The MSI Claw 8 AI+: A Review

 

MSI Claw 8 AI+ - The only Intel 7 Handheld in an "affordable" range worth looking at

I bought this one directly from MSI's online store back in...hmmm...end of October, I guess? It was a decision informed at least in part by watching way too many Youtube videos talking about the various MSI Claw types, and how this one was rather better than its predecessors. It was also incredibly difficult to find a preorder of the Xbox Rog Ally X that wasn't booked out to Xmas, although I did manage to snag a preorder on the Legion Go 2 by chance, and yes I did keep that preorder so I now have both the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and the LeGo 2, so I can definitely compare and contrast. Oh and I finally snagged the Xbox Ally X, so yeah, someone please stop me before I tank my credit card.

Anyway, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ is nice enough that I could in theory have stopped right there and I think I'd be able to say I had an ideal handheld PC gaming device and really didn't need to go any further. I bought it for $1049 on MSI's site, and for that price I definitely feel like I got my money's worth. Here's its specs, for the A2VMX Polar Frost edition: it is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, has an 8 inch IPS touch screen at 120hz, 80 Watt Hr battery, 1 TB M.2 SSD, and the thing has some noteworthy internal speakers.....like, the best speakers you can get in any of these handhelds. 

Because the device uses an Intel chip, it also can use the Intel XeSS upscaling technology. What I have discovered is that no only does this thing run everything I load on to it like a boss, it runs them with much nicer performance figures if the game in question supports XeSS....pretty much if the game has this option, you will want to enable it, its absolutely worth the boost.

In watching endless enthusiast videos about the MSI Claw 8 AI+, I have learned a few things. They are, as follows:

Not all Claws Are Alike: Not all MSI Claws are worthwhile. There is an A8 model which I think is mostly available outside of the US right now that utilizes the Z2 Extreme architecture from AMD, and that one allegedly does not run as well as other Z2 Extreme powered devices already on the market (Xbox Ally X and LeGo 2). 

There is an older 7 inch screen model of MSI Claw with an older model intel chip that is pretty cheap, but also completely not worth the price, allegedly. I am not going to grab one just to find out, I've already got a range of older devices collecting dust on my shelf, don't need one more.

Amazing Speakers: Everyone universally agrees that MSI Claw knows how to pack high quality speakers into a device, and this one demonstrates that amply; the MSI Claw 8 AI+ (I specifically keep using the proper name because the MSI Claw naming conventions are damned confusing) has amazing speakers, absolutely top notch for a device of this size.

Top  Performance: The performance metrics of the MSI Claw 8 AI+ are generally better, sometimes slightly, sometimes by a wide margin, than every other device on the market except maybe Legion Go 2. There was a general concern for a while that Intel's coverage of the graphics processor would lag if the device wasn't successful, but I think based on the fairly stellar performance of this device that Intel must be keeping up.

Okay Ergonomics: The device is fairly comfortable to hold and use, but it could use better "grips" on the sides, as the device can be tedious to keep holding for long play sessions. A popular accessory for the device is a set of side grips you can snap on (these can be 3D printed but a zillion Chinese companies also sell them for varying prices) and they make a huge difference in improving the comfort of the device for long play sessions.

Aesthetics: It's either pretty or ugly depending on your personal aesthetics. I happen to have the newer Arctic White model, which I think looks pretty distinct and cool, but I can concede the older one that came out earlier in 2025 with a mud-brown coloration was not the prettiest.

Hard to Find: I bought it directly from MSI, and I do see it is intermittently available on some websites like Best Buy now, but this thing can be hard to find in stock.

The Micro SD Card Reader Works: this may sound odd, but it's not; the Micro SD card reader works well and you get fast transfer rates. I have had no problem with this one with any games loaded on the card, unlike the Xbox ROG Ally base model and original ROG Ally models. Worth noting that I am using a Micro SD Express card with it; it's not an Express card reader, but it still works and the transfer rate is still better than a normal SD card.

The RGB Lighting Lights up the buttons: it's actually the only handheld that does this, and it is very cool to have the ABXY buttons illuminate like this.

So why get this device over any of the other handhelds? I would suggest that Intel's Core Ultra 7 processor is generally better at this than the AMD Z2 Extreme, although that chip is pretty amazing, too. While I did try the Microsoft FSE experience on this, I found that MSI Claw works better in regular mode. The Claw's own software is "okay" but not great. Still, it doesn't get in the way, either, which is important.

Overall in terms of raw performance and general grip comfort, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ is a stellar device. I would argue that it is a superior product to the Xbox ROG Ally X, but as I am still testing that one out I will reserve judgement there until later in the year.....the comfort of built in controller grips cannot be understated. But the ability to load up and comfortably play pretty much anything with decent graphics and a nice 8 inch screen with good color depth and amazing speakers cannot be ignored, either.

I hooked up the Claw to a docking station and used it on my external 2K monitor, both for general tasks and for gaming. It ran very smoothly and without issue, so it actually could work as a "big screen" replacement if so desired. I bought a slim bluetooth keyboard and mouse which I connected to it and it worked great....in fact a plurality of my blog posts in the last 6-8 weeks were written on the Claw with this setup. I have since disconnected it but only because I discovered that there is, in fact, one device which does the "big screen" experience even better: the Legion Go 2.

