One of my goals for 2024 was to buy fewer minis, and paint more of the minis I already owned. I made a big spreadsheet of all the warhammer that litters my house: some real “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” energy. That saying is a bit dubious, but I do think there was value in seeing what my pile of shame looked like concretely. I would move units up and down my list, trying to plan out a rough order for painting.

It’s interesting to look at these numbers now. January was my most productive month, and the first half of the year much better for output than the second. You can guess when I went back to work by looking at how many minis I painted each month. A final push in December was made possible my the holidays.

Looking at the models I painted, it’s clear the best motivator for myself when it comes to painting is getting models on the table for gaming. At the start of the year I was playing a lot of 40K, and was painting units to add some variety to my Necron army. A Horus Heresy tournament in April got me painting models for my Sons of Horus army. A return to Mordheim in spring had me wrapping up the undead minis from Cursed City. A Necromunda campaign in the summer got me to repaint my Escher gang, and add a few extra models into the mix. If you’re trying to paint more, play more.

I’ve been playing Age of Sigmar Spearhead recently, when I can find the time, using a partially painted crew of Stormcast Eternals. I hate playing with unpainted minis. I was trying hard to finish them before the clock ticked over to 2025. I’m so close! They’ll be my first minis for 2025.

The other goal for all this tracking was to minimize how much of a consumer I was in 2025: I wanted to buy less minis. I didn’t track the dates I bought new minis, but if I did, you could also guess when I went back to work based on when those purchases happened. As I have mentioned before, I find when I’m most busy and stressed is when I’m buying the most gaming material. Instead of playing, the hobby just becomes an act of consumption.

I’m not sure tracking anything led to the two outcomes I wanted. Regardless, it’s nice to see what I accomplished over the year. I love painting. I need to make the time to do it.

Once again my friend Paul T. drops a blog post as comments in the discord server we use to organize our #TorontOSR meetups. As you are no doubt aware, I hate when interesting posts are lost to the ether of the Internet. So enjoy this discussion of campaign design, which makes the case for the infamous negadungeon, which he calls anti-dungeons below. Paul argues that existence of true crap-sack environments for the players to explore adds real tension to a campaign, makes the choices players make when they explore more meaningful.

If we imagine a dungeon where every room is roughly the same — e.g. each room has an Orc or some other 1 HD enemy, and 50 gp — we can say that the dungeon is “balanced” (for the sake of this example). But it has very little texture. The game might still be fun — how much gold can you collect before you overreach and snuff it? — but it’s fairly monotonous. The choice of room you go into matters very little — you could go through the dungeon in any direction, and it wouldn’t really matter. Just leave after you’ve pushed your luck far enough, and that’s the only choice to be made, really. Over the long term, you’d get bored of play rather quickly; it has fairly little depth.

But if there are some rooms that are huge scores, and some that are total deathtraps, which should be avoided, now the dungeon has a lot more surprise, tension, and variability. Suddenly it really matters which way you go and which rooms you explore, and in what order. You start worrying about how to, if possible, look ahead, scout, do some reconnaissance, etc.

There is more variability, more tension and excitement, and much more difference in terms of how the game can go and what comes of it. You could step into the dungeon and walk into a deathtrap, finding nothing, and losing many men. Or you could bypass that room and find the treasure and walk out victorious. The gamble is heightened, the tension is through the roof, and players really have to think (and their cleverness is rewarded a lot more). It adds new dimensions to the game.

You can imagine this applying to larger areas of the dungeon — groups of rooms, themed areas, or levels. The upper caves are dangerous but not profitable; the crypt is a well of wealth. Once the players learn this, they can take advantage of it, so it becomes a question of how and when they can manage to figure it out (hopefully before they die!).

Now we scale this even higher, and apply it to dungeons. This gives texture to the whole campaign, overall. Aesthetically, thematically, etc — e.g. the premise of your campaign is that there are Dwarven tombs around, and those are full of wealth, but goblin-holes also exist, and they rarely have much in them but death and offal.

