Dunecrawl - the Invisible Hand, sessions 1 & 2

The first (of hopefully many) session reports in my Seas of Sand setting.

Dramatis Personae

Hanid, an ex-pirate kerosene-refiner. Aspiring war criminal/profiteer and oil-field magnate; ship's extremely thorough quartermaster and book-keeper.

Isfandiyar, ex-pirate scavver. Mostly in it for the cash and the tattoos; ship's backup book-keeper.

Nadeera, trained academic "archaeologist." Interested in seemingly everything, lots of connections; hopes to maybe help Khalkadinn, her home city.

Rahmuna, ex-noble ex-circus performer acrobat. Mostly running away from her problems; ship's helmswoman and de jure captain.

Selb, trained blacksmith-turned-brawler. Strong and silent type; arguably the most level-headed of the crew.

The Invisible Hand, the crew's Qasiran ketch, plus Malik, a loveable-yet-foolish deckhand, and Saranah, a grizzled and well-worn helmswoman for when Rahmuna's not around.

Res Gestae

First Days Out
The crew began in Qasira, city of merchant-princes and ascetic philosophers, having recently returned from a complicated piracy-capture-hostage situation (that shall remain firmly in the backstory). They had several hundred silver between them and a ship, and so it was decided that, for the time being, they would be merchants.

After some discussion and checking of prices, the crew opted for a cargo of wine, a couple hundred gallons, plus cords of cheap "scrapwood"—driftwood, recycled ship hulls, and other bits of flotsam (ordinarily trash, but still quite valuable in a giant desert that's traversed using wooden ships). They set sail the next morning for Khalkadinn, an oft-oppressed city famed for its academies and apiaries, and Nadeera's hometown. 

Over the first couple of days, they didn't encounter much, just some spotty jagged stones and some sand-kelp (which can be mystifying—the tops of kelp stalks sticking out from the sand resemble nothing so much as a field of tiny waving blades).

The next few days were dry, hot, and empty. The sailing was smooth over the sugar sand, and there was absolutely nothing to do. Eventually, the crew settled on several long games of liar's dice, gambling over the crew's least-favorite tasks. A classic, honestly; sailors are not known for their ability to occupy their minds.

The Oasis

On the seventh day, getting closer to Khalkadinn, the crew had a sudden stroke of extremely good luck: they found an oasis. It was a small one, set inside a marshy atoll-like island, but was lush, green, and teeming with animals: camels, goats, foxes, gulls, crocodiles—all manner of predator prey, happily co-existing at the water's edge. The pool itself was clear and deep, descending ever downwards, so deep they couldn't see the bottom.

The crew, happy for a respite, made the most of the water. They bathed, drank, swam, splashed, and lounged, enjoying more water than likely any of them had seen in a very long time. All except Hanid, who stayed on the Hand, claiming he didn't trust the water.

He was right.

All seemed well that evening as the crew settled in, and they filled several casks with the oasis water. Discussion broke out quickly: should the crew haul the water as cargo and sell it? Should they let others, like Khalkadinn, know about it? Should they move settlers out to the oasis and start their own town? Should they hire mercenaries to guard it, keep it secret? Should they just offer a prayer of thanks and move on? All relevant questions, but no good answers. The crew resolved then and there to stay for at least a day to make further plans and barrel more water. 

That night, the lighter sleepers among the crew awoke to the sound of footsteps above them, on the deck. They woke the rest of the crew as the footsteps faded, and they all went topside. It was difficult to make out details, but some unknown person was clearly running up the swampy side of the oasis' atoll, to reach the water within. 

A quick headcount was conducted, and it was discovered that Malik, the crew's hired deckhand, was missing. They called out, and the figure climbing the hillside responded—but then continued. The crew scrambled, using the ship's mirrors (ordinarily used for long-distance signalling) to light up Malik, and Rahmuna and Isfandiyar chased him down. 

After tackling him, it became that Malik wasn't hostile, per se, or even really upset, he just claimed that he desperately needed the water from the oasis. It was a compulsion, a strange kind of urge, that pulled him back towards the oasis. The crew eventually elected to lock Malik in the ship's cabin, and post a guard to make sure he didn't break out. 

Malik spent the night moaning, howling, weeping, crying for the water that he couldn't get to. They offered him regular water, and even the oasis water they'd put in the casks, but none of it was good enough—he explained, eyes wet and throat raw, that he needed that oasis water. 

Over the course of the morning, others among the crew began to act strangely. First it was Isfandiyar, arguing that maybe they should stay, that he could take Malik to the water's edge; then it was Nadeera, claiming that, well, there were perhaps advantages to staying close to the oasis; then Rahmuna, who didn't really bother with talking and just took off running for the water.

Hanid, Selb, and Saranah all seemed unaffected, and began trying to make plans. A ketch takes three to crew, so they could, theoretically, abandon their crewmates to their inescapable paradise and take off. The three of them went back and forth, discussing plans and possible options, until it was decided for them—Saranah suddenly turned from the conversation, vaulted the ship's sides, and beelined for the oasis. 

Hanid and Selb were trapped, stuck with five people who couldn't bear to leave their precious oasis behind. Furthermore, Selb had drank the water, and thus it was unclear how long her mind would remain her own.

The Beast
Still, the five ensnared crewmembers were still more-or-less in control of themselves. They couldn't leave the water for long, but they were still thesmelves. Rahmuna set about investigating the pool itself; with the help of a diving barrel, she dove deep into the oasis. She swam ever deeper, and the circular walls of the cavern slowly tapered towards a point—where that point was, though, was near-impossible to tell, as Rahmuna had dove so deep that all light had faded away. Rather than risk whatever nastiness lay at the bottom of the pool, she instead turned and moved back towards the surface. On her way up, her foot brushed against the cavern's wall, and she made a startling discovery: the interior wall of the "stone" cavern was soft, squishy, like it was flesh.

As soon as she reported this, Selb took a blade and began hacking away at the undergrowth and ground beneath; what the crew had thought was simply soft marshy soil was, in fact, the flesh of some huge beast. After a minute of cutting, Selb came away with a chunk of flesh, big as her hand, bloody and raw.

Naturally, the crew began cutting their own bits of floor-flesh away as well, and it wasn't long before Isfandiyar, perhaps the most naturally-curious of the group, sampled a bit of its blood. In that moment, he had an odd revelatory feeling, as if some bind passed from his mind. He informed the group, and everyone had a few drops of the blood, thus clearing their minds.

At the conclusion of this, with bloody cuts still lining the floor of the oasis-atoll-beast, there was a tremor, and the whole of the oasis shook for a several long moments. The crew opted to leave immediately, but Hanid had other ideas.

He cut down every tree on the oasis, and began building several long pyres across the top of the hill, cutting long trench-like cuts in the beast's flesh, and then dousing the pyres in kerosene. After the third trench was cut, another tremor shook the oasis, and so Hanid wisely opted to set his existing pyres aflame, and run for the ship.

This time, the tremors didn't cease; the quaking continued, and a long dull roar began emanating from within the oasis. Some of the animals began to scatter, but others remained, stupefied. As the ship pulled away, the whole of the oasis and surrounding hill lifted up out of the sand, quaking, and then sunk with a roaring crash deeper into the sand, forming a huge pit. Sand began to rush and whirl around this pit, coalescing into a rapid whirlpool, pulling the Invisible Hand with it.

Rahmuna and Saranah, both still recovering from the oasis water, wrestled desperately with the helm, doing everything they could to bring the ship back on course, out of the whirlpool of sand. With the roaring still around them, the two helmswomen managed to wrest control and use the whirlpool's own speed to break free of its grasp and launch themselves away from the pit.

Reaching Khalkadinn
As if G_d was offering them some recompense, two days after the oasis, just a day out from Khalkadinn, it rained. It was only for an hour, and the rainfall wasn't heavy, but still—it rained. Barring a failed attempt to hunt sand turtles and a run-in with some spidery crabs drawn by the rain, there wasn't any more trouble.

The next morning, the crew reached Khalkadinn, the city built on a marshy oasis, sprawling and wide, long oppressed by its neighboring cities, Qasira and Din Deresh. As the Hand reached the city, the crew split up, first to sell off their wine and scrapwood, and then to spend a few days taking in the city.

Saranah and Malik, now paid, opted to go and get stinking drunk as best they could—Rahmuna went with them, glad to take her mind off the troubles of the journey there. Nadeera elected to go find some of her old archaeological comrades, former classmates and professors, to learn about any new findings. Selb and Isfandiyar, faced with fending for themselves in an unknown city, tagged along with Nadeera, trying their best to get quite drunk while still not annoying Nadeera too badly. She learned that some set of ruins had just been discovered a few hundred miles to the northeast of, in a stretch of kiln sand.

Hanid, for his part, set out looking for a canter (sailors' term for magicians) who could locate crude rock oil in the desert; some canters can find water via magic, and Hanid hoped for the same, but for oil. No luck, however, not even a rumor. Instead, the next day, he went to the geological departments in some of the academies in Khalkadinn and, by expressing interest in faculty researched, ascertained the location of several distant oil locations.

The rest of the crew spent the second acquiring additional goods to sell, primarily honey. Khalkadinn is famed for its apiaries, and some of the nearby-ish towns, Habba and Khemu, might pay well for such luxuries.

Because the ruins Nadeera had learned of were located somewhere near those two towns, a plan was made: the crew would set sail to the nearer of the two towns, sell a chunk of their honey, go to the ruins and investigate, then head to the second town to sell the rest of their honey. From there, they'd see what goods they could acquire, and figure out their next location.

Habba and Beyond
After picking up some passengers to earn a few extra coins, the crew set sail for Habba. It was only about two days' journey there, and those days were largely uneventful. The second night, however, an odd phenomenon occurred: sparkling lights. in green and blue and pink, appeared across the surface of the cooled sand. First it was just ones and twos, then a dozen, then suddenly hundreds and thousands of these tiny twinkling lights appeared all across the sand. Beautiful, in a strange and somewhat-alien way. None of the crew were quite sure what these lights were; some speculated they might be tiny insects, others thought perhaps some kind of plant, or even just magical glowy grains of sand.

The following morning, the Hand reached Habba, and a chunk of honey was sold. After restocking with a bit of food and water, the crew set out eastward for a large stretch of kiln sand. Kiln sand is dense, heavy, and crusty, almost more like dried clay than proper sand. It can support a huge amount of weight during the day—nigh on 300 pounds—but is so dense that ships are slowed significantly while sailing through it. It's beloved by travellers and soldiers and settlers, but hated by sailors. Still, the crew had to pass through it to reach the dungeon, and so onto the kiln sand they went.

Barring a strange message-in-a-bottle covered in distant foreign runes, the first thing encountered was an old ruined tower, crumbling and weathered. Inside, there was a strange figure, squat and heavy, made entirely of rough-hewn sandstone. The crew attempted to talk to this figure, and realized quickly that while this figure was very much alive and extremely talented in molding sand, it was also extremely grumpy and not very talkative. Nobody quite knew what it was, though legends of sand-fairies that grant wishes or curses are well known.

Hanid and Nadeera both spent a while talking to this figure, and Hanid, ever the ambitious member of the crew, made a deal: if he could take a perfect sand sculpture and make it more beautiful through fire and glass, the sandstone-fairy-thing would owe him a wish. If Hanid tried to make this sand sculpture more beautiful but failed, he would owe the sand fairy ten years of servitude. The squat stone creature gave Hanid a small, perfect cube of sandstone, and told him he had a year and a die.

After leaving the strange creature and its tower behind, the crew nearly ran afoul of a sandstorm. Sandstorms in kiln sand won't choke or drown like other sandstorms, but will instead heave huge clumps of clay-like sand through the air, whizzing and hurtling like cannonballs. Rather than try to brave this, the crew attempted to instead outrun the sandstorm, sailing as quickly as they could perpendicular to it.

The gamble paid off, and while they suffered heavy winds and were coated in clay and sand, the crew managed to avoid the worst of the storm, reaching the edge of the ruins at the end of the day.

This ran longer than expected, sorry. Hope you enjoy it regardless.

Seas of Sand toolkit

I'm working on a setting that's called the Seas of Sand; it's a big desert that's filled with liquid-like sand. During the day, the sand is liquid, meaning you'll sink if you walk on it, but you can sail a ship across it. At night, the sand cools and hardens, so you can walk across it, but ships get "frozen" in place.

It's a naval campaign setting, basically, but it's in a desert, and thus other, unusual things happen.

I've now run about 4 sessions with some OSR types across two campaigns, plus a handful of test sessions, so I've got some mostly-workable rules and a map, which I figure I'll share.

This stuff is geared for GLOG, but is pretty easily hackable elsewhere.

The first are the rules for sandships:

Sandship Rules

These rules cover the basics of sandships, the big wooden ships that sail across the dunes. It's got their four stats, some ship conditions you can suffer from, and a list of ships. All pretty straightforward; a lot of these rules were cribbed from stuff like Skerples's pirate GLOG, and Clint & Cassie Krause's Driftwood Verses, which is still not out but I played one time at Gen Con and fell in love with.

Crew Rules

These cover the different kinds of crew you might have on a ship, and how you pay crews. Merchants pay crews by the day, but pirates pay by the share. At some point I'm going to draft up a loyalty & morale system for crews, where getting shares means more loyalty, but for now it's just payment. (It's also worth noting crew wages are in copper, not silver—this is a medieval-ish setting, and thus most people get paid abysmally.)

Goods & Costs

This doc covers some of the more common goods you might haul across the Seas, plus rules for taxes, sea laws, and ship repairs. This gets into the fiddlier aspect of the game, the more intense bookkeeping; some groups like that, some hate it. If yours is the latter, you can gloss over a lot of this stuff, and just give them a ship and cargo and then tell them to head out.

The Seven Sands

There are seven different kinds of sand in the Seas (and thus seven seas, har har), each of which functions a little bit differently (or a lot differently). The three common ones—silk, sugar, and salt sand—all are relatively normal, but the four weird ones get very strange. 

And here's the map we're using:

It's pretty hastily-drawn, but it works well enough. Each of those squares is 100 miles. I cover Qasira in this post, and might do the other five cities at some point. The different-colored sections are the different kinds of sand that appear in the Seas, covered in the doc above. Here's a brief summary of each city, plus what each city has and needs, in terms of trade. 

These rules are all written with a kind of naval-ish campaign in mind, with players taking the roles of merchants, pirates, or something in between. Lots of sailing around and managing cargo, with perhaps a less-intense focus on dungeons or classic "adventuring." Adventure still happens on the high (sandy) seas, of course, but it's more procedural, more incidental. 

I would make edits and tweaks to all of these, except that the hard drive that had these InDesign and Photoshop files has died, along with most of my work for the Seas, so they won't be getting changes anytime soon, tragically. 

As always, you're free to hack and tweak and modify all of this stuff, though I'd perhaps appreciate you not selling it. I'm hoping to, at some point in the distant future, turn this into a real-ass book and sell it. Hopefully. 

GLOG Class: the Dunerider

This is a class for my WIP desert-naval setting called the Seas of Sand; outside the context of a giant ocean of sand, it's not clear to me how much utility it will have.

>>This version is old and bad, use this one instead.<<

GLOG Class: the Dunerider (aka the Sandsurfer)

A: Sandsurfing, Stunts, Dunespeech, 

B: Evasion, Catch the Dune

C: Soul Arch, Top Glide

D: Shoot the Tube, The Big One

It's worth noting, before we get anywhere, that while the dunes of the Seas consist of a lot of ups and downs and real sandsurfers can really only go down, I broadly assume that trained duneriders can move up and down a dune-side with equal speed. Call it subtle wind-sand magic, if you want.

Almost all of these template benefits only apply while on your duneboard; Dunespeech you can use anywhere, but the others require you to be on your duneboard (or, you know, immediately near it). Use your good judgement. 

You gain +5 ft. of movement while on your duneboard per Dunerider template you have. (I assume an ordinary person's walking speed is 30 ft.)

Starting skills [d3]: 1 = beach bum; 2 = caravan scout; 3 = psammologist (like an oceanographer but for sandy seas).

Starting equipment: a duneboard with a custom paint job, a 15-foot ankle leash, and a see-through headscarf to keep the sand out

(A) Sandsurfing

You are trained in sandsurfing, the sport of standing on a piece of treated wood and riding up and down the dunes. You travel at your normal speed while on your duneboard (compared to sandshoes, which go at half-speed), and can travel equally well on both daytime and nighttime sands. Your board is of high enough quality such that it can sit on the surface for any length of time without sinking, although it might drift.  

(A) Stunts

When you pull a sweet stunt, navigate a tricky spot, stick a landing, or otherwise do something more risky or badass than basic surfing, you have a 2-in-6 chance of success. This increases by 1-in-6 chance per additional Dunerider template you have. When you fail this check, in addition to other consequences, you fall off your board. 