On the Claw I'm currently playing Deadzone Rogue, Atomfall, The Outer Worlds, Division 2, Hail to the Rainbow and The Callisto Protocol and pleased to be making progress in games I have long ignored despite having them in the Steam collection. I also loaded the Xbox app on it and have tried out Forza Horizon 5 and Starfield on it, to great effect. To contrast with the much lower-powered Xbox ROG Ally base model, it probably took a couple minutes for those two games to load into the device, though they ran fine (Starfield was at the edge of "acceptable") but on the Claw they both loaded up almost as fast as on the laptop, and ran like beasts; I capped the framerates at 60 on both, but they otherwise ran at the 1200p resolution of the screen just fine in high graphics settings. Pretty slick.

So barring when I talk about the Legion Go 2 and the Xbox ROG Ally X, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ (that one specifically! Not the others!) is a solid A and if you shop around I have spotted a few in the wild on places like Ebay for less than the $1049 price tag, so you may be able to get it on a deal if you're willing to pay that sort of cash. If you do get one, keep in mind I think it works best as a Windows device, and I have not heard of many having much success with SteamOS on it, probably due limited support for this chipset in Linux.

One last item: you may be wondering about the AI+ element of this device. It's a feature that exists, and supposedly the AI component can help modulate your play experience. I followed an online tutorial designed to maximize the actual power and output of the MSI Claw and killed the AI feature, which was resoundingly considered to do a poor job in this regard. I still seem to get decent battery life even with playing it on "max" TDP and no AI regulation.

Next! We'll chat Steam Deck OLED and its viability in 2026, then the Steam Deck successor of 2025, the Legon Go S.

The Xbox ROG Ally Base Model - A Short Review

 So after some deliberation I decided to make January the month I obsess on the blog on my side-hobby as a handheld PC gaming enthusiast. I have some credentials to this, albeit with the caveat that there are like a millions Youtubers out there who love filming their handheld devices and running endless performance metrics on them. I mainly like the handhelds for gaming, and I tend to go for the vibes when it comes to assessing their performance and value to my personal experience. This means that I may find a device more fun and engaging than reviewers do because I am far less worried about how many FPS I am squeezing out of the device than I am whether it feels good to play and the game seems to run smoothly to my eyes.

So with that in mind, here's my quick review of the first such device of the 2025 crop that I shall dive in to: the Xbox ROG Ally - the base white model! AKA the one with the budget performance specs.

Xbox ROG Ally Base Model Specs: From the ASUS website: Ryzen Z2 A processor  2.8GHz (6MB Cache, up to 3.8 GHz, 4 cores, 8 Threads); GPU is AMD Radeon Graphics Card (integrated? not sure); 7 inch, 1080p IPS display, touch screen, 120hz refresh 500 nits brightness, and AMDFreesync Premium

The Xbox ROG Ally base model is a decent budget priced handheld gaming PC. It runs MSRP $600 but you can find it on sale for cheaper usually. This new line of ASUS handhelds are equipped with the best form factor for comfortable handheld gaming on the market; they are far more satisfying to play on the go than almost every other device, and I find only the Legon Go S to be comparatively friendly to the hands (also the Playstation Portal if you want to count that). 

It's Xbox marketing will disappoint a lot of people who will find the Windows Full Screen Experience (FSE) a shallow replacement for an actual Xbox experience, but it does run a surprising number of top tier games just fine....notably Microsoft published titles like Horizon 5, Gears 5 and Gears Reloaded, Halo Master Chief Collection, etc. all run pretty well on this, but other games may struggle. It's hampered by only 512GB of storage, and the expansion slot for an SSD is often insufficient for running modern games, but I use the SSD slot to load older games and less demanding titles. Bottom line: if your gaming experience revolves around Hades and Hollow Knight, this handheld is a great choice (but so is a Steam Deck). If you want to run games curated by Microsoft to run well (like Gears of War and Forza Horizon 5) it is also a good choice. Other graphically-intensive titles will be all over the place in terms of quality, performance and feel, however. 

I set up Steam, GOG and Xbox's platforms on the device and it ran each just fine. I ran in to repeated issues with how the Windows FSE switches between the storefronts, and whether the storefronts would drop to the background while playing games, which was often so frustrating I would have to kill the FSE mode to get things to play nice, however.

Both Xbox ROG Ally models have the standard 7 inch IPS screen common on prior Asus handhelds. The screen is totally fine, and looks crisp, but it pales when you compare it to the infinitely superior screens of the Legion Go series, especially the Go 2's OLED screen. Good news though: if you are not insane like I and other enthusiasts are, and just buy a single handheld device, I don't think you will be bothered by the screen size.

I tried the Xbox ROG Ally out on a dock with a hookup to a 1080p big screen to see how it functioned as a dockable work station and the answer is: not very well. It showed obvious performance issues in jumping to tasks, the keyboard and mouse, and compared to other handhelds (even the original ASUS Rog Ally which I used this way constantly) it was an inferior experience. So the Z2 A processor is just not great at this sort of docking setup, I can confirm.

Another problem with the device is actually a FSE problem. Microsoft's handheld solution does not play well with the controls on this thing, and I often find that while in FSE mode, the game I am trying to boot in to does not automatically pop up, or the control scheme changes from gamepad to keyboard, or while in a game it will also detect button pushes and activate other features or games in other storefronts. This is a problem that uniquely impacts this device, though some of the issues are found on other handhelds as well (MSI Claw notably), enough so that my preference is to disable the FSE entirely in order to enjoy a game uninterrupted.

