Beneath Ahknoor hit the table for the first time this week, with two different groups. One group is mostly 5e players, new to Carved from Brindlewood. The other brings years of CfB experience across multiple games. Both groups built characters in under an hour, generated live fiction before anyone touched a move, and engaged with the Saga structure without needing it explained twice.

That's the good news. The better news is that both groups found the same rough edges, independently. Location selection needs clearer structure on the page. Item creation needs a written principle, not a verbal one. A couple of move-timing phrasings need tightening. None of it is a design problem. It's all editing.

Next sessions, both groups enter the dungeon for the first time. I'm watching to see whether the fiction the players built in character creation has teeth when it meets what's actually in the dark.

Alongside that, I've been running Thousand Year Old Vampire as a stress-test for BA mechanics from the inside. The experiment started as a way to push on the Reckoning Move under real fictional pressure. What I found was something I hadn't quite expected.

I was writing Beofric (Renard, the vampire he was before), working through the Mirror prompt at the heart of the Reckoning: two things pressing in from opposite directions, the ghost of what he loved and the hunger that made its loss inevitable. And the fiction went exactly where the move wanted it to go. "The dungeon of his own nature has been waiting for it." I wrote that line and recognized it immediately. Not as a design insight. As a kata executing.

The IWTT skills had been running the whole time. I just hadn't been watching for them outside a GM context.

I'll have a devlog or blog post with the full Mathild account when it's ready. For now, I'm sitting with the question of what it means that the katas transfer this cleanly across systems and contexts.

Arden Vul continues to be exactly as much dungeon as I can handle, which is probably right.

The party spent this session navigating a path through beastman territory under goblin escort: a fear creature confirmed shapeless and visible in firelight, a corridor trap that killed one goblin clean, a mechanical spear trap that killed another at the barricade. Eight goblins made it through. Phlorian has vouched for their safety, which complicates the Goblin King commission from Deino considerably.

The session ended in a ten-foot-wide east-west hallway with two carved Thothian priest faces set into the south wall. Both animated as the party passed. The western face spoke in very old, very formal Mithric. Nobody could follow it. The eastern face spoke in clear, modern Archontian: "The followers of the Ibis are dead and gone. Their power is fated and their secrets lost. Neither power nor knowledge is to be shared. Beware."

The western face said something. The party doesn't know what.

On the blog this week: I finished a long experiment using Kingdom 2nd Edition as faction infrastructure for Arden Vul. I went in expecting a decent tracker with good flavor. What I got was a faction (the Children of Deino) that made a real decision, paid a real price, and came out different. The Touchstone role surprised me most. It's not a mood meter. It's a strategic ideology engine. The full write-up is at the blog if faction depth is something you think about.

Two things on the horizon: It's Worse Than That! Vol. 3 is in early development. The subject is safety tools, framed as a foundation for harder, more precise GMing. And now that BA is in playtest, I've started sketching Fell Beasts and Foul Lairs, a series of four-page zinis: one monster per issue, statted for OSE, with art, encounters, rumors, and spoor tables. More on both as they develop.

If this letter found you at the right moment, the best thing you can do is pass it to a GM who'd find it useful. And if you've read It's Worse Than That! or picked up Beneath Ahknoor and haven't left a review yet, that's what unlocks community copies for GMs who can't cover the cost. A few honest sentences is plenty.

Until next time, Pat