Dice Exploder Wraps Season 1, plus The Book of Gaub

Yes that’s right, the first season of Dice Exploder ends today! You can find the last episode in your podcast feeds now, or right here.

Season 2 will be coming at the end of August. Splorts fans in particular, I’ve got a very special episode for you.

If you can’t wait for more Dice Exploder:

Send me questions! If I get enough, I’ll bring on a cohost and do a bonus Q&A episode.

Watch the feed! I may release a bonus episode design commentary on one of my own games.

Come on down to the Discord! It’s among the most manageable discords I’ve been a part of, and pretty much purely for talking about design theory. Someone called it "the Discord I'm in that feels most like the old days of forums." I take that as a huge compliment.

And while I work on season 2 of the podcast, I’m gonna keep writing design essays.

Today’s Essay

In 2022, I was a judge for The Awards, a new RPG awards show that describes itself as “a community-sourced and community-judged awards program that chooses 20 things annually to recognize.” I think Clayton Notestine of Explorers Design does a good job laying out what the goals of this new awards show were in his recap of his experience as a judge. I leave it up to you and the community at large to decide whether we succeeded in getting anywhere close and whether the whole thing was a good idea in the first place, but regardless, I had a blast hashing it out with the other judges and writing essays about the winners.

Today I thought it’d be fun to publish one of those essays here. The feelings I write about in this and The Book of Gaub itself have been stuck in my head the past eight months, and I have more to write about similar topics in the coming weeks. In a lot of ways, you can take this essay as a preview of season 2 of the podcast.

For now, here is The Book of Gaub.

The Book of Gaub: Just Vibes Baby

The deeper I get into this hobby, the more vibes become everything to me.

Vibes are just as important to a game as the rules. Rules moderate your story / adventure / experience as you tell / navigate / experience it, but vibes guide what everyone brings to the table before a single rule kicks in. A beautiful picture can inspire the mood of a whole session or campaign. The design of a pdf or even just an itch page can tell every player what kind of character to think up when called to. Is this a mechs with emotions evening, or are we descending step by step into a scary murderhole? Either’s fine by me, we should just pick ahead of time, and the Pinterest board the GM put together half an hour ago might get us all on the same page.

Rules are great, don’t get me wrong. I love a game that has very specific rules to accomplish a very specific thing. There may be other games that do “it’s a bad idea for us to fall in love but here we go,” but nothing does StarCrossed like StarCrossed. But the truth of the matter is that, whatever you’re doing, someone else has probably covered it. If you write a bunch of pbta playbooks I’ll use them, why not, and your work will undoubtedly improve my game. But if you just tell me “young superheroes,” my playgroup and I can take it from there and get to ~80% of where you’d take us.

What I’m personally hungry for is something newer than “young superheroes.”

The Book of Gaub is newer, which is odd, because it feels ancient. It’s weird. Listen, really, it’s fuckin weird. It’s dark, body horror magic that feels like it was written centuries ago. It’s poetry, not rules. It’s ghost stories and creepypasta. It’s fucked up in all the right ways.

Witness the cute little seven-limbed ball of darkness monster that always inflicts back upon you whatever you inflict upon it, then lovingly strap it to a shield before you charge into battle. Achieve immortality by trapping yourself in a word like it’s a Myst prison book and wait for some poor sod to come along and accidentally speak you, then swap minds with them and take over their body. Put a curse on someone so their bones always lean North (or better yet, to a mysterious unknown location). Every entry in the book is this good, and there’s often three or more on a page.

If you bring two sentences of this book chosen at random to your table and declare that’s what you want to play, maybe they’ll X-Card you, but they’ll know exactly what you mean. This game is specific. It knows exactly what it is, even though that thing is immaterial and hard to describe. But I could bring an adventure hook from the hooks chapter, a 3-stat roll under resolution mechanic, and a couple pregens who hate each other but are partners in business, and we could be out the door Gaubing it up in an hour or less.

Now, maybe you need a bunch of experience to be able to pull a stunt like that, but Gaub’s still got your back even if you don’t. Because - and this is so obvious it’s almost not worth saying - with a book like this that’s all vibes no rules, I can bring that hook to any rules system and any campaign. I can put that shield monster in any dungeon. Gaub is dungeon delving. Gaub is modern urban fantasy. Gaub is Mothership. Fuck it, Thirsty Sword Lesbians. The only limiting factor is if you want the vibes of Gaub around or not.

All-vibes inspires. It makes me think about the campaign I want to run, not the rules I want to use to get there. Actually, it does make me think about the rules, because if this is the mood we want, suddenly I’m thinking about what system’s going to support that rather than going with whatever the new hotness is. You have to use this book with intention.

This is ostensibly a review of Gaub, but humor me while I check on two other submissions to The Awards that I think flourish in the vibes department.

Award-winner Odyssey Aquatica is a supplement for a game about Greek demigods doing Fast and the Furious level action nonsense, where the author was like “okay but what if we did Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with these rules?” Talk about co-opting some rules for new vibes! The art is fantastic, the layout is fantastic, the whole thing tells you exactly what you’re supposed to be doing without any rules. I genuinely don’t remember the rules, but the supplement instills in me the idea of a campaign I might run and what it might feel like. It opened the door on a whole genre of game I hadn’t considered. Wes Anderson movies! What a concept.

Award-disqualify-ee Wanderhome is a game that I found revolutionary in its vibes. The game’s mechanics are barely mechanics at all, they’re evocative phrases. The thing is written like a storybook. It’s lyrical. It’s wonderful, in the sense that fills me with wonder. The places and seasons take you to a magical place you couldn’t have imagined without the help of the game’s vibes. And what’s under the hood mechanically, a deceptively simple token system? Sure, you can use that if you want. There are no dice in the book, but I hear tell that the author sometimes rolls dice while playing. The important thing is that you hang out and feel the texture of the world Wanderhome so easily lays you down in. It’s a place I love hanging out.

You need neither rules nor an adventure nor setting material to be a great RPG supplement. You just need vibes. Gaub has them in spades. If the art on page 2 is your jam, this is a book your should read.