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20
January
2026
An interesting post from Clayton discusses what he calls Dominant Mechanics: “Dominant Mechanics are rules that cannot co-exist in a system without monopolizing play and overriding other rules.” My favourite example of this would be skill checks in later editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This idea relates to one of my big complaints about 4E, where your characters various powers end up being the sum total of play.
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17
January
2026
Press the Beast shared a criticism I enjoyed of some parts of the OSR, and the obsession with products as the output of the hobby. The post is a bit of a rant—to put it mildly—but I also think it’s good advice all the same. When I was posting my Carcosa session recaps, notes, and advice, I was trying to highlight just how little I had done to make that game go. It shouldn’t take much to start playing!
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17
January
2026
The man that brought you Fuck You Design brings you a rant about fancy-ass zines: “Am I language policing here? Sure, why not. I think the original sense of the word matters and is worth preserving, worth insisting upon. I think zines, as a non-luxury print media are important.”
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 14, 2026
Tagged: intotheodd mythicbastionland chrismcdowal
I spent a little bit of time over the last two days getting ready to play Mythic Bastionland. I made a map over the holidays, but didn’t finish filling it with stuff at the time. I was writing down NPC names, rolling on spark tables, and getting enough notes down so that there was some solidity to the world the players were going to explore. Mythic Bastionland encourages some amount of improvisation with its structure, but if you lean too deeply into that games can start to feel meaningless. (Chris has a small blurb about this risk in the book as well.) There was more I wanted to prep before this game, but my personal brand is not doing that extra work. Honestly it all worked out.
I asked some friends I hadn’t played games with in a while if anyone was free to play, people from back when G+ was a thing:
A few of us had played the game when it was being play tested, but no one had played recently, so it was all new to all of us.
The engine of the game is exploration. Mythic Bastionland is a game about exploring the wilderness, travelling from hex to hex in search of adventure. A day is divided into three phases: morning, afternoon, night. You roll for a wilderness complication at the end of each phase of the day. On a 1 you encounter an omen for a random myth in the realm. On a 2-3 you encounter the omen of the nearest myth. On a 4-6 you’ll stumble upon the landmark inside the hex, if one exists. As you move through the world you should expect the myths causing trouble in the land to bubble up. The game should create situations for the players to resolve.
In theory, half the time the players should be bumping into something weird like they are exploring the Southern Reach. This session the players rolled too well: they encountered an omen for a myth with their first wilderness exploration roll, and then never rolled a 1-3 for the rest of the session. Sometimes that’s how it goes. The result was a quieter session, but I used that as a chance to better introduce the world they were exploring.
It can be tempting to try and inject some drama into a game when the dice and your notes say otherwise, but I generally like to play things straight. You need quiet sessions or moments so that there is real contrast when the drama does arrive. I am not a fan of trying to manicure a perfect story up front. It’s almost always more satisfying when these things happen organically.
We played for 2 hours, ending our session in one of the holdings. I actually had good notes for the holdings, having rolled up many NPCs and other drama about the places. (This was easy thanks to all the spark tables and online generators.) I forgot to roll for the local mood when the party arrived at the town. A lesson for next time. That might have been the only rule I forgot today.
[Update] When I shared my experience with running the game online, I mentioned that I had the players rolling the wilderness event rolls. This is normally how I play. I like to have the players roll the hazard dice. In this game that’s likely not the right approach. Knowing that you have encountered an omen seems fine to me, I normally run games where I try and be clear and telegraph what’s happening. But knowing it’s a random omen versus the nearest one maybe tells the players a little too much about what’s going on. That knowledge may make the myths and omens feels a bit less mysterious.
The plan is to play for the next few weeks. An enjoyable start to a new campaign.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 11, 2026
I have written about keying dungeons in the past, when discussing Dwimmermount, and when talking about Deep Carbon Observatory. This topic seems to be in the news again, after Ben shared an enjoyable video of his dislike of Goodman Games’ house style for their modules.1 DCC RPG is quite text heavy, and uses simple two column layouts reminiscent of old TSR modules. They are essentially the best version of an old TSR module. I love many of the DCC RPG adventures, but I don’t love all the walls of text. On the flip side, I am not a big fan of the Old School Essentials house style Ben advocates for either. I find the excessive bolded text and bullet points harder to parse than straight forwards sentences. I also think it’s much more enjoyable to read plain prose.
