Welcome to the December 2021 issue of the Glatisant! If you'd like to send me an OSR game or adventure for review consideration, you no longer need to email me! Just send it to the following mailbox:
Ben Milton, 6505 E Central Ave, Box 127, Wichita, Kansas, United States, 67206
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Knave Knews
The next draft of Knave 2e is now out for patrons! Upgrades include potion-making, arcane magic, a piecemeal armor system, revised maneuvers, dungeon shifts, expanded item packages, and more!
Arcane Ugly, a Knave hack from Trent at Miscast Terrain gets a beta release.
Welcome to the Deathtrap reviews Knave 1e as well as the Dark Souls-inspired Knave hack Grave (available for PWYW at DTRPG).
Cursed!, a new horror-themed Knave hack is also out now.
And Now A Word From Our Sponsor…
Planar Compass: An Old-School Essentials zine to guide you across the multiverse. Issue 2: Buccaneers of the Big Black sails you into the astral unknown! Featuring procedural hex generation crafted with Goblin’s Henchman, a living dungeon hellbent on your demise, and much more! Dock your ship at PlanarCompass.com
Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (8,000+ subscribers) or on Questing Beast (48,900+ subscribers) by emailing me at questingmaps at gmail dot com.
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole ranks two adventures as The Best this month: Brewkessel Level 1 (a wizard school adventure) and Date of Expiration by Graphite Prime. The vertical, platformer-like dungeon layout of Date of Expiration looks really cool.
Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque writes up a play report and review of all 17 adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries.
Beyond Fomalhaut reviews the OSE zine In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe.
Bud’s RPG Review looks at The Dee Sanction, a game of Elizabethan Wizardry.
Professor Dungeon Master compares The Black Hack 2e and Whitehack 2e.
At Questing Beast I review Luka Rejec’s Longwinter books and The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, an excellent starter adventure.
Plants and Herbalism
Was It Likely? creates minor magical effects for 20 real-world trees.
13. Birch: the tree is straight and true, its trunk plunging into the earth like arrows thrust into the ground before a bowman. Arrows of birch will find their mark unerringly, though take care that you know what your true aim is before firing.
Technical Grimoire surveys the growing genre of OSR plant books like A Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, Fungi of the Far Realms, and the Herbalist’s Primer.
David’s post gave me the idea of reviewing some real-world herbalist books, which work remarkably well as resources for Druids, Rangers, and Alchemists.
Art
Monster Brains, one of the best art blogs, showcases the work of Valery Slauk, a Belarusian artist of the whimsical and grotesque.
Awesome Lies shows how many of John Blanche’s illustrations in the Sorcery! Spell Book were based off of images from The Green Fairy Book.
Pits Perilous looks at how early Grenadier miniatures managed to capture the charming, ugly and enthusiastic art of the AD&D manuals in 3D.
The Bard returns with a flip-through of The Complete Elmore!
Theory and Advice
Marcia wrote a Critique of the Conversation Surrounding Lyric Games, in response to this piece from Dicebreaker.
At Questing Beast, I recorded recent session I ran with some players new to old-school play. We played Gavin Norman’s Winter’s Daughter adventure and had a great time! I added GM commentary to YouTube’s closed captioning, so switch that on if you want to see what I’m thinking.
One of my players (a magic-user) asked what wizards should do when they use up their one spell. I Cast Light has some great suggestions.
GGNORE returns with an episode of Dear Gary, where they answer RPG questions from around the internet.
Cavegirl explains why PC “balance” isn’t necessary or sometimes even desirable.
A Knight at the Opera looks at the separate cultural spaces inhabited by DM and players.
Monsters and Manuals reminds us that a good NPC is a PC in his own campaign.
A reader alerted me to the brand new Dungeon Minster channel. An Anglican priest rediscovers his love of BECMI D&D and starts playing it with his kids. Here’s a recent Q&A he did. Give him a subscribe!
Worldbuilding
Six Cities In Love With Their Own Reflections
4. A shining city in the mountains, viewable from afar, notable for the symmetry of its inhabitants’ motions and for the intricate tesselations of its towers. In reality it is just a single large building set amid a vast field of mirrored rocks. The building is a monument to whatever happened to coat the rocks with metal, and the small number of inhabitants there tend to the monument and run a small farm. Sometimes birds descend on the city in vast fractal flocks, and then the people in the valley below shut their doors.
