November 2025 - Jacked In

We're approaching the end of the year, and the northern hemisphere is getting properly gray and wet now (the perfect weather to stay in and play RPGs). Perhaps the southern contingent will play outside now? Anyway, if you haven't planned your Christmas (or other December-ish holiday) games yet, consider this your reminder. But first: the Carousing Collective brings you a feast, including a megagame and two crowdfunding bonanzas, as well as more blogposts than you can shake your bag of Halloween candy at!

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.
5. Stroll the Columnists Colonnade.
6. Languish in the Opinion Oubliette.

Projects Pavilion ⤴

• Mothership Month
  It's that time of year once again, where the Mothership creators are ganging up to hit our wallets extra hard. This year, everything is focused on Prospero's Dream, as popularised by the beloved module A Pound of Flesh. Highlights include Flatline on the Blocks, an action-filled neighbourhood written by a dream team of Mothership and OSR writers, Rites of Renewal, neo-folk horror from the paper perverts over at Peregrine Coast, exploring conspiracy in a gated community in Drink from the Hippocrene, and the psychic parasites of Prospero Protocols. Mothership Month is running until November 11. - Markus M
• Mausritter Month
  Everyone's favourite mouse-based OSR game taking a leaf out of Mothership's zine, and having their own crowdfunding bonanza! A total of sixteen projects, running from November 4. - Markus M
• Over/Under by Sam Sorensen
  A companion piece to Mothership Month, Sam Sorensen is running a megagame via discord set on Mothership's Prospero's Dream, and using a modified version of the rules from his wargame Cataphracts. It's still running, and it's worth popping in if you want all of your waking hours sucked up. - Markus M
• Wildendrem Volume Two: The Saintly Hollows by Phantom Mill Games
  A sequel to the hit Knight-OSR module The Valley of Flowers, Wildendrem Volume Two brings another three regions to the Arthuriana flavoured setting, with even more dungeons and other opportunities to play knights on quests. - Markus M

Blog Bazaar ⤴

• Design Goals for Beneath the Ikor Quag Sinkhole by Semitext Games
  Paul J does a breakdown of his adventure design process, writing the hows and whys of the decisions he made. An informative "designing in public" post that I'd love to see more from bloggers. - Ty Pitre
• The Explorers' Awards Debrief by Explorers Design
  Clayton of Explorers Design (and this very publication) writes an exhaustive retrospective on his experience as a judge in this year's Ennies, as well as his thoughts on awards in general. If you have any interest in the Ennies, RPG awards, or even just award shows, it's mandatory reading. - Markus M
• Leonard Cohen's Advice for Novice OSR Referees by Katt Kirsch
  This blogpost has stolen from the best. Leonard Cohen’s advice couldn’t be more apt for this hobby and is perhaps the best advice I’ve heard for a new referee in the OSR style. - Zak H
• The Monster Economy of AD&D by Woefully Encysted Creature
  The Woefully Encysted Creature's blog continues to delight with a series of articles that mines the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide for the implicit world of its many tables and odd rules. This post is one of the finer ones, delving into the myriad creatures that can be enslaved and killed for gold; but also remarking on the way that the DMG implies that such doings are Evil. A pleasant trip deep, deep into the weeds. - Patchwork Paladin
• A Mask That Eats Into Your Face from Silverarm Press
  This is a wonderful essay from Joel about the importance of creating art that's authentic to oneself—and the vulnerability required. - Rowan H.
• Resonance Mechanic by Noise Sans Signal
  Kyana writes about her alternative for the well-known Inspiration rerolls. A reality-bending Resonance point mechanic, where accumulated rerolls have the potential to alter the player character or even the game world. Handing the players the reins to instigate their PCs inevitable doom sounds like a lot of fun! - Tobias Adam
• Dog Dagger from Bommyknocker Press
  Zak wrote a fantastic magic item—the sort of artifact you can drop right into your campaign or write an entire scenario around. - Rowan H.

Gameable Gallery ⤴

Using AI In Your Games

by Patchwork Paladin

No, not that AI. I mean, putting things in your games that work a little bit like AI. Like they mostly work, but they are also fundamentally broken.

AI Magician's Assistant

Sacrifice any spell to instead get an AI spell, which replicates an existing spell not in your spellbook. The AI spell must be the same or lower level as the spell you sacrifice. The AI spell has a 4-in-6 chance of being the spell you want. On a 2 the spell appears to work, but its effects are perverted (see table). On a 1, the AI spell is perverted, and you can not learn the desired spell normally unless you pass a hard intelligence check (or Save vs Spell, depending on your system), since the AI has confused you about how the spell would normally be cast.

