Every year since 2021 I’ve released a serialised adventure throughout December, putting out one part a day every day from the 1st until Christmas. This year I decided that instead of writing an adventure, I’d write a novella.

The Mouth Of Winter is a serialised grimdark fantasy/horror novella releasing one chapter per day from December 1st through December 25th, 2025 – an advent calendar of grim decisions, ancient horrors, and the cost of survival, for readers who enjoy the atmospheric dread of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and the violence and moral complexity of Joe Abercrombie.

What You’re Getting Into

This is a story about a mercenary company that takes a winter contract to garrison a remote monastery. It’s a simple job for easy money – three months of cold work, then home. Except they arrive to find thirty prisoners staging a desperate escape, and the mercenaries do what mercenaries do; they cut them down efficiently in the snow.

Only afterwards do they discover those prisoners were the annual sacrifice, part of an eight-hundred-year covenant that keeps something ancient and hungry sleeping beneath the mountain. Now trapped by winter storms with no way down, Rhod and his company face an impossible choice – become murderers to honour the covenant, or maintain their humanity and doom everyone when the creature wakes.

This is grimdark fantasy with teeth. It’s about the ugly arithmetic of survival, the distance between necessary and right, and what happens when all your choices are bad but you still have to choose. There are no clever solutions. No last-minute saves. Just people making terrible decisions and living with the consequences. Or not living with them, as the case may be.

Free Sample

Below you’ll find the complete first chapter – roughly 2,000 words of mountain climbing, blizzards, near-death experiences, and at least one screaming horse. It’s a taste of what’s coming: visceral action, character dynamics that matter, and the creeping dread of something vast stirring in the dark.

If you like what you read, the second chapter is already available, with the others releasing daily through 25th December 2025. Twenty-five chapters. One long descent into choices that can’t be taken back.

Fair warning: this isn’t a story where the heroes save the day. This is about what people become when survival demands it.

Chapter One

The wind comes up the mountain like a living thing, claws at Rhod’s face, tears water from his eyes. He leans into it, one boot after another, the path narrow enough that his shoulder scrapes rock on the left side. To his right, nothing but white air and the memory of a drop that goes down further than a man wants to think about. Behind him the company strings out in a ragged line. Twenty-eight men and women, plus whatever supplies the horses can carry. Minus whatever the horses will lose when the storm gets worse.

And it will get worse.

“How much further?” Cadi’s voice cuts through the wind. She’s close behind him, always is, has been for seven years now. His second, his left hand, the one who’ll tell him when he’s being an idiot.

“Another hour,” he shouts back. “Maybe two.”

“Shit.”

He doesn’t disagree.

The monastery sits at the top of this pass, exactly where the monks wanted it close to a millennium ago when they decided that holiness required suffering. The contract had seemed simple enough on paper – three months over winter, protect the monks from bandits and the occasional curious warlord. Easy coin for cold work. The monks would feed them, house them, keep them dry and relatively warm until spring melted the passes and the company could march back down to civilisation. Simple.

Rhod’s father used to say that “simple” and “easy” weren’t the same thing, and the old bastard had been right about that if nothing else.

The path narrows further. Rhod presses himself against the rock face, inches forward. The wind screams past, tries to pluck him off the mountain and send him tumbling down into the white nothing below. His fingers find purchase in cracks in the stone, and he pulls himself along, boots scraping for grip on ice-slicked rock. His gloves are wet, frozen, slick. Can’t decide whether it’s better to keep them on and protect his fingers from the weather, or tear them off for better grip. Both seem like bad choices.

He glances back. Cadi is doing the same, and behind her the rest of the company. Tam is in the middle of the line, one massive hand wrapped around the lead rope of the pack horses. Three of them, loaded with gear, supplies, weapons they couldn’t carry. The big man’s face is set in concentration, his other hand pressed against the rock.

Further back, barely visible through the snow, Rhod can make out Jes and Alyn bringing up the rear. The recruits. Green as summer grass, both of them, signed on a month ago in the valley town where the monks had posted their notice. Good with a blade, Jes, and Alyn could shoot. That would have to be enough.

The wind drops for a moment. In the sudden quiet, Rhod hears someone muttering prayers. He can’t tell who. Then the gust hits, harder than before, and one of the horses screams.

