In the wasteland of the post-Web 2.0 internet I’m grateful for anything that helps me discover new RPG blogs without having to use a social platform. The corporate-owned web is a nightmare and the walls close in a little more every day. The more we can find each other and share our work through personal projects like this, the better off we all are.

You can read more about rootring on elmcat’s announcement post. As you can see at the bottom of the page, this blog is already part of the ring. You should join too.

Session 8: Slime Time

16 April 2024

Player Characters

Hirelings Brought Along

Downtime

Prospero the Violet goes carousing and has a divine visition with the following vision: Mountains overlooking Cuccagna. One big red mountain with a greek-style temple going into it. Inside: Face of a statue of a handsome youth (below) sculped in shock-white. Eyes of a serpent.

More importantly, he gains a level!! Sweet!!!

Then we go dungeon

We make for the 1st floor, but along the way our scout encounters a Scitalis and gets paralyzed by its hypnotic eyes. We close in to fight, Prospero the Violet and Graciela averting their gazes. Wren does not protect their vision and falls victim to its ability. The porter Pero steps up to join the fray, earning a promotion to the role of bravo. After a few rounds of fighting we kill it!

Hooray!

Ok 1st floor

We head north from the entrance and have our thief examine a door. He finds that it’s trapped: there are two holes in the ceiling just before the doorway. The thief mentions with some flour and water he might be able to plug the holes and block whatever might come out. We decide to come back later.

We check out another room. It is full of empty weapon racks and armour stands, but nothing of apparent value.

Exploring westward we come upon a hallway lined with green slime. Poking it with a 10’ pole suggests it is not the infamous green slime of dungeon lore. It smells like Pine-Sol. Upon inspection, it appears to coming through some seam between the wall and floor.

John Napkin tries to locate the seam and pry it open. He succeeds in sliding the wall (revealed to be false) upward, exposing a passage lined with slime running southward. The slime runs down a passage to another wall. We suspect this may be the slime from the vats.

We begin spiking the door. After some time we see green slime come burbling through the far seam in the wall. This time it is the monster kind! John Napkin quickly unspikes the door.

Wren gets curious and tries to burn the floor slime with a torch. It burns slowly and acridly like green wood. While this is happening the monster ooze slides under the door. It retreats from the flame back under seam!

Hooray!

Nothing bad will happen to us

We explore some more. Idk hallways and stuff. We thought it might link back up to the vat room but instead seems to wrap around it.

Too much hallway! We open another door.

The room beyond contains some kind of circular diagram as well, more urgently, as 6 backwards-face Blemmyes. They attack on site!

The Last Heading Was A Lie!! Climactic Battle Against the Blemmyes!! Will We Lose Our Lives?!

They batter our front line with spears, wounding Dame Losaneta. Wren casts Sleep, only putting out one of the Blemmyes (and revealing they have two hit dice).

We engage them in missile combat. It’s not going great!

Prospero the Violet casts Phantasmal Force, conjuring an illusion of a giant spiked roller thingy trundling across the room, crushing the Blemmyes. One passes his save against the illusion and keeps fighting us.

John Napkin tries to parley with the survivor but it does not appear to speak our language.

Dame Losaneta drops the last Blemmye, and we quickly dispatch the rest.

Hooray!

Mmmmmmakin magic circle ooooh baby magic circle ooh

Prospero the Violet binds Losaneta’s wounds. He then studies the magical circle. It appears to be for summoning. He notices that nothing has passed inside of it. He takes a sheet of parchment and copies the circle for further study.

We surmise from the surviving Blemmye not having fled that there are no secret exits.

I was getting very sleepy near the end and stopped taking notes. Sorry about any gaps.

Session 9: Operation Bright Stick

14 May 2024

Player Characters

Hirelings Brought Along

Hirelings left at home

| Hireling | Class/Type | Employer | | ——– | ———- | ——– | | Pero | Porter | Wren | | Mingus | Bravo | Wren |

Operation Bright Stick

Our big brain move this session was to tie a burning torch to the end of 10 foot pole and try to poke things with it. Our first target is the shambling mushrooms on the ground level. Our scout brings the torch nigh…

They begin shrieking like humans being mutilated. More shriekers! John Napkin runs in to fight them. We wail on them for a bit but fail to destroy any of them.

The sound of the fight draws the attention of Caliban! He’s tired of our shit and decides the time has come to kill us.

Caliban begins casting a spell! Prospero the Violet and Bexonius begin casting spell! We fire missiles on him, interrupting his spell. Bexonius hits him with a magic missile for 7 damage!! Prospero the Violet casts Phantasmal Force, conjuring an image of a group of Blemmyes carrying Caliban’s stolen goods and mocking him. He flies into a rage and runs off to chase them. Also attracted by the shrieking, two groups of Monopods show up but they are our friends and just kind of leave. So do we! We extinguish our lights in case they’re the trigger.

Still in the dark, we links hands and slink off westward to a door we haven’t checked out before. Unable to see, Tuva is uncertain whether there is is trapped inside and feels a bit nervous, but we peer pressure her into opening it anyway. A false lip above the door slams down and crushes her head. RIP Tuva.