Get this thing on sale if you can find it and want a Steam Deck replacement, and aren't too worried about high end performance (say, you prefer indie titles and older titles for gaming). But if you want performance and can save up to get something better (such as the Xbox Ally X) I suggest you do that. Spoiler for later blog posts: my personal preferred handheld is the Legion Go 2, but you can buy like 2 and 1/2 of these for the same price so YMMV. Solid C as a rating. 

Games I am playing on my Xbox ROG Ally currently: Forza Horizon 5, Gears 5, Deadzone Rogue, Berserk Recharged, Hollow Knight and Hades (I am waaaay behind on the last two franchises, trying to catch up). I have also loaded up some older titles like Hunted: The Reckoning and Bioshock 2 and had very satisfying play experiences on the device.

Will I still have this handheld by 2027? I don't know. It's really comfortable to play, and I like a lot when it works well, but literally everything it does well other devices do as well or better, and the Xbox ROG Ally X also exists, and it has the same comfort in play. So I may end up gifting it to a friend or relative. 

Death Bat's 2026 Predictions

 Okay, some predictions for 2026 to give me fodder at the end of the next year as I marvel at just how inaccurate I was:

Tabletop Gaming Prediction: gaming as a hobby will remain healthy

Take a look at ENworld's 2026 Most Anticipated Poll here. Holy cow, I recognize or know of 13 of the games listed, and 6 I only know indirectly from the IPs they are covering (Invincible, Assassin's Creed, etc.). The rest are all interesting mystery boxes. I am presuming this high volume of titles scheduled for 2026 is a sign of a healthy and diverse array of options in the hobby.

Although I don't know a lot about many of the listed games, one thing I don't see is very many suggesting a D&D 5E or D20 compatibility origin...maybe one or two by name I can tell, and it does also look like some venerable OSR games are getting refreshes in 2026. 

All told, I think it is safe to say tabletop RPGs will continue to be very popular. It helps that, regardless of the economic dumpster fire the rest of the world turns in to, that RPGs as a hobby are ultimately very cheap and easy to enjoy, with the highest dollar to hour of entertainment value ratio you will find pretty much anywhere.

Computer Gaming Prediction: the dumpster fire is just getting started, but indies and AA will thrive

Unlike tabletop RPGs, computer gaming can be very expensive on the hardware side, and it really looks like there's a quiet apocalypse brewing due to the severe impact AI technologies are having on both the programming side of things and the scarcity issue with hardware. I think more than any industry visible to the public game developers will find this hits them hardest of all, as big studios and their publishers scale back manpower for AI, AI sucks up all the RAM cards out there, and people continue to rebel against flagrant use of slop in games, especially Games as a Service. Oh, and Microsoft and competitors will push hard to get everyone to go full cloud gaming, with the idea being subscription-basd "own nothing" models as the new future.

Meanwhile, this will give more space for smaller indie titles to bloom, and we may see more AA titles get traction as the really big triple-A developers get stymied in their shift to AI. Also, everyone will be relying on their currently owned hardware, as sales plummet because people can't afford decent rigs anymore, and the cheap alternatives (seriously, it looks like 8 GB RAM and Core I5 processors are all that's affordable at this very moment) are just too low powered to be worth it. In short....its going to suck in the gaming space while Big Tech tries to make it all about AI and freemium services where you play on the cloud. 

Okay, that's it for my conservative predictions for 2026! Now for some personal predictions:

1. I will play a lot more Pathfinder and Starfinder in 2026, due primarly to the fact that I am getting old and stuck in my ways.

2. I will get at least one campaign in with Tales of the Valiant because I know the Player's Guide 2 will be an icebreaker for my group that feels TotV doesn't have enough player content yet.

3. I will run another Mothership campaign because Mothership is fun.

4. My son will run another Alien RPG campaign and I will lose at least three characters as is tradition.

5. I will try and might even succeed in running a new BRP campaign and Call of Cthulhu campaign.

6. I will manage to get at least some game time in with 13th Age 2nd Edition, but whether it usurps Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant remains to be seen.

7. I will run some Cypher System when the new edition arrives, assuming it arrives in 2026. MCG has a pretty good track record on fulfilling most kickstartrs timely though so I feel confident this will happen.

8. I will continue to get an abnormal level of gaming done due to the excess of handheld PCs I own. I will probably try to sell a couple of them as I only really need two now: the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and the Legion Go 2. And I have a soft spot for the Legion Go S.

Okay! That's it! See you all in the New Year!

The Death Bat's 2025 Year in Review

2025 - Oh What a Long and Unpleasant Year

I have a confession to make, one which I think is a sentiment others might feel: when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it can have a real impact on one's desire to enjoy simpler pleasures in life. Gaming, for example, requires a certain amount of personal time investment in both effort, thought and emotional commitment. It can be very hard to provide that level of commitment when Real World problems are sapping that time and energy away from you. So while this is not a blog where I write about all the other crap going on in the Real World, it is a blog where I try to focus exclusively on hobbies, interests and escapism...and this year was a challenging experience. I mean, I finally had to start assigning myself a quota on blog posts to force myself to write, because I could feel myself slipping away from these little entertainments in life. Hell, I got rid of my Saturday gaming night this year, because I simply didn't have enough energy left in me due to the interference of the Real World.

