S5E33 - Cabinet of Curiosities

0:00Hello and welcome to Between Two Carons. I'm your high. Hi, I'm Brad. Hi, I'm Skullboy. And I'm Chris. And today we're going to be talking about cabinet of curiosities. But first, welcome to the show, Chris McDowell. Hello. Thank you for having me again. Chris McDowell as I live and breathe. Is this the first time we've done it since you were in my hotel room? Oh, yeah, I think it's the first time we've done it since we were in your hotel room actually. Oh, good. Okay. It might be... I think we've definitely had you on a couple times, but... Welcome back to the show, regardless. No, thank you. Thank you. It's always a pleasure. Chris McDowell has not been a pleasure. It's been horrible so far. Yeah, it's been awful and it's all my fault. Yeah, some people can't get their shit together. I listen, guys, I blame Zencaster, which as far as I can tell is

1:02prejudice against skeletons. I don't... I think you moved to Maine and their data infrastructure is a bunch of crab cages chained together across the phone poles there. I think that's what's going on. It does. It does. It's just lobsters attached to lobsters. Yeah, it's a lobster-based data infrastructure. Yes. Yeah, they are disgusting creatures, lobsters. They're just like these huge insects. Yeah, they're bugs. They're bugs. What's the world eats bugs? It's true. It feels like... This feels like a really opposite opinion for you. You feel like the kind of person that would be like, most of the world eats bugs. What the hell's wrong with America? Well, okay, you guys are so stupid. This is a kosher bias. First off, I've eaten bugs. Second, lobsters in particular are like giant bugs, which makes them extra gross. So it's like... I have a tiny bug that doesn't bother me. They're delicious meat. All right. Yeah, making them giant makes them less disgusting, I think. It's... I have a question. Chris, is it possible to get lobster in the UK? Is that a thing? You fucking kidding me.

2:03Yeah. We're not like a completely backwards. No, no, no. Is that a background? They have ocean literally all around. Yeah, we have. Yeah, but not with lobster. We literally rule the waves if you haven't heard it. Yeah. It's... Well, my question is... Yeah, but it's really expensive to ship the lobster to the UK. So I was just wondering if that's the thing. I'm going to say that I think we catch Scottish lobsters and Cornish lobsters and there's... I actually, I actually, this week was talking about this sounds like a real millionaire take. But I think lobster as a food is kind of overrated. Oh. Yeah, I know. Hot takes. It's certainly overpriced. Yeah, I think that there's other shellfish I would rather eat there. I have to tell you, I'm looking at Cornish lobster right now. It's a 55 quid for 500 grams. And I have to say... All meaningless forms of measurement and commerce. It's disgusting. But Cornish squid, which is right next to it, it looks... It makes lobster look delicious by comparison.

3:04So I think I'm just not a seafood guy. I think that's what this comes down to. I just don't... Oh, see I love seafood. That's the seafood. The things that crawl around on the bottom of the ocean and swim around through the sea is my favorite stuff. Well, it's a good thing you live in Maine now. That's what it is. It is. It is. Yeah, even in Maine, the lobster is pretty expensive. You got to know where to go. I got a place. I'm getting really good prices on my little lobster sandwich. My lobster roll if I want it. Man, you've lived in Maine for two weeks and you say you know a place? I don't believe that for a second. I think you're being taken for a ride, man. I don't know, man. Tell me somewhere else I can get a lobster roll for $10. I don't... That doesn't mean anything to me, but I feel like you're getting taken... I think you've been... You've been... I was already to $60. They're giving you spam shaped like a lobster. I want to go back to Chris's comment about it being kind of a garbage food. It is true that historically, lobster was considered poor people food. The top roach of the sea is what they called it.

4:06So I don't know what changed, what happened, but... What do you mean what changed? The history of rich people is see something that poor people are doing. Look at it in disgust and then some sort of person goes like, oh, but maybe I'll try it. Maybe I'll slum it with the pores, eats it and they're like, holy fuck, this is delicious. And then it becomes a sensation. They're like, no, no. We have to take it from them now. It is ours. That's how rich people work in everything. I think it was refrigeration, but that is a good guess as well. To refrigerate something that just lives in the ocean. Well, no, but to... So it'll keep after they're dead. Anyway, this is way too much lobster. Just talk. This is a dumb waste of time. I'm moving on. I think it might be done. I honestly, guys, I might be done with this whole podcast. I'm on the edge right now. I'm like... It's the one that does it. What am I doing? I was like, this is a cross-rides for show. It's actually important because this is the third time he said that in three episodes. It's kind of a little mirror that matters to me.

5:08I keep a little mirror and I look at it sometimes. I'm like, who am I? Why am I doing this? You know? I'm talking to that man in the mirror a lot in this podcast. I'm... Okay. Anyway, Chris McDowell, how's it going, man? How you doing? How's life going? How's it hanging, buddy? It's good. I feel like I'm about to witness like a historic event, like just being on this episode. Like, is this going to be... Is this going to be it? Is this the... Yo-Hai is just vanished. Yeah, he's rolling away. I don't know if it's true. Is this clip going to be like a documentary in like five years to come? I had to check. I heard my cat and I just had to check and make sure that, you know, she was quiet. See, you made fun of me when I said I'm keeping my door open in case my dog needs me. You laughed at that. And yet you roll away mid-show to check on your... Dear sweet cat. Oh well. How the world turns. Okay, okay. Regardless, Chris, everyone wants to know when is Intergalactic Fashion Line coming out?

6:08Soon. That's the official line. I said coming soon and I stand by that. Yeah, you made your own trailer with... I believe you did the music for it as well, correct? The music and the quotation mark wrapping on there, yes. That's amazing. Amazing. That was a great song, great video. I loved it. Yeah, really enjoyed that. The really annoying thing was that got like a lot of... It was good because it got a lot of traction. I did it kind of just as a... Obviously just a vanity silly joke. Yeah. But that got so many more people to follow the project than like my deep dive video I did and like my launch trailer that was like a proper trailer. And people were coming on saying, Oh, what a cool way to announce the project. And it was like, I've been doing this for like a four months. I've been talking about this game. But it goes to show like the internet, you just need to do something stupid and that'll work. Yeah, that's true. So the sensational. Chris McDowell is Intergalactic Fashion Line fun. Is it a fun game? Do you think people are going to have fun when it releases as a product in a store?

7:09I... Yeah, I hope. So I guess... I mean, if you found Mythic Bastion and Fun, you're probably going to open up and think, Oh, this isn't like Mythic Bastion and... Hmm. But then hopefully you will also find it fun and say, Oh, yeah, this is good as well. Different kinds of fun. You're saying there's different kinds of fun in the world. I think they're wrong. I think doing like a sci-fi game after a fantasy game, it's such a cliche to like do that. And I want them to feel like different types of fun rather than just like, oh, here's the sci-fi flavor of this thing. But I feel like, you know, that progression doesn't work for you because into the odd was like industrial, not even really fantasy. Yeah. And then like quasi-Victorian, whatever. And then Electro-Basheland is, in my opinion, very much not fantasy. It's more, unless you consider like, China-Miaville fantasy. Sure. And, you know, it's... So to me, it's like Mythic Bastion was your first fantasy game, quote-unquote.

8:11Yeah, true. Because, yeah, Electric was definitely more sci-fi. The whole... One of the... One of the starting... with Into the Odd, the one of the starting ideas was like, can I make like a D&D style game that draws more on sci-fi than magic? So if there's something weird, it's probably more like, to be like an alien or a magic... Or an alien or like a technological device that we don't understand. Like roadside pic-nickers. Exactly. This is not a new concept, but like, yeah, it's interesting looking at the two. And... But this is a more, I guess, traditional sci-fi kind of thing. I'm... I think I'm looking forward to it. I think this might be the game that makes me like space. I don't want to put too much hope in this project, but maybe I'm going to turn a hard turn about space when I read this one. So... No pressure, but maybe. Just maybe. I'm letting... Do you like space outside of games or is it just in games? No, no, I think about space. I look at the night sky. I filled with disgust. I hate it. You have nothing. Yeah. Oh, wow. Disgust. Yeah, I remember my friend Steven and I were having a conversation. He's like, there's so many things to get into in the world.

