Archive Delving - TUMULUS #6

A whole half of the year has passed! TUMULUS comes out quarterly - there are two new ones on my to-read pile! I imagine you can see where this is going. Today, I'm delving into TUMULUS 6, the spring 2026 issue, titled Hammer a nail in the coffin.

I found the previous issue of TUMULUS to be a little disappointing. But it's also the only issue I'd ever read! I'm hoping to be a little more impressed by this one. The format is much the same - a double handful of game-related items, essays, mini-games, homework assignments, etc. The theme for this issue is all about the undead. The table of contents this time has ten entries! I'll try to be swift in my writeups about them.

First is the homework assignment. This issue asks us to design a one page game where the player characters are already dead. As far as assignments go, it's pretty wide open. Last time I found the assignment too narrow to be interesting - I like this better! Obviously I'm behind on everything and did not write a one page game, but I will plug Love's a Lich, my one page game wherein one player plays an undead lich who is trying to go on dates (to turn their prospective romantic partners into phylacteries). The assignment is maybe a little too open to spark inspiration on its own, but the rest of this issue has several things that I think could be good jumping off points.

The first real write-up is a bit of historical and scholarly reporting. We get a few paragraphs detailing some historical reports of the undead from a 12th century source, and then some highlights plucked out of John Blair's Killing the Dead, a contemporary work of history. These sources are mined for some quick game inspiration, to start building a new typology of undead and for an inspiration table for rituals to prevent the dead from rising again.

This is a really strong start! I think it might be my single favorite piece of writing in TUMULUS so far, and I think it is the most interesting piece in this issue. If anything, I wanted more detail - a quick gloss of Blair's book makes me think it's also an attempt to understand why cultures became concerned with the undead, and that I think would also make for some really gameable and interesting writing. I'm revealing my bias here - I have a strong preference for historical inspiration over, say, mathematical or agentic theory. But in addition to being more interested in the source material here, I think this article is more excited about the findings, and that excitement comes through. The game pieces here, even incomplete, really advertise themselves as things to be mixed into your play. It's fun stuff!

The second write-up is another report on a scholarly work, this time of Frank Bosman's Death Narratives, which is an attempt to categorize a typology of player character death in games. The article goes out of its way to assert that, although Bosman is talking about video games, that there's value to the TTRPG scholar as well. I'm less convinced, although it could also be that I'm just not very interested in Bosman's typology. He distinguishes three cases, within the subset of games that involve character death, but continue playing as that character - 1, the game represents the character as having actually died, but has an explanation as to why the new character is essentially identical; 2, the game represents the character death as instead a "near miss," and the death has actually been avoided; 3, the game doesn't explain the continuation at all. There's a brief discussion of "permadeath" but oddly Hades is offered as an example. In fact, Hades doesn't fit into this typology at all! It upends a mortal perspective on death - as I understand it, Zagreus really does "die" and descend to the underworld. It's just that he's a god, and dying is merely a temporary embarrassment. This is perhaps a "type 1" style of death, in that the death "really happens," but all of the other subtypes of type 1 are concerned with how the next player character is nearly identical, rather than exactly identical. (Funnily, though, Hades II is a perfect example of type 2, since Melinoe is locked out of the underworld, and can't risk dying). Splitting hairs, I know, but to me this is emblematic of my frustration with these kinds of offerings - so far, the essays about "theory" seem mostly content to glide across the surface of it, insist that the theory must have some importance or relevance, but there's very little grappling with the substantive thought. 

I've given the game away - I don't find any of the analysis or conclusions to this article useful at all. The closest we get to an argument is the statement "player death is a good motivator," which is the kind of platitude that has undergirded dungeongaming since its inception, and a recommendation to "make death meaningful." The other conclusion items are "some models are useful," and "consider stealing from video games." Both of these are frustrating to me - absolutely nothing in this "model" appears useful to tabletop game design to me at a glance, particularly because the essay has done nothing to make stealing video game deaths interesting to me. I remain unconvinced that playing video games and playing tabletop games are necessarily much alike at all, and I'll leave it at that.

The third essay is a shorter one. The entire idea is to use Markov chains as a way to imbue your "ghost attack" "mechanisms" with memory. It's a nice introduction to the mechanism, but it seems only barely motivated by the undead theming. The example given is fine, but it seems like a lot of effort for what I would consider minimal payoff. This is the kind of thing that makes me, a pbta player, do the Invincible meme - "look at what the tradgamer needs to mimic a fraction of our power."