We light up again. The room beyond is some kind of workshop with a table, workbench, a heap of broken green glass, and some primitive tools. It connects to another room with a glassblowing furnace and equipment and a basket full of glass rods. John Napkin inspects the furnace and realizes it is portable. Bexonius grabs the furnace. We argue over who has to take the rods and all the hirelings are being difficult (especially Ugo) so Graciela takes the rods. We head up some stairs to the 1st floor.

At this point Miranda starts rolling dice and becomes positively elated about something. Ugo’s head then gets crushed by Nessuno’s club. Prospero the Violet tries to blind him with a light spell, but Nessuno makes his save. Pero and Losaneta try to poke him the eye, but miss. Tony leaps at Nessuno’s face with froggish agility and knocks him prone. Nessuno wins initiative and grabs Tony before falling victim to a Hail Mary Sleep spell from Wren.

We loot his large sack of goods, as well as his giant eye and elephantine ears.

Take

296 xp per PC, 148 per hireling 1200 gp

Session 10: Not Gonna Lie I Was Really Out Of It Writing This

21 May 2024

Player Characters

Hirelings Brought Along

Hirelings left at home

Go Dungeon

I spent the whole day on Zoom and cannot sit still.

• South tower
• Get shot at through murder holes :(
• Do a funny prank lodging a torch in the pull ring of the door behind which the arrow shooters are >:)
• Let’s GO UPSTAIRSSSS exceeeeeept
• Oops! It’s Blemmyes!
  • of the backwards kind
  • Eventually we kill and/or sleep them yay
• NOW up the stairs

some more things….

• 44 ep
• killed 7 blemmyes
• cast sleep on 4 monopods
• took 5 taxidermy heads (100 ch)
• 1 peridot cabuchon (500)
• pouch of black lotus powder (1000)
• lock box (locked)
• 5 books bound in scitalis leather on human anatomy (100 ch)
• shitty lapis statue (500)

3022 gp 628 xp, 464 gp, 9 sp, and 2 cp per PC 314 xp per NPC

Player Characters

Killing a Lamia – The Lamia’s Treasures – Speaking with the Half-Brothers – Back on the Road – An Argument Over Kneeling

Killing a Lamia

So we’re in a cave we found on the way to uhhh investigate the uhhhh Daughters of Secorax who are….. bad………. because they uhh….. kidnapped…… some guys. The half-brothers. Or enscorceled them or something. But on the way we found this cave where there’s a lamia, who we pissed off previously, and she’s sitting on a pile of treasure and weeping over the corpse of her ghoul-bear (our fault). She also captured some of the Half-Brothers.

We’ve spent most of our good spells and are trying to figure out how to get all the treasure without her killing us. We assume she is quite powerful and also there are few of us tonight.

We start with Graciela healing people of the wounds they took last session from the aforementioned Ghoul-Bear. She then casts a blessing on us all.

We send Petra in to see if there is some advantage we can gain. Petra scopes out the room and sees some treasures, including a gold-encrusted garter(?) and the lamia flopped over and staring into the middle distance.

She catches us but we cast light on her face and the rest is whatever. She’s dead.

The Lamia’s Treasures

So we examine the treasures and all rogues have supernumeracy in the World of Nightwick™️ and thus ascertains the pile of coins consists of 6750 gp. The spoils also include a jeweled diadem and gilded hairnet. These, as well as the garter, are each worth 2500 gp. Also there is a wand.

Holy shit that’s a lot of treasure.

Simona also cuts out the lamia’s tongue. She doesn’t know if it’s valuable but as a professional charlatan she figures she can at least run some kind of racket with it.

There’s a room to the south we hadn’t checked out. Inside we find a fountain that pours out red wine.

Speaking with the Half-Brothers

We saved 3 of them: Payuzo, Loro, and Nado.

Payuzo informs us that this cave used to be the property of the Half-Brothers, who were tricked into surrendering it to the Daughters of Secorax, and then seized by the lamia.

Ditchbank keeps a sample of the wine in his decanter that’s shaped like a satyr and you drink out of its… well you know.

In case you’re wondering what any of these factions are about: I forget. I guess Secorax is an old god. The half-brothers are… affiliated with the Knights of St. Swayle somehow?

Back on the Road

Laden with treasure and not super keen on Graciela’s idea of destroying this temple, we make for Castle St. Swayle. However we get lost hexcrawling.

We set up camp the night. During the first watch, Ditchbank hears a loud snoring. Petra is sent to investigate. The source is a horrid wingless dragon whose sleeping body blocks a whole stream. It sleeps with its red eyes open.

Our first encounter with a real dragon!

Luckily it is fast asleep and we are able to pass the night in safety.

We get ourselves oriented and find our path has drifted south. We try to resume our course to St. Swayle. Graciela is enraged that we didn’t notify her of the dragon so she may end its unholy blight upon the Earth.

An Argument Over Kneeling

We are travelling by moonlight through the terraced gardens that make up the Cuccagnat country side when we come across a knight by a reflecting pool cooking a huge bird roughly the size of a horse on a gigantic spit. His armour is a shimmering black lit by small, moon-like orbs with faces and he has a generally sinister mien.

Ditchbank, our scout, reports this to us.

Simona thinks this is all pretty cool and goes to speak with him. He tells her he is cooking an anthus. He is hitting on her hard and she does everything in her power not to appear to notice. Anyway it’s a bird that eats horses. Simona asks who he serves and he tells us he’s a knight errant, but he says it in a horny way.

