Scribbles and Horrors

My Redux OD&D game had its first TPK this evening and I am sad about it.

Here’s how it happened: when stocking the level I randomly rolled “Spectres” in room 8 of Level Xi. I then rolled 2d6, and wrote “8. 7 Spectres”. I did this months ago. It’s been set in ink for a long time.

Today a party happened to wander into room 8, and faced 7 6hd monsters who move 12” and can only be hit by magical weapons (they had no magical weapons). They shut the door, but the Spectres rolled a ‘1′ on the pursuit die, indicating that they pursued the party through it. 5 of the 7 attacked the party, and after rolling 30d6 for NRACS it’s determined that 13.5 energy levels are subtracted from each of the front rank. Per the spectre rules, Scott Scooter and Scout Mcphee become spectres , and attack the remaining 4 players. 8 spectres attack: 48d6. I stopped rolling after the result became clear.

Everything was above board here. Room 8 is trivial to avoid. I rolled initiative each time, I rolled the correct pursuit roll. Most of Level Xi isn’t all that dangerous! It just so happens that that particular room contained, like, some of the most dangerous monsters in OD&D.

And yet I am sad. I am sad at the loss of Scott Scooter and Discretion Limor and Windy Silverfox. These are fantastic characters, played excellently by their players, and they’ve been wiped away through no fault of their own. It is a real loss, and one which happened randomly, through the confluence of events. Scott Scooter in particular makes me sad. He was a Hero, who had survived a near-TPK last season to a goblin flamethrower.

Yes, I could have seen “7 spectres” and ignored the note, although I’m glad I didn’t. I could have fudged the dice, I could have made them talking spectres and not attacking ones. And yet I still feel there’s something honest about sticking to what’s been decided beforehand. 7 spectres is what was in that room; once written it was out of my hands. I felt it was my responsibility to go with what was written on the page.

I followed the steps and I am sad.

OD&D players who read this will say “Fuck yeah, that’s what happens!”
OSR players will remark, “If you feel sad, perhaps you should have telegraphed the danger better, given more options to escape it.”
Trad players might be filled with horrified vindication, saying “See what OSR brainrot does? It encourages bad game design which leads to shitty, unfun outcomes.”

For me, I think of it as reaping what I’ve sowed. This is how I have decided to run my games and I’ve got to live with it. The real cost of writing “7 spectres” was hypothetical to me before. I now know what that really means. I think I will continue to put things like that in my dungeons, honestly. I will continue to be sad.

The biggest worry I have is that this experience will make players more cautious, less willing to explore deeply. The thing is, it was just as likely for the players in this expedition to come away with thousands of gold pieces — I have to trust that they know this. People do keep coming back to my game, so I suppose I’m doing something right.

Long overdo for the Scribbles and Horrors blog is a detailed writeup of Redux timekeeping. Unfortunately, this will continue to wait until I can find time to write it correctly. For this post though you should know that I divide play up into 3-month seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.

Beginning October 2025 I ran three seasons of Redux weekly. It was great fun and I learned a lot, but by the end I was becoming overwhelmed with a towering backlog of prep and recordkeeping. Ultimately, I simply could not keep up with the homework I had assigned myself to run the show. The biggest worries Records Requests, Session Reports, and NPC Correspondence, but also there were many little systems and stocking which I kept not getting around to. I found it very hard to focus on the campaign at all except when I was literally at the table playing it. For these reasons I made the (good, correct) choice of taking Summer 1026 off (corresponding to summer 2026), and I have some new thoughts about how I want the referee-solitary aspects of Redux to work.

Preparation work takes a long time. I can draw maps fairly quickly, but filling the spaces with things is a bit, creatively, like cultivating mold in the refrigerator. In spurts and startles whole levels will be filled bursting, while others stay empty for a long time. The best approach, for me, is to let dungeons key themselves at their own pace.

What emphatically does not work for me is attempting to key a dungeon the week or night before a session is supposed to go down into it. Frankly I prefer going in entirely blind, making things up at the table itself. I am simply not very good at doing homework.

In effect, the work I set out for myself in Redux operates on two different timescales: the week-to-week playing with my friends going on dungeon adventures, and the month-by-month creeping development of place.

So I’m trying something new: I’m splitting up my refereeing job into two parts. During an active Redux expeditioning season I will run a series of scheduled sessions, writing sessions reports and keeping up with note-keeping. However, I will do my best to keep Redux “in the box” whenever a session isn’t actually taking place. I won’t do any kind of preparing other than what I already have; I won’t add treasure, I won’t write up NPCs, I won’t tinker with systems and sub-systems. I’m just going to show up to the session, open the box, play, close the box. All my D&D energy will be focused on play and session reports as documentation of play.

During inactive expeditioning seasons, where no sessions are scheduled, I can return to prep again. I can fulfill records requests, revise my rules, draw and write, etc.

The strict bifurcation may very well end up being an entirely foolish idea, I can see a few potential problems with it. But, I will try it. See how it goes.

Angie de Riva, Robot Maker, who partook in JayZer0’s The Realm of Yolmi oneshot and Idraluna’s Superadventure 6, wrote this paper, if you can call it that. It reads more like the ramblings of some Nut, which I suppose is exactly what Dr. de Riva is.