Rhod whips around in time to see it happen. The rear pack horse, the one at the end of Tam’s lead, loses its footing. Its hooves skid on ice, scramble for purchase, find nothing. The horse pitches sideways, eyes rolling white with terror, and then it’s gone, tumbling over the edge with a shriek that the wind swallows almost immediately.

Tam hauls back on the lead rope, muscles bunching under his coat. For a terrible moment Rhod thinks the weight of the falling horse will drag the others over, drag Tam himself over. But the rope snaps, and the big man staggers back against the rock face, gasping. Then silence, except for the wind.

“Keep moving!” Rhod shouts. No time to mourn a horse. No time to mourn anything. They need to get off this mountain before the storm gets them all.

He turns back to the path and pushes forward. His legs are burning now, thighs screaming with each step. The cold is seeping through his coat, through his boots, settling into his bones. Behind him he can hear the company moving, boots scraping stone, harsh breathing, the occasional muttered curse.

The path widens slightly. Not much, but enough that Rhod can walk without pressing himself to the rock. He picks up the pace, Cadi matching him step for step.

“Lost a third of our supplies,” she says.

“Still have two horses.”

“For now.”

He doesn’t answer. She’s right, of course. She usually is.

They climb for another hour. The light is fading, what little of it penetrates the storm. Rhod’s hands are numb inside his gloves, his face raw and aching. Each breath burns in his chest, the air so cold it feels sharp. He’s starting to think about shelter, about finding somewhere to hole up until morning, when he hears Tam shout.

“Bridge! Snow bridge!”

Rhod stops. Ahead, the path seems to continue across a gap in the rock. But it’s not stone. It’s snow, a fragile span of ice and wind-packed powder stretched across empty space.

“How wide?” Cadi calls out.

Rhod edges forward, crouches, tries to see through the blowing snow. Ten feet. Maybe twelve.

“Could go around,” he says. “Find another route.”

“Could,” Cadi agrees. “Or we could be here three more hours, lose the light completely, freeze to death.”

“You always were an optimist.”

She almost smiles. Almost.

Rhod studies the bridge. It looks stable enough, if you squint and lie to yourself. The alternative is backtracking in a blizzard, trying to find a path they hadn’t seen on the way up, burning time and energy they don’t have.

“One at a time,” he says. “Lightest first. Rope between each person.”

Cadi nods, starts getting the rope out. Rhod watches the bridge, watches the snow blow across it in sheets. If it holds, they might make it to the monastery before full dark. If it doesn’t, someone’s going to die.

He goes first. Has to. Can’t ask anyone to do something he won’t.

The bridge creaks under his weight. He moves slowly, carefully, each step a negotiation with gravity and luck. How much weight can packed snow take? He’s about to find out. The wind pushes at him, tries to shove him sideways into nothing. His hands are spread for balance, and through the bottom of his boots he can feel the bridge shifting, settling, groaning.

Halfway across. The snow under his right foot gives slightly. Rhod freezes, shifts his weight to his left, keeps moving. Behind him, he can hear Cadi shouting something, but the words are lost in the wind.

Three-quarters. Almost there.

His left foot breaks through.

Rhod throws himself forward, hits solid rock on the other side of the bridge, scrabbles for purchase. For a moment he’s sliding backward, the rope around his waist going taut as Cadi and the others haul on it from the far side. Then his fingers find a crack in the stone and he drags himself up, rolls onto his back, chest heaving.

“Still intact!” he shouts back. “Come on!”

One by one, they cross. Cadi moves like a cat, quick and sure. Tam is slow but steady, his weight making the bridge groan and sag but holding. The others follow, some confident, some terrified, all alive.

Until Jes. The recruit is halfway across when the bridge goes. One moment he’s there, the next the snow is collapsing under him and he’s falling with it, arms flailing. The rope jerks tight, catches him, and he slams into the rock face below the bridge with a sound that makes Rhod’s teeth ache.

“Haul!” Cadi is already pulling, Rhod grabbing the rope beside her. They drag Jes up hand over hand, his weight making the rope cut into Rhod’s palms even through his gloves. The young man’s face appears over the edge, white with shock, blood streaming from his nose.

They pull him onto solid ground. He lies there gasping, eyes wide.

