Arden Vul - Dungeon World - Kicking off the Campaign

Arden Vul Session 01

Arrival in Gosterwick

Date: March 9, 2026

Party: Florian (bard), Lorez (wizard), Cedric (Fighter), Johannes (cleric), Runner (Ranger)

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The Road In

The party arrives on the old Imperial road from Thorum, the cracked stone still serviceable after centuries. The Cliff of Arden Vul is visible ahead, enormous, the carved figures of Arden and her companions rising from the plateau face, the Long Stair switching back and forth between them. The azure-tiled roof of the Keep is visible on the Ridge line above town.

A small patrol of[Knights of the Azure Shield, knights in banded mail, squires in surcoats, intercepts the party on the road and demands their business. Florian speaks for the group, presenting as a performer with an entourage. The knights direct them to check in and get licensed before proceeding.

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The Arcane Practitioners' Club

The party detours to the four-story granite tower on the edge of town that Lorez recognizes as a private club for arcane practitioners. Two guardsmen at the door admit Lorez alone to meet the proprietor, while the rest of the party waits outside. Florian plays a pointed little tune on his lute that earns a grudging apology from the door guards.

Inside, Lyssandra Astorion receives Lorez at her desk, an Archontean woman past middle age with the manner of someone assessing everything she sees. Lorez secures a six-month membership (30 gp) and purchases one potion of healing (150 gp) and a collection of books on the history of Burdock's Valley and Arden Vul (50 gp).

Campaign note: Lorez is now a member of the Arcane Practitioners' Club. Lyssandra knows Lorez's face, his budget, and where he's headed.

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The Out, Misdirection, and Guards

The party makes for the Rarities Factor in the Outs. Johannes asks a local for directions and is pointed into a cul-de-sac, whether by mistake or design is unclear. A group of city guards from the Kettles Barracks comes up behind them and blocks the exit, sizing up the group with obvious suspicion.

Johannes steps forward and identifies himself as a cleric of Heschius Ban. The guards' posture changes immediately; they stand back, offer actual directions, and let the party pass without further incident.

Campaign note: The City Guard has taken note of the party. They are not hostile, but they are watching.

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The Rarities Factor

The Rarities Factor occupies a three-story wooden building in the Outs. The ground floor is busy; Imperial goblins, Archonteans, and a handful of Thorcins working at small tables. A nattily dressed goblin approaches and opens negotiations.

The factor was founded by Wicktrimmer, an Imperial goblin and former Arden Vul adventurer who made his fortune on the Cliff. He maintains offices in Gosterwick, Newmarket, and Narcillian. The party opens a group account (minimum deposit 150 gp, rate .75%/month), receiving a letter of credit redeemable at any of the three offices.

Campaign note: The party's banking relationship is with the[Rarities Factor, the institution least connected to the Empire and most sympathetic to non-Archonteans.

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The Outs, Provisioning

Florian works the neighborhood for supplies and makes a genuine friend of Wegnar, a provisioner in the Outs who deals in dried meats, hard cheese, and biscuits. Wegnar takes a liking to him and gives fair prices.

Campaign note: Wegnar the Merchant is friendly toward the party and will remember them.

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The Falls

The party leaves Gosterwick and follows the road toward the base of the Cliff. The roar of the falls builds over the last mile until conversation requires effort. Everything is mist. The bridge at the river crossing is visible, and beyond it, straight out from the foot of the carved figure of Arden, stands a ruined tower alongside the road to the Long Stair.

The Long Stair itself is not subtle, it climbs and climbs, switchbacking up the full height of the Cliff. The party will not make it to the top tonight.

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Camp, The Ruined Tower

The tower's upper floors have collapsed inward, leaving a single intact ground-floor space, 50 by 50, broken doorway, dry inside despite the spray. The party decides to shelter here rather than camp in the open.

Session ends: Party at the ruined tower, preparing to search it before settling in for the night.

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Open Threads

• Search the ruined tower at the base of the falls

• Ascend the Long Stair

• The city guards are watching — first impressions matter going forward

• Wegnar is a friendly contact in the Outs worth cultivating

• Lyssandra knows the party's wizard and his budget

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Rumors

"There's a bard in town — Archontean, travels with a mixed crew. Played something at the door of the Tower and the guards just... apologized to him. Make of that what you will."

