My friend moved to New York City for work. A weird time to head South, I suspect most people want to travel in the opposite direction. I’d rather he was still here, but there is one perk from his being away: I can mail books to him. On his last trip back he brought with him a copy of His Majesty the Worm (HMtW), by Josh McCrowell. HMtW is an OSR game designed for dungeon crawling. The expectation for the game is you’ll create a megadungeon that your players will explore over many sessions. Unlike most dungeon crawlers, it borrows very little from D&D. Grab a tarot deck, because this game doesn’t use any dice. Wild!
There is probably no world where His Majesty the Worm is someone’s first game, but the book does all the work of introducing itself to a reader new to RPGs all the same. A little later in the book Josh presents a player’s manifesto, which serves as advice to the players for how to approach the game. I love RPG books that approach teaching their game without making assumptions about the audience and their past experience and competency. The books has the games principles up front, setting expectations for the reader. I have lots of experience playing OSR games, but HMtW is quite different, so I believe these sorts of first principles introductions can still be broadly useful.
Character creation feels far heavier your typical OSR game, there is a bit more to do, and Josh encourages you work through the process during a Session 0.1 As part of session 0 players will flesh out characters together, narrating snippets of their past to settle on scores for their character’s attributes, and fill out other parts of their character sheet. I kind of hate anything that feels like it’s adjacent to backstory, but at least this time you’re coming up with it together with your friends. I also find more involved character creation can put players at odds with the “your character can die at any time we will make a new quickly” ethos of OSR play. I think part of the social contract when it comes to killing player characters is that if it takes a long ass time to make a character it’s a little impolite to kill them. Josh does provide a new adventurer checklist for players to use to jump back into the game after a character dies, or if a new player joins. I haven’t actually tried making a character, so me imaging how fast or slow it might be is all you get.
Characters have Bonds tying them together, charged when acted upon, those charges spent for benefits in play. Bonds feed into the mechanics for camping. This is a part of Torchbearer that I thought was interesting, but I am not that big a fan of how Torchbearer actually works in play. It’s nice to see other games try and do something meaningful with this activity that feels like it should be a bigger part of play.
Moving past character creation we get to an explanation of the crawl phase of the game, where you go adventuring in dungeons. Josh does a great job of breaking down tropes for the unfamiliar. Another example of building something that’s broadly accessible. There are rules for social encounters, and far more involved rules for combat. There is lots going on with how combat works. It seems like bluffing would be a big part of the game since it’s card based, everyone has a random set of 4 to work with, some cards are played face down, etc. There is advice for playing online, but I suspect the game would be far more fun in person, with physical cards. (I suppose all RPGs are more fun in person.)
Shopping, the scourge of all RPGs, is handled in a nice way in HMTW. You pay for upkeep when you return from the underworld, deciding on an impoverished, common, or luxurious lifestyle. To buy new gear you select anything from gear lists that match each lifestyle, limited only by what you can carry. I love this idea, something easy to steal for other games.
HMtW is a very procedure heavy game. Play is structured into 4 phases: the City phase, the Crawl Phase, the Camp Phase, and the Challenge Phase. During the City phase you’ll make preparations for your dungeon crawling, deal with any events that may be taking place, and perform any downtime actions. The Crawl phase is your typical dungeon crawling session, moving through the dungeon in search of adventure. The Challenge phase is this games name for combat: you’ll fight monsters of the underworld. Finally the Camp phase is where you will rest and recuperate in the dungeon, bonding with your fellow adventurers.
The game’s structured play loop (city, crawl, camp, challenge) will likely feel familiar to those of you who have read Torchbearer. Of course, Torchbearer itself was modelling the play loop of old-school D&D, so there is some about of the snake eating its own tail here. Both camping and downtime in the city are given some mechanical heft uncommon in many OSR games. When I asked Josh if he was inspired by Torchbearer he said not really, he was far more inspired by OSR blogposts. My theory is that a lot of the OSR’s obsession with procedures around the time Brendan wrote his seminal post on the topic is all from people borrowing ideas from Torchbearer, but I have no real evidence to back any of this up.2 There is perhaps a layer of distorted inspiration?
We get GM’ing advice at the midway point of this chonky book. Like Apocalypse World, time is spent articulating what the GM is even supposed to do, what doing a good job will look like. It’s funny this feels like an obvious section to include in an RPG, but it is one that is often glossed over. Josh covers most everything a GM will need to know to run the game effectively. It’s a well written GM section. There is practical advice for each phase of play. That’s what I like to see in these sorts of GM guides.
The book ends with some fantastic appendices. I really like the city creation rules and sample districts that are Appendix D of His Majesty the Worm. (Appendix C was Dungeon Denizens. Josh could have swapped those two: a real missed opportunity.) Each Tarot card details a district ready to be used. Another things you can steal for other games. The next appendix is advice on how to create a megadungeon: again, eminently stealable. The book concludes with some dungeon seeds and a sample dungeon to put everything you have learned along the way together. Everyone should include an adventure in their game.
