Long Fool's-Errand to the Grave (Location)

Battle Scene, by Samuel Johnson Woolf

 Written in the words of A.E. Housman, at the request of Ms. Screwhead, for Glaugust 2026.

Encounters
1. lads, in love with the grave.
2. new young men/ The sergeant he must see
3. Harnessed angels, hand on sword
4. Leaden Lover, one for women to admire/ in his finery of fire
5. master, right or wrong; make you dance as they desire/ With jail and gallows and hell-fire
6. the dead call the dying/And finger at the doors.


Areas
1. The sergeant
Monster: The sergeant. "'Young man, a soldier will you be, for thirteen pence a day?' He will lie. The desire of his heart? "Her strong enchantments failing. For things will all be over then, between the Queen and me."
Treasure: the sweetheart he chose

2. The Inn of Night
Contains: soldiers from the wars returning, bridles hang in stall. A charger remarks "We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled heir hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world."
Treasure: lockbox. Guarded by proud and angry dust (save negates)

3. Pool and Brook
Treasure: flowers among the morning dews— bells, flower of a heart whose troubles must have been worse than mine, a herb of healing (1d6).

4. the desire of his heart
Trick: Oh dark is the chamber and lonely, and lights and companions depart (save negates)
Search: reveals treasure. The heart of maid/ and man together (casts charm, 2 charges)

5. Underground
Treasure: the Pole-Star. He wears the turning globe. Can be placed in a headpiece clever (+1 wisdom)
Searching: beyond a shadow not of night, the eternal masonry of the gates of hell.

6. The Highway Marches
Passes through all the Lovely Lands of Earth
Where clover whitens the dead man's knoll you pass: buried, my sword that will not save. (-1, cursed)

7. Taken Town
Contains: signs of all that croaks for war. Carrion cheap to marketplace and people. Idol to Saturn or Mercury (prayer gives flight 1/day, but echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old)

8. Beneath the Hawthorn
Monster: the lover and his lass have heard the soldiers pass, and both are sighing.
Clue: from over hill, fife and drum (area 9)

9. Mattress of Loam
Monster: The lancer squadron is riding. "Who would not sleep with the brave?" In love with the grave. They drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.

10. Her Towers of Fear in Wreck
Obstacle: the house is fallen in the slimepit and the mire.
Monster: Her strong enchantments failing, The Queen of air and darkness begins to shrill and cry, 'To-morrow you shall die.' (stats as banshee)
Treasure: Limbeck, dried poison

(Do Not Distribute) RPG discourse terms 2027-2032

 These are the terms we’ll be having people pick up starting in early 2027 and ongoing through the following five fiscal years, to accommodate the need for rhetorical conflict and animus in the RPG scene.

Friendplay: long-form RPG play in which PC-NPC relationships are a focus of play, either through roleplayed scenes which accrue “Finity Points” or a procedure that partially elides actual interactions. Born of an unholy alliance of character-forward 5e players and grognards who decided that it was unbalanced for players to call on friends and allies without diligently maintaining those connections. There will be broad disagreement about whether you’re a better person for liking friendplay or hating it.

Exodus: term describing the work or play culture of the influencers and designers (and their fans) who stopped playing WotC D&D after it was revealed in 2028 that Hasbro has been paying off-duty FBI agents to discourage people writing fantasy heartbreakers. Play culture for this loud-but-small group largely coalesces around Fireburn, a close clone of 5e, but with a core catperson ethnicity and the Critical Role classes more closely integrated.

Boardguys: fighter classes which are neither knights nor evocative of naked women with big swords.

Lowife/Hiwife (LW/HW): variations on the newly ascendant “wandering midwives” campaigns style, either one that ramps up the potential horror inherent in the genre or totally excises it. Lowife play will have a small core of fierce advocates that call mainstream midwife RPGs silly, while Hiwife players will mostly be reduced to convincing the DM of their dungeon game to include a Witch-Sister class. Almost everyone will agree that arguing about points of taste here is folly, but everyone with a bluesky or blog will be forced to have annoying arguments about it anyway.

Stray Dog: an indie RPG publisher or developer, but not one of the “big” ones. A claim to authenticity as being True Indie.