But luckily this is not a blog about the Real World, so lets talk about the noteworthy aspects of gaming in 2025:

Deathbat's Game of the Year for 2025: Starfinder 2E

Who knew....I really love this new edition of the game, and it is 100% compatibility with Pathfinder 2E. The new design and focus makes it a much easier and more accessible experience, and a real pleasure to GM. I am looking forward to running this one more than any other game (except maybe 13th Age 2E) in 2026.

The RPG I Played the Most in 2025: Pathfinder 2E

Close runner up is Mothership, followed by Tales of the Valiant and then there was that D&D 5.24 campaign I ran to give it a fair shake. 

Best New Sourcebooks in 2025: BRP Creatures, Monster Core 2 and Monster Vault 2

A three-way tie! Both Pathfinder's Monster Core 2 and Tales of the Valiant's Monster Vault 2 came out this year, and not a moment too soon. I love the updated stuff in the Monster Core 2, and I really love the Monster Vault 2, which is entirely new stuff, something I didn't think was possible given how many monster books Kobold Press has already come out with. Meanwhile there is the BRP Creatures book, which provides at long last a decade's long "most wanted" book for Basic Roleplaying, now providing enough content that a person could effectively replace their D&D life with BRP if they wanted to.

Best RPG I Didn't Get a Chance to Play in 2025: 13th Age 2nd Edition

I have only been able to read the PDFs, still waiting for physical books, but I am very much loving this mildly revamped new edition of one of my favorite D&D iterations, and it could not have come a moment too soon....I predict I will run a lot of 13th Age in 2026.

2025 PC Game of the Year: Deadzone Rogue

Look, there's not a lot to Deadzone Rogue, it's a FPS game about a dude on a derelict spaceship who has to solve the mystery of what's going on by shooting a million rogue robots and mutants. Every time he dies a computer recreates him and he starts over, but luckily carries his experience forward. It runs like a charm on every handheld I own which means its an essential game for my travel kit.

2025 PC Game I Played the Most: Tom Clancy's Division 2

Per my Steam metrics it turns out I have played this game a ton every single month. I did an entire second playthrough this year, in fact, and am working on the DLC expansions that came out. I like it, and similar to Deadzone Rogue it runs on all my handhelds like a charm (fair disclosure: I have not tried running it on the Xbox Rog Ally base model, but I may try it just to see; its surprising how well this device works with games, actually).

2025 Best Game I Played This Year That Was Not New: Little Nightmares I and II

Yeah, I tried them out on a lark and ended up loving them. Finally about to start the newest one. I understand purists don't like the new one as much since it not a continuation of I and II, but let's be honest, by the end of I (which II is a prequel to) left your little raincoat-clad survivor as Death Incarnate, so I am not sure where they'd have gone with an ending like that.... 

2025: The Year of the Next Generation of Handheld PCs

This year we got the Lenovo Legion Go S, the Xbox-themed Asus Rog Xbox Ally series, the Lenovo Legion Go 2, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and also I understand that all the usual suspects still pump out very nice high end (and high priced) handhelds, such as OneXplayer. Both of my Steam Decks suffered catastrophic failures this year, one of which was clearly a hard drive failure, and for my OLED model I am still trying to figure out what happened if it is recoverable. This motivated me to find replacements. First I sold my old Asus Rog Ally original model, then sold my Legion Go original model, which went to a good home. Then I snagged a SteamOS edition Lenovo Legion Go S with the Z1 Extreme chip, bought my wife an Asus ROG Ally X, and then as the year closed out I managed to get in succession (yes, I have a problem) a MSI Claw 8 AI+, Xbox Rog Ally base model, and a Lenovo Legion Go 2. After the Legion Go 2 I decided I was done for now; there was no purpose to getting the Xbox Rog Ally X model which was inferior to both the MSI Claw and the LeGo 2 (as the fans call it).

Oh yeah, and the family upgraded to the Switch 2 when it came out. My son uses it exclusively as a Pokemon device, but my wife plays a lot on it. I continue to enjoy Switch 2, even though I am not really a good Nintendo guy, but I concede....I really love the new Kirby games that came out on it. 

This may sound excessive....and it is. I could have stopped with the Legion Go S which does everything I want, but I really enjoy messing around with this handheld tech, and I know it goes back to my youth when I would dream about the idea that one day this level of gaming fidelity in a handheld model could ever exist. Seriously, I was thinking about how cool handheld devices were when I was ten or eleven years old, and I have owned pretty much every handheld device for gaming that ever came out in the following decades. It's an illness, I know.

I'll probably be writing more about my experiences with this new generation if Intel 7 and Z2 Extreme powered chips in January. 