Of course, it does matter a great deal what your social contract is and what kind of timescale you’re playing on. Old-school D&D has the potential to be played at variable depth, and can become an incredibly deep game — but at the cost of increased commitment, patience, and so on.

If I’m doing a one-shot for some friends, I’d never pull out an anti-dungeon. But if we have a larger campaign setting, long scale, and other priorities [as you would find in a West Marches campaign], it might be a great tradeoff for the group if there was a lot of texture in this sense, on a larger scale.

I don’t know many people who are currently using anti-dungeons (except for horror-themed one-shots), but I do know a similar example: Eero, in his campaign, has a rule, which is that any adventure hook has a 1 in 6 chance of being a fake, a lie, or a trap. When he generates adventure hooks, he rolls a die for each. If it’s a 1, it is something like this. The “treasure map” actually leads you into a dead end canyon, where you’ll be surrounded and robbed by bandits. The “missing princess” is long dead, and you’ll be press-ganged into working in the mines, instead. And so on. If you were just playing for one night, and you rolled a 1, that would likely be frustrating and unsatisfying for most people (although there are many/some who really enjoy this kind of thing, as well, whether sincerely or perversely).However, add that to a sandbox campaign setting, and dynamics emerge.

When you know that every adventure has an expected payout perfectly relative to its difficulty, like the rooms in the dungeon, it almost doesn’t matter what you choose. The GM gives you an adventure hook, you strap on your armour and you go in. But if some rooms are jackpots and others are deathtraps… and the same goes for dungeons or adventures, then suddenly you have to get a lot more discerning and more clever. The game takes on new dimensions. You might learn you need to investigate an adventure hook, find clever ways to pursue it without putting yourself in danger, do proper reconaissance or background research, and come up with new ways to approach any apparent problem. There’s an added layer of richness there. Where before your game was all, “hey, there’s a Dwarven mine under the mountain? Ok, let’s go loot it, boys”, now instead it becomes something more like, “well, shit. What do we know about Dwarven mines? Where is this information coming from? Do we know anything about the history of the region? Who else knows about it? Can we interview people who live in the area? Were Dwarves known for hoarding gold, by any chance?” Etc. You have to evaluate and strategize at a higher level; the game takes on a different kind of depth.

This has effects on the kinds of campaigns and settings you might be able to come up with or play in, as well. It can allow you to have a much more anti-ludic orientation in developing your setting or campaign, as well as the kinds of things that happen within it.

Let’s say you know there’s a farm out by the forest, and the farmer is under a curse; anyone who stays in his home turns into an undead, mindless, ravenous creature. Over the years, he has dug a pit under his farmstead, where he keeps all the ravenous undead. If something happened to him or the enclosure, it could endanger the whole area.

If your game presumes that all adventures have payoffs, you can’t even include this in your game; you’d have to finagle some reason why there’s an appropriate amount of gold there, as well (or whatever your game demands). The players can see a rumour of a missing person and zombies and go, “ok, cool, sounds like an adventure, let’s do it!”

But if you like the idea of a living, breathing, more real, more textured, anti-ludic setting and game, you totally can place this cursed farmstead in it: there is nothing to be gained by visiting this place, but it can exist in your setting, and that can lead to a more interesting and variable setting.

After all, you don’t know where the game will go - as Brendan says, every trap is also a weapon. Perhaps the PCs will become the foes of a local band of brigands, and they can lure them onto the farmstead and unleash the undead. Or one is a budding necromancer, and can learn to control them and make them into his own army. Or whatever; the possibilities open up a lot.

[So there is one reason for anti-dungeons.] The game expands and takes on new dimensions; many more and many different outcomes are possible. Some of your play might be unrewarding to the PCs or unsatisfying or dangerous, and players have to be more careful, but now all kinds of things might happen which wouldn’t in your “correct” setting where each adventure has a guaranteed payoff.

This is an update to an earlier blog post I wrote on rules and OSR games, which was published in the zine Mixed Success, which you should also check out.

Playing four sessions of Thor Olavsrud & Luke Crane’s Torchbearer had me thinking about how we engage with the rules of the games we play. Torchbearer is a machine that produces a story of grotty dungeon exploration. Its rules are highly procedural. Torchbearer’s mechanics will push the story of your session towards death and dismemberment. Smart players will work together to avoid this grimdark fate. There is no playing this game without understanding its rules, and there is no playing the game effectively without understanding them deeply. This isn’t a game where you can just ‘wing it’—both as players or as the game master. Torchbearer stands in contrast to the games I normally play: games so rules-lite you might describe them as rules-optional.

Torchbearer is a modern ruleset for playing a very old-school sort of game: dungeon crawling adventures most commonly associated with Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). That’s what originally drew me to the game. I’ve been playing RPGs on and off since the 90s, but since returning the hobby a little over a decade ago now I have been most drawn to the games coming out of the Old School Renaissance (OSR). The OSR is a gaming movement focused on player agency, problem solving, and simple open-ended rule sets inspired by old editions of D&D and games from that period of time. Torchbearer is a very different take on a genre I love, it’s a game that is far more baroque and that feels more purposeful. I’d argue the messy games you may remember from your youth are purposeful in their own way.

My favourite edition of D&D is the original version of the game published in 1974 (OD&D). In OD&D, players start the game with a single d6 of hit points, and weapons in the game typically do a single d6 of damage. Hopefully you can see that your heroes won’t be long for this world if you end up in a fight and simply start rolling dice: your dungeon delving adventure will trend towards death and disappointment as your character is cut down by goblins, kobolds, and orcs. The odds aren’t in the player’s favour, so play becomes about fictional positioning to avoid leaving things to chance. Clever play is all about stacking the odds in your favour, and your best odds occur when you aren’t rolling any dice.

This style of play will only work if there is a shared understanding between the players that the person running the game will do so in a fair and impartial manner. In Torchbearer the rules force this impartiality: players will push and bend them to create the advantage they need to succeed. In an OSR game this is usually accomplished diegetically: there are no mechanics for dropping chandeliers on your enemies, tripping colossal monsters, etc. The players need to convince the game master their actions are meaningful, and collectively decide what the benefits should be. In both cases the savvy player is trying to manufacture certainty.¹ While you might be able to get far in an OSR game being completely oblivious to its rules, you won’t get far if you don’t attempt to play smart. Your games will likely feel boring or flat as your character is cut down again and again.

Games like Torchbearer have rules and mechanics that drive the action of the game. They are active participants in producing a story through play. The rules of OSR games can feel more passive in this regard. It’s easier than you think to play sessions of D&D where you don’t roll any dice. The rules found in OSR games are often focused on modeling failure states. In other words, they come into play when you fuck up.

In this way, OSR play feels like it’s about engaging with the negative space of the rules. The rules layout the guardrails for play: “this is a game about exploration and adventure.” You might need to Save vs. Magic, it’s written on your character sheet. You might need to fight a monster, you have hit points and to-hit bonuses. The game tells you what it’s about, where you need to worry, and play then is about trying not to worry. OSR play isn’t simply playing pretend because the game frames what your pretend looks like—like all good role playing games.

Games that work well provide support for play through their rules, GM advice, player advice, etc. This is true regardless of the model of play as described above. When making a game, especially a rules lite game, you should think about how players will approach the rules of play, and if there is enough there to encourage forward movement and interest. It’s easy to look at a game like D&D, realize you always ignore encumbrance rules, and drop them. And in that way keep stripping things back till you’re left with a system that is some variation of “just roll high on a d20”. Or conversely build a game up with the bare minimum you need to play, not realizing it all works because of the years of context sitting in your head. If you inadvertently create a game missing key rules needed for play, or leave these rules as an exercise for the reader, you veer into the world of Fuck You Design.²

Many OSR games work because they rely on their players having internalized all the norms and tropes of the game. Torchbearer tries to encode those tropes into the games rules, producing a game that is far heavier, but more self contained. I often play games with people who don’t know the rules of the game we’re playing. When they need to roll dice someone else will let them know. This works because on some level they do understand the goals of the game, and are navigating its edges. The games I enjoy are simpler, for me. If they fall flat for you, i’m sure there are several blog posts you can read, movies you can watch, doorstop-fantasy books you can consume, and new friends you can make to help get you up to speed. It’s simple.

Work was mind numbingly busy, and then I hopped on a plane to the East Coast. I saw people posting about the Ennies and realized those assholes hosted their awards before I announced the winners of the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming. What’s up with that?

This is the 10th year for the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming. While these awards improve like a good scotch, the Ennies continue to be … well, the Ennies. There is nothing wrong with being the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry, of course. Someone’s got to do it! I just want something different. Maybe you do too.

As always, there is only one rule when it comes to these awards: the books in contention must have arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2023. As I noted last year:

… while Trophy, which arrived at my home in January, should clinch some awards at the Ennies this year, it will need to wait till next year to fight for its spot as The Ramanan Sivaranjan Award for Excellence in Gaming winner. If I had backed it digitally, I’d have included it for contention this year. Simple, right?

In the business, we call this foreshadowing. I hope you enjoy my picks.

Best Gaming Supplement: Hull Breach , brought to life by Ian Yusem.

Hull Breach is a fantastic anthology of material for Mothership: adventures, monsters, advice, etc. With its fanciful layout and polish, its closest analog might be the popular zine, Knock, from The Merry Mushmen. Hull Breach goes a little further in its approach to anthology. Ian has tried to tie various articles together to suggest their use for campaign play. Everything is neatly indexed and cross referenced. You can see he wanted this to be the companion to Mothership 1e: unfurl the mission accomplished banner.

Best Necromunda RPG: Gangs of Titan City by Nick Spence, Ben Brown, and Zachary Cox.

Gangs of Titan City is the Necromunda RPG no one was asking for, but clearly should exist. Like Zach’s other works it is an odd amalgam of RPG ideas. You can see the influence of powered by the apocalypse games and the OSR to produce something new. This game feels so weird and niche I would love to see it find a wider audience. There is a strong emphasis on tools for the GM to use to make a session of gaming go. Some of that story game influence, I suppose. The only thing this book is missing is advice on playing with your Necromunda minis. A real missed opportunity. Finally, Dai Sugars did the layout so you know this book is hot and good.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2023: Trophy Gold by Jesse Ross.

I have already enumerated the ways I think Trophy Gold is amazing. Everything I picked up during the rest of 2023 was really in a battle to unseat this champion of a game. It was all my friends and I would chat about when it came to RPGs for a good while. Jesse Ross has made something compelling with Trophy Gold. The game really manages to be this impressive amalgam of OSR and Story Gaming. It doesn’t feel like it should work, but does! The book itself is beautiful. The Gauntlet, aka Jason Cordova, did an amazing job turning the small digital zines that were Trophy from the Gauntlet Codex into something special. The three Trophy Books: Dark, Gold and Loom are some of the nicest RPG books I own. Jesse did the art and layout as well as the writing: the triple threat! ¹

Honourable Mentions

Keeping this list of shout outs short this year was a challenge: there was a lot I loved, and a few games here were real contenders for awards. Much love to Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova, Sword Weirdos by Casey Garske, The Doomed by Chris McDowall, The Black Sword Hack by Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeannette, CY_BORG by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr, NooFutra by Scrap Princess, Barkeep on the Borderlands by Prismatic Wasteland, and Warped Beyond Recognition by Quadra. I am annoyed at myself for not having played Brindlewood Bay yet: what did I even do with my time off? Be better than me, check this game out, and give it a go!