June 27th Megagame: Super-Diplomacy

The evening of Saturday, June 27th, 2026, some friends and I—including Walid from Dead Letters and ty from OVER/UNDER—are running a megagame version of Diplomacy, which we call Super-Diplomacy.

The game runs for four hours for thirty-five players at boshi’s place. The doors open at 5:00 p.m., orientation and tutorial starts at 5:30 p.m., and the game starts at 6:00 p.m.

Tickets are $20. You can get yours here.

Super-Diplomacy Poster

The core rules are, basically, just Diplomacy, the same ones that Allan Calhamer wrote in ’59. The seven powers write down their orders and submit them simultaneously at the end of each turn; armies and fleets march around a map of Europe (and adjacent regions), fighting each other in diceless battles; at the end of each year (every other turn), powers recalculate the sizes of their military based on the supply centers they control.

Regular Diplomacy has thirty-four supply centers and seven powers, with one player controlling each power. In Super-Diplomacy, we keep the same thirty-four supply centers and seven powers, but this time, we have thirty-four players, one for each supply center instead of one for each power. At game start, twenty-two players belong to the seven powers (three per power, except the Russian Empire, which has four), and the remaining twelve players are independent.

From its member players, each power elects one commander-in-chief, who is responsible for writing and submitting orders for all of the power’s armies and navies. A commander-in-chief, on paper, has sole discretion over their power’s movements: they can, should, and will listen to the other members of their faction, but they are not strictly required to listen to them. When a commander-in-chief submits their power’s orders to the referees for the turn, those orders are final.

Naturally, this may lead to some animosity within the power, so power members have a method of recourse: the vote of no confidence. If a majority of members of a power vote against their commander-in-chief, that commander-in-chief is removed from power, and a new one must be elected. But! if no member of the power can secure a plurality of votes in the succession election—if every member of the power votes for somebody different—the power dissolves, and each supply center becomes independent. Without a clear plan to follow, a vote of no confidence is a dangerous, dicy maneuver. But perhaps necessary, if your commander-in-chief begins to blunder the war.

Independent players are in a precarious position. The basic objective of the game has not changed: the power that controls eighteen of the thirty-four supply centers on the board wins, and everyone else loses. Ideally, an independent player will manage to stay afloat and free long enough to pick the winning power—more practically, though, they’re likely to get snapped up by a neighbor, regardless of that neighbor’s odds of victory.

All of this, notably, still occurs as the game clock ticks onwards. We’re aiming to make it through four turns per hour—quite a clip, even by the standards of regular Diplomacy—which means that all of this politicking needs to happen in a timely fashion. If you spend a half-hour quarrelling over a vote or the terms of an alliance, that’s two turns and an entire year of in-game time that has flown you by. A successful power needs to manage the relationships of its own members, the other powers, and the independent players, which demands delegation and trust. Fail to do this and your commander-in-chief could end up flying blind, diplomatically speaking, making even a large power easy pickings for an alliance of its enemies.

There’s also one other role I haven’t mentioned: thirty-four players get a supply center, join powers, and tussle for control, but there’s one other, the thirty-fifth. This player is, in effect, the news. They don’t get any soldiers or supply centers and so cannot directly alter the board. Instead, they get a laptop and access to the projector at boshi’s place, allowing them to display text and images for the entire game to see. Does that give them any actual power? It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect a clever news-player could find ways to make themselves very influential indeed.

With all these elements running into each other—the board, the politics of each power, the independent players, the news, and all the alliances and deals between them—the game is, in all likelihood, going to be chaotic. A bit of a pear wiggler, if you will. Many moving actors and elements all clashing and crashing into each other, resulting in political outcomes that none of us can predict. I have run and played in-person megagames before, but this is a particular stripped-down model. Where many megagames involve a lot of overlapping currencies, components, rules systems, and fictional elements, Super-Diplomacy tries to winnow all that down, relying instead on persuasion, cunning, and psychology.

It should be fun! If you’re in New York, we’d love to have you come play.

Super-Diplomacy is happening Saturday, June 27th, at boshi’s place. Doors open at 5:00 p.m., orientation at 5:30 p.m., and the game begins at 6:00 p.m., running for about four hours. Tickets are $20, available here, as supplies last.

See you on the battlefield!

June 16, 2026 release

Review: The Crooked Moon

In October 2021, the popular tabletop RPG actual play channel Legends of Avantris began releasing episodes of their “Edge of Midnight” Dungeons & Dragons horror campaign series, with the first season of nineteen episodes concluding in May, 2022. A mini-season of four episodes released in February, 2024, followed by a second season of nine episodes running from April to July, 2024. At time of writing, Legends of Avantris has just over two and a half million YouTube subscribers. While the “Edge of Midnight” videos’ individual viewcounts peak around a half-million, most of the now thirty-two episodes hover somewhere in the tens of thousands of views. Their last video, the conclusion of the second season, states that there will be a third.

In October 2023—a year and a half after the first season concluded, but before the mini-season and the second—Avantris Entertainment (the RPG studio, merch company, and AP production team behind Legends of Avantris) launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Crooked Moon, an adaptation of “Edge of Midnight” into a lengthy adventure and sourcebook written for 5e, billed as not just ordinary horror but specifically a folk horror project. In addition to the multi-hundred page full-color hardback book, the campaign offered all manner of Kickstarter goodies: a tarot deck, a GM screen, miniature models of the major villains, digital assets for virtual tabletop programs, enamel pins, plushies, and thirteen different sets of polyhedral dice. The backer tiers ranged from a thirty-dollar PDF and sixty-five-dollar hardcover to a two-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar deluxe set and seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar “All In” box set. By the end of the campaign in early November, 2023, the project had raised just over four million dollars, an eye-watering sum.

By late 2024, the team had released an alpha version of The Crooked Moon to Kickstarter backers, and announced that the campaign would support two versions: one for original 5e (the 2014 release) and another for 5.5e (the 2024 edition). In late 2025, the project went out for fulfillment to backers in the United States; at time of writing, international fulfillment is ongoing.

A few weeks ago, I read The Crooked Moon for my RPG book club here in New York. While I read a lot of RPGs, both those for book club and more, The Crooked Moon held my attention in a way that others hadn’t. In part, this is due to my fascination with 5e and its third party culture, both as market research and as an anthropological window into a slice of RPG culture now somewhat removed from me (how was there a four million dollar Kickstarter campaign that I heard nothing about?). On another level, it’s an excellent case study, an examination of the work of an extremely popular and successful but still very new team, seeing how they approach and solve various problems and issues. And deep in my jealous little heart, I admit that I’m drawn to the dream of a project of such enormous scope and resources: if you had a cool four million to make a tabletop RPG book, what would you create?

Make no mistake: The Crooked Moon is ambitious. It clocks in at a gobsmacking six hundred and thirty-two pages, it covers huge swathes of territory and content, and it does it all with an extreme level of attention to detail and polish. It also kind of sucks! It falls into so many common traps and pitfalls across all levels of writing, editing, and development, it’s filled with cruft and junk, much of it proves extremely boring to read, and it only rarely delivers on its lofty promises. And yet, it has redeeming qualities! The good parts of The Crooked Moon are often striking in their quality and artistry, head and shoulders above the rest of 5e and contemporary Dungeons & Dragons, as well as many independent RPG releases. It introduces multiple genuinely new and compelling ideas—fewer of which are executed well, admittedly—but those new thoughts so often end up drowned in the familiar, the bland, and the uninspired. The quality and usefulness of the book veers wildly from chapter to chapter: where other RPG books typically demonstrate their value or lack thereof within the first few pages, The Crooked Moon kept me guessing throughout. I ran the full gamut of investment as I read, from bored to tears to mildly intrigued to genuinely engaged to hopping out of my chair with excitement. It is simultaneously just like every other 5e book, yet also unique in myriad ways. A grab-bag of a book, a kitchen-sink project with everything added, nothing left on the cutting room floor, The Crooked Moon’s glut of content lends the book an overwhelming quality, a feeling of being buried beneath an unending tide of raw stuff. Now that I’ve finished it, though, I sort of can’t stop thinking about it. It is creatively aspirational, shockingly derivative, frequently gorgeous, horrifically disorganized, thoroughly bland, frequently tedious, highly polished, deeply inconsistent, typically painful, unintentionally hilarious, and—above all else—utterly gargantuan.

Let me be clear: as is, I would never run The Crooked Moon for one of my tables, and I would not recommend you run it for one of yours. And yet, it captures my imagination in a way other Dungeons & Dragons adventures have not. It is not well-designed, enjoyable to read, or pleasant to imagine in play, but I find it strangely compelling nonetheless. It’s tempting to compare the project to kusoge—“shit games” with cult popularity nonetheless—but The Crooked Moon is not some fumbled indie darling or retro diamond in the rough. Rather, it’s a project of massive scale and budget, the tabletop RPG equivalent of a AAA or even AAAA videogame, one that appears to be a smashing success yet falls apart the moment it’s subjected to any sort of examination. Let me try to explain.

First and foremost, The Crooked Moon flexes its budget. Every inch of a spread shines, rewarding both casual skims and close study. Graphic designer Jelke Ludolphij and lead art director Suzanne Helmigh, both experienced veterans of other high-budget third-party 5e projects, have each done exceptional work. Ludolphij manages to create a look that maximizes clean, straightforward, almost minimalist text and headers—The Crooked Moon feels more open and breathable than almost any other 5e project, save perhaps only the 5.5e Player’s Handbook—while also adhering tightly to the themes and mood of folk horror. His palette sounds boring, nearly all delicate beiges and browns, but on the page it frames and amplifies the text in a way that both soothes and complements the page. The book feels warm and weathered, but also cool and restrained. Its graphic elements bear that delicious quality of feeling simultaneously page-defining yet also invisible. Three particular favorite elements of mine include the pagination elements, the most subdued I’ve seen in a 5e project, that vary by chapter but never threaten to overwhelm; the quiet corner additions, added by hand, to the monster statblocks’ bounding boxes (which otherwise use simple default InDesign stroke options); and the added caps to bounding strokes at the top and bottom of tables, which resemble ears of wheat or frayed rope. Consistently, Ludolphij makes simple choices work well, options that would look cheap in another designer’s hands but here appear elegant. My only critiques are Ludolphij’s over-reliance on distressed Seventeenth Century-style fonts and a strong preference for centered headers—together, they create an unevenness in the classic double columns, with the smaller headers just a little too wiggly and distracting to fit smoothly. But still, these don’t sink the overall effect: an impressive harmony of hand-drawn folkloric imagery combined clean, minimalist lines, at once both smooth and rustic.

Helmigh’s contributions, too, deserve credit. The Crooked Moon includes a massive roster of artists—many of them featured in other Dungeons & Dragons projects, Magic: the Gathering cards, or similar nerd media—and spans a huge range of styles. In addition to the ubiquitous glossy-and-colorful 5e house style, the book also boasts a handful of artists more unique in their approach, and its these that produce the best work. The three standouts in particular are the jagged, energetic faux-woodcuts of Helmigh herself; the delightful, spooky, post-Cal Arts monsters of Holly “Sparrow” Lucero; and the atmospheric, apocalyptic, and many-textured work of Doomed Sarcoma. Critically, none of these three fits into the standard 5e wheelhouse, yet Helmigh deploys each so effectively that they outshine all the others, making the more ordinary villain portraits and dungeon setpieces feel like the odds one out. One perk of four million dollars, it turns out, is that unlike most third-party Dungeons & Dragons projects, you can commission each piece specifically for your book. Nowhere in The Crooked Moon will you find the sneaky Dean Spencer or grandfailure piece so common to other projects coming off Kickstarter or the DM’s Guild. While the sheer quantity of NPC portraits, monsters, magic items, and battle maps—each done up in dutifully saturated plastic hues—makes the book sag, Helmigh’s work as a director still impresses. Where a lesser project would end up feeling disjointed and haphazard in its look trying to bridge so many fashions and flavors, The Crooked Moon feels merely varied. By confining Sarcoma to solely individual full pages, herself to spot illustrations, and Lucero to one or the other (but nothing in between), Helmigh also manages to make the more extreme artists feel more distant, given their own space to thrive—by contrast, the blander 5e-styled pieces fill the middle, familiar pieces in familiar locations.

All this makes for a seamless, painless visual experience framed within and punctuated by intense atmosphere. The book remains bound up by 5.5e’s house style in its use of headers and typographical emphases, sadly, but within those bounds it performs consummately. On a copyediting level, too, The Crooked Moon adheres strictly and cleanly to the standards set by Wizards of the Coast. While I have my qualms with some of those choices as well, both the technical rules grammar and more open-ended descriptive text sit easily alongside any official release. In the general sphere of “high production value fancy-ass Dungeons & Dragons Kickstarter RPG books,” I’d say it’s done better than nearly all others.

On the one hand, this is nice to see: as a working designer and artist, it’s gratifying that enough money can eventually buy better taste, or at least buy long-term investment property facing good taste’s general direction. On the other hand, though, this visual design success makes The Crooked Moon’s many fumbles, blunders, and outright failures all the more frustrating. While I have good things to say about the project, I also want to emphasize: this is a book riddled with problems, huge ones, which together reduce the work to something far less than the sum of its parts.

Illustrations by Doomed Sarcoma

While others prove far more damning overall, the issue I’ll open with is simultaneously visible from the table of contents yet also took me just under halfway through to fully realize. It’s a mistake that, to my mind, stands as deeply indicative of the broader arc of The Crooked Moon as an RPG book—an unforced error born from rigid adherence to the stylistic failures of 5e, the contrasting creative demands of being both cast member and game book designer, and what feels like a total lack of development editing in terms of organization and structure.

The situation emerges like this: The Crooked Moon opens with an overview of “Druskenvald,” the book’s campaign setting. While the first run of “Edge of Midnight,” the actual play series, was set in a variation of Ravenloft, the official Dungeons & Dragons setting (Avantris’s second, after “Curse of Strahdanya,” a predecessor to “Midnight” based on the classic Curse of Strahd) the later mini-season and second season shifted to Druskenvald proper. Minute differences between Ravenloft and Druskenvald abound, but the key facts remain simple: both are pastiche Gothic horror Halloween settings; where Ravenloft leans into Hammer Horror films and pseudo-medieval trappings, however, Druskenvald incorporates elements more suited to an early-Twentieth Century world, replete with flapper dresses, banjo music, and a big black train. A flavor of Gothic less Victorian than Southern, with a palette more distinctly American than European.

After its introduction, The Crooked Moon details each of Druskenvald’s thirteen provinces. While the actual content of these writeups is largely abysmal—more on that later—what matters is that these thirteen prove highly varied from the both the central folk horror pitch and also from each other. They include a land consumed with green-tinged plague inhabited by rat-people wearing beaked plague doctor masks (“Bubonia”), underground temple-complexes built in crystal caves inhabited by quasi-Ancient Egyptian crystal scorpion-people (“Nerukhet”), and a vast desert city inhabited by stylish, ghostly calacas skeletons (“Kalero”). After the overview, the book launches into its player options, doling out the usual heaping platefuls of species, backgrounds, subclasses, feats, more feats, and spells, all of which together take up some eighty pages. Notably, of the thirteen new species, one corresponds to each of the thirteen provinces: off-brand Skaven for the plague country, spider-people for the crystal scorpion caves, and groovy, ghostly skeletons for the Día de los Muertos city. While the subclasses, spells, and feats are a little more grounded and tonally centered, these provinces and species are not. They’re colorful and weird and outlandish—the kinds of thing that certainly fits the “Elemental Plane of Halloween” vibe Druskenvald leans towards, but stray rather far, I thought, from the central folk horror premise.

Well over a hundred pages into the book, the titular adventure finally begins. Or rather, the book states it begins, but it’s another thirty-five pages of background, lore, campaign configuration, summaries, and further character options before the actual adventure content. Following a quick introductory tutorial chapter (the classic “train journey gone awry”), The Crooked Moon introduces its main campaign setting, “Wickermoor Hollow,” and its central hub town, “Wickermoor Village.”

This gave me pause. Wait, I said. Hadn’t I already read the main campaign setting, the thirteen provinces of Druskenvald?

No, it turns out, I had not. In a breathtakingly wrongheaded decision, every single part of the adventure contained in The Crooked Moon takes place not in the myriad fantastical Halloween lands described over the first forty-odd pages, but rather solely within Wickermoor Hollow.

Truth be told, on my first read, I missed this detail until I was a few chapters deep into the adventure. Only after wondering multiple times when the various quest hooks and plotlines would take the adventures out of Wickermoor and into the wider world did I return to the adventure’s sprawling opening summaries to discover that “The entirety of The Crooked Moon adventure takes place within the isolated valley known as Wickermoor Hollow,” explicitly removed from the rest of Druskenvald. After leaving the first hundred and twenty pages—everything after the lore and player-facing options—those thirteen provinces are, collectively, mentioned a grand total of three times.

On first understanding, the revelation stunned me. Why do it this way? Why include so many pages of lore and worldbuilding that, for all intents and purposes, has no effect on the main adventure? Why mention so many outlandish realms to which the adventurers never journey? And if the project absolutely needed these thirteen vestigial realms detailed, why put them first?

