Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Discarded Giant’s Boot

A one-page-dungeon by Marten ''Madzar'' Zarel level nill
Written for Copper Glog
  Have I spoken about Goblin Punch/Arnold K in this space before? There’s a little set of OSR bloggers from the wild early days of the movement, like Patrick Stuart and Skerples, who didn’t much prize playing games, but they loved writing about settings for games. I have my opinions about the values of their game products, but what these fellows were great at was making entertaining acid-trip quick-hit blog posts. Goblin Punch was this, but more, and the dude did seem to actually play games using his weird little hack called the Glog system. Superb writer, worth checking out. Sometimes he’d toss out even weirder systems though, like “copper glog” which is all about coinflips as chance resolution. Some poor fan took his thought experiment seriously and this thing is what results.
  You don’t need to work very hard to understand the plot of this one-pager. There’s this discarded giant boot, you see, that’s inhabited by goblins and holds an ogre deeper inside. The ogre has captured your princess. You are sent by a yellow exclamation point to go rescue said princess, enjoy your pointcrawl in the abstracted environment. The monsters to fight all have scribbly little illustrations.
  Won’t have to go too long here on what I liked, there’s a moderately charming bit where the ogre actually has stockpiled six princesses so far at his house, so you can leave with a princess swarm. Cute. Many monsters have little motive tags, like “sleepy and bored”, that give you direction for how to run them.
  It’s honestly difficult to figure out what can be improved once we get past the initial coinflip-RPG system being chosen, that crushing lack of complexity is felt when all challenges are just simple little fights or magical-tea-party storygame resolutions. The more imaginative bits, like goblin-herded giant fleas and a giant earwig, are harmed by the lack of systematic complexity. There are other problems that basically start requiring us to use multiple coins or coinflips to make bigger tables work, like the 4-entry random encounter table that just bites the bullet and makes a d4 using binary (00, 01, 10, 11). You’re kicking against the shackles here, and the shackles are pretty self-imposed. Art is yucky, goblin’s genitals aren’t needed thanks.
  The best use case here is as an educational product showing why you don’t take high-concept blog thought experiments seriously. I cannot conceive of even the bored theoretical shipwreck survivors with a single penny actually playing this for fun, the zinc in the penny is better used as an inefficient suicide capsule.
  Final Rating? */***** with an admiring nod if all this is a pointed rebuttal to the very notion of “Copper Glog”. Sadly, I don’t think it is…

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