The Glatisant: Issue #30
Discover more from The Glatisant: A Questing Beast Newsletter
Welcome to The Glatisant, Questing Beast’s monthly newsletter. You can read previous issues here and support the newsletter on Patreon here. Due to the length of this email it may be clipped by Gmail. Click “view entire message” at the bottom to see the whole thing.
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole has declared Battle for Carrion Vale to be “The Best!” From the review:
This 37 page adventure details the parties journey through 28 possible vignettes in the aftermath of a battle between law and chaos. A rollicking good time full of situations that are full of gameable content supporting by a useful format and great writing. This is the level 6 adventure you were looking for!
Also, a previous Ten Foot Pole winner, Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, just got released in print form!
The skeleton crew at Bones of Contention reviews six monster manuals across two posts: A Book of Beasts, Monsters & Treasure, Volume 2: Monsters &, The Plantiary, Bizarre Monsters, and Lusus Naturae.
Professor Dungeon Master from Dungeon Craft walks through his Deathbringer rules.
Seed of Worlds reviews Srongholds and Followers, Reviews from R’lyeh reviews Kriegmesser, and weaver.skepti.ch reviews Where the Wheat Grows Tall.
Bud’s RPG Review looks through the Call of Cthulhu Classic Prop Set, which contains a ton of new props for classic CoC adventures.
Over at Questing Beast, I reviewed Courtney Campbell’s trilogy of DM supplements On Downtime and Demesnes, Artifices, Deceptions, and Dilemmas, and Bestial Ecosystems Created by Monstrous Inhabitation. The discounted bundle of all three is here.
If you would like to submit a book for review consideration on Questing Beast, mail it to: Ben Milton, 6505 E Central Ave, Box 127, Wichita, KS, USA, 67206.
Sales
Three amazing Mothership adventures (Dead Planet, Gradient Descent, and A Pound of Flesh) are all 47% off!
The Neverland OSR setting is 20% off.
Warlock! and Warlock! Kingdom are both 40% off.
And Now a Word From Our Sponsors…
Level up your RPG experience with the Game Master Companion and the Player Companion. Streamline RPG gameplay with a feature rich GM screen and transport hordes of monsters with the GM Companion or pack your adventuring gear into the Player Companion and go dungeon delving to bring home untold treasures!
Return to a mythical stone age that never was with Primal Quest - Weird Stone & Sorcery Adventure Game. The game comes with a streamlined old-school spirit system and a mini-hexcrawl for you to play right away! Adventures with dinosaurs, aliens, Elder Gods and much more! Available in Print and PDF at Exalted Funeral store!
The Secret of the Black Crag is an Old-School Essentials island-crawl sandbox adventure by Chance Dudinack (Author of The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford). It centers around a mysterious multi-level dungeon that has risen from the ocean, beckoning treasure hunters into forgotten depths. Back the Kickstarter on August 9th mateys!
The Wicked Ones and Undead Awakening offset print run Kickstarter is underway! Take on the role of monsters building a dungeon and fighting off adventurers in Wicked Ones or become horror movie undead creatures leading their horde against humanity in Undead Awakening. Tons of great art and monstery gameplay!
Cut down your GM prep with The Great Book of Random Tables. Use 120 D100 random tables to add details to your sessions. Find book titles, items in dungeon rooms, encounters, odd jobs, rumors, food, NPC names, town names, NPC descriptions, dungeon health side effects, fortunes, insults, mutations, and more.
Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (9,800+ email subscribers) or on Questing Beast (56,000+ subscribers) by emailing me at questingmaps at gmail dot com.
News
Chris McDowall announces a playtest for Primeval Bastionland. To Distant Lands writes up a play report of it.
Kickstarter announces that ZineQuest will be moving back to February.
The 2022 Ennie Award Nominees have been announced! DriveThruRPG has a page where you can find most of them for sale. Congrats to Dave Thaumavore, Mork Borg, and Jacob Hurst on the nominations!
Throne of Salt presents the third annual Salty Awards.
Current game jams include the Troika City Jam, the One-Page RPG Jam, the Hyperspeed Adventure Jam, and the Vaarn Summer Jam.
Patrick Stuart is planning a compendium of his blog content.
Paramount has released the trailer for the D&D movie.
Worldbuilding
Trilemma Adventures returns with another fantastic one-page dungeon.
A Knight at the Opera expands on the concept of Dungeon as Mythic Underworld.
I Don’t Remember that Move, Archons March On, and Numbers Aren’t Real create lists of Black Books. Great for cosmic horror campaigns!
The Necatrix. Written in medieval Andalusia by Fátima de Madrid as a reply to al-Ghazali’s Destruction of the Philosophers. Proves using pure reason that nothing can or could possibly ever exist. Contains instructions for “escaping history”, using only a wild lion and a labyrinth of mirrors.
A great post from r/papertowns showing the evolution of a fictional city.
Throne of Salt has Eight Space Stations.
Rise Up Comus has Ten Interesting Traps. These are really fun.
Library of Attnam has 100 Magical Statues.
Chris McDowall shows how he creates hexmaps.
RPG Theory
Jason at Pretendo Games discovers that his three-layer structure for RPG rules (social, fictional, and abstract) was first discussed in 1983.
From Richard’s Dystopian Pokeverse: The PCs are a Faction.
Hypertext Fish discusses how to build stories into your environments.
Caput Caprae looks at the paradoxes of using rules metaphors in RPGs.
Chris McDowall sketches out the principles of Primeval Bastionland.
From Map and Key: Writing an RPG the Hard Way.
Stand Up Maths looks at the unexpected math behind D&D’s Advantage rule.
Patrick Stuart looks at the benefits and threats of the sudden boom in AI.
Githyanki Diaspora asks the Midjourney AI to design some dungeon doors, with astonishing results.
Rules and DM Advice
Thalian Musings has another list of Cheap DM Tricks.
Marcia has a procedure for fast travel and keeping watch.
Orbital Crypt recommends allowing PCs to intuit certain things about a dungeon as they level up.
Sandra at Idiomdrottning has a method for describing dungeons.
I Cast Light shows how to create dynamic encounters by adding layers of detail.
The Alexandrian has two posts about prepping and running cities.
Prismatic Wasteland has a checklist for writing good encounters. Alex Schroeder responds with a checklist for making good wilderness exploration games. Papers and Pencils has advice for structuring random encounter tables.
From Tales of the Lunar Lands: You Should Have Your PCs Get Captured More.
Welcome to the Deathtrap shows how to make your setting come alive with evolving rumor tables.
Dungeon Masterpiece has some advice for making prep more useful.
Podcasts and Interviews
Dieku Games interviews Daniel Sell and Marc Miller, creator of Traveller.
Wyrd Science interviews Ben Riggs on his new book Slaying the Dragon, a history of the fall of TSR. Reviews from R’lyeh reviews it here.
The 10-episode podcast When We Were Wizards: An Oral History of Dungeons & Dragons just launched, and is available on Spotify.
That’s it for this issue, see you next month!