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Tried having a quick game of The Quiet Year due to a last minute cancellation in a regular game. I normally like planning ahead, even a “no prep” game, so this is a big deal for me. Can I actually just set up a game and go? Well, yes! 😌 Player: Is this game dark and miserable? Me: No, someone told me they played as meerkats in a zoo. It’s as light or as dark as you want. Behold the tale of the brutal religious civil war of the penguins… 🐧🐧🐧 ...

This post is just spoilers for Witchburner. You probably meant to read this one. LOOK NO FURTHER. YE HAVE BEEN WERRRNNED! 🧙‍♀🧙 ...

I ran Luka Rejec’s Witchburner in Old School Essentials over Discord for my wife and a few friends, back at the height of lockdown. None of them had played OSE before, but as this is a pretty social-based story, it didn’t matter too much. The plot The Mayor pats down her forehead with a napkin and looks left, then right. The councilors arranged around her in their finery nod assent. She looks down at the motley witchfinders, spoken for by the Lord Rightmaker. “Our request is simple. Find the witch before All Saints’ Night, before the month ends, and we shall pay you 3,000 cash.” The shadow-skinned councilor smiles, “And the council will cover your stay at my inn.” The bushy-haired priest looks uncomfortable, “Now go, find that witch, before she brings Winterwhite’s hunger on us all!” The idea is that the rural town of Bridge is plagued by evil portents, caused by witches, and the party is brought in as Witchburners to find the Witch, and Burn them. Minor spoilers below the break. ...

The Quiet Year is a sort-of-coop map-drawing and story-telling game. You use a deck of cards (special printed deck or there’s a lookup table for a normal playing card deck) to draw events, and use them to tell a story. I say sort-of-coop, in that it’s more like Roman consuls where each day/month it would swap who was “in charge” rather than agree or compromise on a single coherent course of action. In fact you’re explicitly not supposed to actually talk through each event together and agree it. You draw on the map the result of each event to build a recording of the story, and you can start building projects to fix the problems beset by your tiny community. The events are things like: An old piece of machinery is discovered, broken but perhaps repairable. What is it? What would it be useful for? As the seasons turn towards Winter, they get darker: The weakest among you dies. Who’s to blame for their death? There are other better reviews, and I don’t really want to do that here. Although I suppose this is a small review of the roll20 module that I used. ...

I make maps for my games. And sometimes, I just make maps because I like them. Hex Kit is a tool I use for that, because it’s so easy to get started! Now, I’ve not tried any other software, so I daresay Wonderdraft or some other mapper is better, but if you’re drawing hex tile maps, at a relatively large scale, you can do something easy very quickly indeed. Here’s a small starmap I made for a SWN game I was playing in. I think I spent about as long looking up the existing names as I did drawing it. ...

The site’s changed name. Welcome to the Source of Entropy! 🎉 There’s still few images and no logo, but I’d rather get content right first. It’s good for a couple of reasons: Entropy is used for getting good random numbers in computers Random numbers are good for playing games like RPGs Doesn’t show up on Google already (other search engines available) I’m a source of entropy as I don’t tidy up to my wife’s standards I wanted something a better more memorable than a nickname I only use on half the social networks around. ...

One of the rumours about Quake level design is that id Software required all levels to be impossible to write in Doom. Leverage your USP, right? That Unique Selling Point was the game being properly 3D and allowing multiple things to exist in the third dimension. Doom was basically 2D with a height map. Vertical space isn’t something I think about at all for dungeon design, I’d literally do “a level” or “a room” at a time! So, how can I learn from Quake and make more interesting levels? Worth noting, a lot of this isn’t unique to Quake, before someone says “platforms existed before Quake”. Vertical space in Quake I can’t remember how to reach the Quad Damage in Gloom Keep any more Pretty architecture - Gloom Keep is a lovely castle you see on arrival Falls - no guardrail is a bit of a hazard Height differences can be barriers Chasms you need to cross Platforms that are narrow/move Scrags hiding above you in EVERY DAMN NEW ROOM ARCANE DIMENSIONS 😡 Stairs Elevators Slipgates OK the last two are more set-piece/flavour things. ...

I want to make rooms more memorable in SGCP as at the moment I’m describing “YoU Are iN a pREttY/UGly roOM” and I want to do better. One thing is to add more stuff than just hostiles. There’s already rules in the game for generating those. I thought about the hazards I’ve encountered in Quake, both in a few hours of playing it here in good old 1985 2020, and also my memories of playing it in the 90s. Turns out it didn’t take very long at all. ...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing Artefact, by Mousehole Press. I wrote some words about it already. In case I didn’t mention before, it’s pretty. Admire how pretty it is, again. Technically, one should play it in one or two sessions and think solemn thoughts as you meditate on being left behind. I didn’t do that. The game has setup (which I did wrong) and three acts, and I did those all on separate days. ...

Some useful feedback from OSR Pit later, and I want to remember what I want to put in an AAR. I might not write that much for each bullet-point, but I think it’s worth covering it all. The last point about the lesson is my reason for writing these, but if I don’t include the context, then I can’t be sure it’s the right lesson. What did I play? How long for? What tools did I use? What was the plot? What happened in each room/encounter? What were the characters? What were the tactics? What did I learn? What went well? What went badly? What would I do differently? I was going to expand this out a bit, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. I don’t read long AARs, so I want to keep them short so that: ...