Tag / RPGs

by Moreau Vazh

Advancement and the Twisted Saints of West Somerset

I have of late been trying to navigate a path between three somewhat incompatible pressures in my gaming life: my group’s desire to play a fantasy sandbox, the knowledge that while the broader TTRPG hobby offers a number of easily accessible styles compatible with that mode of play I don’t get on with most of them, and the fact that I have been playing RPGs for a long time and have my own habits when it comes to building worlds, preparing sessions, and running games.

One of those habits is a preference for setting games where I live. Writing what you know may be a cliché, but basing things in your local area is a good excuse to immerse yourself in local history, a reliable source of the small details that make fictional worlds feel lived-in, and a generally enjoyable process in its own right. You get to twist your immediate environment, and your players get to see familiar places filtered through that distortion.

My current campaign is set in West Somerset. It began in an Elizabethan frame as a rejoinder to a game I ran last year, but in-world events led the group back into an alternate history in which I placed my take on Keep on the Borderlands. I had intended to finish that adventure and return to the earlier period, but the group have settled into this version of the setting and so I have decided to let it run, pushing them out from Taunton towards the Exmoor littoral.

Given that the campaign now seems likely to linger in this space, I have found myself wanting a little more mechanical infrastructure and, in particular, a clearer sense of how characters change over time. For reasons I will unpack below, this has led me towards a series of “advancement paths” inspired by Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints associated with this part of the country.

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by Moreau Vazh

Field Report: The Ink that Bleeds


Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Weird History, Occultism, Criticism, and RPGs. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.

VIBE:

A brief and attractively produced zine that claims to explain immersive journaling games but reads more like the notes of someone lost deep within their own creative process. Its ideas about creativity, the unconscious, and emotional immersion are intriguing but rarely clarified. Rather than offering concrete recommendations or clear explanations, the author wanders between eerie candour and spiritual exegesis, leaving the reader to puzzle out both the method and its appeal.

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by Moreau Vazh

Field Report: AmberZine, Issue 1

Field Report is an infrequent series tracing physical zines that move in the same circles as this blog: Folk Horror, Forteana, Weird History, and Occultism. It takes the place of my earlier Zine Corner series. The rest of the series can be found here.

VIBE:

Long out of print and born in the pre-PDF era, the AmberZines represent a path less travelled in RPG publishing. Rather than offering new rules or optional mechanics, they functioned as an early experiment in documenting play itself. A platform for gamers to reinterpret canon, chronicle their campaigns, and treat the act of play as the primary text.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Borderlands, Unsettled

I am currently running a hacked Cairn campaign set in the Tudor period and my group recently decided to step off the edge of the map, forcing me to come up with a load of new material at quite short notice.

The campaign is set in Elizabethan West Somerset and the idea behind the campaign was to produce a game that was about moving through social hierarchies and obligations in much the same way as modern OSR games are about movement through space and land. The group became ensnared in a pushing match between an ultra-Protestant faction working out of the town of Taunton and a large Catholic family who remained loyal to the Crown after the ascent of Elizabeth to the throne. Hoping to provoke a reaction from the Catholics, the ‘Good Folk’ of Taunton bank-rolled a group of Protestant wizards who named themselves the Red Hand of Dunster and set about waging economic warfare on the Catholic family’s estate.

The characters wandered into the middle of all this and wound up dealing with the wizards resulting in the discovery of a magical portal, which had been used to summon monsters. Rather than closing the portal as I had been expecting, the players spent a couple of sessions prodding it before finally deciding to build themselves a set of diving helmets and cross the portal’s event horizon despite my having no plans as to what might have been on the other side.

I would have liked to just drop my group into an existing Cairn module but I struggle with modern OSR adventures as they are often whimsical in tone and heavily-procedural in play. Having had a good deal of success with dropping Ravenloft into the opening salvo of my campaign, I decided to repeat the experiment with another classic TSR-era module: Gary Gygax’s The Keep on the Borderlands.

This is a piece about how I relate to published materials and how I approached adapting one of the most storied (and problematic) D&D modules of all time.

