Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Public Access v Toon

This matchup shouldn't exist. A multi-month horror campaign about young adults encountering horrible things in rural New Mexico versus a Warner Brothers cartoon short that runs until everyone falls down. The bracket did this on purpose and I'm not apologizing for it.

The radar charts are less a comparison than a Rorschach test. What you see in this matchup says something about your table. Public Access spikes on four axes: GM Scaffolding, Session Shape, Narrative Authority, and World Presence. Toon spikes on one. That spike is Tone, all the way to the right pole, pure play with no ambiguity, and it's a stronger argument than the numbers suggest.

Public Access

The writers room mystery system is still the engine everything else runs on. No canonical solution before play starts, everyone at the table building the answer together from what the players notice and pursue. The Keeper is the most supported in this bracket: phase structure, move guidance, adventure support, location details, side characters, and moments to bring them to life. All of it working together in a way that's genuinely different from traditional RPG tools and arguably more effective.

Character creation happens during a scripted Session One with the whole table in on the action. Prompts set up reincorporation that pays off across months of play.

A Public Access session feels like hanging out at night with your best friends telling ghost stories and spooking each other. Deep Lake arrives with texture and mystery. The gaps in the setting are invitations, not absences.

Eight months at the table delivered nearly as much payoff as a six-year AD&D campaign. That compression isn't an accident. It's what the phase structure, the mystery system, and the reincorporation prompts are all building toward, session by session, until it lands.

Toon

Toon is a zany animated chaos train. That's the whole game. Character creation is done in minutes, the first schtick lands inside ten, and nobody dies: they fall down and come back shortly after.

The Narrator leans on fond memories of Saturday morning mayhem more than the book's tools. Creating backdrops is easy because you don't need much plot to run a really fun game. The Acme catalog shows up when a Toon orders something and becomes part of the world. That's the collaborative worldbuilding system, and it's perfect.

Don't expect character growth. The same Toons can show up in multiple games, carrying their mallets and their spray cans and their absolutely unworkable master plans, unchanged and undaunted. That's not a design limitation. It's a design commitment.

I keep thinking about introducing my grandson to this one. A game that reaches across generations, lands without explanation, and turns a new player into a cartoon character inside of ten minutes is doing something most games can't. The mallet always works. The plan never does. Everyone falls down eventually.

The honest case for the loser

Toon's Tone spike is a genuine achievement. Pure play, no ambiguity, contagious fun that builds into something memorable at the table. The accessibility argument is real: walk right in, immediately funny, no investment required. A game that anyone can play and everyone enjoys is not a small thing. And "you can run any kind of game you want as long as it's a zany animated chaos train" is a design philosophy I have enormous affection for. At the right table, at the right moment, nothing else in this bracket touches it. There are so many adventures I want to run in Toon.

The pick

Public Access, and the Rorschach test lands differently depending on who's reading it. A table that wants one perfect evening of cartoon mayhem sees Toon's spike and knows immediately. A table that wants months of ghost stories and accumulated dread sees Public Access's four spikes and already knows. Both readings are correct. Mine is the second one. The ghost stories, the Licorice Beastie, the writers room, Deep Lake: all of it compounding across months of play into something that earns its payoff. Toon is the better game for one perfect evening. Public Access is the better game for everything that follows.

The mystery system is why Public Access wins this. It's also the design lineage I'm working in with Beneath Ahknoor, my own Carved from Brindlewood megadungeon. If that engine running through a dungeon sounds interesting, it's at mountainfoot.itch.io/beneath-ahknoor.

That's my pick. Who'd you have sent through? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Semi-Final - OSE vs Under the Floorboards

Two well-tooled games with almost nothing else in common. OSE is a campaign chassis for years of dungeon delving. Under the Floorboards is an after-school special where getting eaten by the cat is technically on the table.

Both games scored identically on GM Scaffolding: lightweight but well-supported, purposeful without being prescriptive. That's where the overlap ends.

This article also marks the first appearance of RPG Description Radar Charts. I was looking for a good way to describe how a game feels in a consistent way. I was inspired by flavor-wheel tasting journals. 

