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
In a dungeon crawl adventure, the characters have different goals: finding treasure, not killing monsters. In fact, if you can get through the dungeon with minimal risk, so much the better, because the payoff should be the treasure. Combat serves roughly the same purpose as traps: an obstacle preventing the characters from getting to their … Continue reading Experience for treasure
A recent (private) thread from +Stacy Dellorfano and an ensuing comment from +Kiel Chenier got me thinking about what I like about these older, simpler rulesets. Bottom line up front: it's the "simpler", not the "older". Part of the appeal to some gamers of the "Old School Renaissance" is nostalgia. This is how they played when … Continue reading Open Source Roleplaying
So this weekend I'm going to run some D&D at a local makerspace (TheLab.ms has an open house Saturday evening for anybody in the Dallas-Plano area). I'm probably going to use "Searchers of the Unknown" by +Nicolas Dessaux or some variant thereof, because you can't get much simpler and call it D&D. Microlite20 would work just … Continue reading Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
I finally spent some time playing Scarlet Heroes, the old-school D&D-alike from Sine Nomine Publishing and Kevin Crawford. Unusual for these sorts of games, Scarlet Heroes focuses on very small parties (one or two characters) and even provides support for solo play where the GM is also the player. The system supports existing D&D material with one or two … Continue reading Solo RPG Play using Scarlet Heroes