 "A cleric of Heschias Ban came through the Outs with a bunch of outsiders. Walked right into Kettrick's Alley — you know, where the Catalyst boys like to linger — and just named the god at them. They folded like wet paper. Somebody's either very brave or very stupid."

"Word from the Rarities Factor is a company of adventurers, mixed, Thorcin among them, banked together before even reaching the Cliff. Wick says they're organized. Probably means they're either serious or they've seen too many parties fall apart over coin."

"Wegnar's saying some travelers bought him out of two weeks of rations in one go. Headed for the Long Stair. He liked them well enough, but that's a lot of food for people nobody's heard of yet."

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On the back of a provisioner's invoice, in a cramped mercantile hand:

Mixed company, on foot. Thorcin went straight for the Factor, no prompting. Joint deposit, correct minimum. Wicktrimmer took it without comment. Wizard spent down to nearly nothing at the Tower. Disclosed his total funds during the transaction. Bard is something. Door guards at the Tower had words with the group and then didn't. Couldn't get close enough. They're at the ruin tonight. Worth another week.

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A folded note on dress-pattern linen, the handwriting careful and small:

He plays in the old tradition. I would not have known except I was close enough to hear him tune. What he played at the Tower door was short and deliberate and I do not think the guards understood what they were apologizing for. He has the accent well hidden. I caught it once, in a word to the Thorcin. I don't know if he knows what he carries.

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Torn from a longer letter, military paper, belt-worn:

Walked into the wrong alley. Kettles boys had them boxed. The cleric named the god and they folded. Lucky, not skilled, but the rations they bought say somebody's thinking. Ten days a head. Camp in the ruin, no fire visible from the road.

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A single line at the bottom of a club ledger page, in a precise academic hand:

Lorezl, Archontean. Six month membership, 30gp. One potion, one Vale history. Disclosed full funds unprompted. Lyssandra's word: earnest. Headed for the Cliff. Will report on return, if.

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A brief memo on chapter house stationery, the tone careful:

The cleric of Heschias Ban made no contact with this office. He is aware of our presence here, or he is not. I cannot determine which reading is more concerning. Await your guidance.

Kingdom as Faction Infrastructure: A Gedanken Experiment

I've been running faction play in various games for a while now, and I keep circling the same problem: most faction tools either track resources or narrate vibes, but they don't generate consequences. So when I sat down to test Kingdom 2nd Edition as faction infrastructure for the campaign, I expected to find a decent tracker with good flavor.

What I found was something considerably more interesting. And also something I can't use every session, for reasons that have nothing to do with the game's quality.

The Setup

If you haven't encountered Kingdom, here's the short version. It's a GMless and Diceless game about people in charge of something: a town, a crew, an institution. Players take one of three roles. Power makes the final call on the Crossroads question (the session's central decision). Perspective makes a prediction that becomes true in the fiction. Touchstone reflects what the people feel, which shapes cultural drift.

For my experiment, I ran a simulated playtest with four personas: two pro-integration, two opposed, playing leaders of the Children of Deino. The Beastmen are a disciplined military faction descended from Archontean soldiers transformed by an enchantress named Deino. Their Crossroads: do they accept a group of outsiders as auxiliaries, gaining operational reach but risking structural impurity?

I expected a useful conversation. I got a faction that made a decision, paid a real price, and came out different.

What the Tool Does Well

The role separation is the system's strongest feature. Because Power, Perspective, and Touchstone have different authorities, they can't simply outvote each other. They have to engage. The Perspective player issued a hard prediction early: if auxiliaries are accepted, goblins will exploit the integration seam and the Beastmen will lose a hall. That prediction became true. The faction accepted the outsiders, the goblins adapted, and the hall fell. No negotiating around it.

That mechanic produces narrative causality in a way that most faction tools can't touch. Decisions have downstream consequences that bind future play.

The Touchstone role surprised me more. I expected it to function as emotional color, a kind of cultural weather report. Instead, the two Touchstone players didn't just reflect sentiment. They redefined what success meant. The Beastmen went from debating whether to accept risk, to treating the loss of the hall as proof that they needed to expand aggressively. Touchstone isn't a mood meter. It's a strategic ideology engine.

