January 2026 - The Carousies
Happy New Year! This issue is a little different; in place of our usual columns and gameable goodness we're handing out some awards! Plus, you'll find a thoughtful review by Sprinting Owl of a unique game, plus an assortment of links to the things we enjoyed over the past six weeks.
Roll to Carouse!
- Witness the conferral of the Carousies!
- Lighten your coin purse at the Projects Pavilion.
- Pilfer ideas from the Blog Bazaar.
- Hear the raving of Reviewers Row.
The Carousies ⤴
The Carousies are an excuse for us to highlight some of our favorite projects from the past year! Those of us who felt inclined picked a favorite project or two independently and awarded it a superlative.
Best Artist For Making Me Extremely Fucking Jealous: Tania Herrero
Incredible art. Grotesque imagery. Killer prose and layout on top of that. I think she should have to pick just one because this isn't fair. You shouldn't be allowed to be the only name on a product like the Menagerie of Unbearable Things. She's got an insane-looking folk horror dungeon crawler kickstarting next year dog my wallet can't handle this. Someone stop her, please, I've got a family to feed!! - Taylor B.
Best Tolkien: Middle Earth Hexcrawl Project
Josh of Rise Up Comus for his wonderful fully worked up Shire Hexcrawl setting. Freely available, drawing from multiple iterations of games published in Middle Earth and yet with its own spin, this kind of deep world-building is really inspirational. Twenty-seven hexes, five adventure locations, and dozens of quests. Just reading through the hexes has me itching to pull out my copy of Lord of the Rings 5e—and I just got out of Moria! - Patchwork Paladin
Best Variety of Tables For Literally Everything: d4 Caltrops
ktrey has been blogging since 2007 and amassed a whopping 305 tagged blog posts with d100 tables. That’s over 30.000 entries, ranging from character options to hirelings, monster activity, potions, treasure descriptions, spellbooks and wildlife encounters. If you’re looking for inspiration on quite possibly anything TTRPG related (and then some!), chances are high that they‘ve got a random table for that. A most impressive piece of work! - Tobias Adam
Best Design Resource: Designing Dungeons Course
Josh of Rise Up Comus and Warren of I Cast Light! released the Designing Dungeons Course, a comprehensive, freely-available guide that walks the reader through the process of designing a dungeon—from brainstorming to room keying. Packed full of actionable advice and concrete steps, it's a remarkably generous undertaking that new and experienced referees will find invaluable! - Rowan H.
Best Use Of Dungeon Design Principles In A Non-TTRPG: Labyrinth of the Demon King
I played through this on release and spent every level thinking "oh, that's why we do it like that." Each dungeon has multiple entrances, non-linear design, puzzles, strange rules, and random encounters that force you to decide whether to push on or lick your wounds back home. I played around with turning one dungeon into gameable RPG text and the translation felt almost 1:1. That's not even getting into the delicious, grimy atmosphere - this has the vibes I yearned to communicate while running The Isle. One of my favorite releases of the year and a nice reminder that dungeon crawling is FUN. - Taylor B.
Best Gygax Award: The AD&D Series
The Blog of Forlorn Encystment has been deep diving into AD&D for some time now, scouring tables and asides to try to get a picture of the World As Gary Saw It, full of inhospitable dungeons, even more inhospitable towns, traitorous NPCs and other targets for adventuring. Read! Marvel! - Patchwork Paladin
Projects Pavilion ⤴
The Bloggies
After winning the platinum Bloggie last year, Clayton is hosting this year's awards, and submissions are open!
Cairn In 2026 by Yochai Gal
Yochai offered exciting updates on Cairn in 2026, including Cairn Press and Between Two Cons! - Rowan H.
The Rankin Bass Hexmas Crawl
A group of bloggers answered a call by Warren of Prismatic Wasteland and collaborated on a Rankin Bass-inspired hex crawl! Farmer Gadda, Kati, Liz, Rowan, Sandro, Taylor, and Zak all contributed hexes
Blog Bazaar ⤴
Mining Fallout: New Vegas for TTRPG Setting Ideas from Dice Goblin
Praises have been piled onto Fallout: New Vegas for ages, but the juice in this blogpost is the faction diagram. Steal it. If there's any mine with gold, it's this one. - Clayton
Villains - Building a Baddie from Fail Forward
Sandro writes about developing villains, including helpful guiding principles and 12 archetypes that offer a solid foundation to build on. - Rowan H.
The Only 12 NPCs You Need from Murkdice
These are 12 instantly gameable skeletons for NPCs, using a goals-leverage-weakness framework. Combined with an interesting quirk and appearance, and it's a really handy way to flesh out any NPC. - Patchwork Paladin
The Future - 2026 from All Dead Generations
As part of a prompt exchange on the RPG Cauldron, Gus L wrote a thoughtful response to my question about the future of the OSR. - Rowan H.
