February 2026 - Sea of Love

Welcome back! Whether this newsletter is your main squeeze or one of many loves, we're thankful for your visit. This month, we've got all the classic Valentine's hallmarks in store: a camgirl death game, a Cairn background with a better half, and a review for a lonely, horrific deep woods pointcrawl. Grab a robe, pour some wine, and dig in.

Roll to Carouse!

1. Lighten your coin purse at the Projects Pavilion.
2. Pilfer ideas from the Blog Bazaar.
3. Sample the delights of the Gameable Gallery.
4. Hear the raving of Reviewers Row.

Projects Pavilion ⤴

• Digital Angel (physical edition) by SandroAD
  Sandro's camgirl nightmare simulator has a new body. Initially published on itch a year ago, it now has a physical release (+ new cover art!) courtesy of Plus One EXP. What better way is there to celebrate the season of love than buying a few copies to stick in your coworker's cubicles? - Taylor B.
• Venture Not Into the Nightgarden by eely moon
  A pamphlet adventure for Mausritter about a strange garden one may only enter under a full moon. I simply adore eely's art and it's particularly dreamy here, with a moody color scheme and text to match. The vibe is fantastical, like wandering a festival alone and a little wine-drunk. Available for $4 with plenty of community copies as well. - Taylor B.
• The Bastardized Classics
  Matthew Morris and Jon Davis are currently running an itchfunding campaign for the next batch of their Bastardized Classics series, rewriting (A)D&D modules for the rules-light Bastards. system. - Tobias Adam

Blog Bazaar ⤴

• The Bloggies
  Voting for the 2026 Bloggies is now open! Carouse writers garnered a total of nine nominations, if my count is correct. Go forth and read widely! - Rowan H.
• We Read The Bloggies
  Speaking of The Bloggies, a group of volunteers collaborated to record this year's nominees! Special thanks and kudos to Zak H. for spearheading the organization of the project, Elmcat for handling the technical aspects, and to Grace and Scott for a heroic volume of recordings! - Rowan H.

Gameable Gallery ⤴

Cairn Background: Swordmaster

by Rowan H.

You live and die by the sword at your side. It has a mind of its own, and the two of you engage often in silent conversation.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 gold pieces
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Brigandine (1 Armor, bulky)
• Whetstone
• Sword oil
• Polishing cloth

d6 What sword do you wield?

1. Grumegulper, a wrathful bastard sword (d10, bulky). On Critical Damage, it drains the target's blood, and you regain hit points equal to the STR damage inflicted.
2. Dirge, a heavy brooding falchion (d10, bulky). On Critical Damage, the two nearest enemies must pass a WIL save or flee.
3. Hazeglimmer, a circumspect saber (d8) with ripples of color in its slender blade. When you unsheathe it, the air around you shimmers in a disorienting haze, and ranged attacks against you are Impaired until your next turn.
4. Craven, a timid shortsword (d6). When your HP is reduced to zero, you turn invisible for one turn. Your next attack is Impaired and ends the invisibility.
5. Havoc, a boistrous great sword with a black blade (d10, bulky). You may sacrifice 3 HP to grant your next attack the blast quality.
6. Zephyr, a clever and remarkably light jian (d8). When you lose HP for the first time during a combat, move at double speed during your next turn, and your next attack is Enhanced.

d6 How did you acquire the sword?

1. You slew its previous bearer in a duel. Begin play with a Lasting Scar.
2. The knight you squired for died. He didn't knight you, but he left you his sword, shield, and chainmail.
3. You inherited it. Take an extra 60gp, but beware: a dastardly, disinherited relative wants the money—and the sword.
4. An ethereal lady rose from the waters of a lake and bequeathed it to you. You can now hold your breath for ten minutes, but you must bathe in a natural body of water at least once every three days or become deprived.
5. You won it by cheating at dice against a petty lord. Take a set of Loaded Dice and watch out for bounty hunters.
6. You stole it from a crypt. Add a curse to your inventory. Remove the curse when you bury a dead friend.

Reviewers Row ⤴

Wanderer in a Sea of Fog - A Review of Carver's Ridge

by Taylor B.

Background

Shout from the mountaintops. Breathe with the trees as the fog rolls in. The woods are never silent or sleeping. Spite the deep places. Listen to the wind.

Carver's Ridge is a system-agnostic wilderness pointcrawl by Dungeon Crab, an author with roots in Interactive Fiction as well as the TTRPG scene. Clocking in at 44 pages, this booklet contains character backgrounds, exploration sites, a full-color handout map, and over fifty keyed locations. Because Crab is insane I guess, the whole thing is also pay-what-you-want. Geez!

As far as inspirations go, the list had me hooked ASAP: That Which Gave Chase, The Bloom, The Ritual... my wife and I stayed in Snoqualmie, Washington for our anniversary last year. It was my first time in the Pacific Northwest and the landscape is otherworldly. I felt molecular. I wanted to walk into the woods and dissolve into earth. Will Carver's Ridge match that feeling? Let's find out.

What's inside?

The first few pages introduce you to the Ridge, located inside North Cascades National Park just off the (fictional!) State Route 95. The park's natural beauty stands in conflict with encroaching industrialization. Humanity's few stable footholds (a summer camp, a diner) feel small against the vast woods. Information is limited; folks go missing every year. It's a striking start.

Visually, the document is peppered with photography and handwritten graffiti, which I love. The text is often set slightly askew in a way that evokes an awkwardly-scanned trail map. There are a few noticeable typos here and there, but, atmospherically, it's stellar. What about the gameable stuff?