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by Moreau Vazh

Maps made of People

Over Christmas, I listened to an episode of Thomas Manuel’s Yes Indie’d podcast in which the YouTuber Quinns remarked that dungeons function as a kind of lingua franca within the roleplaying hobby. Not because they are universal, but because they remain one of the few shared points of reference in a space increasingly fragmented into specialised silos.

Most people enter the hobby through Dungeons & Dragons, and they carry with them the ideological traces of that experience. These traces are not so much mechanical preferences as habits of attention: assumptions about what play is meant to look like, what a character is for, and where meaning is expected to arise. Even games that define themselves in opposition to D&D often betray its influence through the shape of their reaction.

One such trace is the assumption that adventures and campaigns are best expressed geographically. Across mainstream D&D, the OSR, and older trad games like Call of Cthulhu, play is commonly framed as a sequence of events unfolding in specific places. Worlds are mapped, locations are keyed, and significance accrues by moving through space.

This is not the only way roleplaying worlds can be imagined. Long before the rise of storygames and their emphasis on social conflict, there was a traditional roleplaying supplement that attempted to build a city out of relationships rather than locations. This essay is about Chicago by Night, a 1993 Vampire: The Masquerade setting book, and the particular vision of a game-world it tried (and failed) to articulate and support.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Year that Ends in 25

We reach the end of the year with both this blog and its author at something of a crossroads.

I started this blog after spending over a decade away from the TTRPG hobby. The idea was that it would do two specific jobs in support of my regular game.

First, it would serve as an idea funnel. I would read widely, watch films, strip-mine them for ideas, and feed those ideas back into play. The blog was intended to function as a kind of creative stomach, using criticism to digest new material.

Second, it would act as a venue for re-appraisal. Returning to the hobby as a grown adult with decades behind the GM’s screen, I knew I was not a blank slate. Absorbing new ideas meant making space by re-examining old assumptions, old methods, and familiar narratives about the hobby’s past. It took time to find the right balance, but I am pleased with how much ground I cleared by engaging with memory, modern writing about RPG history, and a series-based approach to breaking down old tropes and habits.

The problem with this method was that, while it helped me dismantle old assumptions, it assumed a degree of exchange with the wider hobby that never really materialised. I kept breaking things down, clearing space, and looking outward, only to find that the dominant ideas circulating online offered little in the way of challenge or inspiration. That stalled exchange eventually led me to stop listening, stop looking, stop buying, and finally stop reviewing.

Meanwhile, the tools that were meant to be instrumental to my engagement with games have become joys in their own right. What began as the industrialised strip-mining of Lovecraft’s fiction has turned into one of my proudest critical achievements, while writing about Thomas Ligotti and cinematic folk horror has become something I actively look forward to.

This leaves me in an odd position. The question facing this blog is not whether I still care about games, but what role, if any, they should play in a space that now feels more at home with criticism than with hobbyist engagement.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Resistance Table that Became a World

When I returned to TTRPGs, I tried to approach running games with an open mind: I assumed that I knew nothing, I took in new ideas, and I ran systems that I would never have run back in the old days. However, as time passed and fresh experiences slowly accumulated, I realised that there was some method to my old madness and that the routines and techniques I had built back in the day can yield surprising results when implemented with one eye on some of the more modern thinking about games.

This lesson stepped into sharp contrast when I was running my recent Call of Cthulhu game. The group kept committing crimes and I found myself needing to answer very basic questions: what are the chances that someone actually starts an investigation? And if they do, what are the odds they track the investigators down? Later, after a disastrous encounter with some cultists, the characters tried to obtain better equipment and I needed to work out how difficult it would be to acquire military-grade guns and medical-grade narcotics.

Nothing in Call of Cthulhu really addresses this beyond luck rolls and NPC skills, but muscle memory fades slowly and I instinctively reached for the Resistance Table that used to appear in every BRP game: compare an active value to a passive value, read the percentage chance of success, and move on. Two quick checks let me resolve those questions without resorting to pure vibes or GM fiat.

The odd part is that I don’t generally use the Resistance Table. In fact, its use is now so unfashionable that Chaosium removed it entirely from 7th edition. So where did that long-dormant instinct come from?

Weeks later, browsing my old Nephilim supplements gave me the answer: The original French edition had an entire lattice of procedural tools welded into BRP. These were rules that shaped play in quiet, interesting ways but were never picked up by Chaosium or anyone downstream.

