Latest from the Labyrinth #24

White chalk hills are all I've known/ white chalk hills will rot my bones

Mar 10, 2025

I was tempted to open with “it’s already March”, but thought better of it: why is the passage of time greeted with such surprise? It’s just about the only predictable thing these days. I’ll keep this brief as I can already feel doom creeping over me. There’s good and bad news this month, but mostly good.

6 mile hex from an ongoing project, White Chalk. Small hexes at 1 mile scale.

Complete Pariah Sandbox

This is the bad news: I was only able to complete one new module/zini in time for this month’s release. The target is 2 a month, but generally I’ll have 4 or 5 on the go at any one time. Unfortunately on this occasion none of them were ready by 8th March.

The good news is, this month’s addition to the collection is an overhaul to AHPZ05 Hills of the Demon Bear (also included in Atop the Wailing Dunes as Hex A). The encounter tables have been revised, locations re-keyed and two new maps are included:

Because I fell short of my self-imposed volume of updates for this month, the entire collection (currently 27 zini/modules) is available for $6. Community copies are currently available (8 on 10th march 2025, more available next month):
https://atelier-hwei.itch.io/complete-pariah-zini

Alone in the Labyrinth Blog

Since last month’s missive, the biggest development on the blog has been the revival of the White Chalk Neolithic Britain sandbox (chalkbox? shinglebox?). this has been buzzing around my head for a few years now, but I’ve committed myself to getting this up on the blog in an almanac format. Instead of exploring a sandbox hex-by-hex, I’m fleshing out the territory with seasonal weather, flora and fauna, astronomical events and festivals.

The end result is a kind of almanac, and since the target is to produce a new post each month, I’ve set myself up with the challenge of Almanac25 (after Dungeon23 and… Galaxy24?). Two posts so far:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/white-chalk-almanac-25.html

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/03/white-chalk-cold-moon-almanac-25.html

The almanac is inspired by my own real world exploration of Neolithic (and later) sites around the chalk downlands of my (relatively new) home. You can read about how that first started to take shape here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/05/white-chalk.html

Immersion in the wet, windy winter of the English south coast is great but I also create as a means of escape—and so parallel to this I’ve also revived the City of 100 Gods. This is a Neolithic megalopolis with a firm nod to a fantasy interpretation of the antediluvian. Like White Chalk this is a “live” design exercise nd I fully anticipate contradicting, redacting, revising and deconstructing posts as I go. Nothing is canon, but you don’t need anyone to tell you that:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/city-of-hundred-gods-pt-310-further.html

DTRPG Sale

While I continue to make revisions to PARIAH in the form of the sandbox collection, I’ve decided to permanently reduce the price of the original zine. It’s currently less than $5 for a perfect-bound PoD copy:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/311826/pariah-volume-1

To accompany that, you can also get a colour PoD of the adventure Atop the Wailing Dunes for less than $6:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/458091/atop-the-wailing-dunes

Mental Health

At the start of the month I decided to reduce the amount of time I spend online in the hope that this might benefit my mental health. One of the first moves I made was deleting the discord app from my phone, but it still wasn’t enough, and ultimately I’ve decided to leave nearly all the discord servers related to RPGs.

This decision left me conflicted: over the years I’ve made a lot of great friends through the hobby, and nearly all of those friendships have developed through discord conversations. However, for the most part my engagement with discord is entirely passive: I’m scrolling, reading, browsing other people’s conversations. A lot of the time I feel a bit like this guy:

Regardless of the legitimacy of that feeling, it’s an insecurity that wears at me as a 44-year-old parent. I really am way too old to be giving a shit about this stuff.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say I feel overwhelmed. On top of the ecological, environmental and political chaos which seems feels like it’s all going to come to ahead any minute now is the immediate pressure of meeting household costs. Then the issues of parenthood: how do you raise children to be gentle and kind, while also imparting the strength and sense necessary to survive what’s coming?

When confronted by things I cannot control my instinct is to focus on things which I can. For now that means writing and exercising more, and trying to spend more time with my family.

Games

Having said the above concerning discord engagement, I’m still running a play-by-post game of Atop the Wailing Dunes on the Atelier Hwei server. For now the voice action games have sadly been suspended: it’s just impossible to schedule. This means that continual playtesting of City of Ghosts (The pariah adventure that’s been in development for… well… 6000 years?) will have to wait a little longer.

Coda

Next time I write I’ll be in Vietnam on a family trip, so should have lots of time to write up more on City of 100 Gods, White Chalk and the Complete PARIAH Sandbox. Current modules in development for the latter include AHPZ04 Foothills of the Teeth and AHPZ12 The Moon.

Until then,

- Sofinho