To me, there is more value in trying to write something short and evocative, than try and turn it into a deconstructed sandwich.
Orthopraxy has written a great blog post in response to Ben’s video, defending Goodman Games’ approach. ↩
Of course, once ad-libbed into existence, they become part of the fictional world, something players can take advantage of in play. ↩
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 02, 2026
Tagged: intotheodd mythicbastionland chrismcdowal
Long time readers may recall I had started an Arthurian Dark Souls sort of setting I never finished called Misericorde. A year or so later Chris started sharing his work for Mythic Bastionland, and it was more or less exactly what I wanted to do, but better in basically every way. (I mean, for starters, he finished it all.) So anyway, I want to play Mythic Bastionland. The first step is making a realm.
Chris outlines how to create a realm on a single page in the book. Elm Cat has an incredibly thorough post about getting started with Mythic Bastionland that also discusses making a realm. They expand upon Chris’s advice with their own, based on their experience having run the game for a while. Chris’s video of preparing a realm for play is also great. He walks you through his process. You can watch how he uses the spark tables to flesh out a setting. 1 Chris preps his realm in an about an hour. It took me longer—but not that much longer! These two resources are well worth reviewing.
I started by making a map in Hex Kit, a fun activity in and of itself. I decided to start a fresh map rather than continue off the one I had made a few years ago. In my head this campaign could be a prequel to the game I had thought of running, where the king is dead and knights wander the wilderness as transformed monstrosities. I can come back to that idea later, perhaps informed by how this Mythic Bastionland campaign unfolds.
With the map done, I got to populating the realm with some holdings and landmarks. I followed Chris’s advice and examples. The system works! I enjoy the act of building something out of random seeds, trying to figure out how everything could fit together. My first ruler was interested in gambling. So was my second. And so was my third. I thought of re-rolling, but the fact that three of the four leaders in the land are gamblers feels like the seed of a story. These sorts of connections bubble up as you work through the tables. I think our brains are just wired find a way to make everything make sense.
I need to actually play Mythic Bastionland, so will try and avoid being overly effusive, but even in this lonely fun of prepping the game it feels like Chris has made something really spectacular. I don’t consider myself particularly creative, but the book will make sure you can build something weird and interesting. Making a realm and figuring out what’s going on before the players show up was fun. Will it all work in play? I gotta assume so, since everyone else can’t shut up about how great the game is. Stay tuned!
Another excellent resource is the Mythic Bastionland Referee Companion. All the spark tables are available online, and it can roll on all the tables for you in one go, which can speed up the process of building a realm. I just used the book, but I can see how this could be useful. It’s cool seeing other people making digital tools for RPGs. ↩
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 01, 2026
The past year ended up being the biggest year of blogging on this site. At the start of the year I shared my thoughts on blogging in the post Blogging is Forever, a reminder that social media is transient and you should own and control the writing you care about. I was posting fairly consistently throughout the year, but kicked things into high gear in November. This is almost certainly motivated by seeing Elmcat’s blogging map. It’s incredible seeing the web of people that contribute to this scene. The map is a nice reminder of what makes blogging fun and cool. I visited my brother in the UK at the end of November, and blogged more or less every day through to the New Year.
I had wanted to get my Carcosa session recaps back online for some time, and decided to do that for the month of December, using it as an opportunity to talk about running the campaign at the same time. After posting them all I finally wrote a post I had intended to write back when the campaign concluded: Advice for Running a Hexcrawl, A Decade Too Late.
I also wrote 10 reviews in 2025. I haven’t written this much about games since 2013. I ended up reviewing as many war games as RPGs and modules last year. Wargaming has ended up becoming where I spend a lot of my time and energy. Those games were: Xenos Rampant, Trench Crusade, MAC Attack, Space Gits, and Blood Bowl. For RPGs I wrote about: Skorne, Constant Downpour Remastered, Nirvana on Fire, Wandering Blades, and Crown of Salt to close out the year.
There was one post I wanted to write before the clock ticked over to 2026 that I didn’t manage to get in under the wire: a comparison of Carcosa with Mythic Bastionland. I feel like there is something to say about both those games, I just need to think a bit more about what exactly.
