Alone in the Labyrinth: The Beyond & Cthulhu Dark
Re-visiting another game-within-a-game in PARIAH, this time taking a look at CTHULHU DARK and changing codes. Look upon my might wor(l)ds and DESPAIR!| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
A TTRPG blog hosted by Sofinho, home to PARIAH (old school psychedelic animist proto-neolithic roleplaying game) and other stuff.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Re-visiting another game-within-a-game in PARIAH, this time taking a look at CTHULHU DARK and changing codes. Look upon my might wor(l)ds and DESPAIR!| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Mutagenic Hive Swarm: a procedurally generated insectoid reptilian transdimensional hive crawl, available to download from itch.io| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Extradimensional chess. Merry Christmas.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
A TTRPG blog hosted by Sofinho, home to PARIAH (old school psychedelic animist proto-neolithic roleplaying game) and other stuff.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Describing a proto-Neolithic city by the gods worshipped therein, beginning with its outer reaches.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
These are the final wards of The Ladders, the City of a Hundred Gods' warren of slums lying beyond its perimeter walls. Movement through the district is brought to life by day and night encounter tables in this post. Initial thoughts for abstracting the map and navigating the city are here, but this is up for revision. | Alone in the Labyrinth
Since posting about the DAWN REALM a few months back now I've had a rethink about how to approach the spirit realms that sit parallel to the Here & Now. For all the novelty of "switching codes" when dipping toes into other places (and the notion that stripping the character down to its essence could be represented at the table i.e. by taking elements from the character sheet and writing them out afresh) the reality is it's disruptive to play. This isn't necessarily bad, but I'm much less conv...| Alone in the Labyrinth
We return to the Ladders, the slum dwellings on the immediate interior of the City of a Hundred Gods. Day and night encounters are rolled on a 1d20 table found in the post linked below and repeated at the foot of this one. | Alone in the Labyrinth
Hahaha only joking. I love the bloggies! | Alone in the Labyrinth
The process of revising PARIAH continues apace. The most recent uploads to itch.io include two zinis-worth of rituals (amounting to a total of 3500 words), most of which are updated versions of magic previously published here or in PARIAH Vol. Rituals come in two distinct flavours: | Alone in the Labyrinth
This month's RPG Blog Carnival is curated by VDoughnut of VDonnut Valley and is titled: Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond. I have several of these parallel realities sitting around (or stacked on top of each other, like paper plates), many of which I'm actively working on. So this feels almost a little cheeky. I may have to do another before the month is out to show my seriousness.| Alone in the Labyrinth
In ancient times a man named Patrick Stuart shared a post about wrapping a dungeon around a die to create a non-Euclidean adventure site: http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2011/09/did-i-invent-this.html| Alone in the Labyrinth
The Sea of Tents, the Black River and Dusk Gate have previously been described, alongside their patron deities the Shit-Beetle, the Goddess of the Lime-Slake and more. Have a look at that post before coming back here:| Alone in the Labyrinth
I recently shared a revision to the curse of the spirit-touched, tying curses in PARIAH to PC inventory, in a nod to Cairn & Eco-Mofos. Continuing my ambition to publish revisions to the game as a series of modular zinis, I compiled the following curse "templates" (they can be applied as a lateral progression/impending doom track to any character) into the four-side format and published on itch:| Alone in the Labyrinth
If you're subscribed to my substack you'll have seen a revised PARIAH character generator PDF. If you're not subscribed to my substack you may be asking yourself why I have one AND a blog, to which I'll reply: CHRIS MCDOWALL HAS BOTH SO I CAN TOO. You'll also be aware that I already shared the chargen PDF in the last blogpost, so this is a doubly redundant introduction.| Alone in the Labyrinth
Preparation & houserules for a solo campaign in Emily F Allen's STYGIAN LIBRARY using the retroclone BLUEHOLME| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
A much belated follow-up to a 3-year-old post detailing the numerous gods of an ancient megalopolis| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
I'm not a huge fan of RPG Design discourse. I know what I enjoy in tabletop games and my openness to embracing new ideas extends to adventures and rulesets rather than abstracted diatribes and forge-era "theory". I love hearing about the obscure media and radical thought that inspires the brilliant worlds practitioners of this weird hobby continue to create, but for the life of me I can't recall an occasion where anyone's Appendix N included a patronising twitter thread.| Alone in the Labyrinth
I am a horrible philistine: my media consumption is mostly trash. What's worse is that on a surface level I maintain an ironic disconnection from my filthy habits, shovelling garbage into every available orifice while claiming to possess a discerning palate that really objects to all this filth, thank you.| Alone in the Labyrinth