–Scribble M. Horror
—————————–

On the Stupidity of the Biological Sciences

Liberated France
D-Day+18

There is no study more pointless and stupid than the study of living beings. What a waste of breath! I have heard people say–really say!–that life is worth investigating because we are living beings, and that therefore by learning about organic bodies we learn about ourselves. As if studying ourselves were some good in itself. Besides, are we not, more fundamentally, made of elements of matter? Would it not be more noble to study Electrical Impulses, Photochemical Processes, Hypodiagetic Materials to further the self-indulgent investigation into beings that we already are?

Anatomy, Botany, Medicine, Sociology, Politics, these are all sciences for children who have nothing better to do than whine. Much consternation has been flit about among the Army recently about the death of a mere rabbit. A RABBIT! So much worthwhile equipment on both sides was lost in the initial hours of the Normandy invasion, and people are sad about bunnies shot up in a field. The world of the past really has gone insane.

Organic bodies are in nearly every way less interesting and useful than mechanical ones. While there is nothing we can do about our own disposition, at the very least we can focus our efforts on building better robots, robots that can accomplish what flesh and blood cannot, what people cannot. Imagine battlefields filled with nothing but machinery! Just think of the efficiency of an automated bureaucracy! No corruption, no wasted energy, only robots, robots, robots.

The United States Army has so far been gracious enough to grant me space and (meager) funds to prosecute my work in France. I know this position is precarious, however. It will dry up at the end of the war. I must secure a more permanent home for my work.

Last weekend I attended my very first gaming con, Dragonflight 46, and had a great time. I hosted 2 games each of Nomic and The Realm of Yolmi, and played in 3: Bunnies and Burrows and some Story Games.

Here are my experiences game by game:

Nomic

I had scheduled 3 4-hour games of Nomic, one each day. Nobody signed up for the Friday one, so when I arrived I cancelled the event to play B&B. This ended up being a good decision, but it was a valuable lesson in not over-committing to just one game.

Just one person signed up for Saturday, which made me somewhat anxious, but I decided to run it anyway. I was able to get an awesome and lovely game going with a “new players wanted” sign. One of the wonderful thing about cons, I’m realizing, are the virtues of just being in a place with a lot of people who play games and have set aside time to play them. The main rule which broke things was the “you must look directly at the Provost while submitting your proposal,” rule, which prevented things from passing. Win by points at a reasonable time, about an hour before the scheduled end.

Sunday had a lot of signups and went smoothly. Doodle contest. Very rules-friendly–managed to convince the gorup of a reading of the rules which made /all/ votes count towards rule-changes, which I’m surprised I got away with. Silver spoon suggestion. Low scoring, win by time pressure.

The final rulesets/gamestates for these games I will add later.

Bunnies and Burrows

I cancelled my first Nomic game in order to play Bunnies and Burrows with Scott Robinson, one of the authors. I haven’t written too much about it, but B&B is a really important game to me. It completely changed the way I understood these games. It was really great to see how Scott ran things; we avoided some hostile sheep, travelled through the forest and got in some hot water with some stoats (was able to use the bite+hold, rip combo to great effect), were unable to communicate with an armadillo and the squirrel who translated seemed to be trying to scam us, hitched a ride into a human market, tried to find the Markrket witch, a human who could speak to rabbits. After some shenanigans we got out of the market, fleeing across a bridge while being shot at by some humans.

There was no hex grid on the larger map, but we were able to navigate it step by step pretty well, with random checks along the way. I felt like the adventure sagged somewhat once we got to the market–as a party we kept trying to hatch schemes that were a little too complicated, at a little too close a resolution.

I think part of this behavior was due to the GM replacing the larger region map with a smaller market one; s players our scope of action changed to one that was slightly more granular (let me go to that stall, there), which made actions like “I try to steal a cabbage” seem insufficient. In any case, the adventure was a success

The Score and Fiasco

During my breaks between scheduled games I wandered into the Story Games Lounge and played two games of The Score and one game of Fiasco. I don’t think I like story games very much. Both of them focused on something like genre emulation, and their approach with prompts were not the sort of thing that I found creatively inspiring to roleplay.

Still, it was fun to hang around a table and my fellow players were excellent, so I had a good time.

The Realm of Yolmi

I ran two sessions of The Realm of Yolmi, Escape From Special Operations Complex #903, which I had run on Discord months earlier. The scenario heavily relies on novelty and surprise (The Realm of Yolmi itself, the Zeta map, the Creatures), and it worked well for both games. All three times I’ve run it, SOC #903 has taken around 90 minutes to complete. This could be modulated by adding water challenges or teleportation traps.

Since I already wrote a detailed session report here, I’ll summarize the differences of each successive group:

The Friday group was 4 strong, and pretty much immediately found themselves on the map. They crawled up a vent straight into some True Ones, who charged through the vent attacking. The party got in a lot of lucky hits, but True Ones are way too fucking strong, so lost 3. Going another way, the group ran into the scientist Polixia Grouse who warily directed the party to a room with quik-rafts in it, however they had to pass through the Galic room. The galics (as on discord) were not unfriendly, but did shake off an arm. The party took rafts up the big passage, and noticed a door which led to the politicians lair. Listening to the politicians and then escaping.

