsaken for Eternity, Fighter 3; a mohawk-sporting, shockingly clean noble, dressed in aristocrat’s boots. He carries a necklace of fireballs, a miser’s flute, and shockingly un-notched weapons.
Sōt III, Butcher of Bugs, Roller of Rugs, Fighter 3; a haggard knight dressed in bone mail-and-plate, missing his left ear, carrying a heavily-notched but non-magical sword, Righty.
Tarkus Two-Fingers, Magic-User 2; an aspiring dark lord necromancer wrapped in black, with only two fingers on his right hand but many spells on his inscribed knucklebone-spellbook.
Snuffet the Pointer, Magic-User 2; a stoner transmuter, with a feather of Hieracon in his cap, which bends towards dangerous creatures.
One the Only, Fighter 2; a drunken, oddly experienced soldier.
Runpril, Magic-User 1; a simpering, smiley transmuter.
The Luggage, a chest to which the magical wooden donkey legs have been attached.
After some shopping, the party descended. They immediately headed for goblin territory; ambushed some guards; talked their way into the goblin’s armory; looted the armory for coin; and then worried about hiding bodies. Tarkus, miscasting an animate dead, accidentally detonated one of the corpses, damaging himself and the Luggage’s chest.
Deeper into goblin territory, the party encountered strange goblins who spoke in multiple voices, bickering with themselves, and seemingly ignored multiple lethal wounds. Eventually, Sōt and the Eldest Orphan settled on tackling the goblins and hacking their heads off—and still they spoke. They looted the shrine the strange multi-goblins prayed to, acquiring two unknown potions, 6 sling bullets made of tungsten (which cannot rust, and magnifies light), and a scroll of perspectival shift in Colossal, which Snuffet reads.
Using Snuffet’s feather of Hieracon stuck in his hat, the party triangulated the most dangerous foe deep in goblin territory, which they believed to be a being called “the Goblinscholar,” otherwise known as Bolokhiv. After some measurements, backtracking, running into a dwarf scout, and feeding absinthe to a water elemental, Tarkus passwall’d through the wall straight to the foe.
Inside, they found a dozen goblins acting in near-perfect synchrony, a strange magical dance. Above hovered an enormous green ghost, a goblin, its lower body descending into tendrils connecting to its goblin disciples. This is Bolokhiv, the Goblinscholar.
Immediately, Snuffet cast dominate, and in a moment of supreme magical power, managed to dominate Bolokhiv, and accordingly most of his psychically-linked disciples. Not a moment later, the Eldest Orphan lobbed a fireball, killing half the disciples—and Bolokhiv grew smaller. A raging battle ensued as Snuffet attempted to control the disciples while Sōt, One, Runpril, and Tarkus attempted to kill the ones free of Snuffet’s psychic mastery. After the Eldest Orphan lobbed another fireball from his necklace, the battle was decided—the party stood victorious. With its disciples slain, Bolokhiv dwindled, then vanished.
From the pockets of the disciples, the party looted a great deal of coin, jewels, a hungry coin, 12 arrows made of zamak (which deals extra damage to magic-users), a set of mail-and-plate of immobility made from aloxite (which can smooth surfaces down like sandpaper or a file), some valuable aluminum, and a great deal of burned paper and shattered glass—the result of the fireballs.
Upon defeating Bolokhiv, several changes occurred in the party members: they each suddenly learned to read and speak Goblinoid, they gained the ability
Victorious, the party returned to the surface. Tarkus, blowing his winnings, advanced to level 3, becoming Lord Tarkus Two-Fingers.
21st Day of the Month of Grief
The Eldest Orphan (with a ghostly right leg), Sōt III (with a ghostly left leg), and Snuffet (with a ghostly right arm) all descended once more.
Returning to the goblin area, they learned that the goblins have now split into two sub-factions, led by the two former goblin leaders: Khilo, the High Sage, and Bokho, the Great Pedant. The party talked their way into a goblin lecture (all being able to speak Goblinoid perfectly), and using a map they found previously, discovered a secret elevator chamber behind the goblin lecture hall. They also raided a chamber in the goblin camp, gaining some coin, a potion, dust of disappearance, and Tarkus’s original spell-knucklebones, including the all-important death ward.
After, they found a ghost in a heavily-locked tomb named Evgenia, one of the original warriors who helped build and protect these dungeons. They asked her to locate a hidden shaft, also from their map, which she did. The party realized that, because they were only on the first level of the dungeon, the shaft must connect to the surface.
