Goblin Digest - August 2025
A monthly collection of posts from around the GLoGosphere, hypothetically cumulative to some kind of GLoGgies awards at the end of the year.
As you were perhaps already aware, this month was GLauGust - a wildcat blogging challenge that seems to have rippled out away from Phlox's. As a result, there were so many posts! 193 of them in Phlox's Discord alone! More than I could keep up with so I've definitely missed some gems.
For me this was a fragmented month, split by a week of travel and occupied by prep for the upcoming school year. I didn't get a chance to write as much as I had hoped, but it was fun to ride along!
Cloak & Sword
At the risk of breaking kayfabe, one particular branch of GLauGust deserves special mention. With their post Courage and Courage Alone (GLoG class: barbarian), Phlox introduced the "bespoke single-level Cloak-and-Sword class" bandwagon, retroactively attributing it to Loch and 17 other authors. Folks heeded the call and began to fill in the history and soon there were dozens of posts writing classes, settings, and house rules for this fictive game.
Gameable
- Spiceomancy: DEATH DEATH DEATH - A neat HP-less system where players collaboratively develop what the stakes of combat are. Note Vulnavia's comment: "the players could just as easily fill it up with things like 'tied up in a broom closet' or 'harmlessly unconscious.'"
- Garamondia: Wake Up Motherfucker - This one is a bit of a cheat in that I am actually pointing at a series of posts linked in the header. A seductive premise - XCOM-like by way of Silent Hill, a GLoGgy antidote to Delta Green... I feel like I need the example of play / intro adventure to really push this over the edge.
- A Blasted, Cratered Land: GLAUGUST: Esprit - One of the motivating mechanics for C&S, time displaced. I think I'd just use this in other pOSR play.
- Oversights and Oubliettes: Where Does Superman Find the Time? - A rather slight post about "downtime" in superhero games. This sparked a surprising amount of discourse and is worth doing the mental arithmetic of figuring out what yout superhero week might look like.
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: Cloak & Sword Procedure Cheat Sheet - Another whole game? Ish? Dueling! Extended romance rules! A "fertility matrix" that might result in some happy couples giving birth to gargoyles! Not in a million years the rules that I would have written, but there's some delight in that.
- Hilander RPGs: Hilander's House Rules - Hilander occasionally grinds out an entire minimalist RPG over a weekend. This batch synthesizes ideas from a few recent forays into a generic but elegant whole.
- Hilander RPGs: Starships and Dogfighting - For example, this is actually part of a larger scifi GLoGhack named GLoG_ASTRA. I admittedly have my own system for handling this, but these are the rules I am most likely to pinch for my own purposes.
Theory
(Nothing jumped out at me this month, but I think I am most critical of this category...)
Class
- SaltyGoo: 2024 -GLOG classes recap* - An anthology of a year of GLoG classes with a few handpicked selections.
- Velvet Ink and Crystal Fires: The Snow Falls and the Village is Overflowing with Children (GLOG Race-as-Class: Fay) - My favorite of the C&S classes, I think. I just like the idea of making fay food and glamouring folks.
- Velvet Ink and Crystal Fires: Their Conversation is in Heaven (GLOG Class: Beguine) - I finished thumbing through my notes and thought "wait, the Beguine is missing." Little did I realize it was also a purplecthulhu class. This is the C&S class that most influenced my own writing, and feels like it points to a whole other category of GLoG games in the vein of Rosewood Abbey.
Short Fiction and Ephemera
(I'm trying on a new header here instead of "fluffposts." This feels less pejorative and feels like it will be a better fit for a whole category of classes, games, and dungeons that stand out to me more for their poetry/prose than for their game mechanics.)
- Spiceomancy: Girls Like Us (procedures for a city campaign) - The blogpost I have thought about most from last month, admittedly more for its poetry than its mechanics.
- Meg Zone: The lords of rock and river: a tiny regional hexcrawl - What it says on the tin. More verbose than what I usually run at the table but that makes it all the more pleasant a read.
- The Nothic's Eye: ⟿⟿⟿ 🕈︎☟︎✌︎❄︎ ✌︎🕈︎✌︎✋︎❄︎💧︎ ✋︎☠︎ ❄︎☟︎☜︎ ☹︎✌︎☠︎👎︎ 🕈︎☟︎☜︎☼︎☜︎ ❄︎☟︎☜︎ 💧︎🕆︎☠︎ ☼︎✋︎💧︎☜︎💧︎✍︎ ⟿⟿⟿ - A link that I am kind of surprised works.
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: Wonder Every Acre: Thoughts on Hex-Fills* - Technically directly gameable, but in practice I think I would need a touch more than this to run at the table (perhaps actually doing the hex-fill and adding landmark/hidden/secret details).