The Glatisant: Issue #31
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. Subscribe to get new issues in your inbox and get entered in my RPG giveaways!
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole declares the adventure Beyond the Gates of Sorrow to be “The Best”.
A magnificent tribute to the older days of gaming and harkens back to the finer Judges Guild products. Terse, interactive, and building an evocative vibe by leaving room for mystery. A delight!
Technical Grimoire reviews Luke Gearing’s new adventure The Isle.
I think this kind of adventure format would be PERFECT for a solo RPG. The way forshadowing works is that the reader is in the dark much like the characters are. Truths are revealed over time and the adventure can be enjoyed one page at a time.
Caput Caprae reviews Luke’s other big project, Wolves Upon the Coast.
Wolves Upon the Coast is among the most ambitious and impressive RPG projects I’ve ever seen. It gives itself a huge goal—rewrite OD&D and then write the best hexcrawl ever—and then hits it near-perfectly. Every page is new and exciting, bursting with content and ideas and things for your players to do. I could run a dozen campaigns in Wolves and not grow tired of it.
Refereeing and Reflection has an in-depth look at Ben Riggs new history of TSR, Slaying the Dragon.
At Bones of Contention, Gus L has a critical review of the new Dwarrowdeep megadungeon.
Cosmic Orrery reviews Gus L’s recent adventures.
Over at Questing Beast, I have video reviews of Through the Valley of the Manticore, Willow, HighFell, The Haunted Hamlet, and The Dungeon Dozen.
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
Most of the print books at Swordfish Islands are on sale, including my adventure The Waking of Willowby Hall!
Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics have 50% off bundles right now where you can grab the core books, a Judge Screen, and an adventure.
Three Mothership adventures (Dead Planet, Gradient Descent, and A Pound of Flesh) are all 47% off!
Everything in the Warlock! series is on sale, up to 40% off.
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Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (10,000+ email subscribers) or on Questing Beast (57,000+ subscribers) by emailing me at questingmaps at gmail dot com.
Industry and Awards
DriveThruRPG has a series of posts on how to price your books, using sales data from their platform.
WotC announced a new playtest for some revised 5e corebooks. Bob World Builder has an excellent summary of the proposed changes, Dungeon Masterpiece looks at the effect the revision might have on the future of D&D, and I speculate about WotC’s long term plans.
Troy Press released a survey recently indicating that 36% of Americans have played RPGs, 25% at least once per year. This seems WAY too high to me, but then I saw that WotC, which does its own market research, claims that 50 million people have played DnD, which is in the same ballpark.
The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming are here!
Also, the Ennie results are in. I was pretty surprised at the number of products I’d never heard of before. Looks like the Ennie judges are moving on from the OSR, which has dominated in previous years.
Rules, Advice, and Theory
Bastionland has post on breaking down games to their Minimum Viable Teach.
Mindstorm has a great system for creating Witcher-eque puzzle-monsters that players have to solve before they can kill.
GFC’s DND has an excellent video on developing procedures with your players to make mapping easier.
Alex Schroeder shows how you can make reaction results more specific, similar to what I’m doing in Knave 2e.
Prismatic Wasteland and Lich Van Winkle debate the merits of different ways to equip your character: shopping, listing, picking, and gambling.
Dungeon Masterpiece has some concrete tips for dungeon design.
Knight at the Opera has a detailed breakdown of how to make hacking work in Cyberpunk games.
Patrick Stuart has the rules for running an ALL-GOBLIN campaign.
At Questing Beast I break down the different editions of Old-School Essentials so you can find the version that’s best for you.
A retropost from Dungeon Fantastic on how to run PC negotiations.
Jason Lutes, author of Freebooters on the Frontier, explains how he set up and ran a West Marches game.
Welcome to the Deathtrap proposes a use for shrines in open-world games.
The Alexandrian looks at common problems with freeze-frame boxed text and remote-control boxed text.
Bastionland explains what systems add “shock” to games.
Traverse Fantasy: Deconstructing 2d6.
Worldbuilding
Spiceomancy: Ten Strange Ogres
The Cosmic Orrery: Black Books Extended Catalog
Silverarm Press: The Wilderness is a Dungeon: Jaquaysing Your RPG Sandbox
Mapcrow: Make an Instant City Map!
Eldritch Fields: Parallel dungeons (FREE adventure!)
Throne of Salt: Nine Metahuman Clades and All-Purpose Green Box
Coins and Scrolls: Sir Digby Chicken Caesar's Greyish Brown Auction Of Things What I Found In Skips
Pulp Gamer: Villain’s Toolbox
Podcasts and Interviews
On Modern Myth, a 5e player reacts to their first OSR game.
GGNORE returns with an attempt to run a game generated by AI.
Dieku Games interviews Andrew Kolb about his new RPG setting OZ.
That’s it for this issue, see you next month!