This post is about that forgotten set of procedures: what they were trying to achieve, how they shaped play, and why they may be worth a second look.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Criticism and TTRPGs

After some amount of reflection, I have decided to stop reviewing RPGs.

At least for the foreseeable future.

There are a number of motivators behind this decision but the first and foremost is that I am burned out to the point where the sense of fatigue has begun to filter over into other areas. Having finished the first section of my Call of Cthulhu campaign, my recent series of reviews, and a smaller game that I was running alongside these two things, I have reached the point where I am struggling to find the motivation to come up with another game to run. I sit down to write and nothing comes. I sit down to read a rulebook and I find myself either looking at my phone or drifting back to a novel. It’s a strange kind of exhaustion—like the light’s still on but the room’s empty.

Clearly, I need a break and I am to blame for this… I took on too much, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and I allowed my priorities to become inverted: I returned to writing in public as an excuse to engage with stuff that would then filter back down to my game and I allowed myself to get into a position where I was running stuff in order to write about it and no good was ever going to come of that as the tail should never wag the dog.

While I am obviously fatigued and in need of a break, this fatigue has given me reason to pause and re-examine what it is that I am doing with this blog and, in truth, I am no longer sure that reviewing RPG stuff is a good use of my time. For want of a more emotionally nuanced phrase, it is too difficult.

This is a post about those difficulties, how they impacted me and why I suspect they may be impacting other people too.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Something is Wrong Here

The Lantern’s Sweep follows the season’s turn, gathering reviews that trace a feeling and follow a thread. This autumn, the light falls on horror: small-press RPGs, misfit adventures, and strange things that gather at the edge of play. The rest of the series can be found here.

Successfully crowdfunded in October 2018, Something is Wrong Here has refused to vanish the way many experimental games do. Copies still circulate, ghostlike, across the UK and beyond; mine arrived in a plain envelope as if aware of what it contained. Designed and laid out by Kira Magrann, with moody illustrations by Elissa Leach, the game persists quietly and stubbornly through itch and word of mouth.

Something Is Wrong Here is a darkly surreal story game inspired by the work of David Lynch, in which players inhabit damaged archetypes moving through strange, liminal Americana. It unfolds through brief, emotionally charged scenes broken by ritual interludes, each one eroding the thin boundary between character and self. The game merges the narrative tools of tabletop play with the exposure of structured improvisation, deliberately inviting emotional bleed. Players follow a guided sequence of rising feelings, uncanny interruptions, and encounters with their worst selves, arriving finally at a confrontation that feels less like closure and more like judgment.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Thousand Year Old Vampire

The Lantern’s Sweep follows the season’s turn, gathering reviews that trace a feeling and follow a thread. This autumn, the light falls on horror: small-press RPGs, misfit adventures, and strange things that gather at the edge of play. The rest of the series can be found here.

Thousand Year Old Vampire, designed, illustrated, and laid out by Tim Hutchings, was first released digitally in 2019 before being crowdfunded into a handsome hardback that is now in its sixth printing. The game won many awards upon its initial release and has been written about in venues that do not generally write about TTRPGs, particularly literary ones designed to be played alone as part of a guided journaling project.

The game begins by asking you to create a vampire and embed it somewhere in the past. You can play a Roman legionary with a stone-mason’s training who was assigned to the construction of Hadrian’s Wall or a female noblewoman who has assumed her dead brother’s identity and taken up his commission as a Musketeer. The premise is generous: you can deposite your vampire anywhere in history, so long as their life can be broken into memories that will eventually erode as your vampire ages and moves from place to place and life to life.

Most reactions to the game seem to have taken their cues from the game’s commercial pitch: They tell us that this is a game about loneliness and the sweet misery of discarding one’s memories as the years roll by. While I would certainly recognise that isolation and memory are the game’s central themes, I felt neither loneliness nor sadness while playing this game… What I felt was a sense of stress and frustration at my inability to cope with the administrative demands the game placed upon me. After drowning in journals, index cards, and text files, I finally built a system to cope with the mechanics, but this only raised new doubts. Was I playing correctly? Was the difficulty part of the design, or a failure of my attention? The game’s promised melancholy never appeared; what emerged instead was a pattern of brief clarity followed by disarray, a continual search for meaning that felt uncomfortably like life itself.

