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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.