Bibliotheca Dantalionis

Make worse games, game designer! Run worse games, game master!

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I will not break any new ground by saying that perfect is the enemy of complete, and if anything I'm writing this article to remind myself more than anyone else. Countless people with countless uncomplete projects, abandoned because they didn't live up to the ambition of what it could be, know how I feel. Is there truly a creative soul out here that hasn't ever left a project unfinished, paralysed by what a mess the finish product is going to be?

It's silly isn't it? Especially with TTRPGs, a medium chalk full of amateur storytellers, having a great time running derivative stories in good company. In fact I believe that TTRGPs have a unique oppertunity in that regard to pave the way for designing worse. I remember a conversation I partok in a while ago, with someone who was unsure of what they were 'supposed' to include in their first module, and, if I remember correctly, was frustrated at parts of the process they deemed necceasry which they didn't enjoy working on. It was so easy when talking to them to say 'Look, if people like your work they will find a way to run it. How many people out there houserule 5E til death, practically making their own games, just because they enjoy the content, the world, or sometimes even just the idea of 'playing D&D'? So often I see people talking about how they made their own aids, handouts, or whole new story sections just to make work something they found cool, but dosen't work for them alone.'

I'm thinking back to really cool module Gormand's Larder an adventure made with no text. It is entirely constructed of illustrations. It depics cluttered locations, and random encounters through lesser detailed drawings. What do you do when you roll the picture of a broken sword? I don't know about you, but personally I instantly get some ideas. It's such a gift to a community of creators that think, like the new designer mentioned above, that they have to do everything, no matter how much they dislike doing it. Why not omitt statblocks if you hate writing them?

I'm thinking back to Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscapes which is so complex yet captivating that it has developed it's own community of people sharing what tools they made to ease running it.

I'm thinking back to most games I've been part of, be that as a player or a GM, where things go wrong, we forget rules, terrible voice acting gets thrown out, and yet, it is so incredibly fun and memorable. Something I've said repeatedly for the past few years when talking about GMing is that, in my opinion, GMs are 'supposed' to be 'bad', by which I mean that they should not be expected to be good. This is a hobby for anyone, and most people aren't educated storytellers. Beyond the 'Mercer effect' I think we should strive to be even worse. The stories in TTRPGs are special because they're ours, no matter how 'cliche' or overdone. Run those players through a cave full of goblins!

And I guess while I'm at it, you should try to write worse blog posts too.

Moments of Respite

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'll bury the lead in the next paragraph, but I want you during this read to keep this in mind: How can we make the idea of 'Take 20's more engaging or at least make it feel like something happened?

Recently I've been playing the wonderful Pentiment, by Obsidian Entertainment, the industry darling behind games like Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Pillars of Eternity. It's wonderful in many ways I'd like to discuss, but one thing that stood out to me was how it treats passage of time. That is, not the major time skips or even the day-night cycling, but the meals. Every so often you are told it is time to eat, and made to find somewhere where you can do so. Mostly this will consist of seeking out friends and neighbours that happily share their food with you. During such meals there is chatter, gossip, opportunities to learn much needed knowledge to solve the cases you're trying to solve, peppered with the game asking you to click on what ever on your plate you wish to eat next. It's such a small thing, but I feel it works really well to give you the feel for the length of a meal without really needing to sit through the entire meal. It creates a very natural feeling flow.

Let's look at some other examples. Are there any tabletop games that do something similar? My first instinct is to hearken back to Jack Harrison's Artefact, a solo journaling game where you play as some magical trinket, shield, sword, or the like and describe what that looks like, about who possesses you over the years, but almost equally important is the periods of time where no-one own you. This you simulate by resting your head on your desk, closing your eyes, and listening to a short snippet of music. The longest track is, I believe, about 90 seconds long, and you choose the track based on how long you are 'lost' for. When the track is over you open your eyes, and start playing a new episode in your existence.

Almost every game meant to be played as campaigns has some sort of system for 'downtime'. I'd say the most prevalent of these downtime systems is in John Harper's Blades in the Dark, where you pick from a menu of mechanical effects, either working on some gear, upgrading your thieves den, scouting leads for better marks and a plethora of other things. This has been built on in lots of different ways, including by John Harper himself, though I would say the way that appeals the most to me is the idea that not only do you choose whatever you want to do from the list, you also have to play out a small scene of how that thing comes to pass. This however is usually reserved for downtime phases, as opposed to Pentiment's suppers, which are very much scenes where you are progressing the story, even if in minor ways.

