Sweating the Small Stuff
Seven new systems, a 3D map of the Wood, and heroes the size of your thumb
Hello Adventurers
Seven systems went live this week, and the batch has no business hanging together as well as it does. We have transhuman secret agents who back up their minds and resleeve into new bodies, hard sci-fi where the players draw the star map before anyone rolls a die, and a pair of survival games at opposite ends of the scale. One is set inside the stomach of a monster that swallowed civilization; the other stars thumb-sized heroes who treat a sewing needle as a greatsword. One week, one grab bag, seven very different tables. Let’s get into it.
New System Entries This Week
A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine!: EN Publishing’s thirty-page comedy engine; talking apes, time-traveling ninjas, and cartoon cowboys save the day in a single session.
Belly of the Beast: Cruel scavengers pick through the digestive guts of a world-eating monster.
Diaspora: Hard sci-fi on the pre-Core Fate engine; build your slipstream star cluster at session zero.
Dungeons & Dustbunnies: Thumb-sized survivors carve out kingdoms in a ruined human household, where a cockroach is a boss monster.
Eat the Reich: A unit of vampire commandos drops on occupied Paris with one mission: drink Hitler dry.
Eclipse Phase (2nd Edition): Transhuman agents resleeve into new bodies to fight rogue AIs and existential threats across the solar system.
Open Legend: A genre-agnostic toolkit where exploding attribute dice drive heroes through any setting.
Feature Of The Week: Sanding and Subtitling
A couple of small frictions got smoothed off the browsing experience this week. The filter dropdowns for playstyle tags, system family, and supported languages now auto-focus their search box the instant you open them, so you can start typing Hexcrawl or Player-Only Rolls immediately instead of clicking into the field first. When you are scanning a list that keeps growing, skipping that extra click on every filter adds up fast.
One of my personal favorite features of the site is the compare tool. Check the box and see up to four systems side by side so you can weigh them directly without clicking back and forth. But it wasn’t exactly clear to a new user of the site what the tick-boxes on the cards actually do. I added a small subtitle to the site to call this feature out, and will track to see if the compare tool gets more use as a result.
Neither change moves a mountain, but both remove a small “wait, how does this work” beat between landing on the site and actually finding a game.
Worth A Bookmark: Optical Dolmenwood
If your table runs Dolmenwood, this one is for you. Optical Dolmenwood by Centaurion is a 3D interactive exploration tool built around the official hex map. It loads every hex entry (plus roads, rivers, and waypoints) and adds live party tracking and visibility mapping. Now you can run the hexcrawl as a moving picture instead of flipping between the map and the key. It’s pay-what-you-want, the base JSON map is a free download, with a $5 minimum for the full code. If you’re already wandering the Wood, it’s a bookmark that earns its place at the table.
Indie Of The Week: Dungeons & Dustbunnies
Dungeons & Dustbunnies by Castamar RPG Studio plays out at thumb height in the ruins of a giant human world. The civilization that built everything around you is gone, and what it left behind has become a hostile wilderness for the tiny survivors who now pick through it. You are one of those survivors, carving out a small kingdom among the leftovers.
The whole pitch lives in that change of scale. A sewing needle is a greatsword. A sugar ration is hard-won sustenance worth risking your life for. The monsters are the things that share the house with you, blown up to nightmare proportions. A cockroach is an armored boss, its chitin shrugging off ordinary weapons until you find the soft spot, and a simple house lizard becomes a fearsome dragon. The household map becomes a dungeon the moment you’re three inches tall and every familiar object becomes terrain, treasure, or threat.
Under the hood it’s deliberately featherweight, with a single Decrease Die that doubles as your health and steps down a size as you wear out. That’s enough engine to keep the scavenging tense without ever pulling focus from the setting. I also like the electricity-based Spark Magic system that requires you to haul around heavy batteries to literally ‘power’ your spells.
The trade-off for having setting, bestiary, and spells in seven pages is no advancement track, so characters don’t grow over a campaign so much as survive one. It’s for the table that wants a gonzo, beginner-friendly romp they can teach in five minutes and play tonight. You’re a thumb-sized adventurer staring down a cockroach the size of a tank, in a kitchen the size of a continent. Mind the broom.