Graciela intercedes and asks if he serves the God of Law. He says his only god of the road, and Graciela says she is the high priestess of the road. She tries to get him to sign her book (I think it’s her church rolls or something) and he flirts with her, and they get in an argument over who has to kneel to whom. Graciela gives him an ultimatum asking if he’s one of her boys or not.

“Nay! You are one of my girls.”

The argument intensifies in a predictable manner, until such a time as the knight pulls out a scepter, putting a spell of paralysis of her! He tells us to move on or face his blade.

He drag Graciela away over Ditchbank’s protestations.

One of the half-brothers tells us that this was Sir Jacquo the Black, a regular at jousting tournaments notorious for cheating even though he’s skilled enough not to need to.

We travel through the night and reach Castle St. Swayle.

The Take

• Wand of Radiance (casts Light (1 charge), Continual Light (2 charges), burst of sunlight (3 charges – save vs wands or blinded for 1 round; 6d6 dmg to Undead) – number of charges unknown).
• 2050 gp per PC, 1025 per hireling
• 2700 XP each, 1350 per hireling

Petra levels up!!

Potential scheme: Find out what tournament Jacquo is going to, bring Prospero the Violet, turn Ditchbank invisible, steal the scepter.

Many of you are worried that this is just another big tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That we’re creating a problem to justify invasive solutions. I get that skepticism. It’s earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry. But that’s not what we’re doing.

– Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy

Oh ok, 3 quick questions:

1. So what is it you’re doing, and how do you know you’re doing it and not merely saying you’re trying to do it?
2. Why does what you say you’re doing now mean you aren’t also doing the thing you say you aren’t doing?
3. How is it that the thing you are no longer doing turned out to be a thing you say you’re not doing, and what are you doing to prevent the thing you do next from turning out to be the thing you say you aren’t doing?

Thanks for your attention in this matter.

I am someone who constantly fixates on dungeon ecology questions like “what do they eat” and “where do they shit”. Joe’s solution – “they don’t, they just got here” is honestly really good, something I wish had occurred to me sooner.

And in a way, it sort of did. For a long time now I’ve had in my head a loosely-enforced principle that if you key a monster to a room, it should be because it’s always in that room. Otherwise, put it on a wandering monster table.¹ It’s basically the same idea as Joe’s: If you run into a monster in a room, it’s either because it just got here, or it lives here.

This actually leads to some fairly interesting corollaries:

1) The Dungeon Exists To Keep It Here

This actually goes back to the old association of dungeons with prisons. The point of the room, or complex, or whatever it’s keyed to, is for that monster to be there. This might imply some system of food sources and/or latrines, but they don’t need to be localized to the dungeon or directly accessible to the monster. Like real prisons, the point might specifically be to make it dependent on its captors for its survival. This, incidentally, makes food-laden adventurers a whole lot more interesting.

2) Its Job is to Be Here

It’s guarding something, or it’s posted as a sentry, or a spy, or whatever. Maybe it’s here to feed the monster that’s imprisoned here. It serves some purpose to the dungeon which, again, may be provisioned for externally rather than part of the local environment. There are 4 goblins in this room. They are here to guard a treasure. Every week, 4 more goblins arrive with a supply of food and water and relieve the previous group. Being goblins, they are comfortable and in fact delighted to leave their waste all over. Moreover, they are desperate for any distraction from sitting in this stupid room.

And/or, my personal favourite…

3) It Defies Ecology

In Old D&D terminology, “monster” is a technical term designating “any character that isn’t a player, has stats, and might be found in a dungeon or wilderness.” Chimeras are monsters, but so are bandits. In the worlds I run, however, “monster” often has an additional, taxonomical meaning, designating a creature that does not need to eat, but eats for pleasure.

Historically, people believed in all kinds of critters that don’t quite live the way humans do. Mice, rats, and all kinds of other animal did not reproduce but spawned from the dirt at random. Some creatures existed primarily as a kind of moral lesson, and their needs and habits were subordinate to their didactic purposes.

Such a being doesn’t make a world less naturalistic if you live in a world where nature has a place for them, as indeed our ancestors did.

In brief, why is the chimera on top of the mountain? Because the mountain exists to house the chimera, and the chimera exists to test you. Why can it live here for centuries without a scrap to eat? Because it doesn’t need to eat. Why has it started flying into town and eating people’s herds? To teach them a lesson. And because goat is delicious.

So I literally don’t know if I mentioned this in the 10+ years I’ve been writing this blog but I’m gay. If I haven’t mentioned it it’s not really a closet thing so much as like, not usually what I’m writing about here. That’s an important context note here. Equally important is I am married to another man.

My husband watched Heated Rivalry, the aforementioned show about gay hockey players. I would catch bits of it while doing other things but did not sit down and watch it. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Don’t care for hockey.
2. I really really really really REALLY don’t trust big media companies telling stories about gay men.

This second point is not like, an ideological one. It is a learned aversion from years of bad experiences. Try to count roughly how many movies and/or TV shows you’ve seen that have a gay man. Now try to work out the percentage of those in which he does not wind up alone and/or dead, usually in tragic fashion. My first gay movie was Brokeback Mountain, guess how that one goes. Do you remember when fucking Tron Legacy iced a gay? I do.

