an idea for a magic item overhaul
My favorite scene in the film Dead Poets Society comes when Robin Williams, playing the new nonconformist English teacher at an uptight boy...
jrients.blogspot.com
Decoupling XP and Treasure
What your game gives you XP for says something about the game world and the PCs. For most OSR, the treasure you get directly results in XP...
cavegirlgames.blogspot.com
Principia Apocrypha: Principles of Old School RPGs, or, A New OSR Primer
Principia Apocrypha is a new, free Primer for OSR and other Old School Style RPG Gaming in the form of a collection of Apocalypse World-s...
lithyscaphe.blogspot.com
Game Structures
One of the most overlooked aspects in the design and play of traditional roleplaying games is the underlying game structure. Or, to put it another way, there are two questions which every game designe
thealexandrian.net
Reactions to OD&D – Turns, Rounds, and Segments… Oh My!
Last year I began a series of posts regarding my reactions to the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Recently a post on Delta's D&D Hotspot tweaked me to comment on one of the issues
thealexandrian.net
On the Longevity of Dungeons and Dragons
Why is it always Dungeons and Dragons? Why hasn't some 'better' game come along and replaced it? Why is it always some version or variant ...
hackslashmaster.blogspot.com
Redefining My Interests in Adventure Gaming
Using the term "OSR" as shorthand for the style of games I like to play isn't doing it for me anymore. There is too much baggage associated ...
rendedpress.blogspot.com
Those pesky D&D Saving Throws
Take a look at this chart This chart continued in one form or another up into the release of DnD 3rd edition when it was replaced with F...
batintheattic.blogspot.com
Something about railroading for Jorge Jaramillo Villarruel
Jorge Jaramillo Villarruel wanted something about Railroading. Jorge, what on earth can I say about this that has not already been said -...
falsemachine.blogspot.com
What is Artpunk?
(Basically fancy slightly pretentious hipster-esque D&D stuff.) In answer to a question by Mastered by Marquis asked below, one I can answ...
falsemachine.blogspot.com
Old and Lethal
I’ve briefly ranted about the supposed lethality of old school RPGs before: I think people make way too big a deal about character death i...
9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com
Votaility
Volatility : I've been trying to come up with a formula for "volatility" in a location and location. By volatility I mean a setup tha...
monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com
Gaining XP (number 2)
See part one, here . Where Jeff Rients was not suggesting to replace gold for XP with exploration for XP, Gieljan de Vries does so in the ...
daimon-games.blogspot.com
Old School: Rolling
I'd like to share a game theory with you: don't roll dice unless the DM asks you to. I have dice. I want to roll my shiny dice. I want to ...
alifefullofadventure.blogspot.com
Linear Fighters, Quadratic Magic-Users
I have been working on the follow-up to the article on magic, but it has gotten out of hand a couple of times as I keep finding myself going...
ongoingcampaign.blogspot.com
Ability Scores (3d6 in order)
Ability scores are determined by rolling randomly: roll 3d6 for each ability. Or not. In B/X Essentials , the referee may allow to discar...
daimon-games.blogspot.com
Gygaxian Magic-User Spell Usage
What kinds of spells did Gary Gygax tend give to the wizards in his adventures?
deltasdnd.blogspot.com
TFP DMG: How To Run Combat
To my surprise and delight, there are people out there running my rules as-is! This is wonderful, but also made me realise that I've got a...
tenfootpolemic.blogspot.com
Moldvay Musings XIII: Reactions
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." -Newton's Third Law Sorry, Isaac. Not neces...
geekechoes.blogspot.com
A Little Bit More About Strongholds - Part II
Here we continue where we left off in our exploration of castle construction rules throughout old school D&D. In our last installment we lef...
dungeonspossums.blogspot.com
FarCry 5 in D&D
I’ve just started playing FarCry 5, and it occurs to me that it provides a way to structure a focused sandbox for tabletop play. The structure of FC5 is this: There are three map regions Each…
detectmagic.wordpress.com
The Basis of the Game is Making Decisions
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.
retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
The Elves of 74'...
