September 2026 - Sneak Peeks

Welcome! The seasons are changing, the harvest is coming, and our lives are suffuse with community and creativity. This issue, our featured reviews both cover different flavors of early access: Kati took a look at the solo horror hellscape of Residue, while Taylor bit into the greed-poisoned nightmare of Universel Riche. Whatever your taste, we hope you'll leave satisfied. Enjoy!

Roll to Carouse!

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

Projects Pavilion ⤴

Horse Divorce by Oleander Garden
A "schizoanalytic" RPG that gave me a headache just from the preview. Feels like a document you should only read on TempleOS. Play involves creating a sort-of state machine for your character's mind and moving through it in response to GM stimulus. Probably this would kill me but also after playing Oleander Garden's other stuff I'd follow her into the dark. - Taylor B.

Solo September Games Bundle by Ten Acre Games
The concept of Solo September hit players this year thanks to Solo RPG List and RPG Trader coming together to provide a large bundle of 100+ solo games this month for only $20. The bundle is hosted on RPG Trader, a relatively new marketplace for creators and players to buy and sell TTRPGs. The revenue from the bundle is said to be shared equally between all participating creators, so it's a great opportunity to expand your solo library and support a ton of creators at once. - Kati B.

Shelfie #001 by Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
A new project that should be on your digital shelf is Shelfie, a project which interviews folks about their RPG collection. It's a brief and insightful exchange done with a single picture of the RPG shelf along with questions like which is their favorite and which ones inspired them to play games differently. Shelfie is a lovely endeavor that reminds us the hobby is more than just digital. - Kati B.

Last month, I posted about some Appendix N. jam entries I found compellingly imperfect. Below, I've shouted out the entries I feel are truly exceptional! - Taylor B.

• The Passing of Tengliu by Davino, Porter, Rupp, and Polly
  A game about deserters of a civil war seeking absolution in a war-torn hermitage under oppressive, supernatural silence. Comes with an insane limb-based combat system that reminds me a lot of Toribash. Gorgeously written and illustrated with some of the most haunting atmosphere I've read in ages.
• Kith & Kindling by barse
  A depthcrawl for Cairn set inside a world-spanning forest, grown as kindling to fuel a faulty starship. Lots of delicious angles for pressure here: the delirious forest, a homesick stellar being whose presence compels you to worship, the impending threat of the starship's launch burning the world to nothing... it whips. I adore the mix of Area X-style eco-horror with sublime, dreamy sci-fi imagery.
• Rays of Beleth's Bolide by offworldbogil
  An unhinged road trip adventure about a group of teens driving a demon cat back home to Hell. Underneath the campy 80s VHS energy, the writing is full characterful situations that feel easy to embody at the table. It all comes together with an insane sense of momentum. Impressive work from a consonant salad title and great use of Louis Wain's cat art.

Blog Bazaar ⤴

Big Map Progression by Store Brand Danger
A post about the author's daunting (but not impossible!) first steps towards the creation of their "dream game": a modern fantasy megadungeon for Violence. The post is very "behind the curtain", discussing not just the informational design of the dungeon but also the act of writing it, including a pivot from digital to physical media for the keys. Exciting work! - Taylor B.

Indonesian TTRPG Blogwagon: An Indonesian Magic System by Afraid of Encounters
I played some Kala Mandala over the summer so I'm into these South East Asian ttrpg theories and settings right now. Systematizing a "magic system" of the area feels like a real interesting challenge - John B.

the blackness behind your eyes by Glass Ziggurat
A series of facts about the hypnagogic city of Diomira, inspired by Calvino's invisible cities. Fuzzy, vibrant, unsettling. Feels like what I actually wanted out of Lacuna's Blue City. Killer stuff. - Taylor B.

Reviewers Row ⤴

Playtesting Survival in Residue

by Kati B.