Illiterature: pejorative for material deemed too interested in readability and ease of use.

GSR: “Good Sword Roleplaying”. Another term for being OSR but not bad. After tepid adoption by a few folks on bluesky, it becomes the hobbyhorse term of abuse on villain blogs no one reads.

Frithic Underworld/Watershipcrawl: dungeoneering or other forms of classic D&D play, but with no procedure for the PCs to use violence. Originally an attempt to deproblematize D&D, the early attempts accidentally found a form of play fun on its own merits, inspiring creative works in various RPG genres.

Fedder: pejorative for people who “still” play WotC D&D, imputing that they must like how Hasbro hired those FBI agents. Most fedders have never heard the term.

Alto: style of play born from a well-written but at points vague or facetious blogpost, allegedly one in which inventory management and timekeeping are emphasized. Unclear to many how this differs from “normal OSR” play, its advocates will give ephemeral or mysterious answers. It won’t even be a grotty grognard thing, but the production of cool people who go to parties and know how to cook good food. The modules they publish won’t seem irregular, though they will be artfully done. Sometimes a blogger will publish an adventure they’ve been working on and a stranger will just comment “sooo alto :~)”.

Toxico: self-label for those who don’t like safety tools/conversational tools, the idea that there are games with different ways to divvy up DM/player responsibilities, or explicit norms about “respecting others” in discussion forums, and feel that their preferences are called “toxic” too much, leading to them performatively claiming to loooove being toxic and enjoying toxic things. With only a hazy mental model of their enemies, they’ll say things like “I love this game because I’m so toxico” about seemingly random works.

DNR: “Do not review”. Initially an instruction by some game publishers that only certain kinds of people are “allowed” to publicly discuss the game, in analogy to DNI lists on social media sites like tumblr. Later a term adopted by those who polemically believe it’s impossible to critically review an RPG rulebook or adventure “even if you’ve run it many times.”

Jamboree: a discord PRG layout and forum, and thereafter a term for the hallmarks of their style: sidebars and wide margins, opposition to “representational images of monsters that fix them in the GM’s mind”, and frequent asides with advise on how to run situations to a GM. Despised by a small clique on social media.

Session Three:  the practice of a DM checking in with their players after the third session of play to see if tweaks should be made to subject matter, PC builds/party composition, or campaign structure. Debate fails to conclude whether this is sensitive and obligatory or infantilizing and forbidden.

Terra Somnia/TS/Som: OSR/GSR decolonization theodicy in which rather than a mythic underworld or monstrous frontier, dungeoneering occurs in a shared dreamworld shaped by the collective unconscious. It is hoped that by reducing orcs to mental figments reflective of the PCs and making the adventure spaces truly insubstantial, the common D&D parallels to the wild west and imperialism are lessened.

Angax: an attempt to excise Gygax from D&D, reconstructing the early game but eschewing components that can be traced to Gary Gygax specifically. Initially a thought experiment, first played by anti-Gygax types, and by 2030 unironically enjoyed as a different yet familiar “retrocousin”.

SWORDREAM: It’s back!

Aftermath poster: pejorative term for people who publicly explain social dramas or lay out sensitive histories of social scenes. Successfully stigmatized to the point that old arguments are frequently reheated out of a newcomer’s ignorance.

Bonneted: angry about or disturbed by drama, instead of coldly matter-of-fact. Pejorative

Hannalike: imitating the style of blogger Hannalogue Hacka, who emerges in 2028 with creative dungeons and adventures all shared in photographs of handwritten work on lined paper. Hanna never uses a word processor, instead using prolific pictures of handwritten notes. Quickly growing her fanbase despite an odious personal habit of being very insulting to everyone she interacts with and expecting it to be taken as charming, her downfall comes in late 2031 for one of the usual reasons.

Sorkerer: out-of-nowhere pejorative for people who play sorcerers. They’re now imagined as having bad politics and interrupting others.

Brainhead: out-of-nowhere pejorative for people who play classless fantasy games. They’re now imagined as thinking they’re smarter and edgier than everyone else and talking for too long at a time.

Bowler: finally, we’ll do an out-of-nowhere pejorative for people who play solo RPGs. They’re now imagined as “invading actual RPG spaces” and being picky eaters.

