The Sweet Sixteen bracket has its four semifinalists.

In the Narrative lane, Public Access took it over Teeth. The writers' room is the reason: no canonical solution before play starts, everyone building the answer together from what the players notice. That shared authorship produces a quality of investment that a pre-written mystery can't replicate. Teeth is a genuinely great game and the moral weight that accumulates through Devil's Bargains does things the Carved from Brindlewood mystery engine doesn't try to do. There's a time and a place for both. Right now, at my table, Public Access is the pick.

In the OSR lane, OSE beat AD&D 1e. This one felt like a heavyweight championship on its own, and it's a rematch forty-odd years in the making. I was on the AD&D side the first time. The irony of where I've landed is not lost on me. AD&D gave me Kreega Two-men-tall and Maine the spoon-flinging halfling thief and forty years of table. OSE is going to give me whatever comes next.

The full posts are on the blog, along with the honest case for each loser. I'd love to know who you'd have sent through.

The semifinals start Monday, April 20th. Before then, I also put up a roundup post covering the full bracket with results and links, and a list of follow-up topics I'm thinking about writing into. Kingdom as faction infrastructure. What writing for a game reveals about it. Whether the CfB mystery mechanism is more portable than it looks. The gap between the discourse and the table. Drop a comment and let me know which one you'd read.

On the Beneath Ahknoor front: the 0.6 release isn't coming out at the end of April. I rewrote the Above Ground phase, built a full retainer system, and wrote the Reckoning Move from scratch. I also ended up writing four new levels instead of two. The rules now run to 70 pages and around 25,000 words. Two playtests are lined up, one with OSR and narrative veterans, one with a group coming mostly from 5e. I'm expecting to learn different things from each. The revised plan is a summer release.

Also: somebody wrote up The Awful Weekend On-Call on Reddit and it made my week. If you want to read about a person getting one circle away from arrest before quitting their job and then immediately getting arrested for speeding, check it out.

And there's a rabbit game. It's a horror game about rabbits, it's nearly done with design, and it's good. More on that when it's ready.

The blog is at footofthemountainadventures.blogspot.com. Both volumes of It's Worse Than That! are on sale right now at $4 for the bundle. Everything else is at mountainfoot.itch.io.

Happy Gaming!