Archive Delving - TUMULUS #5

I'm back with another readthrough of my rpg archives! It's a little bit of a stretch to say TUMULUS 5 is really "archival" reading - this is the winter 2025 issue! That's right now! (Or it was when I started writing this blogpost - the spring 2026 issue drops very soon I believe) I was gifted a year's subscription for the winter holidays (thank you Nate), and got a chance to read it at the turn of the year.

TUMULUS is a quarterly magazine by Skeleton Code Machine. I don't have the back issues to compare to, but the copy tells us we can expect individual issues to run ~40-60 pages with illustration. The contents of those pages are a little variable, but the idea I get is that we can expect "game-stuff" in general - some theory, perhaps some reviews, maybe even some little games. The back of the issue has a full page ad for the magazine (more on this in just a moment), pitched as "quarterly inspiration, games, design ideas, and more." Issue 5 is titled / themed "step into the fairy ring" but past themes have been "do not trust robots," or "return to the sea," or "kick open the door." All fairly immediately legible as classic ttrpg ideas, although they seem to run the gamut between setting, genre, and subculturally-specific meme.

Step into the fairy ring is 53 pages long, with 8 individuated pieces of game-stuff (and one art piece that gets the table of contents treatment). One of these game-things is by Binary Star Games, best known I think for their game Apocalypse Frame, and there's art from Evlyn Moreau (whose work I simply adore), as well as Charlotte Laskowski, who I had heard of from Celestial Bodies (a collaboration with Binary Star Games, as it turns out). In addition to the art and writing, there are full page (and sometimes two-page spreads) of ads. They are at least ads for Exeunt Press's own material. I'm sympathetic - get that bag - but it totally ruins the tone of the entire endeavor for me. It's already your own publication - I've already bought it! If you really want to pitch me on your work, actually pitch it to me! These could very easily instead have been opportunities to talk game design and inspiration. Instead, every few pages I'm jumped out of critically thinking about anything to instead face the stark mercantile nature of the object.

But there are also game-things to talk about, so let's talk about those. The first of these is an "assignment" - the reader is directed to make something inspired by "this issue's theme," which here is Good Soup. The prompt ponders games about "collecting forest ingredients for a cozy (and magical) meal," or utilizing the "pick-up and deliver" board game mechanic/play pattern, or what a game that centers the actual process of cooking could look like. We're asked to tag any creations with #TUMULUS if we post our creations online, though unfortunately it looks like that tag is currently pretty barren (some cool pictures of actual tumuli though).

I'm personally not very hooked by the prospect of the theme; I suppose we're yet to see a really great cooking TTRPG, but I don't know that it's for lack of trying. The space seems already pretty full. Actually, I know a designer who's literally written a game called Good Soup! Anyway, I'm not very impressed with most of the stuff I see in this space - most of them hit me as fairly twee, cottagecore live laugh love stuff. Dream Askew / Dream Apart make thinking about food part of their text and even include thematically appropriate recipes, but what sets them apart for me is their understanding of the social component of bringing people together to play. People have to eat! Food has to come from somewhere! Ok, maybe I'm talking myself into coming around on it. I did think it was a little funny to have this prompt come first, before we'd had a chance to be inspired by anything else in the issue, and that the assignment's focus seemed a little more generally forest-themed rather than the more specific fairy-ring of the title.

Item #2 is Dark forests and bad luck, which is a synopsis and review of the game Trophy Dark. I've read Trophy Dark but it didn't really stick with me - despite being quite light mechanically, I was not interested enough to get invested in the light/dark dice distinction. This is even despite the game's animating impulse, playing as doomed adventurers who will certainly not return unchanged, if they even return at all! I love that stuff! And yet.

Beyond the synopsis of the game and its core system, a few thoughts are highlighted for us to consider. First, the idea of push-your-luck mechanics; second, "luck mitigation systems," with Trophy Dark's use of rerolls-at-a-cost highlighted against some other mechanics; and third, an incitement to consider what can be done with "low/no math systems." There isn't a lot of writing about these - mostly the text here is just concerned with presenting the opportunity to think deeper to the reader. I found this a little disappointing - the text is most interesting to me when it's making claims like (paraphrasing) "Trophy Dark's reroll system is more interesting than other player-skill systems because Trophy Dark's rerolls have a steep cost." I'd love to see that thought expounded upon more in the text!

There are a few footnotes, linking to further Skeleton Code Machine blogs. I like a footnote, but these aren't super relevant further reading - an assertion that "even in this 'feel bad' or 'play to lose' style game... push your luck can be an important part" has a footnote to an article titled "Painful Choices" - but actually is just about a different board game in which the choices you make give your opponent points. It isn't even really about a "feel bad" or "play to lose" game, and it certainly isn't about pushing your luck.

