December 2025 - Save Against Holiday Cheer
The Americans have now completed their annual Turkey Feast, and so we are solidly in jolliest, holliest, holiday period of the year. Regardless of whether you're decking your halls or covering your ears, 'tis the season for putting your feet up and reading some raucous roleplaying writing, and perhaps even getting a game or two in!
This issue also lets us introduce a brand new contributor: Kati B! perhaps best known to our readers for her blog The Play Reports, we hope you're looking forward to her writing as much as we are.
An Announcement:
Carouse, Carouse! is shifting our release schedule slightly. There are enough newsletters coming out on the first of the month, so we will be moving to the less crowded middle of the month to give you ample opportunity to read our words without distraction from other monthly releases. Therefore, do not worry when you don't see the our next issue on the first day of the year, it's still coming, just a bit later!
Roll to Carouse!
- Lighten your coin purse at the Projects Pavilion.
- Pilfer ideas from the Blog Bazaar.
- Sample the delights of the Gameable Gallery.
- Hear the raving of Reviewers Row.
- Stroll the Columnists Colonnade.
- Languish in the Opinion Oubliette.
Projects Pavilion ⤴
- Merry Hexmas Blogwagon by Prismatic Wasteland
A longer-lasting blogwagon than usual, Mr. Prismatic is encouraging us all to seek inspiration in the Rankin/Bass movie catalog to build a communal Christmas-themed hexcrawl. Submissions open until December 25. - Markus M - The Bloggies by Clayton
Gather your bookmarks and fire up those browser tabs. The Bloggies are returning and they'll need community submissions to form the infamous Bloggies bracket. Keep an eye on this newsletter and Explorers Design—this year's host—for the official announcement later this month. - Clayton - Bastionland Podcast by Chris McDowall
The Bastionland Podcast is back with new installments of the Rule of Three! Each episode, Chris interviews a guest about three influential games. I love listening to game designers discuss design, and this podcast is one of my absolute favorites! - Rowan H
Blog Bazaar ⤴
- Mapping the Blogosphere by Elmcat
In a monumental feat of data collation, Elmcat has built an interactive map of the RPG blogging communities, relying on links between blogs to determine the connections that form our online communities. Try if you can find yourself in there! - Markus M - d100 Brainfood for Burgeoning Blogs by ktrey
Inspired by Elmcat's fantastic graph above, ktrey decided to produce a full 100 prompts for blog writing, aiming for any new bloggers who may be having trouble getting started. As with the Blog Bandwagons, posts like this are great for developing a community, and I'm incredibly excited to see people take a whack at some of these entries! - Farmer Gadda - The 10 Types of Special Rooms by Traipse
As someone who is actively running—and still keying—a megadungeon with hundreds of rooms, let me tell you: special rooms are the most difficult to write. This post offers an overview of special rooms along with helpful examples and shrewd advice. - Rowan H - What is an OSR by The Garden Below
Last months online megagame extravaganza, Over/Under, brought many new people into contact with the OSR, as they were wondering "what's this Mothership game everyone's going on about?" This post provides a humorous look at someone figuring out what this scene is all about. - Markus M
Very few posts make me laugh out loud, much less laugh incrementally HARDER with every paragraph title. This is a relatable trek through one individuals evolving relationship with OSR, as Juniper learns in out of context snippets what's even in this weird thing people seem to love. You WILL point at the screen and say "Oh, that's me!" at least once. - Farmer Gadda - Pocket-Sized Powder Kegs by Ty
Ty of Mindstorm offers concise, actionable advice for writing conflicts with high potential energy. It's a great post that'll improve your adventure writing in minutes. - Rowan H - The OSR Onion by Rowan H
Another post looking at the nature of the OSR, this one more of an inside perspective, as Rowan peels away its layers, identifying that the Adventure sits at the heart of OSR play. - Markus M - TTRPG School: Required Reading by Snow
Snow is once again doing her part to prevent us from having the same arguments over and over again, providing us an overview of blogposts discussing the role of system in RPG play. You're find a lot of the big name RPG thinkers in her list, it's a good way to spend an afternoon or two. - Markus M - Dare to Play It Straight by Clayton
On Explorers Design, Clayton makes a compelling case for single-genre games. He acknowledges what mashups bring to the table while pointing out what is lost when genres collide. - Rowan H - PAX Unplugged Reports
If, like me, you missed out on PAXU, these wonderful reports from Widdershins Wanderings and Weird Wonder offer a vicarious experience of the con. - Rowan H
Gameable Gallery ⤴
Wishing Well
by Zak H.
