This Week at the Foot of the Mountain (April 25, 2026)

The dungeon breathed back at us Monday night. Arden Vul has a way of doing that: you think you're making progress and then the fiction reminds you that the place has its own agenda. Thursday's Seven Sons session moved things forward in a different register, and I spent some time on Stars Without Number prep, which meant working on factions and brushing up on the rules for psionics.

That reading: I'm partway through Goblindom, a pre-release from the folks at Oddplan!, and I did a full reread of Gord Sellar's Something Tookish! in preparation for a proper review. Something Tookish! holds up beautifully on the second pass. Both reviews are coming in the next couple of weeks.

On the design side, Beneath Ahknoor's structural reorg is underway, about 10% through the text. It's invisible work until it's done, but it matters: tightening the connective tissue so the levels and the moves pull in the same direction.

The more interesting desk work this week was a Kingdom experiment, pre-work for an upcoming post on using Kingdom as faction infrastructure. The hypothesis: you can lift Kingdom's faction-play engine and run it as a standalone tool inside almost any campaign, without running Kingdom as written. The experiment mostly confirmed this. What surprised me was the depth of the result, though it came at a pretty steep cost. This isn't a direct replacement for lighter faction tools. It is great for strategic deployment. The wrinkles are worth a full post, and that's coming. But that's the kernel you can steal right now.

The Radar Chart has been getting some quiet use in the Sweet Sixteen posts, and a few readers have asked about it since the semifinals. If you've been looking at it: what shape does your current campaign make? That's a question that takes thirty seconds to think about and sometimes tells you something useful.

Speaking of the bracket: the final is Monday. Public Access against OSE. One is high-concept mystery, the other is the gold standard of old-school play. Which one do you trust with a new table? Drop the why in the comments.

Coming up: Monday is the final. Wednesday is the Something Tookish! review. After that we're into post-series territory, and I'll be shooting for a weekly-ish cadence.