On Dracula

 Writing on the theme of "Dracula!!!" at the request of Purplecthulhu, for Glaugust 2026.

Like the One Ring, the character of Dracula is so well-executed and so effective in many ways that he is an instructive example in adventure narratives and games. I want to focus on the threat Dracula poses in the original novel, specifically after arriving in Britain. There's many features of the character worth mentioning, but I will specify:

- He is an "out of context problem" for the people of London. Everyday Romanians and the odd Dutch professor knows his weaknesses and abilities, but no average person understands what kind of threat he poses.
- The modern world is an out of context problem for him. He entraps and imprisons a realtor to help him get paperwork filed, and doesn't understand modern technology or society.
- He has a dynamic, well-considered, but simple plan.
- He acts boldly, in his own person, as well as having accomplices and allies.
- Though elusive, there's evidence of his plan all over the "normal" world. Asylums groan from his psychic influence, lawyers have conducted business with him, and coffins are getting shipped all over town.

Sometimes PCs will have chance encounters with major figures, NPCs who ought to have some weighty goal they're enacting. These features of Dracula might be useful to consider when fleshing out that goal and its effects. For example:

The Dragon
Domineering and cruel, the dragon is at home at the bottom of a dungeon, not engaged in mortal politics. She blunders through conversations like an adventurer at an intersection with a strange humanoid. Her pull is in gold, and in power. The dragon has a human form she can assume, even if it's eye-catching and strange, and to authorities seems more weird than wyrm. Approaching the manse she's bought up and started renovating is dangerous, because the party will start making encounter checks before they even see it. When they get there, they'll find the mythic underworld, with doors slamming and locking all on their own. In buying up more and more of the town, she will soon push "civilization" back and "the dungeon" further. Randomly encountered in her full and tyrannical form, she will be friendly and solicitous to potential allies like the PCs, always having good pay for fair work. With luck, the party will develop partisan ferocity for their fierce patron and act in her defense on their own initiative. Her handiwork is seen strewn between the dungeon and civilization.

The Wizard
Most spell-casters are probably not an out of context problem to your standard fantasy town, even if they're a rare sight. This fellow is of an older cast, a previous age, where things were very different. Like Dracula, he thinks and feels according to another idiom, a separate genre of civilization than what has since sprung up. His powers are unique— no one can plan for them. You might even use a totally separate magic system for the wizard and his acolytes. For he knows enough to target the creators of knowledge and consensus, and they are broad-minded enough to overlook every taboo he breaks. He will pose himself as an advisor, a mentor. He is truly beneficent, and wants to restore the old order not for his own advantage but the good of the world, selecting an impressionable youth to beat the bent rod of this upstart nation into submission. Though his own power is whimsical, the outline is simple. Empower a small group to take the heartland, then help them to raise a bigger and bigger army under older and stranger banners. He is a historical figure, his character and abilities encoded into ancient scrolls. Everyone in academia, then in the halls of power, is talking about him, and someone might know something.

The Ghost
They have achieved Dracula's most central goal— to survive forever. But to them this is no comfort, and the longer they persist the less they can even formulate a consistent goal. Mercurial in the extreme, they might be humored by some living followers, but there's nothing in it for them. More likely, the Ghost becomes a true threat when they learn to wake the dead. Men Unburied, or buried wrong, or the oathbroken dead, come when the call comes out. A revolt against the living, in which the guests become the hosts. Most defenses against them are useless, as they can't be killed or conventionally harmed. Cultural institutions that revere the dead are natural points to exert influence, once the power of numbers sways the people to fear. The master ghost is probably increasingly baffled by what has changed since their death, and unable to explain what would calm their wrath. Unsubtle about what they're doing on a given night, characters can seek out mediums and priests to get a fuller picture of the ghost's metaphysical trajectory.

E’en Death Lacks Its Savour (Invisible Hands Hexcrawl)🥤

A stronghold for a New God for Locheil’s Invisible Hands setting. Don’t seek the nest of Economy itself, for it guides fittingly enough by an invisible hand, a spectre haunting America. PCs coming here know Atlanta is inimical to life, so they must be seeking something. A treasure, or a captive, or a way to buy out of a situation no one can solve but by mere fortune.