2025: The Year of the Walled Tabletop Gaming Garden and the Collapse of D&D 5.24 as the One Game to Rule Them All

   This year really saw the division rise between gamers who play D&D 5E, and those who play D&D 5.24, Tales of the Valiant, Daggerheart, Pathfinder 2E, or "insert here." The end result of the WotC OGL kerfuffle from two years back has born much fruit, but gaming now feels a bit corralled. Of these different options I feel like Paizo is working hardest to keep their corner of the market, as if Kobold Press, while D&D 5.24 moves forward on the momentum of a fanbase that is divided in a way I haven't really seen since the 4E days, albeit with less vitriol....probably because 5.24 didn't really change enough to merit anger, but what it did change just feels pointless, unfun or stupid. The number of times I have read an argument about why 5.24's method of "all humanoids are represented by a generic set of NPC stat blocks" is just fine, actually, and the system doesn't have any depth in stat blocks so there is totally no difference between a thug or scout and an orc warrior or lizardfolk is totally normal; the argument for the fans is literally, "The game isn't deep enough, get over it." Meanwhile, an even slightly more thoughtful design on the game could have simply included the customization by species rules from the original 5E DMG and it would have solved everyone's problem here, even mine. Unfortunately almost all of the changes in 5.24 ultimately feel like this: poorly thought out, solving a nonexistent problem, or tackling the problem (if there was one) poorly. I suspect 2026 will see D&D collapse further, and I hope the Daggerheart guys, Paizo and Kobold Press are there to scoop more players up.

2025: If Tabletop was a Hot Mess, Computer Gaming was a Dumpster Fire

From Games as a Service models collapsing to Microsoft publicly trying to murder the Xbox Console in favor of their Game Pass subscription model, to developers taking flack for using AI tools in their development, while other developers use AI generated voices to replace voice actors, its just a hot mess. To be clear: AI (or rather, the programs such as LLMs which are coming out of generative designs) as a tool for programmers to use makes sense to me. But the thing that freaks people out the most is when it looks like AI is used to replace human creativity; because the only people who don't seem to recognize slop for what it is appear to be Big Tech. (EDIT: That's not fair to Big Tech, they know exactly what they are doing, which is theft; it's the tech bros who will argue that slop is fine actually and not theft.)

On top of all this, the rapid development of AI Data Centers are causing RAM shortages and price spikes, and making the prospect of affordable computers in 2026 look dim. Just in the last two months you can see prices spike, and I'm actually really happy I managed to both upgrade my own personal tech and do a ton of hardware upgrades at my place of business earlier in the year, before the prices went out of control. You can find cheap laptops and desktops now, sure, but those machines have specs that were embarrassing in 2019, let alone now. 

2025: Was a Year of All Time

It sure was. I'd like to think things will be better for 2026.....but yeah, I don't think it's going that way. I think 2026 will unfortunately be the year that makes us look back on 2025 and go "Wow, remember when all the stuff we were dealing with in 2025 was just silly stuff like dumb game issues, short sighted and malicious Big Tech decisions driven by accelerationist philosophies, corporate greed and cowardice, life in a kleptocracy and a never ending river of AI slop? Yeah those were great times."

The Twelfth GM Inspiration: A Suggested Reading and Resource List

The Twelfth GM Inspiration: A Suggested Reading and Resource List

For my final blog post on GM Inspirations I am going to offer up my "top ten" list of additional books I keep on the shelf because they are great sources of inspiration and ideas for gaming. Each of these tomes have served me well over the years, and I will try to manage links for everything that can be found somewhere online:

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

Written by Alberto Maguel and Gianna Guadalupi, this is a fantastic resource of imaginary places from myth, legend and fiction. You could do worse than to have this book on hand, it is an excellent resource for inspiration, and practically any article in the book could provide the framework for a game or campaign. 

A Guide to the Ancient World

This venerable classic by Michael Grant has been in my collection for decades. This particular tome is all about actual places and locations in antiquity, and provides an excellent resource for historical gaming. It can also provide inspiration for names, ideas on fictional locations in your own setting, or ways to reinterpret the history behind actual locations into a fictional framework.

The Seventy Great Mysteries of the Ancient World 

This is a more recent work headed by the ubiquitous Brian M. Fagan (one of the premiere popular archaeology writers, almost all of his books are worth a read). It's a fantastic well-illustrated overview of seventy real world archaeological sites, concepts and mysteries, complete with lots of photos and illustrations, the history on each subject, and often maps when possible. Many of the entries look at the real known history behind specific legends and myths, ancient texts and are extremely valuable for a GM looking for real world myth and fact to blend in to a game.

The Phantom Atlas

This tome by Edward Brooke-Hitching is a excellent resource on pretty much every weird notion that made its way into the cartography of the old world, whether it was steeped in legend, propaganda, a misunderstanding or outright fictions scribed on to maps. Every chapter in this book is a Pulp adventure or historical game waiting to happen.

Medieval Folklore

This book is a deep read, but it is very much a guide to what it claims on the tin, and if you are specifically looking for inspiration for a medieval period campaign, or one inspired by the period, you may well find this book full of useful ideas and concepts. 

Giants, Monsters & Dragons

Carol Rose's encyclopedia of monstrous beings is a lovely resource with tons of useful information on the imaginary beasts of the world. It's main downside is many entries degenerate into name-listing, but as a resource to identify the origins of a given beast it can be incredibly helpful. 

The Deeper Dive List: these books are all valued in my collection but will require more time and reading investment....but the knowledge gleaned will definitely prove inspiring to you:

Magic in the Ancient World

Written by Fritz Graf, this is is a very detailed analysis of magic and how it was perceived in antiquity. A fascinating read, exceptional in its depth and useful for Call of Cthulhu and games which want realistic magical concepts in them; a fun contrast with today's modern day magic systems that are primarily a product of video games.

