The Glatisant: Issue #63
An exclusive sale, a real-time wargame, an a cube of ornithopters
It’s time for the monthly link roundup! This is a free public post for all subscribers. If you want full access to the bonus posts, consider becoming a premium subscriber here or a supporter on Patreon. Recent bonus posts include Mechanics that RPGs Don’t Use (Part 2) and The Trick to Making Memorable RPG Settings.
Sales
GLATISANT EXCLUSIVE! I’ve marked down my adventure collection Summer’s End by 50% for a limited time, only for those who use this link. Get 12 one-page adventures in a single book!
Humble Bundle has some huge deals on bundles of Pathfinder and Deadlands books.
Troika! is 72% off
Hubris: A World of Visceral Adventure is 40% off
GOZR is 44% off
The Shadowdark campaign setting Formoria: The Dark Age is 38% off.
Murkmail has released a PWYW Mork Borg adventure.
Reviews
Ten Foot Pole awards “The Best” to Survivors of Frith.
I find this quite the interesting booklet. It IS a campaign for seven to nine levels of play. The dungeons are great. There is no real “plot”, so we don’t have to worry about the usual Adventure Path railroading, but things are related and you can follow up on things and go to new places. The dungeons and their interactivity is the strong point here.
Playful Void reviews the adventure Chateau Amongst the Stars.
. . . if you’re looking for a higher level, beer and pretzels dungeon for Shadowdark, I’d look no further than Chateau Amongst the Stars.
Patrick Stuart interviews Scrap about his new monster art book, Malustrious Brood.
GGNORE does a playthrough and review of The One Ring Starter Set.
The Legends and Dice Cafe does some character creation and a bit of SOLO gameplay for my game Knave 2e.
At Questing Beast, I reviewed quite a few new books, including Vaults of Vaarn #4, Maze (the video went a bit viral!), Steve Jackson’s beautiful puzzle book The Tasks of Tantalon, and Luke Gearing’s Swyvers (for those who like the videogame Thief). I also flipped through new RPG mail with two of my kids.
Have an upcoming Kickstarter or an RPG project you want to promote? Advertise in The Glatisant (22k subscribers) using this form or advertise on the Questing Beast channel (100k subscribers) 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, #127, Wichita, KS, USA 67206.
Game News and Culture
Matt Colville had a very fun conversation with Quinns of Shut Up and Sit Down fame.
Friend of the channel Luke Stratton ended up on local news talking about how tariffs affected his Pirate Borg business.
White Wolf Games is back.
User azura26 on reddit has created three data maps showing how r/RPG’s favorite RPGs are related to each other, based on how often they are mentioned together.
Jon Peterson announces the release of Playing at the World 2e: Vol. 2.
Pathika has a two-part series examining the dungeon designs of Jennell Jaquays.
Sam Sorensen has a fascinating writeup on how he runs his wargame Cataphract.
The pitch is pretty simple: it’s an asynchronous play-by-post real-time wargame, set in a pseudo-Black Sea region circa 1300. That means no sessions—instead, my players write what they want to do in a discord channel, and I keep track of their orders on my map. We track things in real time, so that means if an army takes two weeks to march from one place to the next, well, I’ll see you in two weeks. Messengers are just “a guy on a series of horses,” so they, too, are tracked in real time—a letter sent from one stronghold to another 150 miles away takes, at minimum, about three days to arrive.
The Video Game History Foundation unearths, digitizes, and uploads ALL of Cyan’s archival footage. The Myst and Riven games were extremely formative for me when it comes to my love of exploration and puzzle solving.
Rhystic Studies examines the strange history of the all-ornithopters MTG cube.
Theory and Advice
Cryptic Keyway has a fun technique for revealing campaign lore: slowly unredact a page. Also, a novel use for ChatGPT: convert bloated room descriptions into organized, useable ones.
Beneath Foreign Planets: The Hunting Die - Improving Encounter Rolls, Again!
James of Grognardia regularly runs very long campaigns. Here’s how he does it.
Joseph R. Lewis is one of the best adventure writers working today, and has been regularly putting out excellent videos on adventure design.
Explorer’s Design: How to Roleplay Without Accents and Design Your Locks With More Keys
Prismatic Wasteland compiles all the pope-and-cleric themed blog posts written during the papal conclave.
Rise Up Comus: The Copy and Paste Manifesto
The Alexandrian: Adversary Rosters | 5-Star Dungeons
A Knight at the Opera: Look Before You Leap
Matthew Andre has a three-part series examining what works and what doesn’t in RPG layout.
Skeleton Code Machine has some great advice on the kinds of questions to ask playtesters.
Mystic Arts has been making some great videos on old-school play recently.
Elder Goblin Games had me on this month to talk about all things OSR.
Worldbuilding
Rotten Pulp: ENTITY 11: HABIT FORMER
Vaults of Vaarn: Major Faiths of Vaarn
Rise up Comus: Worldbuilding Through Saving Throws
Cryptic Keyway: Treat Lists of Deities Like Roll Tables to Create a Scrambled Pantheon
Patrick Stuart discusses how Agriculture might function in the Veins of the Earth.
Darkness moves through the underworld like semi-sentient weather, harvested by wind-traps woven by hyperdimensional limbs, condensing, perhaps to lucent black mana, scraped and harvested from traps by guilds or bloodlines.
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