As mentioned, Carver's Ridge is a system-agnostic document. I'm no stranger to reviewing a bit of systemless content, but the decision here comes across more frustratingly noncommittal than anything. The book helpfully urges you to not run it as written and suggests adapting the text to anything from Cairn to Triangle Agency to Dread (an insane spread lol). It then presents a series of rollable backgrounds, inventory rules, and travel procedures that align pretty straightforwardly with Liminal Horror, which feels... like it doesn't actually want to be system-neutral.

In general I think this adventure exhibits all the worst symptoms of system agnosticism. It wants to be broadly adaptable but doesn't want to alienate unfamiliar players but also clearly hews towards a particular style of play but also also makes you do all the adaptational legwork since it doesn't commit to anything. And I like legwork! But the fun part of legwork is engaging with the text and asking yourself "if that's true, what else is true?", not statting Grizzly Bears for Into the Odd. IMO if you're going through the trouble of writing Odd-style backgrounds and Odd-style inventory rules, you might as well just add a page of Odd-style saves and call it a complete package, Silent Titans-style.

Really I feel this opening bit spends too much time explaining itself and not enough time being itself. This changes later, thankfully, but all the hemming and hawing over what it wants to be and how it should be used and blah blah blah is, to me, another consquence of noncommitment. Since you can't assume your reader is familiar with a particular system, I think there's a temptation to explain everything as if they just left Plato's Cave and are reading an RPG for the first time. An example is the Encounter Die section; on the left is the full text, on the right is what I feel you can pare it down to without losing meaningful information.

Comically this overwrought explanation comes one page before an encounter table that ends at 9+ and doesn't actually tell you what die to roll which... kinda rocks lol I don't think it's intentional but I hope it was.

After all the intro bullshit we get into the real meat of Carver's Ridge, and THIS is where the sauce lies. In the encounters alone we have hornless, bleeding deer and industrial-sounding birdsong. Several encounters involve The Call, a phenomenon that slowly absorbs your character into the forest's weirdness each time you hear it. Some of my favorites:

Weather: Electric. Skies are grey and your skin prickles. Ozone smell.

Encounter: An invisible, silent person violently shakes a party member and starts destroying equipment if unrestrained. Treat as a man.

Event: Random party member catches a glimpse of their own face just off trail, then realizes that they are standing off trail looking back at the party.

The best way I can describe this section is "unrestrained" (complimentary). The first fleshed-out location - a beaten-down diner - throws out an NPC with nine different bullet points of additional info, and some of them are even useful! I like the excess because it paints a vibrant picture, although I do think it's possible to channel that energy into more concise, effective descriptions. The reason I think that is because the document does so in the next section (a scout camp in bad decline). Compare and contrast:

Bart the diner owner is more fleshed-out and, I guess, functional, but Margaret and Arthur are exciting. I take one look there and I know exactly where and how I want to play them. The rest of the camp staff are described with similar oomph and I think it's stellar.

A good chunk of the adventure is taken up by the actual pointcrawl, and it bangs. The 50-ish keyed locations are split across eight interconnected trails and the underground cave network beneath them. This section is where Carver's Ridge is at its best. I adore the trails! They're a natural way to add texture to different "districts" in the pointcrawl, and the text is dripping with atmosphere.

There are also a few standalone exploration sites. Two of these - an alien, almost Source-engine-y factory and a bunker with a fucked-up deer reminiscent of Deep Carbon Observatory's giant - are great! The last, a Gothic manor with some cursed wax sculptures, is unkeyed and minimally detailed. It's an exploration site in the same way an online recipe is a full meal. In practice I could improvise a good time there, but it feels a bit limp as-is.

How would I run it?

Well, first I'm using Liminal Horror since this beast is just a few stat blocks away from being published by Goblin Archives. Re: the included character backgrounds, I'm either ditching those entirely or using them as a single Group Background rather than making everyone roll. There aren't any creature stats or anything, but most of the encounters are vibrant enough that I could just wing them in the moment. The important part here is navigating the pointcrawl, but there are (intentionally) few hooks and no answers. Just for some direction, I'm plopping folks at the summer camp and pointing them towards missing boy scouts at the Factory, which is my favorite part of the setting I think. After that, exploration takes the wheel. How exciting, to think about where it might take me!

Flavor Packet: 1d6 Pieces of Otherworldly Litter

When I review something, I like to write a little mini-expansion to show how crucial the act of being inspired by other's work is for our shared hobby. One thing about this adventure: there's no loot! Here are a few warped relics to strew about the park. Enjoy!

1. Dirty flip phone. An antler gores the still-flickering screen. Hitting Call summons a gang of angry, hornless elk hostile to all human life.
2. ULTRALITE-brand backpack made from gossamer-thin fabric. Floats slightly. When worn, treat the bearer's total weight as ten pounds.
3. Twisted-up cigarette with a single smoldering ember at the tip. Water won't put it out. Toss it at something living and it'll light up like a brush fire (1 use).
4. Classic hooch in a glass jug. Smells like the La Brea Tar Pits. Take a sip and name a destination - after a six hour blackout you'll wake up there with blood on your hands and sirens in the distance.
5. Missing pet poster marred by rain. Just a name is left: "Sammy". Call it out; rustling in the trees will lead you to a safe place to sleep. Roll a Hiker encounter on arrival.
6. Palm-sized clay figure. Kinda looks like you. If you toss it in combat, it draws aggro from whatever you're fighting. Bleeds in comically large spurts when attacked.

Final Thoughts

I rate Carver's Ridge one more staircase in the woods than I'd ever like to see. Good shit. You can download it for free (with a suggested donation of $7) here.