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by Moreau Vazh

Strahd on the Moors

This blog is meant to track my creative process, though it mostly records what distracts me from it. Recently, returning to my Tudor Cairn campaign, I found myself thinking about how that game only swam into focus when I began to take inspiration from the landscape that surrounds me.

The OSR loves its forests. Cairn inherits its literary metaphysics from Dolmenwood, where the deeper you go into the woods, the stranger things become. It is a lovely idea, but it never sat right with me. When I picture deep dark forests, I do not see mystery. I see fairy tales by way of garden-centre statuary: porcelain pixies squatting between the recycling bin and a gently rusting barbecue.

In England, forests are not intimidating places… They are small, well managed, and full of signage. You pass through them on your way to a pub lunch. They belong to the realm of car parks and bird hides, not the uncanny. Vaesen: Britain and Ireland made a fascinating mistake when they grafted Scandinavian unease onto terrain that hums with different frequencies. The world outside my window is not a land of deep woods and trolls but of fog, peat, and ruins. Its fears seep sideways rather than looming overhead.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss

The Lantern’s Sweep follows the season’s turn, gathering reviews that trace a feeling and follow a thread. This autumn, the light falls on horror: small-press RPGs, misfit adventures, and strange things that gather at the edge of play. The rest of the series can be found here.

Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss is a folk horror sandbox adventure, written in an OSR-compatible style. The adventure was originally published in December 2021 as part of an advent calendar-inspired funding structure whereby new sections of the adventure were released daily in the run-up to Christmas, with earlier buyers receiving the material at a significantly lower price. The adventure generally retails for £12.50, though I picked it up at 50% off as part of a promotion.

Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss was written by Chris Bissette, who also appears to have done all of the artwork and layout. The product you download from itch is somewhat intimidating in that it includes over thirty different files with text, images, and atmospheric music. However, the heart of the adventure is a 91-page core document: a folk horror sandbox set in an isolated valley where a celestial event gave rise to a sinister cult. Decades later, the cult’s plans begin to come to fruition as the faithful gather to celebrate the liberation of The One Who Waits.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Brindlewood Bay

The Lantern’s Sweep follows the season’s turn, gathering reviews that trace a feeling and follow a thread. This autumn, the light falls on horror: small-press RPGs, misfit adventures, and strange things that gather at the edge of play. The rest of the series can be found here.

Brindlewood Bay was first published in 2020 as a 40-page fanzine. Its success led to a 2022 crowdfunding campaign that expanded the game into a 168-page hardback—lavishly produced by indie standards and still widely available, both in physical form and as a PDF. The game was written by Jason Cordova, with additional material by Calvin Johns, Petra Volkhausen, and Steffie de Vaan. It was laid out by Harald Eckmüller, edited by David LaFreniere, and features moody, delicate artwork by Cecilia Ferri.

Described by the publisher as a “dark and cozy mystery game,” Brindlewood Bay follows a group of older women whose shared obsession with murder mysteries draws them into solving real crimes in their New England town. While this setup evokes the tone of Golden Age detective fiction and television procedurals like Murder, She Wrote, the game is built for long-term play. As the campaign unfolds, the murders deepen into something stranger… A pattern emerges, symbols recur, and the line between detection and creation begins to blur.

How are the murders connected to the growing signs of an occult conspiracy in the town? That’s not something the Keeper is meant to answer alone. Brindlewood Bay is a game in which truths are discovered, not revealed… where meaning accrues through shared invention, uncertainty, and thematic ritual. Structure holds the shape. The players step inside. The mystery opens. Something begins to speak.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Ritual of Dismissal

Last week, a prominent YouTuber named Quinns released a video about the ENNIE award-winning RPG Triangle Agency. As someone who a) doesn’t regularly watch Quinns’ videos and b) has not read Triangle Agency, I am in no position to speculate on the soundness of Quinns’ remarks but I was dismayed by the reaction to the video.

