The Year of the Gazetteer: A Retrospective

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With the Year of the Gazetteer behind us, I'd like to think back on how much it has done for this blog in the last twelve months. We went from averaging about two and a half posts a month in 2022 and 2023 to having at least 10 a month, with 2024 having 149 posts - my most productive year by far. I created 13 hex maps (counting Ochsebad) of various regions in my long-running Lunar Lands setting, which has hosted almost every campaign I've run since middle school - altogether detailing 33,543 hexes and 229,233 square miles of setting. That's an area a little smaller than Madagascar if smushed together, although the areas are not contiguous. I also wrote several articles, including lore, adventure hooks, and homebrew game material, that detailed different parts of my setting, fulfilling the purpose I made this blog for in the first place but never knew where to start with. Keep your eyes out for a Lunar Lands index in the future, where I will catalogue this material.

I learned a couple things along the way. Originally, I intended to use three-mile hexes for every map - I'm inclined to agree with Mythlands' points about this scale - but as I expanded beyond Switzerland-sized Lescatie I realized that it would just be unfeasible to keep making maps in that scale on a regular basis. After the undertaking that was Togarmah, I realized that even doing six-mile-hex maps of many regions was too big to do in detail, and most of the maps are only partial segments of their respective regions. Nevertheless, I still think there's more than enough to last a good few campaigns. Maybe some day I'll go back and fill in the gaps with hex maps of the remaining areas, but for now, it's a project I'm quite satisfied with.

Out of all the maps, the one that's gotten the most attention has been that of the Freikantons, which has sat in my list of most popular posts for some time now. I suspect this comes from its links to Ochsebad, which I submitted for the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam at DIY & Dragons, realizing how I could contribute to both projects (which was a lot of fun!). Or maybe bitches just love the Old Swiss Confederacy. Who knows.

From here, I want to go from a big success (at the time of this writing, my post on terrain rules for combat is still my biggest success) to what I consider my biggest failed experiment. This didn't happen last year but the year before, but back then, I wrote a post about how the setting of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica would work well for an OSR campaign. I still think that, but I'm sad to say I don't think that's a campaign that will ever see the light of day. Though the post brought a lot of attention to my blog - even making it onto the OSR subreddit, somehow - a lot of the discourse there made me realize that there is not a lot of overlap between why I enjoyed Madoka Magica and why everyone else did.

I should note that I got into the series very early on in its run, I believe the day it blew up online as soon as the third episode aired (if you know, you know), and at that time, there had not been much in the way of character development; what drew me in was the interesting and very gameable setting and magic system, which seemed like it was going somewhere. I thought that setting would lend itself well to OSR gameplay. However, most of the reception I got was about how OSR systems don't model interpersonal dynamics well, despite me stating this was the aspect of the series I found the weakest. What I realized was that it's been over ten years, and most people now know Madoka Magica for the character-driven show it ended up becoming. I found the setting interesting but the characters unlikeable, whereas the fandom generally finds the characters likeable but the setting uninteresting (or at least unimportant). Nowadays, anyone wanting to play a game in the Madoka Magica universe is probably going to expect a depressed lesbian psychodrama instead of the horror-infused dungeon-delving sandbox about grappling with the limits of your own humanity I wanted to run, and that isn't really the kind of campaign I would be interested in running.

Anyway, I bring all of this up because this experience has taught me absolutely nothing.

Art by Martin Rodriguez

2025: The Year of the Barbarian

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

- Robert E. Howard

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gee, if only I was a half-naked, super-ripped dude who could solve every single problem with one blow from his enchanted blade, THEN maybe I could get some gasoline and a lower interest rate on my home loan.

- Misterkitty's Stupid Comics

Lately, I've gotten deeply into a specific kind of fantasy. Sword-and-sorcery blood-and-thunder barbarian hero pulp heroic fantasy. The likes of Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, Fafhrd, Thongor, we can offer an honorable mention to Dave. While barbarians in the Lunar Lands tend to look more like ancient Celts or Germanics, I can't deny that I don't love myself a good Frazetta or Vallejo mighty-thewed warrior, in its own context.

