I spoke to award-winning TTRPG designer Josh McCrowell about His Majesty The Worm, the dungeon crawling RPG currently nominated for two ENNIE awards.
Edited and adapted from a conversation on July 9, 2025.
Alex: We’re here today to talk about His Majesty The Worm, the OSR game that reimagines almost every part of the dungeon crawling experience.
Josh: That’s right. I’m Josh McCrowell. I wrote His Majesty the Worm. It came out last year and is currently up for two ENNIEs, one for best rules, and one for best game. Thanks for chatting with me!
Alex: I referred to His Majesty the Worm as an OSR game, but you typically describe it as a new school game with old school sensibilities. Can you elaborate on that?
Josh: The OSR is dead, long live the OSR. As a marketing term, the OSR is still very much alive, and people like me want to talk about the OSR, want to think about the OSR, call their stuff OSR. And nobody is going to productively argue about what is OSR, but practically speaking, we know it when we see it. And when you have a marketing term, like hey, this is OSR, you’re expecting a retro clone of a basic edition of D&D. There’s a million of them on the market, and I own a million of them and I like them and I keep buying them, because they all have something that I want to get at. But His Majesty the Worm is not a retro clone. It’s a new rules system specifically for dungeon crawling. It has some really obvious differences from an OSR retro clone. It uses tarot cards instead of dice, being probably the most obvious, kind of in-your-face difference.
Josh: So even though it has the OSR bedrock principles — like what you find in Matt Finch’s primer or the Principia Apocrypha, it talks about what an OSR game is — and all of those themes, and theories, best practices live in the book. And there’s not a strength check or dexterity bonus or an armor class to be found. So it’s very thematically similar and mechanically dissimilar. If you were going to make an OSR game today and you weren’t just trying to recreate Basic edition D&D, His Majesty the Worm is my pitch for how you would do that.
Alex: Most OSR games are broadly compatible with one another, but His Majesty the Worm, like you said, it doesn’t have dice. It takes things in a new direction.
Josh: Compatibility is one huge plus for the OSR. You know, if you’re blogging and I’m blogging, you can basically snap our stuff together like Legos. And that is part of the aesthetic, that’s part of the appeal. His Majesty the Worm does require a little bit more elbow grease, or maybe a little brain juice. But it’s not impossible. In fact people have asked me, hey can I see the dungeon that you used when you were playtesting the game? Because I wrote it on Sundays, the development cycle was quite long, I was playtesting the game for seven years. And I’ve always said, no, you can’t see my dungeon, because it’s just stolen OSR content from other people. I gave it that brain juice. So it’s not terribly difficult, especially once you get your arms around the game, which I luckily have.
Alex: Probably more than anyone else!
Josh: Yeah. And there’s advice in the book on how to do it. There’s a page that walks you through my process. So it doesn’t have perfect compatibility, but it has a lot of equivalent compatibility [in the same way] that you have to do mental calculation to go from descending to ascending armor class.
Alex: You said you wrote the game on Sundays?
Josh: I’m lucky enough to have a full-time job, and the way I treated this was just like a one-day job. I would write on Sundays. It’s a big book, 400 pages, so it took a long time, about seven years. But it worked for me. That’s what I had to do to make a fairly persistent hobby of blogging and talking about RPG stuff, to be able to make actual creative work that I can show other people. So I kind of treat it like a one-day-a-week job. And I’m still having fun doing that, and I’m continuing to make other Worm dungeons and supplements using the same procedure, slowly but surely.
Alex: I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next. Let’s talk about the name. I love the title, where did it come from?
Josh: Cheers, thanks! The title is an allusion to an Italo Calvino book called The Castle of Crossed Destinies. I think a lot of people know Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a book where the premise is these travelers are in the forest, and they’ve lost their voice, so they tell each other their life stories by laying out sequences of tarot cards. Because [His Majesty the Worm] uses tarot cards, it seemed like a natural allusion. In part of the book, the fool is leading the king through the woods and they come upon a graveyard. And the fool says “Look, majesty! Here reigns a monarchy even greater than yours: his majesty the worm!” and when I read that line, I was like, “This has to be the book title.” It really hit me on the head.
