A while back, I spent a lot of time looking at how to run D&D Fifth Edition in an "old school" manner. Others have made the case for a long time that 5e already does this quite well with few to no changes. I feel like some of the options the game already presents can … Continue reading Old School Fifth Edition Ruleset
Note: I originally wrote this post a few years back but never actually hit "Publish". I've polished a tiny bit and put it out there because I really do like the product still today! Castle Gargantua from Kabuki Kaiser bills itself as the "biggest megadungeon" in the history of the OSR. This is a little bit … Continue reading Castle Gargantua
After I wrote recently about procedural generation for dungeons, my brain kept chewing on the possibilities here. I decided to try the process outlined in the Dungeon Masters Guide (5e) Appendix A. This post will run through my experience doing that, as well as a look ahead at what could come next. Random layout The … Continue reading Worked example of a procedural dungeon
The main reason I stopped playing D&D Fifth Edition was that it read too much like a set of software requirements (use cases). 5e writes everything out in expansive detail, rather than in a concise "Strunk & White-esque" manner. This drove me back to simpler rule sets like Swords & Wizardry and even Microlite20 or Searchers … Continue reading Musing on the implications of the D&D 5e SRD
I've wanted to try to generate an adventure with the random tables in the new Dungeon Master's Guide since I bought it. Here I present one example of my experimentation. Note that I didn't fudge any rolls - all this reflects actual results. Location-based adventure Because my current "sandbox" campaign focuses on dungeon crawls, I'll start … Continue reading Building the framework of a dungeon adventure
We can't really call D&D Fifth Edition "old-school" since, you know, it just came out. But it appeals to some of those sensibilities in a way the previous edition did not. With that in mind, I'd like to run some adventures from Dyson's Dodecahedron in 5e. I have a LFG ad on Roll20 for Tuesday evening. If the experiment … Continue reading Old-school action in a new-school edition
This weekend, I discovered Microlite20 on donjon.bin.sh. Suddenly I "got" the OSR. Despite having read a bunch about it, the whole thing just hadn't clicked for me. Then I read that Purest Essence version and boom. I remembered being 13 in my best friend's converted garage, playing D&D and GURPS and Traveller and our own designs and … Continue reading Microlite20 and O5R
Technoskald's Forge 