9:12Look at the sky. Look at space. And I'm like, he sucks. I want to get into baseball. And I did. And it was a lot better than whatever he was yapping about... About space. I'm doing baseball next after into... Baseball, that's just... That's it. Yeah. Oh, baseball land is going to be really good. I think that's a good... Well, my... It's not enough sports RPGs. No, I do agree on that 100%. Someone just released a football as in like soccer. You mean soccer? No, no, no, not great. Like, like, yeah, but they call... Someone just released a Karen supplement where you can play soccer in the game. Perfect. And I looked at it. I added it to my collection and I didn't look at it again. It's just not... It's just never going to appeal to me. I feel like with a sports game, the actual playing of the sport is probably the least interesting part of the sports game. Yeah. Like, you could... It's all the stuff surrounding the sport and like, you know, the players getting into trouble outside of the game and like the fans getting weird

10:13and then like the management doing stuff is like what makes sports kind of the thing that people follow. Like, keep following. I'm going to make it so the whole match is just one role and you can't actually influence that role at all. And then everything else is the game there. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you look at media like like heated rivalry, I think there's probably some truth to that. Like... We don't want to watch the hockey, all right? We just want to watch the hot boys flirting, you know? Like... Yeah. I think maybe... What's that passion? They let passion owns or whatever. Maybe that's the optimal system to play. That's... Yeah. A baseball RPG. For... What can run everything? It feels like in the discord at least, if you bring anything up, they're like... It's definitely passion's the old passion. Yeah, it's... It's the... It's the boss baby of a video of RPGs. That's great. You keep saying that, but I'm not... Nevermind. Can't... Okay. Well, let's get into...

11:13A question from the Mootsack. Let's do it. Start the questions. The Mootsack. We got a question from the Mootsack. The Mootsack. Let's pull it out. The Mootsack. That's what we call our mailbag. It's just a cute little name. So this question comes in from the discord, but the person who sent the sentence Craig, also known as Doc Webb, Craig says, How do you walk the line between telegraphing? This is too dangerous and you will instantly die if you do it. And this is the fun kind of dangerous. I feel like every GM does this differently and with varying degrees of success. Chris McDell, how do you walk that line? So in terms of telegraphing it, I guess. Yeah. So I... I think I've written about it quite a lot in the past of like that I would normally over-telegraph these things and just be really blunt and say, Look, if you fall down this hole, you will die.

12:15But in reality, I think in my actual games, I tend to not... I find a hole that you fall down and dies right away, not that interesting. So I would probably... like in when I'm planning the adventure, I wouldn't have things be that deadly. My game, my home games aren't like super deadly in terms of what's in there. But I do think if... If death is on the table and it looks like it's gonna... There's a good chance it's gonna happen. I really hammer the point home because I want the player to know. I want the player to potentially have their character die, but then feel like it's been fair, I guess. Right. Well, how can you do it though? But after you want, how do you do it? So I just tell them. I say, look, this thing's gonna do... I wouldn't necessarily like turn around the sheet and say, oh, this thing just d12 damage and you have three hit points or whatever. But I would just say, look, I'm looking at the numbers and it looks... There's like a 80% chance this thing's gonna kill you if it hits you. So... I think... I try to not... I like to try and stay kind of like immersed

13:16and I'm gonna say the word, diogetic about things. But I think it's okay sometimes to just say, I've got all the numbers here and you're in real trouble. There's this thing which I think it's okay to kind of lift the curtain just for a moment. If you just sort of flash it like that, like just flash it a lift of the curtain, just enough to sort of let them know what the risk is. Nice. Yeah. Okay, how about you, Brad? I think Chris McDelos, correct. Yeah, I mean, I think it's honestly communicating steaks is the right idea, but in my opinion, fun, deadly danger, deadly danger for playing a right is one of the same. You know, it's fun to fall down a hole and die. You know, I think... If we're all in the right mind, if we're on the same attitude when we're playing, you know, when that character falls in a hole and dies, we're all having a good time, including the guy who fell in a hole and died. I think that's the kind of table I'm running right now. But yeah, I think being open and honest with the steaks before someone attempts something dangerous is just like the honest way to do it.

14:17I, by the way, I had three casualties in my last mythic fashion land session, Chris McDelos. So people are always telling me that nights can't die. Like it's impossible to kill him. Like, I'm just doing. I'm killing nights left and right, man. Are you kidding me? Like, there was like a... It was kind of a cultist flame pit. And they were like throwing themselves in the flame to like show how much they love the cult leader. And two of my players just jumped in... Well, they're attempting different things, but they just fell on the pit. And they just... That'll do it. They burned the death in the pit as bodies fell on top of them and crushed them and they couldn't get out. And I can't remember the third one, but it was something similar with the pit. The pit really got a lot of my notes. It's really... It's not like it's a pit problem rather than a mythic fashion. We got to get... We have to audit our pits. Our table pits need auditing. But you know what? They love those pits. My players were like, yeah, man, we died in pit. Great, right?

15:17It's rated down, honor the dead, move on, and have a little laugh about it, you know. Whatever. You guys familiar with that? There's that pit in Eastern Europe somewhere. I think it's in a place that's presently a dictatorship. Where is it? Anyways, it's like a burning pit to hell. It's just on fire and has been on fire since like... The 70s. And it's just... You can go to the bottom if you wear like super protective suits, but it's just like a pit that's on fire. I think there's one in like Pennsylvania. I think there's one. No. Yeah. I think this one is in... I built... Okay, I want to say it's in... Oh, Turkmenistan. It's the Dharvaza Gas Crater, also called the... The official name is Shining of Karakum. It's a burning natural gas field collapsed into a cavern. In near Dharvaza, Turkmenistan. Stick that in your sandbox, damn. The Shining of Karakum.

16:17But also look up the centrally a minefire in Pennsylvania, because that's... Okay. That's still going? Yes, that is perpetually burning. An eternal flame as the... Who needs monsters? We just need... We just need hits. We need pits. Just old pits. An old pit's adventure would be great. Yeah. Pitthic fashion land. Next, Chris. Just the world of pits. Okay. Okay. Sorry, Chris. I'm sorry, Chris. Chris, sorry, Chris McDell. All right. They keep answering the question. Say I'm... You got any of the answers for this one? Yeah, I got you. I'm pretty transparent with a lot of the game mechanics stuff. When I'm running things, I find that it's a great way of convincing the players that I'm not out to get them. It's to be like, hey, if you try this, it is going to result in, you know, either this or this. Good luck. And, you know, they're just fine with it. I don't know. It's... I don't... It's just fine.

17:18It doesn't have to be... I don't know. We don't have to be fully immersed always. I'm not a big full immersion guy. I'm playing a game. We're all playing a game. We all have full and rich lives outside of the game. And then, every once in a while, that game creates a little neat moment that we remember for a long time. And that's the beauty. But it doesn't have to be like a... We don't have to... We don't have to, you know, come in and sit down in the theater and make all the props. Like, it's... I don't know. It's just... It's fine to say there's a 20% chance you're going to survive this. I don't know what to tell you. If you light a fire, yeah, I'm probably going to roll on the encounter table. Like, it's just how it goes. Yeah, change your messed up heart if you don't like dying in a pit. That's where we're at. You know what I mean? Like, that's a player problem, you know? Yeah. So, okay, I'll go quickly here. Obviously, I agree with everyone else. Just tell your players what the truth is and what their risks are. I want to just jump off that for just one second and say, I ran a game a couple of weeks ago

18:19with a bunch of 5-E-heeple. And like, I ran Karen for a bunch of 5-E-players. And there was a point where one of the players tried to tell me I should rule something differently because of the rule of cool. And I just want to talk about the tyranny of the rule of cool for some reason. Oh, the tyranny of gold is. Let's go. Because here's the thing like, we're doing issues now. Well, for folks who don't know the rule of cool or the golden rule is, hey, if the end result would be cooler than what the dice say, you just kind of let that ride. And I faced this in this game because this guy who I was playing with who liked this system out. He liked Karen. He liked kind of the OSR playstyle from what he could see, at least the aspects of it that he got from my game. And he, but he said, you know, I thought it was just be cooler if I could just do X, Y, and Z. And it was a very dangerous moment. And I said, well, to me, like the rule of cool kind of undermines what I like about OSR,

19:20which is sometimes bad things happen even if you're doing this thing really cool. And I don't know. I just want to know what you guys thought about that. Do you like the rule of cool? Do you employ it? Do you ever say the words? But the rule of cool, is that a thing that any of you employ? I'm going to say no. Good. Good. That feels the way everyone's going. Yeah, it's like, it just summons up a very specific kind of person to me that like, I don't know, is sort of like a cringe millennial that, oh my goodness. Spice. Yeah, that's how it feels to me. I don't know. It's like all the people that like have like super popular Let's plays are all like, ergh, the rule of cool, everything should be amazing. Like we should all be just, it's just, we're telling a story. And it's just like, I don't know. Yeah, I'm telling a story in which like fake people could die in a pit. Like, if every time they came to the pit, like everyone was like, but could I jump my motorcycle like over the pit and like give everybody a high five while that was happening?