I'm being a little harsh - I think this kind of mathematical thinking is real (and interesting!) game design. It's a little more boardgame-y to me, but this kind of memorious mechanism does seem like it'd be useful for OSR style stuff. The limiting factor to me is that I'd need to be excited to roll a lot of dice to see how often we move to a different phase. Like the weather hexflower it references, this would be a tool I'd use for prep or things that move through a longer amount of time in the game.

This quarter's random tables are D6 Vampires and D6 Secret Societies! I don't have much to say about them. They're fine! Unlike last quarter, there's no suggested use for them, so they're a little scattershot. You couldn't use this as a random table to generate your local vampire in a dungeongame, for example, without some translating. I don't think that any of the 12 entries surprised me in any way.

Next up is a section on haunted houses. It begins with a delightful anecdote from Pliny, detailing a haunted house. After the story, we're told the five essential components of a haunted house story or encounter: The location, the cause [of the ghost], the manifestation, the mystery, and the confrontation. The typology is pretty similar to the one linked in one of the footnotes, CrimeReads' "Elements of a Haunted House." I'm not sure that I find this typology hugely helpful for gaming purposes. I'm also not certain that I'd have cut the idea into these parts in this order - it seems to me as though the best haunted houses have their "cause" wrapped up in their "mystery" - it isn't just that you need a cause and a mystery. 

But the purpose of dividing them up this way is to give us some random tables to generate a haunted house! This is a neat little set of tables and I think, although fairly simple, that it looks pretty good. Not too much to say about it! It looks like you could whip up a pretty good haunted house with this fairly quickly.

The firth writeup is about Adam Vass' Blood Borg, a morkborglike about playing vampire punks fighting for survival. I largely don't care about vampires, so I never checked out Blood Borg, despite liking what else I've seen of Vass's work! It was nice to get an article writing about someone else's design work, particularly for this game which I probably would not have taken much of a look at.

Here, we get five little mechanisms pulled out. At a quick glance; Vampires in the game must acquire Blood, and can spend Blood for benefits, but it sucks to be at 0 (or negative!) Blood; Vampires must Slumber; Each Vampire is Hunted, and every session the Hunter gets closer; Vampires belong to Factions, which are each pursuing some goal; and Vampires can only die in the usual special ways, not by dropping to "zero hitpoints".

On their own, without any cool layout and any of the meaningful context, these are just boring! It's hard to appear interesting without context, and unfortunately we don't really get any. What happens when the Hunter closes in? Can anything be done about it? How am I supposed to feel about that inevitable confrontation? None of that comes through in the article. In fact, it barely even communicates the mechanism; mostly the article is informing me that there is some mechanism, and then insisting that cool and thematic game design is happening. I believe it, but I haven't been given a lot to go off of. I'm way more interested in the fleeting mention of dumpster diving rules, which, by only their nature and presence, communicate a lot to me about the tone and setting and suggest something fun to do.

I mentioned the insistence on theme; there's a late-in-the-article citation of Sarah Shipp's book Thematic Integration in Board Game Design, referencing her "layers of theme" theory (the citation is, of course, back to the Skeleton Code Machine blogpost on the book). Maybe it's the dregs of whatever persuasive writing theory I've got still rattling around in my brain, but it's hard for me not to read the whole article as an excuse to reference this theory and link back to the blog - the discussion of Blood Borg is merely the excuse. I'd be happier about it if the engagement with the theory went more than skin deep. For example, Shipp's theory is explicitly about boardgames. She presents three layers - layer 1 is the core game mechanic experience. There's no way to play the game without these; it seems like playing the game is synonymous with utilizing these "mechanisms." Layer 2 is made of the "unavoidable" thematic elements "baked in" to the way players interface with the game. Things like the art on the gameboards, or icons on cards, the shape of the game pieces, etc. These are separable from the "core game experience" but won't be separated under normal circumstances. Layer 3 is for optional engagement - things like lore in the back of the rulebook, or supplementary reading.

