Pondering arch-mages again, on the lines of 'what do you do when you get total control of reality' - previous I wrote on their goals, the status flexes of individuals beyond want. Now I have been pondering what kind of casual horrors they inflict on those around them through sheer carelessness and self-absorption without any accountability and way too much agency.
d20 regional impacts of careless archmages
1. their tower is absolutely crammed with automata who spend more time going "excuse me" and attempting to work around each other with their countermanding orders because nobody has priority. Nothing gets done and the wizard's idea is then "well nothing's getting done, I must add more automata obviously". They are overworked and so the cycle has worked itself into a teeming hive of jammed up autonomous automata. The entire place is a sink for magical energies and ores and dwarvish engineering. The dwarves love it. The gnomes dislike it, but view it as better the gold is in their hands than in that lunatic wizard's.
2. An entirely illusory tower where it appears to be absolutely fantastic but people keep dying because the guests are in fact exposed to the elements even where the illusion appear they are sheltered. The illusions are impeccable and very well supported but the wizard himself having a couple of rings of elemental endurance fails to recognize this is the problem.
3. Classic hybridization, chimerization program where they have simply too much time and industry and attempt to make the perfect fill-in-the-blank and of course have a whole bunch of misbegotten failed experiments roaming the countryside.
4. The giant churning forge where the wizard was incensed at local craftsmen's temerity has spent a significant amount of time rendering them all obsolete and has flooded everything around with okay smith goods equivalen. Only okay is good enough for most people and the remaining demand for quality is insufficient to sustain a population of skilled craftsmen and it is now becoming absolutely impossible to get decent gear anywhere around here to the point that the king is worried that his military forces are unready.
5. The wizard has created a library of old knowledge clones of himself that wander the realms answering questions. These questions are just wrong based on a hasty stitching together of factoids from a set of raiders that destroyed all the local libraries
6. A wizard has stolen all the groundwater for water elementals to guard their tower and also run their fancy fountains because they are from a coastal nation and they're feeling homesick.
7. Stole all the groundwater because they are attempting to fill an ocean within their own private demi-plane. This is the only way that they can get the authentic flavor of their local spring water.
8. Stole all the groundwater because a local dryad refused to take up with them on the basis that they're simply a heinous individual.
9. Devastated all the local forests by casting a summon woodlands spell and then marching off to battle with another wizard and getting the entire forest either killed in battle or stranded in a desert to eventually die.
10. Devastated the local locality by diverting a river to create enough ice for their new hobby of ice crafting.
11. ruined the local ecology by continuously summoning storms to their local mountain top tower and creating a freakish rain shadow across a continent, a series of storm attracting lightning rods marches across the landscape.
12. A badly thought out but highly effective mine has been digging away. Elements have collapsed and flooded twice now. However, the internal mine protocols were have been clever enough to keep them in operation, but not clever enough to recognize the damage that they're doing.
13. Created an artificial god from whole cloth to prove it could be done by importing a large amount of koa-toa and embarking on a generations-long social engineering project.
14. an attempt to win a bet with another wizard has resulted in the excavation of a truly colossal marine trench that has allowed huge ocean predators to come much closer inshore than they normally can. The local cliffs act as something like a salt lick to these monsters and they have been slowly eroding the ground with their activities.
15. A failed attempt at trying a pillar of flame wizard's tower has been abandoned. Said tower has ignited fires across most of the local landscape and rendered everything to an ashy wasteland the the tower itself has since gone out for want of fuel.
16. An attempt to resolve a wrong-headed argument about the nature of the cosmos has created a portal to a nightmare realm from which spews ceaseless nightmares. The wizard is long dead, no longer capable of regretting his folly, and yet the nightmares persist.
17. An illusionist attempting to demonstrate the superiority of their craft has microcosm where nothing is real or to be trusted. They all craft work within a certain region has a half chance of being simply illusionary.
18. in an attempt to make an easy access to his local thing, this wizard has created an unstable set of portal networks which allow weird migratory behaviors. The local wildlife have adapted. There is now an entire cohort and subspecies of migratory beasts that use the portals for their seasonal wanderings. The nearby ecosystems have been altered by this. However, they have stabilized into a new equilibrium, which is in fact working perfectly well, but it is not entirely native.
19. A wizard has released bunch of servitors to improve the local ecosystem and this is an ongoing forced evolution cautionary tale showcase. Every fix needs another fix. It is in fact a a glorious endorsement of the foolishness of messing with nature when you don't really understand what you're doing.
20. They have released monsters because they like the sounds they make and because they are no threat to the wizard they do not account that these things are deathly dangerous to 99% of the rest of the population
Showing posts with label osr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label osr. Show all posts
18 July 2026
04 July 2026
Capsule Reviews #10: Kala Mandala Zines
I grabbed the set of Kala Mandala zines after the Hey Centaur shop went online. These are great zines of the old school OSR glory days - easily earning their shelf space beside any of the greats. We get a great setting in the Playbook and two Art Research zines, further expanded by three juicy adventures - all site exploration with a twist for each.
Six books existing in the core set at time of writing:
Kala Mandala Playbook - 42 pages, system
Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya - 26 pages, adventure
Deluge at Drizzle Distillery - 42 pages, adventure
Tragedy at Zaya's Theatre - 26 pages, adventure
Earthly Beings - 38 pages, gazetteer
Heavenly Bodies - 38 pages, gazetteer
Plus the Paper Minis set. As a whole this is the character generation and system in the playbook, three adventures (Het Thamsya, Drizzle Distillery and Zaya's Theatre) and two world-books/gazetteers (Earthly Beings and Heavenly Bodies)
I did have a minor logistics issue in that I ordered the stickers collection and got a second playbook - strictly this has worked in my benefit because the playbook is a touch more expensive than the stickers. From a point of view of trying to get Kala Mandala to table, having a second playbook might end up being more helpful. So I am going to call it a wash, all to the good.