20:20It would be so cool. It's like, yeah. And then the game would also have no meaning. It's fine. Like you can tell a story. You can write a book. That's whatever. But just like, I don't know, like, I like stakes. I like the feeling, the danger of stakes. Like if I've played in games where people, like if I've had a character that like should have died in a situation and they were like, no, no, no. We, I'm not going to do that too. It's like, what do you mean? I knew what I was getting into. I'm not in a child. Like this is, it's fun to die. It pretend. Like I, I just like, I don't know what to tell you. Like this is, this is, I, like you're not going to hurt my feelings playing D&D. Like it's going to be okay. I think the problem I have with it is not that it overrides mechanics in favor of the fiction. Because I do agree with that. Is that it overrides mechanics in favor of the fiction for the player's positive experience. And that's what I'm not interested in delivering. Like I, I, I don't, I don't, I'm not, I'm not, this isn't like dungeon world. I'm not trying to like make them the central focus of the collaborative story that we are telling together

21:21and that they're just one part of it. So to me, that's the bell. And it's hard to know. Like there are times where I'll say, oh yeah, you killed that guy and mechanics don't matter. But I don't do that because that was cool. I do it because of her similitude. Anyways, I mean, I don't, I think this is, I think it's hard to know when is the rule of cool and when is just letting the fiction. I think there's a fine line between like the rule of cool and like, rulings. You know, like, you know, for some, for some situations, okay, I care just playing a thief and he's sneaking down a hallway and he sees a barrel to hide behind while the orc patrol is coming, right? Like some cases where I'm like, you have the tools, you have the skill, I'm not going to make you roll the dice because you're proficient. It makes sense if you just do this. I don't want to make you roll for everything. That's the kind of game we're playing where if you are prepared enough, you know, and the situation makes sense that your character is good at this, we're going to skip the dice rolls because I'm not going to be,

22:23you know, a prisoner to the dice, right? And then I think sometimes, you can kind of honor that in a way where it's like, man, okay, my players had a really funny, cool, cool idea. Like, I want to respect like the cleverness of this idea. It seems like this might work. We're going to skip the dice rolls because, like, I'm kind of in that same mode of rulings. I'm like, yeah, you know, like, that same session where the players are falling into pit one character, remembered he's been carrying around this like, infernal flame, like literally like a flame capable of burning the world. And he like forgot about it. It was in his backpack. He was like, I want to take out my infernal cursed flame and jump up and touch the cult leader. And, you know, this guy's been a major figure in the game. And I was like, yeah, yeah. I thought from him and I was like, yeah, I think I was ruling that. It was like, you know, a 2D 10 weapon or something like that. But like in this moment, this dude's been carting around this flame forever.

23:23He's jumping out of a flaming pit to grab this dude's ankle. I'm like, hell, yeah, this dude's emulated. You killed this guy. No rule required. We got the big column of flame turned into a crucifix. Like, Neon Genesis save on Galeon. I'm like, yes. You know, I'm leaning all in until like, you've earned this like big, big ridiculous moment. So I feel like that's really riding the rule of cool, pretty, pretty dang close. But I was just wanting to honor that players. Like investment and planning and whatever, you know. And it fit the genre as well. It didn't feel like, oh, you're doing some weird thing that's just like feels really out of place in what kind of fantasy world. Like it feels like that's how like a story would end if you were writing a story. It made sense. Yeah. And I think Brad's argument is fully, I've come 180 on this. I think the rule of cool is good. I think what it comes down to, like all things, it's definitional. Because I guarantee there's people listening to this right now that are like, they also, they don't like the rule of cool. And then they just described a bunch of ways in which they like the rule of cool. And it's like, yes, you're right.

24:25But that's because everybody has like a different line in their head of like, like what is too much? And like, I think the way that it's often described, like in a popular, you know, like when you see like these like high profile DMs like talking like in interviews and stuff like that, is like, I think in their mind, they're railing against the worst DM they ever had. And I think that's what everybody's doing. And it's like, there's always that scenario where you had somebody that was just like, was like completely unreasonable in your mind. Because you're like, no, this would totally work. Like, and they're just like, no, it doesn't fit into my idea of like what the story should be. And like, that's where the friction is. And that's where you get the whole divide amongst the hobby basically. And so it's a question of like, yeah, like what do you, what do you get away with? Like what makes sense? Like what feels earned? Like everyone's got their own lines for that. And it's, you know, you just got to figure out. That's why you just got to play with people that are generally on the same page. I think there's always a cross fader between who's, who has the power in the game, right? Is it the tyrannical DM saying, my rules,

25:26you know, my way till payday, baby, or is it the players saying, we're telling a story together. I'm going to swing on this chandelier and cut it off and surf on it. And it's going to crush the dragon's head, you know, and then I'm going to jump down his throat and cut my way out through his belly. And everyone's like, yeah, rule of cool, you know. And, you know, ultimately, it's like play culture, table culture, but I like establishing a baseline of danger curating an experience where based in various, some altitude and then giving some leeway for when players cleverness is going to pay off. You know, I think that's my line. Yeah, have stakes. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for that question about the rule of cool Craig. It was really great. And you can email us at betweentikersdemo.com. All right. Let's move on. For our main. Chris McDowell, we do a segment every week here. And we wish we didn't have to do it. And actually, truth be told, I talked to our lawyers. And luckily, I did get the green light that we can stop doing this segment.

26:27So for the last time, we're going to do a weekly segment. We do this every week. But once again, this is the last week. We're ever going to do this. It's a recurring segment called So Hot or So Not. Again, we wish we didn't have to do it. And thankfully, we won't have to. So this is it. Audience, if you like this segment, I'm sorry. But enjoy it while you can. Because this is the last one we're ever going to see. It's a simple game, Chris McDowell. We're going to ask you a series of problems. And you just let us know if these concepts, these ideas are so hot. You say so hot. Or if there's, if you think they're so not, you say so not. Do you understand the rules of the game, Chris McDowell? I understand up. This is why I'm here. Chris, great. Thank you, Chris McDowell. You're high, Sam. Are you, are you ready to play So Hot or So Not? Yes, of course. Okay. Here we go. So hot or so not with Chris McDowell starting now. Chris McDowell, question number one, Adventure Modules. So hot or so not? So not. And I'm just saying that to piss people off really. But like, I think, yes, they are important. But we're in a weird place with guys

27:30to venture modules recently, where I'm trying to, I'm wording this very carefully for something that's meant to be important. Yeah. So not for me, because I would always rather make something myself and run it. So my personal view is so not. Wow. Spicy take for a guy on an Adventure Module review shot. I respect the, I respect it. I respect the opinion, Chris. No, and it's especially ironic considering that, oddly like, three adventures you've made, which were all super short. The Iron Coral is still like one of my top five. And the reason I got into writing my own modules. So in many ways, you're kind of like, yeah, I'll take them out the next edition, just removing it. The guy that invented television was like, nobody should be watching this thing. So it's just, it's just padding at the back of the book. Yeah, I'm taking it out. Wow, great. All right, moving on, Chris McDowell, next question. And I'm not just asking this because you're English, OK? Cricket the game, the game of cricket.

