Latest from the Labyrinth #23
Here we go round the mulberry bush
Another month, another newsletter, another round of hot freshly baked pariah zine-cakes emerges from the oven of my imagination. It’s hot in there, but mostly due to the fevered abstinence that followed festive excess. Far be it from me to suggest that it is the heart of an incandescent star within which matter and energy collapse into their fundamental parts and are then reassembled nay fused in an explosion of blinding heat and light…
I’ll leave that to you. Here are your 7 brand-new (aforementioned) pariah-shaped cakes, part of the COMPLETE PARIAH SANDBOX COLLECTION
AHPZ03 DAWN is a procedure for generating adventures, events and encounters in the Dawn realm, the spirit realm from which organic life originates. Pariahs visit this by taking heroic dose of entheogens, shedding part of themselves along the way and emerging changed on the other side. Usually.
AHPZ07 Ebua and the Spirit Mountain was originally released in June 2022, was included in my sandbox adventure Atop the Wailing Dunes and has now been augmented with an additional map and location details for the obsidian mines operated by mandrill sorcerer Ek-ch-ek.
AHPZ20 Rituals I & AHPZ21 Rituals II deal with as mystic (previously shamanic) and sorcerous rituals respectively. In both cases I think I’ve made the process clearer and more interesting than in PARIAH Volume I, both in terms of preparation and outcome, but I’m interested n your opinions so throw them at me and I’ll try to justify the changes!
AHPZ39 Boons & Banes and the Spirits expands and greatly individuates the boon & bane tables from PARIAH: VOL 1. There are 1d6 tables of boons and banes for 5 types of spirit of the Here & Now (animal, plant/tree, rock, water, wind) and 1d20 tables for each of the 6 Other Realms (Dawn, Dusk, Death, Moon, Sun & Heavens, THE BEYOND). That’s 22 tables with 290 entries, or 145 boons and 145 banes (I admit there’s a couple of thematically appropriate repeats but again, I like this a lot).
AHPZ40 Mountains continues to add to the generic sandbox tools by territory/biome/hex type (so far I’ve released grasslands and tropical forests, trying to put out at least one new hex type a month). I especially enjoyed the humanoids, settlements and high strangeness elements on this one and hope you will too. Keep an eye out for the Void Priests especially, once we break through the mountains north of the wailing dunes…
Finally AHPZ54 Queen of Dawn formalises a procedure first drafted in an old blog post. This won’t before everyone, but if you want to run an encounter with an actual goddess in an unusual and campaign-altering way then this will be up your alley. I need to commission art for this as the placeholder was an image owned by Games Workshop and I’ve heard they can be litigious.
This is the updated index:
AHPZ03 Dawn
AHPZ04 Foothills of the Teeth
AHPZ05 Hills of the Demon Bear
AHPZ06 MUTAGENIC HIVE SWARM
AHPZ07 Ebua and the Spirit Mountain
AHPZ08 Sun & Heavens
AHPZ09 Valley of Mui Eiru
AHPZ10 Dusk
AHPZ11 The Ikau Mangrove
AHPZ12 Moon
AHPZ13 The Beyond - POLARIS
AHPZ14 The Beyond - THE INDIGO DEEP
AHPZ15 Pariah Generation
AHPZ16 Mutations
AHPZ17 X is for...