The answer, I suspect, lies in three distinct but equally powerful urges: first, player-facing options are a selling point for Dungeons & Dragons projects on Kickstarter. While the six original adventurers of “Edge of Midnight” comprised some unusual-looking characters, they were largely existing rules species reskinned for other purposes, most prominently a semi-undead crocodile-man (a Zombie) and an animate scarecrow (a Warforged). But a massive crowdfunder requires huge draws not just for prospective GMs but also for players, thus necessitating the thirteen species. And since Wickermoor Hollow is mostly a rather low-fantasy sort of place (the correct choice for folk horror, in my view), those thirteen distinctly fantastical species required origins, thus necessitating the provinces. Through this lens, viewing the provinces not as their own intentional locations but merely extended set-dressing for the species, the decision starts to make more sense. The species are all familiar tropes—reptile-people, humanoid gargoyles, living dolls—and so building the thirteen provinces specifically to justify the existence of the species allows each to feel more unique, cramming in various fantasy-standard traits and qualities. Needless to say, these bolted-on bonus traits (not just ghouls but icy ghouls, not just bird-people but prophetic mystical bird-people, not just demons but demons with scorpion telsons) never push The Crooked Moon’s added species to depths beyond simple gimmicks. They feel vestigial because they are vestigial, an extra addition for Kickstarter backers rather than something more essential.

As for the placement of the thirteen provinces first (rather than relegated to an appendix, or cut entirely) here emerges the second urge: to mimick the Wizards of the Coast house style. In nearly all Wizards-produced adventures and modules, the setting background information comes first—most notably, as The Crooked Moon’s chief reference point, in Curse of Strahd. To place the background lore somewhere else would be to violate the standards handed down from on high, and, both as a product designed to appeal to a very large but very particular audience and as a work that struggles find anything resembling its own identity, The Crooked Moon cannot do so. Avantris needed the species to sell books, needed the worlds to justify the species, and needed to follow the Wizards organization model to appease the 5e purists. And so we get forty pages of lore on places we’ll never see, never get mentioned, and do not matter in the slightest.

The third and final urge is the simplest yet also the most pernicious: one of the provinces—“Pholsense,” a realm inhabited by gargoyles, particularly the city of Cyril—actually featured in the original “Edge of Midnight” run. The version that appears in The Crooked Moon is much changed from its original Ravenloft incarnation, but it was present, so naturally it must be included for existing Avantris fans. More on this later.

Much of The Crooked Moon’s chaotic and uneven design emerges from these competing pressures. As a project, the book scrambles to fulfill numerous contrasting—and sometimes outright conflicting—desires, creative constraints approaching from a half-dozen directions or more, all at once, across the entire work.

Nowhere do these tensions appear more clearly than in the central story of the adventure. On paper, it’s simple: an ancient evil slowly awakens in the woods, and the player characters unwittingly hasten its rise. In practice, though, it grows muddier, and the resulting tale is tangled, messy, awkward, and ugly. (Potential players be warned: spoilers abound from here on out.)

At core, there are basically two stories running through The Crooked Moon: the first follows a trio of hags (the “Vermintoll Coven”) plotting to resurrect a pair of dead gods (the “Crooked Queen” and “Horned King”), who in turn seek to usurp Druskenvald’s current rulers, a human couple named Phillip and Adela Druskenvald, who dress like extras in The Great Gatsby. The second tells the tale of six former adventurers who slowly grew corrupt and eventually turned into evil monsters (the “Fallen”), and now need some good old-fashioned slaying. These two stories do not, broadly, have anything to do with each other: the events of the hag coven’s sacrifices do not clearly impact the six mutated villains, and the teased-out histories of the six do not involve the hags, the dead gods, or the Druskenvalds. The campaign begins with the hags-and-sacrifice thread, spends six of its seven middle chapters dealing with the corrupted adventurers (with a brief hag-related sidequest in the middle), then returns to the Druskenvalds and the awakening gods for the finale.

Each of these is, broadly speaking, a mess. The tale of the Crooked Queen and the Druskenvalds proves vague and confusing in the extreme, featuring multiple instances of unspecified powers lost and gained, usurpations and counter-usurpations, deaths and resurrections, and references to nebulous sins that may both cause or be caused by ultimate forbidden evil. It simultaneously positions both its loose protagonist-allies, the Druskenvalds, and its ultimate villains, the Crooked Queen and her Horned King, as having held control of Druskenvald with near-unlimited power and then losing it. Accordingly to the capital-L Lore, Phillip Druskenvald conquered the Crooked Queen’s realm to acquire godlike power (but it happened so long ago he’s forgotten it), then much more recently the Crooked Queen has stolen away Phillip’s powers upon returning to Druskenvald after a long train ride across the planes (how she does so remains unclear), rendering him merely human. Yet also, the Horned King is born of the sin(s?) that lie in Phillip’s heart, thus implicating Phillip and Adela as the makers of their own destruction, sort of, but the Horned King was created by the Crooked Queen specifically to reclaim her realm in vengeance of Phillip (how did she do it if she was weakened?), yet Phillip gained his godlike powers because he was able to usurp the Crooked Queen in aeons bygone (which makes me wonder how he completed that conquest in the first place?), but also Phillip becomes or possibly always was(?) the Horned King himself, and on and on it goes.

The book fails to solve the twin challenges of simultaneously placing a friendly god or two on the party’s side while also positioning the party to defeat an unfriendly god or two. The stakes need to rise ever higher, but none of these gods can be able to simply wipe the party (or its foes) off the map with a blink, so their powers can’t be too strong. Yet also, events still need to proceed at a pace and the party needs to stay in the center of the action, so prophecies and revelations constantly trigger with little warning or precedent. All this creates an extremely muddy backstory with an on-the-ground situation that comes across as little more than the default: the Druskenvalds, their former powers removed via unclear means, are now effectively ordinary nobility in fancy clothes; the Crooked Queen and Horned King, slumbering and waiting to awaken, exist almost exclusively offscreen in the background. There are funny Roaring Twenties-themed good guys to give you assorted quests (though they barely manage even that), and there are spooky but conveniently vague bad guys that must be stopped by doing those quests.

The six fallen adventurers, in turn, feature a relatively clear but nauseatingly generic backstory: they were once six strangers, came together to do good, went on many adventures together, defeated one or more unspecified great evils, and seemed set for life. But, the book explains, “While these former heroes never once directly heard the seductive voice of the goat in the woods, the sin that dwelled in each of their hearts was plied by the Horned King until they brought about their own downfall one by one.” On first read, I groaned aloud.

If you haven’t already guessed it by now, let me make it clear: these six fallen heroes are the six player characters from the original “Edge of Midnight” series, now warped and turned to evil. The references to their shared backstories—friendships and betrayals, romances within and without, shared jokes and experiences—comprise a loose adaptation and translation of the events of “Edge of Midnight.” While references to former campaigns’ adventurers are nothing new in Dungeons & Dragons (just ask Melf, Maximilian, or Mordenkainen), the cast and subsequent designers of Avantris have adapted their old player characters not into heroes, but villains. The good knight has become a wicked vampire; the wise druid has been overcome by plague and blight; the healing priestess now experiments upon living humans. While this could work well enough in theory, each of the six bears the same basic individual story: they were once good, they came in contact with a powerful spirit, the spirit came to dwell within the hero (by bargain, entrapment, consumption, or simple bad luck), and the spirit overcame the hero to transform them into a monster. Each features a heroic backstory, a subsequent turn to darker things, and a larger, more fantastical being as a looming threat.

This seems as good a time as any to make one of my harshest critiques: The Crooked Moon does not appear to have an original bone in its body. Two of the Fallen—the banjo-strumming scarecrow Jericho Sticks turned to a scythe-wielding crow demon, and the spectral blue shovel-wielding orc Yorgrim turned to a spectral blue lamp-wielding wraith—are based directly on champions from Riot Games’ League of Legends (Fiddlesticks and Yorick, respectively, the latter being nearly one-to-one). The crocodile-man pirate warlock Briggsy “Kutlass” Kratch is a take on Kaptain K. Rool, from Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country 2. Upon reading the chapter regarding the fate of Lethica Nightborne, the priestess turned to cosmically-inclined Victorian medicine, I described it to a friend as “Entering the Bloodborne Zone.”

The principal events and trappings of the main campaign, too, trade inspiration and pastiche for outright reference. The Ghostlight Express, the train upon which the player characters arrive, is the Old Black Train from Patrick McHale’s Over the Garden Wall, with a froggy conductor resembling the riverboat frogs of the same. The Horned King, when he makes his appearance, is a large black goat, described multiple times with the words “live deliciously”—a phrase lifted directly Robert Eggers’s The Witch, in which an evil black goat named Black Phillip (an incarnation of the Devil) asks the protagonist, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Indeed, even the book’s cover and central setpiece is an homage to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, that titan of folk horror, and several NPCs bear names taken straight from characters of the same. The list goes on: a tarot deck reading for magic items lifted from the Hickmans’ Curse of Strahd; a wizard subclass based on Hiromu Arakawa’s Full Metal Alchemist; multiple Druskenvald provinces pulled straight from Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft; the dress and crown of wildflowers from Ari Aster’s Midsommar; a recurring hare motif taken from The Wicker Man, again; and a recurring side villain borrowed wholesale from Mike Mignola’s Appalachian Hellboy line, who carries even the same name—“The Crooked Man.”

With only a scant few exceptions, the imagery, motifs, themes, and most compelling elements of The Crooked Moon are references and allusions to other works, in nearly all cases more imaginative and provocative than what Avantris has produced. The overwhelming majority of what seems to be original to the book is, with again only a handful of exceptions, painfully generic. Marius Renathyr, the knight turned vampire, leads a blood-cult abbey called “The Crimson Monastery,” whose followers worship “The Crimson Rose.” Farryn of the Greenwood, the druid satyr turned fungus monster, believes in a coming forest-prophecy event called the “Emerald Rebirth.” Wickermoor Hollow is a region where backwards villagers follow “the Old Ways” and refer to scientific scholars as “Newcomers.” When the requisite spooky circus comes to town, they’re led by an evil clown named, naturally, Chuckles.

Plainly put, all the cool parts of The Crooked Moon came from somewhere else.

Now, to be clear, all this is perfectly fine for an ordinary Dungeons & Dragons table. Matt Colville’s ancient mantra to GMs—“Take the stuff you like and put it in your game”—remains true. But a GM’s home game is not a published adventure, and certainly not a four million dollar published adventure going out to more than twenty thousand customers. For a product of such scale and caliber, and especially one with a writing team of over a dozen—including veteran hands like James Haeck, Ginny Loveday, and Brandes Stoddard—the final result ends up shockingly bland. You can guess every story beat well in advance, know everything about the NPCs with a glance, and see plot twists coming from a mile off. While obviously huge amounts of work went into the volume of details and sheer quantity of writing, the overall outline feels like a boring first draft, a placeholder—the absolute default.

What makes all of this even more bizarre is that, for the most part, Avantris planned it this way. On first read, when I realized that the six fallen heroes were the six player characters from the actual play series, the disjointed twofold structure and total lack of originality started to make sense: the original “Edge of Midnight,” I figured, played through a campaign compiled from their GM’s favorite folk horror media, which, as a mere YouTube series, didn’t need to be terribly novel. The disconnect between the hags-gods-sacrifice plotline and the fallen heroes plotline emerged, I assumed, because the latter were the adventurers who had played through the tale of the former on the show. In my mind, The Crooked Moon was basically a spruced-up release of “Edge of Midnight,” with the added bonus of the six PCs as side villains.

In a baffling twist, however, this isn’t the case. It took a fair bit of wiki-diving and episode-hopping, but in the process of writing this review I made a remarkable discovery: for the most part, “Edge of Midnight” does not feature the main characters, locations, or events of The Crooked Moon. While a handful of elements recur—the same trio of hags appears, as does an iteration of the first haunted house adventure and Phillip and Adela Druskenvald—the principal storylines are not at all the same. “Edge of Midnight” takes place in a version of one of the thirteen provinces, concerns itself with the rise of first an evil archbishop and later a ritualist witch, and features only a narrow slice of the NPCs that appear in the published book. The Crooked Queen and Horned King, the principal villains central to the story at the heart of The Crooked Moon, are not present or even mentioned. Most of what occurred in the original run of the show appears in a pair of NPC descriptions and a few table entries in a province’s section, a few hundred words at most.

Rather than the fairly predictable path of running an adventure for six player characters and then bolting those six heroes into that adventure as unrelated side villains for the published release—sloppy, maybe, but understandable—Avantris opted for the far more inexplicable path of bolting their six heroes as side villains into a new adventure, one made almost entirely from scratch. Previously, I’d assumed that the stark differences in content and tone between the colorful thirteen provinces of Druskenvald and the far more sober Wickermoor Hollow were due to Wickermoor being the central setting of the actual play, and thus a necessity to include. But no! The team at Avantris started with the outline of thirteen oddball Halloween lands, and then decided to write an adventure that had nothing to do with them. They had every chance to weave their former adventurers deeply into the story, an all-new tale to hold the six close to its heart, and instead they opted not to. That Avantris produced a book whose separate components have almost nothing to do with each other was not, as I assumed, the result of needing to include content from an actual play never designed to be published, but rather a deliberate choice.

How and why such a particular chain of decisions occurred remains a mystery. I keep searching for clues, looking for some hidden pattern or reasoning buried in The Crooked Moon’s pages, but I have yet to find any such elucidating elements. At present, the most likely explanation I have remains the most obvious: that this was a first-time project by rookie directors armed with the budget to hire innumerable writers and endlessly expand their book, but not the experience or vision to realize when to stop.

Increasingly, I suspect those many writers were each hired for different sections. While the whole book does closely follow the broad 5e editorial style guide and individual sets of sections match in terms of structure—each adventure chapter follows the same basic structure, the thirteen provinces share the same basic subheaders, the subclasses all match, and so on—the style, content, and quality of each section varies tremendously, as do the differences in atmosphere, tone, and mood.

Take Wickermoor Village, the hub town. The settlement lands reasonably well as an exercise in ambient tone-setting, but utterly fumbles its execution as playable adventure content. Of the thirty or forty named NPCs, nearly all have not-uncompelling hooks and premises, but only a handful execute on them in a meaningful way. A cursed baker is weeks away from turning thirty-five, the same age at which her mother and grandmother died, but “How she chooses to act on that is left up to you,” and neither the curse nor its breaking are detailed; an amnesiac apothecary suffers from blackouts and lost time, but their “mysterious past and periods of lost time are left for you to use as needed,” with no followup; a barber-surgeon takes his clientele’s hair, teeth, and blood for secret rituals “to gain dominion over the townspeople who oppose the return of the Crooked Queen,” but those rituals—along with the precise clientele and victims of his rituals—go unspecified. Over and over again, The Crooked Moon presents the possibility of an exciting character and situation, but leaves it to the GM to do the work of developing that as content to play.

Quite a few villagers in Wickermoor harbor secret identities or cult loyalties, in fact. But, with only one or two exceptions, they never result in anything of consequence: in the penultimate chapter, when the cult reveals itself and begins dragging friendly NPCs to the requisite wicker man, the book presents lists of “Possible Captives” and “Possible Cultists,” but does not specify who targets whom, who sacrifices whom, or who in general conducts the cult ceremonies in any capacity. The folk of Wickermoor rarely do much of anything, really. They offer no quests, ask no favors, and need no assistance, even when (as happens with some frequency) the whole town is bewitched or ensorcelled by dark magic. The text gestures towards the possibility of conflict or competing desires—a cult non-specifically attempts to recruit the local tailor, an artist’s painting grow steadily more unhinged without elaboration—but each time the details go unsaid, or else are explicitly left to the GM to decide. There are five loose religions or philosophies described, each framed like a significant faction with purported goals and ideals, but these, too, go nowhere.

Folk horror, as a genre, hinges on differences between an old world and a new, where the customs and beliefs of otherwise-ordinary people lead them to commit horrific acts. The American grad students of Midsommar travel to rural Sweden to conduct anthropological research, to make the unknown known, and suffer terrible fates for their curiosity. The Puritan family of The Witch leave their New England colony for the wilds to live a more faithful and devout life only to run afoul of Satanic witchcraft, accusing each other of ill magic and curses as they fall victim to iniquity. Police Sergeant Howie, the Christian protagonist of The Wicker Man, is horrified to discover the inhabitants of Summerisle have returned to an ancient paganism. Just as a Gothic tale requires past misdeeds come to haunt the present, folk horror requires an older tradition to supplant and shock modernity. (In Dungeons & Dragons parlance, one might describe this conflict in terms of law versus chaos—though I leave it to you to decide which is which.) Where supernatural horror and dark fantasy can conjure nightmares from the ether, folk horror needs a more human touch, a willingness of ordinary people—the eponymous folk in question—to participate in the ritual terror.

Wickermoor Village lacks these essential qualities. The sole ominous practice the party explicitly encounters—the sacrifice of a goat clad as a human—occurs at the very beginning of the adventure, an introductory setpiece with no lasting consequences. The book states that overlap exists between the more public and well-known traditions of the Old Ways and the more secretive practices of the Crooked Queen’s cult, but the details of these traditions and rituals go undefined. The Newcomers, the supposed innovators and futurists, never come into real conflict with the more traditional villagers. While the cast of Wickermoor Village feels primed for sudden horrifying folk traditions emerging, the details never arrive. Indeed, in the section concerning rumors and rituals, the book states that “There are plenty of strange happenings and rituals that the characters can stumble upon in Wickermoor Village and its surrounding areas,” but, predictably, these end up largely unspecified. Avantris provides a table of 1d20 suggestions, but they go no further than the notional: without specifics, the idea that after a funeral, “the deceased is fastened to a horse and sent off into the moors for a ‘last ride’” lacks the necessary resonance. “A public battle to the death,” fought between townsfolk “with their children strapped to their backs” sounds compelling, but without any further detail as to which villagers, which children, and for what reason the duel is fought, these ideas remain just that—ideas. Concepts for a GM to go over and develop on their own, with the hard work of preparing such situtations for play at the table left undone.