It’s interesting to read a game that is trying to hit the same notes as other OSR dungeon crawling games, but that is coming at it from a totally different place. You can’t carry forward assumptions from other games when it comes to the rules, there is no d20 roll high to fall back on. That said, a carousing table is included so no one will question the game’s OSR bonafides. HMtW isn’t the sort of game I typically play nowadays. I often reach for games with almost no rules, and then struggle to run them all the same. This is a game I do want to run or play, though. It’s so unusual and different. It’s also clearly the option if you want to run a Delicious in the Dungeon game.
Session 0’s are for cowards. People should dive right in and figure out their friend Rebecca is the most annoying player in the world during the crucible of play. ↩
I suppose I can ask Brendan next time I see him. ↩
Clayton has done an amazing job organizing the Bloggies this year. Everything is neatly organized on his blog, with little infographics to help you follow along with what’s happening and what you need to to participate. The first round of voting is happening right now. As before there are four main categories: advice, reviews, gameable, and theory. He’s added a new ‘meta’ category, to highlight posts that are a little bit meta. There are too many good blog posts, and Clayton has done a great job making some thematic and Sophie’s Choice match ups? How are you supposed to choose between The OSR Onion vs. What is an OSR? That was my hardest pick this round.
An interesting post from Clayton discusses what he calls Dominant Mechanics: “Dominant Mechanics are rules that cannot co-exist in a system without monopolizing play and overriding other rules.” My favourite example of this would be skill checks in later editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This idea relates to one of my big complaints about 4E, where your characters various powers end up being the sum total of play.
The man that brought you Fuck You Design brings you a rant about fancy-ass zines: “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.”
I spent a little bit of time over the last two days getting ready to play Mythic Bastionland. I made a map over the holidays, but didn’t finish filling it with stuff at the time. I was writing down NPC names, rolling on spark tables, and getting enough notes down so that there was some solidity to the world the players were going to explore. Mythic Bastionland encourages some amount of improvisation with its structure, but if you lean too deeply into that games can start to feel meaningless. (Chris has a small blurb about this risk in the book as well.) There was more I wanted to prep before this game, but my personal brand is not doing that extra work. Honestly it all worked out.
I asked some friends I hadn’t played games with in a while if anyone was free to play, people from back when G+ was a thing:
A few of us had played the game when it was being play tested, but no one had played recently, so it was all new to all of us.
The engine of the game is exploration. Mythic Bastionland is a game about exploring the wilderness, travelling from hex to hex in search of adventure. A day is divided into three phases: morning, afternoon, night. You roll for a wilderness complication at the end of each phase of the day. On a 1 you encounter an omen for a random myth in the realm. On a 2-3 you encounter the omen of the nearest myth. On a 4-6 you’ll stumble upon the landmark inside the hex, if one exists. As you move through the world you should expect the myths causing trouble in the land to bubble up. The game should create situations for the players to resolve.
In theory, half the time the players should be bumping into something weird like they are exploring the Southern Reach. This session the players rolled too well: they encountered an omen for a myth with their first wilderness exploration roll, and then never rolled a 1-3 for the rest of the session. Sometimes that’s how it goes. The result was a quieter session, but I used that as a chance to better introduce the world they were exploring.
It can be tempting to try and inject some drama into a game when the dice and your notes say otherwise, but I generally like to play things straight. You need quiet sessions or moments so that there is real contrast when the drama does arrive. I am not a fan of trying to manicure a perfect story up front. It’s almost always more satisfying when these things happen organically.
We played for 2 hours, ending our session in one of the holdings. I actually had good notes for the holdings, having rolled up many NPCs and other drama about the places. (This was easy thanks to all the spark tables and online generators.) I forgot to roll for the local mood when the party arrived at the town. A lesson for next time. That might have been the only rule I forgot today.
[Update] When I shared my experience with running the game online, I mentioned that I had the players rolling the wilderness event rolls. This is normally how I play. I like to have the players roll the hazard dice. In this game that’s likely not the right approach. Knowing that you have encountered an omen seems fine to me, I normally run games where I try and be clear and telegraph what’s happening. But knowing it’s a random omen versus the nearest one maybe tells the players a little too much about what’s going on. That knowledge may make the myths and omens feels a bit less mysterious.
The plan is to play for the next few weeks. An enjoyable start to a new campaign.
I have written about keying dungeons in the past, when discussing Dwimmermount, and when talking about Deep Carbon Observatory. This topic seems to be in the news again, after Ben shared an enjoyable video of his dislike of Goodman Games’ house style for their modules.1DCC RPG is quite text heavy, and uses simple two column layouts reminiscent of old TSR modules. They are essentially the best version of an old TSR module. I love many of the DCC RPG adventures, but I don’t love all the walls of text. On the flip side, I am not a big fan of the Old School Essentials house style Ben advocates for either. I find the excessive bolded text and bullet points harder to parse than straight forwards sentences. I also think it’s much more enjoyable to read plain prose.
All the room keying hacks you see really aren’t necessary if your room keys are short and quick to read.
You should start room descriptions with the things players will notice right away. Don’t bury the lede.