For most of my life, the only gay love stories I had were the ones I was part of. If you don’t get how painful and lonely that can be, I’m not sure I can explain it. I guess I’ll try.

When you are in the closet two of your biggest worries are a) dying alone and unloved and b) people beating the shit out of and/or killing you for trying to avoid a). Coming out helps but does not make those worries go away. I do not enjoy being reminded that the normative model of a TV viewer is apparently more comfortable watching me murder my husband (I’m looking at you, Weapons) than kiss him.

This might help explain why I’ve grown so wary of any kind of big media product about gay men. The happiest gay story I’ve known is the one I’m in now. That may sound like bragging, and I’m so grateful for what I have, but it’s not all that comforting to see yourself as a rare exception to a very ugly rule, so I’ve preferred not to see myself at all.

But my husband loved Heated Rivalry, and I mean really loved it. He’d talk about it at any opportunity, read about it constantly, watch clips and commentaries on it at all hours. It’s clearly very special to him. He also never watches things a second time. So when I saw he was starting a second watch through Heated Rivalry, I figured I should pay attention. Plus, I kept hearing bits of one of my favourite Wolf Parade songs and figured any show with good enough taste to use it can’t be all bad.

This one:

Here’s another thing about the closet: every gay man has a mental playlist of songs that, to their creator, probably aren’t about the closet, but, to that listener, are extremely about the closet and could never be about anything else. “I’ll Believe in Anything” is one of mine. Over the years I loaded it up with every emotion imaginable. Joy at its awkward, jangly beauty. Sorrow in its bittersweet crescendos. Hope and love in every word of it’s 2000’s-twee enigmatic lyrics. It kept me company in breakups, rejections, and ghosted dates. It raised my spirits on tired, ugly days.

I can barely put into words what it was like to see this exact song mean, apparently to the creators of this show, and now thousands or millions of others, exactly what it means to me, with every ounce of fear and love and beauty my mind has loaded onto it. I wasn’t ready when it happened, and since seeing the scene in question I have not been able listen to the song without crying. And I’ve listened to it a lot.

I’m not going to post a clip. If you know, you know. If you don’t, watch the damn show.

Just after we wrapped up my first trip through the series and my husband’s second, my husband showed me a video of some famous psychologist describing it as “reparative”. It’s beautiful, she says, because it surfaces all those old fears, and hopes, and loves, and it shows to them to you and lets you feel them, and then gives them the resolution you’d always wished for. I remarked that that’s very nearly the same way my therapist conducts our sessions.

And it’s shocking how powerful that effect has been. Shortly after the psychologist’s video my husband and I got to talking about how we came out to our parents – we’ve talked about it plenty before, but it’s an uncomfortable topic – and ended up doing so more candidly than ever before. I learned things about my his coming out that I hadn’t known I didn’t know. I’m thinking about Heated Rivalry all the time now. He says he is too.

But beyond any kind of personal reparation, it’s stuck with me as maybe the first thing I can point to when I want to explain why it all matters so much. It captures not just the fear and loneliness of the closet, but the pain of hiding the part of yourself that brings you to some of the most joyful, beautiful moments you’ll ever have. It tracks how that act of hiding can’t be separated from the other parts of your life, how the closet isn’t somewhere you go, it’s everywhere you are. It captures the incredible relief when you finally let yourself out and, of everything I’ve ever seen, does the best job of showing why someone would risk the kind of sacrifices that every, and I mean every, gay man, has to confront at one point or another. Why it is so fucking crushing when straight people complain about having to see Pride flags, or men holding hands, or whatever else they want to reduce to “flaunting my lifestyle”.

This all reads as trite. I’m reciting gay clichés. I have had to fight with every fibre of my being to avoid now-nearly meaningless platitudes of “representation” or “seeing myself in media”. But I’m trying not to listen to the part of me that says that this is all sentimental slop, that I’m a Serious Man and Above This Kind Of Thing. The fucking snob who claims it’s nearly porn and only watched it because of Wolf Parade and who, damn him, still waited to be alone to cry over it. Isn’t he just providing cover for all the people who’d rather watch me get murdered? He takes the back seat today.

The show is beautiful. Send post.

I don’t really have much to say about them, I’m just having fun and I think they’re neat. As you can see, I’ve mostly been focused on fighters lol.

Black Magic

• As long as you wield a staff, rod, or dagger, you have access to 4 of the following motifs: lightning, flame, frost, torrent, darkness, and poison. Spells using these motifs to attack have range 1. You may spend downtime imbuing another item with your power (subject to the GM’s approval); in your hands, that item counts as having these motifs. You may only have one such item at a time – if you imbue another, the previous one loses its power.

White Magic

• Spend Inspiration and 1 action to align mist with a body’s natural flow, instantly healing a target in the same zone as you for 1 Heart of damage per point of Inspiration spent.
• When you observe someone plainly wearing their emotions, you can always sense what they intend to do next. If they are concealing or disguising their true feelings, you sense the emotion they are trying to hide, but not their intentions.
• As long as you wield a staff, rod, or have both hands free, you have access to the light, air, and shield motifs.
• You may spend Inspiration and 3 actions to mantle yourself in swirling wind. While so veiled, you are light as a feather, resist missile attacks, and can move through an additional combat zone per round without spending an action. This effect lasts for the duration of one scene or until you dismiss it. Reduce the cost of this ability by 1 action if you have the air motif or similar.