AI Spell Perversion Table

d6 Perversion Effect

1. Target flips polarity: heals become harm, harm becomes healing equal to original effect.
2. Spell applies to caster instead of target. If already self-target, apply to closest creature.
3. Scale distortion: some change in all of the numerical aspects of the spell, ideally in a slightly nonsensical way. For example, affects half a creature, duration of every other round, extends in rays within an area.
4. Semantic drift: spell uses a wrong concept, ideally somewhat associated. Fire → bright light. Visual illusion → smell illusion. Telekinesis → unpredictable gravity tug.
5. Crash: spell fizzles for one round, then auto-fires in nearest future combat. Caster has no control over target.
6. Data poisoning: spell works normally, but caster gains false memory of an alternate use. Next time this spell is cast (real or AI), roll 1d2: 1 = works; 2 = nonsensical variant that does nothing but produce confusing sensory output.

Optional modifier: a perverted spell always has a visible “artifacting” tell such as glitching runes, echoing sound, or stuttering light.

Reviewers Row ⤴

Getting in Over my head and going Under

by Markus M

For the first time since I started my blog, I will have a month with no new posts. This has a natural explanation: all of my RPG attention has been sucked up by experimental sci-fi megagame Over/Under, a game unlike any I have ever played (though I have heard it compared to EVE Online, Space Station 13, and MUDs, neither of which I have experience with). Rather than explain the rules, I encourage you to read Sam Sorensen's blogpost, but suffice it to say: the mechanical rules of the game are only a miniscule part of my experience. Being a mere denizen (as opposed to a faction boss), I have close to zero interaction with the wargame layer, but that does not mean I am powerless. With information and diplomacy being key parts of the game, interacting with other players may be just as important as interacting with the game.

The investment in characters has also led to impressive feats of roleplaying, with entirely player-directed events having massive reverberating effects on the whole game, including some having to come to terms that the game is not what they were expecting, and others having their first experiences of bleed. It was clear from the start that this game was an experiment, and it gets ever clearer every day. However, the team running the game (led by Sam Sorensen and Sean McCoy) are continually adapting to the needs of the player-base as they become apparent - the most recent addition being more out of character channels and a larger moderation team.

From talking to other players, it is also clear that we are having very different play experiences, but due to the importance of secrecy, we cannot really talk about them in full. I am greatly looking forward to the end of the game, when we will all be able to safely spill the beans without compromising our factions and schemes. The game has already inspired great blog posts, and I am sure there will be many more coming down the line.

Playing With Your Food: A review of Gormand's Larder

by Taylor B.

Background

A cursed ogre lives in an ancient forest and is cooking occult dishes to try to break his own curse, Sadly, the nearby village is on the menu.

Gormand's Larder is an experimental system agnostic adventure by the most know-her-when-you-see-her artist in the TTRPG scene, Evlyn Moreau. The zine is presented as "a horror story about curses, meat, and animal cruelty" with one important conceit: the information is presented almost entirely through illustration. You get a teensy bit of lore and a brief artist's statement, but for the most part all you've got to work with here are a few area names and Evlyn's willowy, fantastical art.

I was drawn to this instantly. Evlyn's work is already wonderful, and a zine where her art really gets to speak sounded like a dream. My first thought went to Kevin Lucbert's La traversée, a similarly textless book about a sailor on a strange river. I loved the experience of reading that, the struggle of wringing narrative from its stark illustrations, the drowning feeling as its grotesque imagery washed over me. Will Gormand's Larder stir my soul? Let's find out.

What's inside?

A cursed forest (9 areas + rules for going off the trail) and the titular larder (6 rooms + one ogre). Each area has a name, a large illustration, and two d6 tables to fill them out a bit. Atmospherically these zones range from relatively grounded (an empty village, a crossroads) to wonderful and strange (a meat tree, a painted cavern). The two major locations differ tonally as well - the forest teems with mysterious wildlife, handmade implements, and occasional nightmares; the larder proper delves into body horror, curses, and mutation. A few factions - dryads and burrowing rat people - are implied with unclear goals. My favorite inclusion is a player's map at the end that comes with a selection of bespoke markers, presumably to cut out and place as the dungeon is explored.

Funnily enough, in the midst of all this I feel the actual Gormand fades into the background, mainly because there are no explicit rules for running into him or placing him in the dungeon. You get his lore, the contents of his pockets, and the twisted shit he's experimenting with in his fuckass haunted meat lab, but I think without any notion of where he is in the dungeon I keep... forgetting to think about him. Without any other direction, I'd probably roll a d6 and place him in the corresponding room larder room to start things off.