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OSE

OSE hands you tools and procedures that will sustain a campaign well, backed by one of the strongest ecosystems in OSR gaming. Character creation takes ten to fifteen minutes and you're playing immediately. The scope can feel broad for a new player, but OSE is still the game I'd use to introduce someone to the D&D family. It avoids the system creep that weighs down other entries in that lineage.

The GM and the dice build the world here. The book hands you a blank slate by default, with richly realized settings available if you reach into the ecosystem. You could bend OSE toward pulp adventure or light science fantasy without much trouble. Horror, mystery, and supers would require more work than the system wants to do.

A good OSE session feels like a sword and sorcery story: exciting, purposeful, with room for whimsy or darkness depending on what the table brings. It's a fantasy game, and it does that one thing across a very long campaign.

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Under the Floorboards

Under the Floorboards has almost no friction. Two simple mechanics, three well-defined phases, and a setting that players inhabit immediately without explanation. You could hand it to someone who has never played an RPG and be in the scouting phase inside of fifteen minutes. The book hands you richly detailed locations: description, possible goals, obstacles, hazards, and complications layered in. You can play straight from the page on day one.

The scouting phase is where the table builds the world together: naming the location, placing obstacles, describing hazards. That shared authorship front-loads investment in a way most dungeon games skip entirely. Then the expedition tests what they built against what they actually find. The gap between the two is where the game lives.

The register is warm without being toothless. Getting eaten by the cat is on the table. For the most part, though, it's small creatures trying to make do in a big world, and that specific emotional frequency is something OSE can't replicate.

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The honest case for the loser

Under the Floorboards is the more immediately accessible game in this matchup, and the more fully realized one out of the box. The radar chart shows it: World Presence at 4 against OSE's 2 means UtF hands you a complete, inhabitable world before you've written a single note. The scouting phase creates investment that OSE never tries to manufacture. And the emotional register, warm, specific, quietly tense, is something that compounds across a short campaign in ways that stay with a table. UtF might get back to my table first. That's not nothing.

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The pick

OSE, and it comes down to Session Shape and scope. Under the Floorboards peaks at a short campaign. OSE peaks at years of play, a living ecosystem, and a community writing adventures for it every month. In a semi-final, the game that can carry a table across a decade deserves the nod over the game that produces one perfect kind of session. The little gems that a little less scaffolding unveils are still waiting. So is the study with the cat. OSE gets there first.

That's my pick. Who'd you have sent through? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - A look back before the Final Four

 For the last bit I've been comparing some of my favorite games across 4 broad groupings. I've shared memories and insights. I've whittled it down to four.  I'll start the next phase of posts on Monday, April 20th. Before I get to that I wanted to share some other thoughts.

About the Sweet Sixteen

To refresh your memory, here's my original bracket with my results (and links so you can go read up on any matchups you missed).

OSR

• (1) OSE v (4) ICRPG
• (2) AD&D 1e v (3) Shadowdark
• Lane final: OSE v AD&D

NSR

• (1) Cairn v (4) Under the Floorboards
• (2) Mothership v (3) Mausritter
• Lane final: Under the Floorboards v Mausritter

Narrative

• (1) Public Access v (4) Kintsugi
• (2) Trophy Gold v (3) Teeth
• Lane final: Public Access v Teeth

Others

• (1) Crash Pandas v (4) Kingdom
• (2) Toon v (3) FATE Accelerated
• Lane final: Kingdom v Toon

Some of these surprised me when I sat down to write about them. I'm sure some of them surprised you too. I'd love to hear what you think I got wrong and why, and game that you'd have put into your own bracket.
I also want to write a bit more about some thoughts that I've had.  Which of these do you want to read about?

1. Kingdom as Faction Infrastructure - Kingdom is a no-randomizer game about communities navigating crossroads and crises. But what if the community isn't the main campaign? Running Kingdom as the off-stage engine for factions in Arden Vul or Stars Without Number might be the most interesting thing I took away from this whole bracket. I want to find out what the Voidsong Collective does when nobody's watching.