Like so much of The Crooked Moon, the villagers of Wickermoor feel like setup with no payoff. Could this cast of NPCs form the basis for evocative and unsettling folk horror? Of course. Are the necessary details provided in The Crooked Moon? Of course not. Folk horror relies on folklore—the oral and material traditions of a culture, a people, their stories and customs and houses and clothes and legends. While there is an interminable quantity of regular old fantasy lore in The Crooked Moon, and endless gestures towards the trappings of folklore, the book fails to build the requisite culture necessary for its horrific aspirations to hit home. Both folklore and horror are built on specific imagery, practices, and symbols, all of which Wickermoor Village lacks.

(While their near-total disconnect from the rest of the book ensures that it’s less of a practical issue, all of these criticisms prove equally true of the thirteen provinces of Druskenvald. Avantris provides each province the broadest of overviews of its people, places, and customs, followed by a table of 1d12 “quest hooks,” each an empty outline of an adventure without details or specifics. There are no maps beyond an illustration of all Druskenvald; the two named NPCs and handful of monsters per province receive no statblocks; the provinces get no descriptions of specific locations. Each is an outline, a set of suggestions, a notional basis for what could be an exciting Halloween region, but wholly lacking in play-ready content. Like so many other parts of The Crooked Moon, the provinces are unusable without either constant total improvisation or hours upon hours of GM preparation.)

After arriving in Wickermoor on an old black train, Phillip and Adela Druskenvald in tow, the party gets shunted to the first dungeon: a haunted old hillside manor, the Crooked House. While the content of the dungeon itself feel solid enough for the most part (a tub that drowns a bathroom in blood, a spirit board to ask a ghost lore questions, a preponderance of loose teeth), the surrounding narrative threads are overwhelming, confusing, and contradictory. The Crooked House juggles no less than three separate families (two now dead), an introduction to a recurring side-villain named the Crooked Man, the introduction and subsequent defeat of one of the three hags of the Vermintoll Coven (the ones trying to resurrect the Crooked Queen), a decades-old massacre with only spectral survivors, a voice-stealing spirit cat, the kidnapping of Phillip and Adela Druskenvald, and a child that can see ghosts. Each of these threads jostles for prominence, and details vanish in the shuffle. It’s just too much!

The structure of the adventure chapters in The Crooked Moon only causes further confusion. Each chapter begins with a high-level background and summary—noting here that the full arc of events is always plotted out ahead of time, with little room for player choice—followed by a more detailed history of the site in question, then descriptions of the key NPCs of the region and their backstories, then a quest hook for the players to chase, and only then an introduction to the adventure location in question. Rather than explicating details as players are likely to encounter them, each chapter frontloads a mountain of lore and history. While three to six pages of background doesn’t sound like much in the abstract, the chewiness of the prose and the convoluted backstories create an immense amount of details to keep track of: the Crooked House, for example, introduces fourteen NPCs over the course of its prelude, less than half of which actually appear in the house itself. While future chapters are not quite so bad (the next two introduce a mere seven or eight named NPCs apiece), this structure makes each adventure harder to use than it genuinely requires: when a keyed location mentions an NPC, for example, one needs to flip back and forth across a half-dozen pages or more to find them. The adventure locations proper assume an intimate and familiar knowledge of the details of their histories, relying on a GM’s capacity to process and convey a mountain of exposition rather than well-paced writing. By the third or fourth chapter, this grows exhausting.

The adventures locations themselves, the environments and the threats they contain, are, for the most part, also just not very good. They provide innumerable instances of inescapable magic walls, villains that instantly teleport away when attacked, on-rails sequences that cannot be deviated from, and exceptions designed to stop players from doing what they’re not supposed to. Nearly all chapters are linear, brittle, and devoid of agency. Compounded by the thick mouthfuls of frontloaded lore, it makes each chapter a tangled maze, requiring constant rereads, flippings-back, and references. (Perhaps, I idly wondered, it’s a kind of meta-commentary: deeply linear play mirrored by and juxtaposed with deeply non-linear reading?)

A case study: When the party arrives in the Drowned Crossroads, a bayou-inspired swampland, to tangle with the undead-ish crocodile-sorcerer Briggsy Kratch (a.k.a. the Grinning Sinner, a.k.a. Mister Crossroads—the book can’t quite seem to decide what to call him), there’s a beat where the party meets Kratch in his swamp-shack. Precisely why this interaction occurs remains somewhat unclear: per the deeply convoluted backstory summary the chapter employs instead of an introduction, Adela Druskenvald visited Kratch to get a second opinion on a nasty prophetic dream she had, and Kratch promised her insurance against this fell doom at the cost of her wedding ring, which she accepted. But then, after Adela “had forgotten the path she took” to meet him, her arm became infected with a cursed disease that can only be dispelled with Kratch’s death and the recovery of her ring, but, of course, this disease must be kept secret from her husband, Phillip. She conveys some of this and instructs you to travel to the Crossroads, where you meet two NPCs who teach you how to play Liar’s Dice and offer some more lore, then proceed to do nothing else.

The book seems insistent that the party will want to meet with Kratch specifically in his shack. Once there, a conversation ensues, and Kratch invites the party to his riverboat casino, offering each adventurer a cursed bargain or trinket as a key: if they refuse, they cannot gain access to Kratch’s boat and make no progress (why cursed bargains or curios are required to enter a casino is never explained, but the boat cannot be boarded or even observed otherwise). If they accept, Kratch bestows his end, the boon or curio, then teleports away. If they attack Kratch, he summons a few monsters and again teleports away. If a character tries to steal extra curios, all items past their first dissolve upon leaving the shack. Each player character must gain one curio or bargain and no more, and there is nothing they can do to prevent such an acquisition from occurring. What could be a fun decision point for players to risk overreach and suffer the consequences—an appendix even includes a massive table of random curses to incur!—is hacked down to a scripted encounter. One of the most open-ended and intriguing moments of possibility, the chance to rob a cursed pirate captain or else attempt sneak aboard his haunted riverboat, ends up reduced to a setpiece conversation with no chance to alter the course of events. It’s frustrating even to read, but I cannot imagine how it must feel to play.

(Adela’s wedding ring is later found to have been in the pocket of a friendly NPC the whole time, stolen from Kratch offscreen before the adventure began.)

These sorts of botched setups and squandered possibilities keep occurring. In the blood-cult vampire monastery, it’s possible for the party to receive an invitation to meet with the vampire abbot Father Renathyr in his office at the top of a belltower. If attacked, Renathyr rings the bell to alert his monastery to the threat. When I started reading this key, I figured this would be the setup for a fun alternate boss fight: navigate Renathyr to the top of his tower, alone and isolated, but simultaneously fend off waves of minions and cultists charging up the belfry’s stairs. I imagined that the bell could be a fun tactical consideration: if you can stop Renathyr from ringing the bell, you can stop the minions from arriving, thus adding further texture and nuance to the fight. But no. If you attack Renathyr, he rings the bell and teleports away to his boss chamber.

Across the board, The Crooked Moon carries a strange allergy to maps, to physical space. While certain locations receive more detailed to-scale maps—either on the scale of dungeons, like the blood monastery or Lovecraft sanatorium, or else on the scale of settlements, like the corn-maze village or haunted cemetery—many do not, including two of the three towns outside Wickermoor Village. Regional distances often appear denoted in time, rather than space: that haunted cemetery lies “approximately half a night’s travel southeast at a Normal pace,” a centipede-infested mine is “about 8 hours of travel away from the village at a Fast pace,” and the Drowned Crossroads requires “three nights through treacherous terrain,” with no pace given. While the book ends with an overview map of Wickermoor Hollow, it’s far more of an illustration than a diagram, with the book explaining that “The map of this province [Wickermoor Hollow] is deliberately not to scale, and the details on it are not precise, which allows for flexibility in this folktale adventure.”

At various points throughout the adventure, the book simply gives up. When the party enters a corn-maze to pursue the scarecrow-demon Raum (f.k.a. Jericho Sticks, a banjo-strumming scarecrow), no map is provided, instead relying on two 1d4 tables and a sequence of successful Perception checks. If one tries to fly above the maze to get a better view, the text specifies that when “a flying creature reaches 120 feet above the ground, they are suddenly 60 feet above the ground.” In the fungus-infected forest, there is a map, but it goes unused: instead, the chapter segments the ten-odd locations into sets, with the paths and sequences between those locations within a set randomized. Towards the end of the book, there’s a dream sequence, one built by layering together the Crooked House and the nightmares of Adela Druskenvald. Rather than take the far more compelling and rich method of attempting to geographically map out a person’s dreams, however, The Crooked Moon instead defaults to an “encounter flowchart,” a linear sequence of setpieces with no variation or choice to their order or progression. When describing the nightmare, the book states that “If a creature attempts to leave a location, it finds itself moving back into the location, no matter how far or in what direction it travels.”

Periodically, The Crooked Moon offers what appears to be a choice to ally with the villains: accept the fungal blessing of the plague-beast; join Father Renathyr’s vampire blood cult; gamble with Mister Crossroads. In each case, though, these choices are either false or else end in a negation of play. Winning and losing against Kratch both result in the same boss fight with merely a buff or debuff applied; adventurers who become vampires are automatically removed from the party to become evil NPCs; accepting the blessing of the fungus-plague kills you instantly. Any possibility of unexpected or emergent play in the adventure finds itself dutifully excised.

It’s possible, I suppose, that the players on Legends of Avantris enjoy such unabashed linearity, such a forcibly guided experience. Certainly my players would not—and I doubt yours would, either.

Amid all this overwrought Dragonlance-core railroading, though, hides one unexpected bright spot: Memory’s Rest Sanatorium, home of the ultra-goth Matron Lethica Nightborne. The Bloodborne Zone. It’s really good! While it bears the same structural issues as previous chapters, requiring readers to chew through a half-dozen pages of generic lore and flavorless backstory, the actual dungeon is compelling, creepy, and well-designed. (It also opens with the weakest, and thus most charming, quest hook by far: a previously-unmentioned farmer NPC in Wickermoor explains that his unnamed cousin went to the sanatorium for health reasons and never came back, sending him only ominously-cheerful letters. The letters go unstated and the cousin is never mentioned again, but gosh if that isn’t enough motivation for our plucky heroes.)

The sanatorium itself, the main dungeon, features a sharp division between open areas, where the player characters can freely explore—they might even check themselves in as patients—and restricted areas, where the more nefarious experiments occur. The entire second floor of the sanatorium is restricted, naturally, and only from that second floor can the party access the final boss chamber, so much of the challenge is basic navigation and exploration. All over the sanatorium wait fun interactive elements for players to engage with and exploit: the nurse orderlies wear masks to hide their faces, but extra uniforms can be employed as disguises; if a fight breaks out, a lockdown initiates, but the party can break into the control room to both start lockdowns themselves or disable them entirely; the pharmacy holds unlabeled medicines with varying effects, all of which show up across the sanatorium and can be wielded by the player characters (before or after they learn the effects); the brainworm-infested surgeons pretend to be ordinary humans in the presence of visitors, so you can cow them down from a fight if you act like a confused guest or patient; the head nurse worries about Matron Lethica, and might give you a pass to explore restricted areas if you can convince her you’ll help; the memory-draining serum employed in the sanatorium has an antidote, but it requires ingredients harvested from all over the dungeon. Within the sanatorium wait hidden passageways to find, medical examinations to manipulate, secret codes to steal or decipher, imprisoned experiments to unleash, and patients to rescue. It’s all just so interactive and organic and fun—and, at just under thirty keyed rooms, more than twice the size of the next-largest dungeon in the book. In what feels like a deliberate barb to the other regions’ bosses, too, Matron Lethica does not have reflexive teleportation, instead relying on lockdown and her minions if attacked. In fact, her main laboratory (the threshold of the boss chamber) features both an obvious slow elevator and a secret teleportation orb—if the party finds the orb first, they can force Lethica to take the elevator, giving them ample time to set up for the ensuing boss fight.

Over and over again, I found myself impressed and delighted by the sanatorium. Is a spooky Victorian hospital with Lovecraftian cosmic horrors lurking just out of sight terribly original? No. It’s basically just the Research Hall from Bloodborne’s “The Old Hunters” DLC (with a monster borrowed from Bram Stoker and Ken Russell, the “White Worm”). But at the same time, the execution is so crisp and fun that I don’t mind, and I doubt my players would, either. The final boss fight even features two unique elements—a smaller wizard boss riding on the back a big beefy monster boss, and arrays of pressurized pipes filled with acid goo—that put it head and shoulders above the rest of The Crooked Moon’s fights. Frankly, it’s baffling that this chapter received such a higher level of interactivity, dynamic potential, and open-ended problem-solving in its adventure design compared to the rest. It was here, reading the sanatorium, that I started to suspect these chapters got doled out to individual writers and then brought together at the end, because the differences feel too stark to have come from the same pen. To whichever of the innumerable writers hired for The Crooked Moon created Memory’s Rest Sanatorium: excellent work, I salute you. Please keep writing adventures like this. In the world of 5e, it seems they’re sorely needed.

Other than the structural issues common to all chapters, my one genuine criticism of the sanatorium is the same criticism I have of many of the rest of the adventure chapters, and indeed most other parts of the book: it’s not really folk horror.

While sanatoriums do feature prominently in horror media, those works are not folk horror, but rather Gothic horror. Memory, grief, psychological trauma, the depths of the human mind, beings from beyond the stars—none of these are staples of folk horror, because none of them have anything to do with folklore. Bloodborne manages the shift from the Gothic horror of religion and hauntings to the cosmic horror of insignificance and aliens by linking them with through-lines of forbidden knowledge, violatory rituals, and physical transformation, but none of those are folk horror. I’m not opposed to each of the six Fallen playing its hand at a different flavor of horror, but those need to tie into the core of folklore. I could, with some imagination, see a world in which the sanatorium works itself into the folkways and traditions of Wickermoor Hollow, but The Crooked Moon doesn’t take the time to do so. In fact, with her social isolation, wielding of alchemical science, and institutional structures, the adventure positions Matron Lethica far more in line with the order and progress of Phillip and Adela Druskenvald—an outlook on life which should, by rights, be opposed to the Crooked Queen. After all, it’s a rural farmer, the epitome of folk, who asks the party to investigate the sanatorium. But, unfortunately, this thread goes unexplored.

Of the six Fallen’s chapters, only one comes close to folk horror: Foxwillow, a farm town haunted by Raum, the aforementioned secret-eating scarecrow demon hiding in a corn maze. The set dressing is present and the area feels folksy, leaning into the “rural town full of secrets” vibe, but the demon is not well-worked into the folklore and traditions. That he’s summoned by villagers hiding dark secrets who start to murder each other—rather than, say, summoned by villagers performing an age-old ceremony of giving up secrets to a demon—again falls closer to Gothic horror than folk. A sister murdering her half-brother for her mother’s affair is a family play, a morality tale, more a haunted psychodrama than something concerned with people bringing their traditions to bear.

The other five come no closer: Briggsy Kratch and the Drowned Crossroads make a gesture, but they too end up more concerned with the sins of dead men than customs and rituals; the blood-cultists of vampire Abbot Marius Renathyr burn heretics, but do so according to institutional orthodoxy within the rule of the Crimson Monastery, an explicitly new innovation separate from the rest of Wickermoor; Maidenmist Cemetery, the haunted graveyard of Yorgrim the Gravedigger, feels like nothing so much as a kludge of Dark Souls level designs, replete with lighting beacons and a boss door; Hartsblight Forest, the fungus-plagued wood of satyr druid Farryn of the Greenwood, opens with an encounter of other ominous satyr druids, but they’re contextless, with no ordinary people to support them; and Memory’s Rest Sanatorium, of course, is a hotbed of mad science and cosmic tentacles, not traditional customs and practices.

If we expand the lens of The Crooked Moon to—like Ravenloft—include Gothic horror more generally, many more begin to fit the mold: the sanatorium, certainly, as a matron literally confronts past misdeeds with follies of science; likewise the blood monastery, as a knight covers up and papers over his past sins with religious obsession and hunger; the fungus forest, too, with a druid turning to magic to revive her dead lover and in turn being corrupted herself. The Dark Souls graveyard bears little resemblance to Gothic horror in its narrative beyond a loose theme of memory, but very much so does in its general aesthetic of a haunted cemetery; the crocodile swamp struggles, but still features a dead man coming back in vengeance against an evil wizard who made a pact with the devil, so we’ll give it a pass. Colorful, Dungeons & Dragons-infused Gothic horror, certainly, more vibrant and varied than most of Ravenloft, but still, reasonably Gothic. The Fallen’s stories deal in descents into corruption, isolation warping former heroes, and ghosts of the past both figurative and literal: classic Gothic.

But, of course, The Crooked Moon doesn’t bill itself as Gothic horror, but folk horror. Its front matter acknowledges that the book “draws inspiration from the wide umbrella of works encompassed by the Folk Horror Chain, as well as elements of other horror subgenres such as Gothic Horror, Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, and more,” but still—the cover says “Folk Horror Roleplaying,” not “Folk Horror and Other Horror Subgenre Roleplaying.”

The “chain” Avantris invokes is a creation of novelist and musician Adam Scovell, who, in his treatise Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, describes folk horror as being defined by four key elements chained together: landscape (typically hostile), isolation (social moreso than physical), skewed morality (trending nastily), and a happening or summoning (supernatural or otherwise). Setting aside the fact that effectively zero of the adventure locations and threats in The Crooked Moon actually hit all four of these, Scovell’s assessment of the genre and definition are not reliably accurate.

