undefined

		{
 "slug": "dungeon",
 "books": [],
 "content": [
  {
   "markdown": "\n\nThe _Empire Strikes Back_ of the original Earthsea trilogy",
   "data": {
    "title": "The Tombs of Atuan",
    "authors": [
     "Ursula K. Le Guin"
    ],
    "editors": [
     ""
    ],
    "translator": "",
    "date": "2019-02-15",
    "rating": "++",
    "re-read": true,
    "pages": 150,
    "non-fiction": false,
    "comic": false,
    "published": 1971,
    "image": "",
    "tags": []
   }
  },
  {
   "markdown": "\n\n",
   "data": {
    "title": "Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself",
    "authors": [
     "Sam Gorski",
     "D.F.Lovett"
    ],
    "editors": [
     ""
    ],
    "translator": "",
    "date": "2019-11-21",
    "rating": "",
    "re-read": false,
    "pages": 198,
    "non-fiction": false,
    "comic": false,
    "published": 2019,
    "image": "",
    "tags": []
   }
  },
  {
   "markdown": "\nA rule book. Are RPG rule books fiction or non-fiction? I'm going with non-fiction in this case.\n\nI haven't played this yet so this is just a rules read through.\n\n### System\n\nMazes is an OSR adjacent RPG. In keeping with other [Old School Renaisance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_School_Renaissance) pieces it jetissons the player character interaction mechanics and improv stylings seen in many modern RPGs in favour of delivering a straight to the point dungeon crawl experience. Mazes varies from the template in a few interesting ways though...\n\n1. There really is nothing but dungeons here (Mazes); no treking across the wilderness, no taverns, no quest givers, no shopping for provisions \"Skip all that noise -- start at the door into the dungeon\"\n2. Whereas most OSR fare will choose a favourite D&D edition and build a system around those rules here we get something much more interesting. Each player only ever rolls a single dice* the number of faces you get depends on your character's \"Role\" which is a kind of super-class (The DM never rolls anything). You might think this would make e.g. Sentinels (d10) strictly stronger than Paragons (d4) but this isn't the case because the success criteria for different types of check are distributed un-evenly and rolling the highest or lowest number on your dice has special effects. It's a fascinating idea and I really look forward to seeing how it plays out in practice.\n3. Character creation is very quick, literally 10, 15 minutes and character progression is practically non-existant. This is good because it seems the system can be pretty brutal wrt. sudden and unexpected death -- very old-school.\n\n### Theme\n\nThis is where the rule book falters for me, it doesn't really create a sense of place or purpose. What do these adventurers want and what is the nature of the world they live in? Broadly we're in sword and sorcery territory, think Robert Howard and Fritz Lieber, the type of story the game sets out to tell is dubbed \"Swords against the darkness\" which sounds kind of cool but I feel like the book needs more than the couple of paragraphs it provides to flesh this out. \n\nPart of the issue is how sparsely illustrated the book is, there's some perfectly nice sketches but they lack specificity. Similarly where the game does provide colour in the text it doesn't really do so in a coherent way. A good example if this is the \"names\" section in the character class here are the suggestions for the _Haunted Librarian_ class: \n\n>Patrick, Adriel, Nicole, Senzaarous of the Three Eyes, Xi Bung, Aramavirumcnoabtrois\n\nThese veer haphazardly from just normal names (Patrick, Nicole) via vaguely orientalist stuff (Xi Bung) and trad fantasy (Adriel, Senzaarous of the Three Eyes) to wierd fantasy (Aramavirumcnoabtrois). But what are we to make of this? I guess part of it is that it's just funny to juxtapose Patrick with Senzaarous of the Three Eyes and part of it is about saying \"do what you want, make up your own setting\" but more a more concrete vision of the world could have helped to sell the theme.\n\n### Thoughts in anticipation of running the game\n\nLike most GMs I'm a tinkerer, I _always_ tweak RPG rules; ignore some stuff, add some stuff etc. With Mazes I'd like to make inter-character relationshsips more meaningful, I feel like a way to do this might be increased use of flashbacks. The rules touch on the idea of flashbacks but it's not really encouraged. I like the idea of fleshing out characters relationships with one another during lulls in the action ([like that bit in FFVII where you have to climb the stairs](https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-vii-remake-made-me-climb-59-flights-of-st-1843048862)) and perhaps providing some systemic advantage to characters with a shared history relevant to given situation which in turn would encourage players to come up with these scenes from the backstory.\n\n\\* yes, I use dice as the singular",
   "data": {
    "title": "Mazes",
    "authors": [
     "Chris O'Neil"
    ],
    "editors": [
     ""
    ],
    "translator": "",
    "date": "2024-02-07",
    "rating": "",
    "re-read": false,
    "pages": 231,
    "non-fiction": true,
    "comic": false,
    "published": 2022,
    "image": "https://imagedelivery.net/j9Jow5yhb9rJLKWa-j_yTg/ec095aa5-4341-4204-1c6c-49efea19a700/bookshot",
    "tags": [
     "dungeon"
    ]
   }
  },
  {
   "markdown": "\nI've enjoyed Stu Horvath's [Vintage RPG account on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/vintagerpg/) for a years but when \"Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground\", his book about the history of RPGs told via his collection, came out I balked at the price and decided to hold off till I was feeling less skint. The next day it arrived in the post! Turns out that an earlier, flusher feeling, version of me had pre-ordered it. I'm glad I did. \n\nThe book is divided by decade starting in the 1970s and finishing right up in the present. Within this broad structure and with the evidence of his collection Horvath sketches a particular view of RPG history defined by design iteration and experimentation, even the original DnD is shown to be an organic outgrowth of historical wargaming rather than the product of some singular creative moment. This communal process has often been enabled by the fact that game mechanics don't fall under copyright, alongside a willingness to borrow liberally from other media and disciplines which seems baked into RPG culture. Is there any other form of entertainment that so closely meshes maths and improvisational theatre?\n\nAfter the main body of the book there are, of course, appendices including a couple of short essays, one on collecing on one the idea of the dungeon... \n\n>In dungeons, we get, not just a place to explore, but also the very soul of the first roleplaying game: Travel deep, fight monsters, find treasure. As a space, they are constrained, with narrow, claustrophobic rooms, allowing players limited choices for routes in the immediate term. In the long term, though, those choices string together into a vast, non-linear space, constructed, fractal-like, out of an infinity of twisting corridors.\n\n>There are no real-world equivalents to this kind of dungeon. It is an irrational, imaginary space, a broken mirror cobbled together out of shards of myth, snippets of fiction and slivers of our own fears. More than the dragons or the power fantasies, this great below captured the collective imagination. The dungeon speaks to something primal about the way human minds work, even if we can't quite understand its shadowy vastness.\n\nI'm not sure anyone _needs_ to drop £50 on this book but I don't regret for a moment that my past self did. ",
   "data": {
    "title": "Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership",
    "authors": [
     "Stu Horvath"
    ],
    "date": "2024-03-08",
    "rating": "+",
    "re-read": false,
    "pages": 456,
    "non-fiction": true,
    "comic": false,
    "published": 2023,
    "image": "https://imagedelivery.net/j9Jow5yhb9rJLKWa-j_yTg/7dc83fab-5d1c-4659-0167-f8654076fe00/bookshot",
    "tags": [
     "dungeon",
     "games"
    ],
    "editors": [
     ""
    ],
    "translator": ""
   }
  }
 ]
}