Planets & Monsters

One Page Dungeon Classics: Splashdown in Fiend's Fen

I'm writing reviews of one page dungeon contest submissions that I think are interesting, fun and worth trying to throw into your home game. Among the common advice given to those starting their own sandbox, is the suggestion to throw in some one page dungeons. Never mind the staggering number of submissions and sweeping ranges of quality between them. I followed this advice and built my own fantasy hex crawl and in the process I became obsessed with one page dungeons, looking through many years worth of submissions. I feel that there are so many little hidden gems that don't get deserved praise, this series highlighting some is an attempt to undo this crime.

Splashdown in Fiend's Fen was written by Alan Brodie and won Best Science Fantasy in the fourth annual One-Page Dungeon Contest in 2012. Brodie doesn't seem to have a footprint in the TTRPG sphere except for a few gods contributed to a collaborative project called Petty Gods, spearheaded in 2013 by James Maliszewski, author of the blog Grognardia. His contributions were: Beorl, the petty god of honey, mead and beekeepers, Päkkaan, the guardian of the Northern Wilderness, and Xul, who serves Chthonic gods and demon princelings. Brodie is also attributed in Swords and Wizardry Revised edition as a Wraith Slayer at the end of the book. This probably means something like that he backed the books kickstarter at some special tier or that he was an early playtester.

The adventure itself is a compact science fantasy dungeon. A glowing, 50 foot, cube shaped, alien space craft has crashed in a medieval fantasy swamp populated by frog-people. Optional Complications give a few possible major changes to the module. When I ran it, I added the Complication about a captive rust monster having escaped containment due to the crash. I decided that the frog people were worshipping it along with the "Sky Box" itself. I made sure to telegraph that the rust monster could destroy any metal when the players did a bit of recon, so it became a social encounter of bargaining with the frog people to allow them past the rust monster and to explore the cube ship.

Inside, players meet with the malfunctioning ship's chaotic effects on physics while trying to navigate doors that are only operable through matrices of colored squares. All doors are opened a roll of 1-2 on a d6, with intelligence modifiers allowed. I allowed my players to try a door once per dungeon turn. The encounter table, rolled every two turns, is titled Random Strangeitude, and contains events like the changing of the pitch of the ships humming, or the gravity inside the ship inverting, causing damage to everyone. The Strangeitudes and locked doors work together in a fun way that create tension in the dungeon that makes excellent use of the science fantasy angle.

The cube ship contains four first level rooms that can be navigated without violence. The crystal being trying to repair it's ship on the next floor in the fifth, final room, can also be navigated without violence. In this case it is less likely, especially if the PCs have damaged or looted the ship along the way. This overall design approach that allows problems to be solved in open-ended ways means that players have an invitation to use their creativity to overcome the dungeon's hazards.

The final interesting point I have about this one page dungeon is that it offers the possibility of the cube ship being repaired by players, introducing a Spelljammer-like campaign arc filled with planetoids and strange crystal beings. In my first One Page Dungeon Classics review, I wrote about Fane of the Fossilmancer being cool because it is a gateway dungeon to a new setting. Splashdown in Fiend's Fen isn't just a gateway, it gives you your own ride.

One Page Dungeon Classics: Squatters!

One of the best ways to to give a dungeon depth and complexity is to make it feel like it has a history. Squatters! written by Lee Parker, submitted to the 2010 One Page Dungeon Contest, has a colorful history, being lived in many times over. It has a gonzo but somehow logical sequence of residents that shape it, making it what it is now. "Krug's lair" has four layers of history: originally it was the dragon Krug's lair, until he physically outgrew it and moved out, next it was the illusionist Droon, who made it seem like Krug still lived there to steal tributes from the local villagers, third, it was the bugbears, hobgoblins and goblins who found the back entrance to the lair and killed Droog, and finally, the abandoned sections have been infested by large wasps who came in through the back door broken by the goblins.

Each area of the dungeon is distinct, and travelling the dungeon becomes a slightly confusing trip into the past. Best of all, each of the still residing chapters of the dungeon's history act as factions within the dungeon, with their own drives, who can be pitted against each other by clever players. They don't need to fully understand how everyone got here to know that a large wasp will probably attack a hobgoblin if they get them in the same room together. The interconnections, multiple entrances and secret passages make for a pretty wide range of routes through the dungeon, something that encourages and challenges player agency.

When I ran this dungeon, my players didn't discover the illusionists hidden lair. This is mostly because they were too distracted by the illusory flaming pool to search for secret doors. To be fair, the pool is a great introduction to the dungeon. Treasure thrown into it slowly sinks until it falls secretly into a cage full of other tributes in the dungeon room below. As I mentioned in my first One Page Dungeon Classics review, I really enjoy a good "welcome to the jungle" moment, where you get a good taste what's to come from a dungeon. When the first player dipped their hand into the pool, felt their hand slow down, and then pulled their hand out to find it still dry, they knew something weird was up.

Most of all, what impresses me about this dungeon is the way its many layers of history are so organically pieced together. Although the idea is really original, after reading it you think that there must be dungeons like this in nearly every medieval fantasy world. Dragons are constantly growing, they must eventually have to move to new lairs, and in their wake a dungeon ecosystem comes to fill the void.

One Page Dungeon Classics: Fane of the Fossilmancer

I couldn't really find much about Ian Shears, author of Fane of the Fossilmancer. He doesn't seem to have any digital footprint in the TTRPG space aside from credits editing, proofreading and writing in the Dungeon Crawl Classics fanzine, the Gong Farmers Almanac alongside many other contributors. It's also a bit hard to know his age when he submitted the dungeon in 2018. The artwork looks like it could have been drawn by a 14 year old. The contents of the dungeon are so off the wall gonzo, and of course the topic, dinosaurs, make it seem juvenile. None the less, the challenges, puzzles, choices and dangers within seem very deliberately chosen to create a range of challenges and player autonomy and make the author seem mature. The library door puzzle is just the right difficulty in my opinion. It requires runic symbols on statues to be recognized in the nesting ground, then petrified eggs need to be matched to statues with the correct runes.

The concept of fossilmancy itself, using fossilized dinosaur bones as magical components, is awesome. It also means you get to go adventuring in a dungeon with giant fossils as set dressing, even providing a bridge to the terrifying, glowing green ooze vomiting zombie T-Rex. The moment my players were attacked by animated pteranodon fossils while lowering themselves by rope into the first cavern, they knew they were in for a weird time. The first cavern then demonstrates the theme of the dungeon in it's giant glowing ooze river flowing from one side to the other, asking the players to choose their route, following it up or down stream. Exploration of the dungeon reveals a fossilmancy production process, interconnected via the river of ooze, which ends in an impossible number of skele-gels incubating in their vats. The most straight forward combat challenge of the dungeon is here in the vat room. A few skele-gels are activated by intruders, and they can potentially wake up of more skele-gels from their vats in a cascading manner, putting some interesting pressure on the conflict. Instead of hacking and slashing their way through it, the players have to deploy crowd control or come up with some other unconventional solution.

Another reason that I like this dungeon is that it serves as a gateway to another land. Through the Fane of the Fossilmancer, is the underground tropical jungle filled with still living dinosaurs. This is the land that the labs founder, a reptoid, comes from. The dungeon not only gives us a window into this new terrifying faction, the reptoids, it also gives us a doorway to their world. When I added this dungeon to my campaign, I did put a subterranean Lost World here, and it began a campaign arc that lasted many sessions. Gateways like this are not really seen in commercial products because it offers too sweeping a change to the setting without providing any support. I suppose it would be seen as unprofessional by many, but here I think it is a very bold move and packs a whole campaign settings worth of hyperdiegesis.

Fane didn't win any awards in 2018, it didn't even garner an honorable mention. The link to the Google Drive holding all of that years submissions is broken as of writing this post. The only place you can find any mention about it is Anarchy Dice's blog review series of every submission to the contest that year. It's hard to believe, but somehow, after all these years, the fossilmancer lives on.

Knucklebones and the origin of system matters

A stone carve 20 sided die with Greek letters carved into its faces

The oldest known 20-sided dice were carved from stone 2000 years ago in Ptolemaic Egypt, thought to have been developed for religious purposes. Egyptian gods or Greek letters were inscribed on their faces, the roll result indicated some oracular answer to a question.

The use of objects to determine a random result, like drawing straws, is of course even older. The 3000 year old Chinese divination book, the I Ching, calls for a randomized yarrow stalk counting ritual. Reading tea leaves is a way of randomly producing an answer to a question about as old as tea. Often the results of such random techniques are attributed to gods or ancestors answering a question being asked. In addition to religious use, many of these objects were used for gaming.

Many knucklebones spilled out of a felt bag on a table

The predecessor of the Ptolemaic 20-sided die is the mother of all dice, the knucklebone. Knucklebones are a certain ankle bone of sheep and goats, that when tossed will land on one of four sides. This bone is common to many hooved animals which humans have domesticated for thousands of years. Its hard to say when the first ritual or gaming knucklebone was. While many are found with inscriptions on their sides, some think that their use predates written language.

The 20-sided die was introduced to an established ecosystem of knucklebones and carved dice. In contrast to the bell curve distribution of a handful of smaller dice being cast, it provided a list of 20 outcomes with equal probability. It's not too hard to imagine some negative reaction to the use of a 20-sided, stone icosahedron over the classic knucklebone. The idea didn't catch on and only a handful of these 20-sided dice were found. Perhaps the knucklebones faction won out and convinced everyone of the pointlessness of changing systems. Perhaps the crafting process was just too laborious to be sustainable.

Bones carry a spiritual heft, having once been part of a living creature. Often times a diviner or gamer will be rolling the bones for an audience, and a good prop helps any performance. Whether it is the rolled bones, a scatter of pebbles, or a ritual performed under the influence of a stimulant, the audience can carefully study it, trying to divine the answers for themselves.

Perhaps in some neolithic Mesopotamian city, two fortune tellers using different approaches for divination would slander each others methods. One arguing that all those gimmicks weren't necessary and that the gods spoke through drug induced spiritual possession. The other arguing that skillful use of knucklebones techniques produced more accurate and helpful predictions. The feud escalates to a religious fracture, the first blood drawn over system matters.

* * *

The Free Kriegspiel movement in 19th century Prussia was founded on frustrations of the first wargaming community at their hobby becoming codified and complex. A foundational treatise aired its critiques:

1) the rules constrain the umpire, preventing him from applying his expertise;

2) the rules are too rigid to realistically model all possible outcomes in a battle, because the real world is complex and ever-changing;

3) the computations for casualties slow down the game and have a minor impact on a player's decisions anyway;

4) few officers are willing to make the effort to learn the rules.

A system matter shaped the culture of play around wargames. The solution for many was to throw all rules out the window, and simply have a conversation about what they wanted to do on the battlefield. A referee would use their historical and tactical expertise to determine outcomes at the table. The 50 year onslaught of rules bloat was torn down and they started over from scratch.

* * *

A century later, D&D would grow out of wargaming, once again popularizing the 20-sided die. Along with D&D came a few other role-playing games, including its 6-sided dice based science fiction counterpart Traveler. The two games were seen as not only being different genres of fiction, but as different approaches to play. Gary Gygax would write in the first Dungeon Masters Guide demonstrating this attitude:

Of the two approaches to hobby games today, one is best defined as the realism-simulation school and the other as the game school AD&D is assuredly an adherent of the latter school it does not stress any realism (in the author's opinion an absurd effort at best considering the topic). It does little to attempt to simulate anything either.

Gygax would write 29 pages later that (sic) "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” It's contradictions all the way down. Similarly, while Traveler is described as being a game about simulating interstellar mercantilism and starship management, the classic adventure modules from that era show a great depth of story and adventure to be had.

* * *

This all leaves the impression that system matters have been around for as long as people have been asking questions and randomly deciding their answers. Do system matters schisms even have an origin at a certain point in time or in some aspect of games themselves?

Around the turn of the century there was a philosopher named Henri Bergson, who at his peak was called the most famous man in the world. His lectures while visiting the US caused the first traffic jams in New York City. Bergson described the importance of intuition as being the synthesis of our reasoning, tool making brains and our raw animal instincts. Instinct can't be discounted because it evolved to process complex information over millions of years before reason ever came around.

Bergson had a rival in Bertrand Russel, a logician who objected, arguing that Bergson's instinct would drag humanity back into the dark ages. Between them, the system matter was whether or not pure reason was enough to navigate our world.

In the following decades, Russel's thought has become canonized in a philosophy of mathematics, while Bergson's celebrity is now mostly forgotten. I agree with Bergson much more than I agree with any side of any of the other system matters I've raised. We have faculties that make us human, and we can never escape reason nor instinct no matter how much we'd like to do away with either.

Review: 'Renraku Arcology: Shutdown,' or The Greatest Sci-Fi Megadungeon that Never Was

Renraku Arcology: Shutdown is a supplement for Shadowrun 3rd Ed., sometimes marketed as an adventure, sometimes as a setting. Beloved as one of the best Shadowrun modules, important in the meta-plot of the Shadowrun universe, and bearing an intriguing description of a massive arcology taken over by a malicious AI, I thought this would be a good way to sample the best of what this major scifi TTRPG franchise has to offer. The copy I read was an original printing, bought on eBay from someone who was liquidating a storage unit containing a large collection of Shadowrun and military history books. The POD edition is reported to have noticeable defects in it, so I opted to buy this copy that was suspiciously cheap compared to the collectors item tier prices of the other copies listed. On receiving it, I found that it had significant water damage and mold stains, and was a little put off, but of the options I had I still think I made the best choice for myself. In working through this artifact, I felt like I was reading an RPG product from another era, written with unfamiliar style and sensibilities.

This is an 88 page, perfect bound, 8.5" by 11" booklet. 70 of the pages are various forms of fiction chronicling a series of events in and around Renraku Arcology (an arcology being an immense city-like structure with residential, industrial and commercial sections) that affect the greater Shadowrun universe. The fiction takes the form of Arcology promotional material, a news article, Shadownet bulletin board conversations between shadowrunners, the diary of a resident, a corporate meeting conversation, and post-mission debriefs. This fiction collectively pieces together Renraku Arcology's mysterious shutdown, culminating in the reveal of a god-like AI that has awakened and seized control of the arcology, pursuing incomprehensible goals. The AI, Deus, creates a host of new drones, including by turning the arcology's residents into brainwashed slaves, and restructures entire floors of the arcology to serve its bizarre and sadistic purposes. A resistance emerges who have safehouses and cells scattered throughout the arcology, who work towards the liberation of imprisoned residents. The final chapter following the fiction contains "Game Information" made up of descriptions and stats and a 3 page listing of the contents of the arcology's 342 floors (shown at the bottom of this post).

While there is some unique and useful information presented in the first 70 pages of fiction, I think by modern sensibilities of minimalism and at-the-table useability, a single page or two could summarize the shutdown timeline, and the freed up 70 pages could be replaced with keyed maps. The final three pages listing floor contents could even potentially be used to run the entire arcology by a GM with a flair for improvisation. So it begs the question, what do the 70 pages of fiction even do? To answer this question, I think we have to see things from the perspective of the year of publication. We need to rewind the clock back to 1998 and look at the cultural conditions that created the game.

The 80's are a period in TTRPG history that is critiqued by members of the OSR as being after the nostalgic, classical period of D&D, where railroaded Dragonlance modules rose to prominence. The narrative of the novels had more effect on the game world than anyone's home game. The early 90's were subject to much critique by the storygamers of the Forge, who were critical of Vampire the Masquerade for recycling the heavily combat focused D&D derived mechanics while paradoxically presenting them as narrativist. Both Vampire and Dragonlance leaned into meta-plot to convey a narrative rather than encouraging emergent story as is popular today. I've already mentioned meta-plot once toward the beginning of this post, but to briefly define it: a meta-plot is an overarching history of events that occur in a TTRPG world, which happen independent of the goings on at the table of a group of people playing the game. This overarching story created continuity from edition to edition, and from supplement to supplement. Meta-plot offered the simulation of a world in motion, where the changing political situations could be reacted to by players. It also provided a story for GMs, the most reliable customers of TTRPG products, to follow along with which kept them hooked and buying products to complete their collections. It's worth pointing out the irony of a product set in a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk dystopia being bloated by nearly 500% to make it a more viable product that would appeal to its audiences addictive tendencies.

So meta-plot provides a professionally written story on a grand scale that GMs can write session content for that slots into the bigger picture. In context of this understanding of meta-plot, the 70 pages of fiction can be understood to provide either diegetic information that can be provided to players as a reward for completing a mission, or as examples of railroaded missions for the GM to imitate. These lead to the eventual unveiling of Deus and the enormous arcology setting that provides a campaign worth of missions.

While this supplement provides a proportionally small amount of useful gameable content by my modern standards, I still think it presents an incredibly compelling setting. The arcology has barricaded entrances mostly connected to a parking lot with a traffic jam frozen mid-evacuation, a secret entrance guarded by the Orc Underground, a secret bunker where the wealthiest surviving members of Renraku management have holed up with a large weapons stockpile, a creepy abandoned amusement park and mall, floors that have been rebuilt into "zombie rooms" where residents are held and brainwashed via neural implants, bizarre mazes created seemingly to torment members of the populace, virtual kingdoms owned by Deus' Otaku technomancer elite, active but repurposed hardware manufacturing facilities, a roof with military grade defenses, a sympathetic origin story for Deus, and much more. While this supplement is not an actual megadungeon, it could also be the greatest sci-fi megadungeon ever made. Here are the final three pages showing the floors contents (don't judge me for the mold stains!), so you can be the judge.

Review: The Curse of Mizzling Grove

The Curse of Mizzling Grove is a generic DIY elf-game adventure module written by prolific blogger Idle Cartulary, crowdfunded in Zine Month 2024. I have the physical version, a 38 page perfect bound booklet fulfilled via Lulu. It also features really striking art by Niosis, which is what originally caught my eye. The module centers on Renwall tower, a haunted wizards lair in Mizzling Grove packed with memorable encounters and furnishings. I should disclose that my zine month project last month received a nice plug in Idle Cartulary's substack, although I was thinking about doing this review before that happened, and I will make this review honest and be critical where I see appropriate. I have not run this module.

One of my strongest impressions of The Curse of Mizzling Grove (or CoMG) after reading it is that it was written by someone who is well versed in the various techniques in the modern OSR. The first page acknowledges Anne from DIY & Dragons for her most well known blog post Landmark, Hidden, Secret, and utilizes this technique explicitly with "H"s and "S" in room descriptions to indicate Hidden contents that need to be explicitly asked about before being revealed by the referee, and Secret contents which need to be discovered through more committed investigation. The module demonstrates another recent best practice from the blogosphere, being strongly reminiscent of what Gus L. calls Jewelbox design. Jewelbox design is named after house design for retirees who have financial resources, but lack mobility to make use of a large house. These houses are small but very deliberately and meticulously designed. Such dungeons exemplify quality over quantity of rooms. Each of CoMG's rooms is well seated in the tower's fable-like origin story, the inhabitants are unique and weird, and their relationships with each other are detailed. A third bit of OSR wisdom that it employees is that it uses the ultra lethal wandering monster (the Star-gazing golem) that is not intended to be a combat encounter but a hazard of the dungeon meant to be cleverly dealt with in the tradition of the crawling giant in Deep Carbon Observatory. Each of the dungeons 20 rooms has a page dedicated to it, and a map of each floor is reproduced near its descriptions for convenient reference at the table. The complete map of the tower's five floors is also shown near the beginning. I have noticed this technique in the OSE modules I've read, but I'm sure this trick dates from further back. Finally, the layout seems to be based on the Classic Explorer Template by Explorer's Design, but I may be imagining this last one. The protagonist in the lore of the dungeon is the wizards daughter Valeria, and a story centering a woman is not something common in the OSR.

Despite the high quality of form in the construction of the module, I do feel that despite all the attention put into the details that come together to make it, it is a little disconnected thematically from a big picture perspective. The tower was once inhabited by a great sorcerer Cacus Aquilia and his daughter Valeria. Cacus' specialty was astrology, but the dungeon is also filled with clockwork creations, and Valeria studied dragons. This combination of sorcerous specialties feels mostly arbitrary. It's likely that the Star-gazing golem was conceived of together with the complex brass telescope on the top of the tower, but the combination doesn't feel meaningful to me. There is also an apprentice mummified in moss on one of the balconies, which I have trouble placing in the dungeon. He is certainly an interesting encounter, but what does magic moss have to do with astrology and clockwork creatures? These are all very interesting features on their own, but there is a sort of disconnect I feel in the overall picture.

CoMG features a variety of puzzles. The secret doors of the tower are tied into the lore of the setting and tower itself via crystal paintings of historical sorcerers. Some of these paintings have constellations on their frames, and if the correct constellation of their birth is depressed, a secret door will open. The correct constellations are recorded in a book by the Star-gazing golem, so solving this puzzle means taking a dive into the fiction woven throughout the tower. Gaining entrance to the tower itself is a puzzle as well, a few possibilities are offered in the module. The most salient is the secret door (the visible door is a ruse, totally impenetrable) hinted at by an obscure pedestal outside the tower that calls for a "wizened eye." One way of discovering the door is to look through a shard of wood with its eye burned out that splintered from a tree struck by lightning, which serves no real purpose other than to furnish the shard. This is a bit video gamey to me, but at the same time I can imagine a players excitement on looking through the shard to discover the secret door, and that makes it fine for me. There are also alternate entrances to the tower, including treating with the highwaymen who have a lair in a cave with a secret entrance to the tower basement. Players can also climb up to the various balconies visible from the outside. The titular Curse of Mizzling Grove is another major puzzle. To break the curse, players need to collect several scampering eyeballs and reattach them to the statue of the Observer, a god whose protection has been broken, resulting in the scattering of its eyeballs. This could easily constitute the main activity of the delve, I can imagine searching the tower trying to catch them all would take a lot of time and effort. This puzzle is a bit video gamey as well, and is mostly optional, so I feel the same way about this as the secret door.

In all, this is an excellent adventure module, full of character and carefully designed. I've called attention to the many ways this module draws from other places, but it is also decidedly not written by anyone but Idle Cartulary. The concept, rigorous attention to detail and sense of humor come together to make a memorable experience. For all the attention the author gets as a critic and commentator on the scene, I think it is worth considering her as an adventure writer as well.

The TTRPG in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility

Walter Benjamins head shoddily photoshopped over Matt Mercer behind a DM screen

This blog post contains my analysis of TTRPGs using the ideas in Walter Benjamin's influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, if that wasn't obvious by the title. In his essay, Benjamin discusses the development of new forms of media created by technological advances around the turn of the century. He uses a critical Marxist lens to analyze the social and material conditions that determine the role of art in society. Assuming that his basic premises are true, I think there is a lot of insight to be gained from using them to look at the TTRPG hobby.

There is a huge amount of discourse around this nearly 100 year old essay, and I am only moderately knowledgeable of it, having watched a few lectures and listened to a few podcasts on it. I will try to focus mostly on one of the main themes of the essay, the idea of aura versus exhibition value of art, which was discussed at length in my cursory research. Aura is the inherent physicality, history and presence of an object or person. Exhibition value, is the value of the reproduced art as a commodity accessible to and consumable by the masses.

Benjamin discusses the new forms of media from his time: photography, sound recording and film. In comparison, TTRPGs are much less technologically advanced, even though they are newer. TTRPGs encompass many forms of media at once, making up an ecosystem of play. This includes the medium of play itself, which exists in our minds and words while playing, game texts, adventure modules, the notebooks of game masters and players, and so on.

One comparison he spends a lot of time on is theater versus film. Film is more or less the technologically reproducible version of theater. The aura of the performer is destroyed in film creation, while theater requires physical presence, so it allows aura to remain. As Benjamin puts it, "Aura is bound to [the actor's] presence in the here and now."

Benjamin says that an audience receives a film, reacts, and immediately regulates its reaction. In this way, the masses absorb media as distraction, habituating themselves to new modes of apperception. This is in contrast to the way it was in the past, when the individual was absorbed into a piece of art in quiet, solitary, asocial contemplation. Benjamin's view is more or less that this mass, regulated reaction is a progressive, proletarian experience, whereas solitary contemplation of aura is regressive and bourgeois. However, contrary to what Benjamin says, in a movie theater filled with individuals, aura is anything but absent. If an audience can receive mass produced art, react and regulate its reaction, the aura of audience members themselves affect each other as they perform being in an audience.

A similar dynamic exists in the TTRPG, where the group reacts to the fiction they are producing themselves, and regulates their reactions. Just as members of the audience of a film experience each others auras as they watch together, the individuals playing a TTRPG experience each others auras. Beyond affecting each other as members of an audience, they are also performing and creating fiction, distracting and habituating, reacting and regulating in a tightly closed loop. The aura once only accessible to the asocial elite bourgeoisie, becomes more and more prosocial and democratized in the TTRPG hobby space. TTRPG play brings a return to aura, but with its role inverted.

Where the technology that produces film can be used to manipulate media and reveal dimensions of reality and experiences that do not exist outside of film, the TTRPG medium of play is produced in the mind. No media even exists as true record except for as memory, GMs notes, adventure modules, and game texts and in some cases, audio or video recording of play. Players often prioritize the idea of immersion, an experience of fiction that evokes powerful responses in players. Immersion represents the height of distraction versus quiet solitary contemplation, which may be why it is such a valuable experience to so many players. I would even say that immersion and distraction are the same thing.

Mass reproduction can not create exacting technological copies of the medium of play of TTRPGs. True, zines and books can be mass produced, but fiction produced by play can not, because it doesn't come from a film projector, but the human imagination itself. Any game text or practice; systems, procedures, settings, modules and the like, all seek to reproduce fiction in some way or another. A player reads a text, and then something is imagined. One player describes their imaginings, and another player imagines it in their own unique way. I think imagination as film projector and game text as film reel works as a rough analogy, except that each individual will reproduce fiction uniquely in their own way, and that fiction produced enters a melting pot of other fiction.

TTRPG capital must be removed from the mass reproduction of game texts in order to allow the masses to regulate their own consumption in their desire to know themselves and their class. Benjamin discusses how the number of readers has increased with the growth and extension of the press, and as a result, so have the number or writers and opportunities to write. In our current advanced technological society, nearly anyone can have a blog and an itch page. In TTRPGs, we can move towards the ultimate conclusion of Benjamin's example, where reader and writer are the same, bypassing capital as a mediator.

TTRPGs give us an opportunity to experience our own unique auras and react to those of others. As we develop a dialogue with the people in our groups through play, and with others in the hobby space through the sharing of our zines and ideas, we can learn to be audience as much as we are artist, to obliterate not aura, but the dualistic view of artist and audience itself.