In a media studies question like this, the usefulness of a definition lies in two basic factors: its ability to include those works that we already intuitively or culturally understand as broadly fitting into the defined category, and its ability to exclude those works which we already understand as generally not fitting into the defined category. Definitions find value as lenses for viewing fringe cases, those works and qualities that lie along the edges of better-understood categories. We already understand that The Wicker Man, The Witch, and Over the Garden Wall are folk horror, and we already know that The Exorcist, Alien, and Saw are, while horrific and frightening, not folk horror. The job of the definition, then, is to provide a set of boundaries that include everything that fits in the category and exclude everything outside the category, thus allowing us to examine the less certain edge cases with renewed accuracy and insight.

On the question of exclusion, Scovell’s definitions prove too broad. Take, for example, the journey through the Mines of Moria, from The Lord of the Rings: we have landscape (the Misty Mountains, Caradhras, and the mines themselves), isolation (the Fellowship enters alone, the way sealed behind them), skewed morality (evil goblins everywhere), and a happening or summoning (the Balrog). Or, alternatively, Luke Skywalker’s visit to Yoda on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back: landscape (the swamps of Dagobah), isolation (Dagobah is very remote), skewed morality (Yoda is a weird little frog guy who doesn’t care about what Luke thinks he should), and a summon or happening (Yoda pulls the X-Wing from the swamp). I would not describe either of these as folk horror—nor, I suspect, would Scovell, or, for that matter, Avantris—but they fit Scovell’s definitions anyways. They suggest a definition too broad, one incapable of excluding things which we recognize as not folk horror.

On inclusion, Scovell’s chain also cuts off works that fit well inside the auspices of folk horror. Take, for example, Shirley Jackson’s landmark 1948 short story, “The Lottery,” well-known for traumatizing middle-schoolers everywhere. “The Lottery” is an essential piece of folk horror. In a piece for the Irish Times, Bernice Murphy, a professor of English at Trinity College Dublin focusing on popular fiction (especially horror), describes Jackson’s short story as “arguably the most influential North American folk horror text,” going on to say that “the story gains much of its power from the contrast between the entirely matter-of-fact way with which the lottery is carried out and the act of communal savagery it facilitates.” (Murphy also edited a 2005 collection of criticism on Jackson’s work, Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy.) While “The Lottery” does indeed feature skewed morality and a significant happening, per the folk horror chain, it does not clearly feature significant landscape or isolation. The unnamed village of “The Lottery”—modeled on Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time—is small, sure, and presumably rather insular, but the story references other towns and villages nearby (ones that are said to have done away with the lottery), and there is no sense of the folk of the village being cut off from the world at large. Likewise, while Jackson intentionally sets her tale in high summer, June 27th, the physical stage of the story is simple: the action takes place in the town square, “between the post office and the bank.” Both the prose and the characters reference the changing of the seasons—Jackson opens with rich green grass and flowers “blossoming profusely,” and a village elder invokes a saying, “‘Lottery in June, corn heavy soon’”—but the actual landscape itself is not hostile, nor even particularly noteworthy. “The Lottery” is horrific not because of its land or its solitude, but because, as Murphy argues, it presents ordinary people committing extraordinary acts, ones that they treat as commonplace despite being deeply cruel and bloodthirsty. Folk horror is a social horror, a horror of people and their beliefs, one reliant on culture, customs, and rituals. That when written down or shot on camera these usually appear in rural farm towns is an incidental byproduct of the genre, not a requirement.

Scovell’s folk horror chain stands at once too broad, admitting all manner of spooky fantasy setpieces, and too narrow, excluding foundational pieces of the genre. Because Avantris chose to rely on Scovell’s work—citing him directly—very little of The Crooked Moon comes across as truly horrific, and certainly not folk horror. Bloody and vicious, sure, and filled with references to works that circle closer to the mark, but almost nothing genuinely lands in its own right. Wicker men and circles of stones alone do not folk horror make.

Even the sheer fact that Wickermoor Village hosts an explicitly secret cult, in some sense, defies the fundamentals of folk horror. The murderous Swedes of Midsommar operate more or less in the open, as do the pagan folk of Summerisle. Even the eponymous witch of The Witch is not truly secret so much as merely out of sight (it’s not like the Puritan family doesn’t know she’s out there). If Avantris wanted to create a genuinely folkloric horror, the ordinary people of Wickermoor would need to participate in the terror, and do so as a simple matter of course. A few of the unspecified random tables of events could be interpreted in this light, but none of the specific events of the main story do. Indeed, in the lead-up to the finale, the villagers find themselves being kidnapped by their secretly-evil neighbors (a bog-standard Dungeons & Dragons cult plot point) rather than participating in a traditional happening themselves (a far more folkloric terror). Without the specific customs, rituals, and folkways of Wickermoor detailed, The Crooked Moon cannot invoke those customs in its monsters, setpieces, and adventures, and so is left to rely on mostly the defaults. Even the one chapter in which the party is accused of murder, a deeply convoluted plotline featuring multiple instances of disguises and body-snatching by one of the Vermintoll Coven hags, the accusations result from supernatural bewitching rather than earnest belief. Witch hunts stand as a classic form of folk horror—see Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw, both of which Scovell cites repeatedly—but The Crooked Moon uses the accusations to create a stealthy escape sequence rather than any sort of trial or social conflict. What could be a compelling moment of culturally-sanctioned terror ends up instead reduced to merely an action setpiece. Again and again, The Crooked Moon gestures towards folk horror and borrows its set dressing, but misses the thematic core of the genre. It’s very frustrating.

More galling still, The Crooked Moon includes a novel set of structures that, on paper, feel like they should prove invaluable for delivering elements of folk horror: “fateweaving.” Presented just before the adventure begins (after the loredump, but preceding the first chapter), the book describes fateweaving as “an optional framework to intertwine the characters’ individual stories throughout the adventure,” a sort of individualized meta-structure. Each player chooses one thread for their character (or has one chosen for them) and follows that thread through the main tale. Each includes an overall goal (complete the ritual, discover the source of the visions, destroy the doppelganger), some options for personalization (the nature of past experiments, the symptoms of an incurable disease, the demon that owns one’s soul), a prescribed starting scene (a family member confiding a secret, an invitation to a secret society, a dream of a mysterious tree), and then a series of additions to existing scenes, characters, and areas within the rest of the adventure, solely of interest to the character’s thread of fate. There are thirteen threads in total, each with five of these additions: for example, the Thread of Rejuvenation (which concerns itself with the natural world), describes a character having a specific foreshadowing vision in a specific room of the Crooked House; meanwhile, the Thread of Liberation (involving a character having lost or bargained away their soul to a demon) dictates that Briggsy Kratch’s riverboat casino holds a special set of magic playing cards to find. Little story threads for characters and players to chase, designed to convey the classic recurring individual-character storyline of many television shows and RPG actual plays—a personalized, serialized C-plot, running mostly in the background, culminating in a big climax.

Structurally, the fateweaving threads are messy, at once both too prescriptive in their details yet still underdeveloped. They tie to The Crooked Moon’s thirteen player character backgrounds (each quick and mostly lovely), one recommended thread per background, but with only a handful of scenes per thread, they’re so minor as to likely be forgotten. In a few cases, a player character might have two or three scenes at the beginning of the adventure and one or two at the end, but none in the middle. While the presented endings to each thread vary wildly—ranging from starting a kind of localized apocalyptic rapture to discovering that the character is a time-traveler to spiritually merging with one or more monsters—none of them are terribly folkloric in nature. I expected, hoped, that these threads would bind players to the rituals and customs of Wickermoor Hollow, giving them specific practices and details to latch onto and in turn discover horrors within, but they don’t. If anything, the threads are nearly always heavily supernatural in nature, disconnected from the material realia of the Hollow and the ways of its people, resulting in adventurers that feel, if anything, even less connected to the world. They present a very intriguing concept, a structural framework that could, in better hands, result in some extremely satisfying personalized plotlines, but they don’t. Fateweaving is a veneer, a layer on top of the main adventure, but adds little of substance.

Like so much of The Crooked Moon, though, it didn’t need to be this way. Character-specific threads woven into an adventure are plausible and valuable, and underexplored territory in adventures. Most examinations of this kind of character–narrative structure emerge as outgrowths of rulesets rather than adventures: Grant Howitt’s Eat the Reich, for example, or its predecessor, John Harper’s Lady Blackbird, both of which include specific rosters of existing characters to choose from. But something like fateweaving—a structure, a role, built into the adventure and required for play—still holds tremendous potential in sandbox adventure design. If instead of totally distinct narratives, the thirteen threads in The Crooked Moon had centered around, say, each of the campaign’s main villains and threats, they could have proven far more present and valuable, not least as means with which to familiarize the players with the folkways of Wickermoor Hollow. That they don’t manage this, or even really make an attempt to do so, speaks again to the underdevelopment of the book’s central setting and theme.

The other elements that feel most ripe for weaving into folklore are the book’s many monsters, of which there are over fifty, plus nearly twenty individual legendary monsters and a dozen player character familiars. While most feel like hastily-reflavored Halloween variations on stock Monster Manual entries (Not a yeti but an “Alpengrendel,” not a shambling mound but a “Bayou Beast,” not a scarecrow but a “Pumpkin Head”), one of The Crooked Moon’s distinguishing features is that each of these monsters possesses a secret weakness. Both described in a monster’s text entry and appearing in their statblock, a given weakness varies in both efficacy and ease of discovery, but each can significantly sway a fight, in some cases ending it before it begins.

As I read these entries, I noticed an odd pattern: the boss monsters’ weaknesses, both those of the main adventure and the optional post-game boss rush, are mostly terrible; the common monsters’ weaknesses, though, those appearing throughout The Crooked Moon, are mostly very good. For the main boss monsters, nearly all boil down to “Shout at this boss about their backstory crimes.” (That so many of these monsters are resituated characters from the original “Edge of Midnight” campaign makes the requisite lore-learning feel, shall we say, rather indulgent.) The optional post-game bosses prove a little better, but still forgettable—multiple weaknesses, for example, involve little more than writing specific words on an object to wield against the boss. The main adventure’s bosses’ weaknesses usually get at least gestured towards throughout the chapter by NPCs or environmental cues; the post-game bosses’ are not, instead left entirely to the GM to arrange.

Likewise, the common monsters’ weaknesses are mostly not communicated to players explicitly, adding more work to the GM’s plate. (Except! again! the Bloodborne sanatorium, which does feature numerous clues pointing to its monsters’ weaknesses! More kudos!) Despite this, the weaknesses themselves prove extremely fun and exploitable, with many being the sort of thing clever players can intuit, guess, or figure out via experimentation. For example, if you run across a swarm of evil pigeons, you can confuse them by handing them a letter to deliver; bewitching carnival spirits that tell stories are sorely weakened by reciting the morals of their stories before they finish their tales; Lovecraftian aliens turn out to be immunodeficient to earthly diseases; phantom funeral hearses cannot detect living creatures that hold their breath; and undead ferrymen stop fighting and offer one free boat ride if you pay them three coppers. While the actual implementation into 5.5e rules language feels clunky, they’re all clear enough to run more or less just off the text, with the precise effects figured out on the fly. Taken as a whole, these secrets stand as genuinely fun and interactive in a way that surpasses the monster design of nearly all other monsters in 5e, and indeed even the monsters found in many well-regarded old-school bestiaries. They’re clever and thematic, significant enough to provide a huge advantage without ending fights immediately, and simple enough to exploit yet still require a degree of preparation. Overall, the monster weaknesses are excellent, among the best I’ve seen.

What’s odd is that many of these secrets feel strikingly folkloric in their style, almost fairy-tale, and a few even allude to broader cultural knowledge: at one point in the adventure, an undead ferryman arrives with two copper coins sewn over his eyes and another on his forehead, but the other ferrymen in the adventure do not present such adornment, and no NPC or environment ever mentions this three-coin payment. Swarms of ghostlings cannot cross over iron, and their monster entry even specifies that this is why graveyards are surrounded by iron fences—a fantastic little piece of aesthetics-as-retroactive-worldbuilding—but again, nowhere else mentions this restriction. Gobblegeists, creatures like giant draconic turkeys, are repelled by seven-pointed stars: their entry states that followers of the Old Ways carry seven-pointed stars for specifically this purpose, but none of the followers of the Old Ways the party meets carry such stars, nor do any of their holy places bear one. While many other monsters feature simpler, less obviously folkloric weaknesses, even the blandest and most mechanistic could easily be imagined in the context of traditional custom.

The book does provide a set of rules for discovering a monster’s secret, spending so much time and making so many checks, but these rules depend on “sources,” which once more end up left to the GM’s discretion. The book offers suggestions such as well-versed sages, knowledgeable locals, and libraries, but again, it’s difficult to say exactly which of the many NPCs qualify as sages and locals for which monsters, and across the whole of the adventure, The Crooked Moon features about three libraries total. Besides, as any player can tell you, rolling to mechanistically “discover” a secret is far less compelling than actually discovering that secret in the wild with your own wits.

To be honest, it feels like whoever wrote the monsters strove to create creatures that could be woven into the folklore and culture of Wickermoor Hollow (and did a more than decent job doing so), but the rest of the writers either did not have the monster details while they wrote their sections, or else the monster writer’s work was simply ignored.

After the monsters comes a string of appendices, all of which smack of the stretch goal: powerful scaling magic items, the ones drawn by Adela Druskenvald at campaign start via tarot cards, powerful but mostly forgettable; cursed magic items, which grow more deleterious the more you use them and thus prove mostly pretty fun; potions, each with an enhanced version, a sort of “Greater Healing Potion”-esque upgrade, inoffensive yet unambitious; and a table of one hundred and fifty-six curses (for the major and minor arcana of a tarot deck, upright and reversed), which strike a pleasant balance of silly and debilitating. In general, most of these appendices feel marginally sharper and more polished than the variations one might expect in an ordinary Dungeon Master’s Guide, but not by much. They’re fine, good enough, decent work—though this places them, it ought to be said, a fair sight better than most of the preceding chapters.

While their overall quality is higher than the adventure, neither the appendices nor the monsters escape the overall issue of the book as a whole: disconnect. Muddy and unclear vision. A lack of direction. The Crooked Moon feels less like a single coherent project than a patchwork of designs, a semi-random compilation of ideas, rules, and content strung together only loosely. I have mentioned so many elements already: the thirteen provinces, the myriad player options, the central story of the Druskenvalds and the Crooked Queen, the six Fallen, the individual adventure locations, Wickermoor Hollow and Village, the monsters both legendary and ordinary, the appendices, and more besides. None of these fit cleanly together. The sections retain strong editorial and visual styles, but those are largely concerned with technical unification—making sure the chapters go in the right order and that the pages look similar—rather than creative direction. In terms of design, story, tone, theme, genre, and voice, the individual parts of The Crooked Moon just do not align.

How exactly a project on the scale of The Crooked Moon ends up this confused and disorganized remains mysterious. I’d hoped that the ending would provide some elucidation, but no such luck: once you slay the final Fallen, the adventure swerves to a shoehorned-in carnival section featuring Chuckles the Clown and various silly games (another stretch goal), and from there the campaign moves totally on rails. You fall through the linear series of dream-sequence setpieces about Adela Druskenvald’s fears, then fight two strikingly samey sequential hilltop-sacrifice battles, both featuring prominent elements taken directly from The Wicker Man, down to the names of the NPCs. Naturally, Adela burns to death in the wicker man and cannot be saved by any means.

From there, it’s a rush through another linear setpiece sequence following Phillip’s trail as he flees to the Crooked Queen’s tomb-tree, with justification for his doing so provided only in little post-hoc notes and journals. (Boxed read-aloud text states that “It is obvious that Phillip was attempting some form of resurrection ritual” to bring back Adela, though I admit if the book hadn’t outright told me this I am not sure I’d have figured it out.) Once you reach the tomb-tree, Phillip naturally transforms into the Horned King—who, remember, is just Black Phillip, the goat from The Witch, with a third eye and bat wings.

Once you defeat him, there’s an odd beat where suddenly the book requires a final sacrifice to banish the Queen, offering possible sacrifice suggestions such as “anything of great personal value to the character: a cherished item, a piece (or person) of their past, or even a part of themselves (reducing an ability score by 2, giving up a class feature, etc.).” Then, players roll dice to determine if their sacrifices are acceptable; they can also commit suicide to automatically succeed. If too many sacrifices fail, the Horned King resurrects and the players lose without recourse. It’s a bizarre and feeble attempt at some kind of thematic ending, and without diegetic reasons for the sacrifice or even the vaguest hinting from past characters, it feels totally arbitrary.

As the finale to a sprawling campaign, the battle against the Horned King and ensuing sacrifice fails both to unify what came before or make significant deviations from the expected path. For a genre known for protagonists either succumbing to the horror (as in The Wicker Man or Witchfinder General) or else joining that horror (as in The Witch or Midsommar), The Crooked Moon offers neither: Phillip transforming into the Horned King carries no weight, no emotional heft or payoff. The party never gets the chance to side with the Crooked Queen, to become crooked themselves; their goody two-shoes heroism is simply assumed. The last two chapters prove utterly predictable, completely devoid of choices to make, and culminate in railroaded jank and setpiece battles that once again pay homage to the aesthetics of folk horror without reaching any level of depth, insight, or meaning. Were it not for the faux-Americana setting, the ending could safely stand in for any other generic fantasy adventure.

Such a bland and flat finale suggests that there may indeed be no mystery to the development of The Crooked Moon. A team of actual play actors wielded a compelling concept and established merch production lines into a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, but lacked the experience or design chops to deliver on their lofty intentions. What they created instead is a book that gestures in new directions but nearly always falls back into familiar territory, leaving its most promising notions behind in favor of well-trod basics.