Six books existing in the core set at time of writing:
Kala Mandala Playbook - 42 pages, system
Stirring the Hornets Nest at Het Thamsya - 26 pages, adventure
Deluge at Drizzle Distillery - 42 pages, adventure
Tragedy at Zaya's Theatre - 26 pages, adventure
Earthly Beings - 38 pages, gazetteer
Heavenly Bodies - 38 pages, gazetteer
Plus the Paper Minis set. As a whole this is the character generation and system in the playbook, three adventures (Het Thamsya, Drizzle Distillery and Zaya's Theatre) and two world-books/gazetteers (Earthly Beings and Heavenly Bodies)
I did have a minor logistics issue in that I ordered the stickers collection and got a second playbook - strictly this has worked in my benefit because the playbook is a touch more expensive than the stickers. From a point of view of trying to get Kala Mandala to table, having a second playbook might end up being more helpful. So I am going to call it a wash, all to the good.
20 June 2026
In Favor Of Repetition
Standing up from my last campaign my players said something that I was not sure should I feel hurt by - that my last couple of campaigns had the same feel. I thought I ran some fairly different things
- Brancalonia
- Spelljammer
- Hexcrawl25 But I wonder if they feel the same because these players have other very different GMs to compare against so the innate similarities of my DM style overwhelmed all other differences? I ran them differently enough to my own perceptions that I got three completely different things out of them but I guess I must reuse parts more than I thought...
At this point I am old and ugly enough to recognise the wisdom of not attempting to make everything unique. "Just Use Bears" is a load-bearing stone on my own personal journey to wisdom.
In the interest of being honest, there are certainly things I reuse
- the campaign world / lore - I have a small handful of players who have popped up in more than one campaign who then recognize some of the tales of the hazards below them or have run into aspects of factions in other guises faraway. This I think is the best kind of repetition, the rest just make my life easier.
- menagerie world / kaleidoscope species - at this point the utility of this 'universal socket' world for open table gaming has been proven and reproven. Variety in the d100 NPC species table that makes "Sword Coast Diversity" look like a klan rally in comparison. Want to be some odd species? No problem, noone even looks sideways at you. Talking goose? Can do.
- opportunity to think around obstacles / no-roll success for good ideas - tell me your sufficiently cunning and creative plan and I'll be happy to say you just succeed.
- one-shot framework (Splinters, Brancalonia) - Brancalonia was 'the money's been drunk, the booze is run out, your patron/landlord has a job for you' with a side order of 'I am assured the dragon is dead this time'. For Splinters it was 'hop through this portal, fetch that bit of wood we need for our ritual' - both worked well to get things rolling.
Within campaigns, but not across them I guess repetition is a motif as well
- For Spelljammer, ship deck plans came up again and again, where most other combats usually happen on some different backing, the fact that of course a fight involving your ship means you break out the same deckplan gets really noticeable after a while.
- NPCs (as per adventure threading) - within a campaign I try to reuse the cast, I have snuck in a mention or two of NPCs from one campaign to another but the differences in tone have never really made 'guest appearances' make much sense.
To return to the specific point of my blogwagon comrades, there are typically four types of dungeon - reliably abandoned and dangerous structures - in menagerie world (on the continent everything has happened on so far) drawn from great buried hazard-strata from the continental history
- ruined temples from the cult purge a few decades back - these are for unquiet spirits, undead, bloody rituals and cults. Shallowly buried threats being dug up by fanatics.
- fortified shrines of the predator queens many hundreds of years ago. There are for running into the petty gods, hideous artefacts, and determined relic hunters looking for war-winning weapons.
- bunkers and fortresses from the first dwarven empires war against the Final Star many thousands of years ago. These are sections of the Apocalypse Archive; for the spooky tense 'this is not a place of honour' crawls through a place where something terrible obviously happened, with lots and lots of grim defenses pointed toward some as yet un-found horror.
- wizard towers abandoned by their masters at all points down the timeline. Wildcards, but always hazardous because wizards.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
- Brancalonia
- Spelljammer
- Hexcrawl25 But I wonder if they feel the same because these players have other very different GMs to compare against so the innate similarities of my DM style overwhelmed all other differences? I ran them differently enough to my own perceptions that I got three completely different things out of them but I guess I must reuse parts more than I thought...
At this point I am old and ugly enough to recognise the wisdom of not attempting to make everything unique. "Just Use Bears" is a load-bearing stone on my own personal journey to wisdom.
In the interest of being honest, there are certainly things I reuse
- the campaign world / lore - I have a small handful of players who have popped up in more than one campaign who then recognize some of the tales of the hazards below them or have run into aspects of factions in other guises faraway. This I think is the best kind of repetition, the rest just make my life easier.
- menagerie world / kaleidoscope species - at this point the utility of this 'universal socket' world for open table gaming has been proven and reproven. Variety in the d100 NPC species table that makes "Sword Coast Diversity" look like a klan rally in comparison. Want to be some odd species? No problem, noone even looks sideways at you. Talking goose? Can do.
- opportunity to think around obstacles / no-roll success for good ideas - tell me your sufficiently cunning and creative plan and I'll be happy to say you just succeed.
- one-shot framework (Splinters, Brancalonia) - Brancalonia was 'the money's been drunk, the booze is run out, your patron/landlord has a job for you' with a side order of 'I am assured the dragon is dead this time'. For Splinters it was 'hop through this portal, fetch that bit of wood we need for our ritual' - both worked well to get things rolling.