This month, I acquired early access to Residue, a solo survival rpg, being created by Weird Place. I backed it on Kickstarer back in March and got to take a sneak peek at it through tabletopia. It's a brutal survival game, taking inspiration from games like NORCO and indie publishers like Apocalypse Party. Residue has quite a few components and may appear more board game than RPG at first, but don't let that fool you. It features a hexmap with creature, item, and npc decks along with a player board for managing dice and resources/consumables. Various tokens are used to mark the hex map with different types of people and places you discover as you explore. The goal for players is to survive and reach a specific hex that's randomly placed during setup. Survival means keeping your Hit Points up and your Strain, a kind of stress indicator, down. Players can live if their Strain is above their Strain Threshold but die when it's 3 times that. It represents pushing your character way beyond their means without the ability to recover. I'll give a very brief overview of how the game functions, which I'm sure will have some tweaks as it's finalized for production. The number of physical pieces and various mechanics may sound overwhelming, but the gameplay loop becomes clear after a tutorial. It's very fun to dive into and has just enough crunch for me to be thinking about a run I did days later. I can see solo players chewing on it for quite a while. If you're curious about more of it, you can read through the Quickstart to get a better sense of play beyond what this review provides.

Character cards are chosen at start with specific starter equipment and resources. This might be an item card or a higher die in a resource. Inventory dice (Food, Water, Environmental, and Corruption) step down when they fail a use and if a player doesn't have the required resource for an interaction, they suffer a specific Condition. To mitigate such things, there is a Luck die, and there is the ability to add more Strain to re-roll one or more die in your dice pool.

Difficulty is set by a die where all inventory items start at a certain step. Normal difficulty uses a d10 while Brutal uses a d4. My first playthrough was on a normal run, and I died after traveling through 4 hexes. To be fair, I was learning the game and realized I needed to lean a lot more on racking up Strain. It's better to gain Strain, or use your Luck, than to lose an Inventory die and risk suffering a condition. Each hex I visited had multiple steps to its encounter, and it quickly clicked for me how Regions can be a great way for third party content. When you travel to a blank hex, you roll for a Region and based on which part of the Region you enter, the other 5 become adjacent to the hex you entered. It's quite a clever way to generate the map procedurally.

The course of a Turn, or Day, looks something like this:

1. Roll your Endurance Pool. These are all the actions you can take before needing a rest, and they are a full polyhedral set of dice, minus the d20. They're used for skill checks, attacks, and defense. It's important to choose your dice carefully as it's not about meeting a certain number to get a result but rather the numbers map to a Success Array that determines the number of successes you achieve. The key thing is only 1 dice can be used for each action.
2. Travel. Moving between hexes means reading the encounter and making choices about navigating it. This often involves using up resources and actions.
3. Rest. This is where you recover HP and reroll your dice pool. It does require taking 1 Strain to recover all your dice, and you have to roll all your inventory dice to see if they suffer Wear & Tear aka risk them stepping down or losing them entirely. On a 3+, the dice remains. On the flip side, if you score the max on a die, you can step up the dice.

With so much riding on dice, there's a lot of inherent tension in the game. The excitement and joy of getting an inventory die to step up to a higher one comes with such relief. There's a ton of decision making and strategy when it comes to what dice to use for an action, what dice to roll, and when to lean on the Strain/Luck to help you get out of a tricky situation.

The team spent a ton of time setting up a website with a tutorial and a couple regions for players to explore. There was a lot of effort into ensuring the materials translated well for a digital early access playtest. They've been very welcoming of feedback and quick to answer questions. I'm very excited for the final version and can't wait to see where this ends up.

Phantasmagoric Desire - A Play-Informed Review of Universel Riche

by Taylor B.

nsfw warning: this review contains images with light nudity. Please direct any complaints or concerns to professordungeonmaster@yahoo.com.

Background

The free sky was claimed
by the flickering, monumental visages
of those who'd bought the world.

