Patrick Stuart's Blog

 I am slowly grinding my way through the re-writes for Veins of the Earth. As part of the re-write I have re-organised the ‘Pariahs of the Earth’ monsters section into a list of sixty creatures, expanding some concepts and re-doing others. Some of these are ‘Re-Skins’ or re-conceptions of common D&D monsters, some are descriptions of whole cultures.

The current list;AntiPhoenixArachnopolis RexArcheansAtomic BeesBlackfoot TapperCalcinated Cancer BearCambrimenCastilian Caddis LarvaeChaos GoblinsCholeridsCivilopedeCromagnogolemDead-Eyed DwarvesDeep JaneendErOEgg Dead (PseudoOolites)EigengrauFossil VampireFungal AmbassodileFunginid SlavesGegenscheinGilgamashIgneous WrathIgnimbrite MiteKnotsmenLamentersMantis ShrimpMeanderthalsMondmilchOlmOnce-MenOneirocetaceanOpal-Winged ChiropteraePanic Attack JackPhantom Hand of GargasPsychomycosis MegasporesPyroclastic GhoulsRadiolarianRayMenThe RaptureScissoFishSilichominidsExplorationSubstratalsSoft-HeadsSonic PigsSpectre of the BrockenSplinterladsSpotlight DogsStill-Tor-MenStormsheepTachyon TrollTetracharcarodronTitanSkull Hermit CrabToRaptoiseTrilobite-KnightTrogloraptorUltraviolet ButterflyZombie Coral

EncountersA major part of the re-write is a focus on usability and part of that will include encounter tables. And part of that will be a discussion and instruction on just how encounter tables can work, with a very basic workshop for anyone who doesn’t already know about them describing, for instance;
The way combined-dice rolls can produce probability curves and how you can use those to produce pseudo-natural encounter tables that might simulate the more interesting elements of an imagined environment - something that is carrying on without the PCs and which they happen to be going through.How you can make very ‘big’ tables of this kind for large volumes to give them a kind of identity, but also smaller ones for different more local environmentsStraight-roll single-die graphs of various sizes and how those produce a generally different tone of reality, something a little more ‘event focused’, and how and where in the game you can use those, and how often and where you can re-use them, based on what they are doing.
The aim here is to give people the tools to create their own ‘family’ or ‘toolbox’ of tables, ones they make themselves to suit their own style of game and a simple ‘starter list’ of encounter tables and similar, to go with the map-making and world-populating sections. I imagine the reader building and populating their map, making notes on it on another piece of paper, and creating a small, efficient, handful of tables to go with them.

COMMON MONSTERSThe question then becomes; is it reasonable for me to tell the reader about other common D&D monsters? And if so, how much of a description should I give?
I have taken out any creatures where I have basically done my own version and only included ones in the SRD
NOT IN THE SRD, DO NOT USEBeholder - a big loss, can I steal ‘Eye Tyrant’ from someone?
Mind Flayer - Have ‘Soft Heads’ so fine.Umber Hulk - I will learn to live without you.Kuo-toa - I am sorry guys you are dull plus I have Olm.Githyanki - Too PlanescapeGithzerai - Too PlanescapeSlaad - Very cool but can live without them, also not very ‘Underworld-specific’Displacer Beast - as aboveYuan-Ti - guys you are less interesting than you soundCarrion Crawler - Carrion Crawler I will miss you bro but must build a life without you
Is there an own-brand numbers-filed Eye Stalk Bite Globe guy I can use?

General HumanoidsWe need these guys! They are the meat and potatoes of encounters! (Though I still took out ‘Orcs’ and their general family as I felt in an environment with big dangerous intelligent humanoids they don’t really have a strong identity in the underworld.)
Grimlock - Blind humanoids. ‘Savage’. Have a really good illustration in the 3.5 Underdark book. Feel like these guys are a winner.Kobold - Petty lizard-dog things. Kind of boring and I’m not sure there’s any reason they should exist but they do. Famous trap-users allegedly. I suppose they can go in? Every paracosm needs something specifically lame as fuck I guess.Troglodyte - Colour changing, dumb as bricks super-stinky Lizard-people? I have never seen these in a game. At least slightly more interesting than normal Lizard people. Alive or dead they smell REALLY BAD. Very dumb. I think I like these guys?

Boring FaunaFire Beetle, Giant Centipede, Giant Bat - I mean fine.

Ambush MonstersEttercap - dull, hangs out with SpidersGiant Spider & Giant Wolf Spider - The Wolf Spider will get off the web at least so there is that.Gibbering Mouther - honestly pretty cool, I may have mis-categorised this one but no-idea where else to put them except in ‘Weird Guys’.Otyugh - vital recycling, probably someone will complain if you kill this. Static I guess. More of a location.Phase Spider - annoying but interesting to fight.

BurrowersLiterally built for it.
Ankheg - meant to burrow through soil so not fully appropriate but good to keep around for old times sake maybe? Will he be lonely without the Umber Hulk?Bulette - presumably having a great time underground.Purple Worm - technically a burrower but honestly deserves its own thing. A good Big Dangerous Monster.Xorn - kind of basically like meeting a guy really? Just a guy who eats gems.

Dead and DryThere are too many of these and many are dungeon-specific. I did imagine a lot of undead underground but also imagined them semi-civilised, part of society and subject to law in a way they are not usually and able to converse.
Bodak - deadly gaze, ok?Crypt Thing - the ‘teleports everyone’ guy, but basically a skeleton, very Gygaxian, surely this guy would have an actual job in the Veins?Demilich - jewelled skull, no worse than meeting a millionaire underground.Huecuva — ‘The undead remains of a faithless priest, cloaked by illusion to appear a living, robed cleric’ I guess we can have this guy. Is he still doing the predatory false priest thing down here?Lich - Classic. Again, just like meeting a Mayor or something.Mummy - classic, more like meeting a person than a monster.Revenant - Revenge-based murdered corpse, possibly wet, but if in the Veins, maybe in some kind of existential mission, maybe more like meeting a weird guy.Skeleton - classic, in the Veins, should be like meeting a guy.Winterwight - what even is this? Is this new? A cold Skeleton I guess.

Dead and WetFeel like there would be proportionately less of these underground as they are made of valuable meat.
Coffer Corpse — “A drowned or grave-cheated corpse that strangles the living; it collapses as if destroyed, then rises moments later to renew the attack.” Surely too annoying to have in the Veins. Feels wrong.Ghoul - I kind of have Pyroclastic Ghouls already, also, in the Veins, probably more like meeting a guy, if they are smart enough to last this long.Mohrg — “The animated corpse of a mass murderer, its exposed organs bound in rotted sinew; a lashing tongue paralyses prey for its raking claws.” Very cool and weird but probably no, not unless in special environments or circumstances.Penanggalan - As above, cool but probably no.Wight — Cool enough to probably go in the ‘dry’ list. Also like meeting a guy.Zombie - a poor fit this deep down, also I have ‘Cholerids’ already.Vampires! - Already have these. Definitely like meeting a guy.

Dead and Not ThereCaller in Darkness — “A roiling mass of death-agony born where many people died together in terror; it assaults the mind directly, drowning victims in others’ final moments.” Honestly very cool but I already have the Panic Attack Jack which is essentially this but the caving version plus corpses. So, maybe?Ghost - Classic. With living and dead communities being more integrated this will be just a dude who isn’t there.Mohrg — “The animated corpse of a mass murderer, its exposed organs bound in rotted sinew; a lashing tongue paralyses prey for its raking claws.” Knarly. Nearly wet. Probably a ‘No’ or ‘Nearly never’.Poltergeist — Not as bad as the Mohrg but limited use for you, sorry.Shadow - Honestly fine if they have some personality and reason for being there.Spectre - freezy touch, generic, absorb into ‘Ghost’, along with Poltergeist.Will-o’-Wisp - A classic but probably semi-tamed or at least negotiated with underground.Wraith - A super-ghost? Ghost boss? Lets just say this guy is the other Ghosts boss.

Dead and What the FuckAtropal — “A stillborn godling risen as undead — a bloated, cosmic-scale horror whose touch withers and whose gaze slays.” What the actual shit I have never even heard of this. Keep I guess? Sounds fun.Devourer - “A gaunt, towering undead with a smaller trapped soul writhing in its ribcage; it consumes the spirits of the slain to fuel dark spells.” Never heard of them. Too wet and specific for General but might be fun to keep around.Nightshades (Nightcrawler, Nightwalker, Nightwing) - I don’t know anything about these guys! I guess they can stay? I am too scared to throw them out.

Fucking Annoying Lurking Trap ThingsCave Fisher, Cloaker, Darkmantle, Grick, Mimic, Piercer, Roper - fine fine fine. I think I kind of hate these things. They are traps not encounters really for me, but some are classics and they have A place, even if I don’t like them. I don’t think most should be on an encounter table but putting them in a place in a dungeon-equivalent map or something is fine. Can anyone explain how the fuck the Cloaker and Darkmantle both exist and are they materially different in any meaningful way?

Slime and OozesI kind of slightly hate these guys too but less than the weird trap things. They have their place.
Black Pudding - corrodes metal, splits, fine.Gelatinous Cube - Classic. Keep. The best of the slimes.Gray Ooze - hidden, acidic, eats metal, sounds shit. Ok, keep.Ochre Jelly - bright yellow, acidic, divides, flows, ok?Shrieker - not a classic but a familiar type. Static, put with weird trap things.Violet Fungus - the shrieker but worse. Static, put with weird trap things.

Big Cool Main MonstersAboleth - I can’t believe this guy is in the SRD! Thank you Wizards of the Coast!Basilisk - not very underground-coded but sure I can find a use for you.Behir - I have to confess, I do not find you very interesting but I am reluctant to throw you out.Chuul - Chuul you have no real identity for me but I will give you a chance.Drider - I reskinned Drow but I WotC is willing to hand you out, you are too cool to let go.