As much as we like AD&D's multi-classing rules, they weren't exactly a master class in technical elegance. But they weren't all that bad ei...
pitsperilous.blogspot.com
17 Questions Answered
One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me: Chris McDowall’s blog is great in general but this post in particular, A Player’s Handbook fo…
ominosity.wordpress.com
Ditch the wilderness maps!
I love maps, I really do. I wish I could cover my walls in all sorts of different maps. I could happily cover my sitting room walls in different maps of the world, my bedroom in all the fantasy map…
ominosity.wordpress.com
On The Ten OSR Concepts, Plus One
The Gadabout by Tomek Larek As our corner of the hobby matures. more and more real good thinkers get involved and put the intellectu...
treasurehuntershq.blogspot.com
Don’t Prep Plots
If you're GMing a roleplaying game, you should never prep a plot.Everyone's tastes are different. These matters are subjective. What works for one person won't necessarily work for another. Yada
thealexandrian.net
One Way To Do It
Zak S / Zak Smith /Zak Sabbath playing diy D&D (dungeons and dragons, dungeons & dragons) notes on playing RPGs w/fellow porn performers
dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com
All Dead Generations
"[RPGs] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The [dungeons] of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the [games] of the living."
alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com
The Secret of Descending AC
Screw it, I’m going to add two new armor types to the way I handle armor. But before I explain that, let’s take a detour and talk about desc...
9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com
"Modern gamers are quite happy playing on at consensual death, narrative railroad were there is no true danger only the illusion of it. Dice fudging behind the screen is the order of the day. All ogres are quantum and player agency is a farce. The DMs role in these “games” is that of a performing entertainer that guides the “players” through a carefully crafted prewritten story’s plot checkpoints." /tg?
Mechanics for Resource Management - part 3, Types of Resources
The purpose of this post is to try to enumerate all the different resources people try to manage in D&D (or at least the most common ones)....
diyanddragons.blogspot.com
Analyzing old school D&D | Dungeons & Dragons / Fantasy D20 Spotlight
I do a fair amount of analysis of old school versions of D&D, but there's never really been a thread for it. So here's one! Feel free to post your own analyses. Anything that involves deconstructing the game, from size and scale, to weapon damage, to monster distribution, to class progressions...
forum.rpg.net
How To Get Started Playing Old-School D&D For Free
So you want to play D&D like you did when you were young. Or maybe you want to play D&D like the greybeards do, after you heard them la...
dungeonspossums.blogspot.com
SUPPLY - The Risk Economy Part II
COMPLICATING THE RISK ECONOMY Slow building tension and risk is one of the goals of the Risk Economy, a way to encourage exploration by o...
alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com
Rulings in Practice: Social Skills
In the last Rulings in Practice I mentioned that the techniques used for resolving perception tests can be contentious and result in a surprising amount of rancor and anger.But social skills are
thealexandrian.net
Referee Skill: Description Procedures
OSR blog about: Thinking Required Underworld Exploration!
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com
The WEIGHT of GOLD - is OD&D right again?
How much does a gold coin weight? The answer is not as simple as you think. Here is my favorite post on the subject. Delta's thinking and...
methodsetmadness.blogspot.com
California Gamin'
I had a delightful conversation with Victor Raymond last night, a considerable portion of which was devoted to discussing a seeming oddity ...
grognardia.blogspot.com
Self-publishing thread (s)
Who on this board has self-published material before? Who has acted in an editorial or production capacity for a game publisher? Care to share your experiences?
www.rpgpub.com
"'The Philosophy of Composition" in Roleplaying Games, Pt. 1: Effect
One of my favorite pieces on writing is Edgar Allen Poe's " The Philosophy of Composition ," which he wrote for a semiyearly literary magazi...
whosemeasure.blogspot.com
XP! A Survey of How All The Older Editions And Clones Award Non Monster XP, Plus a Request for HELP! by Joethelawyer's Not-So-Wondrous Imaginings
I compare how XP for gold piece value from magic and treasure is awarded in OD&D, Holmes, B/X, Mentzer Basic and Expert, Rules Cyclopedia, AD&D, OSRIC, Swords and Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea, and LOTFP. Plus, I ask for your top cool movies or TV...