The depth of what came out of this experiment genuinely surprised me. The Beastmen feel like a faction now, not a stat block. They have a position, a wound, and a changed worldview. That's hard to get from a spreadsheet.

What It Costs

Here's where the honest evaluation lands, and it's important. The richness Kingdom produces comes at a real price in time and logistics.

To run it properly, you need multiple players willing to sit down and engage seriously with a faction they probably don't control at the table. That's a hard ask. Alternatively, you run it yourself, playing all the roles: holding competing positions simultaneously, arguing against your own conclusions, trying to keep Power, Perspective, and Touchstone genuinely distinct. That's possible, but it's cognitively demanding and the seams show. 

Neither of these options is lightweight. Neither of them is something you want to do every week. Kingdom also generates motion, not equilibrium. A successful decision still produced structural loss, increased pressure, and a faction that felt different at the end than at the start. That's genuinely exciting when you want a faction to evolve. It's too much torque for a faction you're checking in on between sessions.

There's also a translation layer required. "Hall loss" as a Kingdom outcome has to map to something in Dungeon World terms: a location clock ticking down, a threat activating, a front escalating. Without that work, the outcomes stay abstract. Rich and interesting, but floating.

Where This Fits

I'm thinking of Kingdom as a strategic session tool, not a session-by-session tracker. Use it when you want a major faction at a genuine crossroads, when you're willing to do the work, and when the outcome should reshape how that faction operates going forward. The Children of Deino came out of this experiment more alive than they went in, and that's worth something.

For Arden Vul, this probably fits best at inflection points: big political moments, major alliance decisions, the kind of shift that changes a faction's posture for the rest of the campaign. I'm also watching it with one eye on my Fracture Radius SWN campaign. Stars Without Number already gives you faction mechanics with real teeth, but Kingdom might serve as a deep-dive tool for the moments when you want to get inside a faction's head, not move its counters.

I wrote about Kingdom during the Sweet Sixteen bracket series, and it made the final rounds for a reason. This experiment confirmed why. It's a serious tool that rewards serious engagement.

Go Play It

If faction depth is something you want at your table, pick up Kingdom. Ben Robins built something genuinely worth your time. I'll be reporting back on how it fits into Arden Vul once the Beastmen finish licking their wounds.

State of the Mountain - 2026-05-01

The structural reorganization of Beneath Ahknoor is done. Parts Four and Five are in the document, the bones are where they need to be, and the game is ready to go into playtest. That's the headline.

Before playtests start, two pieces are going into the document that have been implicit in the design for a while. One is a player-facing reference: the four phases, the core moves, how Conditions and Scars work. The other is a plain-language overview of the campaign engine: how Sagas, Clues, the Unlocking Move, and the Reckoning connect into the loop that drives the whole game. Both of these have been living in the design. Time to say them out loud.

After that, two playtest groups with different audience profiles and different arc lengths. I'll have more to say when those are underway. You can follow the project on itch at https://mountainfoot.itch.io/beneath-ahknoor, and the current devlog has the structural details.

The reorg took most of my writing bandwidth for the past month. With that done, I'm turning attention to the rest of the pipeline. It's Worse Than That! Vol. 3 is next in the zine series, and Fell Beasts and Foul Lairs is on the horizon after that: a return to the OSR content that brought a lot of you here in the first place.

At the table

I ran Session 0 of my Stars Without Number campaign today. The setting centers on contested reality following a corporate incident at Emberfall, and the players have a faction landscape that's going to make them work for every alliance. More on that as it develops.

Arden Vul has been relentless: the group narrowly survived a Con-draining invisible stalker, a scratching sarcophagus, and a room so ominous they shut the door immediately. Most recently, they downed a mechanical dragonfly mid-flight. Its wreckage revealed azurite eyes, metallic cabling, and a shattered vial of red fluid, but no maker’s mark. One thing is certain: whatever sent it knows their location.

There's a connection to the Kingdom-as-faction-infrastructure post I'm drafting, since I've been testing that framing against Arden Vul. Watch for that one.