Within campaigns, but not across them I guess repetition is a motif as well
- For Spelljammer, ship deck plans came up again and again, where most other combats usually happen on some different backing, the fact that of course a fight involving your ship means you break out the same deckplan gets really noticeable after a while.
- NPCs (as per adventure threading) - within a campaign I try to reuse the cast, I have snuck in a mention or two of NPCs from one campaign to another but the differences in tone have never really made 'guest appearances' make much sense.
To return to the specific point of my blogwagon comrades, there are typically four types of dungeon - reliably abandoned and dangerous structures - in menagerie world (on the continent everything has happened on so far) drawn from great buried hazard-strata from the continental history
- ruined temples from the cult purge a few decades back - these are for unquiet spirits, undead, bloody rituals and cults. Shallowly buried threats being dug up by fanatics.
- fortified shrines of the predator queens many hundreds of years ago. There are for running into the petty gods, hideous artefacts, and determined relic hunters looking for war-winning weapons.
- bunkers and fortresses from the first dwarven empires war against the Final Star many thousands of years ago. These are sections of the Apocalypse Archive; for the spooky tense 'this is not a place of honour' crawls through a place where something terrible obviously happened, with lots and lots of grim defenses pointed toward some as yet un-found horror.
- wizard towers abandoned by their masters at all points down the timeline. Wildcards, but always hazardous because wizards.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
10 June 2026
Actual Play: The Hole In The Oak
tl:dr; fun old school dungeon, menace telegraphed by the corpses of adventurers, bigger than it seems with lots of secrets that can get missed even when players pry into things.
Another of the adventures I got when Attronarch sold them off - I did a capsule review of The Hole In The Oak a while back and wanted to expand on the running experience.
As per that capsule review - The Hole in the Oak is an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.
Session Report: The Hole In The Oak
Party of three - Mountain Dwarf Rogue, Halfling Fighter, Elf Ranger
At the request of the town Arcanist, some wandering adventurers set out to find the wizards lair by a big oak out in the swamp and see how dangerous it might be. After considering enlisting some henchmen and deciding they would rather not split the loot, the party hiked out past the old skyburials, out past the mudpool shrine and after some tense negotiations with a tabaxi hunter, found a mysteriously dry patch in the middle of the swamp with a great gnarled old oak growing on it.
[DM Commentary - to this point the players were hexcrawling out to the adventure site, I was still working out whether wrapping these stand-alone adventures before and after with some hexcrawling was fun or a time sink. It increases the risk of people getting distracted or side tracked but does make the world feel more real with not everything being about the one thing they are looking into. Also in the course of the evening before they set off it became apparent that the halfling was a mighty local athlete of some reknown.]
Venturing down into the hole they found by it they squeezed past some grasping vines, argued with some root faces, trading a famed discus for some answers. The root faces told them that to find the wizard they needed to go back through the roots and the other way. They ranger was unwilling to hazard the roots again and so they set out to find another way around.
They trekked on to a big cavern and thence to a mysterious carved arch with a corpse in front of it. Searching the corpse and archway found the corpse was definitely dead from a big slice and the arch had nothing obvious to it. Some wandering troglodytes struck up a shouted conversation through the archway but with neither group will to cross it, our heroes wandered off to find another route.
[DM Commentary - the wandering monster tables came into play quite interestingly here - the party was semi-stalled out in front of the arch, intimidated by the obvious trap, when some troglodytes turned up - also very much disinclined to deal with the trap. Running into a group that is not inclined to be baited into screaming and charging an obvious death-trap, where the correct answer is to tell them to sod off and go around is pretty iconic for old school dungeon crawling.]
They found a room full of mysterious sand, a spectral fight between man and giant lizard and then arrived into a big hall full of work statues with many doors. Searching there yielded little beyond trails.
The next door they tried revealed another corpse and another arch - they rummaged through the corpses pockets, found some coins and then decided to leave this arch alone too. They decided to try the door on the other side of the hall... and found another arch! A sharp eyed party member spotted the glint of eyes above it then the ferocious halfing charged into combat. Some unlucky misses by the giant spider and a critical hit from a longbow led to a resounding victory and the party pressed onwards through this arch.
Marching past a statue and some mirrors they came to a large room with a big rug - and decided to head north, away from their stated goal of the passage beyond the roots. A careless step and the rogue vanished, snatched away to the bat cavern by an unseen magic circle. The ranger and fighter press on a little, finding a locked room with some troglodytes and after a tense but informative conversation around a scarcely opened door, they too decide to step on the magic circle to follow and find their comrade.
[DM Commentary - this is one of the eternal challenges for how to handle surprise party splits - tell the player who just vanished 'I'll get to you in a minute' and make the rest of the party make suitably uninformed decisions, that at least everyone can listen to? Pull the vanished player to one side and play things out with them while the other cool their heels - the fact that time is required to deal with it being information in itself? Just continue play for the vanished player and let the mystery collapse for the rest? I did the first but pushed pretty hard for a decision from the rest to keep the vanished from getting overly bored.]
The rogue appears elsewhere - in a new part of a familiar bat-stinking cavern - and choose between three doors ahead of them. Skirting some beetles feasting on a kill they squeeze arduosly through a tight, slimy crevasse. By the time they had emerged into an cavern full of stalactites with another door they heard noises on the far side and opened it to find the ranger and fighter just appeared.