Jen’s Rest is a modest village three days ride from the nearest city. For its size, it has an unexpected surfeit of manor homes. Several noted beauties and a famous poet originate here as well.
Children may be heard reciting a hand-clap poem here, before being swiftly hushed by their elders:
A hundred years or so ago,
Jen was an old alewife.
She caught an errant brownie,
It bargained for its life.
Ever since, Jen’s well stayed full,
Deep enough to fish.
What is more, each Longest Night,
A coin begets a wish.
Secret village lore holds that Jen’s Well is enchanted. At sundown on Longest Night (winter solstice), the well will choose one person who threw a coin in that day, and grant them their wish.
The village holds a feast on this night. An hour before sundown, a lottery is drawn to select a single villager to cast a coin into the well. The well itself is under guard for the entire day ahead of the feast to prevent unauthorised coin-tossing. Every sixyear, the village nominate a wisher who is expected to make a wish on the village's behalf.
The village holds the secret closely. Despite the festive atmosphere, travellers are turned away on the day, and guests are turned out. Villagers will evasively cite an "old tradition" if questioned why outsiders are not allowed.
(d4) PCs are allowed to stay because...
- one of the party has come into inheritance of a house.
- they are employed to guard the village gates during the feast.
- an important villager owes a life-debt to them.
- heavy weather has made travel impossible.
(d4) Drama at Jen's Well
- A circus troupe has found out the well's secret. The head acrobat Ma Sleek is extorting this year's wish, and using her company as protection while she's here.
- Two clans, the Meadowlands and the Carrocks, share guard duty of the well. Each claims the other has snuck a coin in the well before the feast.
- Auntie Featherchin has read an omen in her cards: the fairy folk are angry. Wood clearing for new pastureland is encroaching on the Old Forest. She claims this year's wish will backfire unless the fairies are appeased.
- The taxman Ernest Inch is coming early this year. He and his brute squad won't be dissuaded from staying at the village on the night of the festival.
Reviewers Row ⤴
Plugged Into PAX Unplugged
by Kati B.
This past month, I was afforded the wonderful opportunity to attend PAX Unplugged (PAXU) for the first time. Previously, my RPG-related con experience was only GenCon, and while the two cons have a focus on RPG and Board games, they couldn't be more different. I was lucky enough to be going the same year a bunch of fabulous creators were going too. We made plans to meet up throughout the weekend and support each other at signings and playtests. I arrived on Thursday, giving myself plenty of time to check into my hotel and relax without missing a single bit of con time. I recommend doing it this way if you're able, but it's no requirement to enjoy the convention.
While the schedule for PAXU is listed on the website, there's no clean way to extract it, such as downloading a .csv file that I could find. This made planning for the trip in advance rather challenging. The convention wants you to download the PAX Nav app and set up your schedule through it. To use the app, you must scan your badge to confirm you're an attendee to gain access to any of the features relating to PAXU. I didn't realize this until right before the convention, and I found it frustrating being forced into usage of their app. PAXU also does not provide a platform to pre-register for most events. All organization for sign-ups to games happen on third party sites. For RPG Freeplays, games were scheduled through RPG Geek and Warhorn. I was overwhelmed by both systems. I found out about the RPG Geek forum thread too late, and I had never heard of Warhorn at all. It felt kind of crummy to miss out on the chance to try new systems if you weren't fast enough to find the information. Thankfully folks in the Prismatic Waystation shared games they were running, so I was lucky to be part of two playtests. One of these, Amanda P.'s, you can read about in the Blog Bazaar!
The space for PAXU is all inside the Philadelphia Convention Center. When I left my hotel at 10:30 AM on Friday, I did not expect to see a line wrapped around the convention center for people who had badges. I thought perhaps this is will call where folks are picking up things, but it wasn't. Next thing I knew, I was in line to enter the building (only one entrance was open) for ~30 minutes, which I'm told wasn't that bad. It put a bit of a damper on my initial excitement, but it was a pretty minor inconvenience. Once inside the convention center, the space was huge, and there was plenty of room to walk through everything. Unlike GenCon where the expo floor is so overwhelmed with foot traffic, you can't get by without touching a bunch of people, PAXU had their booths much more spaced out with wider lanes running in one direction. Even at peak traffic on Saturday, it wasn't as congested as GenCon which was a huge relief.