In Praise Of Physical RPG Magazines (Part One, Part Two) from For Want of a Silver Bullet
Adam is singing the praises of printed books and zines in not one, but two blog posts already, and has a third one in his back pocket. As an avid home printer, I agree with him wholeheartedly! - Tobias Adam
Sam’s Three-Question Taxonomy by Sam Sorensen
Sam outlined a three-question taxonomy for role-playing games. It offers a very helpful framework for conversations about different preferences and playstyles. - Rowan H.
How to Design Signals In Books from Explorers Design
Clayton wrote an incredibly useful guide to signals in books that's a must-read for anyone who wants to learn layout. - Rowan H.
Reviewers Row ⤴
Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?!
by Sprinting Owl
Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?! is a villainess otome isekai solo ttrpg published for pay what you want on itchio in 2024. You are reading about it in 2025 because I only found out about it in 2025—if I had known earlier, you would also have known earlier.
Otome is a genre of visual novels broadly aimed at women teen and up. Villainess isekai is a subgenre of otome, usually changing format to a webnovel, in which the perspective character reincarnates into her favorite game but as the extremely maligned villainess who is doomed to be hated and shunned and destroyed in the end. This creates melodrama, but it also forces her to work for her happy ending and invites the reader to reexamine the way that characters are cast in a traditional otome’s plot structure.
More about that later.
Reincarnated, by excellent artist and veteran designer wym lawson, is a series of three 8 page PDFs that simulate this subgenre. The differences between these three pamphlets are slight, with one being for traditional otome fantasy stories, one for supernatural otome stories, and one for wuxia otome stories. You don’t need to read them all to play; you can just pick the one that’s closest to whatever you normally like to read.
In terms of gameplay, Reincarnated is a tables game. You roll on detailed and genre savvy sables to generate your game’s protagonist, her love interests, and other aspects of the world. You create your villainess (who is your protagonist, but also not the protagonist) yourself, and make a few small choices about whether they’re a more analytical game player or a feelings first rush-into-situations kinda gal.
To advance the game, you make checks against your Love or Lore, rolling d6s under them. You have a doom track, and after every couple of rounds the game checks to see if you’re doomed. You reduce your doom by succeeding skill checks and increase it by failing them.
You also increase your relationships by succeeding skill checks.
As previously mentioned, the game has you generate several love interests, and all of them have a hearts score from -1 to 10. As you rank up their hearts, you can go on dates with them, get mechanical bonuses from them, even improve your stats if they fall in love.
The game proceeds across thirty rounds, and if you get to the end there are various outcomes that you can qualify for based on your stats and who you have relationships with—all assuming that you aren’t going the extra mile and journaling your story and bending the occasional rule to better fit events to the plot you’re writing.
If your stats are high enough, you can even qualify for an ending where you forsake your love interests and pursue ultimate power.
“Huh,” you might think. “That seems out of place.”
Another thing you might note is how when you roll a crit failure you also get a twist in your story. These are a little more pointed than the scenario events the game has you regularly roll for, and they include things like the game’s protagonist realizing she’s a character in a game or one of the love interests seeing his heart meter.
“Oh,” you might say. “What.”
Also, this is a game you can lose. Very easily, in fact, if your rolls go the wrong way. You can leverage your character’s background for a bonus on checks and once you get some hearts onto the love interests they can make things a little easier, but it’s also possible to get an event that checks your doom on round two and fail one of your skill checks before then, leading to an extremely premature bad end.
The bad ends range from being killed by the government to being tortured by your love interest, and if you don’t like the ending you’ve gotten then the game invites you to time loop yourself and start the story over fortified with your knowledge and any bonuses you collected on your previous run.
This time travel is in the supplementary rules at the back of the PDF, along with a few other modifications, such as unlocking the protagonist as a love interest, adding new love interests, or expanding the range of the heart counter so that you can have love interests at -3 or 15 hearts instead of just -1 or 10.
At -3 they hate you so deeply that they cause a critical failure immediately, and at 15 their love is so far past their intended capacity for it that they erase themselves from existence to smooth the way for you to reach your happy ending.
“...”
Also, did you know that when you timeloop the entire game can start degrading? Power levels change wildly. Characters glitch out of existence. Fate attempts to push you towards or away from a specific love interest. Characters from outside canon start to appear. A player begins controlling the protagonist. A different player begins controlling the protagonist. The protagonist begins remembering the timeloop.
Reincarnated has a nested bedrock of meta-horror that bangs supremely hard because it is both perfectly appropriate for the genre and pushing at the edges of what the genre allows. As you tinker with the game trying to get your perfect ending, it splits apart, unravels, distends into new and unrecognizable shapes. All changes to all things are permanent forever, and how ethical can a seduction be when you have knowledge from across multiple timelines and lifetimes?
This is also completely underselling the game’s art, which is sparse in the PDF but bold and splashy on the game page.
Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?! is a rare work that understands its genre, uplifts it, critiques it, subverts it, and never loses its love for it. It is a testament to otome and romance and villainess stories and messy heartfelt storytelling and fridge horror and a lot else besides.
It is, again, pay what you want on itchio, and it is extremely worth your time.