​Spectacular Settlements, by Nord Games, is a system-agnostic tool for creating settlements of all sizes for your fantasy roleplaying game of choice.  The book was funded for publication through Kickstarter.  I became aware of it when I saw the latest Kickstarter by Nord Games, Dangerous Destinations, and I wanted to see if I liked the kind of work they had done in their previous publication.  I found an affordable copy through ebay. 
 
Of course, affordable is a relative.  Spectacular Settlements is a $45 450-paged, full-color, glossy-papered, art-filled, hardbound book.  The book has high production value, but it is a big, heavy tome to have sitting on your shelf.
 
There is a lot of useful information here, and I found a lot of great insights about why and where settlements pop up and the nature of settlements.  But all that information and insight is arranged with a specific use in mind.  If you are using the book in that anticipated way, then you’ll have what you need.  Pulling the information out, if you’re not interested in using the book as it’s designed, is a lot of work.
 
So how is it designed?  It is set up as a kind of lonely-play world-building book.  You want to make a settlement for your world, so you open up to the type of settlement you want, print out a worksheet for that type of settlement, and then follow the steps in order.  The steps are a series of tables, using an assortment of dice from a d4 to a d20.  The tables are built so you never have to back track and adjust a decision you have already made—in this way, every table looks forward.  To keep information from becoming contradictory at the whim of the dice, earlier rolls will give you bonuses to add or subtract from upcoming rolls.  For example, your roll for population density will affect how likely crime will occur in the settlement, with thicker crowds making everyday crime more likely.  You roll for every detail, in what I assume is an effort to make your settlement as complete in your mind as possible.  Often those contradictions, when they occur, are the little gems that make your settlement unique.  As an example, I rolled up a trading post in which the population’s wealth was “impoverished,” but where the conditions of the trading post were “immaculate.”  (You roll for the condition earlier, and it gives you bonuses to rolling on the population’s wealth table.  That contradiction, along with other unexpected rolls, was the seed that helped me build out an interesting background for the trading post.
 
The larger your settlement, the greater number of tables you have to roll on.  For a capital city, you are rolling up specific districts found in the city, and specific shops that exist in each of those districts.  You’re rolling for type of governance, who’s in the market place, what your government prioritizes, who are some famous residents, what the houses in each district are like—it’s a lot of detail.  And not all of that detail is designed to lead to inspiring contradictions or intriguing facts.  And that’s my first criticism of the book.
 
You could make the argument that you roll for what interests you and let the rest go, but the tables are setup to interact with each other, as later tables are regularly influenced by older ones.  The tables are not built for a la carte treatment (though you can make them behave that way), and they are not built for inspiration.  Some tables are more inspiring than others, and some tables are just facts you note on your sheet, mere data that will likely remain inert in play.  Do you care how the entry to the whatever district is guarded if the characters never go to that district?
 
And that leads me to my second criticism.  The tables are not easy to find or consult on the fly.  I suppose you could ask for a 10-minute break to roll up a district once the characters have decided that they want to go there, but that doesn’t seem like a fun option.  So you can either roll up the entire settlement before play (or between sessions), or you can just make things up on the fly, which is what you can do without the book anyway.  It would be great if there was a section of the book designed to use the tables in a way other than settlement construction from start to finish.  Or alternatively, it could have a set of quick tables for a quick-and-dirty construction without breaking from play.  Instead, at least 100 pages of the book are pre-constructed settlements that other people have created using the methods provided.  I personally have no use for such a collection.  An example or two per settlement makes sense as a way of showing how to turn all your information into an interesting settlement, but what do I need with 8 settlements mapped and built for worlds other than mine?  I got the book to make settlements of my own, not use other people’s creations.
 
And while I’m talking about page-length, the book could be further shortened by judicious use of space.  Tables are spread out in the layout in a way that fluffs the page count unnecessarily.  I feel like this tome could be a tight and useful 50-100 pages if it were given a new layout and the examples were all removed.  There are even almost 50 pages of “interesting NPCs” that I don’t have any use for.  I love supplements of this sort, but I don’t want them taking up more space on my shelf than the games I need to make them useful.
 
The good news is that Nord Games is introducing a paperback version that removes all the examples and unnecessary extras to give you just the table and information you need to create settlements.  And as I said, I found the information very useful in thinking about and constructing settlements.  So I’ll be very glad to trade in my $45 hardbound monster-text for a slim, useful $20 paperback.
 
This book, the way it’s intended to be used, will be most useful at the start of a campaign, when nothing is known about the world.  In order to build your settlement, you naturally have to know something about neighboring areas. In rolling up your city, you might discover it’s flooded with refugees escaping the two warring kingdoms to the South.  The rumors and current affairs of the city are there to give characters immediate hooks to start exploring or investigating.  Once a campaign is running, characters are likely to have enough momentum already, and the world enough flesh on its bones, that such inventions will be at best unnecessary and at worst distracting.  Of course, if you’re not worried about using the cities you bring to life and you just have fun creating new places whether or not they’ll be used in a game, then there is plenty of fun to be had here.  It’s not built to be used the way I would like to use it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not built the right way for someone else’s purposes.

 
Space Aces: The New Guidebook is another offering I picked up during Kickstarter’s ZineQuest.  It’s a 24-page, full-colored zine that consists of 4 pages of rules and the rest of the pages are filled with tables and art.  The booklet is well-made, printed on high quality paper, and looks to produce good, campy fun through episodic, goofy adventures.
 