(A) Dunespeech

You know the strange dialect of sandsurfers, called Dunespeech. It mainly consists of the terms "radical," "gnarly," and "dude," along with subtle variations within the ubiquitous Shaka Sign. All duneriders know the Dunespeech, and it's said communications between them can be incomprehensible to the point of seeming to be encoded. 

It's also possible, though perhaps unlikely, that certain intelligent creatures within the Seas—like dune dolphins or hellbenders—might respond better to those that know the Dunespeech, or even speak a little themselves. 

(B) Evasion

When you end your turn, for every 10 ft. you are from where you started this turn, you gain +1 Defense, up to a maximum of +6. This extra Defense lasts until the beginning of your next turn.

The key thing here is displacement vs. distance travelled; it's 10 ft. from where you started, so just surfing in a circle and ending up in the same spot gets you nothing. 

(B) Catch the Dune

If you fall onto sand, you ignore falls that are 20 ft. or less. If it's more than 20 ft., you can make a duneboarding roll (that currently-3-in-6 roll) to negate the falling damage. If it's more than 100 ft., you have disadvantage on the roll, and your duneboard will shatter on impact. 

(C) Soul Arch

For the next minute after successfully performing an especially sweet stunt, you have advantage on Charisma checks towards those who witnessed your stunt. 

(C) Top Glide

When you crest the top of a dune, you can make a stunt check to leap and then glide through the air on your board; while in the air in this way, you have double movement speed, but generally cannot turn.

If you use 15 of your 45 ft. of movement to make it to the top of a dune and then leap off it, you have 30 ft. of movement remaining, and thus can glide for 60 ft. 

(D) Shoot the Tube

Once per day, you can, for a round, boost your speed by an amount equal to the highest dune you have surfed down. (You must keep track of the highest dune you've surfed down.) If you've surfed down a 50-foot dune, you can boost your speed by 50 ft. for a round. 

(D) The Big One

Once, you can declare some large dangerous psammitic phenomenon (like one of God's Sanding Blocks, or a firestorm, or one of the bigger sand-geysers) to be The Big One. Until that phenomenon leaves or ceases, you can surf across the surface or outside of it as if it were a regular dune. 

--

As always, this is largely untested. If you get a chance to try it, tell me!

Why GLOG & How GLOG

Written for Oblidisideryptch's challenge/appeal/question thing floating around #glog-ghetto. 

Why GLOG?

In short, because GLOG is the most OSR of the OSR systems. 

I'm a relatively recent convert to the OSR scene. I only started getting interested in the scene around a year ago, and I've only been playing and running OSR games for the past few months, barring a couple of Knave oneshots. 

Here's why I got into the OSR, coming from a deep-5e background:

1. Lower-stakes stories, but higher tension. You've got fewer hitpoints, lower levels, and less gold, but the bits and pieces you do earn are all the sweeter. 
2. Simplified rules. There's less fiddly bits, there's less page-flipping, there's less crunch between you and the game. 
3. Flexibility, and ease of hacking. People in the 5e space (and parts of the indie/storygame space, tbh) get very squirrelly and defensive about hacking. I hacked a lot of 5e, and it took a lot of convincing to get people to come on board. In the OSR, hacking is the norm; it would be weird to run a game that was entirely by-the-book.
4. Community, and more specifically the broad range of hacks and adventures and options available. Yeah, 5e's got the DM's Guild and stuff, but the OSR has people churning out good free content near-constantly.
5. WOTC is shitty. Yes, the OSR has problems with this (some of the same ones, too, like the Stricken One), but because it's decentralized, it's lot easier to cut out the bad and keep the good.

Of the popular OSR systems (at least the ones I'm aware of), GLOG does these points best. Just to go down the list rapidly:

1. GLOG is always high tension, because your HP is always low. Convictions drive your story. The tech is low. Lots of OSR games do this, but some don't (@DCC).
2. Other than Knave and WoDu (both of which I quite like), GLOG has the best words-to-usefulness ratio I've seen of just about any OSR system. It's compact, it's clean, it's pretty clear. You can hand someone the OG GLOG PDF and they'll get a handle on things quickly. Compare this to, say, OSE, where there's lot of arcana to wade through, let alone something Shadow of the Demon Lord.
3. GLOG is deeply, deeply flexible. The base rules are mostly pretty "OSR-standard," which means you can bolt on almost anything to them, tweak them around in lots of different ways, and even write full hacks, and the game will still hold up. It's robust, partially because it's so short, but mostly because it's just well-designed.
4. Community. Out of all of the OSR sub-scenes, GLOG is far and away the most active I've seen. New hacks come out every month, and new classes come out of every week, if not every day. People who play GLOG always make their own versions, and then usually release those versions to the public. It means there's always people discussing the game, and there's always new and interesting things happening.
5. As far as I know, Arnold's not a shitty person, and neither are any of the other well-known GLOG people, like Skerples. So that puts us ahead of WOTC, Lamentations, and whatever Frog God's publishing these days. 