Hey! Time to exhume that lead! My proposition, which I've personally used in some of my earlier works, is the 'Moments of Respite'. Whenever players spend longer periods of time doing something where there is no danger, ask a question. This can be improvised in the moment, build on something you set up earlier, be rolled from a list of generic questions, or any other way you can think of to conjure them up. Frame the question through what the party is doing. Lets imagine the party is taking an hour to fix the wheel of their cart before they move on. 'While you work the wheel you notice something you haven't before Ender. Lilly has a tattoo up on the nape of her neck, and from this distance you can't quite place what it is. How do you go about sating your curiosity?' or 'Xavier, one of the tunes Emma plays on their lute sounds familiar to you. Where have you heard this before? Do you inquire about it?'.

The idea is essentially to seed moments where players can take a second or two to speak in character, or tell the table something about their character. My hope is that, like closing your eyes and listening to some music in Artefact, this will last at most 5 minutes, but will give the sensation that time has passed (because even though less has passed in real life than in game, it actually has!) so that 'Ok, we take some time to fix the cart' becomes less of a hand wave, nothing moment, and instead can instead be rewarding breaks from action.

Also, because I don't know if I will have an opportunity to write about it, I love how in Pentiment you don't get to know if you solved the murder. You run around, collect clues and can find likely stories, murder weapons, motives, and when you present these to whoever arbiters the case they will take them into account in the verdict, but at the end of the day you'll never get to know if you were correct or not. You have to sit, like the main character, wondering if your actions lead someone innocent to die, and weather investigating the murder at all was worth doing. Definitely something I'll be doing in an adventure at some point.

A story I don't know how to write

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About a year ago I received my copy of Neurocity, a not-so-subtle Orwellian ttrpg about living in a highly censored surveillance state. I skimmed it, as I do most rpgs before committing to reading them, and despite being unsure of whether it suits me as a GM or not it has stuck with me. Or, more correctly, a single paragraph stuck with me and I haven't been able to stop think about it:

'As a general rule, characters start the game without Revelations; they are people who have never questioned the nature of reality.'

What a strong premise! Having played a lot back and forth with player buy-in and stories where the players aren't strictly heroes, I became a little obsessed with this framing. Characters in Neurocity have the potential to rebel against the system, with the game providing no solution for what that might look like, but it doesn't assume that players will. It says that living in the world of Neurocity is painful, stressful, and not even death can save you (with people killed being cloned back into life, a little less like themselves each time), but not what you should do about it. The game is very happy to let you play out your tragedy of a character that stays ignorant of the true source of their suffering until the very end. You start as censors, cops, propagandists and the like, and if it feels natural you can stay that way the entire story. But you don't have to.

A lot of my work is very heavily inspired by music, something I hope to write about more in depth another time. A band in particular that inspires me a lot is prog-rock band 'The Dear Hunter', whom over the course of a decade released the 'Dear Hunter' saga, about the life of the eponymous character. Afterwards they released 'The Indigo Child' an EP setting the foundation for their next saga, of the same name, which was followed by the album I actually wanna talk about: 'Antimai'. In many ways Antimai doesn't really have a story, instead serving as a lore dump, each song describing a different part of the sci-fa world this new story will take place in, an oppressive city where even the higher classes feel the pressure of the thumb placed on top of them.

'If my morals seem a bit mislaid, it might be easy to forget. If I ever tried to disobey, you're probably gonna find me dead!'

Something I'll definitely come back to again and again on this blog is my love stories told form the perspective of shitty people. Stories where you are following someone who is, at least initially, kind of a dick, or unaware of the oppressive society they uphold, or a total sleazebag. Whenever I listen to Antimai, I keep imagining what a ttrpg told from the stories of these higher up in the hierarchy would look like. I want to run a campaign once where the characters start out playing for the wrong team, where they're blissfully unaware of the real harm they're causing, before revealing to them what they're part of and seeing how they react. Is it not these difficult choices we play ttrpgs to explore?

Now how do I do this? I don't know. I'm still thinking about it? I have a handful of games and modules on hand that promise to do what I ask, and I will try to table those and come back to the design table when I feel more confident. My most recent idea is to use a pbta structure, but then I feel I should run more pbta before delving in. Though, there will always be more homework to be done, so what I should actually do is just jump in I think. Oh well.