Alex: I want to talk more in depth about the mechanics of the game, but first, as you mentioned earlier, His Majesty the Worm has been nominated for two ENNIEs, best game and best rules. Voting is going on now! Do you have anything to say about that?
Josh: Vote for me! [laughter] It’s a tremendous surprise and honor. When I say it’s an honor just to be nominated, I mean that really, really sincerely.
Alex: You’ve been putting in the work for a long time. I’ve been following you on Bluesky, Twitter before that, and you’ve been talking about this game for ages!
Josh: If I’m not a fan of the game, nobody else will be. I made a game that I wanted to play. I think that’s a lot of game designers’ journeys. What game do I want to play? And I wrote it, and I was desperate — especially seven years ago — to try and talk to somebody about it. I’ve been lucky enough to find other game designers, people that really encourage me and inspire me. Talking to them about their stuff makes my stuff better. And I hope vice versa! So yeah, I’ve been talking about it for a while, but I’ve been playing games since I was 12, I’ve been making games since I was 12. This was my first sincere attempt to clean it up enough that people who weren’t at my table could run it. Because my friends have played my games forever! But you know, a jumbled 20 pages of Word doc can’t transfer that experience. So I tried to make something that other people can play. So the reflection of the ENNIES is something that is extremely humbling. I am going to be talking about it a lot in the coming weeks, just because I’m excited, and my long-suffering friends I hope will be indulgent, which they have been.
Alex: Let’s talk mechanics. I love what you’ve done with map-making. The players have their version of the map, the GM has the canonical version of the map, and hopefully the twain shall meet.
Josh: I’m pleased you like it. I think that’s one of the things I hear a lot of pushback about. And by God, play the game your way! I don’t have enough hours to come over to your house and bully you until you do it the way that I want you to do it. So if it offends your sensibilities to hand your players an incomplete copy of the map, don’t! I hear people rub against that, but let me make a pitch: I think if you try it, you might like it, and your players might like it. My players like it, and now it will be hard to wean them off of it. A couple times in our weekly games we go to a mini dungeon, and I’ll say, “wow, this one’s not on your map, let’s map it out for real” and they always look like they’re about to pull their hair out of their heads, because the quality of life improvement of having some version of a map has really made them feel comfortable with it. And it’s hard for them to go back.
Josh: I came to that conclusion because there’s a feeling of — if you’re making a map of any sort of space that’s more complex than just duplicated 10-foot cubes next to each other, when you have angles or complexities and all, there’s this dance that happens at the table. And the dance is the GM saying, “No, no that’s not quite right” and the thing is it would be so easy to map out a space that you can see with your human eyes. If you went to Notre Dame, you can sketch a map of that in a classic D&D way pretty easily. But if somebody is describing it to you, there’s a skill of both the GM needs to be able to perfectly articulate all these details of where the naves and columns are, and the distances between them, and then the skill to listen to that and replicate it. It’s easy for a human to see, but hard for a person to hear. So you get this weird gulf — either the GM has to correct the player and be like, “No, no it’s not like that!” and then they might as well just draw it. And in any case, the game is slowed down because two people are talking and nobody is playing. I want to cut that out. So if you give the players a copy of the map, there can still be secret rooms. You know the shape of the rooms, but not what’s in them. It really speeds up play, gets us to the meat of the game, which is making decisions.
Alex: There’s a quote by Stephen King that says something like, “If you are describing anything more complex than a green book on a table in the middle of the room, then what you’re describing and what the reader is picturing are two totally different things.”
Editor’s note: I’ve misrepresented the spirit of the quote, which is that the small details don’t matter. There’s a differently edited version of it that seems to argue the exact opposite of what I suggested here. Sorry, Mr. King!
Alex: It sounds like minimizing that downtime is one of the core tenants of the game. As a whole, it seeks to re-examine every part of the dungeon-crawling experience. Is there a particular mechanic that you’re especially proud of?