2.  What For a Game Reveals About It - When I wrote a room for Under the Floorboards, I built a toybox: description, complications, obstacles, changes over time, goals. When I wrote magic items for Mausritter, I built fuel. The game told me what it needed. That difference, UtF is about the place and Mausritter is about what you find there, turns out to be a useful lens for thinking about any game you're designing for. 
3.  The Mystery Mechanism Is More Portable Than It Looks  -The Carved from Brindlewood writers room doesn't care whether the mystery is a murder, a haunting, or a dungeon. No canonical solution before play starts, everyone building the answer from what they notice: that structure works wherever you put it. The More Than a Mystery jam proved it. Beneath Ahknoor is built on it. I want to think out loud about where else it might go.
4. The Reddit Bracket vs My Bracket - If you polled the right communities, Shadowdark beats AD&D, Cairn beats Under the Floorboards, and FATE Accelerated beats Toon. My bracket diverges from that result in at least three first-round matchups. That gap isn't random. It says something about the difference between the discourse and the table, and I think it's worth naming.
5. The Honest Case for the Loser as a Format - Every post in the Sweet Sixteen includes a section that argues against the pick. That's not throat-clearing: it's the section that makes the pick land. A recommendation that doesn't acknowledge what it's leaving behind isn't worth much. 

 About Beneath Ahknoor

Working on the next release turned into a much bigger undertaking than I'd imagined.

I reworked how the Above Ground phase acts as a reflection of the change and loss that delving brings. I added a full retainer system that contributes to both tension and reputation. I built the Reckoning Move, a mechanic for reckoning with a level at the end of a delve cycle. And I sharpened the level through-line into four connected elements: the Saga, Entry and Re-entry Questions, Unlocking Questions, and the Reckoning Move. That line flows across multiple sessions, giving the table time to build out each level and what it costs the Adventurers.

I also ended up writing four new levels instead of the two I'd planned.

There's some polishing left, a few loose ends to tie off, and a substantial editing pass ahead. The rules now run to 70 letter-sized pages and around 25,000 words.

Two playtest games are lined up. One is with a group of four OSR and narrative gaming veterans from my table. The other is with a mostly 5e group who have spent time at my table as well. I expect to learn different things from each group, and I'm looking forward to finding out which of my assumptions were wrong.

I'd hoped to have the 0.6 release ready by the end of the month, but that's not happening. My revised plan is to release it in the summer.

About my other projects

The Awful Weekend On-Call

A couple of years ago, I wrote a solo RPG based on a terrible on-call shift as an IT worker. It was an act of catharsis.  Imagine my joy at finding a write-up on Reddit!

"Just finished a play of The Awful On-Call Weekend. What a blast. The game concludes either with you unemployed, in prison, or back at work on Monday. I was one circle away from getting arrested so I flipped the narrative and quit. But to end the game I got my character arrested for speeding. It was super fun, engaging, and just crazy watching my errors pile up one after another."

It doesn't get much better than finding something like that written about one of your creations. 

It's Worse Than That!

My latest volume of It's Worse Than That! helps GMs practice their improv skills with a series of scenes built around the Devil's Bargain mechanic. You don't have to play Forged in the Dark or Rooted in Trophy games to use this volume though. I wrote a post on itch about how the same kind of improv is used in OSR games.
Right now, I'm selling both volumes for $4 ($1 off of the combined cover price). If you're looking to strengthen your GMing chops, this is a good place to start.

Some things on the horizon

I'll be writing more about the Stars Without Number and Arden Vul campaigns as they get off the ground, and you can count on reports from both Beneath Ahknoor playtests. Beyond that, there are a few projects I'm itching to spend time on.

The monsters I wrote for Patreon are good, but they could be better organized and more useful at the table. A rewrite is overdue. I also have a short-form Carved from Brindlewood game that's been brewing in the back of my mind for a while, and a handful of solo games that are playable but not yet in publishable shape.

And then there's the rabbit game. It's a horror game about rabbits, and it's nearly done with design. I'm not ready to say much more than that, except that this one is good.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - AD&D 1e v OSE

 

OSR Lane Final

This one feels like a heavyweight championship all on its own. It's also a rematch, forty-odd years in the making, of the AD&D vs BECMI argument that split the gaming world in the early eighties. I was on the AD&D side then. I looked down my nose at Basic D&D because I already played Advanced D&D. The irony of where I've landed is not lost on me.

