The Explorateur: Issue #8

All the little things add up.

No time for an essay this month. Work and life has been piling up lately—in a good way! So, rather than pontificate on a design concept, or talk slyly about recent discourse, here are some updates on Explorers.

• I generally don't share my Explorers Design articles in the The Explorateur, but if you're a frequent reader, you'll probably like these standouts:
  • Stop Hiding the Apes in Your RPGs, show us your cool thing early.
  • How to Design a Gaming Community? A retrospective and manifesto.
  • Why Combat is a Fail State. A reinterpretation of an old-school maxim.
  • How to Roleplay Without Accents. In a nice easy-to-read list.
  • Design Your Locks with More Keys, give puzzles diverse solutions.
• ENNIEs Judging continues. We're in the final stretch before nominations. Not being able to talk or write about these submissions is making me feral.
• Ongoing game projects continue. I'm writing an adventure for Cairn and a system-agnostic setting for Mothership and Troubleshoot. The latter is 30% written. The former? Getting rewritten after taking in new inspiration. Such is the creative process without a deadline. (Give yourself a deadline.)

Let's get on to last month's discoveries...

Quest Givers

This section shares any game jams, contests, and collaborations. If you want to share a community event, jam, or project message me on Bluesky.

• Crit Awards Voting Opens. The Crit Awards, like The ENNIES, have public voting on its nominees—which means if you want your favorite creators, streamers, and actors to win, you have to vote for them. For the AP Heads.
• Tabletop Bookshelf is Looking for Reviewers. If you're a professional writer looking to get paid to review games like in the days of yore, one of the best online distributors for rpgs is looking for contributors.
• A Pog Jam. Do you like Slugblaster? Do you like pogs? Do you like the idea of making something for Slugblaster that uses pogs? I have good news, there's a jam for that. It ends June 18th.
• Build a Better World Jam. Design a game that imagines a better future. This jam is for any system or genre. It can be about revolutions, post-post-apocalypses, a housing sim—you name it. Jam ends June 21st.
• Desert Dwellings Jam. Make a game or adventure using Odds & Ents' Desert Dwellings art pack. My recommendation: give the art a look, then use it like a though starter and brief. Jam ends June 30th.
• Spring Supplies and Shots Jam. Make one-shots and random tables for Frontier Scum, the rules-lite acid Western roleplaying game. It's a great acid-infused take on Spaghetti Westerns. Jam ends July 11th.
• Healthy Game Jam 2025. Make a game that promotes health and wellbeing. It can be as small as a mechanic or supplement, or as big as a fully-fledged rpg. The jam starts June 16th and ends on July 28th.
• Get Razed Jam. The game Dirtbags! (a sci-fi shooter ala Running Man) is having its first ever game jam. If you like Tank Girl and Starship Troopers, this might be for you, ya hoser. The jam ends July 31st.
• Summer LEGO RPG Jam II. DIY & Dragons is hosting another awesome jam where you turn LEGO sets into rpg goodness. This time submissions can go weirder, smaller, bigger, and everything in-between. Jam ends August 29th.

Reviews & Exhibits

Critique and examinations of tabletop rpgs, adventures, and more. I try to share exhibits with something to say other than the usual, "Is this worth buying?"

• Malustrious Brood by False Machine. This review-meets-interview features the legendary duo, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess (Veins of the Earth and Deep Carbon Observatory). Inside: creativity, process, art, and more.
• Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast by Idle Cartulary. Nova describes Yazeba's as "An unequivocal masterpiece," but only after making the daunting crawl through the tome's many secrets, surprises, and character arcs.
• Chateau Amongst the Stars by Idle Cartulary. Once again, Nova has a great review here. This time, it's for a high-level Shadowdark adventure. I think this review and my article on puzzles are great companion reads.
• Mythic Bastionland by Old Men Running the World. I endorse this read through's opening summary: It’s OSR¹ hexcrawl² Pendragon³ in miniature⁴ (complimentary⁵). Want to know the footnotes? Click that link.
• Momento Mori: Deep Dive by The Indie Game Reading Club. Paul's latest deep dive is about Momento Mori, an absurdly decadent rpg about doomed characters in 14th-century Europe. Look up pictures of this game. *Whistle*
• Rolling Dice in Cairn vs D&D by Patchwork Paladin. This review is a great study into how Cairn's rolling-for-saves cascades through the system, leaving nothing, not even the familiar narrative established by D&D, untouched.
• Delta Green & Impossible Landscapes by Quinns Quest. Video. Quinns is back with an hour-long review of the cosmic horror RPG, Delta Green, and its most infamous (and probably most boundary-pushing) campaign module.

Rumors & Best-iary

The never-sponsored section of the newsletter. These links are the treasures I found while wandering the internet wilderness.