There’s a concept, a lens, in the game industry—I heard it first from Mary Kenney, a writer now working at CD Projekt Red—which states that the story of every game is itself the story of that game’s development. Caves of Qud, for example, involves going on a long complicated quest, alone, through endless mystical rabbitholes to deal with techno-fascists trying to take over the world, and was created mainly by just two developers over the course of more than a decade; Dishonored concerns a small band of rebels working against corrupt authoritarians after being betrayed and left for dead, and was developed by ex-staffers of studios shut down by their publishers; Dark Souls starts you caught in an endless cycle of creation and destruction that you fight back against through strength of will, and From Software is now famous for being a beacon of relative stability in an industry devastated by ongoing layoffs. (For an in-depth comparison, try playing through Psychonauts 2, a game about examining the materialized interior psyches of various people, then watch Psychodyssey, Double Fine Production’s in-house documentary series of the game’s development.) This is all a somewhat unfalsifiable notion, of course—at such wide angles, it’s difficult to prove any interpretation truly incorrect or inaccurate—but the lens remains fun and fascinating nonetheless.

While The Crooked Moon is about a lot of things, the principal recurring narrative motif is that of getting in too deep without understanding the consequences. Phillip and Adela Druskenvald stand as the most obvious facet of this thread, of course, not realizing that their actions would resurrect the Crooked Queen and Horned King, but the same is true of the Fallen, each of whom started out with noble intentions only to end up mired in dangerous messes. Nearly all characters make bargains with powers greater than they—the Fallen, the Druskenvalds, the Crooked Man, the hags of the Vermintoll Coven, and most likely even the party—and end up mutated and warped as a result. One wonders how Avantris feels, finding themselves suddenly gone from merely a very successful actual play channel to invested with four million dollars and the obligation to deliver tens of thousands of books to legions of hungry fans.

In truth, though, I find that The Crooked Moon wears its most apt metaphor right on the cover: the wicker man. A wicker man is unliving facsimile, an artificial object made in the image of the self. A wicker man is designed for destruction, consumption, a piece meant not to stand the test of time but to be set aflame and watched as it burns. A wicker man is woven together from thousands of individual strands, each tough and reliable in their own right, but ultimately stands empty, waiting to be filled. A wicker man appears impressive, but on the inside still remains hollow.

Historical wicker men were used as a means of mass religious oblation, animals and people stuffed inside and set alight, filling the emptiness with living beings. We see one on the cover without its prey, its bulk yet hollow. That the masked cultists gaze at you, the reader, perhaps offers the answer as to the victims of the wicker man’s sacrifice.

March 25, 2026 review

Cataphracts Design Diary #5

Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on. Previous design diaries: Entry #1, Entry #2, Entry #3, Entry #4.

Today’s design diary is a little bit different, a little more topical-news-update than let-me-share-my-process. (If you’re here on an archaeological design dig, this may be less helpful.) But, nonetheless—onwards!

Cataphracts HQ Discord Server

I made an unofficial official Discord server for the project, called Cataphracts HQ!

The server is open to the public for discussion and design. Come chat, talk about the many Cataphracts games people are running, your experiences as a referee or commander, work on your own projects, and otherwise hang out. While there is a channel for LFG purposes, it’s (mostly) not a server for running games but rather discussing Cataphracts as a whole.

Art by Viktor Vasnetsov

Rules Update v1.2

Rules update v1.2 of the main CATAPHRACT rules document is now live!

I won’t cover the entire changelog here, but this update addresses a few topics: a bunch of language adjustments and clarifications, removing a few loopholes and exploits, beefing up strongholds, changing the way scouting works (you can now see other armies’ scouts before you see the army itself), an overhaul to ship rules, some math tweaks, and a handful of other changes.

If you’re invested in such things, I recommend you read the new rules update directly.

Cataphracts Stuff by Other People

There are now many Cataphracts games out there, and even more people discussing and writing about the game. Here is my feeble attempt to catalogue some of this writing and design, though I’m sure it will be incomplete.

I am focused mainly on documenting material written for the public: blogposts, mainly. There are a lot of rulesets and hacks in Google Docs, but those A) feel more inwards-focused, only incidentally public, and B) there are too many of them to list. But, if you have put out a blogpost or other public-facing writing about Cataphracts (prior to today) and you don’t see it on this list, hit me up on Discord and I’ll add it!

Campaign Scenarios and Materials

Phlox’s Testudis. An extremely impressive and detailed campaign scenario, replete with map features, factions, and more.

Phlox’s Useful Real-World Maps. A list of hex maps of parts of Earth that you could reskin for a Cataphracts game.

Play Reports

Dom’s After-Action Report. A detailed writeup and history of a two-month game run by Domicilius last year—a fun read for sure, and I think the very first Cataphracts game to actually conclude.

Seedling’s Miniphracts Writeup. A detailed start-to-finish writeup of Miniphracts, a smaller short-form campaign Seedling ran as training for another, larger campaign, the Tinh Hai Emergency.

Toastiferous’s A Month Until the Snow After-Action Report. A video AAR of one character’s experience, matched with two others.

Edrenaline’s A Month Until the Snow After-Action Report. The second video AAR of another character’s experience in the same campaign.

Squidney’s A Month Until the Snow After-Action Report. The third video AAR of the same campaign.

Dan’s Campaign of a Thousand Crowns Report. Dan ran one of the first and biggest Cataphracts games, the Campaign of a Thousand Crowns, and wrote a gobsmackingly huge 120-page report of how it went.

Rules and Player-Facing Content

Phlox’s Cataphracts Special Detachment Generator. A fun, cute random generator for making special detachments. Lots of silly combinations, but very useful for brainstorming.

Dusk Witch’s VANGUARD. A new campaign and ruleset (from a seasoned veteran of OVER/UNDER) set in a pseudohistorical version of Southeast Asia in the ’40s–’50s.

Tangent’s Dragoons. A new campaign and ruleset (from another O/U veteran) set in a sort of Early Modern-ish setting.

Louis’s Player Roles. A collection of unusual and odd possible player roles to fit into a Cataphracts game, including metabolic vehicles and choruses of psychic ghosts.

Louis’s Bugaphracts. Working through a ruleset where you play warring anthills. Fun!

Louis’s More Bugaphracts. A whole bunch of scary and unusual bugs to use in a Bugaphracts game, some of them sourced from the GLOG server. More fun!

Design Thoughts, Advice, Theory

Dom’s Reflections. A very thoughtful and insightful set of reflections on the campaign Domicilius ran.

Dom’s Tips and Tricks. Advice for new GMs based on the same game.

Robert’s Thoughts on Automation. The degree, style, and texture of automating Cataphracts is somewhat divisive, so Robert (an honest-to-goodness software engineer) weighs in.

Depending on how things go, I might put out another blogpost highlighting others’ contributions at some point in the future.

March 20, 2026 cataphracts

Apologia for Plain Paragraphs

Markdown doesn’t play so nice with text formatting stuff. You can read the clearer original Google Docs version here.

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What was the last book, article, or essay you read that was, by sentence count, composed of mostly bullet points? That is, a piece where the number of sentences begun by or contained within a bullet point outnumbered the sentences without, the “regular sentences.”

I can’t think of one.

Alternatively, what was the last book you read that contained numerous instances of bolded inline text? Not titles or headings, but actual words mid-sentence that the author or publisher printed in bold, regularly, multiple times a page? While some magazine articles use bolding to, say, differentiate between interviewer and subject, I can’t name any essay or article that chose to regularly bold certain words or phrases mid-sentence or -paragraph. The same goes for books where parentheticals follow most every sentence, or articles loaded with nested sequential bullet points, or essays with “important” words printed in a half-dozen colors, fonts, or weights. I simply have not seen such practices.

Except, of course, in tabletop roleplaying games!

Crack open any of the most recent popular tabletop RPG books and witness the positive flood of boldings, italicizations, underlinings, smallcaps, parentheticals, bracketed asides, sidebars, lists, tables, bullets, nested sub-bullets, color-coding, font alternates, and all the innumerable other invented methods to display text. Sometime over the past decade or two, it has become wildly in vogue to saturate the page of an RPG book with as many typesetting and graphic design features as possible. This extends across more or less all RPG scenes, at least as far as I can tell—no matter your preferences for storytelling or simulation, big hefty tomes or slim little booklets, the ancient behemoths or the tiny indie outfits, nearly all adore their barrages of graphic design features.

I want to be clear: this is weird! These practices are strange and unusual! They defy explanation!

But it also seems like this sort of textual busy-ness is here to stay, or, at least, it is now deeply embedded within the broader design palette of tabletop RPGs. As an easy example, scan through the winners and finalists of the ENnie Award winners for “Best Layout & Design” over the past five or ten or fifteen years: Mythic Bastionland, Wonderland, Shadowdark, CBR+PNK, Impossible Landscapes, and the rest. While they vary in their precise application and methodology, the overwhelming majority show a stark aversion to straightforward, plain sentences and paragraphs.

Many of these stylistic choices exist at the intersection of editing and graphic design. A list of bullet points exists not only as a structure on the page, visually, but also as a structure in the writing, linguistically. One influences the other: graphic designers make changes to the text visually, which influences how it’s read; editors alter the text in the manuscript, adding changes for a later graphic designer to employ. For this piece, however, I’m not going to draw a strong distinction between where one ends and the other begins. While obviously those lines matter for reasons of both academia and labor, I’m talking about the broader, more directorial decision to write RPG books in this way, regardless of where it comes in the pipeline.

It’s critical to note that I am not guilt-free in this regard. I’m about to castigate some popular design decisions in tabletop RPGs, and I want you to know that I do this in large part because I have made many projects following this general method (and brought in a good deal of money doing so) but am now convinced it’s incorrect. But I, too, am guilty, not only of employing these methods but also of publicly advocating their use. The Big Wet, Lowlife, Seas of Sand, Time After Time—I filled each to the brim with bullet points and boldings, but now I wish I hadn’t.

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Let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about. Here’s a sample text, a description of a room in a haunted house.

B13. Trophy Room

A stuffy, musky room opens, the taxidermied heads of deer, wolves, and boars lining the walls. Three glass cases on the north wall hold clusters of other hunting trophies: horns, fangs, claws, tusks, mummified organs, instruments made from horn and gut, and lengths of hide and fur. A central table holds comprehensive sets of tools for both hunters and taxidermists: knives, scalpels, scissors, oils, hooks, cotton, wooden racks, wire armatures, and lengths of chain.

Disturbing the tools causes the mounted animal heads to bray and shriek with pain and fear, quieting down only after long minutes of panic. Removing the tools from the room causes the animals grow to friendlier, eagerly gazing towards the removers. Those who can speak with animals then find them calm, kind, and helpful—especially to those bringing their favorite snacks.

And here’s how that same key might be rendered in the more contemporary style:

[B13] TROPHY ROOM

Stuffy, musky (smell of old animals, chemical oils). 3 glass cases sit on the north wall. Animal heads line the wall (deer, wolf, boar, stuffed). Central table holds various tools.

• Glass cases: clusters of hunting trophies: horns, fangs, claws, tusks, mummified organs, instruments (gut, horn), hides, fur.
• Animal heads: stuffed and taxidermied animal heads of many animals: deer, wolves, boars.
• Table: old wooden table, with two toolsets:
  • Hunter’s tools: Knives, scissors, oils, hooks, wooden racks.
  • Taxidermist’s tools: Scalpels, oils, cotton, wire armatures, lengths of chain.
  • Disturb the tools: The animal heads bray and shriek with pain and fear for several long minutes.
  • Remove the tools: The animal heads grow calm, kind, and helpful, especially to those bearing their favorite snacks.

Note the differences. And just in case you think this simply a matter of how these display on my rather minimal blog setup, here’s a side-by-side of what they might look like on the page:

Plain paragraphs vs. bolded bullets.

Next, consider an NPC’s entry, a dungeon-dweller merchant type:

Gediminas the Barber

A sloped, slick man, forty-three years old, with a stained bandage wrapped over his eyes and a pair of elongated skeletal arms emerging from his shoulder blades. A pair of special holes cut in the back of his dirty poet’s shirt allow the skeletal limbs full access, the bony hands darting this way and that, complementing his normal fleshy pair. Gediminas bustles about the shop floor, always in a rush, skipping between trimming a client’s hair, mopping his brow, ringing up charges, powdering a brush, and sharpening his scissors. Unable to see, he often jostles people and objects as he passes, now misplacing an item, then losing his place as he moves. His skeletal hands, however, work with great precision, regardless of sight and independent of vision. He mumbles to himself as he works, murmuring prayers to Blind Io. Gediminas offers full surgeon-barber services at the standard prices: haircuts (10sp) and shaves (5sp), but also surgery (50sp), stitches (15sp), cauterizations (5sp), amputations (75sp), and leechings (25sp). He pays half again the full price for healing potions, white and red salves both, and bloodcap mushrooms.

To clients whose hair he’s cut five times, Gediminas also shares his most dear desire: to travel to the Far Floors (pg. XX) and visit his nephew and former apprentice, Mindaugas the Monk (pg. XX), gone now for two years. To those bringing word from Mindaugas, Gediminas offers both free surgery and haircuts, grateful tears streaming from beneath his bandage.

And the same entry done again in the contemporary trendy style:

GEDIMINAS THE BARBER

Sloping (bent over, hunchbacked), slick (oily, shiny) middle-aged man (43). A bandage (stained, dirty) wraps around his eyes (cannot see), and skeletal limbs (elongated, deft, independent of sight) extend from his back beneath his poet’s shirt (filthy, grimy). Roll 1d6 to determine Gediminas’s current activity:

1. Trimming a client’s hair.
2. Mopping his brow.
3. Ringing up charges.
4. Powdering a brush.
5. Sharpening his scissors.
6. Mumbling a prayer to Blind Io.

• Services offered:
  • Haircuts (10sp)
  • Shaves (5s)
  • Surgery (50sp)
  • Stitches (15sp)
  • Cauterizations (5sp)
  • Amputations (75sp)
  • Leechings (25sp)
• Wants: healing potions, white and red salves, and bloodcap mushrooms, which he buys at 1.5x price.
• After getting 5 haircuts: Gediminas reveals he wants to travel to the Far Floors (pg. XX) to visit his nephew and former apprentice, Mindaugas the Monk (pg. XX), gone now for two years.
  • Bring word from Mindaugas: Gediminas offers free surgery and haircuts, grateful tears streaming from beneath his bandage.

Once again, note the differences. Finally, as a third example, some rules text from a crunchy punchy space fantasy project:

Armor

A gladiator’s armor is divided into individual pieces for the torso, head, arms, and legs, each of which has its own armor rating. Armor negates damage beneath its rating. Each time a piece sustains damage in excess of its rating, it reduces the damage by its rating, then lowers its rating by 1. After reaching rating 0, the armor piece breaks, and must be repaired at a hub. Certain weapons and effects can ignore armor (like vibro-blades) or further reduce armor’s rating (like magma shot).

Armor is heavy. A gladiator can wear armor pieces whose total ratings are equal to or less than their Brawn score—past that, they cannot deploy maneuvers, and suffer a disadvantage on checks made to move nimbly or swiftly.

And the same rules done up in a more contemporary style:

ARMOR

Gladiators wear armor, divided into individual pieces for the Torso, Head, Arms, and Legs.

• Each piece has an armor rating.
• A piece negates damage beneath its armor rating.
• When a piece suffers damage in excess of its armor rating, it reduces the damage by its rating, then lowers its rating by 1.
  • After reaching rating 0, the piece breaks, and must be repaired at a hub.
  • Certain weapons ignore armor (like vibro-blades).
  • Certain weapons further reduce armor’s rating (like magma shot).
• A gladiator can only wear armor pieces whose total ratings are equal to less than their Brawn.
  • If they exceed their Brawn, they cannot deploy maneuvers, and suffer a disadvantage on checks made to move nimbly or swiftly.

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I could keep going with these. While I acknowledge my precise application of bold, italic, and underlined text is a little arbitrary—typically the editors and graphic designers who use such methods employ style guides—it’s based on real examples I’ve seen over many a project.

Now: read these examples! Which is easier to read? Which is easier to process and comprehend? Which is easier to return to return to and reference later? Which sticks in your head after reading?

Here’s a simple acid test: find two RPG books, one with bolded and bullet-pointed entries (say, “The Feast of Tegny Wood”) and one written with plain paragraphs (say, “Sag River Extreme Cold Research Facility”). Read an entry or three from each. Then, on a piece of paper, write a brief summary of each in your own words. Compare your summary to the written entry. Is it easier to write an accurate summary from the bolded bullet points, or the paragraph?

In theory, there are two basic reasons to bold, underline, italicize, or otherwise emphasize a chunk of text: to indicate that it’s an important term, like a rules keyword or reference term, or else to draw the eye and create a visual hierarchy. Both of these have their purposes in the design of RPG rulebooks. It can occasionally be valuable to signify important terms in-line, and visual page hierarchies remain extremely useful for organization and clarity. You’ll notice I didn’t put any emphasis on the headers of my sections, but I think a basic bold or underline would be very appropriate.

Overdone, however, these overwhelm. Text emphases draw the eye. They call attention to the emphasized words, pulling your focus across the page. Where the text of a novel simply flows top to bottom, left to right, an RPG book page full of bolded text presents no clear place to start and nowhere to go next. The level of complex emphases and other elements becomes too much, it all begins to feel merely chaotic. Your eye jumps from bolded term to bolded term, less reading the words themselves than browsing the emphasized text and letting the rest merely wash over you. It looks fantastic in a store page preview, or when flipped through at the shop, but it’s a style built for those who skim.

As these emphases appear in great quantities, they begin to reduce everything that isn’t emphasized: if a word or phrase isn’t in bold, can it really be important? If it really mattered, wouldn’t it be emphasized somehow? Editors and graphic designers work desperately to ensure that all critical details appear higher in the visual hierarchy, and readers learn that anything not emphasized rarely matters. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: designers are afraid readers won’t read and so put anything important in bold, thus leading readers to stop reading everything else in plain text (since it must not matter), so more must be emphasized, and so on. Summaries beget summaries.