They made their way back down the bat cavern, retracing their steps past the sand, the dead spider and carefully around the rug until they entered a passage where an illusory image of the wizard sprang to life with a halting and partially complete welcome. Deciding they had fulfilled the letter of their mission by finding out about the place and being right beside the entrance, they climbed out and hiked home to be paid.
The party netted 2 gold, 14 silver each as their share of the coins found on the dead dwarf; plus payment from the Arcanist that far outstripped that.
[DM Commentary - the route the party took missed pretty much everything valuable; this was poor, hazardous pickings from their point of view. The 'pry up everything, poke in every corner' mentality of real old-school dungeoneering was absent so traps and treasures were missed as the party remained very wary of traps.]
Session Report Ends
It was a little tricky to navigate the book - because it is so Jayquaysed you have rooms connecting which are far apart in the book which drives a fair amount of flipping about. The many corpses of unlucky previous adventures kept the tension very high and inculcated a healthy respect for the traps and hazards they suspected were about. As I previously wrote "The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display."
This venture was a scouting run - the players declared they had enough to get paid and bailed leaving extensive blocks of the dungeon untouched and without real clues to what might be there beyond a sense the place was definitely bigger. I am not sure the players were even left convinced there was anything worth going back down there for - they missed clues to treasures - and it would pretty much need new rumours to get them to go back.
Overall great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim and densely packed with lots of directly adventurable content. There was way more thaan I used for this four-hour slot, probably another two similar sessions could be wrung from this, lots of adventuring.
Another of the adventures I got when Attronarch sold them off - I did a capsule review of The Hole In The Oak a while back and wanted to expand on the running experience.
As per that capsule review - The Hole in the Oak is an old school style dungeon with odd, unsettling things abounding and plenty of factions around. This is a 32 page zine with art more towards the 'grim things happen to adventurers' style of early D&D. The map is huge with ~ six main sections with lots of empty spaces. The dungeon is well Jayqauysed with many ways to loop around - when I ran it the players noped out of dealing with an obvious trapped arch that they could not figure out and decided to loop around and then later loop around again. The inhabitants all knowing that there were multiple ways to get anywhere also made conversations about directions entertaining.
Session Report: The Hole In The Oak
Party of three - Mountain Dwarf Rogue, Halfling Fighter, Elf Ranger
At the request of the town Arcanist, some wandering adventurers set out to find the wizards lair by a big oak out in the swamp and see how dangerous it might be. After considering enlisting some henchmen and deciding they would rather not split the loot, the party hiked out past the old skyburials, out past the mudpool shrine and after some tense negotiations with a tabaxi hunter, found a mysteriously dry patch in the middle of the swamp with a great gnarled old oak growing on it.
[DM Commentary - to this point the players were hexcrawling out to the adventure site, I was still working out whether wrapping these stand-alone adventures before and after with some hexcrawling was fun or a time sink. It increases the risk of people getting distracted or side tracked but does make the world feel more real with not everything being about the one thing they are looking into. Also in the course of the evening before they set off it became apparent that the halfling was a mighty local athlete of some reknown.]
Venturing down into the hole they found by it they squeezed past some grasping vines, argued with some root faces, trading a famed discus for some answers. The root faces told them that to find the wizard they needed to go back through the roots and the other way. They ranger was unwilling to hazard the roots again and so they set out to find another way around.
They trekked on to a big cavern and thence to a mysterious carved arch with a corpse in front of it. Searching the corpse and archway found the corpse was definitely dead from a big slice and the arch had nothing obvious to it. Some wandering troglodytes struck up a shouted conversation through the archway but with neither group will to cross it, our heroes wandered off to find another route.
[DM Commentary - the wandering monster tables came into play quite interestingly here - the party was semi-stalled out in front of the arch, intimidated by the obvious trap, when some troglodytes turned up - also very much disinclined to deal with the trap. Running into a group that is not inclined to be baited into screaming and charging an obvious death-trap, where the correct answer is to tell them to sod off and go around is pretty iconic for old school dungeon crawling.]
They found a room full of mysterious sand, a spectral fight between man and giant lizard and then arrived into a big hall full of work statues with many doors. Searching there yielded little beyond trails.
The next door they tried revealed another corpse and another arch - they rummaged through the corpses pockets, found some coins and then decided to leave this arch alone too. They decided to try the door on the other side of the hall... and found another arch! A sharp eyed party member spotted the glint of eyes above it then the ferocious halfing charged into combat. Some unlucky misses by the giant spider and a critical hit from a longbow led to a resounding victory and the party pressed onwards through this arch.
Marching past a statue and some mirrors they came to a large room with a big rug - and decided to head north, away from their stated goal of the passage beyond the roots. A careless step and the rogue vanished, snatched away to the bat cavern by an unseen magic circle. The ranger and fighter press on a little, finding a locked room with some troglodytes and after a tense but informative conversation around a scarcely opened door, they too decide to step on the magic circle to follow and find their comrade.
[DM Commentary - this is one of the eternal challenges for how to handle surprise party splits - tell the player who just vanished 'I'll get to you in a minute' and make the rest of the party make suitably uninformed decisions, that at least everyone can listen to? Pull the vanished player to one side and play things out with them while the other cool their heels - the fact that time is required to deal with it being information in itself? Just continue play for the vanished player and let the mystery collapse for the rest? I did the first but pushed pretty hard for a decision from the rest to keep the vanished from getting overly bored.]
The rogue appears elsewhere - in a new part of a familiar bat-stinking cavern - and choose between three doors ahead of them. Skirting some beetles feasting on a kill they squeeze arduosly through a tight, slimy crevasse. By the time they had emerged into an cavern full of stalactites with another door they heard noises on the far side and opened it to find the ranger and fighter just appeared.
They made their way back down the bat cavern, retracing their steps past the sand, the dead spider and carefully around the rug until they entered a passage where an illusory image of the wizard sprang to life with a halting and partially complete welcome. Deciding they had fulfilled the letter of their mission by finding out about the place and being right beside the entrance, they climbed out and hiked home to be paid.
The party netted 2 gold, 14 silver each as their share of the coins found on the dead dwarf; plus payment from the Arcanist that far outstripped that.
[DM Commentary - the route the party took missed pretty much everything valuable; this was poor, hazardous pickings from their point of view. The 'pry up everything, poke in every corner' mentality of real old-school dungeoneering was absent so traps and treasures were missed as the party remained very wary of traps.]
Session Report Ends
It was a little tricky to navigate the book - because it is so Jayquaysed you have rooms connecting which are far apart in the book which drives a fair amount of flipping about. The many corpses of unlucky previous adventures kept the tension very high and inculcated a healthy respect for the traps and hazards they suspected were about. As I previously wrote "The old school approach of 'here is a thing, sticking your hand in is entirely up to you - and entirely optional' is well on display."
This venture was a scouting run - the players declared they had enough to get paid and bailed leaving extensive blocks of the dungeon untouched and without real clues to what might be there beyond a sense the place was definitely bigger. I am not sure the players were even left convinced there was anything worth going back down there for - they missed clues to treasures - and it would pretty much need new rumours to get them to go back.
Overall great adventure-per-weight for gaming away from home - slim and densely packed with lots of directly adventurable content. There was way more thaan I used for this four-hour slot, probably another two similar sessions could be wrung from this, lots of adventuring.
27 May 2026
Review: Fly Me To The Moon
tl;dr: old school hex crawl on the dream-like moon, lots to dip into for inspiration.
Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.
Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.
I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.
So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits
Going through this in chunks:
Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.
Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.
I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.
So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits
Going through this in chunks:
13 May 2026
Art of adventure threading for campaigns
I poked one of the mainstay DM's of our local game society for their top tips on how to stitch scattered adventures together to make a campaign:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story
You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.
Why think about stitching adventures together?
In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.
After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.
Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.
Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."
Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.
All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.
Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures
The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.
One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.
There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.
The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
- Conservation of NPCs
We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.
I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.
The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.
Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.
The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.
If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.
Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.
This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.
Plan to test
I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story
You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.
Why think about stitching adventures together?
In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.
After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.
Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.
Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."
Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.
All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.
Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures
The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.
One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.
There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.
The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
- Conservation of NPCs
We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.
I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.
The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.
Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.
The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.
If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.
Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.
This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.
Plan to test
I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.
02 May 2026
Actual Test: Dungeons of Knock #1
I have been using Knock #1 as my go-to resource for the Hexcrawl25 campaign - the dungeons in the "Extraordinary Excursions" section were my source for complex sites and I got three of them to table. These dungeons were The citadel of Evil by Stuart Robertson, Praise the Fallen by Graphite Prime and Zaratzarats Manse by Nabok the Censored. I used these for two cultist lairs and a random wizards manse stumbled upon. This still leaves one last dungeon for use if needed - all told great value for the size of the book.
I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.
Running through them in order encountered by the players:
Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.
On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.
The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.
The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.
My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.
The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.
They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.
My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.
Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.
The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.
The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.
I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.
In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.
The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.
The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.
This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.
From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.
I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.
In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.
I used all of these dungeons as "I need a dungeon in a hurry because the players went off on a side quest" and they worked pretty well. Even the Citadel of Evil, which I initially thought seemed small, turned out to be very worthwhile. All of them got serious use - at least two sessions apiece from each of them with Praise the Fallen needing one big initial session that was a prisoner break-out then a later three-session return to clear it out completely.
Running through them in order encountered by the players:
Praise the Fallen has 15 A5 pages with lots of interesting bits and pieces within. They got to do a bunch of creeping around some of the nice old school spooky things like statues of angels and so on. Some proper old-school traps like compulsions to fling yourself on a blade were good and unsettling even where saves were made.
On the initial excursion the party missed most of the really nasty stuff - they probed the front bit, got into a big fight with a gathering of cultists and prevailed by bottling them up in a room and liberally using flaming oil. Solid tactics and good use of terrain. They did a bit of further creeping around, decided the spookier, deeper rooms were way over their heads and withdrew with the prisoners they had rescued.
The dungeon lurked in the background, oft mentioned, for much of the rest of the campaign until the party finally decided to go in and neutralise the threat. This return was supposed to be a quick raid (according to players plans) plunging deep into the temple to root out the cult leadership. The first session of this 'final' raid went well for the party as they ambushed cultists, sneaked about and bluffed their way past scattered lowly cultists with stolen robes and their acquired lore. The second session, as they ventured deeper they managed to pass many of the set piece wards and guardians using 'pass-pendants' before rousing a very large cave monster and having to fight them on treacherous terrain which left them low on resources and hit points to end the session. They staggered from that into a next set of guardians for the third session, fighting their way through and then getting into another big fight to stop a summoning. This brought out the dungeons arch villain who was invisibly nibbling them to death with summoned minions before they finally managed to reveal them and land the killing blow, just above the initiative tick where the villain was about to flee and become a recurring pest.
The dungeon itself is really nicely done. You get an intro on one page, some notes on rules applicable for the whole dungeon then a random encounter table and the main villainess. A small, total map is then followed by section-zooms with room-by-room detail. There are nice touches like the numbers of the rooms on the margins - a one two three up in the top corner so as you are leafing through you can quickly see where your where your room is. Stat blocks appear on the page where where you should be using them, descriptions are pretty terse, BX-style. The map is doing a lot of work with proper detailing of stairs up, stairs down secret doors and the likes. Good information density overall. I ran it pretty much straight out of the book.
