Sales
The Fiend Folio (1e), Deities and Demigods (1e), Monstrous Manual (2e), and two Dark Sun Monstrous Manuals (2e) are all 40% off.
Troika! is 72% off (my review here).
The GOZR RPG is 44% off (a fascinating, hand-written RPG) (my review here).
A big collection of Old-School Essentials 3rd party adventures is 37% off, including many adventures that I’ve reviewed.
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole declares the FREE adventure The Final Voyage of Draengr Thar to be “The Best.”
This 25 page adventure has about eleven locations in some old barrows with wights and is themed around Vikings. It is one o[f] the best viking adventures, one of the best wight adventures, and one of the best horror adventures that I’ve seen.
At Questing Beast I reviewed the Jewish folklore-themed adventure Beyond the Pale, as well as a book I’ve been waiting 10 years to finally read: BREAK!!
The Alexandrian has gone on a tear, reviewing 11 Mothership zines over the course of three blog posts, featuring the good, the bad and the very ugly.
Save Vs. Total Party Kill looks at Art by Nohr, the artist behind Mork Bork and Into the Odd.
Playful Void announces the The Idle Cartulary Awards for Excellence in Elfgames 2024.
And Now a Word From Our Sponsor…
Grimwild is a FREE game of cinematic fantasy adventure, taking the thematic tropes of D&D and mixing it with the gameplay of games like Blades in the Dark, Fate, and Burning Wheel.
Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (20,000+ subscribers) using this form or advertise on the Questing Beast channel using this one. 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
At the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo, I interviewed six YouTube GMs, asking them questions submitted by Questing Beast viewers, such as how their views on RPGs have changed.
Barron De Ropp from the Dungeon Masterpiece channel has launched Green Dragon Fest 2, a small, luxurious con where you get to play RPGs with many of the creators in the video above, like Kelsey Dionne, Professor Dungeon Master, Bob World Builder, and Justin Alexander.
The Bloggie Awards are almost finished! The winners of the five categories are: Theory: The 1 HP Dragon, Gameable: Overloading the Random Encounter Table, Advice: On People-Centered Adventure Design, Review: Deep Dive: Stonetop, and Best Debut Blog: Murkmail. The best blog post of 2024 will be announced on January 31.
Creating a Zine? Jacob Hurst a table for calculating how to mail them for cheap.
McKennaArchive has a fantastic collection of original artwork from the early days of Games Workshop.
The New York Times did a lovely obituary for Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer who created the exactingly accurate The Atlas of Middle Earth. It turns out she also did atlases of Pern, The Land, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms!
The Paradiso channel shows his process of drawing a dungeon room every day, by drawing directly on a calendar!
Mattlock’s Tavern proposes Hexcrawl25, a year-long project to build a fully connected campaign setting.
Mike Mearls is developing a streamlined version of 5e called Odyssey that attempts to return the edition to its original vision.
A great video from Rhystic Studies looking at confusingly written Magic cards.
Theory and Advice
The Bright Reality and the Third Eye: Lost Pages comes up with a framework for magic, where opening your third eye is both a source of knowledge and peril.
Eye of Newt and a Dash of Stardust: I Cast Light examines the essential ingredients for building fairy-tale adventures.
Negadungeons and the Texture of Death: Save Vs. Total Party Kill posts an essay on why adventures that turn out to be deathtraps or that lack a reward are important elements in campaign play.
Designing Dungeons: Rise Up Comus has published a course on dungeon design.
Articulations: Necropraxis looks at how the internal structure of a game can make it more or less friendly to modification.
2500 HP Dragons: From Fail Forward, a new twist on the classic 16 HP Dragon and recent 1 HP Dragon.
Infinite Counterplay: Bastionland looks at how hard counters affect gameplay in wargames vs. RPGs.
Writing Rooms in Pairs: Failure Tolerated suggests an easy way to create interconnected dungeons faster.
Calendar Chronicles: Among Cats and Books explains how using a calendar app can transform your prep and worldbuilding.
Defeat, Not Death: A Knight at the Opera considers how your game would change if 0 HP always means defeated rather than dead.
Worldbuilding
Distance and Vastness on Hexmaps: From Monsters and Manuals: how much can you see from the top of a hill?
Treasures 2: More great artifacts to discover from Strange Aeons.
Aqua Tofana. Thumb-sized vial of colourless liquid. Makes you fall so deeply in love with the first woman you see that it kills you. Brewed from toads and mercury by the Palermo poisoner Giulia Tofana in 1633. A kiss each day from your inamorata delays your painful death.
Alternate Moralities: Whose Measure God Could Not Take comes up with 10 things monsters might test other than morale.
Regret: the ethos of those who live too long, both forgetting what it is to be part of the world and cherishing the last good things of the dying age. When they're likely to die, or when annihilation seems possible, or when they must destroy something irreplaceable, elves and angels test Regret or flee, taking any beautiful objects or innocent creatures they can and forsaking tainted items or ugly creatures.
Abpolis and Abpolis 2: At Monster Manual Sewn From Pants, Scrap showcases his new model making project.
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