Shamanism

Written by Mircea Eliade, one of the pre-eminent French anthropologists of the mid twentieth century, his work on shamanism and its many variations in different cultures is a must-read for students of anthropology but also happens to be a valuable resource for understanding the way people imagined and interacted with the spiritual aspects of life in antiquity and in archaic cultures. Mircea Eliade wrote several excellent books on religion and magic, but Shamanism is the definite must-read.

Seafaring Lore & Legend

Peter D. Jean's treatise on maritime myths, legends and occasional facts is a fun read, but because it is more of a general tome on the subject with discreet chapters and topic it is slightly less useful as a general resource. It is a fun read, though, and provides a lot of inspiration for what may happen in a maritime themed campaign setting.

The Golden Bough

Hey, if you want to read a fascinating book full of interesting observations (and arguably still not too out of date), as well as one of the books actually on a sanity-loss inducing list in Call of Cthulhu that is a real book, then read James Frazier's unabridged seminal work on magic and myth. Well worth it, and surprisingly readable. I love this book so much I somehow have three copies on my shelf and one in my ebook collection, including a rare copy that is over eighty years old. 

Okay! That's it for my GM Inspiration posts for December. What to do for next month.....hmmm....

The Eleventh GM Inspiration: Archaeology

The Eleventh GM Inspiration: Archaeology

Similar to the post on using mythology and folklore for inspiration, I feel it almost goes without saying that archaeology is a valuable resource for a GM looking for ideas, and similar to real world myths, has the added bonus of lending some real-world veneer of credibility to your scenarios and campaigns.

I have used archaeology as a resource for gaming for decades (my degree was in Archaeology, after all). There are several useful ways you can do this, and while it can be fairly easy in the internet age to just trawl for random ideas, I suggest going to the books for the best stuff. Some useful ways you can do this:

Artifacts - you can grab low hanging fruit like the Antikythera Mechanism, the Bagdad Batteries or pretty much any wacky concept rolling around out there. There are no shortage of interesting real curiosities out there, and you can also dive into the stranger side of things with the world of "weird archaeology," also known as pseudo-science, but it often provides great resources for the more fantastic worlds of fantasy and horror gaming. Hell, Call of Cthulhu's core conceits are based entirely on the pseudo-scientific principles of concepts such as Lemuria and Mu, as an example. This sort of stuff can easily be filtered from the ether of the internet. 

Cultures, Concepts and Ideas - if you dive a bit more deeply into archaeological texts (and also anthropological texts) you can glean some interesting ideas for world building, maps for site locations and if you are willing to dig deep into the world of actual site records and material published on excavations at different locations throughout the world you can get entire lists of the sorts of in situ artifacts found at actual real world locations that can in turn spruce up your dungeon or ruin delve of choice. At the most basic level picking up a few issues of Archaeology Magazine can give you some easily accessible resources and maps. My favorite general purpose texts for this sort of research comes from a bewildering array of books on my shelf, but I will post a bit more about that in the final Inspiration blog.

For a good resource on actual inventions and technologies, I recommend Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe. This is the single most useful volume I have on a practical overview of various technological inventions and breakthroughs, with a concise rundown on the whats, hows and whys. An excellent game-focused secondary resource would be GURPS Low-Tech. 

If weird and wacky archaeology is more your muse, I definitely suggest that GURPS Warehouse 23 is a great gaming-focused resource, and a it happens one of the best pragmatic resources on the subject that is still written with a real archaeological focus is Ancient Mysteries, also by Peter James and Nick Thorpe. I have found this to be a much more useful resource than, say, books such as Forbidden Archaeology which are not written from a real academic perspective. 

The Tenth GM Inspiration: Techniques used in Modern Indie Modules

The Tenth GM Inspiration: Techniques used in Modern Indie Modules

Last blog talked about how I use round outlining (as I call it) to work out scenarios and even whole campaign ideas. This time around I wanted to talk specifically how that technique is in regular, constant use in the indie RPG scene right now, and its a very effective way at creating and running ready to go scenarios. The most effective examples of this technique are found in Mothership modules, specifically the trifold brochures which are an extension of the one-page module designs that started becoming popular a decade or two back (from the One Page Module contests, AAW games adventure-a-day and more). The Mothership modules (and there are also Mork Borg, Cairn and other modules of similar nature) are generally built around packing an entire session (or more) on two pages, which can then be folded as a trifold module. This forces the author of the module to maximize their use of space. 

One way to do this effectively merges the module description boxes, the map and the adventure path all into a single mixed graphic....the Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is the first such module for Mothership, and an excellent example of how to execute this (I do a deep dive on it here). Each area of the haunted space station has a quick series of bullet points on the salient elements of the area to be explored, and line/arrow links showing you where in the space station you can then go to from that location. Some extra page two text covers NPCs, the monsters and encounter timers and events. I managed to get three or four sessions out of this module, it's that good.

These modules my design work best for GMs (Wardens in Mothership) who are accustomed to improvisation, because the space limits mean you will inevitably have descriptions or events that cannot be covered; the design is meant to force emergent gameplay, and a GM running a module in this design would be best aided with a notebook on hand to take notes as you expand upon the module as you go, to keep your plot and detail additions consistent.