Martial Arts

• Spend Inspiration to infuse a weapon with elemental power for the duration of a scene. It deals damage as a magic attack.
• Spend inspiration to perform feats of strength well beyond your normal limits.
• Choose a weapon on your person when you take this feat. That weapon is now tethered to your body. When you throw or fire this weapon, you can instantly teleport to its location as soon as it makes contact with another surface. This ability can only be used immediately after using the weapon, and costs 1 inspiration if used with a projectile weapon such as a gun or a bow. You may transfer this
• Spend inspiration to instantly travel along a straight line along a flat surface to a close location you can see. You cannot pass through obstacles or other bodies, but you ignore terrain and cannot be interrupted.
• You can attune a weapon to your spirit and convert it to and from mist at will, with a touch. You may have a number of attuned weapons equal to your Hearts. While a weapon is mist, it takes up no space (even in your inventory!), cannot be taken from you, and can be called to hand at will.
• You can leap extraordinary heights. If you land an attack while in midair, you can hover in place for a few seconds, and can lunge a few feet in midair to reach a nearby target. You can continue using this ability as long as you keep landing hits.
• Spend inspiration to immediately interpose yourself between a nearby ally and an oncoming attack. When you do, make an attack roll with your current weapon. If your roll is higher than the roll against your ally, it is deflected and you ignore all damage.

Gambits

• Spend Inspiration to choose a target who is not aware of your presence. As long as you keep them in sight, stay on the move, and have places to hide, they will not see or hear you until you interact with them directly. This only applies to the target; roll as normal for anyone else.
• When you take the time to carefully study a broken-down machine, you can always get a general sense of its purpose and what it would take to fix it. When you spend Inspiration to repair a machine, you count as an additional person working on it for each point of Inspiration spent.

You might say, well, zines are often PDFs, and PDFs are easy to reproduce and distribute. But damn near anything can be a PDF. The PDF is a digital expression of a print format.¹ A zine is a print format. If your RPG product is, at its core, a PDF and not meant for print, don’t call it a zine.

Am I language policing here? Sure, why not. I think the original sense of the word matters and is worth preserving, worth insisting upon. I think zines, as a non-luxury print media are important.

One of the things that makes zines democratic print media is they are cheap and easy to print, bind, and copy. They should be DIY friendly. I’m going to put a very fine point on this: DIY friendly. That means that anyone with access to a printer and a stapler should be able to print off, bind, and enjoy. This is what makes them zines, and not magazines. I am an avid DIY printer and binder and let me tell you, most of these PDFs are nightmares.

Many of the products OSR folks are calling zines are none of these things, and I call stolen virtue. Here are my guidelines for making a zine you can call a zine.

1) Cheap

If you’re charging more than $5 for your product, don’t call it a zine.

2) Printer friendly

This is the most important thing, obviously. It also touches on a lot of different facets, so I’ll have to break it down.

Universal paper size

I think someone came up with this before me but I can’t remember who. Was it Yochai Gal? It seems like a Yochai thing. The point is, not all countries have the same standard paper size. Most (all?) use either Letter (215.9mm x 279.4mm / 8.5” x 11”) or A4 (210mm x 297mm / 8.25” x 11.75”). Getting the other size can be surprisingly expensive. The difference may seem small, but converting from one size to the other always means you either have to shrink the page to fit or crop part of it out. When dealing with small print, it’s the difference between readable and eye strain.

Some folks offer separate PDFs for letter and A4, but that’s a pain in the ass for the author. So your documents should be laid out to fit both sizes without scaling down: 210mm x 279.4mm, or 8.25” x 11”. This will mean your margins will be a bit funky, but now people all around the world can actually read your zine.

Don’t forget the margins

Most consumer printers can’t actually cover an entire page and need about a quarter-inch / 6.35mm margin on all sides to print without shrinking. That means we need to shave another half-inch, or 12.7mm, off our universal page size. So your working area is actually 197.3mm x 266.7mm or 7.75” x 10.5”.

Colour optional

Do you have any idea how expensive colour printing is? Avoid information designs that rely exclusively on colour. Besides being a nightmare for people with colour blindness, it also makes your zine way more complicated and expensive to print. Preview your layout in black and white to make sure they read clearly with or without colour.

Ink/toner efficient

This is more a polite request than a guideline: Be kind to readers’ printers and avoid layouts that make heavy use of dark tones. Be especially judicious with white-on-black text.

3) Stapler-friendly

Yeah it turns out binding introduces a bunch more issues. Most people don’t have access to fancy bookbinding equipment (or the requisite sewing skills to do without). Most people do, however, have access to a short-arm stapler, and can bind your zine by printing it, folding it in two, and stapling along the fold.

Foldability

Remember your universal page size? That’s actually the size of a whole spread. An individual page is half that: 137.9mm x 210mm, or 5.5” x 8.25”.²³ Don’t forget the margins!

Page count

So there are two important factors here: the amount of paper your average desktop stapler can handle and the weird vicissitudes of booklet printing. The short version is, the total page count of your PDF should not be above 48 (including the cover page and back!) pages, or 24 spreads. The page count should also be a multiple of 4, or an even number of spreads.

The 48 page cap is because most desktop staplers can handle around 10 pages without jamming, or 12 with a little coaxing. 40 or under is ideal.