So!What do you think of my scheme here? Is it reasonable?
Did I miss any actually-good and Veins-appropriate monsters (that are in the SRD)?
Should I go back through all my own books and make another list of my (and Scraps) own monsters? Or is that cringe?
Should I put in monsters from other independent creators books? (single-line descriptions with references to the books); probably still no, sounds shady & cringe. But if someone has done a really good one is it bad for me to say ‘check out the so-and-so from such and such a book?’ (Still probably a bad idea))
Did I miss any publicly available and good, Underdark monsters?

I was broadly demoralised by this damnn book, but to make it bearable to get through, I will make a list, from back to front, of everything I actually liked.

TOROG - The King Who Crawls

The Level 34 Solo Lurker Himself! (“Huge Immortal Humanoid, XP 195,000")
God of Torture, Imprisonment and the Underdark. A few concepts in here govery hard indeed and Torog is the best. Entered the Underdark to fight some primordial horror in the Dawntimes and was cursed even as he killed it. He cannot heal, cannot leave, and as a God, cannot die.
Trying to escape the Underdark, Torog crazily crawled his way through the whole of the planet. He was cursed to never reach the surface, but he could madly smash his way into other planes, so long as it was into the Underdark of those planes. His crazed crawl created a permanently bloodstained Godroad which curls and spirals madly through the Underdark, and even breaches the walls between realities.
Now his palace is the hewn corpse of the Titan he killed to get here and Torogs servants have to constantly chew and cut away at it to stop it re-growing. Bitter, wrathful and in constant pain, Torog tortures and imprisons people, turning them into wracks. Unlike other Gods, he does not share his power or trust his angels. If he wants to communicate he will either send some horrid low level servant with his words sliced into its back, or the big guy is coming himself, in person. He likes to take cities of people who piss him off, and pull them down into the Underdark. I imagine this happening like two mountain-sized hands rumble up from the earth on each side of the city, fingers like arcologies, curling over, then down, down down.
Torog is so depressed he may actually want to die, which would form a neat apex to a long campaign. The guy was just messing with you because he wants to commit suicide-by-adventurer.
If he does die, he horrible presence is the only thing keeping the Abberant Outer Realms from infiltrating and merging with the Underdark, which will end up with Mind Flayers, Beholders and Grell turning everyone into pâté, which is a neat piece of setting-sustaining divine engineering.
Torog is novel, functional, has a cool picture and really holds the book together. Its not surprising they made the whole thing about him.

The Incunabulum


Vecna-Worshipping sort-of humans defined by Mum-Ra Drip. Obsessed with discovering and recording secret knowledge of all kinds, they have “the grisly ritual of the Unveiling” which strips every piece of memory from a (dead?) subject. This involves the questioner eating the subjects brain, which gives them access to their entire experience. BUT, the interrogator has only 12 hours to write down parts before the memories fade. They keep these secrets on parchment, (which is probably made from the victims).
The Incunabulum are culturally defined by their wrappings. When they come of age they are given a set of wrappings derived from dead Incunabulum. These contain knowledge and memories, and once they go on, they don’t come off till death.
The lore says elements of these memories date back to the first Incunabulum. The nature of replication and dispersal means that, while there must be continuity, I’m sure there will be a lot of alteration, adaptation, splitting and drift in what feels like a ‘written genetic signature’, each Incunabulum having access to a kind of edited, pathed together palimpsest of memories, dating first to one or two predecessors, and from them, back and back and back, all the way to the first. The patterns created by the memories no doubt being stronger than the details of the memories themselves, each Incunabulum being a kind of evolved book of memories, as well as a person.
I’m already interpolating too much into a very sparse 4e text. These guys look largely human, they hang out in a Cavern-Venice City called Glimmer in the Shadowdark, worship Vecna exclusively, make a lot of use of (dry, never wet) Undead, and generally love secrets and being evil. Good villains with some unexplored Borgesian depths.

Blood OozeA bad Ooze monster with fragments of interesting elements. One - its made from Torogs blood. Two - if it manages to Ooze you it gets inside you and puppets you. Three - “A blood ooze has no allies.” A koan to place alongside “Giant Oysters are never surprised.”

Lathan, River of Souls

“The lathan forms where streams of souls join together in a crevasse known as the Vale of Sighs. Here the moaning torrent becomes a true flow as spirits funnel through the narrowest part of the canyon ... its surface and depths are made of a rushing press of intertwined and glowing spirits.”
“Devils frequently sail the Lathan to the Soul Slough to find souls that had been promised to them. They float atop the spirits in iron-keeled boats and fish spirits out with ghost catching nets.”
“Only at one place along the Latham does a permanent crossing exist: the Worm Bridge. .. Its master, Bragarra the Bridge Witch, controls it constantly to keep it from being dashed to pieces by the tormoil of the Lathan.
The bridge is crafted from the corpse of a purple worm whose long body forms a tunnel through the water to reach the other side. On either end stand a pair of nightmares chained to the dead beast, and dark stalkers lurk nearby, ready to obey their masters commands. Nearly frozen and unable to move more than its head, the purple worm must be pulled up and down the river to compensate for the water’s movement. The dark stalkers drive the nightmares to draw the worm taught for crossing, and sin its coils deep to avoid floating dangers.”

Bragarra the Bridge Witch is very Chris Avellone-coded.

Esaham, Graveyard of DemonsThis is actually a pretty bad section, but the very idea of a graveyard for Demons, a place of binding and repose for what are meant to be sempiternal, extra-causal entities, is provocative.

Icegloom Chart



Bad name, good concept. A fat shard of ice. “Barely visible channels and bubbles in the ice constantly reshape themselves to resemble a map,”

Fire PitOne very good fragment from an overall tiring 4e ‘Encounter’.
“This magic fire pit burns only meat and leaves wood untouched.” From an encounter in the Feydark. Excellent Druidic/Ent horror concept.

Deadtrees

“These four titans shed dappled shadows over thier realm while gods and primordials still warred.”

Four primeval and long-fallen Tolkienesque super-trees. Their roots though, still exist, and now form tunnel systems. Very fey concept for the Feywild, but interesting.

Sick Gnomes
The GNOMES are wilding the fuck out.

“King Finutar’s court magicians assure the people of Drochdan that the haze is a hostile sending from a rival kingdom - perhaps the formorians. In private,some gnomes whisper that it is a curse ...”
“In reality, this magical ailment is spread by contamination of the Drochdan’s food supply by fungal spores. This fact explains why entire gnome hunting bands are stricken by it at the same time - they’ve all eaten the same rations.”

Look, even mildly interesting GNOME CONTENT is rare.

Inbharann
A Formorian Kingdom that has learned how to mass-produce Sauron-Eyes and uses them as searchlights.
They also have a neat succession system; anyone can be adopted into the Royal Family based on competence. When the Monarch dies they all have to fight it out. The war is over when one is left standing, however, if everyone dies, a tribunal decides which one fought with the “greatest cleverness”, and orders his or her resurrection.
Resurrecting the leader from a dynastic bloodbath is fun, and having a commission to decide which was ‘cleverest’ feels very loony-tune-talmudic.

Primal Mud4e combat chess idea with mud which you can use to heal yourself. Stated in the text, this dries out when you call on its power. Unstated is that, if this is a pool of mud, you just healed yourself and then likely trapped yourself by drying the it out, which makes for a nice combat decision. Even better, in a combat situation with multiple liquid pools, drying them out here or there could make the place more or less navigable for allies or enemies depending on circumstance.

Mherkrull

“Just as Asmodeus rebelled against the god that commanded him to relinquish his power, so too do devils and angels alike occasionally challenge their lords. Those wise enough to recognise their error before being destroyed have no hope of mercy. Their only succour is to escape divine notice for a time, and those who succeed most often do so by coming to the cavernous godless realm known as Mherkrul.”

That’s nearly all we get.

Xarcorr - Realm of the AbolethsSome reasonably funky environments are sketched out;

“The area around Xarcorr tumbles and twits as if in pain ... stone shifts and mutates without warning ... Thoughts drift through the passages like smoke, choking the minds of the unwary with the nightmare imaginings of abhorrent creatures..”

These roiling rocks have islands of relative stability.
The Dripping Jungle; ”abuzz with glimmering creatures that make their own light. Ghostly insects glow in gemstone colours through transparent shells. leechlike rodents leave luminous slime trails behind their slithering bodies. Great behemoths stand on legs as tall as ship masts that shine with radiant blood, stretching their ruddy necks to reach ceiling vegetation”
The Stone Gyre; “the rock becomes fluid - the stone of the caverns ripples and moves while remaining in a cave shape ... Up is whatever direction air can be found.”
The Toothy Plains; “vast, flat expanses of ceiling and floor roughly 200 feet apart. .... massive crystal monoliths that resemble jagged fangs jutting from the ceiling and floor ... “glide along the surface from which they project..”
Then, once you enter Xarcorr itself; “a strange, still point, disorientating both in its contrast to the surrounding chaos and in the alien nature of the realm. ... Xarcorr overlays the place in the world that its area covers. it is both in the world and not, and what was in the world before its coming remains behind the unreachable barrier of Xarcorr’s existence. No mortal knows what lies in the world beneath where Xarcorr now rests.”
Within; Dreaming Vaults “in these long chambers the aboleths keep captives of many races alive in a shared dream state. ... Their captors observe the effects aboleth plans might have on the real world by looking at the reactions the captives have and how the sleepers imagine others would behave.”
The Warp Web; “rivers of slimy water from all over Xarcorr ... float out into the open air and split into a latticework of waterways that dangle down into the canyon.”
The Preserve, where the aboleths “modify the environment in extreme ways, hoping to scrape open a hole in the weave of existance and find a conduit to the Far Realm behind the flow”


Grell Colony PoliticsWe have a nice page here digging into the varying philosophies amongst a colony of Grells. I feel like these my have been written by a very angry, very cynical vegitarian;
The Byoll (”Opportunity for Use”) “Their philosophy permits captured prey to avoid being eaten by performing a dangerous mission of the grells devising.”
The Glatt “Equanimity of Harm”) “The Grell philosophy Glatt holds that harm to prey animals is a necessary part of life, but that the moral grell parcels out this unavoidable hurt so that no piece of potential food suffers more than other members of its litter, tribe or group.”
The Jrall (”Feasting in Knowledge”) “Jrall philosophy argues that it is acceptable to torment and kill sentient beings as long as they are ennobled by knowledge first. Thralls are kept in clean pens and taught the simplest rudiments of Jrall belief in anticipation of the day when they will be slowly devoured alive.”
The Kragg (”Consume the Willing”). “Like the Byoll - from whom they broke in a murderous conflict years ago - the Kragg send captured prey to perform hunting missions or other quests for them. The Kragg do this as part of a braoder exercise in bending future prey to their will. They use their psychic powers to make their victims want to be eaten. Philosopher Kragg asserts that this is the only ethical way to devour sentient species.”