28:30What do you think? So hot or so not? I'm going to say so not again, because I, I did have to play cricket at school. And it's a terrible sport when you're not good at it. I think you can rate sports on how, how much fun is it when you're bad at the sport? I like that. So what's number one? What's number one? Well, I think like, let's say like something like football slash soccer, that is, you can still have some fun playing that badly. But with cricket, it's very, that the throwing is difficult. The, the batting is fun. I enjoyed batting, but you only get to do that for a very short time at a time. And then the rest of your time you stood out in the field, waiting for your turn to swing the stick again. So just sounds like baseball. Well, I mean, I think it's essentially the same as an era. Pretty similar, yeah. No, no, no, no, because baseball, when you're, if you're on the batting team, wait, I got no, I got this wrong. No, it is like baseball. It shows how little I know about it. Chris McDowell, next question. What about crickets, the bugs? What about crickets, the bugs?

29:31We were talking about eating bugs already. I ate a cricket for the first time this year, yeah, when I was in China. In China, you ate them all. Yeah, and they were, they were, they were fine, but it was like deep fried and covered in chili and salt, which makes anything taste good. Right, right. So I don't know how much of the, the flavor was, yeah. So crickets, the bug, I'm going to say so hot, yeah. Do you like the chirping? Do you like the chirping sound they make? Well, we don't, we don't get them that much over here. So I do like it when I'm in another country and I get to hear the crickets and the cicadas, et cetera. Nice, great, wow, great, great answer. Yeah, okay. Chris McDowell, what about cults? What about cults? And I mean this, let's take a step back, role-playing game cults, all right? Role-playing game. Yeah, they are at risk of being like overused. I'm going to say, I'm going to say so hot, they're on the way down. I've had some good times with cults. So, I've written about cults myself. We're trending downwards, you say? I think we're trending downwards and something else has to go. I'm more in favor of just having religions like take that place. I mean, more evil religions, like.

30:34At the end of the day, cult is just an unpopular religion, right? And like, yeah, yeah. No, it's a religion. It's just a religion that hasn't had enough time. Yeah, cults are adventure modules and religions are systems. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I feel, oh my god, I feel awesome. I'll be taking more further questions on this. I feel blog posts popping out right now. Okay, Chris McDowell, crazy that you already kind of covered this, but I got to ask it anyway, it's on me. It's lobster as a food, parentheses lobster as a food. You kind of already answered this, but so hot or so, not a Christmas towel. I'm going to say so not. I think I would rather, there are other like sea creatures I would rather eat here. Okay, Chris McDowell skiing in role-playing games. Skiing, have you ever done that in a role-playing game? I don't think I've ever done it, which makes me want to do it. I'm kind of fishing here because I want to shoot my shot. Is this competitive skiing or like leisure skiing or what? I think there's a lot of potential for either one. Really like a whole game's worth. But I'm hoping to plan to seed for some kind of skiing,

31:35bashenly. If I'm truth be told, I'm kind of shooting my shot. I'll pine bass. No, it needs to end in icy. Arctic would be the one, I guess. No, just skiing, not, no. Just skiing. Yes, skiing, bashenly. It's on a ski, ski lodge, ski slopes. Well, I'm already doing the baseball one. So like, can I do like a sports compendium? No, no, no. You're going to have to do a bastion land. No, but then you could say a two game. No, I'll live in a limping basket. I'll get sued by the Olympic people. That could maybe get you the tension. They don't think they'd really get it off the ground. Olympic would be really good. Could you do like 72 sports? Like, that would be good. I would not, I would kill for that. I would lose my mind. OK, yeah, I'm going to do that instead of into galactic. I'm going to shelve into galactic now and do that instead. Thank you. Thank God. Yeah, I'm not crazy about space. Yo, hi, I'm Sam. Are you, what about skiing and rolling? Have you guys ever do role-playing skiing? I don't think it's done. No, I can't say that there's ever been a... Fist would have some skiing in it. Yeah, I bet you there's some fisk skiing.

32:36Get some uzi's on some skis, man. There's some like skis low-cut. I'm jumping in fisk. Oh, though, yeah, the fins do that, right? They go, they ski and shoot. There's an event show in Luka Reck. Did a long-winter. That's right. It long-winter. Has that got skiing in it? It feels like that should have skiing. I think it should, but I don't think it does. I remember, I think there's some illustrations. There's some skis. I can take a picture of them. Possibly. Maybe it's like stealth and mothership. You're supposed to be skiing all the time. You don't know how light and skiing be, I guess. I skied a little bit as a child. I remember the thrill of the ski slopes. It's a really expensive hobby. I can't afford to be a skiing man. It's a slippery slope, isn't it, when she gets into it? With Chris McDowell at the word play. I feel like there is a lot of potential for imagining going skiing. I'm just throwing that out there in the world. I would love to just imagine going skiing more so than actually trying to get into going skiing.

33:37I never want to go skiing. Yeah. The same way as I never want to go into a cave, but it's fun to go cave in like D&D. Yeah. OK. Can I tell you a hallucination of mine? Very quickly. And then we have to move on with the next prompt, Yohai. Really quick. I'll hallucinate. When I was a kid, I went to a Fries electronics, which is an electronic store in California and a Frieshop in Arizona. There was a computer game that they had there where you put your finger in this hole, and then you think the direction you want the character to go, and there was a skiing game, and you think left, and it would go left. You think right, and it would go right. And I swear this really happened. I swear, but everyone I've told it to has told me, I imagined it, I dreamed this. I remember you put your finger in. Skiing glory hole, like. Skiing gum jibbar or something like that. I think gum jibbar. But I like having with the two extremes

34:38is dune and sex jokes. That's it. No, it's like one of those oxygen testers. Yeah, yeah. You put your finger in there, and I swear. And I thought it worked. I thought, whoa, I'm moving it with my mind, but I'm sure it's not what's happening. So if anyone out there has heard of this game or remembers this game, where you ski with your mind, please let me know. Yeah, I don't know what to say about that. I hope that this is a deeper dive than I'm prepared to go on right now. I think. Yeah, okay. All right, there's like 10 years old. Chris McDowell, last question. Back to the game. Thank you for your hallucination, you Hi. I'd love to learn more about that. Let's put it in there. Chris McDowell, last prompt, last prompt here is, what do you think? Like guns, so hot or so not guns. Guns in real life. Well, let's let's break it down for his guns in real life and then guns in pretending to have guns. I don't want to be like the caricature here,

35:39but I'm going to say guns in real life are so not. Yeah. But guns in games are cool, which is terrible, because they're like one of the worst things imaginable. Yeah. I'm right in the same page with you, Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have books where I will look through like a book and I'll be like looking at some one before decay guns and so now be like the 13 year old kid in me will be like, oh, cool. Yeah. But it's, yeah. I've got to enjoy it while I can before it's just like ruined for me, but yeah. It's the biggest, it's the biggest so hot, so not like separation between the fictional thing and the in game thing, I'm going to say. Totally, yeah. Definitely. It's like a lottery ticket versus like a scratched off lottery ticket you see on the ground. It's like, whoa, full of pregnant, you know, pregnant with potential versus like, oh, disgusting garbage, you know what I mean? Oh, no, but I think I would, if I found like a scratched off lottery ticket that was winning that victory with the ultimate. Yeah, because you would know that that person got to see the win and then and then something happened to them. And that's just so right there.

36:39Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's environmental storytelling right there. Maybe they were so rich that they, yeah, I'm not going to continue this scratch card analogy. Carry on. No, I like to, I like where you're going. They're so rich. Go on. Well, what sort of person scratches off a scratch card just for the thrill? And then they see like, I don't know, a thousand pounds. They're like, I don't need that. And they just throw it away. Because if it was like, if it was like 10 cents, would you go back in and claim it? They just like the game of scratching. They want to play the little fake crossword puzzle or whatever. Imagine two different scenarios. One is a child that just scratched it all off and then threw it out of a car window because they're like, whatever, I did the fun part. That they either had to get at an 18 year old person to buy for them. They go, oh, they won't sell me my scratch game. They missed it. Wait, they're trying to buy this for me. A child shouldn't get rich. So we're actually doing the MFA of a by taking the money from them. Yeah. Children getting rich. That's another so hot so not that's okay. So, yeah. A blank check, I think is. Exactly.

37:40A cautionary tale. It's this. Yeah. Yeah, Richie Rich, another Rich child movie. Slash, you know, IP. That one's sad foul for a while. Well, this has been so hot or so not. Thank you, Chris McDell for playing in and thank you, hi and Sam for joining us again for the last time. This was so hot or so not. And now let's move on with the main review. Brad's really like teasing the end of the podcast in all things. I feel like every section is like, just the last time we're doing this. Well, nothing lasts forever. You know, every, you know, what was that guy wrote that little poem about the good, the things that are gold and kind of stay or not, you know, just like that guy. Yeah, that was it. I actually did. Yeah. I, I, I, okay, just before we move on, I just want to add that I tried to go, while you guys were talking, I just tried to go find the game I was hallucinating. Yeah. And I didn't find it, but I did find a game called Skill, SK, EL. Terrible name. It is a ski, it's a skiing game in which you are sealed

38:41a musician. Okay. I take it back. Great name. It just launched the game in the browser on it, as I was playing it. I couldn't get out. My mouse and keyboard wouldn't escape. Oh, I fell forward in my hands, just went to WASD and my mouse. And I'm playing it on, I'm playing it on, I'm like, I got an eye score by accident. Oh, no. No, you got to put your finger in the ports on the computer. Oh, it's new. Yeah. Oh, there you have. I just thought that was a funny diversion. Let's move on to the main review. Today we're going to be talking about Cabinette of Curiosity's. This was written by André Novoa with Layout by Diego Barros, editing by Isaac Williams, cover art by M. Quintanilla. And it was published by Losing Games and Games I'm Neveris in 2025. This is an A5 trifold landscape production.

39:43And before we go into talking about the art and layout, Brad, why don't you tell us what this adventure is all about? All right. So this is a Cabinette, literally a Cabinette, because these are mice. And it's full of the estranged collection of just stuff by a, what is he? A hedgehog, a little hedgehog wizard guy named Oswald Wondersnowt. And Oswald collects all this random this and that. And it's turned into something weird. It's here's quote, a winding, shifting place where the curious and the clever are quietly invited to test themselves. And Oswald watches this all go down. It's like his little entertainment. So this is just kind of a little weirdo mouse, like Puzzley, Death Treppie, Dungeon kind of adventure. It's based or inspired by snakes and ladders or shoots and ladders, where it's a vertical, like side scroller style

40:49map. And there's a number of features that will let you climb higher or slide down lower into these different rooms. Yeah, again, it's just a five pamphlet size. How many rooms do we have here? We have 10 rooms. So yeah, packs a lot into the format here. 10 rooms in a wide format pamphlet dungeon. Go, I'm done. All right, well, let's talk about the art and layout. Let's start with the layout first. I think this is pretty impressive for what they're able to do with the space they have, because they really don't make much use of one side. I mean, one third of the front is the cover. And then the back is just some adventure hooks with an explanation about what you can find inside. And then there's some encounters and treasure tables. But the actual dungeon itself is really just 1a5 sheet,

41:49which is pretty impressive. I mean, there's 10 rooms here. They're not like short rooms. They have one room has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 bullets to interact with. So I think it's pretty impressive. And then they also have the map doing a lot of the heavy lifting as well, where you kind of get a better idea of what something is or looks like by just glancing at the map and comparing it to what you read. So I think the layout's really good, personally. Yeah. I think this is one of the better examples of a cross-section map for a dungeon that I've seen. This is totally usable and runnable, whereas I feel like a lot of cross-section side cross-section dungeons just don't give me the juice for actually running it at the table. This is really nice. And I can see using this. And it being fun. Yeah, definitely. It's like you say, I think they pack a lot of punch.

42:51The room descriptions are very dense. There's a ton of info there. But then the opposite sides, there's so much space. I think ultimately it did make good use of its space. But I kind of wish they took the monsters and they moved them into one of the other panels on the other sides, on the page with adventure hooks or something like that, which seems like there's just a lot of space there. And I wish we had a little more room for maybe some of the room descriptions on the two panels immediately to the side of the map. But yeah, I think ultimately this is like a very easy to use. And it is nice that everything is on one side of the brochure. Like everything you need is there. You don't have to flip over to see the monsters. I think that's probably a good decision at the end of the day. Yeah, looks nice. I like the colors too. Everything is pink. It's very, very pleasing. What do you guys think about the art? I really like M's art. They did try the beetle milk and the thing which falls,

43:53which are both like best sellers on the care and store. If they could just sell me more, please. They often. No, I will eat. Yeah, M is probably not seeing this. The thing is, but if they are, I have emailed you. Please sell me more of your stuff, thanks. That said, I really like it. It's perfect for mouse reader. I never realized how perfect their art was for mouse. It's just so cute. Yeah, it's kind of like a sort of invaders in quality to it that I enjoy. And somewhere between that and actually like the art style of animal crossing. This little, the Oswald drawing is very animal crossing to me. Yeah, I think it's tonally, it works really well. I want more little guys. There's only three, but that's, you know, it's a small thing. So it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. The map looks really good too. Maps look a little like abstracted.

44:53Like we don't really get size and stuff like that. And there is some questions sometimes, again, with like every mouse reader module, is the thing you're describing, mouse scale or person scale. And I found myself wondering that a few times. And the map sometimes helps me, but other times I'm just like, I don't know. But still, yeah, I think the art is very appealing. And I really like the overall color choices made here. It's a nice looking product. Well, we can get right to it then. If you guys want to just do the review. Chris McDowell, what did you think of cabinet of curiosities? So a couple of caveats at the start of this. I think when I read through adventures, I've already revealed in the so hot, so not section that I, but noted adventure heater. But I guess where I'm going for it is I normally, if I'm running a game at home, I will very rarely run a pre-made adventure. I reckon maybe like 25, 20% of the time maybe.

45:55So I do it very occasionally, usually for like one shot. But if I'm playing, usually I'm making my own thing. And I might pull stuff from other modules. So when I look at a module like this, I'm always looking at what can this give me that is different than what I would do if I could just write something myself. Obviously it's saving me the work of actually doing it, which is I guess the big thing. And so I did enjoy it. I enjoyed the content a lot. I, when I opened it up, I was really happy to see the format because I thought, oh, this was kind of familiar. This looks like the kind of module that I normally like to run. But I did find it a little bit tricky to navigate because there were certain elements where, so for each of the room descriptions, you've got a little line of text that's almost like box text, I guess. It's just like a summary of the room. And then you have three or four bullet points, or two or three or four bullet points for things,

46:56but not necessarily one thing per bullet point. It's not necessarily like a list of points of interest. So sometimes you find out about a key thing in the opening pros. Sometimes you find out about it in a bullet point, and some things are actually not in the text at all, that only in the image, in the map. So I think in room two, there's something about a pipe. The pipe is quite important that the water comes out of, but the pipe is only mentioned in the text when the pipe starts to shoot water out. So you kind of, if you just go off the text, you don't really give the players a chance to realize there's a big pipe in this room. So I found that a bit tricky, but other than that, I really liked the snakes and ladders concept, and I was trying to think about seeing this before, because it seems like such an obvious thing to do. But I don't think I've seen anything that plays with this idea of there's kind of a standard way to go

47:57through the dungeon, like going up the snakes and laddersboard, and then there's these shortcuts and pitfalls down. So I thought that was a really cool thing to explore. And because I do have lots of little nithpick nip picks, I wrote down like a million things, but I wanted to get it out of the way now that I think this is really cool, and I would definitely run this. I only have small little complaints to make, I think, overall. And a few highlights as well, which I'll sort of point out when we get to them. So I'll go next mostly because I just have nothing different to say than Chris, what I wrote down was, how do you know what to describe? Yeah. Which is, I think what was hard for me was, you were expected not to look at the way it's written and use that as jumping off point for how you describe it, but instead you have to read it and then look at the room, and then figure out the right way to describe it. So you're not going to say, there's a leaking pipe.

48:58You'll say, oh, there's a pipe, I know that because it hasn't started leaking yet. Oh, now it started leaking. You have to just know the order of things. And I also had some trouble with the sizes of things, like how big is the eyeball that they find? You know, compared to the snake, that sort of thing. That's actually a problem with mouse reader that I always have. Like, what is it a human eyeball? Is it a hedgehog eyeball? Like, kind of my eyeball is this. I do agree that I think it's a very fun adventure. I never made these shit snakes and letters. I just didn't make that connection because I'm a dummy. I don't understand how I miss that. But I do appreciate it. I think it's cool that the rooms have, every room has multiple exits and there are clever ways to get to them. And it's because it's meant to be a test, that's one of the one or a couple of the hooks that it's a test. It's easy to explain away why. Such an, why would he leave the key for that room hanging in the ceiling? Well, it's a test. I think it's a great contrivance. I think, I think adventures need more of those contrivances

50:02to explain away the puzzly aspects of dungeons. I like it. I think it's fun. Then my favorite part of it is that there's a room where you can fall through the floor and if you take enough, if you take more than a certain amount of damage on the next room, you fall through that floor too. Yeah. I think it's kind of a Homer Simpson falling to the stone cutters floor over and over again. I really enjoyed that part. So yeah, so that's all my non-spoilery comments can make. I love the art. I think the layout is great. I think the map is awesome. And I'm impressed with the amount they were able to pack in here. My only real nitpick is that it's not written in a way that I find usable at the table. But it's not long. If this was like a 24 page adventure and it was all written this way, I would not look at it. But it's a one page or so. I don't really care. I've already memorized it now. So maybe that's a great excuse for writing that way, but it is a nitpick. So how about you, Sam? What did you think? I enjoyed it.

51:03I'm definitely with you on the liking this sort of like a test dungeon kind of thing. There's a like anytime. Yeah, like I feel like this could easily be, this would be a cool thing to insert into like a thieves guild or something like that, where it's just like, oh, and this is how the thieves like, you know, are, you know, you earn your way into the orders by completing the cabinet of curiosity kind of thing. Like I like that kind of stuff. I think it's cool. I think overall, I didn't have the troubles with the like parsing, like the what should I talk about versus like, like I understand that it's not, it's not explicit in the way that it's describing it. But like I just don't generally have this problem where it's like, I don't know, like, I look at this room and it's just like, okay, well, all of these, the pipes, the important, we have to talk about the pipe that's like the first thing. But like, I can see wanting them to be a little bit more explicit with that. And similarly, like in terms of like the, is stuff, like I agree that is stuff human sized or mouse sized is a mouse reader, like problem that's like,

52:05anyone writing a mouse reader thing should maybe consider saying, like having, like, I don't know, maybe it's stuff that's big, like human sized is in one color and stuff that's in mouth size is another color. Maybe there's a little symbol, something like that just to like make it easy for everybody to know exactly what's going on. I think between the text and the pictures, like it wasn't terribly hard for me, it's like that eyeball to me is obviously eyeball sized, like human eyeball sized because it's really big in the room. But like that's, I mean, I'm just, I'm going on vibes there a little bit, I guess. But yeah, I think overall this is, this is like a cute mouse reader adventure. Like it leans into the kind of mouse reader I'd like, which is like in my mind, like the borrower style, mouse reader is sort of the best in my mind because it's like, I think it's really easy for people to latch onto it. And so it like creates a immediately familiar game environment which I think is really cool.

53:06And also, like, I don't know, it's like, anytime I look around a room, like if I've been reading a mouse reader thing, I start thinking in mouse reader like, oh, like this is like, what's this, is this a cool, you know, place to traverse? Like, I think that's one of the things about mouse reader that's just neat to me. But yeah, I think this does it pretty well. And... Yeah. Yeah, I'm mostly an agreement here. I think it's a really clever, cleverly designed dungeon, just the way the rooms connect has a lot of thoughtfulness and just a lot of fun in figuring out how to get up this dungeon and then slipping down just navigating the different doors. I think just inherently as doored, as an example of door D&D, this is really successful just because the dungeon crawl is very thoughtful and very clever and very fun. I also think there's a lot of really fun encounters within it. I would love this clockwork room where I don't want to spoil

54:07too much, but it's very puzzly in the way you negotiate the different elements of this room, combine them in different ways. There's just a lot of interesting stuff and different ways to use things with other things. And yeah, I think there's just a lot of fun to use. I think with pamphlet sized dungeons, there's always some constellations. And I think, kind of as you mentioned, one of the things is clarity to the referee or to the DM or whomever about what is being conveyed. And I think there's some things that complicate this. Like you said, Chris, there are some necessary information in the map, but on the other side of that, there's some things in the map that you can't necessarily show to players and I kind of wish they kind of picked a point of view to stick with. Like this map is really nice. I almost wish I could slowly reveal this to my players, but in some ways I can't because like just in room one,

55:08the illustration of the map clearly has like a key dangling from the ceiling. But if I read the room description, it says, it requires a turn to even of searching, just to find the key. There's a lot of elements where you have to spend time to find this stuff because one of the kind of motifs here is that each room is just jammed, jam packed with tons of stuff. And part of this is managing your time. Like how much time do you want to spend digging through all the weird stuff here to find treasure, versus the random encounters that are like constantly threatening us. So I think it really is one. You have to kind of read and kind of process and download and kind of internalize what's in each room, what you want to communicate to your players, what you can show your players, you know, and probably you're going to have to just draw your own map for them or have them map it obviously. But none of that is really doing you any favors as far as like ease of use. And again, for me, I think that's an okay consolation because I think the writing is sharp.

56:08Encounter design is fun as heck. Like I think there's tons of just fun jammed in each room. So I do think it's worth it, but that is like a hurdle to get me to the table. It's just, you know, it's a pamphlet size dungeon, but you really have to kind of download it before it's ready to run. Yeah. So yeah, let's just want to go in the deep dive and talk about it. Yeah, yeah, that's the deep dive. So deep dive for cabinet of curiosity starting now. All right, let's let's do deep dive. Deep dive. Set the deep dive. Okay. Yeah. Set the deep dive. What's the deal with the deep dive? For the spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. Yeah. Forget all the stuff we just said. Here's the deep dive. Ready? Here it is right now. Okay. All right, Brad, what's really going on here? What else can you say? I mean, there is... It's a hedgehog. It's a hedgehog and he's hanging out at the very top. Waiting for you to get there. I do kind of like that there is like...

57:10This snail infestation. And there is an interesting decision when you get to the hedgehog. The hedgehog is like, you did it. Your reward is you get to keep one treasure that you found, but by that point, you probably have a backpack full of treasure. There's a ton of stuff here. So all of a sudden, it's like, do we fight this guy? And like he has statted out. But you could offer to go clear out his snail infestation. That will let you take another treasure, like still not everything in your backpack. But he'll be like, yeah, you guys can have one more. So I do think there's some fun narrative that happens along the way as you get to the top and you think you're out, but now you have to make more decisions about what to do. That's pretty cool. Yeah, is there anything else we need to say that's kind of spoilery? Spoilery. I mean, I have something for every room. I don't know if you want to learn it. Right. Literally, literally, say here and go through like every room. I don't really want to do that. Yeah. Kind of come back to the snails, because I think the snails highlight something for me

58:11that I thought was interesting. The slugs snails. Yeah. So I saw snails and I thought, oh, that's cool. I've not seen snails in Maustritor. I've played maybe three Maustritor adventures. I played like the bees, the one with the bees. Honey in the rafters. And I think there's one good spider. Yeah, I've played a few different ones. One of the things I'd like about Maustritor is everybody already knows the best tree. So if you've never played an RPG and if you don't like fantasy and sci-fi and you've got the most normie taste in the world and nice, hey, okay, you're a mouse and there's a snake then you know what's going on. You're there and you can picture it and they're like, oh shit, this is like a terrifying monster. So I think one of Maustritor's strengths is using real animals. I know sometimes they're like corrupted or twisted in some way to make them kind of more weird. But for my, I can gather these are normal snails. And I'm a big fan of using animals because when you think of a snail, you know they're going to be slow. You know they're going to be slimy. But one of the key points in here is that the snails