The Saturday group was 8 strong, and only lost 1 character to some (uncharacteristically hostile) Galics. The pattern of progress was almost identical to the Friday group, except they met no True Ones and made an unlikely ally of the grumpy Marshall. It took a little longer for the Saturday group to locate themselves on the map, but they figured it out within 30 minutes.

Something I wish I had done better for The Realm of Yolmi is to take a minute before play to play players through their character sheets. All of the players were great sports about it, but it did happen several times that aspects of the game which i know weren’t ones they knew. In the second game, for instance, people were somewhat confused by descending armor type and misunderstood my pregen sheet ammo notation. It’s very reasonable to be confused by that, and it could have been avoided with a few sentences at the beginning.

One actual regret I have is I spent a lot of time writing Pre-generated characters which I was quite proud of. I had planned to scan all of these before the con and release them on itch, but I didn’t end up having time. As a result, the players took away the original copies. This is a good thing–art is inherently ephemeral, and should be shared–but I do wish I had been able to make time to save my work. I can always make new ones, though.

Note (10/27/26): It has come to my attention that The Realm of Yolmi is being reprinted. Normally this would be fantastic news, however the guy behind the company printing it appears to bear full-throated support of the current fascist regime in the US. Fascism has no place in this hobby. I urge you not to purchase The Realm of Yolmi from that source.

Overall thoughts

My main aim was to see what cons are all about and share my niche interests. Both succeeded–at least one person each game I hosted expressed interest in investigating Nomic or Yolmi on their own.

It turns out I like cons, or at least, I liked this one. The development of D&D makes a lot more sense, seeing how a community of people-who-play-games can operate. There was just a lot of good energy.

I like structured social interactions. I liked spending all day wandering around a hotel and having a big schedule that told me where to be at particular times. Everyone at the con was friendly, gracious, and more or less eager. Really, excellent.

I will definitely try to make it to more, more Nomic, more Yolmi, and perhaps some other games as well. I’m interested in taking advantage of the con space/time to run more multi-player games I have kicking around; Diplomacy, some hex and counter stuff.

This is a report for a session of Classic Traveller run by Mistuh online on 8/17/2026 via Discord.

RENEGADE SPACE

A group of ruffians got together and decided that they were going to steal a mech suit from House Nrang on the water-world Dactos. The plan was doomed from the start–the kind of disgruntled failed terrorism that is the gentle humming background noise of conquered territories. The banal headline filling a neglected margin in tomorrow’s news: FOUR KILLED WHILE ATTEMPTING TO BREACH SECURE AREA. Who cares?

The co-conspirators were a hodge-podge of under-equipped nobodies, high-class losers who had nothing better to do: Hierodule Gathphystjav (Idraluna), Euth N Aja (Kwall), Ehort (Shy Owl), and Army Major Baron Bargan Numsen (JayZero).

The escapade began after Major Numsen met a beggar (former knight) named PauTen-Ksha who desired his house glory to be restored. Taken with the idea, he assembled the group for Industrial Grass whiskey at his chateau on the coast. Possible ways to retrieve the suit were discussed, including hosting a Grand Ball to attract some Nrang nobility. A survey of the finances showed such a party was out of the question, however.

Instead the party tromped back down to the beggar to question him further. The Hierodule sought to read the fellow’s memories using sorcery, and he responded violently. The scuffle ended with the beggar being apprehended by the authorities and taken off to be executed, however the magician was able to glean from them memory a restraining-equipment ID number: 23462. Find the restraint, and you’ve found the armor.

Off the party went to the registration center, to get info. After waiting in line for many hours, a clerk informed Major Numsen that the location of that object was restricted. Even purchasing a drivers license was unable to get the major the info he sought. With a deftpat on the shoulder, the sorcerer noted the location of the armor: Warehouse 7, site 3

Ehort then scouted out the area of Warehouse 7, and in the course of wandering met some guards, who mainly seemed disaffected and not entirely unfriendly. The next day Ehort invited one guard out for drinks, and after several rounds of black goo the sorcerer was able to again use magic to discover information about the layout of the warehouses, including the location of the Kshatar mobile suit.

The next night the party planned to simply sneak in during a shift-change and use the suit to break out.

Clad all in black, they attempted to jump the fence. Gathphystjav and Numsen made it, but Euth and Ehort fell on their behinds outside the fence, provoking an immediate response from the guards. Exhort attempted to distract the guards, however Major Numsen threw his dagger at one of them, getting a chestful of bullets for him and Gathphystjav in response.

The two outside the fence fled and surrendered. The guard said to Ehort said “Halt! You have been accused of Attempted Trespassing–how do you plead?” to which Ehort said “Guilty!” and was promptly executed. Justice being done, the guard asked the same question of Euth N Aja, who responded “Not Guilty”, explaining a convoluted spy-plot which, though quite well argued, earned him a bullet as well.