The structural reorganization of Beneath Ahknoor is complete. Parts Four and Five are done. The document has the bones it needs to go into playtest.

That work happened in the context of Improve My Game Jam 44, a bi-monthly itch jam with a clean premise: take a project you've already been working on and move it forward. Submit a devlog showing what changed. No theme, no prizes. It turned out to be the right container for this push. If you have something half-finished sitting in a drawer, submissions close May 2: https://itch.io/jam/improve-my-game-jam-44

Before playtests start in May, two pieces are going into the document that have been implicit in the design for a while. One is a short player-facing reference: the four phases, the core moves, how Conditions and Scars work. Everything someone needs to show up without having read the full rules. The other is a plain-language overview of the campaign engine: how Sagas, Clues, the Unlocking Move, and the Reckoning connect into the loop that drives the whole game. Both of those have been living in the design. Time to say them out loud.

After that: a final pass on the Reckoning Move, two new levels, and then the playtests. Two groups, two different audience profiles, two different arc lengths. More to come.

Follow the project on itch: https://mountainfoot.itch.io/beneath-ahknoor

Elsewhere

Arden Vul continues to be exactly as much dungeon as a Keeper can handle, which is probably the right amount.

The party has been recruited by Deino, a faction leader operating out of a 60-by-60 Thothian chamber in the beastman precinct. She had been expecting them. When the patrol brought them in blindfolded, she looked each of them over in turn and, when her gaze landed on Phlorian, told the patrol leader: that's the fifth. Nobody knows how she knew to expect a fifth member, or how she identified which one he was. She gave the party a commission to clear goblins from a neighboring section and sent them off with her senior officer as a guide.

The dungeon has been working its way through them steadily since. There's an invisible territorial creature in a junction room that drains constitution on contact and manifests its target's deepest fear. There's a red basalt sarcophagus with a brass lid nailed shut and something inside that has been scratching for what sounds like a very long time. There's a secret door behind the throne in the semicircular room that, when the party lifted it a crack, exhaled foul air and produced a growl from the dark. They closed it and mapped it.

The session that just wrapped ended with the party resting in a fountain room: a freestanding bronze cod-shaped spigot pouring clean water into a basin that never overflows, no visible drain. An 8-inch mechanical dragonfly had found them there, surveyed the room, and been cut down by Cedric before it finished its reconnaissance. Inside: compound eyes of carved azurite, a mesh face, fine metallic cables, and a broken glass vial that had contained a red liquid, now gone. No maker's mark. No answer for what it was carrying or who sent it.

Arden Vul is a large place. Whatever sent that dragonfly knows the party is there now.

I've been working on faction tooling and session infrastructure on the Keeper side: a structured vocabulary for tagging threads, a simple way to track what the dungeon has noticed. None of it is ready to write up yet, but it's starting to pay off.

The Sweet Sixteen bracket series wrapped on the blog April 28. Sixteen games, four lanes, one final: Public Access over OSE. The series is done. What I'm still turning over is what that result actually says about where I want my table to sit, and whether the bracket format revealed something I didn't already know or just confirmed what I suspected going in. Probably a post in there somewhere.

Something Tookish! went up on the blog yesterday: a reading review of Gord Sellar's cozy halfling CfB mystery game, following an interview with Gord. The short version is that it's a well-realized game with a clear design voice, and it's left some marks on the Beneath Ahknoor work. You can see some fingerprints in my example text for the moves. 

Foot of the Mountain Adventures: Something Tookish! (A reading review)

A while ago, I  interviewed Gord Sellar about Something Tookish! , how he got into gaming, how he found his way to Carved from Brindlewood, ...

Seven Sons of Aerulon reached the end of its run this week. I played in two campaigns with the game: a duet with the GM/writer and a four-player arc alongside it. The setting is cross-connected in ways that rewarded paying close attention, and the GM/writer is planning a significant redesign before the next round. The setting and the way the game's threads tie together across play are worth talking about at length. I'm hoping to sit down with the GM/writer for an interview. More on that when it happens.

Thanks for reading. If you're following Beneath Ahknoor, the devlog has the details - https://mountainfoot.itch.io/beneath-ahknoor/devlog/1506325/beneath-ahknoor-06-reorg-complete

If you have a half-finished game of your own, the jam is open two more days.