Hraak Azul

A massive living multiple-fungus fortress/environment colony, slowly moving through the Underdark, going who knows where. Pretty similar to the Fungal Environment in ‘Forgotten Realms: Underdark’, but now mobile and with a nice image and some extra details.

Dark Lake ZigguratIts a big black Ziggurat on a dark lake. Neat element is that it is multi-planar, and perhaps multi-causal. The same ziggurat, built by different races and cultures, in different planes, in exactly the same place, and perhaps with multiple histories even within one plane.
Kind of basic Lovecraft tbh but a big black ziggurat standing alone above a dark lake, miles beneath the earth, is still a banger image. Its also mildly funny/das that the Lovecraft inspired Kua Toa have a colony nearby and keep sending Fishmen into the Ziggurat to perform what they think is ‘sacred work’ (they are being randomly hurled through other dimensions and driven totally mad.).

MaelbrathyrMaybe the only part of 4e Underdark that keeps some of the old ‘Infinity Engine Location’ energy from Forbidden Realms: Underdark. Maelbrathyr feels very much like a city laid out in isometric graphics, with a dark and edgy backstory and a series of personally dramatic bossfights with Chris Avellone-style tormented bad-guys.
Story is that an Underdark City put together a team of heroes to rescue someone from Torogs Torture clutches. This they did, but the King Who Crawls was annoyed enough by this that he reached up and dragged the entire city down into the earth, leaving it a tiered collapsed city of ruins and levels.
He also cursed the heroes who ‘stole’ his prisoner, even the ones who didn’t survive. Now they are immortal horrors, mad and evil. One a half fire half ice slug centaur in undying agony, one given mega-schizophrenias by being inhabited by the souls of the comrades he let down, who don’t like each other or him, and who change his body when they take over, and one guy trapped in an eternal hamster-wheel/orrery torture device who can only roll around forever. Hilarious. Good one Torog.

This Image


Is this “4th Edition” in the room with you now?

Reading this was like suffering a flashback to an old, dull, war. 4e truly is a depressing system, with a kind of brutal, nasty, cognitive weight. Going thorough the text I kept wanting to argue with someone who wasn’t there, and who hasn’t been there for fifteen years.
Building your entire reality around a series of boutique grid-pattern ‘balanced’ combat encounters (which the PCs can’t actually lose without fucking things up), drags the imaginative potential of the human soul into a pit of mediocrity and tortures it - glistering pools of blood torn from a god who can never heal and never die and which still stain the passage of the King Who Crawls, give a +5 to fucking a fucking evoking surge but disadvantage on heals or some shit, its just the most depressing stuff. Torog would approve.
Even the really good ideas, like the Incunabulum, which have potentially fascinating concepts behind them, are all designed to be communicated via big dumb stat blocks, which are all built around combat-as-sport grid combat, its like watching fine French cheese be squeezed through a sieve onto the dirtiest burger.
Foaree Underdark also provides splatters of gaming advice, not so much wrong within itself, as the horrid product of post-apocalyptic mutational pressures producing something that approximates a previously health organism, but only through limb-splintering mutilations of an already horribly warped concept;

“One way to impress upon the players the dangers of the Underdark is tot talk about the deadly monsters that live there. But talk is cheap. I find that most players assume the DM will pit them only against foes they can defeat. They imagine difficult fights, but they also imagine winning all of them.
That’s great. D&D is at its best when its collaborative and everyone at the table has fun. Still, I like to put fear in the players and let them know that their decisions have real meaning in the game. If every choice has the same victorious result, the game gets dull.
I find the best way to do this is to call the players’ bluff. I’ll talk about some dangerous foe in a particular location, and if the players go there, they meet the danger. In effect, I put up a sign that says, “Here there be dragons!” If the players go past the sign, they meet a dragon - and not some wyrmling either.
The key to making this approach work is letting the characters get away. Some players might want their characters to run, but one or two often stick around to see if you mean it. (”Maybe that Mind Flayer is a doppelganger. He wouldn’t really have us face a Mind Flayer.”) This inevitably draws the others back to hep out, but after a few potent attacks from the monster, everyone should be looking for the exit. When they do, let them go. if you need a reason for the monster not to pursue, perhaps some other threat attacks it (the big fish being eaten by the bigger fish). If you do something like this in the Underdark, the players will give each other worried looks the next time they need to delve into the deep, dark caverns.
Using this technique has the additional benefit of teaching players that it’s ok to run from a fight. I’ve seen many campaigns come to an abrupt end or have to be saved by some deus ex machina because the players didn’t see a way out of a fight that went south. letting them run away shows them that their decisions have consequences, but that you’re still collaborating to make a fun game.”

Not a good book but there were at least some good things in it.

 By Bruce R.Cordell, Gewndolyn F.M. Kestrel and Jeff Quick. Art direction by Robert Raper. Graphic Design by Robert Raper and Robert Campbell, Cartography by Robert Lazzaretti. First printing 2003.



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This book has some notable slop and a semi-regular patterning of some supremely boring ideas, which gradually frets like cloud to reveal increasingly good work in exploration, before dawning blackly into seventy pages (nearly half the book) of geographic information about the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and in particular, of the period right in the middle of R.A. Salvatore’s ‘War of the Spider Queen’ novel series.

honestly, these covers are almost selling me


Prestige Classes, ‘Regions, FeatsThese things are like dirty nasty crack to me, or cheap sweets I can’t help eating more of. With my heart and my soul they disgust me, yet like a low enslaved desire, some abandoned part of me yearns for them; what exactly would it be like to be a ‘Cavelord’ (a kind of Underdark ranger), and exactly how does that differ from a ‘Prime Underdark Guide’ (someone who helps others range under the dark). Perhaps these crystalline imagined alter-selves occupy something like the fragmentary dreams of other ordinary lives which sleet through our minds in quiet moments of the vaguest ennui; “What would my life be like if had Prestige Classed up to ‘Arachnomancer’? Sure there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to do, but think of the spiders. At least then I would know who I was = an Arachnomancer.” O to be the guy who has a ‘thing’, and for everyone to know it.
A standout for its pleasurable ridiculousness is the ‘Illithid Body Tamer’ - for those who, not only want to play a brain-eating psychic octopus from a hyper-villainous made-for-crime cephalopod race, but want to play the buff , hand to hand focused version of that race.




These strong squid come with a range of whirling tentacle attacks; (Tentacle of Fate, Reaching Tentacle, Whirlwind Tentacle and Tentacle of Destiny) spiked tentacle attachments and a promise not to use their innate, deadly, and very easy murderous psychic powers. A promise which they will break if they feel like it;

“An illithid body tame is not slavishly devoted to its code. If using plane shift or mind blast is clearly in its best interest, then it does so, preferring to lose access to the benefits of abstinence than lose its life.”

This surely takes the already hypertrophied art of Prestige Classing close to the limits of its own absurdity. But perhaps its that very insane hyper-specifity that helps to cast the strange spell such thing have over a living game. The others in this book are more boring and lack the ‘tang’ of 3.5 hyper-absurdity. (The vision of a 3.5 influenced game where only the most deranged Prestige Classes are allowed; Cancer Mage, Candle Caster, Halfling Outrider and Fochlucan Lyrist anyone?)
Though some still mourn the loss; “Multiclassing, at its best, is a biography expressed through mechanics.”
Nothing in the ‘Races’ section is as good as these images of them;


which are amongst the best art in the book.



You are not (at least here), actually allowed to be a ‘Derro’, which is disappointing for the book that introduced the Mind-Flayer Body-Tamer. Perhaps even amidst these often somewhat-villainous races, they were simply too Chaotic Evil.

‘Feats’ are as you would imagine them, apart from a few sparks of fun; ‘Elfhunter’ only available to Drow? Very sad. ‘Graft Illithid Flesh’ lets you play Squid Frankenstein, which has at least one very boutique use we will discover later on.

Magic and SpellsSpends an alarming amount of time describing the for-this-book ‘Node Magic’, a system of magic and advantage built around dicking around with ‘Earth Nodes’. This is the kind of deeply embedded rules system that, once you know someone is planning on interacting with it, you have to integrate it into your whole campaign, placing various NODES of varying level here and there; and what NODES you place where will have a big effect on play.
If anyone has ever used this, leave a comment or a link. Its hard for me to believe anyone could be as into something called ‘Node Magic’ as is required to actually simulate and use it for a campaign.
I did find a handful of spells I enjoyed, all of which do what they say on the tin; Amorphous Form, Contagious Fog, Drown, Rushing Waters, Viscid Glob and my favourite; Stone Sphere, which creates a five-foot diameter sphere of polished stone which moves under your control at a speed of 30ft. The Stone has Armour Class 5 and 500 hit points. One round per level and its a Level 5 spell. After casting, directing its movement requires a move action, so you can still presumably cast more bullshit so long as you stay in place, rolling your bid deadly marble about. A wonderful alternative to ‘Fireball’.

Equipment and Magic ItemsThings improve a little more with ‘Equipment and Magic Items’, almost all of these are very or slightly impractical outside of a handful of uses, but isn’t that the pleasure of a tool? And of having this particular tool? Perhaps this granular imagining is the true spirit of 3.5.
It also has a pleasing image.