The d6 tables are wonderfully vague. Sometimes the entries appear to be literal sights within the forest, others might be curses to plague the party. Does the skull with worms in each eye socket mean anything? Does it have power or ritual significance? What do I do with it as a referee? Who knows!

Evlyn's art is forced to pull a lot of weight without text to back it up, and she nails it. Everything from little frogs to skinless statuary overflows with personality. It's not just fun to look at - when I see all of this, I want to put it in my game. I want to share this with my friends and figure out together why it's important.

An important note: I'm looking at the recently released expanded edition. Evlyn initially put out this zine in 2015 with only the larder included. The current edition has her revisiting the setting ten years later and adding in the forest section. In the decade that's passed, her life and perspective have changed significantly. How do these two areas, made so far apart, gel with each other?

Personally, if the author's note hadn't mentioned it, I don't think I would have been able to tell they were made at different times. The forest feels cohesive with the dungeon, if less horrific. Gun to my head I might say the illustrations in the forest have a dignity to them that the larder lacks. Evlyn says she was trying to be "a bit edgy" with the body horror in the larder, and I think I feel that (certainly not in a bad way). The newer pieces come across as more mystical, like something you might see from a distance and then never again.

How would I run it?

Well, isn't that the question. How do you run a picture book? Evlyn lightly suggests using it to prep your own dungeon (boring!), but says she prefers to run it very improvisationally, asking questions about the art to her players and building up the world through their answers. With this method, she points out that the world resists clarity. By refusing to set answers in stone, the mysteries you create at the table may never be solved. I LOVE this!!

In some ways, Gormand's Larder feels written in the spirit of an oral folk tale. It's a work that wants to shift in the telling, leave conspicuous blanks, drop a horrific detail and move on quickly with a wink. But how easy is this in practice? As an example, I'll take the first room of the larder (the foyer) and walk through how I might run it. I'll assume I'm using Cairn to play this, as its light weight makes it an easy framework to improvise within.

The main illustration speaks for itself. A room carved from cavern wall, densely packed with signs of life: a firepit with warm coals, split-log seats, spilled beer. Trophies and baskets line the walls. Two quick dice rolls give me double sixes, so I can add in that mysterious glowing egg and strange coins. Are these treasures? Traps? A crucial aspect of the textless presentation is that the adventure can't explicitly assign malicious intent to anything. Violence can be heavily implied, but ultimately, no matter how grotesque or evil something looks, it's still up to the viewer to decide its desire. My gut says to put the egg in the firepit, nestled in the coals but unburning (it's magic I guess, and probably benign), and stick the coins in the big pair of shoes on the bottom left (currency for some kind of occult syndicate, probably).

That's one room down without much trouble, but what happens next? What if the players experiment with the egg or the coins? What if they want to know what it means? I'm a big fan of going with my gut and just winging answers in the moment, but certainly this is also an invitation to collaborate. I might ask players flavor questions (how does it smell in here? what creature was that pelt pulled from?) or even mechanical ones (what spell is carved into the egg? what organization accepts these coins?). I might pass my printout around the table and give everyone a chance to look, or I might shove it at one person and ask for their particular interpretation.

If I were feeling saucy, I'd run this GM-less and give everyone equal weight in fleshing out the world. If I were feeling really saucy, I'd give everyone a few room printouts and ask them to cut-and-paste from the d6 tables as desired, then run the dungeon that they helped build. The possibilities are enticing. The whole adventure is a vibrant toolbox that begs to be played with.

Flavor Packet: 1d6 Motherly Curses

When I review something, I always 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. Included in this expanded edition is the Gormand's enigmatic mother. We don't know much about her except that she cursed her son for stealing her recipe book (icon behavior btw). I'd like to flesh her out with some other curses she might hit you with if you piss her off. In the spirit of the adventure, I've doodled each entry. Enjoy!

Final Thoughts

I rate Gormand's Larder 🔥🍖👻 out of ten. Good shit. At the time of this writing, it's on sale for half-off with print copies in the pipeline. You can purchase it here.

Columnists Colonnade ⤴

Three-Sentence Theory: Certainty Parity

by Rowan H.

Generally, the referee and the players should have a similar degree of certainty about the outcome of characters' actions. If the referee is certain about the outcome of an action, then the players should have the opportunity to gather plenty of information that telegraphs that outcome. If the players cannot obtain information about a course of action's likely outcome, then the referee should randomize the outcome.

Opinion Oubliette ⤴

The oubliette is empty this month!