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AD&D 1e

AD&D 1e has a mini-game for almost everything. Figuring out the right set of rules for your table has always been part of the fun. THAC0 takes a lot of heat, but Weapon Speed Modifier and weapon type versus armor class were there too. Poison types, mining rates, construction costs: more options than you could keep in your head, and a specific pleasure in finding the combination that worked for your table.

That toybox is also a relationship. Decades of memories live inside those rules. Kreega Two-men-tall, the half-ogre fighter who rampaged through my Riverton Campaign. Maine, the spoon-flinging halfling thief from Hochheim, just concluded. Those characters ran on this chassis and couldn't have existed anywhere else.

AD&D rewards the kind of player who wants to go deep. The mini-games, the subsystems, the Dragon Magazine expansions: all of it is there for the table willing to dig.

I find myself looking back at AD&D the way you look at a place you grew up. The memories are vivid and the floorplan is still in my bones. I know where everything is, even the rooms I never used.

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OSE

OSE is slim, fast, and fun. The writing is clear and well organized, which is not something Gary Gygax was ever accused of. You can run from the page without translation, find what you need without hunting, and hand the book to a new player without apology.

The design choices compound over time. Customizable thief skill advancement from Carcass Crawler is exactly the kind of thoughtful addition that shows OSE isn't just a restatement of the old game. It's a refinement.

OSE is also the common language of OSR gaming right now. When the community writes adventures and supplements, this is the chassis they're writing to. That portability means everything you run in OSE connects to a living ecosystem of material.

I'm looking forward to rewriting some of my earlier campaign material into OSE. There are little gems waiting underneath the scaffolding, and I want to find them.

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The honest case for the loser

AD&D has a special place in my heart, and I find myself looking there for ideas more often than I expected. The mini-games, the subsystems, the sheer appetite the game had for everything: none of that goes away. If you want advanced play and don't mind the scaffolding, AD&D is still the answer. And if you're having fun and not hurting anyone, you're playing the right game the right way for you. That was true in 1979 and it's true now.

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The pick

OSE, and it comes down to where I am right now. Lighter systems, higher portability, and the promise of new memories crafted with friendlier rules. AD&D gave me Kreega and Maine and forty years of table. OSE is going to give me whatever comes next. The little gems that a little less scaffolding unveils are worth finding.

That's my pick. Who'd you have sent through? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Public Access v Teeth

Narrative Lane Final

Two games that lean into horror with different approaches and excellent results. Both shine with tools for shared narrative building and rising tension. Their common heritage in Powered by the Apocalypse highlights the differences between them more clearly than any other matchup in this bracket.

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Public Access

The writers' room mystery system is still the engine everything else runs on. No canonical solution before play starts, everyone at the table building the answer together from what the players notice and pursue. That shared authorship produces investment that pre-written mysteries can't replicate.

What I've learned writing It's Worse Than That! material for Carved from Brindlewood games is what the system is asking of its Keepers. A Night Move scene needs dread, escalating personal cost, and a worst case that's worse than the player imagined. The following scene is from the IWTT! Winter 2025 volume:

The Latchkeys are sneaking around an empty fairground a couple of hours before dawn. Maia watches a skeletal figure rise from the bubbling depths of the Fried HoHo stand's industrial fryer as a cloud of rancid grease fogs the air. Its hollow eyes burn with cold hunger. The player wants to knock the awning supports out and trap Mr. Bones in the kitchen. The Keeper asks what happens if she fails. "I'll be trapped with the skeleton, swimming in hot grease." It's worse than that: Mr. Bones is going to kill her and turn her into a deep-fried minion.

That escalation structure is what Public Access runs on. And the mystery solving mechanism turns out to apply well beyond traditional mysteries. The More Than a Mystery jam explores that range, and so does Beneath Ahknoor, my own CfB megadungeon. The system is more portable than it looks.

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Teeth

The Devil's Bargain is the heart of what Teeth does differently. Where Public Access asks what happens if you fail, Teeth asks what you're willing to offer and who gets implicated by the offer. This scene is from the IWTT! Spring 2026 volume:

Something went into the drainage ditch at the edge of the village and hasn't come out. The smell suggests it has been using it for some time. Reverend Osswick Pale watches from his doorstep with an expression that suggests he knows more than he intends to say. Grusham Fell drops into the ditch and asks for a Devil's Bargain. What do you offer? How does the offer change if the creature has already taken someone this week? What offer implicates the Reverend rather than escalating the immediate danger?