In an excellent post attempting to make sense of what happened, Thomas Manuel suggests that substantial discussion of Quinns’ post may have taken place behind closed doors but the most common online reaction appears to have been existential bafflement at the idea that one might proffer an opinion that does not end in an invitation to spend money.

Obviously, there is a (much) longer post to be written about how consumerism and para-sociality have hollowed out online discourse but I was more unsettled by the well-worn objection that always seems to surface when someone tries to start a conversation about reviewing RPGs:

“You Can’t Review a Game without Playing It”

This claim may or may not be true, but it’s rarely made in good faith—and almost never when the review ends in praise. It surfaces whether the critic played the game or not, and the reasons why such reviews might be unacceptable are seldom explained. It isn’t a position. It’s a ritual of dismissal: re-invoked to ward off criticism that serves a purpose beyond purchase or praise. In form and function, it closely resembles the No True Scotsman fallacy.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Hollow Valley Method

There are already too many RPG books.

Shelves groan with unused settings, unplayed supplements, and dice that have never been rolled. Never known mercy. Never tasted fear.

We buy them for inspiration. For hope. For the sense of possibility that comes with a new world in shrinkwrap. And then we leave them unread. Waiting to be forgotten.

This is not unusual. The hobby rewards acquisition over use. Hype over engagement. It is easier to buy a world than to run one. Easier to read a setting than to let it unravel at the table. What we accumulate is not just product, but a backlog of potential.

This piece offers a way to use that backlog. Not as it was intended, but as something to be misread. Rather than struggle to approach settings by the paths their designers intended, what if we explored them from the outside? What if we played characters who do not belong—who wield no power, decode no lore, fulfil no canonical arcs… and yet pass through the world anyway?

The Hollow Valley Method is a way of playing where the protagonists are not chosen ones, trained operatives, or destined heroes. They are small people from a small place. People with their own rituals, their own gods, and no real understanding of the wider world.

The twist is that the world isn’t theirs. It’s someone else’s. One you already have on your shelf: Ravenloft, Planescape, Glorantha. You take that dense, dust-covered lore and treat it not as canon to master, but as a world to misread. The characters enter it as outsiders. They interpret it through their own logic. They survive not through strength, but through stubbornness, kindness, mistrust… and the occasional lucky pie.

It’s a style of play that resists consumerism, power creep, and lore worship. It says: you don’t have to know everything to walk through a world. You just have to keep walking… and hope that the world doesn’t notice you.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Darkened Hill & Dale

Darkened Hill & Dale is a collection of seven system-agnostic adventures published as part of a series named This Blighted Isle. It successfully crowd-funded in March 2024 and is currently available in both physical and digital editions. The digital edition is available from DriveThruRPG as well as from the Patchwork Fez online shop, where you can also purchase physical copies. The digital edition of the collection (£15) includes seven adventures and some hand-outs. The physical version of the collection comes in both hardback (£40) and paperback editions (£30) and both come with a separate set of physical hand-outs. Additional copies of the physical hand-outs as well as postcards featuring the book’s internal artwork can also be purchased. The book is 152 pages long.

Written by Sarah Cole, Darkened Hill & Dale features cover art by Camilla Sicignano; portraiture and artwork for “Fool’s Fire” by Jazmin Presidente; linocuts by Mat Pringle; and the remaining scenario art by RainbowPhilosopher/Sarah, with minor adjustments by Cole. The seven stand-alone adventures are all investigation-based with strong horror and paranormal themes. Though billed as rural in character, most are set in and around small to medium-sized English towns where players contend with garden centres selling unusual plants, church bells made from unearthly metals, temporal loops, and sinister rituals.

Darkened Hill & Dale shows that horror doesn’t need fog-drenched streets or mythic backwaters. By rooting its seven scenarios in the textures of small-town England, it proves the local can be enough… strange, unsettling, and radical in its own right.

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by Moreau Vazh

Between the Map and the Marsh

When I returned to gaming, I wanted to start fresh. The habits and preferences I had built over decades came with me, roots thick and gnarled, carrying the scent of rooms and landscapes I thought I’d left behind.

