Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Carved in Stone, subtitled “A Storyteller’s Guide to the Picts”, is a 160 page setting guide, by Brian Tyrell and Lizy Simonsen, with research by Dr Heather Christie. This is a massive book, with a huge number of other contributors, particularly illustrators. This is, effectively a historical sourcebook, in the guise of a setting guide to a fantasy game, from the perspective of a 7th century Pict (who are, for what its worth, the people who lived in Scotland in the 7th century). Or, perhaps, it’s a setting guide to a fantasy game, in the guise of a historical sourcebook? I’m not really certain — although if the concept of either compel you, or you’re a historian yourself perhaps you should skip the review.

I’m going to choose to breeze over part 1; this is the evidence, and an exploration of what academic choices and work went into this massive book. The mere existence of such a massive collaboration between academia and the roleplaying hobby in the form of such a well-illustrated and well-evidenced book, is absolutely phenomenal, and this section talk about that. But that’s not something I need to recap in detail, and so I’ll move on to the first section: Landscapes.

In Landscapes, we start to talk about the actual locations in Scotland. I like the highlighting choices here. Effectively we have a bolded sentence, the summary of the paragraph that comes next, so you have the short and long description of a feature. This is the first half of a spread; on the second, there are 3 detailed encounters, and 8 less detailed encounters. These are gorgeous, and evocative: “A goatherd finds the remains of a fire by the mountain trail, along with a few iron tools and bits of cloth. While gathering the scattered items, they pray for the soul who left them.”, for example. They conjure questions about the world, and the characters, lots for a referee to improvise and work from. Weather is expressed as an illustrated cycle, again, with both a more technical description and a poetic one. This is solid, if perhaps overly detailed, incorporation of the unique Scottish geography into gameable form.

Next up is Kingdoms. This is a combination of factions and the map and key, with “regions” being by specific people. It follows the same format as Landscapes, to excellent effect. It’s also often funny (at least to those a little familiar with the subject matter): “York. An up-and-coming town that bishops and merchants are keen to support. Perhaps in a decade it might be worth a visit.” Languages are covered, and are shown through colour and symbolism on the maps. I adore how bilingualism is expected, but that examples are given of what that would look like in everyday life. Trade and value is covered, but also the rules of negotiation and trust are discussed, as our power, responsibility, and the specifics of royalty.

Next up is Perspectives, which covers time, traditions, storytelling, celebrations and the like. Less concrete cultural considerations. These abandon the easy-to-run structure of the earlier chapters, mainly because the topics are a little more difficult to define. Most importantly to most referees, this covers magic, which covers spirits and the rules around them, how Christians think these are demons, how sorcerers weave magic into quartz stones and brew potions, Magi and their more powerful magic, as well as the role Christianity has in magic and in politics, including miracles, magic and saints. This implies a lot of potential magical complexity, that isn’t explored in depth here.

The final and longest section is Lives. This is the real stuff of the world, which you’ll be preparing yourself: Travel includes pros and cons of different methods of travel, random landmarks you might encounter while travelling, people you might meet. Then there are settlement generators. Then 7 detailed locations, to show what things could look like for the various types of settlements. Then lots more things that I honestly feel belonged in perspectives: Skills, food, medicine, fashion and art, more time on the symbol stones mentioned earlier, equipment and entertainment.

The appendices are a mixed bag; I think the text itself is meandering enough that many of these things could’ve been incorporated in their relevant sections. There’s more on law, medicine, trade and magic here that simply should have been in the main text. But there are also useful things that definitely belong in the appendices: Lists of names, for example. I get the overall feeling the appendix is a bunch of detail that they didn’t want to bog down the reader with, but thought were interesting enough to be “further reading”, and it ends up being just a little clumsy.

The layout is stellar; the art is vibrant and interesting. I’ve often opined the fact that there are too few roleplaying game books designed like children’s history books: This is that book. While it could be more navigable from an information design perspective — this is a curse that I suspect comes from the desire to communicate academic as well as game design information — I think the layout is just stellar; this is by far the most readable roleplaying game gazette I’ve ever read. It’s gorgeous. You could leave it on your coffee table.

My preference is for a more detailed and intertwined world; this isn’t that. But what it is, is a huge step up in detail in the best possible way, from most worlds designed to be mostly evocative and improvised upon. A recent example of the style is Empire of Hatred; but the detail here is far more supportive, and if you wish modules like that one were more detailed, this is an excellent choice.

Carved in Stone is strictly system agnostic, which may work for some people, and may not work for others. My own style, I could run this as easily as anything, with a little prep for stat blocks. That may not be as compatible with every referee’s style. Certainly, I think this would be extremely compatible with something like Wulwald which I reviewed last year and seems a no-brainer for the kind of world set here. The main clash with popular systems is the ambiguity with which Carved in Stone treats magic here. The big challenge, for me, is that there are loads of implied systems of complexity: Language, trade and negotiation, and reputation are examples. These are things that are often mechanised in OSR style games, but here are simply described. I think I’d need to develop my own systems for these, if I were to run Carved in Stone, which is a not insignificant commitment. But, if you have an abiding love for the subject matter, you might also consider that just a bit of fun. One massive, implied subsystem here is tale-telling, which gets a section with lots of detail, but that I really feel should be a significant mini-game — it feels a lot like boasts from Wolves Upon the Coast. Overall, I can understand the choice not to put this to a system, but I think it is far weaker for it. That said, I can see a world where the community crowd-sources a system to play this in, and if it gains popularity, I’m excited to see what the community does with all of these fascinating implied systems.

If you’re interested at all in the history of the British isles, Carved In Stone is probably one of the better books I’ve seen on said history. It’s also an excellent setting guide for an OSR style roleplaying game (or, I suppose, a traditional system like 5th edition), although the kind that leaves a lot of room for your own interpretation. If you love to take worlds and build your campaign around them, this is a hell of a world to build around. But there’s a lot of gaps by virtue of this being system-agnostic: A lot of important concepts here that you’ll need to figure out how to explore, a lot of things you’ll have to decide whether you consider important regardless of the import the book places on it. It’s a game that seems designed really well to take advantage of specific systems that you could adapt to its use: Wulfwald or Wolves Upon the Coast come to mind. It’s a book that you’ll want to study if you’re going to run it, but if you do, there’s so much power in the minutiae you’re going to be able to describe, and the writing is often gorgeous and assists you in communicating a lot of the strengths of the texts. This is a complex one, I think in terms of the tension between the academic or historical, and the game design or gameability, and every referee will fall in a different place. But if the concepts here are exciting to you, Carved in Stone will be a beautiful book to have on your coffee table, filled with great historical communication, even if you choose not to take the effort that is likely required to bring it to your table.

Idle Cartulary

Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.