So yeah. GLOG embodies the things I like about the OSR the most. Also, it's free, and it's got a funny name. 

How GLOG?

Step 1. Read the original GLOG, plus the Goblin Guts and the Wizard bits. Make sure to read the theory sections at the beginning and end. 

Step 2. Read some other OSR stuff. Some theory-ish stuff, like Principia Apocrypha; some systems, like Knave, World of Dungeons, B/X (don't buy this, find a copy), Jared Sinclair's 6e, Troika!, and something by Kevin Crawford; some adventures & settings, like Veins of the Earth, the Stygian Library, the Ultraviolet Grasslands, Kidnap the Archpriest, and Barrowmaze; and some classes for GLOG, like the Gothic Villain, the Zouave, Many Goblins, and the Rethought Cleric. Of all of that, see what appeals and sticks with you.

Step 3. Keeping the theory in mind as best you can, smash the systemic stuff from the other games you've read into GLOG. Tweak rules, adjust numbers, and (re-)write whole sections, if you need to.

Step 4. Using whatever OSR monstrosity you've just cobbled together, run through some of the adventures and settings you read earlier. 

Step 5. When things break in a session, adjust them and keep going. Afterwards, try to see why they broke, and fix it. 

Step 6. Repeat steps 2-5, continuing to read more theory, systems, and content. 

At some point, things will stop breaking constantly, and your game will hold together mostly stable. When this happens, you're free to start adding on really wild stuff, which is when it gets fun.

This all sounds kind of flippant, but really, there's no better way to get into GLOG (and the OSR in general), than to just grab whatever's free or cheap, read it, and start playing. It may sound like a trial by fire, and it kind of is, but things won't ever go that wrong.  

My GLOG

It's called the SLOG and it's here!

Sludge GLOG, also know as the SLOG

I, too, have made a terrible decision, and I, too, have made my own GLOG hack. It's called Sludge GLOG; also known as the SLOG. It doesn't acronymize correctly, but I refuse to call it "the Sludge Laws of Gaming" or something.

What is Sludge GLOG?

It's a GLOG hack. Here's a non comprehensive list of what it does, particularly things that might be a little bit different:

1. It's roll-under-stat for checks and saves, but roll-high for attack rolls. I've always hated the weird inverse-subtraction math you have to do in base GLOG, so now it's this. It's kind of bullshit to have both roll-under and roll-high, but it is what it is.
2. A skill system where skills add a 1dX to your stat when you make a relevant check, and X increases as you use the skill more (kind of, there's more to it than just that). It means skills are independently-tracked from levels, it means they're never not-good (like x-in-6 skills can be), and it means they aren't a separate roll of the dice from the d20. I might do a longer post talking about them at some point.
3. Some crunchier armor and damage rules, adjusted from my earlier two earlier posts (damage, armor). Armor has this fancy value called a Damage Threshold, which is separate from AC, that makes it so weapons sometimes deal no damage, and then there are some fun riffs and tweaks based on those. 
4. A death & dismemberment table that's big and bloody, and a slightly-adjusted way of doing negative HP (there's a ticking-clock element, so if you don't instantly die, the severity of the D&D table roll influences how fast you'll die afterwards. It's good).
5. A very slight adjustment to how convictions work, meaning you carry more conviction points, which are now called vincere to distinguish them from Convictions themselves.
6. A fatigue system cooked up by me and Kahva that's robust and easy to understand, but also has some depth and flexibility to it. 
7. An actual equipment table, so you don't have to use Knave or something in your GLOG game.
8. Some fancy woodcut art by Albrecht Dürer and some other dead people in the public domain.
9. It's still only 11 pages, including the front matter!

Here is the link:

Sludge GLOG, aka the SLOG

And here's the link to the version without background art, in case it's hard to read or you want to be gentle on your printer.

You should try it! I think it's cool! And tell me what you think if you do get a chance to test it out!