Sci-Fi: Assorted Gear and Upgrades
Timeshift Scope
Uses proprietary Chrono-Shift ™ Technology to provide a visible superposition of all possible futures, weighted by probability. See where your enemy will be a half second before they move.
Note: prolonged use of Chrono-Shift ™ Technology may result in paranoia, degraded reaction times, headaches, nausea, sixth-finger syndrome, and glaucoma. Chrono-Shift ™ Technology is illegal in the New Netherlands. Speak to your local arms dealer to find out of Chrono-Shift ™ Technology is right for you.
How to Use the Lastlands: Luka Rejec does an overview of the setting that ties together Wichburner, Longwinter, Holy Mountain Shaker, and several other adventures. He also has a new substack newsletter for short fiction set in his worlds.
Nebulous Numismatics - A Coin Generator
Material: Still-Living Flesh, throbbing slightly and leaving bloodstains everywhere. Shape: Oval, like a coin-coin that's been sat on. Obverse Side: Moon, changes shape and therefore size in phase with the real moon. Reverse Side: A Fingerprint with too many psychedelic whorls and plumes to it to be human. Quirk: Fluid. They slide off of each other near-frictionlessly, flow like jingly, shiny water.
What is Wulfwald? An upcoming Anglo-Saxon setting with a great Russ Nicholson map, that’s what.
Upstairs, Downstairs: d20 Power Relations
14. Emptily theatrical. They make an enormous show of performative authority on one side and performative deference on the other, but anyone paying attention will notice they both actually just seem to do whatever they want.
71 dungeon rooms described in 21 words each from Eldritch Fields and Archons March On. Punchy, striking, gameable.
30. Suspended Animation Choir: Six identical people under glass pyramids, in trance, humming an eerie tune. Anybody who joins the humming can communicate with them.
Eclipse Knights - the Prescience Wars
The future is the greatest wyrm and guards the greatest horde. What do you desire, what can you imagine to want, that does not ultimately lie there, wrapped in the coils of time? sliding over scales of moments, slipping, tumbling, flashing amid the darkness, both real and dreamed, but possible?
Simply Liches (and d50 eerie museum exhibits)
Lichdom is older than humans. When the world was more pure and young, and the Ur-Ghast was only a small hateful pool in some subterranean locker, it was already here. Enormous beasts roamed the earth then, far larger than they can now ever be. Pteranodons flocked around fur-bearing many-limbed giants flinging spells at each other that could level mountains. The sea boiled and plants summoned magma demons that crawled out from between tectonic plates to destroy their enemies (slightly taller plants).
Compared to then, what humans do now is baby magic.
2. HOMO OCCULTUS OBSERVATOR - 1762 BCE-527 CE
A number of Babylonian priests and astrologers in the service of Hammurabi discovered the celestial object [REDACTED] millennia before the Royal Astronomical Society, and due to being exposed to it through nothing but their own mathematics and naked eyes rather than telescopes and other tools were exposed to the full brunt of its emissions both physical and metaphysical.
Urth Simulator: Generates different aspects of a Dying Earth setting on demand.
Hexroll: Generates a novel-length D&D setting every few minutes.
Human Non-Universals, or: Make Your Own Vancian Culture
Dungeon Masterpiece examines the design of Riven, one of my favorite videogames, and how it incorporates its puzzles naturally into the setting.
Rules and Game Design
Prismatic Wasteland has a fun XP system in which players add dice of different sizes to a bowl as they overcome challenges.
Saker Tarsos gives a preview of the card decks he’s designing for Ultraviolet Grasslands.
Golbin Guts v2: Arnold at Goblin Punch is rebuilding the GLOG again, this time with lots of rules for single-class parties.
All Dead Generations gives away the free adventure Hel’s Crow’s Final Rest.
The wargame Necromolds had the genius idea of giving the players Play-Doh molds that they can use to cast new warriors at the table.
Odd Skull explains a very elegant system for adjudicating maneuvers like tripping or disarming in traditional DnD combat. I liked this so much I added it to the most recent version of Knave 2e.
Interviews
The Lost Bay podcast interviews Paolo Greco (Lost Pages) about The Book of Gaub and spellbooks in general.
The Deiku Podcast interviews Leo of LFOSR.
That’s it for this issue, see you all in January!