Returning to the surface, the party did some complicated measurements and realized the shaft must connect to the general store. They stormed in, tore up some floorboards in the basement, knocked a trapdoor open, and found a long ladderway descending into the dark.
After a few hours’ rest, they went down, some 250’. The bottom was a dark, dank, moss- and mushroom-bitten chamber. After pushing open a secret door, they discovered a room with an enormous mushroom inside, some 25’ tall, its cap just as wide. Creepers and vines hung from its gills. The party took a couple of photos (with Erasmus Karl’s old camera), noticed a door and the fact that the mushroom had dozens of eyes along the edge of its cap, and then departed.
22nd Day of the Month of Grief
Three new faces arrived at the tavern, not from the Imperium but rather below—goblins! With Bolokhiv’s demise, some goblins find their way to the surface to join the company and thus players may now play goblins as a player species option (we’re doing it a little differently in this campaign than this post, but it’s the same basic idea).
These three brave companions are Vibok, Olokh, and Khib, all burglars. Directed by the more experienced adventurers, the goblins descended the general store ladder and went to face the huge fungus. Conveniently, Vibok speaks Mycologue, the language of fungi.
The fungus, it turns out, is not very friendly. It names itself That-Which-Dances-Alone-Beneath-The-Moonlight, and mentions it is separate from the “Magnificent House.” It wants meat, food, and acts suspiciously hungry for goblins. After some negotiation, the goblins decided to draw straws and offer up two companions so that one might go free. As Vibok and Olokh prepared to offer themselves up, the mushroom took a different option, and three huge tendrils lashed down, snapping up the goblins.
A short fight followed, in which the Khib was thrown against a wall, scalped, and died—whereupon Vibok and Olokh, ensnared still, also believed themselves dead, and so died. Thus ended Vibok, Olokh, and Khib.
23rd Day of the Month of Grief
Tarkus (sporting a ghostly right arm tipped with three new ghostly-skeletal appendages), Sōt, the Eldest Orphan, and the Luggage headed back down to check out the goblin territory (after Tarkus death warded everyone for safety).
After making it to the goblin camp, they learn that the goblins splintered with the defeat of Goblinscholar Bolokhiv: the two goblin academic leaders, Khilo the High Sage studies “deep psychometry” while Bokho the Great Pedant practices “ascendant psychometry” instead, and both sides now hate each other.
The party: hid Tarkus’s skeletons in the Luggage; disrupted a lecture to find a secret room; discovered the secret room housed an elevator down (currently lowered); looted an unoccupied goblin academic’s office; ran into Evgenia, causing the goblins to panic and scatter; and sent Tarkus’s skeletons to raid Evgenia’s tomb. Then, they set out to scale down the elevator shaft and find whatever lies at the bottom.
Sōt and the Eldest Orphan lowered Tarkus down, using a clever piton-knot combination to prevent falls. As Tarkus reached the bottom and set about picking the lock holding the elevator in place, his skeletons returned at the top carrying a huge silver pike. Sōt and the Orphan, unable to speak the Corpsetongue, tried to explain that Tarkus was below. The skeletons, understanding perfectly, dropped the pike down the shaft. It barely missed Tarkus, and bent severely. After unlocking the elevator, Tarkus grabbed the pike (with both regular hand or ghost hand, as silver affects ghosts) and cranked the elevator back up, at which point he tried to hand it to Sōt and found he couldn’t—cursed.
The party descended, discovered a fleshy chamber full of carnivorous mouth-mushrooms; tried to cut their way through but found it bloody and risky; sampled the mushrooms (delicious!); and then returned to the goblin camp via elevator—Sōt, who sampled the mushrooms, found himself oddly hungry, almost aching.
From there, they almost immediately ran into Evgenia, furious at her tomb being looted: through the power of (Evgenia’s looted) bent silver pike and the kicks of ghostly legs, the party managed to defeat her. From there, the party went to her tomb and looted the rest of the treasure the two skeletons hadn’t, including a set of full mail made from duralumin (which slows fall speeds). Then, Tarkus accidentally miscast question dead and temporarily died, so the party chucked him in the Luggage and returned to the surface.
24th Day of the Month of Grief
Snuffet, Runpril (now with a ghostly right arm) and Sōt III set out with:
Paparazzo Vetch the Orcbreaker, Fighter 3; a tourist-turned-aspiring-chef, wearing a belt of cat imprisonment and carrying a sealed oilskin bag with an angry air elemental trapped inside.