There's a homework section with three exercises - one to further understand Trophy Dark, one to contrast its system against a boardgame, and one to think about luck mitigation. I do love homework, so I might do this and come back, but I'm not quite interested enough in Trophy Dark to be excited about the first two.

Third is Binary Star's contribution, Fey contract law. This is a conversation game where one player is a fey, and the other is an unlucky mortal traveler who has stepped into a fairy ring, and must bargain for their release. The mortal must offer terms to secure a contract (ranging from their name to their eternal soul), but the fey also has secretly instituted a rule by which the conversation must proceed. If you catch out the other player in a breach of the rule/s, you are allowed to add or subtract a term to the deal, but if you have accused incorrectly (likely only to be the mortal, I imagine), the accused may add or subtract two terms. The conversation proceeds in turns, with the traveler speaking first, and the fey second. If you're brave enough to risk a second or third sentence, you may also add or subtract a term for each. Skilled travelers can force the fey to offer terms once they have successfully negotiated all of their own terms away.

It's a cute little game! I think a lot of it rests on the secret rule - otherwise, both players can just make three statements each time and the game ends in five turns with essentially nothing changed. I think the secret rule is kind of a cursed problem - giving the fey free reign to invent any rule would mean that the traveler will basically never be able to guess, but limiting the rules to a list of possibilities means that there's optimal play. The "skilled" player will never be in breach of any of the rules. You could make some of the rules on the list mutually exclusive, but now some of your rules are more valuable than others, and thus better guesses, etc. I don't think any of this kind of thinking is particularly important to this game, where the point is very clearly about having a cute little procedure to play with a friend one-on-one. But I do think that the "mechanical" design of this game doesn't quite come together for me. 

Compare to the game Inhuman Conditions - it's an even more freewheeling conversational game (participants are not required to respond in specific numbers of sentences, nor do they have a time limit on their individual statements), but by 1. making some information public but 2. giving the disadvantaged player secret information, I think the system is more successful at provoking interesting play. Secret information remains kind of a cursed problem - robots in Inhuman Conditions can just lie and break their restriction and the investigator would never be the wiser (until perhaps game end when they can declare foul play). This is why I call it cursed; the existence of hidden information necessarily entails that one player doesn't know when the rules have been broken. But Inhuman Condition subverts this by making following the rules enticing. I'll cite Jay Dragon's Rules are a Cage essay again - Inhuman Conditions shows the robot player the cage and asks "wouldn't it be fun to win with the restriction? Don't you want to see if you can get away with it?" The rules can't solve the problem, so they ask you to solve it yourself. The limited mechanical structure is open enough to contain normal human conversation, but provides an enticing enough barrier that I'm excited to grab onto the bars and pull, and engage in a new play pattern.

Fey contract law has some hints in that direction, but I don't think it provokes as interesting of play. For example, if I'm the fey and I choose the rule that smiling and laughing is forbidden, I can try to make the traveler laugh or smile, and then reveal the rule and insist on better terms. Now we're playing a game where we're each trying to provoke each other into laughing! But the skilled traveler enters the game knowing that laughing/smiling might be forbidden - instead, the game they're playing is a social deduction, trying to guess correctly what behavior the fey is hoping to provoke them into. Failure has negative consequences immediately, which makes optimal play more desirable, and makes guessing unappealing.

Anyway, that's a lot of words about a game I haven't played, and can't speak to any actual experience of!

Fourth: Somatic component mechanisms, which is about the idea of hand motions as a game mechanism, connected to the fairy ring theme via a card game titled Fairy. The structure here is quite similar to the piece on Trophy Dark - we get a synopsis of the game and then some thoughts on how its pieces could inform design for tabletop games. A few other games are lumped together here; Redigo, which uses hand gestures as its action-resolution system and Spellbinder / Waving Hands which is quite directly what the article is interested in, using hand motions to cast spells.

The discussion ends with some ideas on best practices and thoughts on why hand gestures might be appealing (chiefly that they're understandable at a glance and can reinforce themes or symbolism). But the text also notes some difficulties with implementing hand gestures as a central game activity - the game will not be accessible to all players, the game will be harder to play virtually (and I think substantially less charming), and even, the text claims, "it's easy for somatic component mechanisms to feel like a gimmick."

