Welcome to issue #6 of The Glatisant! This newsletter is a free service put out by the Questing Beast YouTube channel, where I sift through July’s 780 blog posts to bring you my favorites. If you aren’t subscribed, you can sign up below to get new issues sent directly to your email.
If you’d like to support the channel on Patreon, the $5 and $10 tiers were recently upgraded to allow those patrons to watch my video reviews before they hit YouTube, as well as vote on what book gets reviewed next.
Award Season
To begin with, let’s look at the winners of the most prestigious award in RPGs. You know the one I’m talking about:
Ram’s website Save Vs. Total Party Kill hosts a lot of the OSR’s best tools and generators, as well as Ram’s yearly awards. This year’s winners are:
Best One Page Dungeons Collected into a Fancy Book: Trilemma Adventure Compendium
Best Settings and Adventure: Silent Titans
The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2019: Zombie World
In other news, a number of old-school and old-school-adjacent products just nabbed some ENnie Awards, including:
MÖRK BORG: Product of the Year - Gold, Best Game - Silver, Best Writing - Gold, Best Layout and Design - Gold
A Pound of Flesh: Best Adventure - Gold, Best Layout and Design - Silver (Sean McCoy has a blog post here about what the Mothership team are doing next).
Trilemma Adventures Compendium: Best Adventure - Silver, Best Cartography - Gold (new Trilemma bestiary PDFs for B/X and Dungeon World were just released here).
Tunnel Goons: Best Free Game / Product - Silver
Ultraviolet Grasslands: Best Interior Art - Gold, Best Cover Art - Silver
Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: Best Family Game - Gold, Best Cartography - Silver (Thanks to everyone who voted for Labyrinth! I did not expect to win in both categories and I’m over the moon about it. I’m also happy to have lost out on the Cartography Gold to Trilemma. If anyone deserves that, it’s Michael. He has a whole channel showing how it’s done.)
Middgyr
Legendary fantasy illustrator Ian Miller is involved with the creation of a co-op dungeon crawler called Middgyr: Tower of Chaos. Not a lot is known about it right now but there is a Facebook page dedicated to it that includes his concept art.
Zines and Jams
The Eclectic Bastion Jam is in full swing on Itch. It ends on August 13, so you still have time!
The OSR Pit forum is creating a community zine and looking for submissions, which will close near the end of August.
The Oblidisideryptch blog is creating a community zine focused on the GLOG rules, called Charcuterie Board. Submissions for issue #1 have already closed, but you can learn more at the OSR discord.
The GLOG
To begin with, Oblidisideryptch discusses how they stopped worrying and learned to love the GLOG, which serves as a great introduction to that scene.
Archon’s Court recounts how they started GLOG hacking, and links to a number of other posts on the same topic.
Numbers Aren’t Real creates 55 new GLOG class names based on the titles of penny dreadful novels and the OSR discord fills it out. Then they made 63 more.
And what the heck, here’s the insane google spreadsheet that tracks every GLOG ruleset and all 479 GLOG classes that have been created so far.
RPG History
Awesome Lies wrote about the origins of some of the stranger Warhammer races that are often forgotten today, like the Chaos Snakemen, Zoats, and Fimir. They also created this useful graphic of the mythological origins of Warhammer’s monsters.
Campaigns Playable wrote a series of four posts breaking down each element of D&D’s original subtitle: “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns.”
Zenopus Archives has dug up a rarely-seen example of OD&D play as described by Gygax in 1976.
Blogosphere Reviews
Bryce Lynch added two new adventures to the ranks of “the best” on Ten Foot Pole: Zedeck Siew’s Lorn Song of the Bachelor and Nickolas Zachary Brown’s Tomb of the Frost Walker.
At Reviews from R’lyeh, Pookie reviews my (multi-ENnie winning!) RPG Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.
Welcome to the Deathtrap reviews Locas Rolim’s Moorcockian RPG Pacts and Blades.
Melan at Beyond Formalhaut reviews the (ENnie nominated!) Knave zine Rakehell #01: The Rift of Mar-Milloir.
Ben at Mazirian’s Garden does a retrospective on the Sky Realms of Jorune.
YouTube Reviews
John Battle just started a YouTube channel and has already filled it with a number of video essays about OSR products, like this one on Troika!
Dave Thaumavore reviews Low Fantasy Gaming.
Vi at Collabs Without Permission reviews the magic system of Whitehack.
Geas Publications is another new YouTube channel with a focus on OSR zines, like this review of Willow.
Seth Skorkowski reviews the classic tournament module, The Ghost Tower of Inverness.
And here’s the latest of my Questing Beast reviews: Chris McDowall’s Electric Bastionland.
Soft D&D
A number of blogs continue to speculate on a more whimsical, less violent form of roleplaying. At False Machine, Patrick Stuart brainstorms monster that would fit this model, like Rude Orcs, Moon Mages, Loan Trolls, and Crime Birds. His game also has a tentative title: Goose-Gold & Goblins.
At Monsters and Manuals, Noisms explains why Porco Rosso is the most gameable Ghibli setting (I agree.)
The Graverobber’s Guide elaborates on three non-violent quest hooks: The Sudden Proposal, The Production Crew, and The Impossible Foe.
Elfmaids & Octopi creates a list of 100 petty wilderness spirits. E&O plans to shut down the Blogger site and move somewhere else soon, due to parts of the site starting to fall apart after Google’s recent changes.
Worldbuilding
Signs in the Wilderness has come up with a method for randomly generating hand-drawn maps over two posts.
Was it Likely? has created a generator for the Lost Gardens, a bizarre, body-horror-infected landscape.
At Lost Pages, Paolo Greco has begun a series showing how to create a spell list to fit your campaign world.
The Bottomless Sarcophagus describes Professor Vlinderkaai's Sempervivarium.
Goodberry Monthly continues its exploration of Wizard City, with posts on The Museum of Crime, the Rooftop Dueling Federation, and the Clocktower.
The Library of Attnam explains the magical properties of a Titan’s anatomy.
Theory
At Game Maker’s Tooklit, Mark Brown looks at the divergence of JRPGs from Western CRPGs, as well as their common origin point, D&D.
The Alexandrian discusses the pros and cons of asking your players to contribute to worldbuilding mid-game.
Whose Measure God Could Not Take creates a goofy 3-Attribute generator and collects a large number of resources for advancing your character without leveling up.
Ben at Mazirian’s Garden talks about presenting your campaign setting to your players by leading with the unknown.
Alone in the Labyrinth re-envisions magic spells as rituals.
Welcome to the Deathtrap examines the ways that the false “Role-playing vs. Roll-playing” dichotomy can lead to an overly narrow view of what it means to play a role.
Dreaming Dragonslayer has been writing a series on playing RPGs with kids, but I found this one on eliminating death to be particularly interesting. But if a PC has to die, Box Full of Boxes has three different ways to pass along those experience points to another character.
Random Tables
That’s it for this issue! See you in #7.