These days, much of this impetus also comes from inertia. We’ve reached the point where a page full of bullets and boldings is “What an RPG book looks like.” A page without such emphases and intricacies looks empty, blank, boring—certainly not, the designer says to themselves, the kind of thing to win an ENnie for “Best Layout & Design.” A page stuffed with tables and lists and nestings and elaborate color-coded sections feels more RPG-ish, regardless of its ease of reading or its value at the table.

In decades past, though, RPG books looked different. This widespread trend toward bullet point-ification started only in the past ten or twenty years, largely as a reaction against the endless bloated paragraphs so common from the Eighties onwards. Those monstrously inflated columns of text are still around, of course, and still thick as peanut butter, but the editors and graphic designers react against not an issue of form, but execution.

To be clear, the complaints against these trad behemoths are very real: key details end up buried in the morass; secret details lie nestled alongside obvious features a GM might read aloud verbatim; the flow and order of information end up confused and circular; description, rules text, and advice blur and smush against each other; and there are just too many words to get to grips with. All of these matter, and all of these complaints are valid! But each of these, too, is possible with bullet points and bolded text—and each can be solved without abandoning the sentence and the paragraph. That critically examining the text in RPGs and thoughtfully correcting known errors leads to bullet points is not a foregone conclusion, but an incidental occurrence. It’s been long enough now that we have an excess of bloat in both RPGs written in paragraphs and RPGs written in bullets, just as we have carefully written examples of each as well.

The popularity of bullet points endures also, I suspect, because bullet points feel more intuitive for writers reading their own work. When I take notes on a lecture or textbook, I do it in bullets; when I’m keying a dungeon for my home game, I write those in bullets, too. Bullet points are good for notes, the kinds of notes that almost always summarize a larger reality. When I write “7 hungry crocodiles eating goblin carcass” in a key for my home game, I know that those crocodiles are actually the missing villagers now transformed to animals, and that the goblin carcass was actually poisoned by the nightshade well. When you already have the broader context of a situation, simplified notes can prove extremely effective, but when you come in fresh, you need the clarity that sentences and paragraphs provide. I don’t doubt the many writers of bullet-pointed RPG books who proclaim their bullets easier to read and reference when compared to paragraphs—I merely doubt that their readers experience the same.

Like text emphases, bullet points have their place, of course. When a writer genuinely needs to present an unordered list of entries, bullets remain perfectly acceptable. But RPG books are not composed solely or even primarily of unordered lists, and so the relevance and prominence of bulleted lists are overstated. Indeed, many of the editors and graphic designers espousing bullets explicitly pair them with an emphasis on the ordering of information in an entry, creating an odd juxtaposition: after all, if a list needs ordering, it shouldn’t be bulleted but numbered.

Now, I have read many arguments in favor of this bullets-and-bolding style. The most popular technique involves bolding (or otherwise emphasizing) the most important or detailed elements within a given entry, then adding further details to those bolded elements in bullet points beneath the main paragraph. This is another style that I suspect feels better to writers than readers: it self-organizes as you go, sorting elements of the entry into the important parts in bullets, and the unimportant in not-bullets. (It’s a variation of this style that I mimic in the examples above.) What’s odd about this style is that it resembles less novels or nonfiction than a different written mode: interactive fiction, “I.F.,” otherwise known as a text adventure or parser game.

When you play a parser, like Amy Briggs’s Plundered Hearts or Sam Barlow’s Aisle, you get a chunk of descriptive text, and then type various commands like “look” or “examine” on various words based on the description. For example, if the game says “You stand just outside the narthex of the cathedral, ivy curling along the tympanum, graffiti overlaid atop stained-glass windows. The narthex’s doors stand open,” you might type “Examine ivy,” “Look at stained glass,” or “Read graffiti.” When you write a parser game, you have to go through and detail each and every object in all the rooms, like the ivy or stained glass or graffiti, but also the doors or the tympanum or the narthex itself. A room’s description both conveys its overall picture while also suggesting the various interactive elements within that room—the exact same style as these popular contemporary boldings-and-bullet RPG books.

Two issues emerge from this: first, while I suspect that this is an at least somewhat intentional resemblance, it’s misguided to regard to parser games and tabletop RPGs as similar mediums. A parser game, like all videogames, exists only to the degree that its developers program the software to exist: it’s a joy to discover new verbs in a parser in part because it’s exciting to discover the new modes of interaction the developer now affords you. In an RPG, though, effectively all verbs are available at any given moment, with characters able to smell, bend, lick, kiss, and ensnare with a complex trap right from the get-go. Likewise, while each environment and object in a parser game needs to be created by a developer and only exists within the confines of that programming, objects and spaces in an RPG end up much more fractal and open-ended. You can knock down the walls of any dungeon, just as you can examine those walls’ fine-detail brickwork, lick them for flavor, scrawl on them in chalk, or brush off small brick-particles study in a lab for their molecular composition. In assuming a level of “programmedness” in an RPG ruleset or adventure, we yield some measure of the fractal beauty of imaginary spaces.

But, as we all know, some degree of abstraction can prove helpful. The second issue proves more grievous, and far more pertinent to my overall message: the point of an RPG book is not solely to convey detail to a GM, the point is to make something worth reading. Defenders of bolded text and bullet points often state that they care less about the flow of words on a page or the aesthetic qualities of writing than they do ensuring that the GM receives the maximum amount of information transmitted directly from the writer’s brain, with as little room for interpretation or artistry as possible. If you agree with this idea, I offer a simple suggestion to you: play a videogame, then run your RPG sessions from that videogame.

I’m not kidding! If you don’t care about the medium of transmission and only value the volume and accuracy of detail conveyed, you can just as easily find dungeons and storylines from videogames. A session of a roleplaying game is not bound to books! Boot up Skyrim and run through Bleak Falls Barrow: that is a dungeon, one that’s just as ready for play in a session of a tabletop RPG as any that exists in a book. If all that matters to you are the features and contents of the imaginary world, the medium should not matter, and there exist far more efficient media at conveying the details of a non-existent space than words in a book.

Likewise, it’s trendy to advertise an RPG book as not needing to be read ahead of time to run a session. To continue the example, this feels much the same as if you looked at a map of Bleak Falls Barrow but didn’t actually play the videogame. Can you run an RPG session from such a summary? Of course you can. You can run an RPG at the table with anything, or with nothing. Summaries have their purposes, of course, but they’re no substitute for actually engaging with original material.

It’s the same thing with ordinary prose. The writers, editors, and graphic designers of books that eschew plain text strike me as afraid of their audience, or mistrustful. They want to sell RPG books because RPG books are, we seem to have decided, the objects required to play an RPG sessions. But books are difficult! Reading is hard, much harder than vibing with illustrations or examining a diagram or skimming a list of bullets. Bulleted lists full of bolded terms stand as executive summaries, just the highlights, only the most important bits. The craft and art of writing gets shoved aside in favor of communicating raw information—RPG book as product, rather than as piece.

As I alluded to earlier, there’s a reason humans don’t write most books like RPGs. When you intend your audience to read the words, you need to trust them to actually do so. Bulleted lists and emphasized text may draw attention and look glamorous to those who only skim, but for the genuine reader, they prove more difficult. RPG books exist as books specifically because the written word allows imaginary spaces and situations, the stuff of which RPG play is made, to be conveyed in ways that are unique to the medium of text. The character of writing should be embraced as humans have written for millennia: in sentences and paragraphs, one after the other.

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Or, if you’d prefer:

RPG books exist as written text used to convey imaginary worlds. Text possesses unique qualities that allows it to do so in ways other media cannot. Accordingly, we should write RPG books in same method as other books: sentences & paragraphs.

• RPG books: The rulebooks, adventures, supplements, modules, and other material used to run a session of a tabletop roleplaying game. Considered essential.
  • If questioned: RPG sessions can be played in numerous ways. Because they are imaginary worlds, they can draw from any and all media.
  • If believed: Save or spend 1d6 × $500 on Kickstarter RPG Projects over the next five years. Save again to run a session with a project.
• Written text: A persistent form of documented language, as depicted with specific visual images combined in numerous ways, such as letters and words.
• Imaginary worlds: The primary medium of a tabletop roleplaying game, consisting of one or more imaginary spaces and their contents, imagined by the players of a roleplaying game.
• Unique qualities: Malleable (infinitely), available to all those literate at any time, requiring little-to-no upfront cost to produce. Limitless possibilities, including the use of metaphor, theme, symbol, motif, and emotion.
  
• Other media: Film, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, dance, software, etc.
• We: the players, readers, writers, and other artists producing tabletop RPG books. (Much disputed.)
• Sentences & paragraphs: Secret method of encoding language thought lost to time, now practiced only by sages and occultists. Save to comprehend. Save again to write.

March 13, 2026 design the biz writing

Cataphracts Design Diary #4

Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on. Previous design diaries: Entry #1, Entry #2, Entry #3.

After many months away—and with OVER/UNDER in the middle—I return to the siege.

In the time since the last design diary, many new Cataphracts games have sprung up! I know of at least four or five that have run to completion, another six or seven currently active, and at least that many being readied for launch. It’s impossible to overstate how exciting this is: seeing people take the rules and run with them in all kinds of directions—technicolor high fantasy worlds! twentieth century post-colonial industrialization! teeny-tiny two week games! cannibalistic apocalypses! insect warfare! gigantic games with over a hundred players! more automated Discord features than you can shake a stick at!—has been deeply rewarding. Thank you all so much for your energy and passion.

I have a couple of updates to share about my own Voreia game, but first, I want to address a topic I’ve gotten a lot of questions on over the past couple months: I often mess things up in Cataphracts. Like, all the time. While most commanders see them only on occasion, my game has been riddled with mistakes and errors, a long train of accidental blunders I’ve made over the many months. Many referees who contact me seem quite worried about the mistakes they make, and so I write this to assure you—it’s gonna be fine. There are very few mistakes that can’t either be fixed or lived with.

There are four-ish categories of mistake you can make while refereeing: numbers, information, space, and time. All four are related, with one category blurring into another, but it’s useful to divide them by the source of the mistake. I’ve made all of these errors in my game at some point, and I want to talk about how I corrected them.

While I’ll make some reference to the Cataphract rules, most of these are more about, like, conduct and adjudication and communication, rather than strict rules. (Eventually, one of these design diaries is going to be a big long game studies post discussing the boundaries between those things and the limits of “the game.”) Accordingly, most of the solutions are not questions of rules but questions of running the game.

Numbers

Numerical mistakes occur when I mess up the math. The two most common errors I make are, one, getting my percentages wrong in battlefield casualties or supply losses, and two, adding together supply counts wrong from foraged hexes. I’ve made others, but it’s usually one of those two.

Battlefield casualties can almost always be quickly fixed directly: just correct the wrong numbers. Because I directly edit commanders’ army sheets after each battle, it’s easy to tweak things on short notice. (If I’m really sneaky, I can do it before the commander’s player even thinks to check their sheet.) Typically, this mistake gets noticed within a few hours of change, either by me or a commander, and you can just fix it directly without major issue. If it does take you days or weeks to notice, I would recommend letting the error stand as-is, since it’s likely knock-on decisions have already been made. (Although truthfully, if it’s been a long while, it’s more likely I’ve already forgotten the original math and the error will go unnoticed by anyone.)

If you’re changing an army’s numbers and have already informed the commander of another army of the primary’s numbers (allies arriving at the battlefield too late, say), I would tell the newcomer player directly. If you quickly and easily admit your mistakes, I find commanders to be very generous and forgiving. Just say you messed up, tell them the new numbers, and make the fix.

Mistakes in foraged supplies are similar. Commanders are far, far less likely to notice errors than you are, given that they’re working off of settlement level numbers that are estimates at best, which means it’s incumbent on you to correct them. As before, I recommend just saying that you’ve messed up the math, fix it directly, and move on. If I’ve given a commander too many supplies, I’ll sometimes just let it slide, too, especially if it’s been a few days—it’s a big feels-bad as a commander to think you have a certain number but then get it knocked down out of nowhere. (If you’re the kind of referee who cares about these things, you can always mark a hex or three as foraged a couple extra times to account for the extra.)

In general, numbers mistakes are easily corrected, but very obvious. I recommend being direct and straightforward with your players accordingly, and fixing the mistakes as soon as you notice them.

Information

Informational mistakes occur when I tell a commander the wrong thing. These come in three flavors: errors of omission, when I was supposed to tell a commander something and didn’t; errors of transmission, when I tell them something but get some of the details wrong; and errors of addition, when I tell them something they weren’t actually supposed to know.

Errors of omission almost always occur as a result of scouting reports, message arrivals, or other sorts of time-location events that I’ve forgotten to write down. Usually, I notice this relatively quickly once the two armies get close to each other on my map, and so it’s a simple fix: I just tell the commander “X hours ago, your scouts reported Y.” For example, “About four hours ago, your scouts reported an army of some 2,000 infantry to the north,” or even “Ah, sorry, yesterday evening, a letter arrived for you saying Z.” Afterwards, I typically let commanders engage in mildly retroactive actions to account for that lost time (a form of rubberbanding—more on this later).

The one exception to this is if I miss a letter delivery and only notice days or weeks later. In that case, I often just let it stand. After all, letters get lost.

Errors of transmission come in many flavors: mixing up my cardinal directions on the map, misreading numbers on a spreadsheet, copy-pasting the wrong letter, getting the banners or colors of an army wrong, or a thousand other things. One way or another, I get the shape of a notification to a commander right, but botch the fine details. In most cases, this can be fixed by just explaining yourself: tell the commander(s) you got something wrong, fix it, and move on. As with omitting details, this may involve a smidgen of rubberbanding to correct for mistakes, but most transmission errors are not going to require huge changes to correct.

Errors of addition are a little more complicated. In general, I strive to avoid the necessity of a barrier or gap between player and commander; because there’s such close parity, “metagaming” as it’s normally thought of either doesn’t really exist or is largely a non-issue. If you as a player can think of it, you can probably do it as a commander. But! errors of addition present a confounding variable: when I tell a commander that they’ve spotted an army (when they actually haven’t seen them yet) or received a letter (but it’s meant for somebody else), we hit a break. Suddenly, the player knows something they shouldn’t.

Most often, these errors are fixed by essentially just asking the commander in question to—and this is a very technical term—pretty-please try to forget they knew that information. And, truthfully, this usually works. My commanders are generally quite forgiving and accepting of this kind of thing, and will play to their in-world knowledge—even when, as has happened once or twice, it puts them in a noticeably worse position. If the commander with unintended information is unable to play it down, I typically inform related parties of the error, giving them out-of-game information to make sure we’re back on a more level playing field. For example, if I mess up and inform a commander that the enemy is approaching even while that enemy is still thirty miles out (and that commander won’t or can’t ignore that information), I might tell that distant enemy commander that I messed up and now their opponents know they’re coming. Not a perfectly solution, I admit, but one that gets everybody closer to back on the level.

Space

Spatial mistakes occur when I mess something up on my map. The most common variation of this happens when I miscount the number of hexes or miles an army or messenger moves, either accidentally moving them too fast or too slow. Sometimes, this is compounded by messing up other travel conditions, like forgetting that there’s bad weather to slow everybody down. Regardless, it’s pretty common that I somehow mess up the math and have somebody in the wrong place.

Often, I spot these errors before the army or letter reaches its destination. In this case, it’s an easy fix: just scooch ’em to where they need to be. Because commanders only know what I tell them about their environment, and most of the time marching along a road is very unremarkable, it’s quite easy to quietly shift an army’s position a hex or two forwards or back without needing to make a big deal out of it. Letters are even easier—when you scooch a letter, nobody notices.

That said, I do sometimes let spatial errors stand. If an army takes an extra half-day to reach its destination, I shrug. Things happen. Likewise, if a letter ends up arriving three days late because I miscounted hexes or wrote down the wrong day, that seems fine, too. While it makes me feel lazy to be outright encouraging a little bit of unplanned sloppiness, I do think that it’s not worth terribly stressing over long-distance letter deliveries. Call it the chaos of war, or whatever.

As with other kinds of mistakes, the times that it’s worth really being sharp about your fixes are when multiple commanders get involved. A single commander who ends up scooched a half-day one way or the other is probably fine, but if there are multiple commanders close enough that their scouts can see each other, it’s critical that you offer accurate and up-to-date reports. As before, my method is usually to explain myself directly, apologize, and inform all commanders of the new situation at hand.

The other situation where it’s worth rapidly fixing spatial errors is when you, as the referee, misunderstand a commander’s orders. For example, if a commander asks to “march up along the river for three days,” and the river flows from south to north, you might move them upriver—southwards. But, the commander might’ve meant “up” in terms of the map as they’re looking at it—northwards. Usually, commanders will notice these errors quickly and you can fix them, adjusting as you would any other mistake. Sometimes, though, you might already be committed, especially if it’s been a few days: when this happens, you should talk to your commander and do your best to figure out a satisfying in-world reasoning for the error. Perhaps your scouts got lured off by a vineyard and ended up drunk; perhaps local partisans lied to your spies, deliberately leading you all astray. These mistakes, ones that are noticed too late to be undone, deserve special care and attention from you as the referee, both to help assuage the commander’s feelings and to ensure you won’t make the mistake again.

Time

Temporal mistakes occur when I mess up the schedule. These can sometimes occur in isolation, but because time is such an essential element of play, more often than not they tie directly into another mistake. Botched letter delivery times play into questions of information; armies moving incorrectly affect the spatial flow of the map. Time never stops moving and affects all parts of the game.

