The Glatisant: Issue #35
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!
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole declares two adventures to be “The Best:” The Oneiric Hinterlands and Cavern of the Creeping Terror.
We got good encounters. NPCs are on a table, with some great terse aspects to them, along with where they are found. Easy to use and memorable. Encounters are chill. “Four skeletons are impaled on stalagmites and message has been carved in to the southern WALL: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES” Yesh baby! We’re on a f***ing adventure now!
Reviews from R’lyeh reviews Dice Men (a history of Games Workshop) and The Electrum Archive.
Jorphdan makes a list of his top 30 D&D adventures over three videos.
False Machine reviews In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, a new fan zine by Monsters and Manuals.
At Questing Beast I reviewed The Bottled Sea.
If you would like to submit a product 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 (13,000+ email subscribers) or on Questing Beast (71,000+ subscribers) by emailing me at questingmaps at gmail dot com.
#Dungeon23 Resources
At the start of December, Sean McCoy posted a tweet (and a blog post) about a year-long project, where participants would create a megadungeon room every day. Blogs like Mazirian’s Garden, To Distant Lands, Zedeck Siew, Silverarm Press, Grognardia, All Dead Generations, and Monsters and Manuals are all getting on board and providing advice…there’s even a subreddit for it!
Here are some useful resources of you are new to dungeon-building:
Maze Rats, which has lots of Dungeon-centric tools and tables.
Four videos I made on dungeons: Nine Dungeon Design Secrets, Building Living Dungeons, Stop Hiding Traps, and The Fourth Pillar of DnD.
News
This month a “fireside chat” between WotC leadership and investors leaked, in which CEO Cynthia Williams stated that the brand was very “under monetized” and talked about plans for implement “recurrent spending” for players. Listen to the audio here. This got me thinking about “folk DnD” and “official DnD” cultures within the hobby.
WotC also announced that they are releasing a new Open Gaming license with One D&D (the upcoming 5e revision) that would require publishers to report their earnings to WotC at a certain threshold and even give WotC a cut if they make enough money. This created a lot of confusion online, as most people don’t really know what the OGL is, why it was created, or who has to use it. Here’s some useful links if you want to know more:
At Play What You Want, a copyright lawyer responds to a WotC cease and desist letter.
The Alexandrian has a two-part series on the history of the OGL and another post on whether you need to use it.
Trilemma Adventures hypothesizes that WotC might be trying to make the upcoming OGL’s new restrictions retroactive, which would be cause for serious concern.
Prismatic Wasteland comes up with alternate names for WotC’s trademarked monsters, if you want to use them in your published adventures.
I also made a video about what I see as a DM crisis in the 5e branch of DnD. Dungeon Craft responds to it in a video here.
RPG Theory and DM Advice
Vile Cult of Shapes: Hexcrawling Procedures: A Simple Guide
Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings: More Cheap [DMing] Tricks
Demogorgon: Castle Xyntillan is a Masterpiece (an Actual Play)
Wizard Thief Fighter: Making a Game: There and Back Again. Some really interesting news in here about the second edition of Ultraviolet Grasslands.
The Dwarf Died Again: In Defense of the Classic D&D Saving Throws
To Distant Lands: Adventure Design by Spell Level
Jeff’s Game Blog: The OSR as a Subject of Scholarly Inquiry
Correspondence is About Diligence: War Stories
Traverse Fantasy: OSR Rules Families
Goblin’s Henchman: Puzzle Design – is it possible to try to make a (semi) rigorous system?
Direct Sun Games: Designing OSR-Style Puzzles
[Monte Cook’s] RPG Design Theories: Subtext in Game Writing
A Knight at the Opera: Not All Balance is the Same
Sersa Victory: Cyclic Dungeon Generation
Rotten Pulp: Random Boss Idea: Destroy the Action Economy
Yore: X-in-6: one of my favorite tools when GMing old-school games
Idiomdrottning: Railroading, Fudging, and Cheating, Why Mosnters Have HP, Fail Forward is Bad for Gaming, Skill Checks, Group by Group Initiative
Worldbuilding
Can Baron and Kelsey write and publish an adventure in a single sitting?
Coins and Scrolls: Magical Medicine in Endon
Lumpley Games: Follow the Thread: A Worldbuilding Guide Part 1, Part 2
Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward: I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
Rise Up Comus: More RPG Blogs as Taverns
Prismatic Wasteland: Hexcrawl Checklist: Part Two
The Acorn Afloat: Esoteric programming languages as spells and vice versa
Monsters and Manuals: The Great North - Illustration and Content Teasers
Map Crow has some solid advice on how to place features in your DnD world.
Elsewhere in Hobby Gaming…
Can you make a Magic deck out of hand-illustrated artist proofs?
On the Rule Zero EDH channel, I try to guess which Magic cards a good and which are trash.
The Mordheim 2022 Invitational look amazing.
That’s it for this issue, see you next month! This newsletter makes use of affiliate links, which help support Questing Beast at no cost to you.