"E Is for Eccentricity". John Leighton, 19th Century. I recently started a new campaign of Electric Bastionland with friends. This is a sort of "science fantasy" game with OSR roots, though mostly unrecognizable from the Original D&D from which it ultimately started. More precisely, EB represents the latest iteration of Chris McDowall's game "Into the … Continue reading Into the Bastionland
Troika! is a science fantasy OSR game with some really cool ideas in it. Several of them you could pull out and put in your own game even if you don't play Troika! per se. Here are four of them.
Musing this afternoon on @benlaurence1's older blog post "Pleasures of the OSR: Secrecy and Discovery". The thing I like about this play style (and I like many!) is precisely the surprise of what happens when random tables drive play. Making sense of these seemingly unrelated bits of ephemera (random encounters, generated NPCs, found objects) means … Continue reading Random Tables in RPGs
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash ‪The podcast "Fear of a Black Dragon" does the thing that yields my highest praise in gaming media: it makes me want to stop listening and go play a game! The episode on "Times That Fry Men's Souls" is especially good, in large part due to the deep discussion … Continue reading Implied setting
Lately, I've been thinking about whether I should start publishing more stuff beyond my musings here and my game sessions. I wouldn't do this for the income stream ("monetize your hobby and make it a job" doesn't appeal to me) but rather for the fun of seeing other people use what I've made and hopefully … Continue reading Create the content you want to see in the world
So right now, Into the Odd has my attention. This game has a super light rules framework inspired by older versions of D&D (even lighter than you probably think) that also lends itself well to episodic play. Each session consists of a self-contained "expedition" to recover strange magical devices called Arcana. The author, Chris McDowall, … Continue reading Delving Into the Odd
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
