I released a new version of Board of Mammon, my one-page GM-less RPG in which players are demonic corporate executives competing for Mammon’s favour. Along with a suite of tweaks (Biz Climate is now an Event, and you get to roll more dice), V2’s hot new feature is a second Events table which gives each Board Meeting a bit more infernal colour. Now your supply chain issues might come as a result of church interference, an annoying bloom of demonspawn, or even a newly discovered sin. Thanks for the feedback and idea, Kieron!

Download it here, or on Itch.io, for free.

I’ve updated Fortune Dark, a light TTRPG system I put out a couple of weeks ago. The notable change is to player death. In the original version, player characters would be smited (smote?) by their god and removed from the game once they got their fourth debility. Now they can have as many debilities as they can bear, but there’s also the addition of a new move, Sacrifice:

When the party decides that one of its members has fallen too far from their god’s grace and offers them as sacrifice, collectively describe how you perform this rite, then remove all cursed dice from the party’s fortune and claim 1 tribute. The sacrificed character’s adventure is over.

The idea is that now death is a choice with a dark benefit. Once a player has a lot of debilities, they’ll likely only be able to act by spending fortune and thus be a major drain on the party. So perhaps it’s time to put them out of their misery, a gift which cleanses the party’s stock of luck. Feels like a grim but enticing decision, and therefore very fitting for Fortune Dark. Thanks, Caleb, for the idea, which I’ve basically lifted wholesale!

Download the PDF here.

I enjoyed Godland, a film in which a Danish priest is told to go to Iceland to build a church and loses his mind. It’s sort of a Scandi Heart of Darkness with starkly bleak-beautiful cinematography, a truly excellent performance from an Icelandic sheepdog, and a sense of material grit and grind that films rarely capture. Every crunching step on exposed scarp; cloying mud and spongy moss; the incessant blowing of the wind; the reassuring mass of hardy horses — the actors appear to be truly living in this place. Iceland here is profoundly harsh and inconstant, not at all where fragile priests should be. Currently available on the BBC’s iPlayer.