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
Basic Wilderness Encounters is 50% off.
FIST: Ultra Edition is 50% off.
Modules B1-B12 from Basic D&D are on sale as a bundle.
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole give “The Best” to three new adventures: Slyth Hive, The Valley of Flowers, and Constant Downpour - Remastered. From the Valley of FLowers Review:
An idiosyncratic vibe with a MONSTROUS number of things going on, and a tone that is magnificent . . . There is a writing and creativity here, creativity aligned with tone, that just fits perfectly.
Grognardia reviews Bat in the Attic’s How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox.
Save Vs Total Party Kill reviews the new starter adventure from the Mothership boxed set, Another Bug Hunt.
Reavers! takes a look at the system of Wolves Upon the Coast.
At Questing Beast I review the Electrum Archive zine:
I also review FIST: Ultra Edition, which is currently on sale at DriveThruRPG!
And Now A Word From Our Sponsor…
48 hours left to back D&D Worlds at a Glance on Kickstarter! One book to create thousands of customizable 5E shops & locations with handouts for food, items, NPCs, weapons, quests, rumors, and more. Mix and match descriptions for over 35 locations. Have everything you need ready in seconds!
Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (19,000+ subscribers) using this form. If you want to send me books for review consideration on Questing Beast, mail them to Ben Milton, 6446 E Central Ave, Box #127, Wichita, KS, USA 67206.
News
WotC announces that the updated SRD for the new 5e rules will also be released under Creative Commons, which is very good news. Creative Commons is not under WotC’s control, and is actually irrevocable.
GGNORE plays through some of Cloister of the Frog God.
The Tabletop Game Designer’s Association was recently created, and appears to have a lot of useful resources.
MIT Press has released Fifty Years of D&D, a “collection of essays that explores and celebrates the game’s legacy and its tremendous impact on gaming and popular culture.” Sample here.
Hankerin Ferinale of Runehammer recaps his experience running games at the recent Green Dragon Fest.
Some new game jams have been announced: The Barkeep Jam, and the Lego RPG Setting Jam (here’s a great entry for that one).
Bob World Builder created a survey identical to the one WotC put out a while back and analyses the results.
History
A Knight At the Opera: The Best RPG Cover of All Time
Mythlands: Appraising ADVANCED D&D - Part II (Races)
Grognardia: Heretical Thoughts (Part II)
Was Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons really that bad?
GenConTV has released some excellent videos covering 0e, 1e, and 2e of D&D for the game’s 50th anniversary, featuring DMs and guest like John Peterson, Luke Gygax, Peter Adkison and Zeb Cook.
Rules
Prismatic Wasteland: Wizard Diss Tracks
Goblin Punch: Deconstructing Healing, Potions, and Shrines
Ludological Alchemy: The Most Powerful Ability in Dungeons & Dragons
Bastionland: Drama from Inelegance
Coins and Scrolls: A Material Component Magic System
Questing Beast: Guess the D&D Edition Episode 2!
Mothership in One Rule:
Rhystic Studies: The Zugzwang Machine | A History of Lantern Control
Theory and Advice
Lumpley Games: Traffic Lights Are Communication Tools
From the start, calling these same sorts of things “safety tools” when used in an tabletop role-playing setting, seemed…off. A couple years back, in the depths of COVID, Elliot and Vincent and I were having a conversation about this, and Elliot said “they should be called communication tools, because that’s what they do. They can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, but they can help people communicate better.” And he’s right!
Remember when there was a shift in awareness and therefore in conversation around the idea of a trigger warning? That as it turns out one cannot possibly know what everyone else may find triggering, it’s much more effective and practical to put content warnings on what you made, rather than try to predict what others may find disturbing? It’s time for a similar shift in how we talk about these tools. They are communication tools, they are only as effective as the people who use them in good faith with a shared understanding of how they work, and they will not, cannot, make a situation “safe” merely by being present.
Bastionland: The Power of Bluntness
Goblin Punch: Deconstructing Random Encounters
Technoskald's Forge: Blorb: The Technoskald Interpretation
Explorer’s Design: Design by Abstraction, Mörk Borg (Layout Exhibit), The Art of the RPG Cover.
The Alexandrian: Dungeons: Player Mapping, Player Mapping – Part 2: Dungeon Master Best Practices
From the Desk of Baron de Ropp: How To Design Dungeons Like A Metroidvania
Monsters and Manuals: Eddison-Tolkien-Zelazny: The Sweet Spot
We can think of Zelazny and Eddison as being two poles on a spectrum in fantasy literature - the former strongly emphasising the telling of a good story at the expense of detail, and the latter lovingly and almost obsessively painting a picture of a fully realised and inhabited world. I like both; I have a hard time accepting that Eddison's is not by far the greater achievement, but it is hard to find a more entertaining series in the fantasy canon than the first five Amber books.
One of the reasons why I think Tolkien still stands supreme in the genre is that his work strikes almost the perfect middle between these two extremes.
Worldbuilding
Goodberry Monthly: A Black Market History of Kalliope
Goblin Punch: Random Ship Encounters on the Sea of Fish
Numbers Aren’t Real: 20 Soulslike Bosses
Alone in the Labyrinth: D12 Meteoric Metals
A Knight at the Opera: Deconstructed Ravenloft for Dinner - Mindstorm Guest Blog
Any Austin: Where do Skyrim’s Rivers Come From?
That’s it for this issue! This newsletter makes use of affiliate links, which help support Questing Beast at no cost to you.