Doing this for a homebrew is actually a great exercise in thinking about what the core conceits of the scenario should be. You also don't need to limit yourself to a one or two page format, though that can be fun as an exercise in creativity and design. That said, look to systems like Shadowdark, Cairn, Mork Borg and Old School Essentials for examples of how this concept is expanded upon into multi-page modules that are still, at their core, using the "what matters most in this area" conceit of tight design with outline-focused dungeon design. 

Looking back on the 2025 Predictions and Gaming Plans

 Back at the beginning of 2025 I made a few little predictions about how 2025 might go. So, how did Death Bat Camazotz do at predictions.....? Let's find out!

1. D&D will do just fine - specifically I suggested its too big to fail, but that they might not get their virtual tabletop thingy together. I think I was mostly right here, as D&D 5.24 seems to be going strong, more or less, but I do think that there are some signs its crumbling a bit.....the loss of a lot of long time WotC staff, the D&D Beyond portal getting shifted away from the now on life support virtual tabletop, and a thing that is only anecdotal right now, but it really doesn't look like anyone's buying the new D&D books at the local game shops this season....the new Forgotten Realms books have even been 50% off at one game store locally and they still can't move them. So.....I think while I am technically right here, I think 2025 showed a lot of cracks in the D&D exoskeleton that may impact it for 2026.

2. Nothing else steals D&D's marketshare - this is also a half true sort of prediction. D&D still seems to be getting played and WotC has pivoted to making it more like a franchise. They are making a new video game which appears to be an action focused game about a cool warlock. But meanwhile the tents of those alternative groups like Kobold Press and Paizo are growing bigger, and it seems like there's been a lot more non-D&D gamer interest going on in 2025. But this is all speculative and anecdotal without some sales figures.

3. The looming tariff wars will hurt gaming - damn I was spot on about this. Books have shrunk in size, grown in price, and many aspects of the gaming industry had to pivot to figure out how to handle potential price increases. This even when it seems some products like printed matter might have exceptions. Overall its probably not as bad as I would have imagined, but the actual general economy has done even worse, and this is the first year in a long time where my gaming purchases have slowed down considerably.

4. 13th Age won't come out in 2025 - well I have an order in place and the final PDFs of the Hero's Guide and GM's Guide as I write this, so 13th Age has arrived by the skin of its teeth! I am actually incredibly happy about this, the new edition looks fantastic, and I miss the 13th Age style of play. 

Then I made some computer gaming predictions:

1. The games industry implodes further with games as a service models - Yeah to some degree, but then we still have successes like Helldivers II and Arc Raiders proving that you can pull this off. That said....Destiny 2 is doing poorly, Call of Duty is doing poorly, Battlefield 6 is apparently pivoting to a freemium cash shop experience which is making people mad, and it turns out the real story of 2025 in gaming is how much people hate the fact that developers are turning to generative AI to fluff out battle pass content and such. So I was right.....but with caveats.

2. Consoles and PC Hardware gets more expensive - yeah I sure wish I was wrong here but its honestly one of the easiest markets to watch the impact on with regards to tariffs and the economy. I bought a lot of tech this year and am glad I did, because its about to get worse. The additional unanticipated impact of AI datacenters soaking up RAM manufacturing is going to make things even worse in 2026. 

3. 2025 will be the worst year for new games - I don't know that I was right here. What I can say is we are getting too many remakes, and not enough new content that gets proper exposure, but that is a side effect of gamers trapped in nostalgialand. That said, I played a lot of really great games this year, including Deadzone: Rogue, Cronus: The New Dawn, Silent Hill F, Fort Solis (okay, that one's older, but I played it this year), and the Steam metrics suggest that most gamers are spending more time playing older games now and less time on the new stuff, anyway.

4. Bungie hits rock bottom in 2025 - yeah sadly I think I was right here, though I don't think Sony is going to let this cash cow die as easily as they did the studio for Concord. The latest expansion for Destiny, which is loosely Star Wars themed, does not seem to be enough to retain old players after their last year of problematic design choices, or get new ones. Despite this, I took a really long break from the game and recently jumped back in, and find I am enjoying it again....it's still a good game, but it needs more careful curation now, I feel. We won't even talk about Bungie's nightmare with Marathon, though I still have high hopes for it whenever it does come out. 

Okay! So for the next round of predictions I predict I will try to come up with some more volatile and less safe predictions, just for fun!

On the Gaming Plans for 2025

I posted at the end of 2024 my anticipated gaming plans for 2025. It's always fun to document this because I can see just how idealistic my plans were relative to how far they went awry! Specifically:

Dragonbane - yeah nope did not happen and I can't even remember why it didn't work out.

Savage Worlds - I did run this for a few sessions but just wasn't feeling it. It's complicated, but I think the short version is "you need the right group for the right game."

Mothership - I managed to run a couple short campaigns with Mothership in 2025, so success!

D&D 5.75 (D&D 2024) - I finished one whole campaign with this once the Monster Manual 2025 came out. I wrapped the game around level 7 and decided I had given the new system a fair shake, and did not like it. I put the books in to storage and then mulled over how to get my D&D fix from an edition that didn't seem to be taking a weed wacker to the core conceits of D&D.

Tales of the Valiant - it took a while but I ran a short campaign and really liked it. I was derailed with Starfinder arriving on the scene, but TotV is a worthy successor to classic D&D 5E.

GURPS - I read a lot of sourcebooks, thought about running it, and never got around to it. My time with GURPS lies in the past, when I gamed with like-minded souls in the nineties and early 00's who "got it" and I just don't feel my current group of players are gonna get it.