The Clocks in Night of the Hogmen are beautifully drawn. The Vale is a wonderful sandbox. The moral weight that accumulates through Devil's Bargains produces a different quality of consequence than the CfB mystery engine. There's a time and a place for both of these games.

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The honest case for the loser

Teeth is an amazing game that I need to play more of. The hogmen, the burning church, the flooding countryside: that energy is specific and irreplaceable. The Vale is a rich sandbox with room for a long campaign, and the Devil's Bargain mechanism does things the CfB mystery engine doesn't try to do. The reader who thinks Teeth deserved to go further isn't wrong. Right now, at my table, it's not the pick.

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The pick

Public Access, and it comes down to the writers' room. The shared creation of the mystery, the way the mechanism applies to different kinds of problems, the dread that accumulates in a specific place and time: all of it keeps pulling me back. The Licorice Beastie still limps. Mr. Bones is still in the fryer. That's what Public Access does, and it's enough to win.

That's my pick. Who'd you have sent through? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Under the Floorboards vs Mausritter

 

NSR Lane Final

Who doesn't want to play a tiny creature hunting for matches in a study, trying not to get caught by the family cat? Under the Floorboards puts you right there. Mausritter puts you in the same basic situation and hands you a magic sword.

Both games knocked out higher seeds to get here. Under the Floorboards sent Cairn home in round one. Mausritter edged out Mothership. Two different takes on tiny adventures in a big world, and two very different ideas about what the table needs to make that work.

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Under the Floorboards

The scouting phase is still the thing that sets this game apart from everything else in its lane. You build a mental map before you go in. Then the space surprises you. The gap between the plan and the reality is where the game lives, and no other dungeon game I know manufactures that gap as reliably.

The cozy register keeps doing work. Small stakes produce real tension because the creatures living them are so vulnerable. A flooded cellar is a catastrophe. A cat in the hallway is a boss encounter.

Writing a supplement for UtF taught me what the game is asking of its designers. A room for UtF needs description, complications, obstacles, changes over time, and goals. It's a toybox for the Narrator, layered and alive. The game is fundamentally about the place.

I'd go back to this game with new tools now. Years of running narrative games have given me a sharper eye for complication and escalation. I know things about pacing and reincorporation that I didn't know in 2019. The study with the cat and the missing matches is still waiting. I want another run at it.

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Mausritter

The faction system remains the game's quiet infrastructure. Factions pursue their own agendas, create pressure the players didn't generate, and make the world feel like it exists between sessions. That's harder to build than it looks.

The magic system compounds across play in ways that keep sessions surprising. Spells as items, items as spells, recharging as a decision point: it rewards players who pay attention to what they're carrying.

Writing two collections of magic items (here and here) for Mausritter taught me what that game is asking of its designers. Mausritter needed fuel: objects that spark adventure, that players pick up and carry and use and argue about. The game is fundamentally about what you find. Put enough interesting things in the world and the fiction generates itself.

A crew of adventurer-mice outfitting themselves for the cats of Zyan (hat tip to Ben Laurence) is the campaign I keep turning over in my head. The faction system and the magic items and the sheer weight of a strange city at that scale: it's all there waiting.

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The honest case for the loser

Mausritter is the better game for a campaign. The faction tooling, the magic system, the way the world accumulates pressure between sessions: all of it compounds over time in ways UtF isn't built for. If you want to run six months of mouse adventures with real stakes and a living world, Mausritter is the answer. The cats of Zyan aren't going anywhere.

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The pick

Under the Floorboards, and the designer lens tipped it. What UtF asks of its Narrators and its supplement writers is a deeper engagement with space and place than Mausritter requires. That depth produces something I keep wanting to return to and push harder. Whichever of these I play next, I'll borrow tools from the other. But the study is calling, and the cat is somewhere in the hallway, and I want to find out what changed while we were planning.

That's my pick. Who got robbed? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Kingdom v Toon - Others Lane Final

 

No one dies, they just fall down. No Dice, No Masters. An industrial-sized box of ACME mayhem against a thinking game about a society's attempt to survive.