The rules are pretty disposable, consisting of standard RPG fare: a set of stats that give you a number to add to a die roll to determine whether you are successful or not.  You roll two dice when you set out to do something “risky, dangerous, or uncertain”: a d20, which measures your success or failure, and a d6 that determines whether you get a benefit or pay an extra cost.  Essentially the d20 determines the yes/no, and the d6 determines the but/and.  Success and failure are determined by deciding first how difficult it would be to accomplish the thing being attempted, and the game gives you 4 levels of difficulty: easy (5+), tricky (10+), hard (15+), and epic (20+).  Your stats let you add anywhere between -1 to +3. 
 
I’m not sure how any of those percentages work out, but to me that’s beside the point.  The question I ask is this: how interesting of a question is “how hard would this be to do?”?  While I’m not a fan of GM-decided target numbers in general, the real problem is that the question isn’t interesting and it seldom leads to exciting conversation at the game table.  The accompanying question is, “can I do this thing?” and that’s not especially interesting either.  Those two questions have been central to RPGs since the 70s, but are they really worth sustaining?  The author tries to counter for these uninteresting questions by including the d6, because the questions, “what good comes out of this?” and “what extra troubles come out of this?” are much more interesting by their nature.  Unfortunately, there are no structures to make benefits and costs inherently productive or interesting as they are left entirely up to the GM (or the table if there is no GM).  Costs are potentially tied to the rising action of the game through a mechanic called “heat,” which increases every time a cost is rolled on the d6.  The higher the heat, the more consequential the cost should be.  But again, what that means is really left to the players.
 
I know some of that sounds harsh, especially for a game that is so light on rules.  But having sparse rules only means that they should be tight and compelling.  An easy comparison is to look at Lasers & Feelings, which has much shorter rules, but which accomplishes the same ends with more interesting conversational prompts.  In fact, the basic episode tables reminded me of the Lasers & Feelings setup tables (and I can only assume Space Aces was directly inspired by the game, but there is no list of influences or inspirations within the text itself, so it can only remain an assumption).
 
That tables are where the zine really shines.  There are a lot of fun tables, and some of them are really well-honed lists of options.  Some of the lists and individual options are pure silliness, but that is one of the stated goals of the text.  There is one odd feature of the lists, which is that most of them are set up to require 2d6, the first to determine the column, and the second to determine the row.  Since the mechanics of the game run with 1d20 and 1d6, it seems like it would be a more natural fit to use them both for the tables as well.  This quirk also put me in mind of Lasers & Feelings, which uses only a d6.  It seems like this zine could easily be about additional tables to expand and shape your Lasers & Feelings game, and as such I think it is an incredibly fun and useful booklet.  In spite of the fact that I can’t ever see myself using the rules of the game, I can see always knowing where it lives on my game shelf so that I can have ready access to the tables.

 
Dungeons & Dilemmas was Kickstarted during 2020’s ZineQuest, and the physical copies were sent out a year later in March of 2021.  The stated purpose of the 56-page zine is this: “Dungeons and Dilemmas presents a process for building dungeon scenarios that are more emotionally engaging and morally complex while retaining a focus on exploration, action and adventure” (1).  Burneko makes it clear that this is not about making less combat-centric dungeons for your fantasy roleplaying, but about giving those combat scenes more meaning in play.  The booklet does an admirable job of achieving that end.
 
Drawing inspiration from the town creation rules in Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard, Burneko begins by laying out 6-step process for creating the backstory of a dungeon so that it can present layers of meaning and history for the exploring players to discover and delight in.  Then, once you are brimming with ideas for visual motifs, encounters, and other elements, Burneko outlines a quick way to create the dungeon layout as an abstract cluster of room in order to help you plan out where information about the dungeon’s storied past should go, and to help you decide where encounters and treasures are best laid to ensure the “narrative” of the dungeon unspools well without ever having to dictate where the adventuring party goes.  The third chapter is about using the tools of the dungeon to effectively communicate the layered past: room content, traps, items, monsters, and NPCs.  The fourth chapter helps you use these same ideas to build a single dungeon out into a longer campaign of adventure and discovery.
 
The writing is cogent and direct, saying exactly what it wants to say without wandering off on tangents or spilling on to fill pages with inessential information.  The book, while far from short, is compact and tightly packed with precision.  There’s a lot of useful information in these pages, and there is a lot for the imagination to chew on.  I personally don’t run dungeon adventures—or at least I haven’t for a long time—but I’m always interested by what’s going on in that area of design.  Burneko’s technique is a fun way to focus your thoughts and ideas into a taut bundle of excitement.  Anything that makes the solitary fun of adventure design gamelike in its approach is offering a lot to its readers.  It reminded me a lot of Vincent Baker’s The Seclusium of Orpheus of the Three Vissions, another guide that makes a kind of game out of creating a wizard’s tower to be explored by a party of fantasy adventurers, though in layout and presentation the two books are vastly different.
 
Dungeons & Dilemmas even comes with an adventure created using the techniques presented in the zine.  It’s a fun adventure, and it’s easy to read it and see how each of the prescribed steps make up the final adventure.  The one thing I would have liked to have seen was a great explanation in that example adventure about Burneko’s own thinking about the potential paths within his abstract room diagram.  That part of the discussion in the first half of the zine is by far the most complicated to parse, and I was hoping to see it clarified by way of example, especially since I found the concept so interesting.  It’s not a big loss, but it is a missed opportunity to make concrete his exciting ideas.
 
The PDF is available through DriveThru and Burneko’s itch.io page, and it’s worth the $8 he’s asking for it.