AHPZ18 Death
AHPZ19 Spell-Spirits
AHPZ20 Rituals I
AHPZ21 Rituals II (sorcerous)
AHPZ22 Fighting, weapon proficiencies
AHPZ23 Advanced death and dismemberment (AD&D)
AHPZ24 Conditions, wounds, scars
AHPZ25 Traits, skills
AHPZ26 Spirit weapons
AHPZ27 Curse templates
AHPZ28 Malevolent spirits
AHPZ29 House spirits
AHPZ30 Genius Loci + wilderness
AHPZ31 Caves & exploration
AHPZ32 Band and Elders
AHPZ33 3d100 Items
AHPZ34 Wilderness: GRASSLANDS
AHPZ35 Entheogens
AHPZ36 Wilderness —TROPICAL FORESTS
AHPZ37 The Beyond— Phantom Watchers
AHPZ38 Wilderness —THE SUNLIT SEA
AHPZ39 Boons & Banes of the Spirits
AHPZ40 Wilderness —MOUNTAINS
AHPZ41 MORE CURSES (curse templates)
AHPZ42 The Teeth of the Sea 1
AHPZ43 Wilderness—ARABLE LAND
AHPZ44 The Teeth of the Sea 2
AHPZ45 Wilderness—BADLANDS & BROKEN LAND
AHPZ46 Valley of Mist
AHPZ47 Wilderness—DESERT
AHPZ48 The Not Here Never
AHPZ49 Wilderness—FOREST (TEMPERATE )
AHPZ50 The Yellow Moon
AHPZ51 Wilderness—HILLS & UPLAND MOORS
AHPZ52 The Void
AHPZ53 Wilderness—LAKES
AHPZ54 The Queen of Dawn
AHPZ55 Wilderness—MANGROVE FORESTS
AHPZ56 Ancestral Shrines
AHPZ57 Wilderness—RIVERS
AHPZ59 Wilderness—SWAMPS
AHPZ61 Wilderness—TAIGA
AHPZ63 Wilderness—TUNDRA
AHPZ65 Wilderness—VOLCANO
AHPZ67 Wilderness—WETLANDS
AHPZ69 Wilderness—WETLAND (AGRICULTURAL)
...and possibly quite a lot more
On final note on this collection: I’ve been advised that the PDFS are best exported as single page spreads—these are then easy to print at home (using the booklet function), can be read in that way on mobile and can still be amended for widescreen viewing on laptop or desktop. Further down the line I’ll look at optimisation for print and digital enjoyment, but again, please keep your suggestions coming.
Alone in the Labyrinth Blog
Two posts for January (not for want of trying):
An explanation of the City of a Hundred Gods exploration “mechanic” (it’s a sort of hexcrawl). This also provide me with a repeatable structure to flesh out the rest of the city with a new post each month, meaning we should have a complete Neolithic mega-city by the end of November:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/01/navigating-city-of-hundred-godsanother.html..and having spent so long trying to condense Dawn into 4 sides of A5 (about… five years in fact?) I had to do a post about it. This is essentially the contents of AHPZ03… with a few extra bits for the discerning reader, as this was also my contribution to January’s blog carnival:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/01/exploring-dawn-realm-rpg-blog-carnival.html
Elsewhere…
Speaking of blog carnivals, this month’s the carnival is hosted by Sea of Stars with the theme: Dragon Neighbours: how do you live with a dragon nearby?
https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/2025/02/05/beginning-this-months-rpg-blog-carnival-dragon-neighbors-how-do-you-live-with-a-dragon-nearby/
Dragons get far less attention than dungeons in the contemporary OSR so it’ll be exciting to see what emerges this month. For my part I’ve already missed an actual showdown with a dragon in the weekly OD&D drop-in I sometimes join. Actually gutted, might just post about that because it’s important to talk about our feelings.
Speaking of blogs more generally, the winners of the 2024 (or is it 2025?) bloggies have all been announced and, to no one’s surprise bu tmine, I walked away without even a nomination. Luckily my conspiracy-hungry mind is already being fed a healthy dose of fake news by
to keep me spluttering feathers until the next plebiscite:
You can read the official result at Sacha’s blog:
https://sachagoat.blot.im/
Stuff that turned up this month
Got my PDF copy of RUINS OF CASTLE GYGAR and it is DENSE, like a megadungeon zine should be. Looking forward to have a print copy and carrying a huge campaign in 64 pages of old-school goodness. It’s available for pre-order now:
https://ruins-of-castle-gygar.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
I was also very pleased to receive a copy of Luke Gearing’s Swyvers. I got hold of the very extensive quickstart a while ago and absolutely loved it, but didn’t think I’d be able to order a hardcopy… how things change! It’s a really beautiful book, an original setting and campaign frame with some cool variations on that old-school mechanical chassis we all know how to get rumbling with. Don’t ask me what this paragraph is, I’m not a reviewer, I’m just letting you know I have some new games. Here’s a link:
Coda
There’s quite a lot due your way by next month:
ANOTHER set of files for the Pariah sandbox
Further insight into the sprawling City of a Hundred Gods
A possible dragon post for the RPG Blog Carnival
Same vague-posting about the bloggies!
…updates on WHITE CHALK and CITY OF GHOSTS!
Until then,
- Sofinho