59:12want better shells. Presumably so they can like get in the shell is that actually spelled out? Like they can swap shells? I don't know, I think I don't know how, I don't because snails can't. No, snails do not do that. And that this is what I pounded my fist on the desk and I was like, snails cannot do that. Which ordinarily in any other game, I'd be like, oh well, who cares? It's like fantasy snails. But I think because Maustritor, one of its strengths is how it's kind of got like one foot in reality. For some reason that kind of like set me off. And I was like, no, because the players, because I was thinking if I was a player and I saw these fancy shells, I might think, oh well, if some of the player at the table said, oh, can we take one of these fancy shells and like bribe the snail? I'd say, no, that's stupid. Snails don't swap shells. They grow, they grow, they grow, you're thinking of hermit crabs. But so I think that created like a weird bit of dissonance. Now maybe they just collect shells because they like how shells look. I guess it's like a statue for a snail, isn't it? Like a really beautiful shell

1:00:13is like having a beautiful body like in a statue. But I think again, it all leads back to that thing that's at the heart of Maustritor, which is that it's things that in other games you can just kind of like hand wave away and say, oh well, it's fantasy, I'll just come up with an answer. Because it has this logic that I think is one of its strengths and it's kind of groundedness. When that starts to like, when you start to feel the tension around that with something, like, oh, how big is this eyeball? It feels worse, I think, than in other games when you're like, ah, just make up some bullshit answer like for how big something is. But no, so that's along with your way of saying, I liked the snails, but I would have liked, I don't know, that was the other thing. So in Maustritor, the conceit with languages, as I remember, is that you can talk to other rodents and you can kind of talk to other mammals. But then I think invertebrates are kind of like,

1:01:14you can't really talk to them, like you can't talk to the bees in honey and the rafters. So I wasn't clear whether you could talk to these snails. Did you guys read that you could talk to these or did you think, it says that you can like bribe them? That's, to me, that's like a really, that rule in Maustritor is a really great, really clever rule on paper, but I don't know, I don't wanna do that. I wanna have my mice talk to snails. Yeah, is there any benefit to not being able to talk to a snail? You guys are talking about snails. How can they talk to hedgehogs? They're in entirely different order. Yeah, it's like, I want to get into the table. I'm like, let them all talk. I want the snake to like, and you could have to talk to the bees. They're slow and they could be like kind of alien in their like outlook. Yeah. It feels like such a missed opportunity to not be able to talk to snails because you've got all this animal characterization like baked into the snail. Yeah, I know. I think your right thing is that hedgehogs are like moles, right? And I guess that moles and mice look the same,

1:02:16but they're very different like taxonomically. I'm just saying like, you guys are all, you're worried about that. That's true, we are. I can understand. I can understand. I can understand. Snails are like freaking monsters as far as I'm concerned. If I saw a snail real life that was my size, I would be very scared of that snail. But like, hedgehogs are just as different from mice as snails are in my mind. So I'm like, if you accept the hedgehog wizard, why would you not accept the snail? I don't know. I'm thinking of, I'm looking at my mouse reader box right now, and I'm thinking about playing that for my next campaign. But I'm kind of thinking of ditching that rule. I don't want, like I like chatty stuff, you know what I mean? Yeah. I don't want to be like, okay. It's gonna talk or better. Yeah, or else be very Lucy with how many languages a mouse know? Maybe give them a language list, you know? Like, oh, you know three languages. You know, you're a multicultural mouse. You went to international mouse school. Like, you know, you pick inverter bread, you know, crustacean, you know.

1:03:17Our languages will be sweet to add. Yeah, because that would be a good thing to add to mouse rate, for sure. Yeah. The funny thing is that porcupines are related to mice and hedgehogs are not. So you could swap the hedgehog out for a porcupine. You just be, no one would know. Gigantic. That's a matter of skill, right? And this is all like very human logic. Like mouse race runs on mouse logic, not human logic, say. Yeah, very good point. Yeah. And the other thing that I noted as a, I'm gonna give a positive, it sounds like I'm down on this, but I'm really not. The positive that I had, there's one new spell in here, which is anime subject. And I believe this is new. I didn't go and check through the mouse litter box. But the recharge, so mouse litter, you have to like recharge the spell by doing something. So you, the recharge is to bury it with something that once moved on its own and leave it for three nights. And this inspired me to draw up a three-dimensional recharge matrix for what makes a good recharge ability.

1:04:20So can has, I haven't read can yet, just can have these. LAUGHTER I'm glad you asked, Chris. Can Karen take inspiration both from Into the Odd and its ascendance, including mouse litter? And in fact, well, spell books in Karen do feel like mouse litter spells. They are not. In fact, instead, what I opted to do was use relics, which are similar to, have you heard of Into the Odd? There's this... Yeah, that's a... Yeah, there's arcana. And an arcana is an item that just does the thing that it does and it's dangerous well in Karen. It does the thing that it does, but then it has a recharge condition. And it'll have like three charges. And yes, in the situation you're describing where you have to bury something, I stole that entire idea from mouse litter and I put it into relics in Karen. For instance, there is a wand sort of thing, like a stick that can cast the haste spell.

1:05:25And to recharge it, you have to shoot it out of a crossbow. OK, cool. That kind of idea. So yes, the answer is yes. Karen does have that sort of... So you might want to take notes because I'm going to describe the three axes of this matrix now if you're okay with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the X-axis is a common or rare. Like how common or rare is the thing that you need to recharge this thing and the Y-axis is how easy or difficult is it. So for instance, if something was common and easy, it might be like hold it up to the sun for an hour. Like the sun's always there, it's common and it's easy to do that. If it's rare and easy, it might be like tap it against a willow tree. So you need to find a specific tree, but it's easy to do when you get there. If it's rare and rare and difficult, it might be to submerge it in lava because lava is hard to find and that's hard to do. But this one here, which is buried with something that once moved on its own and leave it for three nights, I think really threads the needle of what I think is the sweet spot of this matrix, which is common, but difficult.

1:06:28So there's lots of things you can think of that move on their own, but it's kind of difficult to... You can't just do it by tapping it against a tree. My first thought was like you have to find a grave and bury this thing. Or you have to kill something and then bury it with it. Something that moves on its own is probably going to be something that's alive. So I like that it makes it difficult, but it doesn't make it some weird thing where it's like climb to the top of a mountain and do something. Well, there's no mountain in this adventure, we're not going to do that. It's something that you could find, but it's difficult. And then there is a Z axis as well, but I'm going to save that for the blog post and we'll... Oh, we got a teaser. The exception I would add to your matrix there is... Well, maybe you would qualify this as difficult. Tell me how this fits in. In Karen, there is this item I created for the Wardens Guide called the Veil Silk Grip. Basically, when you wear this white glove, it lets you put your hand through solid objects.

1:07:31And it has five recharges, one for every finger. And essentially, in order to use it more than once, you have to snip off one of the fingers, which begs the question, how do you use it if there's no finger for your finger to go into on the glove? So you have to figure... You can still use it, but you have to figure it a way to get your hand... Because your hand is not going to go through. I thought I was very clever when I wrote it. Now, I'm just wondering where this is. So when you've used it like twice, there's only three fingers. There's like three holes in it. Correct. Correct. Correct. I think that one has potential. I'm immediately like, how would I rule it if my player just said? It's one of these things where a player might say, oh, well, fuck it, I don't care. I'll chop off my small finger, my pinky. But like, so some players will be like, yeah, whatever. And then you do it. And then there's no like effect to it. Oh, there'd be an effect.

1:08:33That's it. I think you need to... I think you need to... You guys are both nuts. Have you ever put a glove on? You ever put a glove on? You don't have to put your fingers through all the holes. Jesus Christ, true. You can just put your fingers through a few of the holes and you're like, ha, ha, I win. My idea was though that it's harder to manipulate things with fewer fingers. That, I agree. It's like, it gets more difficult to do. But like, I applaud the psycho, that the first thing they think to do is take a cleaver to one of their fingers. Or... Or... Yeah, it's a silly thing. So would you consider that one easy then? But I was wondering because it was diminishing. Well, it's right because it would be incredibly difficult in real life. But it sounds quite easy as a player. Because if I'm playing a one shot and I'm like, I don't care. I'll chop off three of my fingers. Can I still hold my sword? You don't need to chop off your finger. Okay. All right. Let's move on from that. Do you have any other specific notes?

