Goblin Digest - May 2025
E.B. Bensell. Illustration for Davy and the Goblin. 1885.
This is a monthly collection of posts from around the GLoGosphere, hypothetically cumulative to some kind of GLoGgies awards at the end of the year.
This month I had a few conversations about what constitutes a community and whether Discord groups count. The answer, of course, seems to be a resounding "it depends." There's a blogpost in describing what that scene is like but that's maybe too much for these introductory notes. What I will flag is the rise of bandwagons, perhaps leaking from other OSR scenes. These feel like a big shift in GLoG as a community of practice - less insular and more explicitly collaborative.
Honorable mention goes to SaltyGoo's Base Rules - an extremely clean distillation of GLoG but not a blogpost and thus disqualified.
Beholders
This month Phlox's came together to make various weirdo many-eyed monsters. There are some that predate May here, but I figured it was nice to bundle them for posterity.
- Garamondia: A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern heads (the originator)
- Mediums & Messages: Saint Blights
- The Nothic's Eye: Three "Beholders"
- 400 independent bathrooms: Crook Stalker (Beholder Bandwagon)
- Nrdman on Reddit: GLOG CLASS: Stalker(Beholder as Rogue)
- Occultronics: A New Direction (Beholder Bandwagon)
- Craggenloch Tribune: Reinventing The Beholder - The Ontocritic (GLOG Bandwagoning)
- Garamondia: Modron Calculator (Beholder the Second)
- Meg Zone: A little, yellow book and the beauty its readers behold
- Seed of Worlds: Riftling (Beholder Bandwagon)
- Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet: Harken (Beholder bandwagon)
- The Madman's Menagerie: Job 17:2 (GLOG class: Legally Distinct Eye Ray Entity)
Gameable
- Goodberry Monthly: POMERIUM - Twilight City - More excellent setting building that I come closer and closer to running verbatim. Also I think a great example of clean and distinctive blog layout.
- Glass Ziggurat: 50 Purchases From the Goblin market - Increasingly these are the kinds of tables that I actually pull up at the table.
- Whose Measure God Could Not Take: Kitchen, Empty (Adventure Component) - A single room sketched in sufficient detail to make for a sort of escape room like experience. More than I would ever run at the table, but full of bits to borrow.
- Garamondia: 'Decay' Dungeon - The Blister - A sharp dungeon with a nice Dark Souls feel and interesting implications for the broader setting it inhabits.
- The Transiapheian Bulletin: d8 Volatile City-State Governments - Very detailed and a nice compliment to other hexfill materials
Theory
- Rise Up Comus: Embedding Lore in your Classes - A theory post that arrives at GLoG rather than starting with it. Distant echoes of this Was It Likely? post I adore.
- Grackle Court: You're Using Mounts All Wrong! - A short post on lightweight but more interesting systems we might attach to mounts.
Class
- Salty Goo: The Salt Dryad - An elemental diplomat? Really interesting implied setting for this. I could see folding this into a future Caves of Qud-esque game.
- Salty Goo: 2023 - GLOG classes recap - One archive acknowledges another.
- Grackle Court: [GLoG] Psychic - A weird scout? I think this will pull a game in a wild direction.
Fluffpost
- The Nothic's Eye: Masked Theater of the World Above - Interesting to consider in detail the character of the art in a setting. Part of a nascent theater bandwagon that there might be more to report on soon.