• The Five Laws of Roleplaying Games by Monstermind. The Five Laws of Library Science are a manifesto and theory of principles for operating a library (and why it matters). This article brilliantly applies that theory to rpgs.
• The Copy and Paste Manifesto by Rise Up Comus. There is no perfect game, adventure, or dungeon for you—except the one you cut, copy, and paste together yourself. I feel this manifesto in my bones.
• Why Japanese Fantasy has Dungeons... by Weird Place. Video. If you're a fan of Dungeon Meshi or Final Fantasy, check this out. It's a fun look into how D&D's style of fantasy arrived and quickly evolved in Japan.
• White Smoke Has Risen from the Blogosphere by Prismatic Wasteland. During the Papal Conclave, the rpg bloggers were having their own conclave—a cleric/religion-themed extravaganza. Priz (who started it) has a complete list.
• Matt and Quinns Chat. Video. I could listen to these two talk about rpgs for hours. Unfortunately, I have to settle for just one. In it, they cover forgotten rpgs, games journalism, and every rpg featured in Quinns Quest.
• Designer: Francisco Lemos. Small adventures with colorful maps and rich illustrations? That's all Lemos makes. I'm particularly drawn to Forlorn Encounters, The Crypt of Crimson Ice, and The Lair of the Alchemist.

Theory & Advice

Any ideas, guidance, and tools that make playing and creating in the tabletop space more engaging, meaningful, and rewarding. This is the catch-all section.

• Typography Is Fashion for Words by OSR Rocks! "Why do fonts matter?" That's the question I struggle to answer simply and concisely, yet this article does it so quickly it makes my attempt at a 101 feel convoluted. Nice!
• Making Better Rulebooks with ADDIE by Skeleton Code Machine. I love taking inspiration from non-rpg sources. In this article, Skeleton borrows the ADDIE model from instructional design to create better rulebooks.
• Keying Room Descriptions P1 & 2 by Rise Up Comus. Designing Dungeons, the online course, continues with two chapters on the hardest (and most debated) part of adventure design: how do you describe a room?
• Ternary Ordered Dither by Benign Brown Beast. This is a great walkthrough on dithering—a technique that recreates an image using pixels and limited color palettes. It's a cool aesthetic with some useful advantages.
• Bite-Sized Dungeons: Revisited by Traverse Fantasy. The blog is shutting down, but not before refining and re-publishing some of its greatest hits. This method for dungeon generation is effective and now somehow even simpler.
• Triple Threat Rooms by Murkmail. This article offers a new layer of depth to the dungeon stocking procedure (built on Murk's version). In it, we get something really neat, a means of generating inter-location relationships.
• Leave Blanks by Sly Flourish. This evergreen advice has a great opening example, which shows how one can create space for imagination with just a few choice words. It's also a great way to turn a weakness into a strength.

Design Lore

Design inspiration from beyond tabletop rpgs. I share them when I find them.

• D&AD Awards 2025. "Design and Art Direction," this British organization is one of graphic design's most competitive. Every year they host an award show and every year the turnout is hugely inspirational, novel, or just plain good.
• Dieline's Best in Packaging 2025. The Dieline Awards have been going on for 16 years now, and every year a slew of winners pushes packaging, print, and production design far beyond anything most rpg publishers could dream of.
• 30 of the Best Book Covers for April 2025. Print Magazine's regular column is full of standouts. My favorites are the three covers by Jonathan Pelham, which DAI (Throne of Avarice, Inevitable) originally pointed me to.
• The People's Graphic Design Archive. A crowd-sourced virtual archive that aims to expand, diversify, and preserve graphic design history. It's got everything from labels ripped off soup cans to Legend of Zelda loading screens.
• Choosing a Cover Font (for Children's Books) by Looking at Picture Books. This fun article, which was originally found and shared by Idle Cartulary on their newsletter, is a fun case study on the power of cover fonts.
• You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown by Christopher Butler. It doesn't matter what industry you're in—there will always be famous figures, but famous figures don't make the bulk of what we know.
• Grand Unified Gateway Theory by Geoff Engelstein. If you don't know this game designer and academic, stop what you're doing and check some of his books. This theory proposes flattening the "gameplay loop."
• Studio Showcase: House Industries. The famous factory of American kitsch. Their work is earnest like a hot dog, but refined like a fine bottle of whiskey. Check out their fonts while you're at it.
• Artist Showcase: Luis Mendo. Sensory. You can hear, smell, and feel everything they draw, whether it's a teeming five-story building full of people or a dusty corner store. There's a lot to mine here for how to depict places.

Design Archive

Sometimes I miss something or want to bring it back from the dead.

• Question-Based Adventure Design by Mindstorm Press. Every negative review I've read has unanswered questions, but I doubt there are many unanswered questions with this approach to adventure design.
• Lessons from Hell (on adventure design) by ICastLight! What can we learn from John Romero's video game, DOOM? Quite a bit, actually. The famous run-and-gun shooter is a masterclass in level design.

Missed the last issue? Read it here.

The Explorateur: Issue #7

Monthly design discoveries for tabletop rpg designers including jams, critique, theory, and tools. Vetted. Looted. Curated.

Explorers DesignClayton Notestine

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