1:09:34I like all your notes here. Chris deserves. So yeah, going back to the formatting. I'm not going to continue to harp on this. But I think for me, there's been a lot said about bullet points recently and pros. But I think they both have their place. But this kind of, because this is like in between the two, I almost feel like you don't get the full benefit of having bullet points. And you don't have the full benefit of like a nicely written paragraph of pros. So in the end, I think like... I think like the two of you said, like I ended up just kind of reading the whole thing and internalizing it. And the bullets almost became irrelevant because I had to read the whole thing anyway. So it's a rare case where I'm like, I think this may have been better if it were just pros rather than bullet points because I don't see the bullet points as doing much work here. Well, yeah, because the standard king model that we were all sort of gotten used to in OSR modules is whatever is bolded in the descriptive text is then repeated in the subtext layer.

1:10:38But that's hard to do in small state. The downside to that model is it takes up more space due to formatting. Right. Yeah, if you want to be efficient, you can just write like a paragraph like Luke Gearing and just like leave it there. And if you're really good at that, if you really minimal about it, then it can work. But it is hard to find stuff sometimes like I was thinking about this while reading this racist module the other day. And how there is a small... Rises, Rises. Yeah, you familiar with that. Is it racist? Oh, is it racist? I don't know. I looked this up recently and I settled on recess. Yeah, recess monkey, right? That's not spelled the same way. Well, okay. Anyways, this module had some good ideas in it. But in order to find what was in a place, you had to read like a six paragraphs and go, oh, there's that useful book. Did these people just not know how to use bold?

1:11:39No, because there's a lot of bold text in Rises. It's all the cliches are bold. So I just think it's so interesting that we just kind of coalesced around this model in the OSR. But it doesn't mean it matches for every single format. I still think it's impressive what they did here with the formatting. And I think here the good thing is here that it's consistent. So it would be a big problem if a lot of the pet pages were in that traditional bullet point style. But then on some of them there was like missing information. But because straight away you kind of realize, oh, I can't just like go down the list and say, oh, there is this thing and this thing and this thing. I do have to read the whole thing and look at the map and describe it. Which is for a module this small is not like a big hardship. So it is because it's consistent within itself. And it kind of skirt the issue of it. Certainly. Looking down the rest of my list. There were a couple of times where I, so for instance, there are hooks for why you are going into this dungeon.

1:12:41And it's a D6 table of adventure hooks. And I think that they're all perfectly fine. But when I'm thinking about efficiency of space, I kind of wish that this was like one good hook. It doesn't even have to be the length of these six. But some of them, a lot of them are just kind of like, oh, someone, an NPC that you don't really get any information on. Once you to go and get this one thing or somebody will pay you to go over there and do something. They're all kind of baseline hooks for like why am I going into the dungeon. I think it would have been called this space was like, had a bit more, just a little something to ground you in the setting more. Because when I hear this is a cabinet. My first thought is like, yeah, but so it's a cabinet presumably like inside like a house. And I don't need there to be like a secondary map of the entire house. But even if it just said like, oh, this is inside like a dusty old abandoned house or something. You've been sent here by such and such to get this thing.

1:13:42And it was one prompt with a bit more kind of juice to it. Rather than six. I'm a big fan of random tables, but I think this is a case where I'd rather had like one specific thing. Rather than six different prompts, perhaps. Yeah, I can recognize that as well. I think there's probably some more useful stuff to put in that part of the module. I actually kind of built in. You know, we know who this was. I think it's easy to get from here to there. Well, okay. All right. Well, I think we're about done here. Before we go, Chris McDowell, work in folks find more about whatever it is that you make. What's the game called? It's called can. Yeah. For Karen. Please, please. That's the one I don't like. So, yeah, so my stuff is at Bastionland.com. And if you really want, if you want me to market it myself, you can go to Bastionland.com.

1:14:45I think there's a link there to Intellective Bastionland on Kickstarter. I should make that a bit more prominent, but just find Intellective Bastion on Kickstarter and follow it. Because I will be launching that soon. Yeah, soon, not soon, but you know, soon. I'm excited. I'm excited. Yeah. All right. Well, this is a bit between two Karen's. You can find us at between2careons.com or on our Patreon, a Patreon.com slash between two Karen's. Just a quick plug for our Apple Podcast review page. Recently, I put out a call for folks to give us some reviews on the Apple Podcast. And folks came through and left some pretty funny and heartwarming reviews. So, thanks for that. That was nice to read. Yeah. Make some more, do some more. Why not? You know, just go there and read them and enjoy them. And hey, maybe make some of your own if you haven't made some. Because it really does help us somehow. And just before people ask, because people always ask, like, I don't even know how to get to Apple Podcasts.

1:15:47I've never been there and I'm never going to go, what can I do? You can just anywhere that you have a presence on the internet. You can interject randomly into a space. Like, hey, there's this podcast I've been listening to and I really like it. You guys should get to check it out. Like, a recommendation can go a long way if you're a person that's a compute. Anywhere? Anywhere? Well, anywhere that makes sense. Let's, you know. Okay. Okay. You also can find the link to our Apple Podcasts review page through our website between twocareons.com. And also, you can get merch from our friend's schoolboys website, www.betalethans.com, number one website on the internet. And thanks to Bob and McKelver for doing the music and bubberage of this show. And thanks to our patrons from helping us continue to make it. I just hit 250 episodes on the Google Sheet that I keep. That's public and pinned in Discord. I don't think anybody even knows about it, but I have a page I maintain that I'm sick of maintaining.

1:16:48If anyone wants to volunteer to maintain it, that basically says the episode title, what we reviewed, where you can get links to the modules we review and also credits for every, every, you know, the writer, the layout person, the designer, whatever. So if you ever, hey, if you want to help me keep that going, hit me up. That's all I have to say, Brad, shut it down. Folks, thanks for listening. Thanks for being here. Thanks for, thanks for being alive. You know, thanks for staying safe. You know, it's good to get out there, but it's good to stay safe. And that's why we encourage wearing a helmet and anything you do. Put on a helmet before you leave your house, before you step into a road or get in a car. People say to wear a helmet when you're riding a bike. I say wear a helmet when you get in a car, honestly. A lot of stuff can happen in a car. People can throw a rock at you through the window when you roll it down at the drive-through. Hey, you know, I'd like that. Where's some food? Too bad. Here's a rock. You can hit with a rock.

1:17:50Boom. You got to concussion. You're dead. Okay, so that's why I always like to wear a helmet when I ever leave the house or even when I'm in the house. I sleep in a big helmet and it, and that's why I'm always, I'm always safe. People who meet me say, wow, gosh, this guy is safe. Gosh, this guy plays it safe. That's what they say when they meet me. I wear a high visibility vest to bed. Just in case I need to leap out of bed and be seen in the night. There's a lot of danger that can happen when you're wandering around in the dark of your house. In the middle of the night, you can bump into stuff. Other people can bump into you. And I think that's the real risk that I like to mitigate with my high visibility vest that I wear to bed. So folks, whatever you do, however you are staying safe, there's many ways to say safe. You can just yell, you know, announce your presence wherever you go so people don't bump into you. That's another safe thing to do. I like to do that as well. But stay safe. That's the real message here. And we encourage you to always stay safe because safe people get to keep living. And when you're alive, you get to experience the joys of life, whatever those may be.

1:18:53The sweetness of fruit juices running down your cheeks after you bite into a big juicy peach. Nothing like it. Nothing in the world like biting into a fresh, a fresh juicy peach and feeling those juices run down your lips and down your chin, dripping in and staining your shirt. I think that's one of the great thrills in life. And I thank my lucky stars every day that I've lived a safe enough life that gets me to these sweet pleasures. And folks, we hope you're enjoying the sweet pleasures as well. Thank you for listening. And stay safe. And we love you. And we hope you enjoy the sweet pleasures as well. And maybe that this podcast might be in some way just a fraction of the sweetness of a sweet peach. If so, we are so grateful and we are so thankful and we celebrate that. And we hope you celebrate it as well. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. And that's the end of the show. Farewell. Goodbye now. Bye.