I Love This: BIG BONE by Numbered Works

I love BIG BONE! It’s a one-page (two sides) distillation of lo-fi adventure by Numbered Works. It wears its references and inspirations (very MAZE RATS; extremely TUNNEL GOONS) on its sleeve, but it also has a voice all its own: one that is charming and playful, the way the best gaming groups are. With a single d12 and a few essential supplies–“pencil, paper, picnic blanket, park, snacks”–BIG BONE makes getting into the action lightning-fast for the players, sure, but it also gives the improvisational referee a wealth of inspiration. So let’s start there. Here’s what I love:

THE TABLES!

I do not hide my adoration for a random roll table. A good one conveys a lot of setting-specific information in a compact space, and each one of the NINE random-adventure-player-character-spell-building tables does the heavy lifting of dropping you into that sword-and-sorcery comfort food world you’re thinking of. I’m thinking of it, too!

The Adventure Builder section is especially inspired, and if you wanted to really mix things up, you could split each of these in half for some extra adjectival randomization. For funsies, here’s one I just rolled:

“The party discovers a crumbling (12) tower (12) located behind (6) a volcano (8). Inside there is a sad (8) vampire (1) and jealous (3) pixies (9). If you survive the Minotaur (5) room (7), you might find the kidnapped (8) portal (7)."

As a referee, my mind swims with the circumstances surrounding this decrepit tower. Is the vampire sad because of the pixies’ jealousy? Did they steal the vampire’s portal and lock it up behind a Minotaur? As a player, I want to get in and learn more before the volcano finishes the job and completely destroys the tower!

 Suffice it to say, I am a fan of the tables.

PC GENERATION!

The flip-side (literally: the inverse page) of the adventure generation holds player character generation and rules. The character types are balanced in the sense of: who cares? If you want to be a group of a fairy, a catperson, and a goblin, go for it. You can be a fishfolk sorcerer who’s gonna go cheer up the volcano-vampire, and that is beautiful. Bang your gong and get it on.

The stats, similarly, are so refined that there’s zero room for theorycrafting, min-maxing, or power gaming. Everyone gets to shoot their shot, and there are no bad characters in the bunch. This makes me think the game would be brilliant for introducing new people to the hobby. Take the simple and sensible character generation, slot everything into the adorable li’l character sheets, and you have an all-ages party ready to rip.

12-SIDED DICE

I frickin’ love a d12. Apparently Kmart sells big foam ones. I’m getting some.

GO GET IT!

BIG BONE by Numbered Works is available on itch.io, pay what you want. You might also explore LITTLE BONES, a parallel universe using 2d6. Same charm, different bones. The CC-BY-4.0 license ensures I will print a bunch of copies and stash them around town.

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I Love This is an attempt to write some nice things about the nice things I read and see every day. Not so much a review or critique, it's an unabashed good-vibes-only love-fest because that's the sort of thing I want to write and see when I'm writing and seeing! If you like this format (not that I invented "writing nice things") and want to give it a go on your own blog, please let me know and I will be sure to give your post a boost to the best of my ability!

I Love This: BEYOND THE BURNING TEETH by Amanda P.

I love BEYOND THE BURNING TEETH! It's a 31-page dungeon crawl and adventure setting by Amanda P. designed in a system-neutral way but with handy conversion tables for popular systems. It's fast-paced, evocative, and a locale I would thoroughly enjoy moderating or dungeon-delving. Today I want to share a few things that I think will make it worth your while.

THE MAPS

Holy smokes, there are some fun maps here. The side-cut view of The Burning Teeth dormant volcanic range evokes classic landscape navigation and exploration. The nonlinear path to The Vault sets things up so if I want to really stretch this out for a longer campaign, I could easily populate the rest of the mountain and cavern system with goodies and baddies. Or, if we just want to crawl the dungeon, we can hop in the express lane while still getting plenty of flavor-rich sights to see along the way. 

The map for the Temple Depths is likewise incredibly done. Amanda's got some killer mapmaking chops, and the dungeon map here gives you just enough flavor and illustration without feeling cramped. At a glance, I can get a feel for what's happening in the room, and I imagine if I had parts of it player-facing, the room elements' would act as clever shorthand. Nobody's asking, "Where exactly are the steam showerheads on the wall?" because even though I have never once seen showerheads depicted on a dungeon map, I knew exactly what they were when I read them in the descriptive text. More dungeoneers need to bathe, probably.

THE VIBES!

Early in the zine, there's a 2d6 table (love it already) for the effects of hanging out in the Vault, and all of them made me grimace at the thought of experiencing them in-game, let alone real life. It's not the most extreme body horror imaginable, but that makes it so much creepier! I can roll my eyes/another character easily enough if, like, all my bones explode and my hair turns to centipedes in some kind of Mork Borgian case of the Mondays, but: "Your fingernails have begun to grow, visible if you watch them. It seems hasty." I can feel that in my nail plates, and I do not like it. 

This delicate hand in writing unnerving encounters carries throughout the dungeon. There's a scene of a spar between ash-men that has just enough wrongness to it to make me double-up on my caution and concern for what's coming next. There's an instability in the key foes that rightfully puts me on edge in the best possible way. It's dangerous without being blindly deadly. It's moody without going, "Look at how moody I am!"

THE TACITURN GRIMESMITH!

 He's got a couple little metalmen and I want all three of them to be my best friends.

GO GET IT:

BEYOND THE BURNING TEETH by Amanda P. is available on itch.io and Drive Thru RPG. It's rad and will certainly be fun to use in whole or in part with your TTRPG of choice! 

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I Love This is an attempt to write some nice things about the nice things I read and see every day. Not so much a review or critique, it's an unabashed good-vibes-only love-fest because that's the sort of thing I want to write and see when I'm writing and seeing! If you like this format (not that I invented "writing nice things") and want to give it a go on your own blog, please let me know and I will be sure to give your post a boost to the best of my ability!