Universel Riche is a 32-page card-based RPG by Aaron King (words) and Alex Degen (art). It presents itself as a game about "shitty people in a bastard world" warped to debauchery by the gravity of extreme wealth. Players kill, fuck, and scheme under the omnipresent gaze of the Faces in the Sky, using and discarding the people around them in their vicious climb to power. It's sinful. It's hedonistic. It's also unfinished - this is an ashcan release, only covering character creation and basic rules. The GM advice (NPC creation, faction rules, campaign structure) is coming later.

Normally you would never catch me buying an Early Access Heartbreaker, but the vibes are, unfortunately, hypnotic. I wasn't familiar with Aaron's work prior to reading, but I love Alex's art - I first encountered him through his contributions to Anthology of the Killer, then was cemented as a fan through his comic Junior Detective Files (he posted the whole thing for free ages ago and I'd link it buuut that was back on Twitter lol 🤐). As soon as I saw he was working on a TTRPG project I started barking like a rabid dog and had a session scheduled before I'd even bought the game. Now I have the burden of reconstructing the blur of play into digestible slurry. Universel Riche talks a big talk, but did the vibes land in action? Let's find out.

What's Inside?

Indescribable excess. The world is locked in a glitzy prison of unstoppable desire. The people are ruled (not led) by the Faces in the Sky - massive floating visages of unclear origin and immense power. In place of judiciary process, the Faces send hooded death squads to kill one or both sides of any legal dispute according to their whims. Everything is under their control. Everything. Kissing is only legal while the Faces' eyes are closed; sex is only legal while they're open. From the text:

So we fucked each other to exhaustion in the voyeuristic light that pulsed from their pupils, our lips hovering inches apart, waiting for the eyelid darkness.

The two authors feel completely in sync here. Aaron's prose builds out the atmosphere through bold interstitials and mechanical flavor; Alex's art brings it all to life in densely packed black-and-white glamour. The vibes are high drama, noir-ish, and sometimes stupid (complimentary). Everyone is masked, everyone is scheming, everyone is magic, everyone is hot. It's all very Jojo's Bizarre Adventure in the Hollywood Golden Age.

God, what a treat. My first read had me drowning in inspiration. Each of the (many) art pieces contains so much detail that you can point a finger in five different places and have enough material for a session. Even as an ashcan, even with no GM advice, this release is playable because it succeeds in the only thing an RPG text really needs to do: it paints the world inside your head and makes you want to see it move.

Mechanically, characters are built by drawing six playing cards and assigning them to four stats (Lux, Hot, Nepotism, Hustle) and two traits (Demeanor and Nature). Each stat corresponds to a suit in a standard deck, and you get a bonus if the card you assign matches that suit. The traits represent how you act (Demeanor) and who you are inside (Nature), but don't affect gameplay.

Assigning a face card to one of your stats puts you in a sort of Hard Mode where enemies attack unprovoked and you're constantly dragged into the spotlight. There's a subtle push to not be a wimp about this - assigning a powerful card to your traits instead gives you the most embarrassing options available, ranging from "Befogged" and "Shallow" all the way up to "Cringe." I like this push, but I feel like this game wants Hard Mode to just be the default. Is anyone playing this to avoid the glam and slink around in the background?? Boring. I had plenty of players use face cards so it didn't end up mattering, but I probably would've run a high-energy, socially aggressive game no matter what. It just feels like what the whole thing is going for.

This setup does excel at getting you in the Greedmaxxing headspace. My players all came ready to be unhinged weirdos from the jump. There aren't any "normal" rolls - your stats and traits all angle you somewhere special no matter where they land. It's just fun. I had one player roll high Nepotism and high Hustle, then left his Lux and Hot abysmal and blew some solid cards on the traits "Cringe" and "Doomed" in order to create an absolute mutant.

You also get spells at chargen which... I'm cold on. There are four spell schools (money, sex, lineage, and cars), each corresponds to one of your stats and has three available spells. The closer your stat card matches the relevant suit, the more spells from that school you get. The spells themselves are appropriately batty, ranging from brainwashing people into a pyramid scheme to officiating a spontaneous wedding.

