The Glatisant: Issue #49

Toy Boxes, Black Boxes, and Overloaded Encounter Tables

Mar 29, 2024

Welcome to The Glatisant, Questing Beast’s monthly newsletter. You can read previous issues here. Subscribe for free to get new issues in your inbox, or support the newsletter on Patreon (patrons get access to the secret Questing Beast discord channel).

Sales

Humble Bundle has four RPG sales right now: Dungeon Crawl Classics, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Magpie Games, and Pathfinder 2e. The DCC bundle is a particularly great deal with $728 worth of books for $40.
Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes (0e), The Monstrous Manual (2e), Fiend Folio (1e), and Dieties & Demigods (1e) are all 40% off.
Nearly all of the Melsonian Arts Council’s books have been marked down to $4.99.
Forgotten Rites of the Moldering Dead and Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion are both 50% off.
Artifices, Deceptions, & Dilemmas and Bestial Ecosystems Created by Monstrous Inhabitation are both 60% off.

Reviews

Ten Foot Pole ranks Cloister of the Frog God and The Webs of Past and Present as “The Best”. From the “Webs” review:

A magnificent effort here. I am prone to hyperbole, but, I think you could make the case that this is the best levels 4-5 adventure written. Seriously, and if not then it’s right up at the top. Design and imagination forward. Shit makes sense. Interactive exactly the way an exploratory dungeon should be. Room after room adding to the vibe and history of the place. Easily one of the best.

Grognardia reviews the science fantasy RPG Hyperborea.

Players of Gygaxian AD&D will immediately find Hyperborea familiar – six attributes, a plethora of classes and sub-classes (22 in all!), nine alignments, multiple lists of spells, etc. It's a big, baroque stew of often idiosyncratic but flavorful options, but it's never overwhelming. In large part that's because of Talanian's presentation of the material, but it helps, too, that Hyperborea is much more clearly a cohesive ruleset than a sometimes-contradictory hodgepodge built up over time, which only makes sense, given that Hyperborea came out decades after AD&D. Consequently, I consider Hyperborea the best modern restatement of AD&D.

False Machine reviews Sinjin, “a game about necromancers remediating a haunted exclusion zone in 19th century pastiche not-Florida.”

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Free Stuff

Moira Games presents two one-page dungeons: They Dug Too Deep and Hidden Gods of the Woods.
Sarah Angell has put together Shots in the Dark, a collection of 18 one-shot adventures for Shadowdark and other OSR RPGs.
Whose Measure God Could Not Take has a free dungeon: The Geas Years.

History

Underground Adventures examines the 1973 Draft Version of OD&D contained within Dave Arneson’s lawsuit against TSR (available here).
The Rules Lawyer also points out some interesting features:

Tokyo Dev: The rise and fall of D&D in Japan.
Paladin Prose: The Fascinating History of Dungeons & Dragons in Japan

Player Elimination: The Decline of Miniatures Gaming – A Look Back at Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader
Rick Priestly on the History of Warhammer 40k

At Questing Beast, I started up a new show concept (inspired by GGNORE): Guess the D&D Edition! This was an absolute blast to record, and I already have some guests lined up for the next one.