Accordingly, the main way to fix temporal errors is through what I call rubberbanding. To rubberband is, basically, to take actions retroactively in the past or proactively in the future. For example, if I accidentally deliver a letter a day late to a commander—it was supposed to arrive Monday evening, say, but I only tell them Tuesday evening—I might allow them to retroactively declare or change the actions they took on Tuesday in light of that new information. Likewise, you can rubberband forwards in time: sometimes, a commander says something like “Sam, I’m going camping this weekend and won’t be on my phone, so I’ll plan on marching northwards for two days and then halting at the bridge. If we see bad guys and outnumber them, we attack; otherwise, we hold.” Rubberbanding invokes the distance between the present time and the “active time” of the imaginary game world, stretching between the two points like a rubber band. As you increase that distance, you increase the tension of the band—the further you get from present day, the harder it is to allow commanders to make accurate moves.

While temporal mistakes sometimes occur as a result of simple errors, time also becomes an issue when I as the referee start to miss my check-ins. If I have a particularly busy day or two, I may not be able to respond to my commanders, and thus the game enters a state of lag: it’s Wednesday morning in real life, say, but the game hasn’t updated since Tuesday afternoon. This happens to all referees eventually; if you decide to run a Cataphracts game, it’ll happen to you, too.

In general, I’ve found that I can easily handle one day of lag, I can deal with two days with effort, and if I’m willing to be extremely accurate and on top of things I can work my way out of three days. Admittedly, this depends heavily on various other factors—rubberbanding three days of boring marches is easy, rubberbanding three days of complicated siege maneuvers is nearly impossible—but in general I put three days as the normal outer limit.

Past that limit, though, fixing lag requires more extreme measures. In short, you need to shift out of direct one-to-one real time. The simplest and most intense way to do this is to run your game at an increased speed, like double or triple time. At double time, one day in real life becomes two days in-game: in effect, you and your players need to check in on the game twice as often. This is doable, especially in short bursts, but it’s exhausting to do for long periods of time.

Alternatively, you can perform what I call “radical retroactive temporal surgery”—a post-facto timeskip. If you’ve gone five days without checking in, you as the referee can simply declare that those days are null and void, skipped over entirely. Armies do not march, supplies are not consumed, sieges do not progress, letters do not travel, and otherwise the game moves straight from one day to five days later, passing directly over the time in between. It’s a little bit ugly, but it works.

If you’re planning to undergo retroactive timeskips, I recommend you do them a week at a time. This way, Sunday still flows into Monday, you’ve just skipped the week in between. (This can also make it easier to update your Orders Log, depending on your organization method.) Similarly, if you know that you as referee will be unavailable for a few days, you can declare one of these freezes proactively, alerting players that time will be frozen for a week in advance. I’ve done this several times, and while it leads to lots of joke about evil time wizards, it doesn’t break anything too badly.

All of this sounds pretty rough, I realize. Running a Cataphracts game is no small task, and it’s very easy to mess up. But, because nearly all information in the game must flow from commander to referee to commander (as opposed to directly commander-to-commander), you as the referee have nearly unlimited ability to fix errors as they occur. In nearly all situations, the game exists only when you say it does, and players only know what you tell them.

You can fix your mistakes. Do not panic.

Voreia Campaign Update

Normally, I don’t share updates about my own game, the Voreia Campaign, because my players read these blogposts and try to glean insights and I like to keep them in as information-thin an environment as possible. But over the past few months I’ve run into a major version of the problems I describe here, and I want to share my solution.

When I was first talking with Sean McCoy about running OVER/UNDER back in August and September of 2025, he asked me if I was going to be able to run my own Cataphracts game and O/U at the same time. I said I thought I could—I was pretty fast at running Cataphracts, and while O/U was going to be bigger, I thought it would be possible to do both.

Of course, I was wrong. As soon as OVER/UNDER began, it ate all my available time, and my own Cataphracts game fell by the wayside. I eventually told my players this—instituting a half-retroactive half-proactive five-week time freeze—and planned to return to the game with vigor once O/U ended. In the original plan for the Voreia Campaign, the game would run to the end of the year and then conclude, with factions settling in for winter. Once I realized that running O/U and Cataphracts at the same time wasn’t feasible, I made a plan: we’d freeze the game for a month, I’d shift my weather tables back a month (so December would have November weather, to afford them all roughly the same amount of clear time they’d have had before), and we could finish strong.

But, well, OVER/UNDER proved more exhausting than I think anyone planned. I’m still working on my post-mortem blogposts, but in the days and weeks afterwards, I did very little at all. Despite my optimistic attempts to keep the Voreia Campaign going—at one point I was planning on running all of December in double time to catch up—I fell off and lagged far behind. In January, a few weeks ago, some of my commanders posted in our channel to thank me for running the game, assuming that since we’d crossed the December 31st threshold, it was now over.

As you might imagine, this was pretty disheartening. I started the game in March of 2025, and had high hopes for the campaign’s final act (as did many of my commanders). I spent weeks moping around, facing down the twin terrors of either running two months of play in unpegged retroactive time, a nightmare, or else declaring my beloved game dead and buried.

But then, I had another idea: what if the lost time became real?

Normally, severe lag results in temporal surgery, blocking out the missed time, pretending it never existed. But, imagine the opposite: what if all that lost time did occur, is occurring now, and the lack of action is itself canonical? Imagine that, starting in the middle of October (right around when OVER/UNDER began), the Voreian Peninsula was struck with intense and early winter weather, flooding the hills and valleys with snow. While it perhaps cleared for a few days or weeks at a time (my haphazard efforts to keep the game going last year) it all eventually returned, locking armies more or less in place until the snows clear. Imagine that the campaign was, literally, frozen.

The longer I thought about this, the more I liked it. My commanders know the game isn’t over, and it gives me a couple months guilt-free rest. While there certainly would be a lot of work involved in massaging where all of my forty-ish commanders ended up over the course of winter—and how much of their armies are left standing—it’d a far cleaner and more flexible solution.

I ran all this by my players, and they liked it. So, that’s what we’re doing. At time of writing, the plan is to resume the Voreia game in late March or so (roughly a year after the game began) and run it for a final couple of months. I haven’t quite figured out when or why the game’s going to end—probably May or June, probably something to do with a once-a-decade holy season—but that’s the plan. I’m very excited! While I’m used to warping roleplaying game situations to suit real-life constraints on the micro scale (thinking here of, say, Skerples’s “What Happens When You Miss a Session” table from the Veinscrawl), this is a much larger shift both in-game and -out. But, it does make sense: medieval wars regularly slowed or halted entirely during the winter, with armies doing not very much at all for the cold months. While a once-in-a-century bad winter is perhaps a little convenient, to me it does not overly strain plausibility. And it lets me rest, for which I’m very grateful.

I mention this Voreia update both to let you know how my game is going and to point out one final method of fixing the mistakes you make as a referee, which is to reshape the world. While I am a staunch proponent of not letting the rules dictate the world, people matter more than even the world, and so some canon-reshaping can prove worthwhile. If the rules and world conflict, you should rewrite the rules every time. But, as Bernie De Koven says, “If anything needs to change, it is much more logical to change the game than it is to change the people who are playing.” When you inevitably run into some huge blunder that can’t be fixed, take a moment to think, talk to your players, and don’t be afraid to alter the world.

Thank you for your patience over these long months between design diaries. There will be more coming in the future, along with other updates about my Voreia Campaign, other referees’ games, and the Cataphracts project as a whole. Thanks for reading.

January 30, 2026 cataphracts design running the game

New Words from 2025

Late in 2024, I started a big list on my phone of new words I encountered that I didn’t know, with short definitions for each. This is that list, to date.