Mork Borg and Vast Grimm - I did not in fact get around to running either, though Mork Borg remains ready for a pick up and play session at any time. Mothership stole their thunder.

I had a final section on fever dreams, but it's funny because two of the games mentioned ended up being go-to systems: I ran a Mythras campaign (before also concluding it was a bad fit for the group, although my son loved it); and I have pretty much settled with Pathfinder 2E as the de facto replacement for D&D in 2025. Indeed, my Wednesday gaming group has been Pathfinder 2E and my Friday gaming group has been Starfinder 2E for months now. 

The Ninth GM Inspiration: Outlining Techniques for Scenario Design

The Ninth GM Inspiration: Outlining Techniques for Scenario Design

This is a broader concept than it sounds like. Everyone is generally familiar with the concept of using an outline to prepare a text, and its a common way to organize when writing, especially fiction. My introduction to using outlining techniques to plot out a game scenario goes back to the 1980's when I was given a book titled "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," a book that still has many followers today for its useful perspective in drawing and design. I was born into a family of artists, but was a bit of a black sheep.....I was fine at art, but what I enjoyed doing was writing. My mother extrapolated (iirc) from the book to introduce the idea of round outlining to me as a way of organizing written concepts into stories. The idea must not have been from anywhere else as best I can tell, because while I can see it used all the time (especially in Youtube videos and on conspiracist's whiteboards!) Google itself seems to have no notion of what the hell I am talking about.

Round outlining is a lot like regular outlining for a story or body of text that requires organizing your thoughts, but it does so by drawing a bubble around your seed idea, and then drawing lines from that to extrapolations in other bubbles. So I could put, "An Endless Dungeon," as a seed idea, then from that I could draw a line to several other bubbles, each with another idea: Evil Wizard Did It; planar dungeon; the dungeon really does hold prisoners; It's infinite but there is a bottom; it's located in the plane of concordant opposition; etc.

Each of those bubbles could then have more lines drawn from them to other concepts. It could look like this, which is a simulacra of the "bubble" technique, but you get the idea

   Also a wizard the PCs once defeated          And an innocent woman!                  Amozatas the Jailer

                                                 \                               /                                                                 /    

   holds the most ancient and evil beings; Rovas the Red Dragon              The jailkeeper is at the bottom
                                                              \                                                                  /
                                                    its really a prison             its infinite but there is a bottom
                                                                      \                           /
                         planar dungeon-------------An Endless Dungeon----------evil wizard did it
                                      /                                          \                                                        \

                                     /                  Located in the Outlands (concordant opposition)      \ 

                Filled with Escher-like constructs                                     The evil wizard is Kurzhod the Mad  

                     /                                                                                                     \

      use weird maps!                                                                            He made it to lock away Amozatas!

And so it goes.

Over the years it became much easier to adapt this technique to a more conventional outline process simply because we all use word processors now, and that is not a good freeform medium for what I just tried to emulate above. It is however a great technique if you have a notebook handy and also trust your own handwriting. 

More on the use of this sort of concept in the next post....because there is in fact a very distinct and handy way that this technique is deployed for direct scenario design in current RPGs. 

The Eighth GM Inspiration: Mythology (Specifically Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend)

 

The Eighth GM Inspiration: Mythology (Specifically Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend)

Best bet to find: Ebay

It should go without saying that fantasy role playing owes its etymology and origins to mythology and folklore, and while the modern edition of D&D has moved away from these roots somewhat, it's all still there, hidden under the surface, no matter how hard corporate sanitization tries to scrub it.

One of my favorite resources for mythology and folklore is Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Originally published in 1949 and intermittently kept in print ever since, this remains one of the best resources on the subject you can find, with thousands of entries from around the globe on all sorts of interesting lore. Open any random page to this book and you will find useful ideas, inspiration or concepts useful for gaming, or just for your own edification. The copy I have was given to me as a gift for my 13th birthday in 1984 by my mother, and as ragged and worn as it is today it is still my most valued general resource on the subject. One of my first acts with this book was to start looking up random names from my AD&D 1E tomes and find out which monsters and characters had their etymology buried in mythology. This was how I discovered Orcus's origins in Roman myth, that Ed Greenwood really seemed to have a thing for Finnish mythology, and that some things I assumed had a solid origin in myth such as the lich did not, in fact, have such origins (and owed their existence to pulp era writings from Howard and Lovecraft).

Some random examples of how ideas can spring from this book:

Page 734: the start of a lengthy discussion of the topic of mnemonic devices and the mytho-historical importance of this method of memorization and information collection. Also, the mmoatia, a Gold Coast type of little people, perhaps like fairies; and Mixcoatl, the Cloud Serpent, of Aztec mythology.

Page 259: Cranes, and their relevance in myth. The cranes of Ibycus, which drew out his murderer; the start of the topic of creation myths. This is making me think about the use of cranes as symbols in magic or omens. 

Page 763: Need some ideas for where to find museums in a modern day or Call of Cthulhu game? This page has that.

Etc. etc.

One of the cool things about this book is, if you are not overly familiar with the deep legacy of myth, folklore and legend behind the foundations of fantasy fiction and gaming, you might find this book well worth a look, it will expose you to a much more interesting and superstitious world that once existed as a matter of fact for our ancestors.