When I attend GenCon, I create a schedule, outlining my sessions with a plan of how my time will be utilized. While GenCon is much bigger, it's organized in a way I can navigate in advance without wasting my con time. For PAX Unplugged, I did none of that. There was no schedule beyond my two pre-scheduled playtests. The rest of my time I spent wandering and trying out new games or spending too much money on the expo floor. Normally, I would have hated this lack of structure, but it worked perfectly at PAXU, thanks to friends and the ease with which pick-up play is encouraged.
One of the best things about PAXU is the freeplay area for both RPGs and board games. Check out a game, find a table out of the hundreds, take a giant orange cone labeled "Looking for Group", and wait for some folks to come play. If you somehow miss the giant orange cone, you can check on the app for any games that are needing players. It's organized, accessible, and done at your own leisure, so you can come and go when you want/need. It's a great system for people who want to try something for free before buying. Booths are also often running demos of games. There was even a 45-minute demo of Daggerheart next to the freeplay area, a perfect bite-sized demo for a larger RPG. More creators should do this!
Another reason the lack of schedule worked for me is that I had a bunch of friends I was meeting up with, so I wasn't alone. My friends anchored me in finding things I enjoyed and discovering areas of the convention that I originally disregarded such as the LARPing area, the Winged Bull Tavern. A fellow contributor to Carouse, Carouse, Sandro AD, told us to meet at the tavern on Sunday for board games. A handful of us went and after sitting at an open games table, I found myself launching into a character, a flirtatious rogue. Listen, we all have our character archetypes we fall into, okay? All weekend, I walked by this area of the con, ignoring it entirely, and yet found myself having a blast once someone else mentioned it to me. This is one of the beautiful things about conventions in general. It's impossible to see everything, and that's okay! Meet folks and consider exploring their suggestions. You might be surprised by what you find.
Even with some minor pre-planning snags and a different set of expectations, I'm giving PAXU my seal of approval and plan to attend next year. I can't wait to meet up with folks old and new and play more games.
Columnists Colonnade ⤴
Spark Tables in The Wildsea
by Taylor B.
Intro
This month, I finished up a seven session mini-campaign of Felix Isaac's Wildsea, a beautifully vibrant system about sailing an ocean of massive treetops on industrial chainsaw ships. We had a blast in the setting, but both my and my players' favorite parts were the sailing sections - whole sessions moving from one part of the Wildsea to another, encountering strange wildlife and surreal, otherworldly landscapes along the way. Sailing is the heart of the system, with in-depth shipbuilding mechanics, various posts for the players to man, and an enormous world to explore all contributing to an air of heart-pumping freedom. What really brings the world to life are the random encounters; in our campaign, we ran into giant vivariums, electric fungi fields, and magnetic rust swarms. These random stops helped the world sing, adding life and spice to the vast unknown.
Unfortunately, the book didn't help with any of them.
Watch Rolls
Here's the short of the encounter system: every sailing turn, the player in the crow's nest makes a watch roll to see what's on the horizon. The Referee makes a followup roll to determine if there's treasure, a threat, or both. There are three possible watch results:
- Peace: Nothing out of the ordinary, typically results in an encounter with the ship's NPC crew or an opportunity for players to chat in-character.
- Order: Signs of civilized life. Can be other ships, wrecks, outposts, or pirates.
- Nature: The wild world. Can be weather, animals, plant life, etc.
The book provides seeds for each. A few examples:
A problem or event concerning the undercrew, such as a fight, a sickness, or a personal discovery.
A ship passing within hailing distance, anything from a trading ship to bug-fishers to pirates.
A wreck or ruin, a remnant of past expansion, now abandoned and ripe for salvaging.
A sighting of (or tussle with) the true wilds, in the form of a plant, creature, or force of nature.
Basically: this shit is useless!!! The exciting part of a setting like this is the specificity - all the little details that add flavor to the world - but details can also be a burden. The Wildsea is a big, sprawling passion project, and it's so fleshed out that it can almost feel intimidating to improvise without taking a semester to study the lore first. These seeds give you basic skeletons to work with, but what they really need to do is spark my imagination. Give me something to work with! "A ruin" by itself isn't interesting; "a decrepit mansion hanging from a huge treetop by massive iron hooks" gets my ass salivating.
Interestingly, the supplementary material appears to recognize this. The free One-Armed Scissor starter adventure provides bespoke encounters for watch rolls, and they're great!
However, this actually overcorrects and becomes too specific, IMO. The problem is that you're sailing a lot, so it's easy to hit duplicate encounters. This happened to me while I was running the supplement a while back, actually. A bunch of abandoned books strewn across the sea is cool once, but loses its luster the second time through.
Adding Sparks
What I wanted for this mini-campaign was a simple setup to get my gears turning without constraining me in long-term play. To solve this, I pulled from Electric Bastionland's Spark Tables - basic single-word tables that you combine to make an interesting prompt. Each time my players sailed to a new area, I wrote a bespoke set of Peace/Order/Nature sparks themed after the destination. To make things a little easier on myself, the first column of each table is a Thing to encounter, and the second column is an adjective to modify it. My hope was that, even with repeat rolls, the vague prompts + extra twist from the Referee Roll would allow me to improvise without issue. I did this process twice, each time taking ~15 minutes of prep, and was quite happy with the results!
Example Sparks: The Hollowbody Spiral
Background: The Hollowbody Spiral is a region of the Wildsea where metallic debris of all types are magnetically drawn into a massive derelict whirlpool. Think something like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Themes: old tech, electricity, scrap
Peace Sparks
| d6 | Spark (noun) | Spark (modifier) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Robot | Thunder |
| 2 | Undercrew | Motion |
| 3 | Gizmo | Attraction |
| 4 | Reefs | Warning |
| 5 | Song | Data |
| 6 | Shell | Rust |
Order Sparks
| d6 | Spark (noun) | Spark (modifier) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Salvager | Magnetic |
| 2 | Zealot | Gauss |
| 3 | Surveyor | Many-limbed |
| 4 | Spit (small outpost) | Fight |
| 5 | Wreck | Trickery |
| 6 | Killer | Floating |
Nature Sparks
| d6 | Spark (noun) | Spark (modifier) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hybrid | Eyes |
| 2 | Storm | Rust |
| 3 | Quake | Delve |
| 4 | Seeds | Lightning |
| 5 | Vulture | Giant |
| 6 | Parasite | Program |
Results From Play
Watch Roll: Nature (Sparks: Storm, Lightning)
Referee Roll: Treasure with Threat
Result: Heavy stormclouds cause the leaves below to roil, threatening to take weaker ships under. A passenger ship caught off-guard by the sudden storm signals for help. Players decided to brave the storm and rescue the ship, taking damage as the massive waves thrust the two ships into each other. The thankful NPCs gave a chart of the area as payment.
Watch Roll: Order (Sparks: Salvager, Gauss)
Referee Roll: Treasure with Threat
Result: Two ships full of stony, gray-robed nomads pull debris from the sea with huge glowing, coiled magnets. As the players approach, they pull a wounded man in crude metal armor from the waves. Players wanted to barter for his safety. On approach, the nomads pulled out rifles and responded with suspicion. After a tense discussion, the players traded rare, precious salvage with the nomads in exchange for the armored man.
Watch Roll: Nature (Sparks: Storm, Rust)
Referee Roll: Treasure with no threat
Result: Huge cloud of rust flakes color the horizon. Nearby, a tall tree grows from the sea. Passing sailors have constructed a shield-like metal wedge on the front, scarred with rust, presumably to guard against this exact phenomenon. A ramshackle dock allows travelers to safely rest behind the wedge. Players docked inside and made conversation with other sailors, sharing a meal (gaining a stat buff) and spending the night in shelter while the storm raged.
Final Thoughts
In practice, even with some overlap in sparks, the encounters that came out of this system ended up nice and flavorful! Is it perfect? Not quite. The extra d6 rolls make full repeats less likely, but they're still an issue. On top of that, while this is enough of a foundation for me to improvise upon, it's not nearly as accessible as the bespoke examples from earlier. For myself, at least, it worked great. If I return to The Wildsea (which I'd love to do!), I'd likely use this setup with minimal adjustment. The results produced from fairly minimal prep were just too juicy to pass up.
Want to give this encounter style a shot? Pick up the game here and let me know how it goes!
Opinion Oubliette ⤴
The oubliette is empty except for a carrot and a few pieces of coal resting in a puddle of water.