Goblin Digest - June 2025
A monthly collection of posts from around the GLoGosphere, hypothetically cumulative to some kind of GLoGgies awards at the end of the year.
A good month for gamable entries. There was a whole subtheme of whaling that for one reason or another I totally missed out on. I leave the work of archiving the best of those materials to others.
As ever, an asterisk denotes a post that feels like a loose fit for its category.
Gameable
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: GLoGhack: Masters of the Strait🏴☠️ - A whole game! This one with a really interesting Traveler-style system for generating the PCs histories before the campaign. One to watch as Phlox continues to churn out whole hexcrawls for the thing.
- Archon's Court: Small Rules for Lanthanide Horizon (Dissection, Climbing/Caving) - These rules remind me of the very excellent language roll in The Electrum Archive - simple, specific procedures that speak to a very particular game.
- Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet: Downtime activity: Recovering from a wound - As the author puts it, slow wound recovery for the sickos who like that sort of thing. I admire the small-numbers efficiency of this system. Feels like it has an elegance rivaling light/medium/heavy armor.
- Was It Likely?: the most beautiful woman you've ever seen - A perfect little poem of a game rule. Again, the kind of specificity I want in my games.
- The Nothic's Eye: The Temple of the Duellists (Dungeon for Firmament)) - More verbosely keyed than what I use at the table, but a neat little dungeon with a rich sense of setting. "What does a GLoG dungeon?" look like has come up a few times in recent discourse and we might look at this as an answer.
- The Lovely Dark: i say cling to the rocks and i mean hold my hand - An all-timer title for what might reductively be called companion / mount rules. At some point I really want to play in the full Lovely Dark game where these parts come together.
Theory
- 400 independent bathrooms: duopost: gift economy / tablefill resolution* - Originally devised for a Bionicle-themed game but I think a good system for any complex situation with duration longer than a scene or two.
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: Scaffolds for Disaster - Elaborating on the old OSR chestnut of how much to telegraph a trap. This feels a bit like preliminary work to me, but very promising preliminary work.
Class
- Anxious Mimic: Questing Knight (GLOG class) +D6 swords, titles, and disgraces - I love a class with accompanying accessories. This still feels... surprisingly pro-chivalry in a way that I haven't encountered in a bit, but I think would work swell at the table.
- Garamondia: Class - Manikin - A class about agency. Immediately evocative for me in terms of weirdos your players might meet, though I suspect it might be strained as a player character.
Fluffpost
- Was It Likely?: questions to ask girls at the bar* - Technically doesn't require any kind of adaptation to use at the table, but this still feels like the most accurate category.