I needed new methods… I wanted to engage with modern writing and let its forms reshape me at the table, but it felt like walking in someone else’s shoes. Every experiment pulled at those old roots, exposing something I hadn’t expected: To find one’s voice as a GM isn’t about applying techniques you can absorb by aping the dialect of DriveThruRPG’s gold-selling modules. It’s about discovering a language you didn’t know you had been speaking… a language I needed to learn before I could understand what I’d been trying to say all along.

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by Moreau Vazh

ENNIE Award for Best Adventure – Short Form (Round Up and Reflections)

When the 2025 ENNIE shortlists were released a couple of weeks ago, I decided to purchase, read, and (where possible) run every single adventure to have been nominated for the Best Adventure – Short form award. I also did this in 2024 culminating in a post where I shared my thoughts not only on which adventures deserved to win, but also on the ENNIEs themselves as an institution.

Here are this year’s reviews:

You’re welcome to explore the reviews above, but this post is really about bringing the project to a close… sharing some thoughts on what this year’s shortlist says about the state of the hobby, and presenting my favourite of the five adventures.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Sweet Revenge for Perils & Princesses

NB: This piece is part of a series of reviews based upon the shortlist for the 2025 Ennies Award for Best Adventure – Short Form. For the rest of the series, please look here.

Sweet Revenge is a short sandbox-style campaign for Perils & Princesses. Published by Outrider Creative, it successfully crowd-funded in Summer 2024 and was made available for sale in early 2025. It is available in digital form from both Itch and DriveThruRPG for $12 and is also available in physical format from Indie Press Revolution. I purchased the game from DriveThruRPG and received the module in both pages and spreads formats as well as maps, character sheets (both fillable and printable), and a full range of item cards. The PDF is 128 pages-long.

Sweet Revenge is written by Destiny Howell with illustrations and layout from Ryan Lynch and editing by Sean Foer. The adventure revolves around a group of heroic princesses who find themselves drawn to the mysterious Tanglewood. In the middle of Tanglewood lies a town known as Deerhollow which has been cursed by a wicked witch causing all of its citizens to slowly transform into pieces of confectionary. In order to break the curse, the princesses must unravel the mystery of what caused the curse by helping the local townspeople and then venture out into the Tanglewood where they will be forced to joust with evil knights, explore the Rat King’s lair, and navigate a treacherous fairy ball before confronting the witch in her sinister castle.

Sweet Revenge is a generous, clear-eyed, and emotionally intelligent adventure that succeeds on its own terms. It’s a model of accessible design that is well-written, beautifully illustrated, and structured with care. This makes it an ideal introduction to fantasy roleplaying for younger players and new GMs. While its tone and imagery sit far outside my personal tastes, I found myself consistently admiring its restraint, coherence, and quiet ambition. This is not an adventure that speaks to me directly, but it speaks clearly… and sometimes that’s more important.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: The Mall – Remastered for Liminal Horror

NB: This piece is part of a series of reviews based upon the shortlist for the 2025 Ennies Award for Best Adventure – Short Form. For the rest of the series, please look here.

The Mall – Remastered is an adventure for Liminal Horror. The adventure successfully crowd-funded in early 2021 but was re-printed in 2024 with a few minor alterations. It is currently available in both physical and digital formats. People who already own a digital copy of this adventure will be able to re-download the digital version and those who are new to The Mall will be able to download it for $10 though it is currently available to download for free.

The Mall – Remastered has writing, layout, and design by Goblin Archives, cover art by Zach Hazard Vaupen, internal illustrations by Garbage Goat and Trevor Henderson, and additional cartography by Luke Saunders. The adventure is set in a 1990s shopping mall which is currently in the throes of a paranormal convulsion: Trapped inside the mall as desperate shoppers turn feral and infected bodies coalesce into hideous malformed creatures, the group must survive long enough to find a way out.

The Mall – Remastered is a poised and quietly complex piece of OSR design: It is clear in its structure, suggestive in its detail, and striking in its restraint. However, its recognition in 2024 speaks more to the gravity of prior attention than to any renewed breakthrough. First released in 2021 and gently revised since, its return feels less like a new arrival than a familiar face glimpsed again. In a field crowded with new voices, this kind of selection suggests not malice, but drift… a hobby that sometimes confuses memory for momentum, and nostalgia for newness.

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