Both games knocked out stronger seeds to get here. Kingdom sent Crash Pandas home. Toon edged out FATE Accelerated on a banana peel. Two games with almost nothing in common except that they both belong in this bracket.

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Toon

Toon is about choosing the funniest thing you can do in the moment and running as hard and fast as you can in that direction. That's the whole game. The rules exist to keep the momentum up and get out of the way of the chaos.

The contagion is real. New players catch it fast. The zaniness is self-explaining in a way that most RPGs aren't, and the table energy it generates builds into something genuinely memorable. 

The new edition is reason enough to revisit it. A game this fun deserves a fresh audience, and it holds up.

I keep thinking about introducing my grandson to this one. It won't be his first RPG, but I think he'll latch right onto it. A game that can reach across generations and land without explanation is doing something most games can't.

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Kingdom

Kingdom is about exploring questions and communities. The conflict isn't between PCs and monsters or NPCs. It's between ideas. That's a harder game to sell in a sentence, and a more rewarding one to play across a campaign.

The no-randomizer design keeps coming back to me. When there's no dice to hide behind, what the characters say and do carries all the weight. The clarity that produces is unlike anything else in this bracket.

We're wrapping up a Kingdom campaign now, and I'm already half-tempted to bolt it into the faction play in my Arden Vul and Stars Without Number campaigns. The Voidsong Collective is out there somewhere, navigating its own crossroads and crises, and Kingdom is the perfect engine to find out what happens to them off stage.

That possibility, Kingdom as living infrastructure for games that are already running, is the most exciting design idea I've taken away from this tournament.

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The honest case for the loser

Kingdom is going to see more play at my table than this pick suggests, probably as the backbone of faction play in my SWN campaign. The way scenes accumulate into crossroads and crises, the weight that comes from removing randomizers, the clarity about what actually matters: all of it bleeds into every game that comes after it. If your table likes to ask hard questions about what a community is and what it costs to keep one together, Kingdom is the answer. This pick is about what works at my table right now. At another table, the result might be different.

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The pick

Toon, and it came down to my grandson. A game that reaches across generations, lands without explanation, and turns a new player into a cartoon character inside of ten minutes is doing something Kingdom can't touch. Kingdom is the more sophisticated game. Toon is the more joyful one. Right now, joy wins.

I'd love to hear what works at your table. Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - AD&D v Shadowdark

 

AD&D 1e is the great-grandfather of everything else in the sweet sixteen: crunchy, sprawling, and alive in ways that modern players often miss entirely.

Shadowdark is modern D&D trimmed down, lightened up, and given a grimy old-school wash. It really hums at the table.

The oldest game in the bracket against the newest. One built the toybox. The other figured out how to ship it lighter.

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AD&D 1e

The system tries to do everything, and what it didn't cover out of the box arrived month after month in Dragon Magazine. It was an extraordinary time to start gaming. The fiddly bits accumulated into something you could grab and play with, keeping the parts that mattered to your table and leaving the rest in the book. Weapons versus armor class might never have come up at your table. Domain level play might have been the whole point. The game was different everywhere it landed.

The ease with which AD&D absorbed science fantasy still impresses me. Gamma World crossovers, technology rolls, figuring out how a laser pistol worked in a world of swords and spells. The game had an appetite for everything and the chassis to hold it.

Domain play remains one of the great unrealized promises of modern D&D. A high-level fighter attracting followers, building a castle, developing the land around it: that's a whole second game waiting inside the first one.

Wilheim the Paladin fell from grace consorting with the wrong companions. His god came to him in a dream and gave him a quest: take the foul cloak to the sea's teeth three days east, wash it in the water, burn it with wood carried from the ruined shrine. Bring one companion pure in heart and true. Wilheim chose Wulfgang, the guard dog. He fought goblins and a hagborn and barnacle-crusted skeletons rising from the waves. He burned the cloak. He heard his god's voice again that night. He rode home. That quest ran on the AD&D chassis and couldn't have happened anywhere else.

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Shadowdark

The roll to cast mechanic isn't unique to Shadowdark, but the implementation is good and the pressure it creates is real. Spellcasters make decisions differently when the spell might not come.

