Welcome to The Glatisant, Questing Beast’s monthly newsletter. You can read previous issues here and support the newsletter on Patreon here (where you can also get access the the latest version of Knave 2e). Subscribe to get new issues in your inbox and get entered in my RPG giveaways! This month’s giveaway is for a rare copy of Ace of Aces.
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole declares three adventures to be “The Best”: The Mall, The Saint of Bruckstadt, and (my personal favorite) Wyvern Songs.
The amount of things going on in that wilderness pointcrawl is amazing. Lots to do and see and encounters related to each other. Another one has a volcano god “waking up”, with weirdo monsters trying to help. And a floating castle that can crash to the ground in another, with a built in timer to keep things moving .. no dilly dallying with resting here! Even the town, thrown in as an afterthought, seemingly, at the end of the adventures, oozes with delight.
Seed of Worlds reviews the new Through Ultan’s Door book, Downtime in Zyan, which is packed with Ben Laurence’s excellent activities to pursue between adventures.
Reviews from R’lyeh reviews Strict Time Records Must be Kept.
. . .there is no doubting the roleplaying possibilities that the situation would lead to—the desperate fights for survival, the rage at the injustice of the situation, the rush to find the antidote. If Strict Time Records Must Be Kept is cruel—and it is, ultimately, the players need to think of it not as their Referee being the bastard who imposed its situation on them, but switch it around and see it as a chance to roleplay out something they might find in fiction rather than gaming. If their Player Characters survive, what a tale they and their players will have to tell.
A Knight at the Opera puts WotC’s 5e adventures in a head-to-head match against similar OSR adventures. A very fun read.
Save vs. Total Party Kill reviews the new Warden’s Guide for Mothership (only available for backers at this point).
Dungeon Masterpiece summarizes lots of good OSR rulesets like Into the Odd, Mausritter, Mothership, and Cairn.
Over at Questing Beast I reviewed Ace of Aces (a pair of gamebooks for multiplayer WWI dogfighting), The Quintessential Dungeon, Wyvern Songs, Death in Space, and Demon-Bone Sarcophagus, the sequel to Deep Carbon Observatory.
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, 67206, USA.
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Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (12,000+ email subscribers) or on Questing Beast (67,000+ subscribers) by emailing me at questingmaps at gmail dot com.
Industry News
Gavin Norman reports that the gorgeous Dolmenwood Campaign books are almost finished!
The Dicebreaker Tabletop Award Finalists have been announced. Quite a few games in here that I hadn’t heard of before.
Dungeon Craft reports that Bank of America has downgraded WotC to a “sell” due to its mismanagement of the Magic franchise.
Sales and Free Products
Necrotic Gnome releases a free class for OSE: The Necromancer.
Affinity has some deep discounts on its Publisher, Designer, and Photo programs. A great substitute for Adobe if you do RPG layout but don’t want to be locked into expensive subscriptions.
Traverse Fantasy has released Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, a very faithful retroclone of OD&D, for free.
New Rules
Cryptic Keyway rewrites 5e spells to match Knave’s simplified format.
The Wrong Kind of Wax edits the Knave spell list to fit with Against the Wicked City’s principles for magic.
Axian Spice has some house rules for Heroquest that I might use next time I play.
Rotten Pulp introduces positive conditions and community service carousing for Mausritter.
Mindstorm has a system for managing a ship crew.
Liche’s Libram adds New Game+ mechanics to D&D.
History
Matt Colville has an excellent primer on how old-school gaming works, although he doesn’t seem too familiar with the OSR.
Awesome Lies examines how the trade dress of D&D evolved in the 80s.
You can now take a google street view tour through the tunnels in the Great Pyramid of Giza if you want to see what real tomb crawling looks like.
Game historian Ben Riggs tracks down the legendary Martin Map of the Forgotten Realms.
John Romero explains at a conference how the premise of Doom was derived from a D&D game he played with John Carmack (skip to 44:18).
Wandering Bill’s Journal links to where you can read much of Appendix N online.
Mazes and Monsters (the supremely cheesy Satanic Panic film with Tom Hanks) gets a Blu-Ray release.
Polyhedral Nonsense has some very fun alternate RPG covers.
RPG Theory and DM Advice
Technical Grimoire explains how to pitch your game to online retailers.
Bastionland demonstrates how to make ultra-dangerous monsters that feel fair.
To Distant Lands invents a framework for one-scene adventures.
Idiomdrottning has a great piece on fractal subsystems in D&D.
The Arcane Library shows one way to organize your campaign notes.
Welcome To the Deathtrap: Three Quirks of Player Psychology.
Monsters and Manuals: The Phenomenology of Death in D&D
Traverse Fantasy explains how to rapidly make bite-sized dungeons.
Monte Cook has an excellent article on describing vs. defining in D&D.
Gaming in general, I think, was diminished by the insistence that sophisticated worldbuilding trumped encounter design. In the 70s, I could just throw together something geared to be fun and challenging for the players, like a room where gravity worked strangely, or a wall with a bunch of buttons that produced weird effects, and nothing stopped me. But eventually, as worldbuilding became more prominent, the community, the books, and the magazines pushed DMs to explain things so they make more sense. In other words, we needed a reason to have a weird gravity room . . . This “maturing” of the game—this emphasis on worldbuilding over dungeon building or encounter building—didn’t encourage creativity, it hampered it.
Ranger Lemure has the clearest explanation for old-school Thief Skills I’ve seen.
Worldbuilding
Bastionland explains how parlances such as Parababble and Trivel work.
Rise Up Comus and Archons March On describe a number of fantasy taverns based on particular OSR blogs.
Alex Schroeder explains why he likes his boring fantasy setting.
That’s it for this issue, see you next month!
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