Sabine, Fighter 1; a grizzled, burly veteran with a limp.
After discovering that the distance from the base of the second-floor stairs to a merchant’s room was only 10’, the party hatched a plan: Snuffet cast stone to flesh on the wall, permanently transforming it to living meat, then cast perspectival shift to shrink it down and carve an opening, then perspectival shift it back, creating a meat wall with a tunnel through it. The party went through and met Tonus, Master Alchemist, a merchant clad in a yellow rubber jumpsuit with a huge barrel on his back, face hidden by a spherical glass bubble-helmet filled with rainbow potion. The party sampled all of them but bought only one—a potion of cloudkill.
Backtracking, the party decided to go down to the chamber the three dead goblins discovered with the giant fungus. After talking with it for a while (Vetch speaks Mycologue), it seemed friendly, and the party made a deal to get safe passage. Right as the terms were set, the fungus attacked, ensnaring everyone in its tendrils, and a desperate fight ensued where the party only barely escaped. Infuriated, Vetch and Sabine went back down, lobbed in a bunch of oil flasks followed by a torch, then chucked the cloudkill potion in for good measure.
25th Day of the Month of Grief
The party went down the secret shaft beneath the general store once again, and discovered the giant traitorous fungus dead and desiccated. Exploring further in the overgrown depths, the party: discovered a scum-filled fountain with a monosyllabic myconid scout within; talked with two other myconids, part of a hive mind called the “Ministry;” discovered the myconids value LSD and will pay good money for it; and got Vetch an appointment on the 7th of Imperium (next month) to meet with the Council, the leading body of the Ministry (such as “leaders” exist within a hive mind). The myconids explain that this involves trepanning the skull; Vetch believes he will die and join the hive mind as part of this appointment.
After salvaging a bit of treasure, the party returned to the surface. Runpril, with winnings from Bolokhiv still unspent, advanced to level 2, becoming Runpril the Crunty.
26th Day of the Month of Grief
Tarkus descended again, this time joined by two newcomers:
Nouh, Fighter 1; a butcher monk, an adept, tall and scrawny.
Jim, Magic-User 1; a hillbilly goblin transmuter, surprisingly strong.
Descending down to level 2, the party: raised some skeletons; encountered the meat wall (none of which any of them had seen); ran into Curus, Master Peddler, a magical items merchant; accidentally enlarged a door instead of reducing it; raised some undead corpse crawlers; failed to gain access to dwarf territory (dwarves do not like necromancers or skeletons); explored around the edge of a pit leading to deep water; and bargained with some orcs to let them through their territory while blindfolded—in exchange, the party would bring back dwarf heads and show the orcs the way to human territory.
After being blindfold-walked through the orc camp (and hearing all manner of shrieking and gnashing), the party explored only briefly before finding a sarcophagus. Opening it, it released dangerous gas, and a monstrous paper-wrapped hand appeared and ripped the head off of one of Tarkus’s skeletons. A fight ensued: more skeletons died; the gas prevented much movement; the monster revealed itself as a mummy; Jim accidentally transformed everyone’s rations into angry badgers; Nouh was struck by the mummy and became infected with something bad; Tarkus’s minions seemed controlled by the mummy somehow; and Tarkus eventually managed to land a fear on the mummy, who bargained. The mummy offered all its treasure—including a porcelain bow, a scroll of wizard agility in the Corpsetongue, and another scroll written in Hornsound—bar its most prized, which it described as “that which binds the universe together.” The party took the deal, claimed the loot, then headed back to the surface, using passwall to skip the orcs (thus failing to uphold their end of the deal).
27th Day of the Month of Grief
Sōt III, the Eldest Orphan, Snuffet, Runpril descended, joined by:
Old Iron Grip, Magic-User 2; an illusionist with an iron left hand, iron left peg leg, and missing his left ear.
Sōt III recently leveled up to 4, becoming Sōt III, Butcher of Bugs, Roller of Rugs, Squandering Hugs; as did the Eldest Orphan, becoming the Eldest Orphan of Forsaken for Eternity by Birth.
The party descended, climbing through meat wall once more; its tunnel seemed to have shrunk. The merchant room as unoccupied, but the merchant blanket still sat there. They went on to investigate the now-familiar teleportation circle, but still to no effect. Giving up, the party went back to the first level.