You should cut anything extraneous. You could take the time to list out all the torture devices found in the torture room, but I would only bother if there is some value in letting the GM and players know about the particulars. A GM can likely ad-lib there is a rack and iron maiden if those things are simply there to provide colour.2
To me, there is more value in trying to write something short and evocative, than try and turn it into a deconstructed sandwich.
Long time readers may recall I had started an Arthurian Dark Souls sort of setting I never finished called Misericorde. A year or so later Chris started sharing his work for Mythic Bastionland, and it was more or less exactly what I wanted to do, but better in basically every way. (I mean, for starters, he finished it all.) So anyway, I want to play Mythic Bastionland. The first step is making a realm.
I started by making a map in Hex Kit, a fun activity in and of itself. I decided to start a fresh map rather than continue off the one I had made a few years ago. In my head this campaign could be a prequel to the game I had thought of running, where the king is dead and knights wander the wilderness as transformed monstrosities. I can come back to that idea later, perhaps informed by how this Mythic Bastionland campaign unfolds.
With the map done, I got to populating the realm with some holdings and landmarks. I followed Chris’s advice and examples. The system works! I enjoy the act of building something out of random seeds, trying to figure out how everything could fit together. My first ruler was interested in gambling. So was my second. And so was my third. I thought of re-rolling, but the fact that three of the four leaders in the land are gamblers feels like the seed of a story. These sorts of connections bubble up as you work through the tables. I think our brains are just wired find a way to make everything make sense.
I need to actually play Mythic Bastionland, so will try and avoid being overly effusive, but even in this lonely fun of prepping the game it feels like Chris has made something really spectacular. I don’t consider myself particularly creative, but the book will make sure you can build something weird and interesting. Making a realm and figuring out what’s going on before the players show up was fun. Will it all work in play? I gotta assume so, since everyone else can’t shut up about how great the game is. Stay tuned!
Another excellent resource is the Mythic Bastionland Referee Companion. All the spark tables are available online, and it can roll on all the tables for you in one go, which can speed up the process of building a realm. I just used the book, but I can see how this could be useful. It’s cool seeing other people making digital tools for RPGs. ↩
The past year ended up being the biggest year of blogging on this site. At the start of the year I shared my thoughts on blogging in the post Blogging is Forever, a reminder that social media is transient and you should own and control the writing you care about. I was posting fairly consistently throughout the year, but kicked things into high gear in November. This is almost certainly motivated by seeing Elmcat’s blogging map. It’s incredible seeing the web of people that contribute to this scene. The map is a nice reminder of what makes blogging fun and cool. I visited my brother in the UK at the end of November, and blogged more or less every day through to the New Year.
I had wanted to get my Carcosa session recaps back online for some time, and decided to do that for the month of December, using it as an opportunity to talk about running the campaign at the same time. After posting them all I finally wrote a post I had intended to write back when the campaign concluded: Advice for Running a Hexcrawl, A Decade Too Late.
There was one post I wanted to write before the clock ticked over to 2026 that I didn’t manage to get in under the wire: a comparison of Carcosa with Mythic Bastionland. I feel like there is something to say about both those games, I just need to think a bit more about what exactly.
Hopefully 2026 continues the trend of more blogging: for myself and for all the other people I see starting blogs and returning to their old ones. 2025 feels like it was a big year for blogging.
Back in 2024 I decided to track all of my purchasing and painting of minis. This was an attempt to buy less and paint more. It was a nominal success. This year, not so much. Whenever my life becomes too busy I find I channel my hobby output into pure consumerism. I ended up buying box sets that will certainly be fun to paint, but that remain unpainted (and often unbuilt!) as we come to the end of the year: Kill Team’s new Tomb World set, the Horus Heresy 3rd Edition Starter Set, the Dark Oath Slaves to Darkness army box, and the Fangs of the Bloodqueen box. Those last two I really only bought because Meeple Mart was having an “everything needs to go” sale. I ended up with 161 new models between those boxes and a few other small purchases. That’s a lot of new models!
My painting happened in small bursts: the Stormcast at the start of the year so I could play Spearhead; my Trench Crusade Heretic Legion in the spring, when the minis arrived; some orks from Slade, which I thought I might use for Space Gits; the rest of the Stormiest in the summer to finish painting the Skaventide box; the Wildercorps Hunters so I could use them for a Warcry game. I managed to play a lot of games this year, but nothing that required me to do a lot of painting. I played lots of Spearhead and Warcry, but primarily using minis I had already painted.
I’m disappointed with how the year ended when it came to my painting. It’s a hobby I really enjoy, so I should make more time for it when I can. It’s often easier to play video games or watch TV, which are also enjoyable activities, but ones I probably put more time into than I should.
My goal to start 2026 is to start painting the Darkwater boxed set. The game looks like a lot of fun, and I managed to get a good chunk of them primed when the weather in December was a little bit warm. My friends and I have started playing Blood Bowl, so I’ll need to get my team primed and painted as well. Hopefully getting those things out of the way will serve as some motivation to keep going.