I'm inclined to agree - I'm not much charmed by the prospect of hand gestures as central to a roleplaying game. I often think back to something that I believe Avery Alder wrote, which is that in her workshops, she asks game designers to really think about what activities players around the table will engage in, and that a huge, huge portion of tabletop games are all playing in exactly the same "player-action" space. That's not necessarily a problem, I think - it seems pretty likely to me that one thing tabletop roleplayers enjoy about the hobby could be a set of similar player actions. I'm unlikely to get tired of talking in character, for example. But the inducement to imagine other ways of engaging play is worth it. The Quiet Year, for example, is a game that you play by drawing. So it isn't that I'm necessarily opposed to hand gestures as a play activity, but I am pretty doubtful that there's a lot of game design space there.

There's some homework at the very end here, too; one of the exercises is to redesign Rock Paper Scissors to depend less on luck.

Number five is Take it or leave it, an essay on the idea of "Hobson's Choices." There's an amusing story, but the term is kind of jargon for a feeling that most everyone is likely familiar with - the choice between doing something vs doing nothing.

I'm a little stuck here, though, because it seems like the text doesn't actually understand, or maybe just isn't interested, in this particular kind of choice. First we're presented with a couple of other "false choices" - choices made without information (eg, we must "choose" but have no ability to discern between choices), "choices" that have no impact on the outcome, and choices where the output is so random that player input is negligible. That last one seems basically like a weird subcase of the first case to me, but I can appreciate the distinction, particularly when randomness often plays a big part of tabletop games. But none of these are technically Hobson's choices.

The next section is ostensibly about "this action or no action at all" kinds of choices, but its examples aren't actually examples of those kinds of choices. The first example is a trick taking game, where you're compelled to play to match suit if possible. So if you have only one card of a suit and must match, you don't get to make a choice. This isn't a Hobson's choice though, because you typically cannot choose the "nothing at all" option - and actually, choosing not to play would be a huge boon in many trick taking games! Second is TTRPG combat encounters, with the choice being between making an attack or doing nothing on your turn. This is the one example that would be a Hobson's choice, except that fleeing is also mentioned as an option - and in general, although this kind of "everybody take turns making basic attacks until one side dies" play is certainly a way I have seen D&D played, it isn't technically compelled by the system. Third is an example of drafting games, where certain play patterns can result in a player who can only choose to draft one particular card or no card at all. This is pretty close, but I think it remains a "real" choice. I'll admit to not being familiar with the two games mentioned, but if it's anything like drafting in other card games, the ability to not draft a card is often quite impactful, and not at all guaranteed to be undesirable. Further, most drafts involve passing cards around - if you've reached the stage where you have exactly one choice left, it's because you did make previous "real" choices that led you here. The fourth case is the "only one logical choice" case - the example given is between gaining three resources or two. It does seem likely to me that a competent player will always "choose" three. I think that these cases are often unfun, and I do think that the root cause is similar; it doesn't really feel like you're exercising much choice in these cases! But it is not a Hobson's choice, which is marked by being a choice between something and nothing, not optimal and suboptimal. The final case is a "recalling workers" case - in many worker placement games, when you've run out of workers to place, you must spend your turn recalling workers. Just like the trick taking example, this is usually not a choice, but is compelled by the game. And just like the drafting option, it's probably better understood as being part of a previous "real" choice that you got to make - when you place your last worker, you are choosing to spend your next turn recalling workers. You can often choose differently. As a turn, I think recalling workers / acquiring the necessary resources to play often feels bad, but it is not a choice, much less a Hobson's choice, unless we're stepping outside the frame of the game, in which case the Hobson's choice is "this, or abandon the game."

The essay ends with a few thoughts on playtesting to look for Hobson's choices (or at least, instances in which players seem to believe they have only one real choice), and then some more homework. I'll spoil the remainder of the issue a little and say that this essay is the one that I'm most interested in, but I think it still can't quite move beyond the "kind of fun to think about, huh? Go get 'em champ!" mode. It makes a few claims, like (paraphrasing mine) "some limitations on decision space have a positive impact on player experience," and "what makes a choice meaningful isn't always clear." That second one is explored more in one of the blogposts in the footnotes, but the two models discussed are not as interesting to me as the better-known ICI-Doctrine (which is discussed in the comments, amusingly), and I think ICI has a pretty compelling answer: player choice is meaningful if they have access to information, if they can use that information to choose between at least two courses of action, and if their choice has an impact on the state of affairs. I won't make any claims that the question of player agency is solved, but I think it's a pretty strong starting position. It even accounts for Hobson's choices - doing nothing is a choice! If you have information that suggests that doing nothing will have a more desirable impact than doing the one other thing presented to you, then yeah, even if it feels bad, you are making a meaningful choice! 

