Chew Your Own Damn Food

22 Jan, 2026

There's this idea I've noticed over my past few years in this corner of the hobby that I want to talk about at a length a little longer than a discord post. While the blogpost under discussion (here) is a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, it's by no means the origin or the genesis of this train of thought.

We'll start with an excerpt from the blogpost, towards the end of the review. The adventure being reviewed is Gromb's Mandog, which you can find here. Anyway, here's the excerpt:

But [Mandog is] almost completely unplayable; there’s nowhere to start, there are few clues to find out what’s going on; it’s difficult to navigate to a fault. This is not a playground, and that’s a mistake for a module, because nothing works together. There’s very little level design here. I would never run this, because the preparation just to get started is way more than I can justify when there are so many other modules out there; I’d need to mark everything up, develop hooks, and figure out what the characters know so that the investigation will lead somewhere.

Issues with the reviewer's reading comprehension aside (the author misses basic information about the context of the adventure that is available as early as the first page of the module) this attitude is a pretty foreign viewpoint to me as a gamer in the ruins of the OSR/Thinking Adventure space.

Mandog is pretty undeniably one of the most fully-realized neighborhoods you can find in tabletop games. There are over 40 houses filled with people who live in them, and probably 2 in every 6 have enough sauce contained therein to fill out a whole Delta Green module.

"Where is the level design?" at least one person who barely read the module asks. Does your neighborhood have level design? Mandog succeeds and is so compelling in part because there isn't obvious level design; Gromb doesn't give two halves of a sloppy fuck if you Experience What The Designer Intended, because it's not written for a hyper-specific experience in mind. This is pretty bog-standard OSR-adjacent platitude stuff. Play to see what happens, prepare the world and not a plot, all those things that you read in Principia Apocrypha or whatever goofy onboarding text some Gen Xer with too much time on his hands and no gaming group wrote up to explain his gaming subgenre to others of his class.

I really loathe this idea that there needs to be some sort of grand and illuminated Design behind adventures and especially adventure-running aids like systems. Certainly, there is some amount of skill and foresight involved in making good adventures. This doesn't mean that we should all be panning in Itch River for the Well-Designed Adventure so we can shower it in Pay What You Want money and fellate it in our blog reviews.

I'm a hobbyist first and foremost and what I look for in an adventure more than Design or Layout is something I can bring to my friends and have a unique and emergent experience with through the childlike wonder of play. Newsflash, chucklefuck, you can do this with anything, regardless of what some puffy guy on Bluesky says. Last winter I saw Touch of Evil and then turned the setup of that movie into an adventure for Mausritter in time for my game the next day. It rocked, my players were almost too busy pogging to play the game.

Adventures are nice in that they're expressly made to be played this way, but that doesn't mean they should be friction-free. I resent the idea that adventure products need to be made in such a way as to reduce all friction between the text and the referee. Sometimes struggling to adapt, explain, or justify the vagaries of a text can create something wholly unique. I've been running 1000 Statues on the Gay Beholder OSR Server and I think it's a good example of what I mean. There are no hooks, there are no rumor tables, the pdf is not hyperlinked, the grid on the notebook 1000 Statues is written in is missing due to water damage. Making that text work at the table has been one of my favorite parts of playing in the hobby in the past few months. in part because of the effort I have to put into understanding the text and also in part because its laid bare just how much Hype Moments and Aura you can generate from what is ostensibly a group of gamers, a dungeon floor with 8 rooms, and a staircase that goes down.

Part of the attraction in my mind to the DIY Space is being around people who aren't afraid to put in work like this for products that deserve it. If there's enough useful Legwork in something and the text lights your brain on fire, you should do everything in your power to bend, break, sever and stuff the corpse of what you read into your game.

"It's so much work!" I hear you say, and while I empathize with this, the work is the fun kind of work that you sign up for as a referee. If you choose wisely, this work will be fun and inspiring and will return to you in the form of engagement and connection from your players. There are many texts out there to steal and cut into bloody pieces that will leave you better as a referee and a person¹ for playing with them, and ignoring them because its too much work is like refusing to lift weights because it makes you sore.

I'm not interested in the module that slides like a greased hog down the meatchute-throat of the average tabletop gamer, easily digested and utterly forgettable because of it. I want something that sticks with you and chokes you on the way down. Chew your own damn food.

See also

Luke Solves TTRPG Discourse with Allusions to Sartre - part of why I wrote this post was to push against a trend for easily run, simple modules. A multipolar adventure space where people are making things they want to see is good for me as a hobbyist! This post also led me to add a footnote, since I’m not trying to moralize about how we play games. The strong tone is so people take the ideas presented seriously, not because I’m making a super strong normative statement about people who disagree with me. Thoughtful and good faith, so I wanted to link it here.