At least in the current release, I think this is the game's weakest point. My big issue is how limited the spell pool feels - I'd prefer more available options and fewer starting spells. In practice, my players ended up with both a lot of total spells and a lot of overlap in what spells they knew. It's a bunch of nonsense to deal with from the start and feels weirdly generic; the flavor feels less special when everyone can do almost everything. Individually each spell has the juice, but it's hard for them to shine without the breathing room of a larger pool. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Triangle Agency, which starts you off with a small, specialized amount of nonsense, then feeds you a steady stream of new nonsense over the course of a campaign. In general, this is the space where I most wanted the game to go crazy and where I ended up feeling the least satisfied.

Session Prep

Ok, but what do you do?? As mentioned, there's no prep advice, sample NPCs, or even clear session goals. All you really get are a few short Bastionland-y principles that sum up to "world's fucked... unless?" Can you run this on vibes alone? Well, yes. But also the mechanics point you pretty far in the right direction.

Universel Riche is an overwhelmingly social game. Your basic "verbs" are: fight, bully, seduce, infiltrate, and revel. I think the game wants you to run through a stream of high-energy bit NPCs while moving toward your nebulous goal. My fatal flaw is that I'm dungeon-pilled, so I reckoned I just needed to take all the usual bullshit I stock dungeons with (traps, monsters, environmental hazards) and smush them into human shapes.

And there's a really good reference for this! In Troika's excellent starter adventure, the Blancmange & Thistle, players ascend an opulent hotel in order to rub elbows with elites at a massive rooftop party. The structure is basic (go up a number of floors on the elevator or stairs, leech from high society on the roof), but the encounters are inspired. A giant gas man gets on the elevator and sucks out all the breathable air (#same), a sleeping wizard warps the stairs into bottomless pits through her dreams, a strange little man won't let you move forward until you buy something from his shitty shop. Very NPC-as-trap type shit. The setting's a reasonable fit for Riche to boot. Reasonable enough that I thought it'd be fun to write my own "cover version" for this session!

In theory, I wanted to take the B&T's genteel gonzo approach and replace it with Universel Riche's brand of razzle dazzle. In practice, I just converted it from British English to American English. There's a lot more guns and drugs and annoying weirdos.

My main struggle was balancing the numbers. Riche uses a card-based resolution - for any move, you play a card from your hand against a set DC (CC?) and add your relevant stat. If your card matches the stat's suit, you draw and play the top card off the deck (repeating for all following matches). You can add bonuses via reality warping "impositions", which involve playing a card into a sort of inventory slot to immediately use as weapon, armor, or tool. I generally like the casino-y feel of this. It's tactile in play and fun to roll the bones if you have a bad card but good suit.

Thing is, it's very swingy. Your starting stats are anywhere from 1 to 11, and your playable cards range from 1 to 13. I couldn't get a feel for what a "reasonable" DC looked like at all. The book recommends 8 plus an enemy's stat as a standard difficulty, but... I had no clue how to stat enemies!! I was flying blind the whole way through prep and even after playing I don't think I could offer any solid statting advice.

Here's the deal: I speak dice. Me and dice are hanging out all the time. I can set a DC in any d20 system and have a solid idea of what we're in for. I do not speak cards. I'm not on their level. We're not close like that.

What I'm saying is, we only failed one roll and it was on purpose. I was calling for checks pretty aggressively and with an average DC of 15, but everyone was either comfortably holding onto high value cards, had stats high enough to cheese it, or, rarely, rolled the bones into a success. Even on the one failure, my feel for the numbers was skewed. My player was surrounded at gunpoint and taking 15 damage (a number that felt huge to me) and... he tanked it easily with a single imposition. I felt completely clueless lmao.

There are two things that could have helped me here: hand manipulation, and some kind of DC scale chart. From talking with Aaron, I know the former is already going to be in the full game. Enemies will have Balatro-y, minigame-y card mechanics. Ban your highest value card, play Go Fish, make players pass cards to the right, that kind of thing. It's exactly what we were hoping for while debriefing after the session and I'm stoked it's in the pipeline. For the latter though, I got no clue. I think I need a list of guys from like, level 1 Goon to level 100 Mob Boss. Anything to say "when you want a guy to be THIS strong, pick a number from this range."