My only advice is to be enthusiastic about rolling encounter chances - you will not always get them and even when you do, not all of them are going to be serious challenges, so roll often to keep the pressure up.
The Citadel of Evil was an identified location that the party knew they were going to go to so went relatively prepared and this ran over three sessions - one getting to the site and scouting from outside, one session of full-on dungeon-bashing and the last spent scouring the now-pacified wreckage for lurking remnants and/or loot.
They worked their way in through the base, up through the mysterious rooms in the middle, focussed on rescuing prisoners of the inhabitants so less on prying up flagstones and loot to start. The whole thing was a nice combination of slightly mysterious design requiring some careful scouting, non-traps that still needed navigating and then lurking cultists for active danger.
My party spent a session working their way up to the core then got in a fight with the main villain and managed to set a serious fire in the staircase that leads up to the citadel above. They did accelerate that fire but effectively they got into the basements and set the whole thing on fire above while they rescued people and fled. This bypassed some fighting in the upper structure but those foes were mostly guards/not the most interesting thing going on.
Then they did another entire session of poking through the ruins, interacting with traps and dangers and the hazards involved with the burnt out husk and the things rising from the dead and so on.
The dungeon is written to cover two pages so this was incredible bang for buck. Very good stuff, got two solid sessions, ten hours of play out of one side of A4.
The last one was the one on the dust cover, Zaratazarat's Manse, where a wizard was wizarding and cooked up a hazardous artefact that has gotten out of control. On this occassion the artefact is he's made "Ragga Gyxy’s Random Encounter Table", basically a monster summoning slab. This was a place the party was pointed at when they asked a settlement 'what kind of problems have you got' and then decided to poke into it.
I did not use the external village as written because I dropped it into an existing campaign but apart from that, I used everything over two sessions. One was an initial reconnaisance by a semi-open table group and the other was by the rest of the party to clear it out.
In both cases I used the mechanics provided - the big random-encounter table, the per-room encounter ladders, the 'find-the-wizard' rolls, the reaction rolls - which were fun. All of this on the inside of the dust-cover for the magazine so quite small text but still functional.
The first session, the party got there, poked around, ran into some random-encounter generated monsters and met some with negotiation, some with swords drawn. They managed to stumble their way past a bunch of things directly to the wizards bedroom and got in a big fight with the mimic-door there, then spent a block of time dealing with the sketchy magic mirror before leaving with some rescuees.
The second time around a slightly different team went in and went room by room trying to figure out what the problem was. They eventually made their way downstairs, took out the artifact that was malfunctioning to spawn all the monsters and installed the wizards apprentice as the new master of the place before leaving with armfuls of loot.
This is the most complex of the dungeons because there are lots of moving parts - more punchy random monsters, large uncertainty over if/where the wizard is found - and the fact that many of the monsters are sentient and randomly summoned from all sorts of places means they may not be hostile or from this world. I had fun having a dwarf be a warhammer old world dwarf, a white ape be a Barsoomian, etc.
From the inside and outside of a dust cover, let's say two and a half pages of A4, I got two solid sessions, great gaming.
I got great use out of those dungeons - while one could make arguments about room for improvements in any of them which other reviews have done, I think the combination of having a bunch of them in a compact format was very useful indeed when running that open format hexcrawl. The players could roam where they willed and I had kick-ass dungeons at my finger-tips whenever I needed them.
In full transparency I must admit this was not the *most* weight efficient way possible to carry those around since Knock #1 is a chunky book but given the minimal effort involved in pulling it off the shelf and slinging it in my go-bag, I could commit the calories to lug it around.
22 April 2026
Restoration of the r/OSR blogroll
tl;dr: a tale of recovering a piece of blogging community infrastructure from bad decisions and technology failure.
Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.
Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.
After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.
Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.
Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.
Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.
Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.
After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.
Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.
Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.
18 April 2026
Review: The Monster Overhaul
tl;dr: its great, if you are in any way generating your own games, get it.
If you are in any way generating your own games, don't even bother reading this review. Go get the Monster Overhaul. It is so useful.
I backed the Monster Overhaul quite some time ago but I write this now, very late to the game, because I finally got it to my own tables so have earned the right to speak. Since then I have been staring at it for a while trying to properly express what it is that makes this just great.
This is an operating manual for a school, a style of gaming. There are terse instructions about how this is all supposed to work but this is a practitioners guide, not an instruction manual. You get the fruits of a movement of gamers and bloggers trying to figure out what is the most useful tool they could have and then creating it.
Noted as a practical bestiary, it says it is "designed for at-table utility." In place of a standard bestiary with a page per critter with all its stats, you get concepts to support running that critter. These entries do not have hundreds of words of detailed, repetitive stat blocks but something more of the old school with stat lines of maybe two sentences. The rest of the space is then given to tons of context - everything you need in the run up to ever drawing steel on this monster. Less stat block, less of the fight-focus and more 'how it turns up in the session'. You are given the hints and clues to bring it to the table - "the space for you to think" as it says in the introduction.
This book is great for pulling off the shelf when you are thinking of using any given critter and looking up some ideas about how to spruce that critter up and make it interesting. Absolutely tons of ideas in here, the distilled wisdom of some people who have gamed hard and thought about how to support that gaming for others. The monster entries are more streamlined so you will need that notch extra of understanding to interpret them but once you are past the point of just wanting to use a critter as-written every single time, then this is your advanced text.