“Can you walk?” Rhod asks.

Jes nods, tries to stand, collapses. Tam catches him, hauls him upright with one hand.

“I’ve got him,” the big man says.

Rhod looks at the rest of the company. Exhausted, frozen, bleeding in Jes’s case, but alive. All of them alive.

“Another hour,” he says. “Maybe less. The monastery’s just up ahead.”

It’s a lie. He has no idea how far they still have to go. But sometimes a lie is what people need to keep moving.

They climb.

The darkness comes down like a fist, sudden and complete. Rhod keeps one hand on the rock face, feeling his way forward, the company strung out behind him on the rope. His legs have gone beyond pain into a kind of numb persistence. Each step is mechanical, automatic, divorced from thought. Then, through the swirling snow, he sees light. Torches. Dozens of them, burning in the distance, painting the mountainside in flickering orange and gold.

“There!” Cadi sees them too. “The monastery!”

The company surges forward, exhaustion forgotten, the promise of warmth and food and rest pulling them on. Rhod picks up the pace, squinting through the snow at the lights. The monastery is big, bigger than he expected, a sprawl of stone walls and towers clinging to the mountain like a barnacle to a ship’s hull.

They’re less than a hundred yards away when Rhod hears the screaming. It comes from below the monastery, from somewhere in the darkness beyond the torchlight. Dozens of voices, maybe more, shrieking and wailing in wordless terror. Then he sees them, figures pouring out of a lower entrance, running and stumbling through the snow, heading down the mountain toward the company. His hand goes to his sword.

“Arms!” he shouts. “Everyone arms! Now!”

The company drops the rope, scatters, everyone drawing weapons. Rhod’s sword hisses free of its sheath, the steel cold against his palm even through the thick leather and fur of his gloves. Beside him, Cadi has her blade out too, her face set in the hard lines of someone who’s killed before and will do it again.

The figures keep coming, closer now, their screams echoing off the rock. Rhod can’t see them clearly through the snow and darkness, but there are a lot of them. Too many.

“Ambush!” someone shouts behind him. “It’s a fucking ambush!”

Maybe. Or maybe something worse.

The figures are thirty yards away now. Twenty. The torchlight from the monastery casts their shadows long and distorted across the snow. Rhod raises his sword.

“Hold!” he calls out. “Wait for it! Wait for my word!”

The company forms up around him, a loose line across the path. Twenty-eight against however many are coming down the mountain. Bad odds. But then, odds have never been in his favour.

The figures are close enough now that Rhod can hear individual voices in the chaos, can see them stumbling and falling and pulling themselves up again. They’re not attacking with any kind of discipline. They’re not attacking at all.

They’re running. From what, Rhod doesn’t know. But whatever it is, it’s behind them in the monastery, and the company is standing directly in their path.

“Brace!” Rhod shouts.

The first figure crashes into him a heartbeat later.

What Happens Next?

If you want to read the rest of The Mouth Of Winter, chapters one and two are already available, with new chapters releasing daily through 25th December 2025.

You can follow along in two ways:

• Read the story on itch.io – The novella, with new chapters added daily throughout December
• Support me on Patreon – Get bonus chapters, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes development notes throughout the month

The Mouth Of Winter is brutal, unflinching, and asks uncomfortable questions about what we’re willing to sacrifice to survive. If you’re here for that, I think you’ll enjoy the descent.

See you in the deep places.

This post originally appeared on Patreon. Patrons get access to posts at least a week before they go live on Loot The Room, as well as to exclusive Patreon-only content. Tiers start at just £2 per month and your support helps to keep this site running. Sign up here.

You can find the other posts in this series here.

The author of “Blood On The Snow”, Thomas M Kane, is one of the most prolific writers we’ve encountered so far in our journey through Dungeon Magazine. I’m unable to find a complete bibliography for him, but as well as being published extensively in Dungeon and Dragon magazines he was also a regular contributor to White Wolf Magazine and has credits in books for Cyberpunk, GURPS, and Ars Magica, and appears to have a fairly successful career as a novelist. So fingers crossed this adventure is a good one. (I should also point out that this adventure features a couple of really lovely pen and ink illustrations by the late Jennell Jaquays).

“Blood On The Snow” is designed for 3-7 characters of 3rd-7th level, and we’re told that fighters, barbarians, and rangers would be “extremely helpful”. The characters are going to take on the roles of undercover agents, “observers who allow events to unfold around them in order to solve a mystery”. We’ve had a couple of decent mysteries in the pages of Dungeon already, and I’m interested to see how this one does things. We’re told up front that the DM is provided with a timeline of events, which is a good start, but also that they’ll need to be prepared to improvise “if the actions of the characters change the situation or the sequence of events”.

So what’s going on here? Seal hunters working on a peninsular glacier that they stole from “a warlike tribe” – read: its indigenous people, who they now pay as guides as the intruders hunt the ancient tribal territories – have come under threat from a gang of marauders who threaten their operation and make it nearly impossible to bring fur in from the ice. The marauders, we’re told, “seem to understand all the plans of the hunters”, and the local town’s merchant guildmaster believes that this is because one of the local hunters has betrayed them to the marauders. He fears that the traitor is the local guard captain, Kanadius, and he has called in the PCs to help. They’ve ostensibly been hired as hunters to replace those killed by the marauders, but they’re actually here to go undercover and discover the identity of the spy, should one actually exist.

Due to the nature of the adventure – the PCs going along with a hunting party – it’s almost necessarily on rails, and the module does acknowledge this. The PCs are encouraged to follow the lead of the NPCs and we’re given a timetable of the major events of each day. GMs are advised, though, that just because something happens every day doesn’t mean that the PCs are there to witness it, and that they should be actively spying, asking questions, and sneaking off to do their espionage. The GM is encouraged to “give them every opportunity to do this, using the schedule as a guide only”.

This module really emphasises how cold it is out on the glacier, giving us a fairly straightforward weather system to calculate the temperature and weather each day. Although the temperatures are given in Fahrenheit, which is entirely meaningless to me, I do like how simple this is to use. Each day you roll 2d20-28 to calculate a temperature between -30 to +12, and then you roll 2d20 to determine wind speed and alter the temperature accordingly:

We’re also given rules for determining cloud cover (1-2 on 1d6) and snow (1-in-6), and told how being unprotected hinders characters: 1hp damage per hour for every 10 degrees below 40F, and 1hp per turn for every degree below -30F. There are also rules for potions, liquids, and limbs freezing, as well as snow blindness. It’s pretty brutal, and I like it a lot. That said, I don’t actually know how much a GM would end up using the weather tables – the timeline of events gives temperatures and wind strengths, plus details of snow, for many of the days that the journey takes place. It’s annoyingly inconsistent, and I almost wish that the timeline ignored weather entirely and just left it to the GM to adjudicate.

One missed trick here is that there’s no encounter table unique to this module. Instead we’re told that when PCs explore the ice by themselves we should use the “arctic, rough” table in the Fiend Folio or DMG, and then a number of exceptions and changes are given. Personally I think there should just be an encounter table here so that everything you need to run the adventure is in one place.

As with a lot of the wilderness and mystery adventures we’ve seen in Dungeon so far, a big chunk of this text is given over to detailing the local town of Winterwolf. Here at least the town is a little different to the others we’ve seen in the magazine, given that it’s based on Finnish history/folklore and is in an arctic setting as opposed to the standard medieval fantasy fare we’ve seen before, but I do wonder exactly how many small settlements that are only used for a single adventure have been detailed in the history of D&D. I’m not without sin, of course – Bodies In Flight and Beyond The Drowned Spire both have small villages next to the adventure in them – and I’m suddenly curious where this urge to write the world around the site of the adventure comes from. That’s food for thought for the future. Here we’re given a map of the settlement and details of the NPCs, but given that the bulk of the adventure is meant to take place out of the ice I’m not sure how useful all of this is really. I suppose it’s handy if you take the advice that the PCs should spend a month preparing for the expedition first, which allows you to use this settlement in your ongoing game and spend some time there before heading out onto the ice, but if you were running this as a one-shot you could dispense with the village almost entirely. That said, this thing is long and I think that trying to run it as a one-shot would be a fool’s errand, so in this case the town becomes much more useful.

The best part of this adventure is the combination of the timeline of the hunt – which includes notable events as well as the day’s seal take – and a map that shows the route of the hunting party around the glacier, with days and times given at specific locations. This means that the PCs can wander off and get lost on the ice and the GM will always know exactly where the hunting party is, which is a touch I really like. It also focuses on details that give us some sense of the tensions within the hunting party, like this from the first day:

The trail Ali has chosen leads through marshes which have only partially frozen. Much complaining about Ali is made by the hunters. Were it not for his choice of direction, the ice could be entered almost immediately, and the fens avoided. Ali remains passive, but when the complaints become loud, he warns that the bandits are believed to watch the quicker path to the ice.

Day 8 is also a particularly fun one, and a moment where the adventure could go wildly off the rails. If Ali is suspicious of the PCs or otherwise displeased with them he claims that some nearby hills are likely the be the bandit hideout and sends the PCs to investigate. Rather than bandits, though, the hills are home to a dragon, and his plan is for the PCs to simply never return. This is a moment where we’re told to “use random encounters and weather for moderating this task” once the PCs are on their own, and I desperately wish that this adventure had an encounter table – particularly as this would be a good opportunity to put the dragon on it. For each turn that characters spend within four hexes of the dragon’s lair there is a 10% cumulative chance that the dragon notices them, and I think the text here assumes that the dragon noticing the PCs must then lead to an encounter; the actual text, after giving this chance of being noticed, simply reads, “[the dragon] can speak and tries to gain from the encounter without fighting, threatening the party with death unless all valuables are brought forward. It then flaps its wings and charges to frighten the group away with its fear aura: if this doesn’t work, it uses its breath weapon and flies out of combat range to its cave”. This indicates to me that the dragon is active and roaming the territory around its lair, and I wish there was an opportunity here for the PCs to notice the dragon without it spotting them. I also wish it had a name.

After the timeline the adventure ends very abruptly. Either the PCs figure out who the traitor is, or they don’t, and it’s all over. In the event that they haven’t figured out who is to blame we’re told that the GM can either end the adventure here or else send the PCs out with the hunters again, hoping for more information to be uncovered. This time, though, the GM will have to come up with a new timeline of events for a second hunting expedition, presumably adding new clues as the identity of the traitor. I’m not sure whether any GMs would feel like doing that, especially as you’d essentially be running the same adventure again. Will players be up for a second trek across the ice with a group of hunters who are largely hostile to them? I’m not sure.

I’m undecided about this adventure. There are some cool things in it – I particularly like the rules for being out in the cold – but it feels very much like the author trying to make a specific story happen at the table, and that’s not the kind of game I like to run. With that said, though, this isn’t particularly far removed from the way lots of modern D&D players run the game, so if you’re into that sort of play style this might be worth bringing to your table. It definitely lends itself to a style of play with set encounters and encounter budgets, and in that respect it feels very modern and should actually be fairly easy to convert to the modern edition of the game.

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As we’ve established, I’m trying to write magic items for a dungeon game that all do something unique while also providing generators for GMs to make their own stuff for the game. What I’m realising as I work on this is that I can’t really have both – generators are functionally incapable of creating wholly unique results. It feels unsatisfying, but I’m starting to suspect that my best option is to write small minor abilities (this weapon knows a random Phrase, this weapon sheds light, etc.), and for major abilities to direct GMs to invent something. This then goes together with a bunch of example/sample magic weapons that I write, to show GMs what sort of things these items should do.

As I think about this, I’m wondering if the book that I release these in (or blog post, or web page, or whatever I choose to do) should focus more on the philosophy behind how magic weapons are treated in ADG rather than on simply providing the weapon stats and the generators. And with that in mind, I’ve been thinking about what magic weapons actually are in a dungeon game.

Something I’ve had in mind for a long time is that magic weapons (as opposed to magic items in general) aren’t something that’s easily crafted. Instead, they’re forged through acts of unimaginable violence. The intelligence inside a magic weapon isn’t an embodiment of the weapon itself and isn’t something that was created out of the ether – it’s a remnant of the person who was slain by this weapon when it was simply a mundane item, and the magical abilities the weapon possesses are reflections of the power that person held in life. The result of this is that magic weapons are the rarest form of magic item, and they often have antagonistic relationships with the people who wield them – especially if they’re newly-forged.

This adds a couple of layers to my generator. We need to know who the intelligence was in the past, who killed them, and how long ago that occurred. We probably also need to know why they were killed. We’ll also need to decide what type of weapon they are (right now ADG only has Small, Medium, and Large weapons but maybe for the magic weapons we can get more specific within those categories). It might also be fun to decide how complete or fragmented their memories of their past life are, and what they want to accomplish – do they seek revenge, or redemption, or peace, etc. Perhaps we should also decide whether their killer is still alive, and whether the weapon is aware of this or not. I’m also thinking about my game Go Alone, which asks you to roleplay a sentient weapon and reflect on what it means to be used as a tool for violence, and I’m wondering how much of that I can bring into this. I like the idea of determining how many previous bearers the weapon has had, and how hey feel about being used for violence. Finally, we should also decide whether the weapon is able to grow or diminish in power over time.

With that in mind, I’ve taken a run at some more tables for this generator. Here’s the one we ended up with last time, for reference:

And here are the new ones:

I feel like there’s enough here to generate a fairly complex, unique intelligence, and for the GM to know what drives it and how to roleplay it. The only thing I’m missing now is “what do the powers actually look like?”

My instinct is that minor abilities should be drawn from a random table – things like “knows a random Ritual”, “functions as an additional Scar”, etc. Small, rules-based tweaks that are essentially the a dungeon game equivalent of a +1 style bonus. Major abilities should be left up to the GM to create, with a few (maybe 10?) pre-written example weapons to consult for ideas.

So my next step is to go away and write those minor abilities and to create some example weapons. In the mean time, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about this!

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Last time I talked about my aims for magic weapons in a dungeon game. To quickly recap:

1. All (or most) magic weapons should be intelligent.
2. All magic weapons should have at least one unique ability that “breaks” the game rules in some way.
3. The GM should have tools to easily create new magic weapons for their game.

It’s no secret that I’ve drawn on 2nd Edition AD&D a lot in writing a dungeon game. This has largely been in the way I balance the game – my experience thresholds and treasure quantities all use the numbers in 2nd Edition as their base, and some my monster stats are at least partially derived from it. None of it is an exact copy, but why reinvent the wheel?

With that in mind, I thought it was worth looking at AD&D’s magic sword generators for inspiration. Both the first and second editions of AD&D have fairly extensive tables for generating intelligent weapons. For the rest of this post I’ll be referring to the original version of the 2nd edition Dungeon Master Guide, not the Revised edition, so if you want to follow along your page numbers may not match, but generally this stuff is found in the appendices (I believe it’s Appendix 3 in the Revised edition, as in the edition I’m using).

This procedure starts on page 186 with table 113: Weapon Intelligence and Capabilities, which lets us determine the weapon’s intelligence, method of communication, and its capabilities. It looks like this:

• ± The weapon can also read languages/maps of any nonmagical type.
• ±± The weapon can read languages as well as magical writings.
• ±±± The weapon can use either communication mode at will, with language use as any speaking weapon.

Before I go any further in this process I can already see that this can be fairly easily adapted to a dungeon game. I will need to adjust the percentages to account for the fact that the game only uses d6 and d20, but otherwise I can more or less copy this.

When I’m writing for a dungeon game I often run into tension between my desire for the game to be fast and “rules light”, and my love of crunchy trad games with lots of cool bits to play around with. This is something that pops up most often when it comes to monsters. When I write for Pathfinder 2 I love making monsters and coming up with cool things that they can do, and I find a lot of satisfaction in putting together a complex stat block that has a set of abilities that work well together and make the monster feel unique. With a dungeon game I’m always tempted to go too far with monsters when really I want the majority of them to do just one cool thing, and I’m feeling that same urge when it comes to these weapons. For that reason – and because I’m still struggling to see how I’m going to “tool-ify” this process – I don’t know if I want quite so many results that grant 3 primary abilities here.

Here’s what my first run at this table looks like for a dungeon game.

Rather than rolling percentile dice, we simply generate the weapon’s Cunning and derive the rest of its attributes from that. Player Character Cunning is in the 3-18 range, and this only gives us magic weapon intelligence up to 12, which sort of works but also sort of doesn’t. Highly intelligent weapons are fun and introduce a new dynamic into play, and I’m robbing myself of that here. Let’s expand this out to 3d6 and see how it looks.

(You’ll notice I’ve also played around with the communication methods here. That’s just adjusting things to my own personal tastes, and there’s no real reasoning behind these choices other than that it felt right.)

On this second run at it I’ve introduced the concept of Major and Minor abilities. I still don’t know exactly how I’m going to generate these, but I feel like we get a good variety of weapons from this table.

Going back to AD&D, the next set of tables generate:

• Weapon alignment
• Weapon primary abilities
• Weapon extraordinary powers
• Special purpose & special purpose power
• Languages spoken by the weapon
• Weapon ego

Weapon ego (and from that, its derived personality score) makes for some interesting outcomes but it’s also a bit of a pain to work out and keep track of, and I’m not sure it achieves much that isn’t achieved by the weapon having a Cunning score that’s used as the basis for saves. That said, the constant shifting of player character personality scores (which you have to work out once a character begins wielding an intelligent weapon) makes for some interesting outcomes as the weapon’s intelligence takes advantage of moments of weakness. I’ll have to think about whether this is something I want to codify into the rules of a dungeon game or whether this is something that can be dealt with simply through GM advice.

What I’m really interested in here are the powers that AD&D grants to magic weapons. Here’s table 115: Weapon Primary Abilities

And Table 116: Weapon Extraordinary Powers:

The immediate thing that I notice about this abilities is that they’re really boring. If I wanted to replicate this I could simply say that every magic weapon knows X amount of Rituals and have GMs roll for them. That’s not a terrible idea for a minor ability, but I want my weapons to be actually interesting.

For now I don’t have an answer, and so I’m just going to think about it a little more. I like the base table, though, and I think it’s a good starting point. All that remains to be done is to figure out how to draw the rest of the owl.

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I feel like I’ve been trying to “solve” magic items in a dungeon game for years – because I have. I’ve been thinking about how they’re going to work for literal years and still haven’t quite got there.

Actually writing the weapons isn’t the hard part. I know exactly what I want them to do. They’re all intelligent, and they all have at least one cool thing that they do. They sort of function in the same way as monsters in that regard, where each of them has a way in which they break the rules of the game.

Designing them is fairly straightforward, but where things get tricky is in giving GMs the means to design their own. A core design principle I try to upload when I work on stuff for a dungeon game is that I would rather provide tools to allow you to expand the game and build your own things that work with it, rather than just slapping down a book containing a bunch of magic weapons that you may or may not ever actually utilise.

Of course, Little Miss Scope Creep is always present in my mind, saying “but you could write a book of magic weapons and write the tools to allow GMs to make their own”. And this is why we still don’t have a magic weapons book or creation system for the game, because I want to do both and can’t figure out how to.

So what’s the difficulty? The difficulty comes from figuring out what the generation tools for these things should look like and how they should work. If I’m going to write a tool to create things for the game, I want it to be the same tool that I use to create things for the game. I very firmly don’t want magic weapons that confer the equivalent of a +1 bonus, because that’s boring. They should all do something unique. But it’s very hard to write tables that generate unique effects that are also re-usable. You either end up exhausting the utility of the tables – i.e. you see all of the “unique” things, and thus no longer get unique results – or else there’s a point on the table that instructs you to now draw the rest of the fucking owl.

There are a couple of already-extant magic weapons in a dungeon game, hidden inside The Moss Mother’s Maze. The game has evolved slightly since that adventure was written and I’m taking a more structured approach to stocking dungeons with treasure, but those items still reflect my main philosophy that magic weapons should be cool and unique. Here’s what they look like.

Hadratha

Magic longsword. (Medium melee weapon).

When you roll damage you can Exert 1 point of Cunning to add an additional damage die. You can do this as many times as you like on each attack, provided you have the Cunning to pay.

Sacrificing Cunning strengthens Hadratha, with the following effects.

Hadratha Given Flesh
HD 6 AC 7
Deals damage directly to Cunning.
Can choose for her attacks to hit without making an attack roll. She can do this up to 12 times, after which point she loses this ability forever.

Cursed Spear

Large melee weapon.

While you wield it you can’t be killed by violence.