Heading to goblin territory, they pushed towards the territory held by the “ascendant psychometrics” rather than the “deep psychometrics,” the latter of whom seem further from the unexplored area where Bolokhiv resided. They met with the Great Pedant, who seemed friendly-ish; discovered a bear in a cage with a goblin’s psyche stuck in its brain; and recruited a goblin tour guide to show them through what was described as a “trap hallway of death.”
The party met several traps: sliding spikes (cut at the shaft); spinning saw blades (sidestepped, but only after killing their tour guide); falling-block tripwires (ducked); noxious gas (sprinted through); a barely-hidden pit trap (leapt over, but saw something odd speaking Mechanian far below); poison darts (avoided, and claimed a few); and an exploding corpse, which they failed to avoid. It exploded, nearly killing Old Iron Grip, saved only by quickly transforming flesh to stone and sending him home with a teleport. The Eldest Orphan pushed ahead, realizing that this trap hallway led to the far side of Bolokhiv’s chamber—a place they’d already been.
Deflated (though enlightened), the party clambered into Runpril’s teleport and went home. The temple priest saved Old Iron Grip, but only barely.
28th Day of the Month of Grief
The Eldest Orphan, Tarkus, and Vetch descended once more. Vetch claimed the duralumin mail; Tarkus death warded all involved.
Vetch immediately leapt down the shaft to the mushroom chambers carrying the Luggage, slowed by his new mail and landing safely. Tarkus and the Orphan had to climb down normally. The floor was filled with a deep blue-green haze, tinting the moss and fungi even dimmer.
Exploring, the party: spoke with some myconids and learned about a bit of lore (mentions of the Heart of Many Hearts, the Cannibal King, the Castellan of the Depths, and others); snagged some coins with the Orphan’s miser’s flute; and found a room full of pale blue gas and bright blue mushrooms. They wrapped their faces in wet cloths, and explored.
A short ways in, they saw something that looked like a body sprawled amidst the growths; Tarkus tried to animate the corpse, and it had no effect; after some more paranoid investigation, they discovered it was a man, unconscious but alive! As they dragged him out, the Eldest Orphan passed out, unconscious—the gas was sleeping gas.
Tarkus and Vetch woke up the man, learned his name was “Tarninus,” and that he had been asleep for [REDACTED]. Confused and bewildered, the man agreed to follow them as they returned to the surface.
The Eldest Orphan woke up the next day.
1st Day of the Month of the Imperium
On the surface, the party asked “Tarninus” about his time exploring, and he mentioned that the entrance they came up through—the one in the basement of the Forsaken Inn—doesn’t seem at all familiar. His memory is hazy after so long asleep in the dungeon, but the party remains convinced.
Deciding to look for other entrances, the party lowered Vetch off the cliffside that Forsaken sits on, descending down towards the Shivering Sea. About 200’ down, Vetch found a carved stone disc set into the cliff-face, 10’ across, set with the image of a crowned corpse. Descending down even further, Vetch found a half-flooded cave amidst the sharp rock at the cliff’s based, the waves crashing around.
They poked around through the other buildings in town—apothecary, stables, the temple—looking for basements and hidden entrances, and found nothing. Using passwall, the party also examined the weathered statue at the town’s north edge, and discovered a large metal plate beneath it. They then set “Tarninus” up with a shovel, told him [REDACTED], and set him digging.
Resolved, they headed back down below; Tarkus raising more skeletons (and accidentally death warding them instead of raising more). They: went down to level 2; discovered gas that clung to the ceiling, requiring them to squat; convinced some orcs to help them kill dwarves; killed some dwarves in a workshop and a guard post; found a secret chamber that held the possible remnants of an orc-dwarf treaty; and then another secret chamber, which lead to a large metal conveyor belt bearing earth, stone, and metal.
Realizing this was dwarf territory, the party investigated by following the conveyor belt: they killed some more dwarves in some kind of kitchen, found a huge dwarf machine of unknown purpose, and then were spotted and the alarm raised—the party hightailed it back. Before they left, they killed the orcs and claimed the dwarf heads, which they sold back to the other orcs, earning untrusting looks and a measly 20sp per head.
Returning to the surface, the party woke up Snuffet (my roommate came home) and got him to perspectival shift both the monument in Forsaken and the metal plate beneath it, revealing a set of stairs descending down into the dark. The party investigated only a little: the stairs were shallow, only a few dozen feet, and led to a dusty, dark, cobwebbed catacomb.
