Why Didn't Silent Titans Change the World?

28 Jul, 2026

I have read this book so many times.

This is one of the most common things you could say about Silent Titans, though I suspect my reason differs from most.

The module’s opening scene places the party, immediately post memory-wipe, on a spiral staircase surrounding a time tornado which acts as the spine to a “quasi-living multidimensional hyper-intelligence from an unimaginably distant future” - one of the titular titans. The titan’s body is hidden via spatial distortion inside of a belltower which itself sits like a mast atop a boat on the sea of time. Beneath the giant bell at the top of the staircase (remember the staircase?) Dr. Hog, an anthropomorphic dandy pig in a silver maiden mask, uses a steampunk fungal clavichord to remotely pilot a hive of subservient silver ants which in turn dominate the engorged, distended minds of his two tommy-gun-toting ape guards. The apes open fire. There are two doors - one Brass, one Ebony - to your immediate left and right. What do you do?

“Silent Titans… can be a bit much for some people.”
  - Patrick Stuart, on this book’s sales page.

I won’t disagree. Silent Titans is demonstrably ‘a bit much’ for most people. The overwhelming feedback from every review at the time of this capsule game’s release was ‘WOW, this book is BEAUTIFUL! Its DM advice is IMMACULATE! I wish it was easier to understand.’

Have you ever thought about what that phrase means? "A bit much for some people”? I don’t think I have before now. I think it means two things.

1. You are bold.
2. You are tiring.

It means you are asking too much of the average person. But how much is that? How much is too much to ask, and why?

If you read my description of this game’s opening scenario and assumed it was a book full of random cool sounding bullshit, I forgive you. Silent Titans is absolutely the most abstruse book I own, but it is - interestingly! crucially! - not impenetrable. To torture a metaphor, everything about Silent Titans that overwhelms the reader is hidden information, not secret information.

Whenever you are confused, all you have to do is take the word that’s confusing you and Google it.

I swear on my grandmother’s grave this is completely sincere advice. I don’t just mean vocab words here¹, Google will answer your more abstract questions as well.

‘What kind of a name is Wir-Heal?’

• The module is set in a fantastic reimagining of the Wirral Peninsula, Patrick’s postindustrial IRL hometown, best known today for its brief cameo in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.² The cities in the module are also based on real places, as are a fair number of the major characters.

‘Who is Urizen, and why is he imprisoned by the Ouzel?’

• Urizen is the embodiment of reason and Satan-analogue of William Blake’s heretical 18th century mythology - an alternative cosmology radically opposed to Christian dogma. “Ouzel” is the Welsh term for "blackbird".³ Blackbirds are the namesake animal of the Wirral peninsula in Welsh, and were treated as the most ancient creatures in the world (ergo the Ouzel’s status as ancient guardian). The Ouzel, as stated in the module, is also the Christian archangel Uriel - ergo “the maze of Uriel”, where Urizen is bound. It should be obvious why an angel would be opposed to the machinations of the embodiment of pagan rationalism.

’Why is there a traveling extortionist criminal court on the encounter table?’

• Because that actually happened in Wirral.

There is genuine meaning here - not just at the level of simple reference, but thematically as well. Silent Titans is in awe of the depth of English history, confused by the abandoned factory rot of its present, and terrified at the prospect of facing a future we are so clearly not ready for.⁴ There’s an unnerving symmetry to the woodrose (men regressing to beasts in the presence of intellects beyond their understanding) and the mask-men (beasts uplifted though gifts from higher beings) I’ve still never fully untangled.

Sincere question - is learning all this hard? Are we willing to call “put the word you don’t know into Google and read the words that come up” hard? I mean this a little facetiously, but not totally facetiously. Obviously Zedeck Siew knows how to Google words and read, like most people in this niche book hobby.

I think. I hope.

All four monsters described on the left are depicted on the right. Slow down. Look carefully.

I am scared of living in a world where we’ve collectively decided that “Google it” is hard. Not even because of the “phone bad, ipad baby bad” arguments you’ve all heard before, but because I think it’s going to make the lives of people who create the best art harder.

An interesting argument played out a few days ago⁵ between Habeeb and Serket about whether the calcification of fantasy tropes has been a boon or a curse. The former called for fantasy writers to borrow from new places, while the latter emphasized the mythic weight uniquely invoked by using the old tropes and their old names. The truth of course lies in the middle, but I found Silent Titans interesting to examine through the lens of this discussion.

Isn’t Silent Titans both ideals at once? It's a wholly original luminary work built from the most ancient, storied myths and histories of the english speaking world. Its rules system is radically simple and accessible, its production values are some of the best I’ve ever seen, and it came with a robust set of gorgeous maps, minis, and play aids to simplify prep. The PDF costs less than a good sandwich but has somewhere between 500-1000 sales on DriveThru - a tenth of Fabula Ultima.

Why didn’t this book become a phenomenon?

Familiarity is a precondition of resonance. This book was exactly what we all claim to want, but we didn’t recognize it as that because it wasn’t legible to us. And that means the extent to which art resonates with us, whether we know it at the time or not, sometimes comes down to our own choices - our willingness, before we know whether a piece of art is good, to put in the time to make sure we understand what it is saying.

If we choose not to put in that effort, then the kinds of art that will resonate with us will be limited to what is already legible - aka, the art we were coincidentally already exposed to. That’s a self-reinforcing loop. That’s how you get zombies added to every media property and how a weirdo card game decides it needs an Office crossover.⁶

That’s also how one of the best RPG books ever made can get nominated for four Ennies and lose them all to stuff like the Warhammer Fantasy Core Rulebook.

Success doesn’t just naturally come to art that deserves it. We, as an audience, must choose to reward complicated things with our attention. We, as curators, should shill for complex art in all the ways Dwiz hates⁷ to give our peers the most opportunities possible to give in to their better angels and actually do the work to understand what’s in front of them. That’s how we build an ecosystem where the cool games win.

Perhaps the reason I read this book obsessively is, despite my protests, still just a matter of circumstance. I too grew up among abandoned industrial docks servicing nothing, fenced off waste ground, and strange pustules of earth. I intuitively recognized that when Patrick gave a paranoid 11th century aristocrat an uzi, he was imagining the same small town mayor that I am - playing with powers he doesn’t understand to entrench his own petty legacy. It’s all just so familiar.

In what is most likely the last conversation I’ll ever have with my mother, she spent that time mournful of my life choices and furious that I denied her an even greater opportunity to mold me into exactly who she wanted me to be. But even after an hour of yelling, she only started to cry when she said,

“What, so I just have to accept this? I’ve just got to… sit down and shut up?”

And I realized in that moment that there was this whole world of invisible pain she had never wanted to reveal to me. I saw the ghosts of that sentence in a million other conversations; in her determination to win power in a male dominated workplace, and in the resentment she felt toward her ex-fiancé for asking her to give up her academic aspirations. But any of those ghosts could be a mirage - the false positives encouraged by a pattern-recognizing brain. I’m never going to have the context necessary to make that nugget of pain fully cohere with my thirty year window into her life.

I think people are a lot like Silent Titans. I think that’s why I love them. We are all these broken accretions of experiences we did not choose, gifted just enough agency to credibly hope that our futures are not overdetermined. The time it would take another person to sort, categorize, and fully understand the accumulated experiences that comprise us would itself be a human lifetime, so we have to settle for what we can see on the surface, and the pieces those people deem important enough, or we dig deep enough, to reveal.

I think Silent Titans was Patrick trying to create a rosetta stone that revealed as much of his heart as he could stand to show.

It costs £40 plus shipping. It’s one of the seven books I think every tabletop roleplayer should own.

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