Skip to main content

Review: The Dungeon Dozen

One of the first gaming blogs I stumbled across when renewing my familiarity with the hobby was Jason Scholtis' The Dungeon Dozen. If you're not following it, then please allow me to introduce you to your favorite new thing!


Scholtis writes "...flavor-rich yet detail-free idea stimulation for fantasy RPGs in the form of random tables for the underused 12-sided die." 

Occasionally, these dip into the actually-useful, but for the most part, Scholtis is creating a new literary form—poems of dehydrated weirdness strung together by the idea of random generation more than the practice. They are great fun to read, and an inspiration. I don't know how many times I've read a single entry on one of these tables and thought "There's a whole scenario/campaign/multi-generational mega-plot right there." 

You don't roll these tables. You read them and then you dream better dreams.

But don't take my word for it:
Disastrous/Abandoned Projects of the Gods
The Oracle Has Bad News
Yeah, But the Gaze of THIS Cockatrice...
Under the Evil Wizard's Hat
In the Philosopher's Spell Book

I've gotten so much enjoyment out of these lists that I've gone to the blog specifically looking for a "Donate" button, because this guy deserves my money.

And now he has some of it! Because he has released a collection! It is available via POD and pdf. 

I picked up a softcover. It's just the thing to leave on the bedside table as a way of reminding the Lovely Wife, "Yup. You're married to this. This is not gentle hispter-nerdism. This is primal. This goes deep. Your husband put a bookmark in at "Over-the-Counter Dungeon Unguents.""

Point being: I recommend it. If anything, Sholtis is setting his sights too low by marketing it just to rpg folks. I think this would appeal to anyone who likes any form of genre gonzo goofiness, which is a pretty wide circle. You know who'd like this book? Grant Morrison. He should have a pull-quote on the cover. So should Robt. Williams. And Penn Ward. And the revenant of André Breton should write the introduction.

My one note would be about the art. The art is great. It's fun and odd and kinda old school grody in a way that is really simpatico with the random tables. But. It's too simpatico. Given that these are lists of weird details that wake up crazy pictures in your mind, having those same details drawn out for you actually lessens the effect of the lists. They're redundant.


How could I possibly be complaining about this?

If, say, I were an art director at Chronicle Books, and we were going to put this book on the "We're Sorry You Married a Nerd" table in every Barnes & Noble in creation (which someone should definitely do), I'd want to pair the text with spare images that led you to look to the text for details. Such as pictograms.


Nikolai Belkov's Olympic Pictograms. Imagine these, but about Terrestrial Angler Fish.

Or silhouettes.


Lotte Reiniger. Imagine this, but... no, just imagine this.


Available at RPGNow and the D20PFSRD shop as pdfs, and at Lulu as pdf, hardcover, and softcover.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch