Howdy,
I hope all's well and that you're liking Bones Of The Realm so far. Plenty more to come!
what's new
Well, the game's here!
You can now pick up the physical card deck of The Chaos ttrpg. I'm busy already packing it up and sharing it with patrons and playtesters, as well as to some kindly souls who are hopefully going to share the game with the world at large.
This is so exciting, as it's the culmination of around a year's work. But really, it's only the beginning. I have so many plans for this little game, and can't wait to get cracking. Be sure to let me know how you get on with the game. Remember that if you're not sure yet about whether to pick up the physical deck, all the rules are on the site to give you a feel for the game. What I will say, of course, is that there's nowt like holding the deck in your hands and unleashing chaos at your table in meat space!
scraps of the chaos
One of the many things I've been working on in the background is two-page adventures to play with The Chaos. I'm calling them scraps of the chaos. The idea is for them to be used as the destinations in your one-shot sessions, or however else you like. The character(s) can head out from The Keep, venture forth into The Realm following the rumours or jobs noted in the scraps, survive any watch rolls during their journey if you've got time in your session, and then deal with whatever they face when they reach where they're going.
Simply have the player(s) choose or roll for a destination in The Realm, pick a scrap for them, and kick off the session.
I'm in the middle of revamping my Patreon in the background, so that patrons will get access to more of these scraps of the chaos as they're written, until at least there's enough for another random d6 roll for each location to choose a scrap (and if you've got an idea for one or create your own, feel free to get in touch), as well as secret random roll generators I've been working on and a spruced up battlemap vault.
I'll post up once the Patreon's ready to roll, but meantime, here's one of the first scraps I've written. I'd love to hear from you if you give this one a go!
Them Bleedin' Woods - Every tree within a half-day's walk weeps red sap that smells of iron and something older. At The Woods’ dark centre lies The Wound, a great split in the earth that wasn't there last season. Something’s crawled out of it. Maybe more than one thing.
on the art of the one or two page adventure
And here's the thing. There's something deeply satisfying about a single sheet of paper that contains an entire setting or adventure. Not just a summary. Not a pointer toward one. The whole thing, right there, folded into your back pocket.
One-page and two-page adventures have been part of the OSR conversation for years, but they're still treated by a lot of GMs as a lesser format, a stopgap, something to reach for when you haven't had time to prep properly. That framing gets it exactly backwards. The constraint is the design. The bare bones are the point.
Here's why, and more importantly, how to get the most out of them at your table.
why small works
Traditional adventure modules give you a lot. Room descriptions. NPC motivations. Boxed text. Contingencies for contingencies. That thoroughness has real value, but it also does a lot of the imaginative work for you before you've even sat down with your players.
A one or two page adventure gives you almost none of that. What it gives you instead is structure and spark. A setting with bones, a conflict with teeth, and enough empty space that your imagination, and your players', has somewhere to go.
The best examples of this work the way a good folk song works. The melody's simple enough that everyone can hold it in their head. The story inside it is old and true enough that people fill it out differently every time they sing it. The words on the page are the least interesting part of what ends up happening.
For OSR play specifically, this format is almost perfect. Old school games reward improvisation, player agency, and emergent narrative. A dense, pre-written module can work against all three. A well-designed one or two pager points toward the chaos and gets out of the way.
reading it before you need it
This sounds obvious. It isn't always practised.
Before you run a one or two page adventure, read the whole thing at least twice. Not to memorise it, you won't need to, but to understand the shape of it. What's the central tension? What are the moving parts? Which tables connect to which? A well-constructed one or two pager has an internal logic, and spotting that logic in advance means you can maintain it under pressure without having to re-read mid-session.
On the second read, ask yourself: what's the thing most likely to happen first? And what are two or three things that could happen after that, regardless of what the players do? You're not planning outcomes. You're getting comfortable enough with the material that you can respond to players quickly and consistently.
Fold it. Put it on the table. That's your whole prep session done.
the tables are not the adventure
Roll tables are a tool, not a script. This is the single most important thing to understand about running bare-bones adventures.