Various odd or conditionally useful weapons, some bizzarro additions to armour. ‘Blackwater’ which cripples water breathing creatures in a certain volume of water, (there have been occasions where I wished I had some), the Caveharp, (less interesting than it sounds), the blessedly-specific ‘Darkvision Invisible Paint’, wonderful SHRIEK PASTE, a ‘Spelunkers Kit’ which should be standard issue for all characters anyway.
Then a range of poisons and chemicals, including ‘Virile Madness’, which is PCP, and another curious obsession of this book; templates. Here templates for magical weapons made of this thing and that, including ‘Morphing’ weapons, which I feel like would be much more insanely useful irl than in game, where the physical/kinetic problems such things are made to solve are rarely imagined with the depth, fluency and regularity to make their use worthwhile.
Armours of ‘halfweight’, ‘Drowcraft’, ‘Illithidwrought’ and ‘Xorn’. Cortical mucusy armour that blanks your mind to foes, psychic armour and Drow Death Armour that makes you invisible, gives you ‘disguise’ and ‘spider climb’, for if you want to fantasise about being the coolest most cracked ultra-high-fantasy protagonist EVAR - these are dreams and aspirations I think, more than tools, and its curious how much ultra-mega-high-fantasy begins to intersect with post-singularity science-fiction tropes. We will see this later in city design.
Rings, of which the most fun is ‘Antivenom’ (60,000gp), and just below it ‘Antivenom, Frugal’ (10,000gp), just for the image of a world that contrast creates. RODS always feel under-noetic, and Staffs (no room underground surely?). A Figurine of Wonderous Power that transforms into a giant spider you can ride around on, and I have always wanted to own one of these in D&D, the less romantic and perhaps more old-school ‘Figurines of Illusory Escort’ which cast an illusion of guards around you when you sleep. Some very boring Neutral-Themed items. Last; a magic tome so powerful its like carrying around a semi-divine limited-use A.I. (you must speak to it in a specific dead language or it eats your soul and makes you one of its pages), and the Illithid Grafts, finally, but they are mainly just sticking tentacles on things, apart from ‘Humanoid Skin’ which involves sealing up something (or someone, presumably horrific), inside;

“If the humanoid skin hides monstrous features below its surface (such as extra arms, tentacles or antennae), using those features requires thrusting them through the skins surface as a standard action. This act showers all nearby cretures with blood and deals 1d4 damage to the graft recipient.”

Monsters are not a high point, there are rules for crossing things with Illithid (add tentacles), crossing them with spiders (add legs), crossing them with Chameleons, filling them with ‘Faerzress’, rules to mineralise anything; none make anything more interesting, producing largely globs. Multiple creatures that ‘swim through earth’ for various reasons and in various ways. A minotaur with demon blood? The ‘Lith’ has a good silhouette;



The ‘Maur’ as a hunched underground giant has a pleasing mechanic in which, if it can find room, it laboriously and horrifically stands full upright, “an agonizing, joint-popping experience for the Maur, though it relishes the change” and takes on a little of the noble potency of its forebears. The ‘Ineffable Horror’ which I can only assume got its name as an Underdark joke, since it is the most ‘effable’ thing ever.


The only really very-good monster is still only half-good and that is the ‘Annihilator’, a kind of Abberant solo Rust Monster with extra tentacles which can disintegrate anything. “The annihilator seems to derive sustenance and pleasure from destroying things, especially living things.” It has no ecology, background, sanity or reason for being, and likely would not benefit from them, it just likes Annihilating things and that is all it wants to do. A twist in the tapestry of the world and a gleaming contextless ambulatory disaster. Not bad.

just once in my life I want to say ‘call forth.. the ANNIHILATOR’


Exploring the UnderdarkThings take an uptick here and its surprising, or unsurprising, how parallel to my own thought much of this is. We begin with a tour of underground features; Abysses, Caves, Dungeons, Gorges, Lakes, Rifts, Rivers, Seas, Shafts, Tunnels, Vaults and Volcanoes, which in this last section, does nothing to elucidate the Magma/Lava differentiation; what is lava encountered underground, but magma? What is Magma encountered in an open cave, but lava? Precisely when does water count as having left the tap?
From there into rocks and rock formations, including the classic trifecta of Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic, to which we add MAGIMORPHIC rock formations - much could be done with the consequences of alternative geology and tectonics in a fantasy world, one far older than ours, and thus with a different arrangement of stone, or with magical warfare etc happening on the regular, with semi-regular portals to the Plane of this and that, D&D type Gods popping down to fundamentally alter reality for a certain place or time, and of the more Abrahamic, Tolkien-level God fundamentally changing the substance, history and nature of reality if, for instance, you sail too far West. (Discovering America is a sin.)
Then the Environment, climate, ecologies, plants and fungi, animal life. In almost every version of the Underdark the environment is still seperate from the solar cycle, as with ours, but is much higher in energy than our own cave systems. The answer is magic. The conception of the Underdark being ‘magically compressed’ appears in many tomes. This book imagines trees which feed on magic the way others do on sunlight. I can’t help but imagine what the leaf and branch shapes would be? Would the leaves have subtle dimensionally warped Escher shapes? The branches bend in directions you can’t go?
My own conception for this hyper-compression is that of the unification, compression and composting of multiple causal paths, the deeper in you go.
So for instance, if you go a mile down, civilisation is about 5,000 years old and modern humanity has only expanded since the last glacial maximum roughly 10,000 years ago.
But if you go two or three miles down, then there may have been 10,000 years of civilisation, perhaps even mutually-contradicting civilisational paths, either combined from alternate worlds or perhaps those paths wiped from ontology by divine hands, cannot be wiped down here, so if the world is ‘re-set’, this deepest layer of it cannot be re-set, and retains all the old programming and tombs and remnants of old dreams and old ideas, things which could never have happened, but did, but which are only remembered here.
Then if you go down four to six miles, you walk amongst the compressed relics of 20,000 years of civilisation, or 5,000 years X four, each semi-sperate yet interacting, interlaced and overlapping. This combined weight of time, experience and record, more than the surface could bear, is what creates the overwhelming magical compression of the Underworld. There is more down here than could be here, and more and more the deeper you go. Till if you go deep enough, perhaps the depths of all possible worlds combine into one vast realm of night.
That, at least, is my conception. We get ‘Underdark Hazards’, a limited but ok climbing and spelunking section, a bit on getting lost and then a long section on Encounter tables. I will be advising people make their own for Veins of the Earth
Finally for this ‘exploration’ section, we get into the once-again parallel conceptions of a somewhat ‘mythic’ underworld and the differences between this and the real-life underworld that inspired it.
A pseudo-natural aspect of the Forgotten Realms Underdark is that it is not contiguous, that is; it comes in patches and bounds, like islands, and its hard, sometimes impossible, to get from zone to zone. There are big areas of interconnection, but these are seperate to each other. Interesting and curious.
A classic situation for the ‘semi-mythic underworld’ is that its deeper than it should be, and the magma, water, caves and tectonics are much more spread out and interwoven than they ever should be. You can imagine our world like a densely layered cake, or lasagne, with interesting, but limited, layers of interaction. You have limestone caves, which were usually below, or on, the water table, but are now above it, then you have the water table, and its hard to explore beneath that underground, and then you have massively increasing pressure and heat, and then molten rock. Head to tail there is not that much actual depth to work with.
In the Forgotten Realms, and in VotE, there is way more depth and things are more spread out and intermingled, even at the cost of perhaps making less sense. Can you have a huge cavern beneath an ocean, with another (navigable) ocean in it? In our world, no, but in Fantasy, yes. Can you have navigable caves above, around, even below a magma flow? Not really, but in Fantasy, yes.

Geography - Faerun’s UnderdarkA really nice piece of cartography and a slightly-frustratingly organised alphabetical section finish off the book, and much of it is this section. We are moving slightly more into a ‘Hasbro’s Invisible Cities’ vibe here; a list you can read like fiction, purely for the enjoyment of it. And its here that the propensity of the Forbidden Realms to build upon some very normative base concepts, but to keep building on them, to keep iterating and developing, and to bury the results of those developments deep in hidden corners of its world, helps it reach ramparts of innovative high fantasy you probably weren’t expecting going on. A lot of this is normative, some more interesting than you thought, and bits of it are very good.




Araaumycos - an entire kingdom-sized section of the Underdark is one fungal organism. It seems to be maybe possibly sentient, some of the time, and broadly neutral, or at least not expansionist. “On rare occasions enormous patches of Araumycos die, revealing ancient civilisations ripe for plunder beneath.” Even better, there is another, smaller, but aberrant and expansionist Fungal kingdom/entity/person.
Blingdenstone - A collapsed Deep Gnome city, but one of the ‘factions’ currently occupying it is ‘Ogremoch’s Bane’ a sentient cloud of magic dust. Its motivations are unclear but “In the back of the city, dozens of planar creatures of earth stand inert as the cloud swirls around them, whispering promises of victory and glory in Terran. Earth Elementals, mephits, Xorns, thoqquas, end even stranger creatures wait, still as statues.”
Cairnheim, Demense of the Dodkong - a lava tube village of giants ruled by a crafty 1,500 year old Stone Giant Liche with a magical crown, ruthless, but being very old, he still clings to an ancient Giant custom of hospitality, (limited, three days of safety). Of course you need historical knowledge to even guess this custom still exists and he’s not going to tell you.
Chaulssin; a ruined city, half within the plane of shadow, on a precipice above an abyss, now occupied by a House of Assassins. An Illithid city ruled by a council of Vampire Illithids who took over when their Elder Brain died - but they are all going slightly crazy from absorbing the thoughts and memories of so many other Illithids. Also home to the twisted Illithid philosopher Nurr’Korzahg who, after a moment of clarity, has started developing the notion that consistently trying to subvert and dominate all other forms of life might actually be not a great long-term strategy (several cultures and locations in this Map are made up of Illithid-hating ex-slaves, and they have at least two ‘Slave Races’ (Gythanki and Duergar) who ended up escaping and turning into absolute 100% Illithid HATERS, could our own policy of literally making enemies be at fault here?)
Deep Imaskar is a really neat addition to the legendarium; an ancient city of Wizards which hid beneath the earth after a major slave revolt. Now a self-sustaining pocket-kingdom with buildings growing from its gravatically-warped walls.