The whole thing feels almost fractal - the contents page doubles up as a random table - d20 categories of monsters, roll on that, then roll on the next thing - lower dice for less weird possibilities. Parts interlock, one monster serving as the reference for the treasures of others or for behaviours etc. There is a level of layout and depth of design that I think is simply a quantum leap beyond anything else. I imagine this was also a heartbreaking amount of effort so we should treasure this example that we have.
The book itself is lovely too. You get standard book paper in here with black and white printing and good margins because this is a book to be written on, annotated and used at table. Multiple artists keep things interesting - the different sections get a different artist each. Inside of the covers, we get a whole bunch of random tables for things like generic creature upgrades, where to find useful sidebars, how your reaction rules are going to go, reasons for an encounter, where the encounter happens indoors and outdoors. These are mirrored inside front and back covers to make it useful from cover to cover. A beautiful artefact of a book - chunky, heavy, distinct. I will be loathe to actually scribble on my copy but it is going to end up festooned with page-markers and post-its.
So what have you actually got in here?
If you are in any way generating your own games, don't even bother reading this review. Go get the Monster Overhaul. It is so useful.
I backed the Monster Overhaul quite some time ago but I write this now, very late to the game, because I finally got it to my own tables so have earned the right to speak. Since then I have been staring at it for a while trying to properly express what it is that makes this just great.
This is an operating manual for a school, a style of gaming. There are terse instructions about how this is all supposed to work but this is a practitioners guide, not an instruction manual. You get the fruits of a movement of gamers and bloggers trying to figure out what is the most useful tool they could have and then creating it.
Noted as a practical bestiary, it says it is "designed for at-table utility." In place of a standard bestiary with a page per critter with all its stats, you get concepts to support running that critter. These entries do not have hundreds of words of detailed, repetitive stat blocks but something more of the old school with stat lines of maybe two sentences. The rest of the space is then given to tons of context - everything you need in the run up to ever drawing steel on this monster. Less stat block, less of the fight-focus and more 'how it turns up in the session'. You are given the hints and clues to bring it to the table - "the space for you to think" as it says in the introduction.
This book is great for pulling off the shelf when you are thinking of using any given critter and looking up some ideas about how to spruce that critter up and make it interesting. Absolutely tons of ideas in here, the distilled wisdom of some people who have gamed hard and thought about how to support that gaming for others. The monster entries are more streamlined so you will need that notch extra of understanding to interpret them but once you are past the point of just wanting to use a critter as-written every single time, then this is your advanced text.
The whole thing feels almost fractal - the contents page doubles up as a random table - d20 categories of monsters, roll on that, then roll on the next thing - lower dice for less weird possibilities. Parts interlock, one monster serving as the reference for the treasures of others or for behaviours etc. There is a level of layout and depth of design that I think is simply a quantum leap beyond anything else. I imagine this was also a heartbreaking amount of effort so we should treasure this example that we have.
The book itself is lovely too. You get standard book paper in here with black and white printing and good margins because this is a book to be written on, annotated and used at table. Multiple artists keep things interesting - the different sections get a different artist each. Inside of the covers, we get a whole bunch of random tables for things like generic creature upgrades, where to find useful sidebars, how your reaction rules are going to go, reasons for an encounter, where the encounter happens indoors and outdoors. These are mirrored inside front and back covers to make it useful from cover to cover. A beautiful artefact of a book - chunky, heavy, distinct. I will be loathe to actually scribble on my copy but it is going to end up festooned with page-markers and post-its.
So what have you actually got in here?
08 April 2026
Review: Kala Mandala Playbook
tl;dr: a draft system with a setting soaked into its bones; PC's as "meddlers". Light-weight and stuffed with gorgeous art.
I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I bought one of everything including this playtest version of the Kala Mandala playbook; a system to go with their flavour-forward, south-east Asian inspired setting. The base premise of Kala Mandala is that you belong to a meddling association. You are meddlers. Just wandering around sticking your nose in because, to quote it, "You are a professional meddler. You are an adventurer with a legitimate career path. You have monetized your irrepressible nosiness by joining a meddlers guild" - I love it, just fantastic stuff.
This is a full first draft - it has gorgeous illustrations throughout already. The artifact of the playbook is fully baked but it acknowledges that the system is not necessarily fully there. Notes in the back on what has been omitted from focus (balance, economy) also provide email addresses to send in your feedback. I think it is still certainly good enough to get going - I am far happier to have it in my hands in the state it is now than to wait another chunk of time to get those aspects ironed out when they will only sometimes affect your game at all.
So what is all this stuff you get in this book?
I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I bought one of everything including this playtest version of the Kala Mandala playbook; a system to go with their flavour-forward, south-east Asian inspired setting. The base premise of Kala Mandala is that you belong to a meddling association. You are meddlers. Just wandering around sticking your nose in because, to quote it, "You are a professional meddler. You are an adventurer with a legitimate career path. You have monetized your irrepressible nosiness by joining a meddlers guild" - I love it, just fantastic stuff.
Cover art by Munkao
This is a full first draft - it has gorgeous illustrations throughout already. The artifact of the playbook is fully baked but it acknowledges that the system is not necessarily fully there. Notes in the back on what has been omitted from focus (balance, economy) also provide email addresses to send in your feedback. I think it is still certainly good enough to get going - I am far happier to have it in my hands in the state it is now than to wait another chunk of time to get those aspects ironed out when they will only sometimes affect your game at all.
So what is all this stuff you get in this book?
07 January 2026
Nominations for the Bloggies 2026
Clayton at Explorers Design hosts The Bloggies - a yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games. Below are my nominations for the categories they gave.