Ricochet

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I got lucky, moving out from my parents place at the age of 16. Working part time as an apprentice for the local cobbler left me enough money to rent a dingy run down apartment, in someones basement, the kind you live in until you make enough money to live in a dingy run down apartment, not in someones basement, but mentor happened to know someone who was leasing out house that also fell into my price range. Two floors, two bedrooms, big kitchen, storage, even a patch of grass I would eventually tend into a small garden I must admit I am quite proud of. So I contacted the landlord and planned a showing.

The landlord, young bloke named Patrick, was thin and wore oversized clothes that hung off his body like ritualistic rags, doing nothing to hide his protruding ribs. He looked malnourished. Only twink I've ever met to pull off heroin chic. Probably in his late twenties. Our conversation, which was had while walking from where he parked to the house, was scored by a soundscape of sparse but consistent gunfire, growing louder as we got closer to the house. "So, how do you know Willow?" "Through work, err... I'm her apprentice" "Oh! So a cobbler?" "In training at least" "Sounds nice. Lost art these days, craftsmanship" He was cute.

He explained to me that he'd inherited the place from his old man, who himself lived there for the last few years of his life. As we approached the door, gunfire peaking in volume, and he was fumbling with his large key chain, I asked: "So how come you're leasing it out so cheap? What's the catch?" "It's kind of difficult to explain? I think it's best if you see it yourself" As soon as I entered my question was answered. A wisp of air flew past the tip of my nose, just barely missing me, and pinged into the wall on my right. A bullet. A small but noticeable bassy noise reverberated, followed by the smell of sulphur, and the bullet was off again, flying in a seemingly random direction. Where it had hit the wall, a small splintered dent could be seen. The walls, floor and ceiling of the house seems covered in similar dents. Patrick turned to me and spoke.

I now lease from Emma, Patrick's daughter. Patrick died a few years ago, fell in front of a train. So it goes. Blood is pooled around my shin as I wake up, already mostly soaked into the mattress. I get out of bed and get on with my day. I make coffee, eat breakfast, take the bullet through my shoulder, but I luck out and it mostly passes through an old hole, and put on some brand new overalls. It's not long before covered in dark scarlet stains. Customers come by and drop off their shoes or pick them up, as I prefer to work from home. They prefer not to look at me, which I respect, so usually they just leave them outside, or pick up the finished ones I've left for them in front of the door. As I work the soles of a pair someone just brought in, I smoke a cigarette. Most of the smoke never reaches further than my throat, before leaking out of some old rotten hole.

Welcome to Dantalions library!

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hi! Welcome to Hell!

don't worry though, it's not as bad as you'd think ;p

Lets have some quick introductions.

Dantalion is the 71st demon of hell, according to the lesser key of solomon (and feyself), a demon of science, knowledge, and love. She is often depicted holding books, and dons many genders. He also happens to be the mascot for the publishing press: Hellscape!

Hellscape Press is a publishing press, dedicated to publishing primarily tabletop games, though not necceseraly. And despite it's name I'm not interested in publishing only horror, it just happens that most of what I write end up being horror (oops) and I think hellscapes are super neat! I will be using it to publish my own work, but hopefully, once it gathers some momentum, I can use it to publish other artists, cooperating with the other small-fry artists in a collective yell of "ART".

And this 'I' I keep refering to is me, Mia Øvrum! Game designer, author, and artist in her early 20s. I also happen to be a transwoman and am super super queer! I have some small stuff already out there by the hand of other publishers, and some stuff I've been working on for a year or so that I really need to finish so I can send it to the folks who told me they will publish it ;p don't be afraid to hit me up for a chat, look for my contact in the footer!

That leaves only this blog, Bibliotheca Dantalionis, to introduce. This is very much a blog in the tradition of Bastionland, Prismatic Wasteland, and WhatWouldConanDo: the hope is to publish a mix of ttrpg ideas, game development updates, thoughts on the industry and printing, and anything else related to ttrpgs. But I will also use it in all the varied ways, to my hearts content, post short stories, ranting about stuff I find neat, and spreading queerness a-plenty.

I also wanna give a huge shout out to The Coded Type (formally known as The Dispatch), and Iko for fostering the TLB community which has helped me so much to grow as a designer, artist, and person, but of course also for creating the Open Blog Revolution template which made this blog possible! - and to my partner (who for reasons of anonymity I will refer to only by lün initial) D, who helped me navigate the true hellscape: programming.

That's a lot of links and names! I will be making a post eventually listing all the awsome writers (or long dead archives) I think you should check out! But that's it for now! See ya! <3