Imaskar is so secret that the glowing ‘sky’ of its cavern is a gigantic seal made specifically to keep it hidden, a seal so complex that studying and repairing it is equivalent to stargazing, a seal that affects reality so much that, wherever anyone is outside Imaskar, if they imagine Imaskar itself, the seal subtly and invisibly tugs at their thoughts, suggesting to them that the city is long-gone, if it was ever real, nothing but a rumour or fantasy. Imaskar is so secret that if people are chosen to leave, to complete some mission or for other reasons, they have the very memory of Imaskar erased from their minds, and are dropped in some random place far from the city; a true Wolfian hero, (or an RPG hero), who literally does not know where they are from, has a general sense that they have a mission, and at some point, will face a deeply buried command to return... somewhere, somehow. An interesting literary experiment.
Drik Hargunen; a city overwritten on every surface with the testament of a Duergar god, with complex runes of warding and subtle interlaced command phrases for the cities self-defence system interwoven in the ever-flowing words. To live here you must know how to read, know what to read and know deeply what not to read, which is why the Duergar allow no sighted slaves into the city-proper, instead they bring in blind Grimlocks, their hands tied to the handles of carts, so they can’t touch anything they shouldn’t.
Dupapen; a village of Aboleth slaves who, in the mental absence of their masters, have set up a thriving commercial concern. Some time ago the Aboleths ate a bunch of Gityanki and absorbed their minds and memories of intra-planar life. These memories are so vivid and intense that the Aboleths have been sitting around, blissed out and vibing for a decade. They tried breeding new Aboleths to manage the slaves but since each new Aboleth is born with the perfect memories of its parent, they had the same problem.
A near-extraplanar city made up of portals and spherical spaces in solid stone. If you can’t naturally swim through stone, don’t bother turning up.
Llurth Drier; Drow but poor and covered in mud.
Looblishar; a Kua Toa settlement overtaken by devotees of the Goddess of Darkness. Utterly lightless, only those with perfect Darkvision need even try to enter, though small this is the Axial point for a range of portals which reach to oceanic and above ground exit points all over the world. Creepy cultists of the Dark Goddess use Looblishar to move things and people and to engage their no-doubt whacky schemes. The kind of place you drop a patriot missile on as soon as you find out where it is.
Ooltul; a Beholder city forced into a surprising level of cosmopolitan toleration by an infestation of planar parasites who control the head Beholders; “Considering that Ooltrul is a city of evil geniuses dominated by monstrously unhuman aberrations, it is reasonably welcoming of outsiders.”
Oryndoll; an Illithid city dominated by a cult who’s modus-operandi is not only to acquire knowledge, but to specifically acquire knowledge that can then be removed from all other records or minds world-wide, so that this thing once known, now only they may know.
Reeshov; a Grimlock fortress town of former Illithid slaves who surround their settlement with complex traps, free slaves but trust no-one (the Illithids consistently probe their defences with mind-altered thralls and they know this).
Rringlor Noroth; “a city in only the most liberal sense of the word”, a city of Cloakers built into a gigantic bridge, part sculpted from shadow, crossing an immeasurable abyss. “The cloakers of Rringlor Nortoth spend much of their time continuously moaning and flying in great swooping orbits around a bridge of shadowstone”

I love these guys, they manage to be effortlessly more alien than either Kua Toa (cringe and flanderised) or Mind Flayers

“The entrance is a series of cracks and flat passages no more than 4 inches wide within the Shadowspan. Cloakers peel away from the circling mass at random intervals and wedge their bodies into the cracks to crawl into the city.”
“Sometimes, cloakers just lie on the ceiling and stare at the floor for hours;” - same.
One human sage ‘inhabits’ this ‘city’; “Saibh is not insane, but he is immersed so deeply into the cloaker mindset that he cannot easily return and carry on coherent conversations in Common...”

Undrek’Thoz; a Drow mega-city, a bunch of very different Drow cities connected by hidden portals and unified by a general government, though outsiders won’t necessarily know about the portals. The gates between different sections of the mega-city are set to allow no metal to pass through, (to limit the craze for assassinations), this has lead to a sophisticated arms-race in pets and poisons. Economically, the city is unified by vellum scrip. In a high fantasy setting, things like this portal-linked mega-city would be way more common; such settings, if allowed to run, would inevitably develop into something a little like high-energy science fiction.

Final Analysis; Adventure Locations, Infinity Engine, Nostalgic EmotionsA last section on ‘Dungeons’ lets the book down again; single entry, mono-path micro-maps with complex ‘trick’ enemies and substantial treasure. Nothing really like ‘dungeons’ and the section is not large, but it does have an entry for ‘Citadel of the Fiendish Slayer’ which is a great title if nothing else.
Of the differences I have with ‘Underdark’ at least some can be put down to preference in design. I am not of the Kind whom suffers for the Prestige Class, or who enjoys the ‘build’, let alone picking an absurdly specific Prestige Class and playing specifically towards that for god knows how many sessions. A ‘biography expressed through mechanics’ has no interest for me, I am not amongst the elect, yet, I cannot despise them. We are cousins if not kin and I have enough of the hyper-specificity autism tingle to refuse a wholesale rejection. Neither will I live in, or near their, ghetto of stats.
Of the monster section; it is simply bad. Of Underdark exploration and transit; parallel, and respectable.
The best part of the book is where it enters into the beautiful twilight dream of the Forgotten Realms, a place so normative in fantasy that it gets interesting again, there are lots of odd ideas buried here and there in this ‘eventide of gems’ (which I can never believe to be ‘lightless’, the conception of a true devouring dark and of adventuring for weeks within a fragile bubble of light is something this Underdark book, and perhaps every book of this type, fails at), and I see this dream, strangely, through the medium of the Infinity Engine and isometric RPGs like Baldurs Gate and Planescape: Torment.



Perhaps this is because such games were my only actual active interaction with 3.5 and its culture. Perhaps the physical design language of this engine seeped through into the worldbuilding for the entire setting. Wouldn’t be the first time there was conceptual counterflow. Deep Imaskar in particular seems set up for an ‘amnesiac protagonist’ RPG. The careful and quite charming visual design, including pseudo-crumpled ‘parchment’ edges, a boutique, or at least, rare, internal title font, and a handful of other things, speak of the fading edge of correct and comfortable warm and basking 1990’s page design. Summer.
Perhaps it is the sad, strange, isolated summer vibe I get from all these things and which seems to unify them. Of dreams engaged in darkened rooms while concrete bakes outside. Of a slight interior sadness and loneliness mixed with the deep possession of a fantastic land.
‘Stone Sphere’ is great.
(There is a side bar of ‘graffiti left around a portal’ so cringe it nearly made me want to kill myself.)

 THE FINAL HOURS! THE COUNT-DOWN BEGINS!
The Kickstarter for Doom of the Dark, the nightland adventure from Patrick Stuart (me) and Amanda Lee, is nearly over. You have three days!


This may be your last chance to back DotD for the low low price of £8 (or £40 for the wholesale version).
I have been interviewed about the project at the 'Swan and Raven Studio' here;
https://tricks-tales.blogspot.com/2026/05/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

The Dogge is the key to all this. Those familiar with hermetic readings of texts - I only need to mention Leo Strauss, will already understand the significance of this particular dogge in this particular 'wheel'. Rotatio, calcinatio, driving transformation while unchanged and unrewarded. The Philosopher's Stone's dark inverse. Pure process, no product.. But I have already said too much. The Kynicos will understand...

AND Amanda and I have been interviewed in video form by Max Cantor of 'Weird and Wonderful Worlds';
https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2026/05/patrick-stuart-amanda-lee-franck.html





LAST MINUTE LIVESTREAM!
To celebrate the end of the Kickstarter for 'Doom of the Dark', the artist Amanda Franck https://amandalee.itch.io/ and the writer Patrick Stuart https://linktr.ee/pjamesstuart
We will be streaming LIVE for an hour or so (with 15 minutes added for assumed screwups).
Scheduled for;
- UK time - 31st May 10:45pm, ending  1:00am- Chicago time - 31st May 4:45pm, ending  6:00pm
These will be the last hours of the Kickstarter. We will be talking about the Adventure and asswering questions about Doom of the Dark, its art, and anything else (within reason) people want to talk about.
HERE IS THE LINK!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmAiei4uPx8

Praise be to Hekaton and the children of Old Night, the Doom of the Dark Kickstarter smashed its initial funding goal within a few minutes and made ten times that by the end of the day, smashing another goal, meaning we can crank up the print quality as high as possible for all backers.

Fifteen Days Remain!As well as increasing print quality I will likely also look into producing an interlinked PDF to make DotD more playable for those digitally bound.
The artist Amanda Lee Franck attempting to protect her living space
from the smears of that most primal of pigments; charcoal black, (attempt fails re; cat).

Posts and Interviews
However, other than that, I am not super well versed in publicity etc. For the period of the run of DotD, I, and Amanda when available, are open to interviews, articles, posts, links etc etc. If anyone wants us on their thing, or wants text, questions, answers, opinions, we (me mainly, Amanda has a lot to do), are available till the end of May, so drop a comment or email me at pjamesstuart at googlemail dot com.
May the Turne-Spytte Dogge forever tread…

Also look at this video if you haven’t already. It’s very good! (Animation by Amanda Lee Franck).

The Black Casket of Night has indeed been opened beneath our feet, soon, only days will remain!

I have been posting here and there about ‘Doom of the Dark’ for a while. Here is the full version;

After my encounter with Tunnels and Trolls, Amanda suggested that I publish the adventure I created for her and a few friends. This is that adventure, illustrated and layed out by Amanda Lee Franck.

Simple Zine

DOOM of the DARK is a 34 page zine containing a real-time adventure fit for an evenings entertainment. By the end of the night you will have either saved REALITY ITSELF, or doomed it to… the DARK.

The adventure is statted up for Tunnels and Trolls and designed for that playful vibe. Most of the working parts are built into the creatures and the location so anyone familiar with old school D&D should have little trouble running it in a BX-adjacent or Nu-OSR game.