Hopefully 2026 continues the trend of more blogging: for myself and for all the other people I see starting blogs and returning to their old ones. 2025 feels like it was a big year for blogging.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on December 31, 2025
Back in 2024 I decided to track all of my purchasing and painting of minis. This was an attempt to buy less and paint more. It was a nominal success. This year, not so much. Whenever my life becomes too busy I find I channel my hobby output into pure consumerism. I ended up buying box sets that will certainly be fun to paint, but that remain unpainted (and often unbuilt!) as we come to the end of the year: Kill Team’s new Tomb World set, the Horus Heresy 3rd Edition Starter Set, the Dark Oath Slaves to Darkness army box, and the Fangs of the Bloodqueen box. Those last two I really only bought because Meeple Mart was having an “everything needs to go” sale. I ended up with 161 new models between those boxes and a few other small purchases. That’s a lot of new models!
My painting happened in small bursts: the Stormcast at the start of the year so I could play Spearhead; my Trench Crusade Heretic Legion in the spring, when the minis arrived; some orks from Slade, which I thought I might use for Space Gits; the rest of the Stormiest in the summer to finish painting the Skaventide box; the Wildercorps Hunters so I could use them for a Warcry game. I managed to play a lot of games this year, but nothing that required me to do a lot of painting. I played lots of Spearhead and Warcry, but primarily using minis I had already painted.
I’m disappointed with how the year ended when it came to my painting. It’s a hobby I really enjoy, so I should make more time for it when I can. It’s often easier to play video games or watch TV, which are also enjoyable activities, but ones I probably put more time into than I should.
My goal to start 2026 is to start painting the Darkwater boxed set. The game looks like a lot of fun, and I managed to get a good chunk of them primed when the weather in December was a little bit warm. My friends and I have started playing Blood Bowl, so I’ll need to get my team primed and painted as well. Hopefully getting those things out of the way will serve as some motivation to keep going.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on December 31, 2025
I have wanted to buy a copy of Crown of Salt for ages. Nova wrote a pretty glowing review some time ago. Months later Jason and Tom talked about it on Fear of a Black Dragon, and were both so euphorically enthusiastic I knew I needed to check it out. I came close to buying it several times, but getting it from abroad with shipping always felt too pricey and decadent. And then I saw it at the Melsonian Arts Council shop at Dragonmeet and that was that.
Crown of Salt is an adventure for Mork Borg, written, illustrated, and laid out by Tania Herrero. This is seemingly the first adventure she has written, which is kind of bananas. This is such a strong first showing. Update: Tania let me know this is their second adventure! I’ll have to check out their Bottle Rocket, The Pit of Blasphemy.
The book has these little cut scene moments. I love it. — Me on Bluesky
The intro to the adventure is prose and art, luxuriously spread over several pages. A nice bit of story telling that is very reminiscent of video game cut scenes. We learn about an arrogant king, cursed by the gods to become a monster. I wonder if he will show up later? Tania isn’t going to tell us right away. But if you’ve read a book no doubt you’re aware of foreshadowing.
I don’t think I’ve seen another module approach breaking up the various sections that make up the adventure in this way. It’s very dramatic: it really help demarcate the various points in the adventure. Each section has these pages of bridging art and text that reorient the reader for what is to come. I really enjoyed the graphic design of these sections.
A different sort of module would tell you if the crow’s master is lost in the rifts or not, rather than leave it as a hash tag no spoilers mystery for the GM. — Me on BlueSky
The module opens with a description of the small town of Saltburg, where the adventurers can meet some hirelings, the crow above, and get ready to venture out into the wilderness. There isn’t too much to this town, which is fine, it’s not the main event for this module. The hirelings are interesting and dynamic. They feel like the main reason this town is described at all. We also learn what makes them particularly interesting on the page after they are all described.
Tania’s approach to writing Crown of Salt reminds me very much of the work of Patrick Stuart, especially Deep Carbon Observatory and Silent Titans. Not so much in terms of the modules content, but more around how the module is structured. Patrick often hides details from the GM, so that the act of reading the module comes with a sense of discovery that is mirrored by the players. Some people find this annoying, they have a vision of maximum table utility that demands tidy summaries of everything that’s going on. Certainly one way to make an adventure, but I think it’s reductive to think a more creative approach won’t work.
In the case of the crow mentioned above, knowing its backstory likely won’t impact how the encounter is run at the time the party first meets the bird. (And if you read the whole module, you’ll perhaps recall its deal.) With the hirelings you are a similar position. Even if you slavishly flipped from page to page only when required, you could run the encounter where the party does their recruiting, not knowing the hirelings share a dark secret. Tania’s approach makes for a much more engaging read of the module, and in general I think she avoids some of the issues that arise from being coy with all the details.