What lies beneath the monument stairs? How will the party navigate the fungal hazes? Will they side with the dwarves, the orcs, or neither? Find out next time (hopefully sooner than last time).
Two Projects, One Week, Four Years
On Monday, my Mothership adventure Time After Time released. I started working on it in the winter of 2021, during grad school; I Kickstarted it in February 2022 for ZiMo ’22, which I also helped organize. It was supposed to release December 2022. I rebooted the project almost from scratch in late the summer of 2022 (when it was about three-quarters done), taking it from the intended 36 pages to more than double that.
Today, Wednesday, my toolbox setting guide Seas of Sand released. I started working on it in spring 2020, during my last semester of undergrad. I Kickstarted it during the summer of 2021. It was supposed to release May 2022. After struggling a lot during the fall of 2021, I scrapped my original master’s thesis and focused all my efforts on Seas; I wrote many of the 1d100 tables in the appendices over Christmas. I finished the writing, editing, and graphic design, about 80,000 words and 264 pages, in time for the thesis showcase: my little booth had an art-less version printed out on regular school printers, held together with too-big metal rings. The covers were made from folded-over red construction paper. The illustration-less PDF went out to backers just a couple weeks before I finished my master’s.
I finished the rebooted draft of Time After Time in early 2023, some 30,000 words, about a month after I’d originally told my backers they’d have the whole zine. It was that fall, 2022, that I started teaching university courses. I finished the illustrations for Seas of Sand in the early summer of 2023, about a year after the writing and graphic design were finished, in time for the “one year late” mark. That, too, involved a reboot—I had about 40% of the pieces done, and then decided the style wasn’t working and threw almost all of them out. The graphic design of Time After Time took longer than expected: I’d taken the wear-and-tear look of Lowlife a step further, and each spread required about a dozen Photoshop layers superimposed over the InDesign spread working together to get the final look. I ended up outsourcing most of the illustration work to Locheil, an internet friend who did excellent work, because after all the illustrations in Seas I just didn’t have another couple dozen large pieces in me.
After finishing the art for Seas, I took it to Jarrett Crader at Space Penguin Ink for publication. It took us a while to figure out the specifics, but we ordered proofs by the end of summer—I had the proof in hand by September. That book’s still full of my notes, catching typos and issues. Loch finished the art around the same time, and I sent out complete PDFs to my backers in the early fall, 80 pages in total. It took quite a bit of searching and hunting around to find a printer willing to print and bind a zine of such length, but I found one. There, I turned to Spear Witch, a retailer I’d worked with before, for distribution; I had the proofs of Time After Time by the winter. At the same time, a thousand copies of Seas were being shipped across the Pacific on a slow boat from China: they arrived shortly after the new year. After the BackerKit ran for a month, we got copies out to backers by early spring of 2024. The copies of Time After Time made it to Spear Witch from Canada in March, and went to out to backers at the end of the month.
This week, both of them released to the public.
Since I started these projects, I moved three times; received two degrees; taught seven courses; started two blogs; gained a brother-in-law, two nephews, and a niece; went back to therapy again; made and spent tens of thousands of dollars; cut my hair; picked up a couple dozen editing and graphic design gigs to make rent; accrued several hundred social media followers; ran about a half-dozen RPG campaigns to completion and several more to incompletion; and started many, many other projects, only a few of which ever have seen the light of day.
Rarely a day went by where I didn’t think about both projects. And now they’re done.
What have I learned? Mostly what not to do. Don’t run a Kickstarter before you have a complete draft finished. Don’t plan to illustrate dozens of pieces or write tens of thousands of words in just a few months. Don’t piss off the Kickstarter backers. Try not to overhaul projects halfway through. Try not to start new projects in the middle of previous ones. Try not to get yourself in a situation where you’re compelled to lock yourself in your bedroom and work for months without really being able to show it to anyone.
But lots of other things, too. I know vastly more about Photoshop and InDesign than I did four years ago. I know how to publish hardcovers outside of DriveThru. My editing skills are much, much sharper. I have a much better idea of what GMs want from their books, and how to give it to them. I know more about games, play, and roleplaying than I perhaps thought possible.
And, despite the trials and tribulations, I am still making RPGs—there are few greater joys. Keep your eyes open.
Seas of Sand is available in hardcover at Space Penguin Ink, and in digital at itch.io and DriveThruRPG. Time After Time is available as a zine at Spear Witch, and in digital at itch.io and DriveThruRPG.