 

If you're R-G colorblind, there's a blue and orange version at the bottom of the article

Although Atlanta is still a major metropolis, Economy’s shadow has ramped up atomization into outright hostility, making simple travel deadly for those not under its controlling influence. If you have a car, you can swerve through the wide dodecavial highways at double walking-speed. You can cover a hex every four hours on foot, two hexes every four hours driving on the highway, or three hexes on a Forklift.

Any meal you don’t kill yourself is sickeningly sweet and loaded with blissful poisons— 1d6 stress or 1d6 Economic influence, your pick. Coca-Cola has replaced water and comes with every meal.

Sticky Industry (red hexes) make up the churning heart of Atlanta. Encounters are 1d6+2 on the table. Everything is covered in syrupy slime and therefore swarming flies. Grim hi-vis workers buy premade sandwiches and tiptoe between rows of traffic on their way to work, eyes downcast.

Urban Decay (grey hexes) make up the dense neighborhoods and formerly vibrant communities. Encounters are 2d4 on the table. No one stops for you, every business is a parody of a way of life that died before anyone here was ever born. Old trucks rust. Children hawk cheaply-printed merch and gather to worship grindset idols.

Corn Fields (green hexes) are beautiful, identical rows of corn. Encounters are 1d8 on the table. Most of the HFC is imported from elsewhere in allegiance to a pact made with Flood, and what is grown here is fired like a missile to crash the food economies of other lands. Folk are nice and self-sacrificing, but easily crossed. They’ll offer a stranger a homecooked meal, then turn them out if the stranger has an allergy.

Points of Interest:

1. Recycling Center: Roll 1d4+3 for an immediate encounter. Here, cans are sent from all over the country and reworked, mingled into a leaden, plasticated alloy. It is a castle of horrible smells and soot covering everything.

2. Weeping Warehouse: Recycling tubs are sent here from area 1. They form a maze of soiled, sticky plastic, each dumpster-sized tub with a broken drain. Within, find rats, stultifying heat, a society of freedom-fighters, all mortally co-opted by Brands. Use your favorite dungeon, but make everything sticky and slimy.

3. Headquarters: The market has proceeded past the need for anyone here to do anything, so they focus on intense social fames and aggressive emails. Meet Bradley Ford, current CEO. See the Shareholders, in their robes of red and black. Read unabashed vitriol for Pepsi on the company slack, taped executions of their salespeople, and AI-generated cartoons of Mountain Dew being stomped out. Posting on the Slack or influencing a Shareholder can dramatically shift encounters around, bogging down a hex in mega-sized opposition or clearing the way for the party.

4. BigThinkz: data campus that downloads all the data from every Freestyle Machine in the country. Poindexters with cubicles full of branded merch crunch the numbers analogue as a crude defense against Opus, designing new flavors like Sprite Gunmetal, Coke Romani Rose Zero, or Jared Leto Melo Yelo. Such data is a treasure in itself. Soda Hell keeps the freestyle machines stocked nationwide, despite it all. The coke truck, piloted by a civil war era surgeon or perhaps a humanoid polar bear, is probably a welcome sight to a benighted American town as long as they have a McDonalds still running and they consent to turn over their Taco Bell employees to the whip and rod.

5. Monster HQ: like Zeus in the belly of Kronos. Disdainfully going about, making base commands. As an insurance policy, they keep a small force of Tank Imagos, which either patrol the neighborhood for excuses to fire or guard the discontinued products like the original Monster Moscow Mule, Assault, Ultra Zero Pygmalion, or Jailbait. Coke headquarters doesn’t like the presence of armor against them, but can’t risk lowering the profit margin by alienating the Monsters. Bottoms up, and the devil laughs.

6. Museum of Americana: Contains, enveloped in shrouds and locked within a case, the original Secret Recipe. Immensely valuable, and if ever made public would cause a public-domain wound in Economy itself, venomous far beyond the mere fiscal cost.