We in the business might call this a Flux Space™. I can see why Jason enjoyed running this with Trophy Gold, it feels like a great fit for how that game works, and its vibes. The exploration rules remind me of climbing from Veins of the Earth, perhaps an inspiration. — me on bluesky
The start of the module shares d12 reasons to risk ones life, each pushing the players to search for the fallen king (the Cantigaster), his temple, etc. I generally don’t care if an adventure includes hooks or not. I think the only hook you need is the social contract, “I bought this module so that’s what we’re doing,” but the hooks included in this book are good all the same. They do a good job tying the party to the adventure, and also help speak to the larger world. Regardless of how it comes to pass, the party will venture from the town to the rifts, in search of the adventure.
The rifts are presented as a sprawling unmappable space. My friend Nick calls this sort of site a flux space. Tania shares her rules for exploring such a space, which are very reminiscent of the climbing rules from Viens of the Earth. I’m curious to see how they work in play. Reading them I like them. She manages to capture a lot: how much time passes while travelling, if the players are injured along the way due to the route, the loss of provisions, the loss of equipment, and random encounters. To reach the temple, where they should expect to find the fallen king, the players will need to experience 4 exploration events. This approach is meant to simulate travelling through a weird messy underworld.
The encounters here are all pretty fantastic. There are 4 types of events, and 6 possible encounters per event. When you explore you will roll a d4 and a d6 to see what the players encounter. The encounters are all really engaging. It’s hard to pick my favourites. Many will lead to fun situations during the course of a game. I can see how this adventure would work so well with Trophy Gold. The module’s loose structure lends itself well for the similarly unstructured exploration rules of Trophy Gold.
There are a few places where the challenge of the module feels like it veers into rocks fall you all die territory. For example, one of the monsters has a random power that increases gravity in the area: the players must pass a DR12 test or die. There isn’t really anything the players can do to prepare for this situation, it’s a random power that might occur on a random round of combat. There are a few places where it felt like the module was challenging in a way that might not be fun.
This section has some layout choices I found a bit confusing, or places where the placement of information is a hinderance. There is a mini dungeon within the rifts, the Tomb of the Promised Princess. Instructions for finding the tomb are included with the description of the temple, and those are found well after the instructions for exploring the rifts: “only reachable by the guidance of the Latrofax or by rolling a repeated result in an exploration event.” It’s not unreasonable to imagine someone running the rifts portion of the adventure, unaware they need to watch out for duplicate entries. (Earlier, there are instructions on the page following the instructions for exploring the rifts, “Roll a d6 before determining the Exploration Event. On a 1, skip directly to the Promised Princess event. The chance increases by 1 each time.“ Is the intention to use both? I’m not so sure.)
Crown of Salt concludes with a small temple dungeon. You are stalked by the Cantigaster. Tania suggests he shows up when convenient or interesting, but offers up some simple random chance rules if just having him jump scare the players offends your no quantum ogres OSR sensibilities. — me on bluesky
The adventure ends with a small dungeon. The cut scene that introduces this section explains more of the background for the whole adventure. One last twist: a primordial god! The adventure really leans into Mork Borg’s vibes. Like Deep Carbon Observatory, the players will be stalked by the main antagonist of the dungeon, the Cantigaster. This dungeon is flavourful, like the rest of the module. Tania switches to a more straightforward layout at this point. I find the keys a little long to my taste, but I am a fan of tweet sized room descriptions.
We have made it this far and I haven’t even talked about the layout and art. Crown of Salt is beautiful. A lot of people try (and fail) to ape Johan Nohr’s style when it comes to making modules for Mork Borg. Often books just look messy and half assed, they don’t have the graphic design chops to pull off what Johan accomplished with Mork Borg. With Crown of Salt, Tania’s made a really lovely book. There are are occasional missteps, but in general I think she’s made something where the graphic design contributes to the story telling. Her art is fantastic. Like Gus or Luka, it’s always impressive to see someone who can do it all.
