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.
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.