I also wrapped my Tuesday game of Kingdom and the Thursday campaign a friend ran ended as well. This opens the door for my two Beneath Ahknoor playtests.

On the blog

The Sweet Sixteen bracket series wrapped April 28. Sixteen games, four lanes, one final: Public Access over OSE. I'm still turning over what that result actually says about where I want my table to sit.

My reading review of Something Tookish! went up yesterday: a reading review of Gord Sellar's cozy halfling mystery game, following an interview with Gord. It's a well-realized game with a clear design voice, and it's left some marks on the Beneath Ahknoor work.

Something Tookish! (A reading review)

A while ago, I interviewed Gord Sellar about Something Tookish!, how he got into gaming, how he found his way to Carved from Brindlewood, and what drew him to write a cozy halfling mystery game. That conversation made me want to read the game more carefully. So I did. Here's where I landed.

Something Tookish! is a Carved from Brindlewood hack for halfling village cozy mysteries. You can find it at Gord's itch page. The mechanical DNA is clearly Brindlewood Bay: 2d6 moves, a Theorize move at the core, a long-arc mystery layered under individual sessions. If you've played Brindlewood Bay or any of its cousins, the bones are familiar. The changes Gord made are mostly in service of tone.

The game's central tension isn't murder and cosmic dread. It's something gentler: the pull between the comfortable conformity of village life and a restlessness that won't quite stay quiet. Each halfling carries two competing tracks, A Jolly Hat and A Sombre Hat, which replace Brindlewood Bay's Crown mechanics. It's a smart translation. The pressure the system creates is real without being grim.

A few specific design choices caught my attention.

The Musical Move is a helping mechanic borrowed from Josh McCrowell's Under Hill, By Water. A player sings a verse or recites a poem related to the action at hand, and the character they're helping gets a +2 on the roll. It's optional, and the player aids sheet provides rhyme words and opening lines for anyone who freezes up. What I appreciate is how deliberately the game lowers the barrier. It's asking players to do something potentially uncomfortable (improvise verse), and it provides scaffolding rather than demanding performance. 

Gord also includes a worked example for every move. That's a small thing that does significant work, especially for GMs new to the CfB family who haven't yet built intuition for how moves interact with fiction. It's the kind of generosity that shows up in play.

The mystery structure has some interesting adjustments as well. Rather than location descriptions, the game uses Paint the Scene sections: clusters of questions for players to answer when their halflings arrive somewhere. This hands authorial work to the table and keeps the Keeper from front-loading the world. It pairs well with the game's general disposition toward collaborative fiction-building.

One thing I missed was Moments, the little encounter-style scenes from later editions of Brindlewood Bay. Something Tookish! is built on a pre-Kickstarter version of the rules, and Moments didn't exist yet. 

The four mysteries in the Keeper Sheets are well-suited to the setting: a missing muffin tin at the village bake-off, disappearing dwarven contractors, stolen garden vegetables, halflings accused of a theft they didn't commit. They're cozy without feeling toothless. The Strange Clues that hint at darker undercurrents are well-judged, weird without being out of register.

Here's where I'd place Something Tookish! on the radar chart:

The game sits in narrow, well-realized fictional range, it commits hard to its halfling village with shared narrative authority, and a tone well toward Pure Play. GM Scaffolding is moderate: the mystery structure gives you a lot to work with. Player On-Ramp is low in the best sense: you can walk right in.

If your table likes Tolkien, likes cozy mysteries, and has been curious about Carved from Brindlewood, this is a solid entry point. My table hasn't gotten to it yet, but I'm looking forward to the bake-off mystery in particular.

The question I keep turning over: the Sombre Hat track ends in retirement, your character turning their back on the village for good. That's a meaningful arc with real weight. But in a game this cozy, how much do players actually want to push into that territory? My guess is the answer varies a lot by group. I'm curious whether anyone has run a full campaign arc through to that conclusion.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Final - OSE v Public Access

I've been running this bracket for weeks, and I want to be honest with you before we get into it. I'm not neutral here. I'm currently running Public Access. I'm writing supplements for it. My own megadungeon, Beneath Ahknoor, is built on its Carved from Brindlewood chassis. I have more skin in this game than in any previous round, and you deserve to know that up front.