I really loved Crown of Salt. One of the coolest modules I’ve read this year. I regret not grabbing it sooner. I wanted to make sure I talked about it before the year was done. Telling you about it feels like a good way to close out 2026.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on December 28, 2025
Tagged: warhammer 28mm bloodbowl skirmish
Whenever I say Warcry is the best game Games Workshop has made, someone always chirps up to reply that I am wrong, that title belongs to Blood Bowl. It was hard to argue about a game I have never played. Blood Bowl is Games Workshop’s skirmish fantasy football game. You are basically playing Jervis Johnson’s take on American Football. Now having finally played, I have to admit it is pretty wonderful.
My friends and I decided to get start a league. I grabbed the Imperial Nobles team, and a rule book. I more or less instantly regretted not just grabbing the starter set, as I could have sold one of the teams, gained a pitch and tokens, and come out ahead price wise. So, don’t make the same mistake as me. The Third Season of Blood Bowl has tweaked the composition of all the teams so you can field a reasonable team from one box. This small change is what got my friend excited about playing. It’s really what sucked us all in.
My friend had played Blood Bowl in the 90s, so helped the game move along. When I first looked at the rule book I felt there were a lot of rules to make the game go, something I mentioned to my cousin who played in twenty years ago. He scoffed and replied the game was easy! Now having played, I would agree. It’s all quite intuitive. It does feel a bit like football. There was some looking stuff up here and there, but we got into the swing of the game quite quickly.
Blood Bowl is played over two halves. One team will kick the ball to the opposing team: place the ball on a square and roll to see where it ends up and bounces. It’s then up to the other team to grab the ball and move it up the pitch. If you make it to the end of the field, the end zone, you score a touch down. You activate all your minis one by one until there is a turnover. There is a long list of cases that can cause you to lose your turn, but they all eventually boil down to: one of your models falls down or you lose the ball. When this happens play flips to the other player and they take their turn. Each half is composed of 8 turns in a normal game of Blood Bowl.
Your players can move, pass the ball, hand-off the ball, catch, block, secure the ball, and foul players who are knocked down. The actions do what they say on the box. Because you are trying to avoid turnovers, you will generally attempt safer actions first, before riskier ones.
Movement simply has you move down the pitch (a grid) a number of squares as dictated by your move stat. You can rush up to two times, letting you move an additional square each time on a roll of 2+ on a d6. But if you roll a 1 you fall over. In our game my fried Dylan’s catcher fell over getting into position. Play turned over to me, and my turn ended the exact same way. We somehow rolled 1s back to back when rushing. That’s Blood Bowl.
Adjacent players can block, attempting to attack the other player. There are custom block dice to roll that tell you what happens. Hopefully you push the person out of the way and/or knock them down. It’s possible you might get knocked down yourself. Like typical skirmish games there is an advantage gained by having more of your players adjacent to the combat. The offensive players gains strength for their friends, similarly for the defensive player. You roll one block dice if you match the opposing players strength, two if you beat it, three if you more than double it. The player with the higher strength choose the result. (So tackling stronger players is a bad idea.) A lot of the game is positioning to try and gain extra dice for your block roll.
Moving the ball down the pitch will involve passing, catching, and hand offs. The further you attempt to pass, the more difficult the dice roll required. Players have a pass stat, and need to beat their attribute score. Catching and picking up the ball require making an agility score roll. So you could make a perfect throw, but still fumble the catch. You could run to pick up a ball off the ground and fall over. That’s blood bowl.
The secure the ball action is new to this edition of the game, a way to help teams with low agility gain control of the ball in a more conservative way. You secure the ball if you roll a 2+ on a d6, it doesn’t require a roll against your agility stat. The catch is the action triggers a turn over. It never came up in our game, but I can see how it would be useful if you have strong guys who can protect the ball and move it up in the subsequent turn.
After two halves the player with the most touchdowns wins. I lost my first game. That doesn’t matter. I had a lot of fun all the same.
Blood Bowl plays more or less exactly the same as it did in the 90s. An impressive piece of game design. The game is fast and feels really dynamic. There is a lot of back and forth due. Grid movement and no line of sight to worry about helps keep everything snappy.
We were playing sevens, a smaller version of Blood Bowl. You play on a smaller pitch with a smaller team and a smaller number of turns per half. It’s a way to speed up the game. The rules are basically unchanged. Was great, no notes.
I will report back once we have started playing our league and have played more games. Like Mordheim, the campaign system for Blood Bowl is apparently a source of much fun. Is the game better than Warcry? I’m not so sure, but it is certainly one of the greats.