But the question isn't really one of terminology, it's one of player psychology and experience - the thing we're chasing, I think, is self-reported-meaningfulness. And players can believe choices are meaningful for lots of reasons! I do think information and impact are big for making choices feel meaningful, but the information, impact, and even the kind of choice on the table can be quite small and personal in scope and still feel meaningful. Fallen London is a perfect test case of this - a huge part of that game is making mechanically-identical (or nearly identical) choices on the basis of personal edification. Or, we might say, on the basis of playing a role. (I believe this is also what is underlying the essay's brief discussion / quotation about "player preferred strategy" - yes, players will often voluntarily narrow their decision space in favor of a particular "strategy," that's how characterization works!)

All of this is missing from the conversation of player agency! There is no sense about why we should care about it - the closest the text gets is saying that "player agency (i.e. choice) is an important part of tabletop games." The text suggests that false choices can be disappointing, but has no opinion about why. Maybe it's simply self evident, I suppose. But I was hoping for more digging into these topics, and pretty consistently Tumulus brushes up against a thorny issue and stops before it can even get pricked by a complex thought.

Number six is D6 Forest ingredients + D6 Magical elixirs. These are pretty straightforward, but the writing is pretty good, and the details are fun and characterful. The ingredients and potions all feel distinct and have the texture of real objects. The elixirs all have recipes, which means they can all be made by combinations of the six ingredients - I'm torn on this. I like that ingredients have multiple uses, but it makes the elixirs feel a little smaller. I like that some elixirs make clear that there are complications and processes to their creation, and that it isn't as simple as just smushing the ingredients together - this is as clear of a fruitful void as I've ever seen, but there is a part of my heart that makes me gnash my teeth and wail "where is the fun mechanical procedure for making these potions!" Not the point of this section anyway - this is quite explicitly just a section for two D6 tables. Nice tables!

Seventh is a 'broken game" - Mechs and mushrooms! Those are two of my favorite things. It's a worker placement game with mechs (your workers) collecting mushrooms. The little quirk that the game is built around is the idea of a delayed worker management system - you send your mechs out into the world and have to wait until they return, which is dependent on what kind of task you send them on. You'll need mechs to gather reagents as well as more mundane materials for building and refueling. There are some little randomization pieces, like a weekly events table and a daily events table, and in particular there is a system for generating contracts which promise greater reward but for randomly selected elixirs. Pretty neat!

But the text notes that the game is incomplete ("broken" is its term) - there's no win-condition for one thing, and costs have not at all been playtested or tinkered with. There are some exercises for contemplating design flaws and/or opportunities. One exercise states that "in general, its' good to design games so there are no 'zero-decision' turns," and tasks us with hacking the game so that even on turns when no mechs are returning, the player has some agency; another contemplates the idea of the change of the seasons; another wonders about the "repair and refuel" time, and how the game would feel different if you had to wait even longer.

These are pretty neat questions, and I'm closer to being hooked than I have been for the other homework enticements. But I haven't found the time to play this one, and I'm not sure I will. It just feels a little too boardgame-y to appeal to my interests / make me think that there's a great ttrpg design lesson waiting here.

The eighth and final game thing is another game! This is labelled Builder: Mischief village, and appears to be a game design experiment to merge two mechanics that have hooked the author - a "roll three pick two" mechanic from Rumble Nation, and the "give your opponent a gift" mechanic from The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which was referenced in one of the footnotes about painful choices. Mischief village takes these and turns them into a little worldbuilding game of different fairy factions vying for the favor of the fairy queen by seizing control of a location (or by being gifted a favor token).

The pitch is interesting, although it has a couple aspects that fall flat for me. First, the strength of Rumble Nation's dice mechanic is that each player's roll of three uses statistics to powerful effect - you split your three dice into a group of two and a single. The group of two represents the zone that you'll commit forces to, and the single represents the size of those forces. Higher value zones are worth more points - but of course, if you spend your high dice on the zone, you probably won't get to place many troops. The choice is loaded with importance! The dice choice for mischief village is mostly a bust - the six by six grid is interchangeable (so choosing 3 and 4 gives you the choice of either the square 3,4 or 4,3). and you have two singles - one is for the gift , which has some impact on your opponent's point total, but the other single is for mischief, and options 1-5 are interchangeable - exactly one of the kinds of choices we were warned against in that Hobson's choice section! Ultimately it's another fun little boardgame, but it doesn't really hold a lot of interest for me, especially in the context of tabletop games.

This has been Tumulus #5! I am excited to check out #6; maybe it will turn me around on the format & style.