Its not a super-difficult dungeon, though hopefully a fun one. Think somewhere between storybook and catastrophe.

U.S. and U.K. Print

False Machine is doing things a little differently with this one. We intend to print in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. One print will be sent to Spiral Galaxy in the United Kingdom and ship from there, the other will be sent to Flying Cloud in America and ship from there.

This means postage will hopefully be less of an insane nightmare for Americans and Canadians.

The Kickstarter will have options for the U.K. print and the U.S. print, so back for the print location most convenient for you! (& try not to screw it up!).

I am also putting in wholesale options for both prints, so if you run a shop and want ten copies you can back for one of those.

UnIdentical Twins

The two prints will not be exactly the same. The U.K. version will be an A5 zine and the U.S.A. version will be in ‘portrait’ (so a little longer and thinner). We (Amanda) designed the thing with this in mind so the difference in experience should be minimal.

If we make a lot on the Kickstarter we will crank up the print quality on both items, but the printers in the U.S. and U.K. don’t offer exactly the same paper weights etc. We will try to keep the quality of both zines as similar as possible.

50/50 profit split

Like almost all False Machine products, profits for Doom of the Dark will be split 50/50 between writer and artist, so if you are an Amandamaniac, or Franckophile, you will be supporting your artist by backing or buying.

A Real-Time Adventure

Vague concepts for single-night, Level-One, Real-Time adventures have been rolling around my head for a while. DOOM of the DARK is played in real-time; however much time the players take is how much the adventurers take, and there is a time-limit; you only have two to six hours to save the world!

There are also a bunch of diegetic elements included in the adventure to, bluntly, keep bumbling players doing what they are meant to be doing; SAVING THE WORLD IN UNDER SIX HOURS.

Hopefully this should be a fun time for two to six players running starting characters, and a relatively easy dungeon to run.

Quick Kickstarter

The Kickstarter opens on the 15th of May and runs for just over two weeks, ending on the 31st of May (U.K. time! So Mid-day for Americans).

If you want DOOM of the DARK at its initially low price of £8, or if you know someone who might, then you only have two weeks to back this thing or let them know!

The more backers we get the higher we will crank the print quality!

We hope for a print in mid-June and to start delivering towards the end of June.

CLICK HERE FOR THE KICKSTARTER 

 Previously I asked my audience for examples of large-scale cave generation and, essentially, no-one had what I was looking for; I meant Nation Sized, underground wilderness.
In fact only Douglas Niles in ‘The Dungeoneers Survival Guide’ and maybe Zedeck Siew in Reach of the Roach God came anywhere near to producing systems at this very grand scale, and only Niles addressed the problem of three-dimensionality, and he only partially, and via a complex but elegant method of isometric mapping.
Nevertheless, I feel like I did learn quite a lot from dragging myself through all these varied systems and the process did affect my plans and ideas for VotE;ReDux so I will go through my general sense of each method here, in alphabetical order, at least until I come up with a better method.

Carapace - by Goblins Henchmanhttps://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/261079/carapace-basic-version




An odd, complex little pamphlet I got, maybe directly from Goblins Henchman? Who knows how long ago? I found it in my box of Zines! This is an adventure built around some generation systems for having trouble in a giant ants nest (the nest is giant, and is the nest of giant ants, so I suppose for them it’s just a proportionate nest).
Three methods are proposed for the creation of the Nest; a Point Crawl, Labyrinth Move and an ‘Hex Flower’.
[I have photos but it feels wierd reproducing them here.]
Its interesting to me that two of these; the point crawl and the ‘Labyrinth Move’ both live neatly within broader methods of conceptualising and using underground spaces that we will run into later several times.
The Point-Crawl in this case is not a die-drop system and is based on a layered diagram, printed in the pamphlet, with semi-random ‘rooms’ and interactions.
The ‘Labyrinth Move’ uses a table and a progressive encounter roll, in concept, not that dissimilar to ‘Flux Space’, though I think this is more a case of convergent evolution than direct descent. (The text says this is an adaptation of Jason Cordova’s ‘Labyrinth Move’ for Dungeon World - something I know nothing about. I wonder what the background of intellectual connections is here? It also seems similar to Emmy Allens Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library methods, though its been a while since I read those.)
The ‘Hex Flower’ seems to use a similar interior logic to the ‘Labyrinth Move’ but has it built into a little printed Hex-Map with the decision logic based on spatial arrangement. So far as I know, only Goblins Henchman has ever used this. This one also has a Hunter/Prey mechanic built into it, which should liven things up. Perhaps this is something to think about when considering other underground mapping techniques at any scale.

Corpathiumhttps://lastgaspgrimoire.com/in-corpathium/
(Ten years have passed and it’s all still there. The page even has a G+ link (;_;) )
So far as I know, the grand city-building project of Corpathium, which seems notable and unique, only exist via (very pretty and well-designed) web-page. What, not even a PDF? Surely this should have been a book at some point?
Anyway, the only part I am interested in is the city-generation system which could be easily subverted into a cave generation system
Its DICE DROP, which, honestly, is not that bad an idea for intermediate spaces.
Is non-representational, more diagrammatical, so that’s good.
Uses a 7-dice set, so I assume d4, d6, d8, 2d10, d12, d20
Uses the points (i.e. the corners) of the dice! Have not seen that before. If dice point to another they are accessible to each other.
So then we compare the numbers against a list of potential city-quarters with their own sub-rules about what is going on.
Then you have some interesting rules related to the concept of Corpathium as a place
Dice drop honestly seems like a really solid method for ‘intermediate’ zones between the ‘world map’ and outright cave crawling wilderness. It’s immediate, fast, coherent. Probably better and simpler than the method I used in VotE for generating intermediate cave systems. Reading Corpathium persuaded me to the use of a system of this kind and played a meaningful part in causing me to re-order my whole hierarchy of systems.

Deep Rock Galactichttps://steamcommunity.com/games/DeepRockGalactic/announcements/detail/4593196713081471259
Someone recommended I take a look at this web-page where the designers of this Space Dwarf mining game, (which I have never played), talk about their process
Even though this uses systems and crunch impossible for a human, some of the logic of cave-creation, at least the sequencing, is broadly similar; a range of templates with some ‘randomizer’ elements, combined in new, strange ways.
As the designer here sees it, there are a few key considerations in making a good cave: traversal, natural wayfinding, and dramatic experience.




One way this did affect me was that it made me re-conceptualise the ordering, arrangement and importance of the different methods I intended to use, in particular the primary methods. It was partly here that I started to crystalise the idea of there being three ‘layers’ of resolution, with lots of optional little sub-systems which could be added on according to taste and usage, but essentially a sandwich with three layers; Wilderness Scale, built on an interlacing paths pointcrawl, a medium scale, built on a die-drop method, and the idea of the ‘Adventure Cave; a cave made specifically to have adventures in, with maybe a ‘close cluster’ of nearby caves to add options.
I will look into this, in particular; combining the encounter-design ideas from Silent Titans with the 100 caves from VotE (though all this will be much later, need to work on ‘large scale’ now).

The Dungeoneers Survival Guide by Douglas NilesThe most beautiful and interesting book of all I considered, mine has been rabbit-damaged for a long time (something I will never forgive)



Douglas Niles is one of the only creators to directly address exactly what I was looking for; not a big dungeon, or a large cave system but an underground world - something at least the size of a small nation.
He even provides one in this book! Sketching out, through a series of lovely, layered, isometric maps, the ‘Lands of Deepearth’, made up of complex riverine systems and caverns, filled with all the wonderful creatures of AD&D.
However, almost to my relief, as I have read way too many of these already, he never actually deals with how to generate such a territory. He spent a huge amount of energy communicating his wonderful and only somewhat complex maybe even ritualistic isometric mapping system, that I think once you get that system, you can just vibe on it? Honestly a very reasonable concept in that, through achieving a sufficiently complex and expressive physical skill, by the time you have it, you will either intuitively know what to do with it, or experimenting with it is so simple and joyous an experience that the matter simply no longer presents a meaningful problem and you can’ in the words of the winged goddess of victory ‘just do it’.
But, for reasons given in my comments to the last post about this, I am not going to adopt this beautiful and coherent isometric late-analogue culture mapping system. Still an inspiring book though.

Flux Spacehttps://www.paperspencils.com/flux-space/

“This simple conversational back-and-forth is a good engine for producing fun, but it falters when the characters are exploring spaces which are Large, Samey, and Confusing. ... Other examples of large, samey, and confusing environments would be a winding network of caves,”

This is something I had considered when thinking about cave systems but reading Flux Space convinced me that I had not been thinking about it deeply enough. There really is a fundamental tension between the concepts of natural or pseudo-natural caves, which are, as stated above, often ‘Large, Samey and Confusing’, and the forms, shapes, paths and locations necessary for adventure, which are (while seeming not to be so), actually the compete opposite of the above; Small, Distinct and Clearly Organised.

“Traversing through Flux Space can be regarded as a type of Point Crawl, with the distinction that moving between each point is especially arduous. Once a Flux is solved it can be peregrinated through more swiftly, but solving it will be taxing.”

What ‘Flux Space’ is, is a relatively solid and only slightly over-complicated and over-specific method of abstracting the exploration of spaces that are ‘large, samey and confusing’ without specific, local mapping in real life. Instead the simulation is of the company slowly crawling their way about, spending time and resources, gradually encountering important elements of the ‘Flux’.
The basic time signature is ‘Turns’, there are 6 turns per day, so a 4 hour turn. Every Turn of Charting depletes resources, hits some kind of encounter/event, (Flux Space uses the classic overloaded Encounter Die) and crucially, grabs you a Point of Interest. There are a limited number of points of interest per ‘Flux’
There are ‘Shallow’ and ‘Deep’ rooms. At first you randomly encounter ‘Shallow’ rooms, and as you do, cross them out, Then, if you roll a shallow room encounter after its crossed you, you get a ‘deep’ room, and the deep rooms go only in sequence, one after another, and after the last deep room you are done and ‘know’ the maze’. You can move in and out of it however you like.
Some points of interest;

· It assumes you are burning resources, which is standard already for VotE.
· You would need the time and stability to note or record things, though, VotE wise you could use knots or muttered chants
· The Event/Overloaded Encounter Die has some cute elements and some meta-currencies.