anchor.fm
In Defense of Old School Armor Class
Here's a non-controversial topic about which I'm sure everyone completely agrees.
doomslakers.blogspot.com
On the Explicit Procedure of Play
This isn't about bad-wrong-fun. The discussion yesterday about behaviors we've all come across at the gaming table are not gaming problems...
hackslashmaster.blogspot.com
THREAT - The Risk Economy Part III
The last of the set of basic design principles for classic Dungeon Crawls are those around the animate opposition, the active threats to th...
alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com
What's the appeal of OSR? | Dungeons & Dragons / Fantasy D20 Spotlight
Of note, Gygax's games were apparently without mini's for roleplaying. I'd say that was the predominant style of gaming when I started playing. We did use mini's at times to show positioning, but it was pretty adhoc. I never had proper mini's. We'd just use spare dice, Monopoly/Sorry pieces...
forum.rpg.net
Recent-ish Resource Management Links - Late 2018
Around this time last year, I started collecting links when people posted about resource management on their own blogs. Aaaaand, then I kind...
diyanddragons.blogspot.com
Moldvay's ORACLE (Basic D&D is the best, and it contains multitudes)
Here is another great post from Trollsmyth: http://trollsmyth.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-bx-is-best.html The title, appropriately enough, ...
methodsetmadness.blogspot.com
Thinking About Wilderness Travel
Let’s imagine that your players are in the city of Dweredell and they need to go to the village of Maernath to study the ancient crypt of the founder of the Verdigris Order.How does that trip pl
thealexandrian.net
OSR-Style Challenges: "Rulings Not Rules" is Insufficient
I was a Pathfinder guy who got inspired by blogs, and then spent some time trying to figure out what the fuck the OSR was. I read stuff, li...
goblinpunch.blogspot.com
How I Run Into the Odd
Someone asked how I prepare for a game of Into the Odd, so it's time for some rapid fire tips on how to run a game exactly like I do (which ...
Encumbrance rules
If buying equipment at char-gen is often a waste of time, keeping track of the weight of each item is often too much even for the fanatic OS...
daimon-games.blogspot.com
The Pithiest Definition Yet of Old-School Gaming
I like pithy gaming sayings. I love that line by Evreaux of Dragonsfoot, "We don't explore characters, we explore dungeons." I love to g...
dice-universe.blogspot.com
What We Talk About When We Talk About The OSR
Regardless of the wishes of the OSR's prominent proponents, whatever they might be, the term OSR has become irrevocably applicable to a plet...
lithyscaphe.blogspot.com
Expeditious Advance
Venturing forward into the realms of tabletop RPGs, one blog post at a time!
Notes on Greyhawk dungeon level 1 map design | Original D&D Discussion
I copied out the map of greyhawk level 1 (as seen here or
odd74.proboards.com
Searching for Secret Doors
In my D&D group, I'm often disappointed by the lack of team work in searching. Since the search roll is executed in secret, the fact that y...
mathofoldschooldandd.blogspot.com
A Comprehensive Guide to Secret Doors
People will draw an 'S' on their dungeon map many times before they start thinking about what makes a good secret door. Secret doors a...
goblinpunch.blogspot.com
Planning a Campaign as a Series of Decisions
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.
retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
The Retired Adventurer
A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.
retiredadventurer.blogspot.com
D&D Is Not A Role-Playing Game
Well, at least the original edition was not a game about role-playing - any more than Clue is. In both games you get a character to pilot...
rolesrules.blogspot.com
Roleplaytime
To be clear: what follows are my thoughts, not the pronouncement of some authority on high. I am convinced mistaking words for truths is the root of many mistakes. I hope we all avoid as many of those as possible. There is a reason the cover page of the UVG carries the line “psychedelic metal rol
www.wizardthieffighter.com
XP for GP and Retro-Gaming: What are the Alternatives?
In three recent "theory" posts , I've been describing retro-game (OSR) play style. At several points, I've emphasized how the 1 XP per ...
maziriansgarden.blogspot.com
Last edited:
