A monster on the verge of eating an adventurer.

My Electrum Archive character sheet

I met up with Emiel and Ava shortly after they arrived in Toronto for Breakout Con. I love to see my D&D friends in real life: that’s what it’s all about. (Our meetup also included Jon, the Retired Adventurer, who lives so close to me it’s embarrassing I only see him when Ava is in town.) I managed to see them a few times before they left, ending my convention crashing a game Ava ran of The Electrum Archive. We played through an adventure that was intended to be part of the second zine, but which was cut for space—the zine was already massive. The adventure was a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to its release. In The Electrum Archive the typical dungeons are the crashed spaceships of an ancient people. Our characters were sent to find a missing posse of soldiers who were exploring one such ship. We would discover they had all been murdered like something out of Alien. The adventure included: someone gaining telepathy; the rest of the party not clueing into how that happened, and instead gaining random crap mutations; a giant mech suit that ended the session just hulk smashing stuff; lots of sphincters; blood, guts and gore. So, all the good stuff.

Review: Nirvana on Fire

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 16, 2025

Tagged: mothership osr

Nirvana on Fire Cover

Nirvana on Fire: Expanded Edition is a 36 page module for Mothership written by David Kenny, featuring art by Jéromê Berthier and top-tier graphic design by Eric Hill. As the name suggests, this edition expands upon an earlier release, featuring additional writing, art, a nicer layout, etc. The pitch for Nirvana on Fire has the players responding to requests for help from a remote colony:

The power station on the moon Bodhisattva 2a is failing; without it, the inhabitants of Siddhartha’s Peace, the small Neo-Buddhist colony established there, will freeze to death. Abbot Benz-Shiroyuki requests aid. Print a new power converter at the Manufactory and as payment, receive salvage rights to the decommissioned Terraforming Tower at the top of the moon’s space elevator.

In his briefing, the abbot neglects to mention the tower’s AI has come to believe itself a manifestation of the deity Bishamonten. Pushed by Straylight LLC and the dire conditions in Siddhartha’s Peace, the AI is set on taking extreme measures to protect the colony, even if it requires feeding it to the flames of revolution.

I recall being sorely tempted by this book’s Kickstarter, the cover image is so bold and eye-catching. As usual, shipping was too expensive so I moved on with my life. This weekend I attended Breakout Con, where I saw the zine for sale in real life. Beautiful. When I went to pay, the lady working the stall said, “no pressure, but this also comes in a fancy box.” There is no world where I don’t buy the box.

The first party modules for Mothership are excellent and provide a strong template to follow when it comes to organizing your ideas for an adventure. Nirvana on Fire takes those lessons to heart. The module opens with a lot of information to help orient the GM to what’s going on in the scenario. The opening spread is a timeline of how the the colony on Bodhisattva 2a came to exist, how its problems have manifested. The following spread explains how you might use the module. David tells you how you could kick things off, and what “win” conditions might be. This is followed by an overview of the factions at play and the colony itself.

Nirvana on Fire Cover

The graphic design of this module is top tier stuff: they should have put Eric Hill’s name on the cover. I didn’t recognize Hill’s name at first, but he’s the fellow that did the layout for Hull Breach. Of course this thing is going to look hot. Jéromê Berthier art is bold. Lots of reds and blacks. Thick lines. Together the pair take the book to another level.

There are two main adventuring sites in the initial version of this adventure. The first is the colony, Siddhartha’s Peace. It’s described in a single spread, with short descriptions for each of its 10 locations. The GM will roll on a corresponding random table as players move from location to location, which often make the locations a more dynamic. There is a revolution fomenting in the town. Some of the townspeople have become adherents of the AI Bishmamoten. A few encounters involve this tension. The last encounter on the table is “the revolution begins …”.

The “dungeon” in this module is a tower that sits atop the colony’s space elevator, the centre of their terraforming activities until the AI took over. This is 10 rooms, described over two spreads. I would have preferred if the map of the tower was less abstract: it is a simple flow chart, basically. Using the illustration of the exterior of the tower by Jéromê will help you picture the space in your head. As before, a random table provides encounters and colour as players move from location to location. The last encounter on this table is the sole monster that stalks the halls of the terraforming tower, the Spear of Bishmamonten. I was reminded of The God That Crawls or Deep Carbon Observatory, other adventures with a singular powerful monster hunting the party.

Two additional adventuring locations are included in this extended edition. They add more depth to the module. The shorter of two is an addition to the colony, written by Roy Leahy. Players can explore an abandoned Starlight facility, where the company was spying on the citizens and conducting creepy experiments. This location has a nice map. Once again the encounters table elevates the quiet space into something dynamic. The other adventuring location is Facility D-U8K81, written by Noora Masyk. This location reminded me of some of the first party adventures: descriptions are longer, keyed with bullet points. Unlike the other adventuring sites in this module, all the “monsters” to be encountered are described within the location keys. (In this adventure the random encounters table adds some colour.) Both adventuring sites are nice additions to what was already a solid module.

Nirvana on Fire has an amazing cover, and it’s honestly what got me to buy the book. But, contrary to popular belief, you usually can judge a book by its cover. This book is great: I would love to get it to the table. The boxed set comes with a pad of themed character sheets, a GM screen, some patches, and dice. I have zero regrets with my purchase, it’s honestly amazing, but it’s very decadent and certainly unnecessary. That said, these dice are great.

Nirvana on Fire Dice

I love this post from Yochai about running a sandbox style game using his game Cairn and the advice and tools from its Dungeon Masters guide. I’m a big fan of people writing about how they actually prep and run games. I wrote briefly about the start of my Carcosa campaign, how I kicked it off, but never came back to talk about how it was going, or offer advice on running a hexcrawl. It’s something I keep meaning to do, and seeing this post makes me want to do so all the more.

Constant Downpour Remastered

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on February 17, 2025

Tagged: osr mothership

Constant Downpour Art

I picked up Constant Downpour Remastered when I spotted it for sale over on Ratti Incantatti1. Constant Downpour is a survival hex-crawl for Mothership. The players crash land on Venus 3 during a routine mission. Unbeknownst to them someone had planned this crash as a hit. The players need to make it off the planet, before they go crazy or get beaten to death by the Venusians. The adventure was written by Marco Serano, and is inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story The Long Rain. David Simons is the main artist for the adventure.

There is a lot to love about this adventure. Exploring the wilderness is taxing. Marco links hex exploration to the Mothership rules for stress, to help capture the unrelenting nature of the rain, lack of sunlight, etc. There is a posse of mercenaries who crashed before the players, who will pursue them if they drag their feet. Giant Venusians who will try and kill them for being interlopers on their planet. There is the company the players are working for, who have secretly facilitated the crash, and a cabal within the company trying to bring it down from the inside. There are 17 keyed hexes, and some small dungeons. There is a lot happening on the world to draw the players in. The vibes are great.

There are clear procedures for play, something that if often lacking when it comes to running hex crawls. Characters gain stress for every two hexes they move through, forcing engagement with the panic system of Mothership. I like how simple and unrelenting the rules are. I had similar thoughts after I finished running Gradient Descent. There are additional procedures for crossing rivers, adding more depth to the activity.

There are four main factions. Potamo Major are the group that hired the party, and organized the crash. Poto Minor is a rebel group operating with Potamo Major trying to take them down. Crew 612 are another group sent to die on Venus 3—they are effectively a rival adventuring party. Finally there are the Venusians, the group indigenous to the planet. Each faction is detailed briefly, with key locations listed and the groups recent successes. There are descriptions of important NPCs following these descriptions. The Venusians or Crew 612 can be used to force the players into action when they get complacent or overly cautious.

There are 91 hexes in this adventure that have no descriptions. The GM will generate the descriptions for these hexes by rolling on random tables. For a jungle hex you roll a d10 to determine the type of jungle setting the players have encountered (dense foliage, natural walkways, complete darkness), and then another d10 for a random description of that location. There are 24 entries between those three tables. There are two d10 tables for descriptions of clearings, with 20 entries between them. Both types of wilderness have sounds and smells tables to add to their descriptions. Four rolls on various tables gives me: “A lattice of thick vines loop in the air. The vines look fleshier and bumpier than vines previously seen. The slap of large leaves echo in the thick sulfurous air. The vines ahead cross in near perfect plus signs.” I love these vibes, but this is more rolling than I want to do to generate what is effectively an empty hex.2

These tables could simply be used as inspiration, forgetting about all the rolling. Random tables are often used to communicate the nature of the world, even if you might only use one entry from the table in a game. Such tables encourages an open-ended view of the game world: there is nothing canonical. A prevalence of random tables is often a defining characteristic of OSR games and adventures. I worry people feel the need to include them where they don’t make much sense, or should be designed in a different way.3

One of the themes of the module is this idea of repetition, getting lost in the sameness of the world. In that way you could argue this approach to describing the wilderness reinforces that aspect of the adventure. If you roll up these descriptions you’ll see traces of what has come before. In Marco’s own words, “Weaponizing deja vu and melding grays work to reinforce the feeling of becoming lost to the environment.”

Travelling through these hexes in this game serves a purpose: they are a tax. Players gain stress as they move from hex to hex, and will always face an encounter. Marco has done a great job of using the mechanics of Mothership to feed into how the adventure works. There is always some amount of tension coming from each move through the wilderness the players make.

Marco’s suggestion for how to use these randomly generated hexes in play is also poor advice in my opinion:

When describing what is in front of players, it is beneficial to give two distinct descriptions. Example:

Warden: You finally see light as you break out of the complete darkness. Ahead is a clearing. The grass stands upright unaffected by the wind. It creates a mathematical curve .To the left the jungle continues and you see thousands of white orbs dangle from the branch extremities. Suddenly, the fruits fall, exploding on impact, hurling pebble sized seeds across the jungle floor. Which direction do you want to go?

It doesn’t actually matter which way you go! These are two random descriptions, and it’s likely you’ll move into a new hex with two random descriptions. Marco does a great job of placing clues, in-game maps, and geographic features throughout this module that will help the players put some thought into where they will explore in the game. This will make wandering the wilderness more meaningful. The advice given above undercuts the work he’s done.

If running this module I would generate all the hex descriptions and their encounters up front. I think seeing the encounters fixed in place might help create more connections between hexes. Where the players choose to go will be informed by what they’ve learned of the world so far. There is no need to roll two descriptions per hex. Marco has also included a lot of digital material that will help ease running a game. Every illustration is included by itself, making it easy to share with players as they encounter a Venusian Tank or a giant man-eating plant. There are six player facing ‘fog of war’ maps, and they can also be given to the players as the discover them through play. (By reaching certain locations or finding actual maps in the game.) There are even some recording you can play for your players, to make your game a little bit more immersive.

On the whole Constant Downpour Remastered is a solid adventure, and my gripes are minor compared to everything the adventure brings to the table. Constant Downpour takes some big swings. I didn’t even comment on the weird page numbering scheme or how cool the keyed hexes are! As I said at the start, there is a lot to love.

  1. Ratti Incantatti is without a doubt the best thing about Oshawa. 

  2. Carcosa is criticized for being repetitive with some of its hex descriptions. There are lots of hexes with a Shub-Niggurath to deal with, or yet another village. I tried to reverse engineer the setting based on the frequency of the hexes, and the details within those hexes, because it felt like there was a clear structure to copy. When I asked McKinney about this he said he placed monsters and villages where he wanted them, but used the tables found in the book to generate the monsters just like another GM might. What I like about Carcosa is McKinney doesn’t make the reader do any rolling to come up with a boring hex description: he wrote it out for you! In between all the boring is the stuff I love. I am also a firm believer that the pedestrian makes room and helps situate your own creativity in the setting. 

  3. Zak wrote two good posts on random tables, 5 Kinds of Random Generators & What Makes Them Not Suck [2011] and Fast Tables & Slow Tables [2010]. Grimacing Emoji. 

Blogging is Forever

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on February 02, 2025

Tagged: blogs osr

The Bloggies have me thinking about blogging. As you well know, I am pro-blogging. I think everyone should write and share their thoughts. My personal blog has been chugging along for over 20 years! Social media is transient: blogs are forever. There is value in writing stuff down.

It is easy to feel like a topic has already been discussed, that it’s common knowledge. But common to who? My ideas about gaming are informed by the books and blogs I have read, the games I’ve played, and the friends I have made along the way. I talked to people on Google+ a long time ago and left with a sense of what I want from RPGs. There are lots of new blogs that are clearly great, but that I don’t find that interesting because they feel like they talk about topics I’m done with. But so what! Not everything needs to be for everyone. There is always someone new who will come along and not know what’s up. Maybe they find some obscure Goblin Punch post from a decade ago. More likely they read stuff being shared right now.

Clayton won the Bloggies with his post on puzzle monsters. He dubbed this idea the 1HP monster, riffing off an older forum post from stras. This is one of my favourite parts about an active blog scene. People taking ideas and running with them, learning from one and other. Clayton’s post also introduces stras’s decade old post to a new generation of gamers.

Reading the Elusive Shift left me with a strong sense that we are re-learning all the lessons of the 70s when it comes to RPGs. People have done this all before, and will do it all again. That’s part of the fun of this hobby. Maybe you’ll discover that playing to find out what happens is what it’s all about, and share that with your friends. I’m sure the Bakers would be happy for you.

This blog is full of all sorts of posts of varying quality, and of varying interest to other people. I have a blog post about converting all the to-hit and AC scores in OD&D from descending to ascending AC, not because I thought it was revelatory, but because I didn’t want to have to work it out again. Sharing is caring, but the post was for me. There are lots of reasons to put stuff online. Perhaps the best is writing for yourself.

The 2024 Bloggies are just about wrapped up. As usual there are a ton of great blogs that were nominated to fight for the top spots. Over on the RPG Cauldron Sly Flourish asked if someone could put together an OPML file of all the finalists. I know how to do that! So I did. You can import an RSS feeds for all the finalists into your favourite RSS reader. Enjoy.

Download the Bloggie 2024 OPML file

Review: Skorne

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 25, 2025

Tagged: skorne osr fkr

Skorne booklet on my sofa

There is an expanded edition of Skorne, which came out some time ago, but I only noticed recently. Skorne is a very simple OSR/FKR game, available as a PDF, which I printed out like a booklet. Skorne was created by Samuel James, who writes the blog Dreaming Dragonslayer. I have discussed Skorne on the blog, in passing, some time ago. The game deserves more than a passing glance.

Skorne looks to take inspiration from games like Into the Odd and Maze Rats. Skorne is a simple rule set tied to a simple campaign conceit. You are a band of renegades, there are evil tyrants ruling the world, led by the devil prince Skorne. The game begins with the player characters awakening in the ruins of a village destroyed by a warband of Skorne. Like Mork Borg there is a bit of a ticking clock, where the world marches towards ruin as time passes. Classic. If only Final Fantasy games still managed to keep things so tight.

The rules for the game fit on a handful of pages, but ostensibly boil down to opposed 2d6 rolls. Characters have 3 stats: Strength, Dexterity, Willpower. Creating a character will take moments. You roll for your attribute bonuses, and roll for a starting set of equipment, attributes (like a missing eye) or magic spells. Characters have 10 inventory slots. Some situations may cause a player’s character to be fatigued. Like Mausritter, this is tracked by consuming an inventory slot. When a character has ten points of fatigue they die.

Borrowing from Into the Odd, there is no dice rolling to hit in combat damage. Players start the game with 3 HP, each hit doing one point of damage. If players or enemies have a good position, for whatever reason, they may be able to do more hits of damage, or negate some incoming damage. When a character reaches zero hit points they must make a Strength save to avoid death. The combat rules reminded me of one of my favourites, [Pits and Peril][pp], which is also minimal, and expects a lot of adjudication to come from “the fiction”. In that game, as with this one, you will jockey for position and advantage to succeed in combat.1

The later half of the book is random tables and advice for running the game. Good random tables help sign post what a game is about, and Skorne has good random tables. The advice for running the game is clear, actionable, and to the point. There is a short bestiary, which will help illustrate how to make monsters a game where stats and numbers aren’t really that important. The game concludes with a short page about the history of the setting: loose and open ended to do with as you wish. When I first wrote about the game I commented on how it sort of jumps right to it, assuming the reader will know what’s up. A lot of the additions to the game help frame things more explicitly.

Skorne is a really well executed rules light game. It’s a great example to learn from for people looking to make something minimal. What rules and writing are here all funnel you towards a particular sort of game. It’s a quick read, and one you could get to the table quickly: just my sort of thing.

  1. In Pits and Peril it feels like more of a requirement or your combat will never end. 

Art by Nohr

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 18, 2025

Tagged: johannohr morkborg osr art

Screenshot from G+

G+ died in slow motion. There were redesigns people hated. Tweaks and changes throughout its life, as Google tried to make it work the way they wanted. The site was shuttered in April 2019. The social network was never the hit Google wanted, but it was a weirdly popular RPG space—certainly the epicentre of the best parts of the OSR for a period of time. People never stopped posting, right up until the end.

I remember seeing pictures of Mörk Borg in the dying days of G+ and knowing I wanted it despite not knowing what it even was. Despite it being written in Swedish.

Art by Nohr

There is lots of love about Mörk Borg, but I believe a large part of its success is due to the bananas art and graphic design of Johan Nohr. Clayton Notestine has written at length about what makes Mörk Borg’s graphic design so fantastic, so I don’t have to. I get annoyed when people are dismissive of Mörk Borg’s graphic design. You can flip to the back of the book and see the adventure Johan laid out: neat, tidy and functional. Clearly he could have made the whole book like that if he wanted to. The excitement on the page is a choice. I digress.

Art by Nohr Art by Nohr

Johan has produced a lot of art for the RPG scene since my first encounters with his work. He did the graphic design and art for Into the Odd’s fancy edition, showing the world he isn’t a one trick pony. He did the graphic design for CY_BORG, showing the world he can make something that feels cohesive with Mörk Borg, while managing to be its own thing. He’s painted countless covers, pictures of dogs, pictures on cardboard. The man keeps himself busy.

Art by Nohr

Art by Nohr is a chonky coffee table art book, collecting work from 2006 to 2023. The book was published via one of those kickstarters I backed without really thinking about any of the costs. I paid so much money to ship this book to my actual house. A heart breaking amount. If you know me you know I don’t ship fucking nothing to my house, shipping makes me crazy. I have books waiting for me across the globe, one day I’ll see them. But this book I was too hyped for.

Art by Nohr

The book is massive and beautiful. The sort of book you want to lay flat on your dining table and flip through slowly. As I write this post it’s sitting next to me, but I find I don’t actually have anything interesting to say. I love the intensity of Johan’s art. It’s interesting to see 20 years of work in one place. What else is worth talking about? The book is sitting on a shelf next to art books for Anders Zorn, Mary Cassatt and Helen McNicoll, and Denyse Thomasos. He keeps them good company.

I love Johan’s art. Maybe you to do? If so, it’s time to blow some money.

Art by Nohr

2024 in Minis

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 01, 2025

Tagged: warhammer 28mm minis

My mini painting stats for 2024

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.

Stormcast minis partially painted

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.

The RPG Epistles of Paul T: Negadungeons and the Texture of Death

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on December 29, 2024

Tagged: osr epistles

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.