The old-school wink is there without being overwhelming. Play a goblin spellcaster. Feel the lethality accumulate. The OSR pressure is on, but delivered in a way a modern player can understand without feeling ambushed by save-versus-die.

That restraint is the game's real achievement. It knows what it is and doesn't oversell it.

Our opening sessions of Shadowdark went through the entire set of pre-gens in a couple of sessions. The lethality arrived fast and without apology. We started over with new characters and kept going. That willingness to start over, and the lightness that makes it feel fine rather than punishing, is Shadowdark working exactly as intended.

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The honest case for the loser

Shadowdark does something AD&D genuinely can't: it gets a modern player to the table fast, running old-school pressure, without a week of rules reading first. The pre-gen massacre in our opening sessions felt earned rather than arbitrary, and that's a harder trick to pull off than it looks. If you want to introduce someone to what OSR play actually feels like without handing them three hardcovers and a stack of Dragon magazines, Shadowdark is the answer.

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The pick

AD&D 1e, and thirty years of memories made it inevitable. Shadowdark is a better on-ramp. AD&D is a better destination. The toybox, the domain play, the appetite for everything from dungeon crawls to planar quests to Gamma World crossovers: all of it adds up to a game that shaped everything that came after it, including Shadowdark. Wilheim and Wulfgang walked to the sea's teeth and back on this chassis. That's not nothing. That's everything.

New zine: It's Worse Than That! (Devil's Bargains)

The second volume of my GM training zine series is out today.

It's Worse Than That! (Devil's Bargains) focuses on a single technique: how to put a real, costly choice in front of your players and mean it. Devil's bargains show up across a lot of game traditions, from Forged in the Dark to Trophy to old school play. The moment when a player does something unexpected and you need a consequence that fits the fiction, costs something real, and gives you material to build on later: that's the move this zine is built to help you practice.

Dougal on the Trophy Discord saw the sampler and put it well: "Devil's bargains can be tough when you're not feeling inspired and somehow tough to explain too." Worked examples, practice scenarios, and a clear framework for exactly those moments.

Vol 2 is $3. If you already own Vol 1 (Night Moves), you pay $2. Both volumes together are $4 as a bundle.

https://mountainfoot.itch.io/its-worse-than-that-spring-2026
https://itch.io/s/183782/its-worse-than-that-is-better-in-a-bundle

Thanks for reading.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Mothership v Mausritter

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG about surviving a universe that is indifferent at best and actively hostile at worst. Build tension carefully, because once the first domino falls, the rest follow faster and faster.

Mausritter is fantasy adventure writ small, mouse-sized. You play a band of intrepid mice facing off against everything a much bigger world throws at them.

These two games have no business being in the same bracket. Both filed under NSR, both doing something genuinely new, and almost nothing else in common.

Mothership

The Panic system is doing things no other horror RPG does as cleanly. Stress accumulates, checks get harder, and eventually characters stop being reliable. That escalation feels true to the genre in a way that hit point attrition never quite manages.

The concealed death die might be the single most unsettling mechanic I've encountered in any RPG. When a character hits zero HP, a die is rolled in secret. That's how many rounds they have left. Nobody at the table knows the number until someone reaches them to help. The tension that produces isn't artificial. It's earned.

The whole game rewards preparation and punishes overconfidence without feeling punitive. That's a harder design balance than it looks.

An android PC went ahead to confront the mind-controlling villain on a mining asteroid. Things started bad and went south quickly. The rest of the party heard an explosion and ran toward it. What they found was two androids' worth of parts scattered across a frag grenade blast radius. The concealed die had already told us everything. We just hadn't been there to read it in time.

Mausritter

The setting does real work before you ever start play. Small creatures in a large world produces a tone that shifts the stakes in interesting ways. A barn cat is a dragon. A mousetrap is a dungeon hazard with a body count. The scale changes what everything means.

The faction system is elegant in the way the best OSR tools are elegant: enough structure to generate conflict and motivation, light enough to get out of the way. Factions pursue their own agendas whether the players engage with them or not.

The magic system is the quiet star. Spells are items, items can be spells, and the recharging options create genuine decisions about risk and resource management without bogging down the fiction. It's the kind of system that makes you wish more games thought this carefully about a single subsystem.