I still think the pick is right. But this is the one that cost me something to make.

The axes on the chart describe the kind of experience each game produces, not the quality of it. Both of these games are excellent. The question is what they're excellent at, and whether that matters to your table.

Old-School Essentials

OSE is the common language of OSR gaming right now. Trim, fast, clean enough to run from the page without translation, organized so that an entire class lives on a single spread. Character creation takes fifteen minutes and then you're playing. The ecosystem behind it is one of the strongest in the hobby: modules, settings, supplements, and a community writing new material every month. When you reach into that ecosystem, you reach into years of accumulated craft.

The blank slate on the World Presence axis isn't a weakness. It's an invitation. The GM and the dice build the world here, and what gets built belongs to the table that built it. That ownership compounds over time in ways that are hard to quantify and easy to feel.

A good OSE campaign runs for years. Characters die and are replaced. The dungeon remembers everything. Legends get made slowly, across dozens of sessions, by players who are changed by what they survived. If you want to build something vast and slow and accumulative, something that outlasts any individual character or story arc, OSE is the answer. Nothing else in this bracket does that better.

Public Access

Public Access hands you Deep Lake, New Mexico, in 2004, and the Latchkeys, and a mystery that nobody at the table knows the answer to yet, because there isn't one until you make it together. The writers room mystery system is still the most interesting design I've encountered for this problem: no canonical solution before play starts, everyone building the answer from what gets noticed and pursued. The Keeper support is extraordinary: phase structure, move guidance, detailed locations, side characters textured enough to feel real when they come back months later.

The World Presence spike on the chart is the honest read. Deep Lake arrives fully inhabited. The gaps are invitations, not absences.

Eight months at the table with the Latchkeys delivered payoff that compressed what a much longer campaign produces. The Licorice Beastie still limps. That's not atmosphere. That's what the system is designed to build, session by session, until it lands.

The honest case for OSE

This is the round where I have to work hardest, because OSE's argument is genuinely strong and I am genuinely compromised.

OSE won its semi-final on longevity. It beat Under the Floorboards because a game that sustains a decade of play deserves the nod over a game that peaks at a short campaign. That argument doesn't go away in the final. Public Access has a natural arc. OSE just keeps going. Six, eight, ten years of a living dungeon, a rotating cast, a community still writing adventures for it when you need something new: that's not a small thing to walk away from.

And here's the part I have to say out loud: the AD&D campaign I ran for six years produced some of the best table moments of my life. Kreega Two-men-tall. Maine the halfling thief. Those characters lived on an OSR chassis and couldn't have existed anywhere else. OSE is the refined version of the game that made those possible. There is a version of this bracket where that lineage wins the whole thing, and it isn't a wrong answer.

If your table wants to build legends across years of play, OSE is probably the better pick. I won't pretend otherwise.

The pick

Public Access. And here is the argument I'd make even if I weren't the person making it.

OSE beat Under the Floorboards on session shape, on the grounds that a longer campaign deserves the nod. But Public Access is also a long-form campaign game. The question isn't which one goes longer. The question is what you get when it ends, and how often you get there.

A Public Access campaign of eight or nine months produces a complete story with a climax the whole table helped build, a solved mystery, a Deep Lake that means something specific to everyone who was there. Then you can do it again. Six extraordinary nine-month campaigns in the time one OSE campaign runs isn't a lesser outcome. It's a different philosophy about what games are for.

I'd rather have better stories more often than longer legends less often. That's the preference the bracket was always pointed toward, and I followed it here even knowing I'm not a disinterested judge.

The series asked a question I thought was about game design. It turned out to be about what I actually want to be doing at the table. Public Access is the answer. Beneath Ahknoor is what happened when I decided to build in that direction.

That's the bracket. I'm glad we ran it. Tell me in the comments who you'd have sent through, and whether you think I got the final wrong.

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If the mystery system running through a dungeon sounds like your kind of game, Beneath Ahknoor is my Carved from Brindlewood megadungeon. The 0.5 playtest version is free, the 0.6 release is coming this summer, and the devlog is running through the development process. Find it at mountainfoot.itch.io/beneath-ahknoor. Patrons get free access to the paid releases when they drop.

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.

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.