The multiple of 4 thing will make immediate sense if you’ve ever tried to use Acrobat’s booklet printing feature with a document that doesn’t have a multiple of 4 pages.⁴ If you don’t have enough content to fill exactly that many pages, just stick blank pages before the back cover until you do. It is way, WAY easier to insert blank pages in your word processor/layout software than into a PDF.

Actually that reminds me: Booklet form

Some people are stuck with shitty computers or laptops or even just their phones to print things from. Don’t assume your reader can convert your 1up/spread document to a printer+stapler friendly form. The desktop version of Acrobat can do that for you. Most publishing software can do that for you. I’m pretty sure Word can do that for you. If you can, offer a pre-formatted file specifically for booklet printing.⁵

Oh yeah one last thing

4) Fuck your IP

Let people print copies of your zine. Let them print as many as they want, and give the copies to their friends, and let their friends make copies and give those to their friends. Give them explicit permission, ideally in the text of the zine itself. Use a Creative Commons license if it makes you feel better. At the very least, do not prohibit these uses. If you love your IP, you’ll set it free…….

Also they should be PWYW. Sorry! That’s praxis baby!™ If you don’t like it, just don’t call it a zine :)

So that’s the guidelines! I know this is a long post, and my tone can be abrasive, but these are basically a set of little kindnesses you can observe to greatly increase your RPG product’s suitability for DIY printing and really earn the title of zine.

Hell, if you do all the above (yes even the IP/PWYW) you can slap on the uhhhhh Distant Lands Zine Seal of Praxis and show it to me and I’ll link it on a special page on this blog. It’ll be in excellent company.

Problem

Locate the Alpha Platypus!

Platypus Facts

(and Nature DCs to know them):

DC 11:

• Nocturnal hunters
• Faster in water than on land
• Venomous

DC 13:

• Usually feeds on prey small enough to fit in its beak.
• Despite being noctural, they sometimes emerge to hunt on overcast days.
• Need air to breathe, can’t stay underwater for more than a few minutes
• Their venom isn’t deadly to humans, but it can inflict agonizing pain.
• Sleep in burrows.

DC 15:

• They prefer living prey.
• The venom is delivered using the hind legs.
• Burrows are usually found close to but above water. This means the flood has likely forced the Alpha to relocate.

DC 17:

• They don’t use their eyes to hunt; They can sense prey swimming below them.

Adventure-Specific Details

• The Alpha Platypus’s burrow has indeed flooded. Its old burrow was located near Pollnagollum, just south of the Log Tableaux. The new one, still shallow, is furth downriver, a few miles upstream of Pollnacrom.
• The Alpha is known to many of the locals, although rarely spotted. Most fishermen know to avoid the vicinity of its old burrow.
• If the Crows get word of the hunt, they will use the Platypus as bait for an ambush (see below).

What People Know About the Alpha

People know everything appropriate to their background, plus a History check to know one thing from each tier their roll beats.

Common Knowledge

• It emerges on occasion to attack fishers and gobbles up children who run away from home.
• Multiple hunting expeditions have tried to kill. None have succeeded.

Adults and attentive kids

(History DC 10)

• It comes out at night to hunt.
• It lives in the waters between Pollnagollum and Pollnacrom.

Elders and gossips

(History DC 12)

• Hunters once forced it onto land, but found it surprisingly agile! It spun around, striking with its tail and beak at once.
• Another time, hunters chased it into its burrow. It curled up into a ball and spun at them like a wheel!
• Some wily fisher once got it into her head to trap it in its burrow with a net. She was never heard from again.

Fishers and trackers

(History DC 15)

• It has been known to ram boats when provoked.
• It lives near the river bend southwest of Pollnagollum.

Basically Just Gudenus

(History DC 20)

• It has a taste for electric eels!
• If it’s out on a clear day, look out – it must be very hungry.

Examinations

• Asking in Pollnacrom: The villagers will be disinclined to help the party with the hunt unless they get rid of the Golem first. The local fishers all know the approximate location of its former burrow, having learned to avoid it. One fisher by the name of Curi Qale will agree to guide the party there if they promise she can have its meat.
• Asking in Pollnagollum: Similar to Pollnacrom. The villagers can’t remember the Witch and so won’t ask for help, but all have firm rationalizations to refuse to get near the water. Local fishers or hunters, if fed, will volunteer that the Platypus makes its burrow about an hour’s ride downriver along the north bank, just after the turn. If they like the party, they may add that the flood likely washed it out. Local eccentric Gudenus is fascinated with the thing and can answer most questions about its behaviour.
• Oswald Bone-Norman’s Family at the Lifesaving Library fucking saw the thing swimming downstream shortly after setting up on the outcrop. If the Crows have captured it, they saw that too, and have a 50% chance of having been murdered for it (add them to the tally of zombies).
• Locating its burrows: Finding either burrow is a DC 20 Wisdom (Survival) check if searching at random within about a mile of it, or DC 10 if searching purposefully with good information.
• Searching for tracks between its burrows: DC 15 Wisdom (Survival) to reveal tracks through shoreline and shallows (decreases by 2 per successive hour spent searching to a minimum of 10, but increases by 2 for every day passed since the flood). A failure against DC 10 or the DC reaching 30 means the tracks can no longer be detected by normal means.