When you roll an encounter or a point of interest, what you get isn't an instruction, but rather, it's a starting image. Your job as GM is to take that image and make it present. Give it smell, sound, implication. Put it in context with what's already happened this session. Ask yourself: given everything the players have already seen and done, what does this result mean right now?
A wandering monster table entry that says a wounded traveller, leg caught in a snare is not interesting by itself. A wounded traveller who's clutching something the players saw referenced on a map they found an hour ago, that's a scene. The table gave you the ingredient. You make the meal. I talk more about this in my book.
This is also why rolling in the open, or rolling and then pausing visibly before describing what happens, can be a genuinely useful technique. Players see the dice. They know something is being determined. That pause before you describe it builds tension and signals that the world is responding to them rather than following a script.
maintain the setting's consistency
A one or two page adventure can't afford to establish everything. It sets a tone, a central problem, a handful of truths about the place, and then it trusts you to extrapolate.
Your job as GM or if you're running it solo, is to make sure that extrapolation stays coherent. If the adventure tells you this is a forest in pain, then everything in it should feel like it's in pain. The weather, the NPCs, the silence, the things the animals are doing. If it tells you the central wound is old and grief-stricken rather than aggressive, then every random result you roll should be filtered through that lens. The beast pack isn't hunting, it's fleeing. The stranger you meet isn't threatening, they're lost and have no idea why.
Consistency doesn't mean predictability. It means that when something surprising happens, it still feels like it belongs to the same world. Players sense this intuitively. A well-maintained setting tone makes the whole session feel authored, even when most of it was decided by a die roll thirty seconds ago.
let players fill the gaps
A two-page adventure can't tell you what the weaver's workshop smells like. It can't tell you whether the abandoned camp has one mug or three. It can't tell you the colour of the cult leader's eyes.
These are not oversights. They're invitations.
When players ask questions that the adventure doesn't answer, resist the urge to deflect or say you don't know. Make a decision, immediately, in the spirit of the setting. Say it with confidence. The players will take it as fact and build on it, and suddenly the adventure has a detail in it that came from the table rather than the page, and those are always the details people remember.
Even better, as it suggests in The Chaos ttrpg, ask right back. What do you think it smells like? Not as a dodge, but as genuine worldbuilding. Players who feel like the world partly belongs to them play harder and invest more. A one or two page adventure has the room for this because it hasn't over-specified. Use that space.
resist the urge to over-prepare
The greatest enemy of a one or two page adventure is a GM who decides beforehand how it's going to go.
It's tempting. You read the material, you get excited, you start imagining a scene where the character(s) discover the desecrated shrine and then follow the lanterns to the creature and then...and there it is. You've written a plot. And the moment the players do something unexpected, which they will, you'll spend the rest of the session steering them back toward the story you planned rather than running the one that's actually happening.
One or two page adventures work because they're reactive by design. They hand the GM a loaded environment and a set of responsive tools, not a narrative to execute. Trust those tools. The encounter tables, the mishap tables, the points of interest, these exist precisely so that the adventure can surprise you as much as it surprises the players.
When you don't know what happens next, roll. When the result surprises you, say so with your face. The best moments in OSR play often begin with a GM visibly not knowing what's coming either.
scraps of the chaos
And so, the little adventures I'll be releasing to patrons are designed around everything above. Each one fits on a page or two, uses The Chaos ttrpg's mechanics, and is built so that no two sessions of the same adventure will feel the same. The tables connect. The setting has a consistent internal logic. The empty space is deliberate.
They're not adventure modules in the traditional sense. They're more like scored improvisations, a key, a tempo, a handful of motifs, and then a lot of room to play.
So have a look at Them Bleedin' Woods, and yeah, let me know how you get on with it!
thanks so much!
for your support & inspiration
Please share the game with all & sundry, spreading The Chaos into every dark corner its flickering torches haven't quite reached. My aim is for the game to grow like an invigorating fungus on the minds of the OSR community and beyond, and I can't thank you enough for being a part of this.
Meantime, if you've not yet joined The Realm discord, here's the link for that, and I look forward to seeing you there! Be sure to let me know any suggestions you have about what to include in the next issue, or about the game itself, and enjoy the rest of your day. :)
Best,
Scott
0 comments