A post in response to this month's RPG blog carnival: beyond Vancian magic| Alone in the Labyrinth
Hi. There's been some revisions to the player-facing side of the pariah rules, many of which I discussed in October's post:| Alone in the Labyrinth
If you subscribe to the monthly newsletter I hawk over on substack you will have already seen the changes I've made to character generation in PARIAH, as well as the implied modifications to the player facing mechanics. Feel free to peruse the PDF here if you haven't yet seen it. I'll caveat this with the following statement: don’t distribute it for commercial gain or claim it as your own work. It’s a WIP and hasn’t been fully tested yet, new PARIAH campaign should kick off Friday 20th ...| Alone in the Labyrinth
There comes a time in a nerd's life when they have to take a good, long look at what they've done with their time on earth and think to themselves... FUCK! I HAVEN'T EVEN HAD A PROPER STAB AT A CONLANG! | Alone in the Labyrinth
More than two years ago I made a post called "demi-humans and alignment: dwarfs" which originally included a bit about elves, later replaced with a bit that promised: "elves update to follow!"...| Alone in the Labyrinth
A number of weeks ago I posted regarding my intention to run Stygian Library solo. There's a link right here but for some reason they aren't showing up as such, so please scroll to the end to read the comprehensive list of pages linked in this post. I've since already run a party of adventurers through a delve in the Stygian library, and had some thoughts about what the survivors (spoiler alert! some of them survive!) do next. However, before writing that up I wanted to go into a little more...| Alone in the Labyrinth
So... the inevitable has happened: I have postponed the City of Ghosts Friday Lunchtime Sandbox... indefinitely. It became too disheartening waiting each week only for it never to happen. I'm going to blame the format for this: thanks Luke Gearing!| Alone in the Labyrinth
Last year I returned to the untied loose end of the Dawn Realm (crudely, Pariah's equivalent of the feywilde) with this slightly long, sketchy post. It's been fermenting since then with a great deal of reagents added following conversations on this blog and elsewhere, of which many were with Max Cantor of Weird and Wonderful Worlds. It took watching Scavengers Reign for me to take this pot of potent brew off the flames and let it cool, let the residue crystallise, and then snort a big hefty o...| Alone in the Labyrinth
A TTRPG blog hosted by Sofinho, home to PARIAH (old school psychedelic animist proto-neolithic roleplaying game) and other stuff.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Curses as lateral progression/doom templates: lycanthropy, the Hunger (becoming a ghoul), Thirst (proto-vampirism), possession and loss of a true name| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Pariah saving throws are thematically tied to the realms outside the Here & Now of the psychedelic animist omniverse in which PARIAH takes place| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Turning an encounter with a goddess into a minigame in a proto-neolithic psychedelic animist sandbox RPG.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
The Crow Moon is the second month of the year, according to the Neolithic farmers of the White Chalk Coast . Each month I attempt to update this pariah almanac, with the end result being a calendar for an entire year, alongside supporting encounter and foraging tables, which in turn reflect the seasonal changes.| Alone in the Labyrinth
Continuing the series CITY OF A HUNDRED GODS, delving deeper into this ancient megalopolis. CW: animal cruelty, butchery, cannibalism| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Each full moon I intend to publish an update to the White Chalk sandbox here on this blog, describing the calendar year of a fantasy proto-Neolithic somewhat parallel to the world in which we live. At the time of writing we have already experienced 2 full moons (14th January 2025 and 12th February 2025), so I have to produce 2 further posts in prior to March's full moon.| Alone in the Labyrinth
I'm so poor at keeping up with these annual challenges, so I thought I'd run my own.| Alone in the Labyrinth
Previously we exhumed and revived some mystic rituals, with the added details of where they might go wrong if performed by those not fully practised in their execution. This time we're going to look at sorcerous rituals, accompanied by an appropriate image:| Alone in the Labyrinth
Exploring the proto-Neolithic feywilde with fantasy magic mushrooms. Made for RPG BLOG CARNIVAL: Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
A metapost companion to City of a Hundred Gods| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Some thoughts on hud-less roleplaying| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
A pivotal trade city open to the world, yet simultaneously suspicious of outsiders. A place where magic and even writing is illegal.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
Instead of invoking and binding spell-spirits, why not provide them with a nice place to live? Possible whacky theory about the evolution of beekeepin| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
A TTRPG blog hosted by Sofinho, home to PARIAH (old school psychedelic animist proto-neolithic roleplaying game) and other stuff.| aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com