Apparatuses

• Speaking with animals: The Drowned Lands are teeming with aquatic life that can be coaxed into talking with a bit of food. Older fish and various other aquatic animals have a chance in 6 based on proximity of knowing the direction of a of its former nest or present whereabouts.
• Seeking out bait: There is no shortage of attractive bait to be found. Anything the size of a small dog or larger will do. Electric eels are especially enticing, and can be found nesting around the eel trees.
• Netting: In addition to catching bait, a cleverly deployed net can help trap the Platypus in its burrow (for a while). The few fishing nets salvaged from the flood in Pollnacrom and Pollnagollum are largely being used by survivors to catch food. They will not part with them willingly. One can be found in the eel trees. A throrough, full-day search of any tile of shoreline has a 1:4 chance of turning up a usable net.

Activations

• Active search: Whenever the party spends an hour searching for or tracking the Platypus within 2 tiles of its burrow, roll an additional d20 when checking for encounters: The Platypus appears on a 19-20. If a PC is actively on the lookout for it, apply their Perception modifier (if advantageous): Success on a natural roll of less than 19 means they spot it before it notices them.
• Large, live bait strategically placed in its vicinity has a 50% chance to attract it if used in the same tile while it is hunting (75% chance if a huge electric eel is used). Dead bait is not electroactive and only has a 10% chance of attracting it. Lures can also be used near its burrow, where it may notice them upon returning in the morning.
  • The Platypus has learned not to attack armed groups of humans on sight, but it will make probing attacks against humans getting in its way and hunt solitary ones (especially if they are in the water).
  • Nevertheless, it will hunt groups of humans despite its better instincts if it is very hungry (1:6).
• Fighting it in water from a boat: The Platypus will begin by ramming it. Smaller craft have a 50% chance of capsizing. Otherwise, everyone on board must make a Dexterity Save or get knocked over (into the water if possible). The Platypus will target swimming prey before
• Attacking it in its burrow: In many ways, this is where it is most vulnerable as it has little room to turn around. It cannot use its venom if attacked from the front. However, the burrow is tight (only about 6’ high and about as wide), making it impossible to use large swinging weapons.
• Fighting the Platypus: Unless trapped or hunting (1:6), the Platypus never fights to death, instead fleeing into the nearest body of water when reduced to 50%. hp.

The Crows

If the Crows get word of the Platypus hunt (which they certainly will if the party mentions it in Pollnagollum or Pollnacrom), they will attempt to use the hunt to stage an ambush.

Their plan is to use the Platypus as a lure, and it will be ready in 1d3 days:

• The Crows capture the Platypus.
• Using Speak with Animals, Zolushika convinces the Platypus the PCs pose a threat to its life. The Platypus, already disturbed by the flood, will agree to help the Crows.
• The Crows set up an ambush site (as per DCO#8).
• The night before the ambush, the Crows will stage a series of sleep deprivation attacks – a constant string of zombies, picking off sentries, etc.
• The Platypus goes hunting somewhere in plain sight, visible to the PCs shortly after they set out for the day.
  • Anyone knowledgeable about Platypus behaviour (DC 12) will find this odd as it is nocturnal – the most obvious explanation is it’s very hungry. However, a perceptive observer (DC 15) will notice it is hunting lazily given the bounty of food around it.
• Once the Platypus is confident they are approaching it, it begins to flee towards the ambush site. This draws it onto land. (Again, this is suspicious behaviour.)
• Once the PCs are in the killing field, a handful of zombies will emerge to divide their attacks. Ghar will fire. Höolloch and Echo will join shortly thereafter.
  • If the PCs came by boat, a zombie clinging to its underside will push it out shortly after they disembark.

What we did

I’ve been tinkering with solo play lately, and today my husband was saw me fussing around with papers and maps and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was going to try to play Castle Xyntillan solo, without a DM. I asked if he’d like to join.

Given the deadliness of the dungeon, we decided to each run a small party of adventurers that was collaborating to delve the dungeon. We each rolled up 3 OSE characters, tracking them using a one-page tracking sheet I threw together.

This post is going to focus on how we made this work, rather than reporting on our session. Still, here is a short and very incomplete record of things we accomplished in about 3 or 4 hours of play:

• Explored, like, a solid dozen rooms of the castle?
• Had some fights, won a few.
• Found some big shiny treasures.
• Managed to parley our way out of a skirmish with a bunch of veteran skeletons.
• Very nearly TPKed thanks to a nasty random encounter and a few bad rolls.

By all measures a pretty solid session!

We figured out exactly how to play as we went, but our n-GM framework came together pretty quick. In brief, we followed the guidelines below, which I cobbled together from a variety of excellent sources on solo RPGing (listed further on).

