His Majesty the Worm livetweet archive

03 Feb, 2025

When I got His Majesty the Worm in paper, I livetweeted me reading the book. I was pretty happy with my impression, but it's stuck on twitter so here it is, archived forever!

I’m pouring over His Majesty the Worm, I’ll make a thread about it chapter by chapter since it’s my twitter dot com and I do what I want.

Chapter 1: I’m very impressed with this basic rules presentation, particularly with the GM responses section. This might be the best way of describing exactly when to call for a test or not I’ve seen, tying the decision directly to the conversation itself is brilliant.

The framing of the tarot deck really shines through in the writing here. “Favor and disfavor” and “Bound by Fate” are familiar ideas really married well to the tarot.

A lot of these games come with a lot of ancillary advice to make the core mechanic work, but with just GM responses and Bound by Fate Josh has really expertly whittled it down to just the few necessary ideas.

Testing Fate in general seems like it has a lot of fun factor, it seems you’ll deciding whether or not to push fate a lot. Drawing pretty cards, making tough decisions, I love it!

Chapter 2: Like a lot of the NSR and OSR Heresy¹ games I like there’s a strong emphasis on Session 0 and collaborative creation. I particularly love the New Adventurer Checklist, it’s a particularly great procedure for introducing new characters and often missing!

All of this game’s PC beebles and mechanics feel great. At first blush I love Arête, the Languages, bidding Lore, and using Talents to learn them.

Part of me wants HMtW to have more confidence in the languages as they are the best I’ve seen in any game. But I imagine it calls out tracking Languages as optional because actual play often demanded it.

Chapter 3: Guild Rules! The sheet itself is so delightful, I’m grinning about it the Hobbit now. Love the self determined roles, great stuff.

Chapter 4: All fantasy games are owed their author’s Takes on men, elves, dwarves, and orcs. These slap. Critically Humans are actually have Things going on here and are my favorite. Josh’s writing really shines here, I love his little references and jokes like Rng god of chaos.

Chapter 5: While generic class systems aren’t to my taste², the Paths avoid several pitfalls. Using abstract paths gives more freedom to define your class with the motif you make. Path talents are punchy, no +1s here.

This is charming: HMtW assigns Magic-users to Charisma (Wands) and “Clerics” to Intelligence (Cups). Against type! But more historically accurate in a way. Add that to Cups being more accurately Scholars and I like the texture of the new Core 4.

As an aside, I’ve loved Bidding Lore to start, but this game keeps on giving clever uses for it. Wood elves can bid lore on super senses, Bookworms can bid lore on books they’ve read, Monster Hunters can bid lore on their hated foes. I think I’ll see this in other games soon!

Calling it a night here! Ants in the house! We’ve gotten through the character creation part and there’s a lot of sauce here I’m a fan. Really looking forward to digging into the procedures tomorrow!

we’re so back

Chapter 6: Finally the Crawling phase! And what a lovely machine this is! Walk into a new room? GM draws on an event table, checks the room descriptions, and marries them. I like how explicit this is about how this is where the fun is for the GM. And yes it sounds fun!

I want to highlight the social rules because the Emotion Heptagram is very cool and I’m really interested in seeing it at the table. I have no idea how well this works. That’s the exciting part.

Chapter 7 is the Combat rules. This is a bespoke 100% original system. I’m honestly a little blown away. It seems like it’s both mechanically tactical and totally open-ended. You still do 3 things a turn, but it’s got Magic: the Gathering responses and double-edged initiative.

It looks really really fun! I’ve got to give this a spin!³

The Example Challenge Phase does a lot of heavy lifting here. It answered several questions of mine. Shouldn’t there be a difficulty for avoiding traps? (yes, traps play cards) What does bending the rules look like? How does playing the Joker work? It’s really well written.

This is also finally a second dungeon game that uses input randomness and not output randomness! This is a big peeve of mine, I’ve always felt input randomness is underused in TRPGs but it’s here!

Chapter 8: Camp⁴. It’s pretty normal! I’m a little surprised there isn’t a cooking camp action spelled out! Maybe its elsewhere. There is an Overland Travel rules jumpscare in the middle. It looks quite good and the art on p139 ! 🥰

Chapter 9 is City! It’s a lot like camp. The syllable rule for prices is so fun!! I like using upkeep costs to dodge bean counting at the market. A lot of HMtW feels like it's written like a player’s strategy guide, that really shines in the equipment section.