Altogether a very useful and excellent tool which I wish I had invented
NOT a good tool for VERY large wilderness/nation-sized spaces, but very good for cave systems and mazes built around central concepts, inhabitants, purposes etc, between small dungeons and wilderness, an excellent intermediate tool. NOT a rapid, easy immediate generator, you will need to think & plan ahead of time.
Though ‘Flux Space’ would not be one of my ‘Big Three’ core generation techniques, (Large Scale ‘Lands of Deepearth’, medium scale Dice Drop and small-scale ‘Adventure Cave’), I am committed to using it or something like it as an ancillary cave complex generation method. It fits too perfectly into something like a Deep Janeens maze or an Alkalions Salt Maze. Though these would be things you need to think ahead to plan.
There is some excellent advice on filling out this simple and useful concept at the web address, describing more would be excessive. (Someone please write an extensive blog post about how Flux Space related to Gardens of Ynn and that to Dungeons Worlds Labyrinth Roll or whatever it was.)

How to Host a DungeonThis is an entire sub-game and I am sorry I did not get round to reading or reviewing it. Just too big too complex. I will try to read it at some point.

In the Shadow of Mount RottenA 2012 PDF from Joel Sparks.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/100100/in-the-shadow-of-mount-rotten



This has a small, competent, naturalistic cave/lair generator.
It is fine and there seems to be nothing wrong with it but it has little utility for me as, first, we are talking about large scale generation, second, these are very much lairs, or naturalistic dungeon-like environments whose relation is primarily to an ‘outer world’, and last, their entirely reasonable naturalism, means they are largely wet, or drowned and either too small, too long and thin or too blocked off to be interesting.
A fine system. Not for me.

Inkvein by Murkdicehttps://murkdice.substack.com/archive (There seems to be no single central site for this.)
This is an actual Megadungeon for Mork Borg by Murkdice.
Basic notation system looks broadly similar to VotE (addressing identical problems).
No 3d notation in the caves that I can see.
Has a nice Caving diagram.
Is already a megadungeon so has no generation systems at any scale. (These may show up in the final product, I only got a look at the Quickstart rules). Also this is so similar in broad concept to VotE that I am leery of dealing directly with it.


Lowlife by Sam Sorensonhttps://lfosr.com/product/lowlife/


This little pamphlet has a LOT of stuff in it, very little directly related to the precise needs of my enquiry.
We got the basics of this are a die-drop method; where Corpathium used different kinds of dice and the angles of the ‘points’ on the dice to trace a network which produced, in abstract, the accessible paths of a cities layout, Low Life is explicitly aiming to create a tunnel network, uses D6’s and then uses the combinations of numbers to decide partially the connections between things but also the nature of the connections, it also engages the idea of just repeating the dice-drop method to produce a system of greater complexity and interconnection.
Low-Life also has a method for introducing three-dimensionality (!) though it conceptualises this as ‘dungeon layers’ rather than using the diagrammatic nature of the tunnel system to create ‘uppy downy’ not related to the concept of ‘dungeon layers’.
I will almost certainly be returning to ‘Low Life’ later on throughout the project as it covers a lot of very similar ground. A very solid product!


Reach of the Roach God by Zedeck and Mun Kao(rest in power kings)


Most of Reach of the Roach god is about the Roach God and his reach, but at the end we get a little cavern-generation system based on TOYS. This is very millennial as it assumes that people buying this arty D&D book will have toys to throw around and yes I have them, shut up.
This is meant to be simulating the hollowed out bodies of dead gods so the humanoid shapes coming through the process are deliberate. It breaks down the toys into three sizes, two big, four or more medium and some small, and a bunch of ribbon to connect them.
How do you turn this into a map? In the style of The Dungeoneers Survival Guide; just be a good artist, or maybe actually trace around them? That would work if you had a big enough paper.
This method is different to most of the methods so far which tend to work on a principal of “room & route” – this matters as one thing you will notice about natural caves is they don’t have neat divisions between ‘rooms’ and ‘routes’, though, to some extent, this is how humans have to think about them; here is the bit you move through, here is the more round bit where you can rest.
The RotRG method produces large irregular, but linked caverns, which is something you might need, it uses the typology of the toys used to decide the location of world-relevant locations, the god type also represents special rules affecting that space, there are rules for using the ribbon as a river and instantiating that in the cavern system.
A much less technical system than most others, this still does something notably different, and it uses the layered information of its figure types in a range of interesting ways - I am sure a use can be found for this!


My Grand ResultMy final analysis is, as stated above, to work on three ‘layers’ of map and location creation; the Large Scale Underground World, the Die-Drop cave system, and the ‘Adventure Cave’; the kind of place where its good/interesting to have an encounter.
The brutal truth of the modern reader is that, as well as being borderline illiterate (new), they sadly have very little interest in mapping or simulating complex three-dimensional spaces, especially using arguably counter-intuitive methods of paper-folding and cave diagram.
You have collectively, as a culture, let me down in this. You should have been more interested in three-dimensional space. Feel bad about this.
The ‘new’ version of ‘Underground World Generation’ will probably end up being broadly similar to the original VotE version, but without the paper-folding, and with relatively little three-dimensionality, (it’s hard and people do not understand it). It will be integrated much more with generators for Cities, Settlements, Rivers and Environments, but in core concept, still a bunch of scrawls on a page, just now with more interesting dots and names to the ‘wilderness’ reaches of hidden-swiss-cheese stone between routes.
It will be one of three main systems and all should be initiative, quick and not especially clever; the Underground World, the Dice-Drop System and the Adventure Cave.
As well as, and included around those concepts, will be some other optional systems, or at least references to them, in particular, something like Flux Space/Gardens of Ynn, and other perhaps more complex, or longer seeming methods for when you need variety and/or something special or specific. This might just end up with me saying ‘use Flux Space if you want to do this kind of thing’.
This was a useful experience, though perhaps the most useful thing about it, more than any particular method, was the global, or deep, view of how people arrange their generation and mapping methods for actual games, and the intuitions this feeds about what is most necessary and immediate.

 In my big re-work of ‘Veins of the Earth’, I have begun looking at the systems used for generating the geography of the Veins, the large main routes, smaller areas, etc.
My plan isn’t to fundamentally change the methods from the first VotE, but to re-make them, to make the new versions more of a comprehensive generator, with a sequence of tools to systematically generate a large area, routes, cities, villages, trade routes etc.
Something else I would like to do in this version is gesture to or recommend alternate methods or other ways different people have tried to deal with this non-trivial problem of generating and mapping complex, large three-dimensional spaces underground.

From the first VotE. We won’t be using this layout as it belongs to Raggi but the general concept will likely be similar.


My aim here isn’t to copy but to, in the spirit of a bibliography, directly point people towards alternative possibilities. (I am also planning on doing this with monsters so people can put together their own encounter charts).
So far the only other book I’m intimately familiar with which deals with this specific problem, is Douglas Niles Dungeoneers Survival Guide, which has a neat but somewhat challenging method for isometric mapping.




What other books or works, or even posts, are people familiar with that deal with, specifically; generating and mapping large pseudo-natural underground spaces?
(I know there are a million methods of dungeon and mega-dungeon design, that’s not what I am talking about here.)

 
In a late and desperate attempt to shore up my‘relevance’ I have been scouring the internet for evidence that I exist, andhave stumbled into the tragic gap left by the lost ‘Great Crystal Debate’ DOESANYONE EVEN HAVE A COPY? If you would like to find out more, scan down thefollowing chronological list of text, video and audio discussions, down to2018…

 

2015 – Podecast

 

Back in 2015 Scrap and I played around with a ‘Podecast’(i.e. each was at the antipode to the other), and ended up recording a briefrun of unedited ‘conversations’ about a rather wild range of subjects whichranged from 2015 into 2016

 

 

Podecast 1 - the Experiment

https://archive.org/details/PatrickAndScrap1a
I honestly have no idea what is even  in this. Its eleven years old!

 

Podecast 2 - MONSTERS

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick2a

Contents include; Rhiannas new video.Ghosts and why they hold candles. Skeletons and skeletor - egyptian theories ofthe dead. He-Man. Gas-Spores. Nazi Aurochs. “I’ve been around some prettysmelly subcultures.” Eating living things. Godzilla. Forbidden Planet.Imperialism and microbiology. Scrap fades in and out around this point formysterious reasons. Possible collaborations. Natasha Allegri. Stephen Pyne. Thestate of modern poetry. The Art of Not Being Governed.(He wasn’t a poet.)

 

Podecast 3 - BEAUTY
https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick3a
Contents; http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/... hates nature. Snails. “The child of love and war is sex”. A thick silkycoffee with cardamon. Crepuscular Rays. kelvin helmholtz.http://www.pncc.govt.nz/media/32138/c...

 

Podecast - 4 BEES 

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick4a
Contents; 1.20 Scrap starts rambling aboutchromosomes. - (seriously, think about skipping this part). 4.26 Gives up onthat and starts again. Begins a very dark story about Bees. 8.00 King Arthurand Bees. 9.55 The Demiplane of British History. 13.25 Brief ramble here. 13.40Other Planes, verticality. 14.50 Hook Birds. 15.25 Dinosauroids -http://povorot.deviantart.com/gallery.... 15.35 The firstfew issues of Prophet. (I think these are in fact the same guy.) 16.35 “Bees,have to get this back to bees..” 17.20 Evolution of pollen, and therefore bees.17.45 Exploiting colony organisms. Pretending to be ants. 20.10 We are colonyorganisms. 21.20 The nihilism of not cleaning your room. 21.45 Emergency copingmechanisms. 23.09 Sudden change in conversation due to girlfriend interruption.The Death of Avril Lavigne. 24.24 Schizophrenia. The voices are probably real.Believing you are in the matrix. 26.13 “That’s kind-of like a hive..” 26.45 Instories no-one can ever be competent. 28.15 Destroying a city with super-speed.30.15 The delay between conception and creation. 31.00 Cut-Up

 

 

 

2016 - Doom of the Podecast
Podecast 5 -  relate-ablecontent -
https://archive.org/details/Podecast5

 

Contents; 1.30 - Dark gods. 5.00 - FotVH Images.8.30 - Please buy my fucking books. 9.30 - Making relate-able and insightfulpoints about a variety of role playing related conversation things. 10.30 -Alchemy. 15.15 - First impressions of the OSR. 19.30 - Motivations are monstersfrom inside you. 21.30 - Choices in char gen. 31.30 - Cognitive silence. 33.30- Traditional originality, fire, hirelings and dogs. 37.30 - Ten minutes ondark AI’s & nightmare futurism. 46.45 - Language, objects & babypsychology. 51.30 - Lard, the currency of agency. 55.00 - Stories, memory andexperience, the grand conflict. 58.30 - Fail states.