Curse: The Moss Mother always know the location of the spear. When it is removed from this chamber the GM rolls 1d20 secretly. This is the current location of the Moss Mother. Do not roll for encounters again. Each Turn she moves one room closer to the spear, taking the most direct route. Her approach can be heard throughout the maze.

These really occupy two extremes. Hadratha has intelligence and a fairly complex set of abilities. The cursed spear has a simple ability, and a curse that only really has meaning within the dungeon in which it’s discovered. The question now is, how do I construct tools that yield results that fall somewhere within this spectrum of magic weapons?

I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, and I don’t think I’m going to solve that problem today. This post is really just me coming back to touch the issue again, with a view to finally cracking this nut. I’d love to hear thoughts about how to approach this, though, should you have any.

It’s funny how creativity never moves in a straight line. For me it seems to come in phases, shifting constantly not just between individual projects but across entire mediums. One month I’m deep into writing fiction, the next all I can think about is music, and then without warning I’m back into game design. It’s like my brain refuses to follow a single path, darting between different creative expressions depending on some internal tide that I’ve never quite managed to predict.

That restlessness is present even within a single medium. In games specifically, I’ve spent the last few years immersed in traditional fantasy adventures and dungeon design. But this year I’ve suddenly found myself returning to a form I stepped away from years ago and once again becoming interested in solo journaling games.

There’s something uniquely intimate about creating a game meant for one person and their thoughts. When I wrote my first journalling games I was fascinated by the quiet conversation between player, page, and prompts. It’s like leaving notes for strangers to find, never knowing what stories they might tell in response. Working on ‘Blood In The Margins’ has been a process of both familiarity and discovery, like revisiting your childhood home to find that everything seems smaller, but the rooms somehow contain new corners you’ve never noticed before. (Incidentally my partner and I did visit my childhood home a few weeks ago. That was a very surreal experience.)

Creative evolution isn’t always about moving forward into uncharted territory. Sometimes – often, in fact – it’s about returning to old haunts with new eyes, about looking at what you’ve done in the past and bringing the experience of the new, present you to bear on it. The Wretched, like many solo games, contains prompts that are relatively lose. Blood In The Margins is a creature of specificity and focus. You can still tell the story you want to tell, but the sandbox is smaller, the toys within it crafted with more care. This is what I’ve learned from writing dungeon games; that the specific and the concrete are the tools the imagination needs to create something truly surprising of its own. We never truly abandon our past creative selves. We just fold them into who we’re becoming.

Projects & Updates

• Blood In The Margins is in its final 24 hours, and closing in on £8,000. I released a big preview of the game to backers a couple of days ago that will let you play through the opening Act. You should go and play it.
• The final PDF of Down In Yongardy is now available. All that remains now is for the physical book to be produced, which Space Penguin Ink are kindly handling for me.
• Weird Hope Engines was a rousing success. The team behind the show did an amazing job of bringing Directive 92A to life in the physical space, and it was an incredible experience getting to see people actually play it and to read what they were creating. The show runs until the 10th of May and I hope you’ll get a chance to see it. I’m working on a website to archive all of the writing people are doing when it’s over, and I’ll say more about that when it’s ready.
• Speaking of Directive 92A, I wrote nearly 2 hours of weird ambient soundscapes and glitched-out beats to go with it. It’s on Bandcamp for a fiver.
• I’ve been enjoying writing fiction again, and I have two stories published on my itch page. ‘The Knight of Rot‘ is a short, sad grimdark tale set in the world of Mörk Borg. ‘The Interview‘ is a slice of dark academic murder fiction. They’re both free to read, and you can get a limited edition physical chapbook of The Interview as an add-on with Blood In The Margins.

Things I’ve Been Enjoying

• Listening: I’ve been in an ambient and electronic mood of late, and in particular I’ve been really enoying Throwing Snow’s 2016 album ‘Axioms’. Here’s my March playlist.
• Watching: I’ve been going through a Hitchcock phase and finally convinced Steph to watch Rope (1948). It’s still incredible.
• Reading: I’m about halfway through I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan and I adore it. It’s funny, it’s well-written, it resonates on a very personal level, and there’s this slow creeping horror that’s starting to mount. I can’t wait to see where it goes.

As always, here’s a photo of Lucky. He’s enjoying the fact that the sun is out again, though my asthma isn’t enjoying my house being covered in his fur.#