All told though, we had a blast. Here's what my final prep looked like:

• The hotel "dungeon" (full text over on my blog)
• vibes playlist
• a few minutes of dicking around on Tabletop Simulator to figure out how to use it. It's an ok way to run this digitally, just remember to manually add two jokers to your deck of cards. For a free option with less pizazz, I like playingcards.io.

Flavor Packet: Thirteen Local Sickos

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. In this case, I wanted to come ready with a lot of freaks, so. I wrote a bunch of freaks. I ended up pulling from two of these in play (the 4 and 8 results), which means there are eleven fully untested freaks for you to deploy. Enjoy!

1. (Ace) Lunes Kendricks. 5 Nepotism, 9 Hustle. Wet tears, silk scarves, callouses. "My husband would've loved you." His heart still beats in her purse.
2. Mister Mazotti. 6 Lux. 9 Nepotism. 5 Hustle. Il Capitano mask, tight suit, bad jokes. Just assumes he's welcome in whatever your business is. Nearby guests are actors from his father here to protect his ego.
3. Ekko Park. 9 Lux, 2 Nepotism. TV for a head, broadcast's fuzzy. Spies on everyone, for everyone. Everything you say is the exact code phrase she was expecting.
4. "Last Call"-brand party sphere. 4 Lux, 9 Hot, 10 Hustle. Bigass inflate-o-ball, full of drunks. Schlurps up anyone it rolls over. Boasts a full bar and a mean negroni.
5. Galaneia. 13 Hot. Encased in marble, towed by servants, one eye peeks through a crack. Distant, observant, and a bashful gossip. Her untouchability intoxicates the hoi polloi.
6. Shawn and Peggy. 4 all stats. Married, exhausted, deep in luck debt. Always one step away from a rake, a banana peel, a falling anvil. "Shawnie wanted a jet ski. We thought it wouldn't hurt. But a little bad luck goes a long way."
7. Val and Vitale, saints. 10 Lux, 10 Hot. Cold stares, fresh cigs. Wine drips fresh from their heels, lapped by hangers-on. Any move that affects one affects both.
8. Benny Jesserit (BJ). 4 Hot, 12 Nepotism. Mute, two vapes. Blows fat fuckin clouds and shrugs sometimes. His armful of concubines find prophecy in the smoke.
9. Sobriety Vampires led by Virgo Katz. 8 Hot. 8 Hustle. Buncha draculas with stupid AA coins. Suck the alchohol from your blood and backwash the rest into your veins. Know they're buzzkills and revel in it.
10. (Jack) Reuben Senior Junior. 9 Lux, 5 Nepotism. Everybody knows Reuben's in exile and mulling on a few grudges. Wait, holy shit, is that a bomb? Oh my God, it is. He's got a whole ass bomb. Holy shit.
11. (Queen) Nurses Spektor and Ronnie. 5 Lux. 9 Hustle. +12 Damage. All gauze, no skin. Stolen uniforms and specialty knifes. Believe beauty lies skin deep and aim to find it within you.
12. (King) John Semones. 12 Lux, 9 Hot, 10 Hustle. Beaucoup rings, fur cape, burlap mask with one eyehole. Used to beat people with a tire iron and steal their wallets til he went viral on camera; now he's nouveau riche. Still keeps the iron in his pocket, and it's feeling itchy. |
13. (Joker) Some player's parent. Nepotism 13 against their child, 4 otherwise. Impossibly embarrassing. Always teetering on the edge of a terrible business deal. The sharks around you can smell weakness from a mile out.

Final Thoughts

I rate Universel Riche one endless line of frowning ancestors out of ten. Good shit. Gonna be an instabuy once the full release drops. For now, the ashcan is up on itch for $5. All proceeds go straight to the artist to pay for more art. That alone is worth your consideration. Give it a look here.