 

 

 

Podecast 6 TheWonderful Kererū  
https://archive.org/details/Podecast5RemasteredAudio
The Wonderful Kererū appears only once in this Podecastbut exemplifies the spirit of both participants, a fat, pompous, ridiculousanimal snatching a whole twig from the tree of thought, eating a single flowerand then throwing the rest away.

 

Contents; 0.07 - VotE. 2.38 - Weightlifters withno penises. 3.37 - Do you want to talk about pre-history? (We do not do this.)4.36 - I cut a huge amounts of blathering out here. 5.00 - Scraps game. 7.10 -Complexity and depth. 9.30 - Scrap has a moment of clarity about the nature ofComplexity. 11.10 - Where it actually starts to get interesting. 11.50 - Thecapacity of a post-apocalyptic world to create its own context. 13.10 - A newplace to put adventures. 13.45 - “What’s his face? The guy who does Udan-Adan?We’ll probably never know his real name.” 14.15 - Our regular obligatorymention of Zak. 15.50 - Who did invent ‘the dungeon as a living thing? 17.28 -A Ghost in my house. 18.30 - The ‘blank slate’ game world & identity. 20.43- Eve as the first D&D player, Adam as a Storygamer. 22.28 - RachelPollack’s ‘Unquenchable Fire’ I got the name wrong in the podcast. 24.26 - Ourother regular segment on colonialism. 26.16 - Mention of Potatoes causesinternet to drop out. 28.10 - It’s ‘Henry Moreton Stanely’ and I may well bewrong about Cortez. Have fun with Wikipedia. 31.45 - “You’re treating thosechildren like subhumans.” 33.41 - Scrap is confused by the moral exchangeinherent to Government. Sarah Horrocks would probably agree. 38.15 - “If onlyone culture has reliable deep-water navigation, that culture is effectivelyplaying D&D with the world.” 39.45 - Cowboys on Mars. 41.53 - We expand ourmentions of Zak to include his sister? Anyway, X-Men school-style CharacterGen. 47.39 - Communicating on a Meta-Level. Maybe our players are friends.49.15 - MY SPECIAL SETTING!! 51.00 - We cycle back to, or around, differentcontexts in which to place adventures.. 52.00 - The ancient civilization ofDan. 55.09 - The Halfmen of O by Maurice Gee. 56.55 - The Changeover byMargaret Mahy. 58.45 - Does the Conspiracy Theorist have a D&Dish world?No, not really. 60.01 - Pre-apocalyptic D&D. 60.03 - Stealing & fakingart throughout history. 60.05 - Dirtbag Greys. The Burke & Hare of space.60.07 - Changes in scale. Insect wars. 60.08 - The Author was ‘William Tenn’and the book is Of Men and Monsters. 70.45 - Giants would be very vulnerable,and likely peaceful. 72.55 - The wonderful Kererū or New Zeland Wood Pidgeon.(A bird that flies through the glass in your window is also playing D&D).76.00 - “Birds would be good D&D characters.” 81.00 - Evil Dolphins.

 

 

2017 - VotE!
The Secret DM — Veins of the Earth Interview with Patrick Stuart andScrap Princess

 

http://www.thesecretdm.com/2017/04/veins-of-earth-interview-patrick-stuart.html
A text interview about the original ‘Veins of the Earth’.

 

 

2018 - Crystals!
What Would the Smart Party Do? — Episode 80

 

I am not even sure what we talk about here but hopefullyDirks art for Silent Titans gets a mention!

 

Direct MP3: http://media.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/content.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/WhatWouldTheSmartPartyDo_80.mp3

 

Page: https://smartparty.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/patrick-stuart-interview/

 

 

The Great Crystal Debate!

The missing interview!!
Back in 2018 I was making my (negative) views on CRYSTALSwidely known, when who should step forth to challenge me but the fool andcreator of the BREAK! RPG, Reynaldo Mandarinian. To settle the matter for AllTime, we got into a SAVAGE hour long verbal dual which, since there seem to beno copies surviving online, I will assume I won.
If anyone out there has any records or copies of the GreatCrystal Debate, please let me know in the comments. The world deserves to hearmy (assumed) victory, and how crystals were defeated for All Time.

 

 

2019 - The Worm!
Ignite Liverpool — Talk on the WapentakeI am slightly embarrassed to see myself physicallyincarnated in maybe my only physical in-person talk.

 https://youtu.be/nr4KKZMpf6Q

 

Those of you familiar with ‘Silent Titans’ will knowabout the ‘Wapentake of Wirral’ from that book, based on a real historicalincident in which a corrupt lawyer got his hands on the medieval documentsgiving ownership of a dark age court and used them to form a criminal gang andextort the people of the Wirral.

 

 

The Worm Orouboros with Tom Fitzgerald
In this interview the beloved creator of ‘Middenmurk’, sits down to talk withme about the excellent and under-discovered ‘Worm Ouroboros’ by E.R. Eddison.(One day I will read the Zimiamvia trilogy).


https://archive.org/details/TheWormOuroborosWithTomFitzgerald

2020 - DCO ReMastered

Loco Ludus — "Interview with Patrick Stuart" I have no idea what we talked about, but its 55 minuteslong!

 

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/loco-ludus/episodes/Interview-with-Patrick-Stuart-ebgc3h

 

 

‘Udda Ting’ podcast

Henrik Möllers podcast is still going strong. Inthis one I think we talked mainly about Veins of the Earth.
https://soundcloud.com/henrik-moeller-180995804/100-veins-of-the-earth-patrick-stuart

 

The Magniloquent Moth

 

Part One show notes (full version at the link); Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered!), Patrick's talk on the Wapentake at Ignite Liverpool, Silent Titans, The world is a spell, Fear of a Black Dragon (DCO episode), Arnold's "Goblin Punch" blog and time traveling dinosaurs, Veins of the Earth, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, A Night at the Golden Duck, The audio starts to overlap in the second half of the episode, Time travel in RPGs, Continuum RPG.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-first-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707137

 

Part Two show notes CGP Grey's video about why your timeline is infuriating, Is the loose collective of RPG fans online a "community"?, A Distant Mirror, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Patrick's letter writing game (a literal play by post), FLAILSNAILS, Chris McDowall's conversion advice, TROIKA!, Half-Life Alyx, Tom Francis' games, Heat Signature, Tactical Breach Wizards, Deadliest Warrior Yes, there really was an IRA vs the Taliban episode.

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-second-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707139

 

 

2021 - Groan!
Appendix N Book Club
I actually remember this one and it was fun! I finally gotto talk about something other than my own books! This is all about Gormenghast.

 

https://player.fm/series/appendix-n-book-club/episode-103-mervyn-peakes-titus-groan-with-special-guest-patrick-stuart

 

Zock Bock Radio-
Apparently I am, (or was?) the Townes van Zandt of the OSR. I don’t know what that means but I will assume its good! Show notes in the link!
https://pesa-nexus.de/2021/08/29/episode-25-he-is-the-village-green-innovation-society/

 

Monsters and Manuals (Noisms), Video Interview

 

 

I am horrified by the sight of my own face so will rushpast this one.

 

Blog post: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/08/video-interview-with-patrick-stuart-of.html

 

Youtube; https://youtu.be/sPhfvkRDxvo

 

 

 2021 -Demon-Bone!

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Ahh blessed text.

 

http://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2021/08/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

 

 

Her Christmas Knight


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yClMXIjlrM&t=244s

 

 

Archons March On

Thanks to the commenter below who managed to dig this one up!

https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2021/08/interview-with-false-machine-for-his.html

Whose Measure God Could Not Take

This one covers the Demon-Bone Sarcophagus Kickstarter,Gawain and the OSR community.

 

https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2021/09/interview-patrick-stuart-of-false.html

 

2022 - The End!

 "

Art" with Her Christmas Knight


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOpKlStShCs

 

 

Then, Silence
Or at least, no interviews or appearances from 2022 to2025 where I popped up in the ‘Weird HopeEngines’ zine fair.

 

Looking back on it, some of these bursts of extroversionwere to help with Kickstarters, but it looks like the relative failure of‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’ and the hangover from Covid really fucked me up morethan I realised. I may have brought books out but I really didn’t leave thehouse for years. Damn.

 

Now, once again, I fitfully stumble into action, to proveto myself and the world that I exist.
(Seriously if anyone has a copy of the GreatCrystal Debate let me know.)

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)
7.5



Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.
More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.
Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”
“Oh, you should run it for us.”
Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)
(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)
Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation


T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.
What’s different?

TARO“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre



It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.
If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.
This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.
And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.
This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth


KindredKindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.
Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.
If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?
I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.
TalentsEvery PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.
LevelYour Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)




Loony Tunes Adventure GangIt’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.
Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.
In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]
(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat SequenceFarewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.
Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.
Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.
Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.
Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.
One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.
Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of ThisI ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.
Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.
How I conceptualised it was like this;
First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.
Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.
Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).
Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?The game does not seem to want to be played that way.
I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?
Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.
It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.
But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.
I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.
Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon
it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph


Play TimeI came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver“Take That You Fiend!”People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System IssuesI only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster ImprovisationT&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.
Big Dumb Dice PoolsEverything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth


Growing and ShrinkingProbably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.
The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?
The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.
Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.
Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.
There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).
I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.
Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.