No-GM Dungeon Crawl Framework

1. Write a default order of operations for your party – eg. When we find a door we do X, Y, and Z. At corridors we do blah blah blah. Stick to this unless you run into a situation where your characters cannot or following it would obviously be a bad idea. Remember, following your default order takes time, so there’s a balance to be struck between thoroughness and speed (at the potential cost of torches, oil, encounters, etc.)
2. Take more time than you usually might to figure out character backgrounds and personalities. This can be tiring, especially if you have a lot of characters, so use whatever background/character detail tables you have handy. Let your understanding of the characters inform their decisions.
3. Try to only read the parts of the module you’re engaging with right now. Obviously some modules make this easier than others.
4. Use oracles¹ and tables to fill out description a DM might. Ironsworn is free and has really good general purpose tables and procedures for this. Maze Rats and Knave have heaps of excellent tables for OSR stuff at a reasonable price. (EDIT: Kevin Crawford’s World Without Number is a D&D-type game with tables galore and a free edition.
5. Procedurize what you can’t roll on a table. If you know a sourcebook that has a mechanic for something, use it. I grabbed bits from Ironsworn (an excellent solo engine on its own), the hireling and retainer rules from Castle X, various blog posts knocking around my head, etc. This is maybe the most free you’ll ever be to fuck around with mechanics at the table. Savour it.
6. If you don’t have a table or a mechanic, just imagine and/or talk over what would be cool, how the consequences might play out, etc. Seriously, this led to some of the neatest moments in our game.
7. And finally, Quantum spoilies: if you know something your character shouldn’t, you can either:
   • Figure out why your character knows it anyway, and/or, if that feels like cheating…
   • When you “use” the spoiler, ask an oracle whether it was true. A “no” might mean it was true in part but the specifics were wrong (eg. a treasure isn’t where you thought it was), a detail is changed (the treasure is cursed), or make a note of it for later. If you save it for later, ask the oracle if the quantum spoiler applies whenever you think it makes sense (“oh, is that treasure that was supposed to be in that other room actually in this room?”)

Some clarifications and remarks

Letting characterization take the lead sounds almost antithetical to the OSR playstyle, and it is up to you how much to lean into this. Given that you already might have more and better information than you should, I found this an interesting way to generate encounters and difficult situations. For instance, at one point we had managed to call a ceasefire with a very large group of skeletons. My husband suggested they’d want to “keep” the fighter they’d killed in the skirmish. I agreed. However, I thought my cleric might object to letting a fallen comrade be claimed by the living dead. On the other hand, starting a fight with the skeletons would almost surely lead to a rout. I decided to roll 2d6, one representing her zeal and the other her prudence to see which would prevail.² Luckily, prudence won out. If you have an easier time than me just getting in your character’s head, for better or worse, you probably don’t need to hear this.

Maps and Rumours: Castle Xyntillan is better than most modules in terms of offering separate player and DM maps. For this game, I printed out both, stapling each DM map to the back of its corresponding player map. When we explored held my phone flashlight behind sheets so the DM map shone through the player one. I also used a PDF editor to remove the true/false/partial tags from the rumour table, so we could roll on it without knowing whether a given rumour was true or false.

How was it to play? A couple hours in, my husband remarked, “this is nice!” I agree. We like playing RPGs but don’t really enjoy running 1-on-1 games (it’s exhausting on the DM). This was decidedly more relaxed. I’d say we played at a slower pace than usual, as we had to spend more time figuring out how to deal with a spoiler or represent a given situation, but we also covered a lot of ground because there were only two of us. As a forever DM, it was a welcome change to let go of the reins a little when it came to making rulings. I think this more relaxed mood also helped us play for longer.

In short, I recommend it! Looking forward to doing it again!

Further reading

As I said earlier, a lot of our no-DM framework was cobbled together from the multitude of excellent solo RPG material now available online. I’ll list those that had the most influence on our session, with a few words about each.

• Ironsworn RPG by Shawn Tomkin: If you check out one thing on this list, let it be Ironsworn. It is a full system for playing solo RPGs, with some of the tightest mechanical design I’ve ever seen in any game. Tomkin played games solo for decades before writing Ironsworn and you can tell; it has excellent insights into the challenges and pleasures of solo RPGing. It is a masterclass. Beyond the mechanics, it contains excellent advice (the bits about “everything is play” are especially eye-opening) and enough oracles to get most fantasy games off the ground in one single book. I know some players find it a bit too crunchy but if you want a complete and coherent vision of solo play that works right out the box, this is it. Cannot recommend it enough. P.S. It also has an excellent dungeon crawling supplement, a planet-hopping sequel, and setting for maritime campaigns.
• Wizard Deadloss: A YouTube channel where one guy runs a party through an ongoing BECMI campaign using a series of published modules. 102 episodes and counting. I took some notes from him on handling the map and making “in-character” decisions. However, the main reason I recommend his channel to witness how he just sits down and plays without an elaborate solo framework.
• Solo RPGs: Playing a Prewritten Adventure by RPGTips: A lot of good stuff on this guy’s channel but this video had the greatest impact on how I think about using published material. A major influence in “quantum spoilers”.
• Solo Game Master’s Guide by Geek Gamers: Geek Gamers is a YouTuber and one of the most recognized voices in solo RPGing. She has a profoundly different brain from me and a lot of the ways she plays don’t quite click, but her book (and YouTube channel) nevertheless contain some very good advice. I learned a lot from the sections of assembling your solo kit and her advice to get a sense of the world and setting before you do character creation.
• DM Yourself by Tom Schutt: A book on running published D&D adventures solo (albeit with a focus on 5e). Provides guidance on selectively skimming modules, a good worksheet for setting up your “default orders”, and a “AI combat tactics” tables for running enemies, among other things. Frankly, I think this book could be a few blog posts, but the price tag isn’t bad and it helped motivate me to try this out, so it goes on the list