I've been getting into not only 30s barbarian pulp, but also 70s barbarian comics, a surprisingly deep genre that Trey at From the Sorcerer's Skull has written plenty about. He's even done some writings of a game meant to emulate that milieu. I have him to credit for introducing me to Arak, Son of Thunder, which would have gotten into the Lunar Lands Appendix N had I not discovered it so recently and had there not been other, longer-standing influences to include It got me thinking of how I could do something like that myself - and, in particular, there are a few settings I've looked at that I feel would lend themselves well to such an approach. Neither are my own creation, but both I feel tap into the well of sword and sorcery goodness in their own ways.

One is a setting from the second big wave of pulp fantasy that I find incredibly gameable, and which has had a much bigger influence on the tabletop RPG world than many people realize, most likely due to its (in my opinion undeserved) bad reputation. The other is a setting I have talked about here on the blog several times already, one which, despite its association with another popular comic artist (to the point where most people overestimate how much involvement he had in it), I think would shine with a reinterpretation in the Mighty Marvel Manner under the theoretical pen of Roy Thomas. I intend to explore each of these in a forthcoming series of posts.

I'll still be posting the occasional Lunar Lands lore, of course - but we'll take a detour that will ring in the Year of the Barbarian! Stay tuned for what's to come!

And Now For Something Completely Different: Why Madoka Magica is OSR

I swear I haven't lost my mind! Come back!

I don't just post about learned and erudite things like history and medieval folklore on this blog, you know. Yes, I watch anime. Call me cringe all you want, but let's not deny that at the end of the day, the world of RPGs owes just as much to pop culture as it does to "serious" literary tradition. Anything can be a font of inspiration to make our games, and our lives, a little richer. And today, I'd like to explore one such example.

Besides, if you were really paying attention, you'd know I already dropped a few in-jokes to the subject of today's post back in one of my first posts on this blog. Purely because it referenced the same Germanic traditions I did. That's just what I do. Like some sort of enigmatic trickster god, my players never know if I'm referencing some obscure 13th century epic poem or some internet meme. You might not know either.

Anyway, today I'm going to talk about the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica. What makes the series notable for me is that it was the first anime - really, one of the first TV series in general - that I actively followed as it was being released (as it was being released in Japan, no less). It debuted in early 2011, while I was in high school, and I happened to become aware of it when it was freshly three episodes in (if you were there, you know). I proceeded to follow new episodes as they released week to week, and that was a kind of experience I had never really had before. Or, really, since, given the changing landscape of streaming and whole series dropping at once.

Rewatching it a few years back, I don't think Madoka Magica is a perfect series. I wouldn't even call it a great series. It settles for being merely good, but not without its flaws, and they only grow more apparent with age. The pace vacillates between being agonizingly slow and breakneck fast, but rarely settles on a comfortable middle ground. So many characters are frustratingly underdeveloped, and I've come to see the effective protagonist - one of the few who isn't - as the kind of person I would probably punch in the face if we were locked in a room together for long enough. The Watsonian lore and the Doylist themes of the show both raise all kinds of fascinating ideas and implications that feel like something could be done with them, but they never are. The individualist philosophy the series takes on the question of self-sacrifice never sat well with my utilitarian socialist self, and in light of the sequel movie (which split the fanbase in two - I'm solidly on the "it sucked" side of that rift), there's an unpleasant undertone of Objectivism that I can't help but pick up on whether intentional or otherwise. But there's something that makes the series hold a place in my heart.

And I suspect that something may just be how the setting seems to resonate so well with the ideas of a tabletop RPG - particularly one of the Old School ethos.

In the rest of this post, I'm going to give a rundown of Madoka Magica lore with a focus as to what aspects of it are gameable, and summarize how they abide by OSR principles. If you're already familiar with the series, you can probably skip this next part (though I recommend you at least give it a look because there's some things that never actually happen in the series but are totally missed opportunities, and you may not even know about them). If you aren't, please be aware that this discussion will contain spoilers if that matters at all to you - but for what it's worth, I wouldn't have gotten into the series at all if I didn't have it spoiled for me back then.

More under the cut.