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• ABOMINATE: loathe; despise.
• ABSTEMIOUS: not indulgent; temperate, ascetic.
• ACAJOU: the wood of certain timber trees (mahogany), or another name for cashews.
• ACANTHUS: spiny-leafed Mediterranean plant.
• ACCOUCHEUR: obstetrician; one who helps with births.
• ADENOIDAL: related to overlarge adenoids—nasal voice, snoring, mouth breathing.
• ADIT: horizontal mine passage, built for draining.
• ADJURE: urge or request someone in a solemn or earnest fashion.
• ADUMBRATE: represent in outline; indicate, suggest, symbolize, foreshadow (faintly).
• AEOLOPILE: a type of engine—a metal sphere mounted on an axle, with two opposite spouts facing up and down, full of water. When the water boils, the spouts expel steam and sphere spins.
• AËR: the veil covering the chalice (cup) and diskos (plate) used for communion.
• ALGEDONIC: relating to both pain and pleasure.
• ALLUMEUSE: a tease.
• AMATIVE: strongly moved by sexual love; amorous.
• AMBIT: the bounds, scope, or extent of something.
• AMBO: oblong Church pulpit with steps at each end; rather archaic.
• AMSCHASBAND: Zoroastrian divine spark, like an angel.
• AMUSE-GUEULE: a savory appetizer.
• ANACLITIC: strong emotional dependency on another (“anaclitic depression”).
• ANACOLUTHON: a sentence that shifts grammatical syntax midway through.
• ANACREONTIC: written in the style of Anacreon, who wrote about love and wine.
• ANACRISIS: investigation through or accompanied by torture.
• ANAGNOST: a cleric or priest who reads aloud from the scriptures.
• ANALEPSIS: a flashback.
• ANALGESIC: a painkiller.
• ANDIRON: metal support that holds wood in a fireplace, usually in pairs.
• ANGORA: long-haired fur of a cat, goat, or rabbit.
• ANNEAL: heat (metal or glass) and then cool slowly, to strengthen.
• ANOETIC, ANOESIS: unthinking, incapable of thought, receiving sensations without understanding.
• ANOMIE: lack of standard moral or ethical values, in an individual or group.
• ANTINOMY: a contradiction between two otherwise-reasonable beliefs; a paradox.
• ANTIPHONARY: shared monastic choir book, often in large sizes.
• APERIENT: drug used to relieve constipation; a mild laxative.
• APPANAGE: the legal process of granting land or title to younger children of a ruler who otherwise wouldn’t inherit.
• APPOSITE: apt, relevant, appropriate in the circumstances or in relation to the topic at hand.
• AQUAMANILE: animal-shaped jug or ewer, usually holding water for hand-washing (aqua + manile).
• ARCOSOLIUM: an arched niche with a tomb or sarcophagus at its bottom.
• ARCTOTHER: giant bear, from “arctotherium.”
• ARRIVISTE: ambitious, ruthless self-seeker, often new money; a social climber.
• ARTIFEX: craftsman, artisan, “maker.”
• ASKESIS or ASCESIS: severe discipline, usually religious—where we get “ascetic.”
• ASTI: sparkling white wine from the Italian region of Asti.
• ATABAQUE: large Afro-Brazilian hand drum, not unlike a conga.
• ATHANOR: early alchemical furnace, used to keep steady heat for a long period of time.
• AUREOLA: radiant clouds appearing around a figure in an icon.
• AUTO-DA-FÉ (Portuguese: “act of faith”): public, ritualized penance, often ordered by an inquisition.
• AUTOTHYSIS: suicidal altruism in animals (usually insects) done by rupturing an internal gland.
• BADELAIRE: short sword, curved, s-shaped cross guard (the quillions).
• BAIZE: coarse, feltlike wool, usually green—used for card and pool tables.
• BALAYAGE: a gradient in hair color, from dark to light.
• BALDACHIN: a canopy, arch, or ceiling over a throne, altar, or doorway. (Kind of like a Dark Souls gazebo.)
• BALMACAAN: overcoat with raglan sleeves (sleeves that connect straight to the collar, no shoulder seam).
• BANNOCK: a dark, round loaf bread—Scottish, or Northern English.
• BANQUETTE: bench or chair affixed to a wall.
• BARBEL: filaments growing near the mouth of a fish (“catfish whiskers”).
• BOMBARDON: a big brass tuba.
• BORACIC: boric, that is, of boron.
• BOULEVERSEMENT: a violent inversion; an upheaval or upset.
• BOXELDER: American maple tree, with leaves like an ash tree.
• BRACTEATE: single-sided gold medal, like a coin, worn as jewelry or in clothing.
• BREVET: a military commission or promotion conferred for good service, without linked authority or pay.
• BROMIDE: a trite, unoriginal remark, usually meant to placate or calm.
• BROUGHAM: carriage (or car) with an open driver’s seat.
• BULLDAGGER: pejorative slang for a butch lesbian.
• BUSBY: a big plumed fur hat, usually bear (often worn by soldiers).
• CALÈCHE (or CALASH): low carriage with a folding hood.
• CAMBRIC: lightweight close-woven linen.
• CAOUTCHOUC: natural rubber, unvulcanized.
• CAPONIER: covered walkway over a ditch in a fort.
• CASERN: a lodging for soldiers in a town; a barracks.
• CATAFALQUE: wooden frame that supports a coffin for a funeral.
• CATALLAXY: alternative term for “economy,” especially one with multiple competing or converging value systems.
• CATARRH: excessive mucus in the nose or throat.
• CATHECT: invest emotionally or psychologically.
• CATOPTRIC: relating to a mirror or reflection.
• CAVIL: an unnecessary or petty objection; or, as a verb, to make such objections.
• CELERIAC: celery with a big fat root you can eat.
• CHAPLET: a garland or wreath to wear on the head; OR a 55-bead string (1/3 of a rosary).
• CHAWL: large, cheap tenement building (primarily South Asian).
• CHIFFONIER: tall chest of drawers with a mirror on top; OR, a low cupboard topped with a bookshelf.
• CHIGNON: a knot of [woman’s] hair arranged at the back of the head or nape of the neck.
• CHIMINEA: outdoor freestanding fireplace or oven, with a chimney—an old stove, basically.
• CHORINE: a chorus girl.
• CHRYSOLITE: yellow-green gemstone, a type of olivite.
• CIBORIUM: a canopy for an altar.
• CIST (or KIST): coffin made from a hollowed-out tree or stone.
• COFFLE: a chain gang; a line of humans or animals fastened together and driven along.
• COIR: coconut husk fibers, used in rope-making.
• COMESTIBLE: edible (adj.); or, an item of food (noun).
• COMPRADOR: a person within a country or place who acts as an agent or liaison for foreign organizations (usually exploitatively).
• CONCUPISCENT: lustful, filled with sexual desire.
• CONDIGN: punishment or retribution equal to a wrongdoing; fitting, deserved.
• CONTRAPUNTAL: in or of counterpoint.
• CORBEL: in architecture, a piece that protrudes from a wall and bears weight.
• CORNPONE: rustic, bumpkinish, unsophisticated.
• CORUSCATE: flash, sparkle.
• COSSETED: cared for in an indulgent way; pampered.
• COSTER, COSTERMONGER: (British) seller of fruit and vegetables.
• COTEAU: a hillside or upland.
• CROTCHET: a false, perverse, or unfounded notion or idea.
• CRUCIVERBALIST: a crossword-player.
• CRULLER: small fried cake, sweet, twisted or curled into a ridged torus.
• CUCURBIT: gourd (melon, pumpkin, squash).
• DADO: the lower half of a wall, painted in a different color.
• DECKLE: removable wooden frame for paper, used in publishing (it’s what gives books feathered edges to their cut).
• DÉCOLLETAGE: a low neckline, as on a woman’s dress or top.
• DEPUTE: appoint or instruct someone to a task one must do (deputize).
• DESIDERATUM: something wanted or needed.
• DESUETUDE: a state of neglect or disuse.
• DE-TROP: excess(ive); the quality of being or having too much.
• DIAPHANOUS: delicate, light, maybe transparent.
• DIEFFENBACHIA: tropical house plant.
• DILATORY: slow to act or respond (perhaps intentionally so).
• DOLMAN: long robe, Turkish style, open in the front.
• DOVECOTE: a shelter for pigeons; also called a pigeonry (like a rookery).
• DREECH or DREICH: wet, dark, unpleasant weather.
• DRYSALTER: a trader in dyes, gums, drugs, and preserved foodstuffs (like pickles).
• DUCTILITY: the quality of being able to deform or reshape without losing toughness; pliable, malleable.
• DYSPRAXIA: a developmental disability that causes poor mobility, hand-eye coordination, and spatial awareness (“clinically clumsy”).
• EBULLIENT: cheerful and energetic.
• ÉCLAT: brilliance, a shining display.
• EDENTULISM: toothlessness.
• EISEGESIS: reading or interpreting a text to prove one’s own preconceptions (“reading into” something).
• EMBONPOINT: plumpness, stoutness.
• ENCOMIUM: [a piece of] writing that highly praises someone or something.
• ENFEOFF: to grant land in exchange for service, feudal-style (an act of “feoffment” or “enfeoffment”).
• ENTHEOGEN: psychoactive drugs used in spiritual or mystical experiences.
• EPERGNE: ornate table centerpiece for fruit or flowers, usually silver.
• EPIGONE: a less-distinguished follower of a famous artist or intellectual.
• EQUIFINALITY: principle that a given end state can be reached by many means or paths, a trait of open systems.
• ERUCTATION: a burp; burping.
• ESPADRILLES: casual flat canvas shoes with rope-soles (traditionally made from esparto grass—hence the name).
• ESTER: organic chemical compound found in oils and perfumes.
• ETAGERE: furniture piece with open shelves for small pieces.
• ETIOLATE: to whiten, make pale.
• ETIOLOGY: the study of causes and causation, particularly of a disease or condition.
• EXILARCH: leader of exiles, specifically the leader of Jewish exiles in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
• EXPOSTULATE (with): strongly disagree or disapprove.
• EXTIRPATE: weed out, remove, destroy completely.
• EXTRASYSTOLE: a heartbeat outside the normal rhythm; a skipped heartbeat, or “heart hiccup.”
• FAIENCE, FAÏENCE: glazed ceramic earthenware, especially tin-glazed ware.
• FASCICLE: a separately-published entry or installment of a book; or, a bundle of nerves or muscles.
• FAULD: horizontal strip of metal worn at the waist as armor (usually in sets of three or more, to articulate).
• FETLOCK: a joint in a horse or other quadruped’s lower leg, basically the equivalent of their ankle.
• FEUILLETON: a section of a newspaper or magazine for criticism, fiction, or light lit.
• FIACRE: a carriage, a public coach cab.
• FICHU: a small triangular woman’s shawl.
• FLAGEOLET: a woodwind instrument, like a fancy recorder.
• FOOLSCAP: a size of paper, about 13” x 8”.
• FORINT: Hungarian currency, both historically and more contemporaneously.
• FROIDEUR: coolness; reservation (between people).
• FROWSTY: stale, warm, or stuffy, especially of a room or atmosphere.
• FUSTIAN: thick twilled cloth; OR, pretentious, pompous speech.
• GALLIPOT: small earthenware bowl for apothecaries.
• GAMINE: attractively boyish, especially of a woman.
• GERUND: form derived from a verb but functions as a noun, ending in -ing (“Swimming is fun.”)
• GESSO: plaster, often used as a base for paint on a sculpture or structure.
• GILET: sleeveless jacket, like a vest.
• GIRNEY: soft vocalizations of Old World monkeys.
• GRANDILOQUENT: well-spoken.
• GRAVAMEN: a complaint or injury that serves the basis of a legal case.
• GURDWARA: Sikh place of worship.
• HAN(D)SEL: a good luck charm, often given as a gift at the start of the new year or a new endeavor.
• HAUTEUR: disdain, pride, haughtiness.
• HEBEPHRENIA: obsolete term for a type of especially disorganized schizophrenia.
• HIERATIC: priestly.
• HOMILETIC: resembling a homily or sermon.
• HOYDEN: carefree, saucy, boisterous girl or woman.
• HYGGE: comfortable coziness, inspiring of contentedness and wellbeing.
• HYPOCORISM: a pet name; a diminutive.
• IMBRICATE: having overlapping edges (of scales, plates, etc.).
• IMPASTO: painting technique with paint so thick it stands up from the canvas.
• IMPRECATE: utter a curse or invoke evil against someone.
• IMPRIMATUR: a guarantee of high standards or quality; OR, Catholic license to print ecclesiastic material.
• IMPRIMIS: the first in a list of considerations or points; firstly.
• INDITE: write, compose.
• INELUCTABLE: unavoidable, inescapable, unable to be resisted.
• INGLENOOK: a recess or corner next to a fireplace.
• INSOUCIANT: casually unconcerned; indifferent.
• INTAGLIO: design engraved or incised into a material, like metal or wood.
• INTARSIA: the mostly-Arab practice of applying wood layering and veneers to other wooden objects (basically old wooden marquetry).
• INTESTACY: the state of dying without a will, the condition of the estate of a dead person sans valid will. “He died intestate.”
• IRREDENTIST: advocate for restoring a country’s lost territory.
• ITHYPHALLIC: (of a statue or art) having an erect penis.
• JAGGERY: coarse brown sugar made from palm tree sap.
• JENTACULAR: of or relating to breakfast.
• JUNTO: a grouping or faction.
• JUSTACORPS: 17th/18th-century knee-length men’s coat.
• KAFILA: migrant pastoral family, perhaps nomadic.
• KLAFT: Ancient Egyptian head cloth, white (not striped). More accurately called a “khat.”
• LABURNUM: aka Golden Chain Tree; south-central Euro tree with (non-lethally) poisonous hanging yellow flowers.
• LACUSTRINE: of or relating to lakes.
• LAMBREQUIN: cloth that hangs from the back of a knight’s helmet, usually seen in heraldry.
• LAPIDARY: (adj) something related to gems or precious stones; (noun) a gem carver or engraver.
• LECHWE: a south-central African wetland antelope.
• LÈSE-MAJESTÉS: an insult to the king; treason.
• LISSOME: slim, supple, graceful.
• LOACH: small freshwater fish.
• LOCHAGE: officer of a lochos, an Ancient Greek military unit.
• LOCULUS: the niche in a catacomb where a coffin or mummy is placed.
• LORGNETTE(S): a pair of (opera) glasses on a long handle to hold in front of your eyes.
• LOUCHE: shady or questionable, yet alluring.
• LOUVERS: angled slats, as in a door or window.
• MACUMBA: Brazilian folk religion, with elements of both African religions and Catholicism.
• MAJOLICA, MAIOLICA: Italian earthenware, or its later imitations.
• MALAPERT: boldly disrespectful, impudent (adj.); or, a person described as such.
• MANDORLA: almond-shaped aureola, usually appearing in religious iconography.
• MANSARD [roof]: flat-topped but steep-sided roof, like the kind they have in Paris.
• MARASMUS: severe malnourishment in a child.
• MARQUETRY: the craft and trade of applying decorative veneers to objects and structures.
• MATROSS: artilleryman, a gunner’s mate.
• MAUNDER: ramble or talk at length in an idle or daydreaming way.
• MAWKISH: feeble, weak, overly sentimental, soft.
• MEED: deserved share, a reward (compared to “mete”).
• MEERSCHAUM: soft white Turkish clay-like material, or a smoking pipe made of the same.
• MENSAL: relating to or of a table.
• MENSUR: traditional academic fencing, practiced mostly in central Euro countries.
• MENTULA: ancient slang for a cock.
• MÉTIER: trade, occupation, profession.
• MEWS: stables, or buildings converted from stables, or buildings even just kind of built to resemble stables.
• MISHEGOSS: (Yiddish) craziness, tomfoolery, energetic madness.
• MIZZLE: a light rain; a drizzle.
• MOIETY: a part or portion, one piece of a larger divided whole.
• MONOLATRY: to worship only one god without denying the existence of others.
• MONOMACHY: a duel between just two people (one-fight).
• MONSTRANCE: receptacle for communion hosts to allow veneration (like a big fancy candlestick).
• MOTET: polyphonic sacred music, usually a cappella.
• MOUE: a pout, an expression of distaste.
• MUNI: Indian term for an ascetic, an enlightened, a sage.
• MUNIFICENT: generous beyond necessity.
• MURRAIN: an infectious disease or plague, especially of crops or livestock
• NOONING: a midday break; a siesta.
• NOVENA: prayers on nine days, or nine prayers in a set.
• NYCTALOPS: one with night-blindness.
• OGIVE: a pointy, Gothic arch; OR a cumulative frequency graph (basically just a curvy line).
• OPHICLEIDE: keyed brass instrument, like a weird upturned saxophone.
• ORANT: in prayer, prayerful.
• OROGRAPHY: the study of mountain topography.
• OTIOSE: useless, serving no practical purpose; indolent, idle.
• OUD: Middle Eastern short-necked lute, usually with eleven strings.
• PACHITOS: a cigarette covered in straw.
• PALINGENETIC: the exact reproduction of ancestral traits during development (of an organism).
• PANATELA: a long, thin cigar.
• PANNIKIN: small drinking cup, usually metal.
• PANTO: short for pantomime, in the noun sense.
• PAPHIAN: a sex worker, a prostitute.
• PARACLETE: the [Christian] holy spirit, especially as counselor or advisor.
• PARESIS: partial paralysis or muscle weakness due to nerve damage or disease.
• PAREVE: prepared without milk or meat, in accordance with Jewish law.
• PARRICIDE: the killing of parents.
• PARSIMONY: miserliness; an extreme unwillingness to use up resources or spend money.
• PASTERN: the sloping part of a horse’s foot, in between its knee (fetlock?) and hoof
• PATEN: flat dish for holding Eucharist wafers.
• PATERISSA: a crozier, a bishop’s staff.
• PAVONINE: like a peacock.
• PECUNIARY: relating to money (especially the having, or lack thereof).
• PELF: money, especially stolen or ill-gotten (compare with “pilfer”).
• PELISSE: historical woman’s cloak, sometimes sleeveless, ankle-length.
• PELLUCID: translucent, clear, pure.
• PENURY: extreme destitution; poverty.
• PERIPATETIC: traveling from place to place, staying only short periods; itinerant.
• PERORATION: the conclusion of a speech, to inspire enthusiasm.
• PESTIFEROUS: pestilential, harboring disease or sickness; alternatively, annoying or pest-like.
• PETIOLE: a leafstalk.
• PETREL: far-flying seabird.
• PETTLE: fondle, caress, cuddle.
• PHALANSTERY: a utopian, independent commune.
• PHILIPPIC: particularly bitter denunciation or attack, especially verbal.
• PIKER: a gambler who only makes small-time bets.
• PINACOTHECA: a picture gallery, especially with columns, Greco-Roman style.
• PIROGUE: canoe made from a single tree trunk (mainly Central and South American).
• POETASTER: one who writes inferior poetry; a shitty poet.
• POLONAISE: Polish slow dance, OR a woman’s dress with tight bodice and layered skirts.
• POLYCANDELON: a round, flat hanging lamp.
• POLYSYNDETON: close repetition of conjunction (“We have ships and soldiers and silver”).
• PORTE COCHÈRE: a covered archway or entrance for vehicles to pass through (like a passenger drop off at a hotel).
• POSTILION: the left-hand lead horse-rider of a team pulling a carriage.
• PRECARIAT: [the class of] people with insecure income.
• PREMIA: plural of “premium.”
• PRESENTIST: favoring the present uncritically, especially of a viewpoint or lens.
• PRICKET: a type of candlestick with a spike you impale the candle on.
• PROCRUSTEAN: enforcing artificial conformity, uniformity, especially a system or method.
• PROEM: an introduction to a literary work by the book’s author; a preface.
• PROLIXITY: the state of being unnecessarily wordy.
• PROPITIATION: the appeasing of a god, to incur favor or avoid wrath.
• PROSCENIUM: the front arch of a theater, in front of the curtain.
• PUNCHINELLO: a short, stout person, usually comically so.
• PYX: conical or cone-on-cylinder boxes for holding communion wafers.
• QUERN: archaic hand mill for grinding grain, two circular stones.
• QUERULOUS: petulant, whining, complaining.
• QUISLING: a traitor, specifically one who commits treason.
• RAPPROCHEMENT: resumption or establishment of friendly relations (especially in politics).
• REALIA: objects, material, and stuff from everyday life (usually in the context of teaching history or anthropology).
• RECENSION: a revised version or edition of a text (esp a law code, religious text, etc) or the act of making such a revision.
• RENCONTRE, RENCOUNTER: a chance meeting.
• REPORTORIAL: relating to newspaper reporters.
• RESSENTIMENT: the psychological state of suppressing envy and hatred, usually with unpleasant results.
• RINCEAU: continuous wavy stem pattern, as in architecture or visual art.
• RISIBLE: laughable; prone to laughter.
• ROMAN À CLEF: a novel of real people and events but with fake names.
• RONDAVEL: cone-on-cylinder hut.
• SACERDOTAL: related to a priest; in theology, relating to doctrine that ascribes sacrificial, spiritual, supernatural powers to priests.
• SADIRON: heavy flat clothes iron, pointed at both ends.
• SAGOMATA: silhouetted, of a statue, icon, or crucifix. A cut-out.
• SARABAND: slow, stately Spanish dance.
• SAROS: length of time, 223 lunar months, roughly 18 years. Chaldean term.
• SARTORIAL: relating to fashion, tailoring, or dress.
• SASTRUGI: parallel wavy ridges in snow, usually polar.
• SCANTLING: small piece of lumber used in construction.
• SCAPULAR: the monastic scapular, a long draped garment over the shoulders—OR—the devotional scapular, two squares of fabric worn on strings over the shoulder, one on the chest and one the back
• SCARIFIER: spiked or pronged tool for breaking up plant matter.
• SCLEROTIC: rigid, unresponsive, unable to change or adapt (compare with “sclerosis”).
• SCUD: move in a fast straight line, as if driven by the wind.
• SECRETAIRE or ESCRITOIRE: a small writing desk.
• SENTENTIOUS: pompous, moralizing, overly affected.
• SEPTENTRION: Northern, of the north.
• SERAGLIO: either the women’s apartments or the Sultan’s offices in an Ottoman palace.
• SERGE: durable twilled woolen fabric.
• SERRIED: rows standing close together (“serried ranks of soldiers.”)
• SHAFFRON: armor for a horse’s head, the big central plate.
• SHIPLAP: boards that fit together so they overlap, as in walls or a ship’s hull.
• SIMOOM: hot, dry, dusty desert wind (principally Arabic).
• SINECURE: a fake job or position—no work, but comes with money and status.
• SKEP: straw or wicker beehive.
• SOCIOGENIC: produced or detemined by society (or its factors).
• SOUGH: to make a moaning, whistling, or rushing sound (of trees, the sea, etc); or a sound of this type.
• SOUTANE: a type of cassock, worn by Catholic priests.
• SPAGYRIC: alchemical.
• SPILLIKIN: carved fragment or splinter—jackstraw.
• SPLENETIC: angry, bad-tempered, irritable (spleen-ful).
• SPREZZATURA: studied carelessness, “complex tasks performed as if they were effortless and graceful.”
• STEEPLEJACK: a construction worker or craftsperson who works high on tall buildings.
• STEREOTOMY, STEREOTOMIC: stonecutting, or otherwise cutting solids into shapes.
• SUBLUXATION: a partial dislocation (of a bone, joint, etc.).
• SUCCUSSION: (the process or condition of being) shaken violently.
• SUFFRAGAN: a bishop appointed to help another [higher-ranked?] bishop of a diocese / an archbishop / metropolitan.
• SUPERCILIOUS: feeling superior, a looking-down-on-others vibe.
• SUPEREROGATORY: investigated, observed, or performed by what’s required or necessary.
• SURCINGLE: strap that runs under the belly of a horse.
• SURTOUT: overcoat, like a frock coat.
• SWINGEING: severe, extreme.
• SWOT: intensely study.
• SYBARITIC: fond of pleasure or luxury; self-indulgent.
• SYLLOGOMANIA: hoarding disorder.
• TAFFRAIL: the railing and ornamentation on a ship’s stern.
• TAMANDUA: small arboreal anteater, native to the Americas.
• TASSET: thigh armor hung from a belt or breastplate.
• TATTERDEMALION: ragged, unkempt, disreputable (adj.); or, a person described as such.
• TAUROBOLIUM: the practice of sacrificing a bull and draining its blood through a grate onto worshippers below.
• TENDENTIOUS: expressing a controversial cause or point of view.
• TESSITURA: comfortable vocal range of a singer.
• THERIOMORPHIC: having or depicted as an animal form (esp of gods, spirits, etc.)
• THOLUS: a dome-shaped hill or mountain.
• THURIBLE: a censer.
• THURIFER: an acolyte carrying a censer (thurible-bearer).
• TOKOPHOBIA: fear of childbirth.
• TORERO: a bullfighter (cognate of toreador).
• TORT: wrongful or criminal infringement; not quite a crime but something still legally liable.
• TRAVERTINE: white(ish) rock from mineral springs, used in construction.
• TREPIDANCY: nervous or fearful anticipation; trepidation.
• TROUSSEAU: the dress, linens, and other stuff a bride receives for her wedding; alternatively, a dowry.
• TRUNNION: cylindrical protrusion used as a mounting or rotating point (usually on a cannon or machine).
• URIC: related to urine.
• UXORIOUS: excessively fond of (or submissive towards) one’s wife.
• VALETUDINARIAN: [one who is] overly concerned or anxious about their health; hypochondriacal.
• VENERY: sexual indulgence (compare with “venial”).
• VERGER: a church official, the caretaker and attendant. Also the term for someone who carries the bishop’s rod before them.
• VICISSITUDE: a sudden change in fortune or situation, usually unpleasant.
• VITRINE: glass display case.
• VITUPERATION: disparaging, bitter, abusive language.
• VOCATE: to appoint to religious office.
• VROW: (Dutch, Afrikaner) a woman, typically married.
• WELKIN: sky, or heaven.
• WELTSCHMERZ: world-weariness, melancholy, a kind of tired dissatisfaction.
• WITHAL: in addition to.
• XENARTHRA: superorder of animals including sloths, armadillos, and anteaters.
• YEGG: a robber or safecracker.
• YENTA: a gossip or busybody (usually a woman).
• YLANG-YLANG: tropical tree in Southeast Asia (ish), used in essential oils.
• ZAFTIG: plump, round, full (especially of a woman).
• ZEUGMA: a figure of speech where a word in an expression applies to two words (“with weeping eyes and hearts”).

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Eventually, I added some rules: I needed to encounter the words in the course of my normal reading and conversation. If I was deep down a rabbithole and encountering lots of new scientific words (common in Wikipedia rabbitholes), those didn’t count; likewise, already-assembled lists of words (e.g. dictionaries, books on language) did not qualify. But outside those, everything got added to the list, wherever they were found. Sources included books, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedia entries, web articles, blogposts, signs, lectures, movies, videos, games, lyrics, tweets, and the occasional NorthernLion stream, among others.

Looking back, I would say the three most common sources of new words were:

• Museum plaques, especially at the Met.
• Old books, and books about old books (thinking of, say, Umberto Eco or Gene Wolfe).
• The New Yorker.

As I mentioned, this is slightly more than a year’s worth of words, since I didn’t think to publicize this list until relatively recently, making this probably like 14–16 months’ worth of words. While I track words in order on my phone just by adding them one after the other, I don’t have exact dates for each, either. Possibly something for future lists, though it sounds like a lot of work.

I plan to keep tracking words as I learn them. Keep your eyes peeled around this time next year for 2026’s list.

December 31, 2025 housekeeping writing