Four brave mice went into a tunnel and met three skeletal rats. The fight was going reasonably well until a rat rolled well on damage and a mouse rolled badly on a STR save. Then there were three brave mice in the tunnel. They survived. They found a magic sword. They went on to have many more adventures. That fallen mouse mattered. The sword mattered more because of them.

The honest case for the loser

Mothership is the better game for one specific thing: sustained horror. The Panic system and the concealed death die produce a quality of dread that Mausritter isn't trying to match and couldn't if it wanted to. If your table wants a game that makes the genre feel true rather than decorative, Mothership earns that every time. It will always own October.

The pick

Mausritter. The android in the blast radius nearly changed my mind, and I want to be honest about that. Mothership does something remarkable with tension and horror mechanics. But Mausritter is going to get more sessions, more players, more moments like four mice walking into a tunnel and three walking out. The magic system, the factions, the scale: all of it compounds across a campaign in ways that keep me coming back. Mothership is the better game one month a year. Mausritter is the better game for the rest of them.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Trophy Gold v Teeth

 

Trophy Gold is a game about doomed adventurers trying to pay off their debts without destroying themselves in the process. The question isn't whether the dungeon will cost you something. It's whether what you find is worth what it takes.

Teeth is a dark comedy horror game set in a terrible corner of eighteenth century England, built on a Forged in the Dark chassis and stuffed with memorable hooks.

Two games that both lean hard into doom and consequence, arriving at completely different tones.

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Trophy Gold

Characters are lightweight even by OSR standards. There's almost nothing between the player and the fiction, which means the fiction has to do the work, and it does.

The combat system is quietly beautiful. No hit points, no war of attrition: just a repeated roll that builds pressure without grinding. Every exchange matters because the math never lets you feel safe.

The hunt token economy is the kicker. Tokens move you through the dungeon mechanically or convert to treasure to pay down your debt. That double function means every decision has stakes beyond the immediate scene. You're always choosing between momentum and survival.

Near the end of our Public Access campaign, we played a session of Trophy Gold as a game within the game: the Latchkeys sitting around a table, playing hunters in a dungeon. The mechanics were light enough that it almost disappeared. The fiction drove everything. It felt less like a rules system and more like the Latchkeys actually playing the game.

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Teeth

The Forged in the Dark heritage brings real weight to every roll. Player agency is respected, consequences are meaningful, and the dice never feel arbitrary.

But the setting is the reason to play. Eighteenth century rural England rendered as dark comedy horror produces a tone that's genuinely hard to find anywhere else. Grim and funny and horrible, sometimes in the same sentence.

The Night of the Hogmen quickstart alone is worth the price of entry. The hooks are immediate, the premise is ridiculous in the best way, and the whole thing runs with tremendous energy.

From a carriage crash in a thunderstorm to a mad dash across a flooding countryside, the PCs in Night of the Hogmen lurched from one misadventure to the next. The session ended with the party trapped in a burning church, fighting off a herd of marauding hogmen. That's Teeth in one image: catastrophe building on catastrophe, and everyone at the table grinning.

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The honest case for the loser

Trophy Gold does something Teeth genuinely can't: it gets completely out of the way. The hunt token economy and the pressure-without-attrition combat system are genuine design achievements, and the game within a game memory is one of the stranger and more satisfying things I've done at a table. If you want mechanics that disappear into the fiction, Trophy Gold is hard to beat.

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The pick

Teeth, and I want to be honest that it took some thinking, some remembering, and maybe a little dreaming to get there. Trophy Gold is a more elegant game. But Teeth is a more joyful one, and that counts for something. The hogmen, the burning church, the flooding countryside: it all adds up to a game that generates stories with a specific, ridiculous, horrible energy I keep wanting to return to. That's enough.

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A related note

Trophy Gold's & Teeth's (FitD) devil's bargain mechanic is one of the things that made them stick with me long after this matchup. That tension between what you want and what it costs is a skill at the table, not just a design feature. I've been working on a zine that isolates exactly that move and gives you ways to practice it. It's Worse Than That! Devil's Bargains is coming this weekend. Keep an eye out if that sounds useful.

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That's my pick, and I won't pretend it was easy. Who would you have chosen? Tell me in the comments.