Josh: I think a lot of game designers have some sort of crush on their own combat rules, but I do enjoy what’s called the challenge phase—the combat section of the game—a lot. Every player has a set of [tarot] cards in their hand. On your turn you can do anything you want, play a card, add your attribute and you get a total value, it’s pretty standard stuff. But also you can take [actions] on other people’s turn if you have a card of the appropriate suit. So if I have a swords card, I can attack even on my friend’s turn because I have the right card to do it. It represents these opportunities that come up in combat where somebody leaves themself vulnerable, or your friend sets you up, bashes their shield up, you have an opening. I think it is so compelling and so fun for many reasons, but one is just speed. If you are playing a traditional game with traditional initiative you can wait a long time before your turn comes back around, and then you have a lot of downtime. When people are playing cards on each other’s turns everybody the table is engaged, everybody’s leaning over and trying to figure out what they can do to set each other up for success, how they can burn all their cards. Nobody is resting back and waiting for their turn. Even if you kind of have a bad hand, it’s fun to figure out what you can do with it, as opposed to, like, rolling low three times in a row: great I have five minutes in a 50 minute round, and I’ve flubbed three times. At least if I have [some] duds, I can find something to do with them, whether it’s you helping my friends, or getting up, or running out of the room. So I think that the combat is really fun in His Majesty the Worm, I’ve had a lot of fun just doing that every week.
Alex: And is that a shared tarot deck, or does each player have their own?
Josh: We only use one tarot deck at the game. The GM uses the major arcana, and the players use the minor arcana. Major arcana has values from one to 21, so the GM can have bigger numbers than the players can, which makes the players have to team up and combine their cards sometimes to get to where the GM can, and that gives a cool feeling in combat of kind of these fastball specials where players set each other up for success.
Alex: Tell me about the classes, as they are.
Josh: I don’t think I’m breaking any sort of crazy new ground. You have your dungeoneering archetypes with your warrior and mage and thief and scholar, where your your highest attribute gives you a set of abilities called talents that you begin the game with. One thing that I think is kind of neat is that you can learn any ability in the game, but you need somebody else to teach it to you. So as you camp in the middle of the dungeon, you can train your companions in skills that they want to cross class into and want to learn. You don’t start with all of your abilities, but as you gain experience points, you spend them to use abilities you haven’t mastered yet. And once you’ve done that enough times, you don’t have to spend experience points to use them, you’ve trained it enough that they become mastered.
Alex: I like your approach to light and torches as a resource.
Josh: Something that I am bad at as a person is tracking time, especially estimating time in my head. When a player asks, how long does this take, I find it difficult to make adjudications about, well this is a 15 minute task versus a 30 minute task. I wanted to get away from having to make those kinds of adjudications as a GM. I do think torches are so important. One of the core things of dungeoneering is the hungering dark versus the players and the hostility of the darkness. Being able to limit players’ information based on how bright the light is and how many lights they have and who has the light is really interesting to me as it creates these tensions in the game. So light sources have a certain number of times they can flicker. A flicker is a resource. A candle can flicker fewer times than a lamp. When they flicker is based on kind of an overloaded encounter dice which I call the Meatgrinder. Time is weird in the underworld, you can’t quite track exactly how long you’re down there. So [when] they move to a new room, the GM is flipping over cards, and some of those cards tell them that the torches flicker. So there’s a timer on how deep the players can go based on how many light sources they have. And because it’s never exact, you can’t quite game it. You can kind of guesstimate, but you’re making some calculated decisions about how deep you need to go and how many torches to bring with you.
Alex: Who is this game for?
Josh: In some way, it’s the worst of all worlds. You know, OSR grognards don’t want to learn a new system. The compatibility really is what they want, and they have their preferred systems, you know, why get this weird one? And everyone else thinks that the OSR people are weird and basement-dwelling creeps, and there’s weirder quarters there — I don’t want to go there! So in some ways it’s for nobody! In other ways, it’s for me. It’s the game I wanted to play, it’s the game I have played, and continue to play with my gaming group. Our campaign is ongoing, we’ve been playing for eight years now. And my hope is that whoever you are and wherever you are in your journey of RPGs, if you’ve ever wanted to try out dungeoneering, it will be for you too. I get a kick out of it, and I hope you like it too.
Vote for His Majesty the Worm for Best Game and Best Rules in the 2025 Ennies.