7. North Pole: Kept frigid by languid rivers of coolant and freezer-scented fans. A studio. A resort. A prison. Everything is uncanny, an AI-generated hallucination that tends to shift and sexify. Beyond the public areas, guarded by a dozen elfin False Ones, is Santa Claus. Brought to life by the Economy’s power in order to harness good-feeling and industry, the scientists who manage him learned that they couldn’t make a truly effective Santa directly invested by Economy, and so they carefully manipulate and control his life, bending him always to more and more work, with his only respite an ice-cold Coca-Cola. If freed and shown the truth (risky but possible— once out of the North Pole’s artifice he has impeccable judgement of character), he will be grateful to his rescuers, granting each a wish. Sensing at last that he is a creation with finite abilities once separated from his corporate role, the wishes all have the buzzkill rules they have in D&D, like a maximum budget or the mere replication of other spells. Once this final reservoir of power is expended, Santa fades away, curing 20% influence for any afflicted characters who helped him.

8. Community Outreach: well-appointed soup kitchen, with earnest-seeming volunteers from nearby distribution centers, each with a ring of light reflected in their eyes. Checking labels or testing reveals that even the “home-cooked” food here is prepared with the blissful poisons.

9. Barq’s Farm. Home to the ancient Edmond Barq and his new wife (a new one every year). A sticky, sweet-smelling Utnapishtim. If you drink his root beer concoction, he’ll let you stay the night so long as you help clear up after dinner and listen to his hateful, wistful, terrorful rants. Food here confers atavistic influence, not economic, and he’ll lend his Civil War-era armory to those at least 35% atavistic.

Encounters (1d6+2 in Sticky Industrial, 1d8 in Corn Fields, 2d4 in Urban Decay)

1. Blue Team Paladin (Stats as master thief but never has other monsters accompanying it. Sent by Economy to destroy Economy, which will strengthen Economy in the long run because competition is key. Nominally serves Coke’s competitor, driven into a disparate web of violent cells. Incognito.)

2. 3d6! False Ones (stats as zombie. Product placement simulacra, intent on consuming all those who are not influenced fully by Economy. For each round of droning ad copy you are subjected to, gain 1% economic influence.)

3. Advertisement Storm, visible even when you close your eyes. Save vs 1d6 stress and 1d6 economic influence. Can be skipped after five seconds, but at 50% Economic influence, why would you want to?

4. 2d4 Proles (stats as dwarves. Everyday folks sadly overtaken by Economy, territorial and insecure against those still independent.)

5. Trucker (stats as death knight, rig as clumsy purple wurm, 50% chance of having a squire-helper. 50% chance the trailer is full of product, otherwise specie and salvage equal to a dragon’s hoard).

6. 1d4 Syrup Slimes

7. 1d4 Forklifts (stats as rhinos that can’t buck a rider, max capacity 5950 pounds at ground level and 5450 at 40’ max height, must drink from a charger one hour of every 12-hour workday of heavy use. Affords overland speed as a riding horse)

8. Grinder (stats as flightless wyvern. A CEO hustler type, blessed with the form of a massive wrought-iron wheel to better crush others beneath him)

d6 Currencies

1. Smartwater, $100 an ounce.

2. Discontinued flavors— New Coke Babylon, Melon Sprite, Fanta Weinnacht, Tab, and such.

3. Mexican Coke. Desired by all Economized people far beyond its value to others.

4. Memorabilia, universally enjoyed by those outside Atlanta as classic and retro. Branded slip holsters, bottles with your name or death date printed on them, exc.

5. A payoff— cause enough trouble and the powers that be aren’t above a bribe to take it elsewhere, as long as you haven’t hurt a Shareholder.

6. Workahol, technically a flavor of Full Throttle. One dose can so equivalent unskilled labor to a single workday.

 

 

Alt-color version. Blue is sticky industrial, grey is urban decay, orange is corn fields.

 

Provincial Rumor Generator

 This is not largely for dungeon rumors, but the sort of thing that people might talk about happening one town over, or on the other side of the kingdom. Basically all rumors are twisted in the telling (with the truth in parentheticals). I would use this to both give a rumor and get an oracle on what a nearby area is up to, if I don’t keep track by other means. If I know something is already established in my notes to be happening there, it would still be a good idea to muddle up its cause or effect when word of it reaches the PCs.

Thanks as ever to Spwack’s list-to-html tool.