June 2026
With solstice behind us, it's jam season! Learn from last year's entries to the Appendix N Jam, check out the latest projects and blog posts, and mind the Tram Hijacker.
Roll to Carouse!
- Lighten your coin purse at the Projects Pavilion.
- Pilfer ideas from the Blog Bazaar.
- Sample the delights of the Gameable Gallery.
- Stroll the Columnists Colonnade.
Projects Pavilion ⤴
Beyond the Fading Coast by Bath Imaginable
A Deep Water setting guide for Electric Bastionland detailing the iced-over psychedelia of the Surge. Comes packed with warring factions, three adventure sites, and mechanics for dredging the industrial deep. Released shockingly fast after his last setting piece, this maintains the same scratchy hand-drawn vibe and muted (almost weary) color choices. Worth your time for sure.
Into the Hazelands by Tine Fielding
A setting guide for a European folklore inspired setting featuring some GORGEOUS illustrations. The atmosphere is full of charm - very whimsical, very mythical, very wits over brawn. Unfortunately because God is dead it's written for modern D&D, but there's still plenty of good stuff here. Just focus on the mischievous fairy critters and ignore the fuckass 5E statblocks showing you how to kill them.
Maledict by Dog Thing Arts (Aria Carpenter)
Hot off the presses weird west roleplaying with a focus on absolutely gnarly body horror. This one's got a card-based system at its heart, but frankly it's worth your time for the art and vibes alone. Gruesome, bloody, and frayed at the edges, it brings you into the world of the Thicket, where the soil itself is cursed and mutation rides in on errant smoke. God, I love tabletop RPGs.
Appx. N Jam 2026 hosted by Dark Dungeons
A month-long game jam starting this July with a very fun concept: you get the title of a made-up pulpy 70's paperback and write a module inspired by it. I'll be signing up for this, and I hope to see you there!
Blog Bazaar ⤴
Humanity is dead, long live humanity by shurebis
Sort of a blog, sort of a project. Shurebis is working on cramOS, a post-human Oddlike game about androids scrounging for survival in the guts of a dead world. Here on his blog, he posts roughly daily updates on design thoughts, playtesting, and ideation. A great resource for any designer.
Actual Play is Boring, or a Manifest for Cerebral Actual Play by 23 Dogs in a Trenchoat
Sort of a project, sort of a blog. This release (made for the recent Manifesto Jam) covers a rejection of the relatively pristine nature of APs and a desire to capture the fractured, disjointed feeling that often comes with one's home games.
An Illiterate Hobby by Weird Writer
A short post detailing the author's view on TTRPGs at their core and how she sees people interfacing with them. As with all Discourse it's hard to tell if this is aimed at the hobby as a whole or, like, six people in a discord server, but I agree with the thrust of it: engage with the text. Read with intention. Love your medium.
Gameable Gallery ⤴
Tram Hijacker
A failed career for Electric Bastionland by Rowan H.
Occasionally, Bastion's trams arrive where they're meant to, when they're meant to. Not on your watch.
If you are the youngest player the whole group is £10k in debt to...
The Motley Coalition of Pugnacious Youths: Cause the equivalent of £20k in property damage to see your debt forgiven.
You Get
A woefully outdated map of Bastion's tram system.
What did you stand to gain?
£1 - Nothing: trams simply fascinate you.
£2 - Notoriety: take a wanted poster and a bundle of fan mail.
£3 - Passengers' pilfered belongings: take a fancy pocket watch.
£4 - The Cyclists' Union secretly bankrolled you: take a penny-farthing.
£5 - The Slow Bastion Movement publicly bankrolled you: take insulated wire cutters.
£6 - Revenge: you'd won a settlement from a tram accident. Take an additional £20 and a grisly scar.
What was your modus operandi?
1HP - Bribery: take an additional £30 of shoddy counterfeit currency.
2HP - Blackmail: take several incriminating letters.
3HP - Persuasion: take a wearable vocal amplifier and a handwritten manifesto.
4HP - Impersonation: take a tram conductor's uniform and badge.
5HP - Threats of violence: take an imposing replica pistol.
6HP - Actual violence: take a nail-spiked bat (bulky, d6).
Columnists Colonnade ⤴
Lessons From the Appendix N Jam
by Rowan H.
The Appendix N Jam is back! I plan to participate this year, but I've been wondering how participants manage to cram an adventure into four A5 pages. I took a look at some of last year's entries to see what I could learn.
Scope
Unsurprisingly, most entries consisted of a single location with about 8–12 points of interest. Few entries featured more than a handful of characters, prioritizing descriptions of the adventure location.
Short Intros
Nearly all of my favorite entries fit an introduction, encounter table, and other preliminary information on a single page. With space at a premium, it's best to get to the meat of the adventure in as few words as is reasonable.
Maps
Michael Madsen took a clever approach in The Eldritch Staff: his vividly-illustrated map doubles as the adventure's cover. Others used small abstract maps to great effect. Both Invaders of Atlantis and The Five Fates of Estra Zo feature clean, easy-to-parse maps no larger than a third of a page.
Generally, I found illustrated maps to be less effective in this small format. Some left too little room for text, while others appeared too small on the page, fine details lost to scale.
Columns
Two columns per A5 page proved to be a popular layout—and for good reason. These adventures featured small text, which if spanning an entire page would result in too many characters per line for easy readability. Other creators opted for a trifold format, dividing each A4-sized spread into three columns—another solid layout option.
Stats
Many creators either omitted stats or wrote for systems that feature compact stat blocks, such as Into the Odd and Cairn.
You can likely find exceptions to each of these observations, but it's no accident that my favorite entries share commonalities; breaking the mold requires a very high level of execution. With only a month to create my own submission, I plan to keep things simple.