I wanted to spell them out for two reasons: one is that, at least in the treatment on Skeleton Code Machine, there's no mention of a mismatch between any of these layers, or what is sometimes termed "ludonarrative dissonance." I just read someone's writeup of their experience playing La Fleur, a game about creating the best garden and throwing garden parties. All the elements about flowers and etc are the baked in elements - but the mechanisms led to utterly ruthless play patterns. There's a mismatch (or is there?) between the way the game is played and the way the game is advertising itself to you. And it seems like it would be possible to take the underlying mechanics and present them differently. The writeup in TUMULUS and on the blog, though, seem to take it as granted that a game's mechanics and "baked in" presentation will simply support each other.

The other thing is that I think neither treatment understands or grapples with how TTRPGs interface with these levels. In board games, I think it's uncontroversial to suggest that playing the game is synonymous with following its rules. But in TTRPGs, it's common to say that someone really was playing D&D, even if they never rolled a D20 or engaged in turn based tactical combat. And beyond it being common, I'd be willing to argue that it's true. I'd argue that there are ways of playing that mean you're not playing a particular system, at least not as commonly understood, but the borders around and definitions of the games are much less brightly defined, and seem to me to be quite porous. And that's just at layer 1! Layer 2 is about the "baked in" elements of a game - and what are those in TTRPGs? There are people playing D&D who have never seen the player's handbook and never will, and certainly don't play on WotC battlemaps, etc. Layer 3 seems like the most obvious one - stuff that's not in the rules, or is totally optional to bring to play. But the only treatment on the blog makes me think SKM still doesn't understand it! The example used there is of a solo journaling game option. That's not optional thematic work, that's a different way to play!

Bringing it back to the article in TUMULUS; there's something fun to be had here, where each of the five "vampire" mechanics actually seems like a perfectly serviceable little mechanism in layer 1, and then gets turned into vampire specific gameplay in level 2 (maybe? This kind of thing isn't enforced or enforceable in ttrpgs, but I would bet that the actual rulebook communicates a lot here with layout and art). But the essay seems to believe that simply because they are rules that they'll communicate theme due to being in "layer 1". Frustrating, but I'll give TUMULUS the point for introducing me to a theory I hadn't heard of before. Genuinely, pretty cool!

The essay concludes with a short three questions-and-answers with Adam Vass. His answers go a long way towards making me interested in checking out Blood Borg! 

The final essay is about The Skeletons, a diceless game by Jason Morningstar, in which players play as a variety of skeleton guardians of a tomb. They will triumph against the first few invaders, experience changes to the tomb and natural environment, and finally be defeated. The few quotations suggest that the writing is evocative. It sounds like it plays out a little like a map making game. I'm not too interested in "flipping the script" on the dungeon encounter - I feel like I have a pretty good sense of that by now. But I've seen enough of Morningstar's work to believe that the game is doing something cool. And this essay certainly comes away pretty high on the experience.

The one thing I'll say before moving on: the essay cites a complainer on Reddit who whines that the game has no system for resolving encounters, a claim that the essay uses as a springboard to contemplate whether a game needs a "resolution system". As described, The Skeletons has a resolution system! It says that in the first encounters, you win, and in the final encounter, you lose. That's a system! It resolves the encounters! There's no uncertainty - no dice are ever rolled, nor is randomness invoked in any other way. But "resolution" is not required to be random. Ok I'm done picking fights with redditors.

The little exercises here are pretty fun, and are actually I think probably the most well-made exercises I've seen so far. The last, for example, is to come up with five ideas for games in which players play as the residents of the dungeon - and then, wonder if it's possible to play those games without dice. That's really interesting! So too is the exercise to imagine a challenge or test resolution system to The Skeletons and contemplate how that would change the nature of the game. Good stuff!

The final piece is the little test game. Inspired by the boardgame A Place for All My Books and the video game Graveyard Keeper, we're presented with a little boardgame-ish thing here dubbed A Place for All My Corpses. It's a game of balancing money (required to bury corpses and expand your graveyard), reputation (largely a "health" meter - you lose if you run out of reputation), and space (gotta bury those corpses somewhere). It seems like a neat little balancing act, although I'm once again not terribly enticed to try playing it. The theme here isn't very exciting to me, nor is the central set of mechanisms. There is also a failure state - if you run out of money, there is no way to claw back out from zero (as every action appears to cost at least 1). I'm kind of interested - it means money is another kind of health bar! - but I think it's unlikely to ever appeal to me as a boardgame.

That's TUMULUS #6! I'm walking away with a few new ideas and things to read. I'm still a little frustrated with the quality of analysis, but mostly I had a nice time reading and thinking about games.