Last Chapter of the rules proper is the GM section. To me the best pieces are What Are You Holding and the Campfire Discussions. This is a pretty tight GM section as GM sections go. Most of the work has already been done by telling the GM what to do explicitly.

Starting the Appendices: Sorcery! Lots of great work to marry the act of spell casting to the fiction. I love keeping the acorn in your mouth to stay as an animal and putting the pickled tongue in the dead guys mouth so he speaks. Surprisingly on the texty side for OSR spells.

Appendix B: Alchemy. Really fun, really simple. I like that you can see Josh’s penchant for quirky one off mechanics here, I like the Mimic potion that lets you talk to objects for 3 real time minutes. I struggle to drink beer so I’m not sure that rule will stand haha

Also a side note, the inspirations section says you could run a Dungeon Meshi campaign by replacing Alchemy with Cooking. I don’t really see how that would work. Alchemy is mostly about cool one use items earned later and that doesn’t jive with shared meals at camp to me.

To me the point of the cooking scenes in Dungeon Meshi is the character bonding not the meals. So I’d treat it as a Campfire Discussion with one cook or as a Fellowship scene with two cooks like often happens in DunMeshi. I have spoken.

Appendix C is the monstrous manual and I’m really really looking forward to finding out what an ungoat is. It’s been referenced multiple times and I’ve been dying for it

Monster stat blocks are pretty intense honestly! They’re a bit like if modern D&Ds were interested in effects and fiction not numbers. They look fun to play, but it’s a little hard to imagine running more than two of these at once (and I’d probably prefer just one).

Let’s test the monster mixer procedure! We start with a mythic monster. I choose the Catoblepas. We pick a theme and a threat for it. Beast Brute is good. Then we exaggerate one aspect. It’s breath is sickly usually, what if it was sweet? Its gumball eyes turns you to rock candy?

Sounds funny then scary so I love it. Based on our choices it has S6,P4,C1,W1. Let’s do HD 6/0. It has Tough & Fleet for Notes, Trample for Lesser Dooms, and we’ll give it Corrosive Attack as a candy breath for Major Dooms. Last we copy Gaze of the Cockatrice and it’s done!

The Bestiary as a whole is written really well. I love the dragon description and The Sporehulk is a walking Shadow of the Colossus reference and I love it. I’d need to play with these to learn how practical this is, I just can’t tell yet.

Appendix D is City Creation. I’ve been really excited for this part and the next part; not so secretly I’m a huge fan of dungeon creation procedures. This counts and I love this chapter? You just draw a few cards and place them to make a map.

The highlight here is the 56 different districts that each of the cards could represent. These are so evocative and many come with really fun minigames. There’s one where you state your hypothesis to a crowd of drunk philosophers, one where you make a spell with scrabble tiles.

There’s one where you’re read a prophecy and you try to make it come true, you can fight in the pit, you can prove your innocence with trial by combat. These rock and which ones you have and don’t will really shape a campaign.

Appendix E: Underworld Creation. The part I’ve been most excited for! Using tarot cards to map out the megadungeon is great, I love the mechanic of using the card numbers to determine alternate entrances and connections in between levels.

The bulk of this chapter is how to make the individual levels. While I’m a little disappointed there isn’t a hard procedure for this, I think what’s done here maximizes the possible weird dungeons you can make (ideal for this game about weird dungeons).

Frankly though, the 8 point checklist for what your dungeon needs is good enough that I won’t need a strict procedure. And besides, this comes with 21 different Dungeon Seeds, a map and a starting idea to kickstart you. I think you could run this game for years with only these.

There’s also the Tomb of Golden Ghosts! Procedures aren’t complete without a section where the author uses them to make an example. This is a very good example too, and is set around the most fun monster in the bestiary Brain Spiders. Shout out to Big Cheese and Justin Pepperoni.

And now we’re on the index and the reference pages. I had a really good time reading this and thank you if you followed my live rambling about the book over the past few days. ❤️

And thank you for reading this on my blog today!