Theory Category. Thinking about systems, settings, and more.
Idraluna Archives gives us Notebook Kayfabe
Pithy, but a keen insight into how to preserve suspension of disbelief even when blind-sided by players.
Gameable Category. Ready-to-use rules, monsters, and more.
A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads by Garamondia
I repeat what I said for the GLoGgies - so good it kicked off a bandwagon, plus a genius monster that has massive potential to make fascinating campaigns and feel eerie but manageable once you figure out their schtick.
Advice Category. Advice for play, prep, publishing, and more.
Weird Writer's Prep Bandwagon
I rounded up some of the responses on Shiny links #229 and #230 and I know I missed many others - a huge response from the blogosphere with lots and lots of great advice so I think Weird Writer deserves a gong for perfectly timing the zeigeist and drawing forth so much useful blogging.
Strong runner-up for me was Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's hexfill methodology, only posted as a bluesky thread alas. I got a good few gaming sessions and multiple blogposts from this solid, actionable advice for 'regional' hexcrawling.
Critique Category. Critical analysis of books, games, and more.
Elmcats colossal work
I had a glimpse behind the curtain at the blood, sweat and bits that went into this - Elmcat put an unbelievable amount of work into coding this up and hunting down all the legacy blog-feeds of the distant past. Incredible work that helps us put fact-based answers to some bitter arguments and best of all - provides a one-stop shop to explore the greatest legacy hits of the OSR and find new bloggers you would never have stumbled on otherwise.
Best Debut Blog. Recognition for newcomers that make a splash.
Sages Sanctum
Early doors yet but Sage just started blogging and cranked out methodology bangers, lots of great ideas - mentions in the Glatisant & MT Black's newsletter already. I am watching eagerly to see what they come up with next.
Best Series.
Rise Up Comus + Warren D - Designing Dungeons Course
A huge work, a most generous gift of their time to the cause. Deserving of serious recognition.
Image by Clayton
Theory Category. Thinking about systems, settings, and more.
Idraluna Archives gives us Notebook Kayfabe
Pithy, but a keen insight into how to preserve suspension of disbelief even when blind-sided by players.
Gameable Category. Ready-to-use rules, monsters, and more.
A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads by Garamondia
I repeat what I said for the GLoGgies - so good it kicked off a bandwagon, plus a genius monster that has massive potential to make fascinating campaigns and feel eerie but manageable once you figure out their schtick.
Advice Category. Advice for play, prep, publishing, and more.
Weird Writer's Prep Bandwagon
I rounded up some of the responses on Shiny links #229 and #230 and I know I missed many others - a huge response from the blogosphere with lots and lots of great advice so I think Weird Writer deserves a gong for perfectly timing the zeigeist and drawing forth so much useful blogging.
Strong runner-up for me was Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's hexfill methodology, only posted as a bluesky thread alas. I got a good few gaming sessions and multiple blogposts from this solid, actionable advice for 'regional' hexcrawling.
Critique Category. Critical analysis of books, games, and more.
Elmcats colossal work
I had a glimpse behind the curtain at the blood, sweat and bits that went into this - Elmcat put an unbelievable amount of work into coding this up and hunting down all the legacy blog-feeds of the distant past. Incredible work that helps us put fact-based answers to some bitter arguments and best of all - provides a one-stop shop to explore the greatest legacy hits of the OSR and find new bloggers you would never have stumbled on otherwise.
Best Debut Blog. Recognition for newcomers that make a splash.
Sages Sanctum
Early doors yet but Sage just started blogging and cranked out methodology bangers, lots of great ideas - mentions in the Glatisant & MT Black's newsletter already. I am watching eagerly to see what they come up with next.
Best Series.
Rise Up Comus + Warren D - Designing Dungeons Course
A huge work, a most generous gift of their time to the cause. Deserving of serious recognition.
10 December 2025
Grave of a Thousand Heads (Onegeon Jam)
For the Onegeon jam in accordance with The Onegeon Manifesto by Cats Have No Lord
Guidelines for the ideal Onegeon:
Make it system neutral as much as possible
Make it small
Make it either bland or entirely unique.
Make it weird
This site is either a room in a forgotten corner of a dungeon or in a barrow in the middle of an icefield.
The Grave of a Thousand Heads
A frozen stone door, carved with dragonshead, with signs of panelling long pried away. Behind the door a large staircase descends 20' into a 180' diameter hexagonal chamber. The walls glimmer, light reflect from black marble, the floor has mounds and scattered detreitus.
To one side, a pile of frozen headless bodies, hundreds of them, battle-marked and frozen beneath a sheet of ice. Draw close and see someone tried to burn them once before.
Ahead, a cairn of skulls, the missing hundreds, topped with a sword standing to show its hilt. Behind it a tipped altar, a shattered icon.
All across the floor signs a packed camp was destroyed in fighting.
Stepping from the stairs starts the skulls clattering and chittering, pin-pricks of blue light their frozen sockets. The bodies beneath the ice begin to struggle free.
A few skeletons will work themselves free continuously while intruders remain and lurch to attack. Destroying the skulls quiets them all.
Touring the perimeter finds black marble slabs making the hexagonal room, smashed through in places to reveal an older cavern behind. The marble is carved with the tale of a great ritual, strongly featuring undead dragons. The walls behind the slabs are daubed with ancient lore. The altar oozes evil, the smashed icon that of a forgotten murder cult.
Time spent here to piece things together - a murder cult laired here, was raided and wiped out. A noble fell in the battle and was buried under the heads of his foes. The site itself was being studied by the cult but is of an older time, a previous dragon cult having built it, etching their most powerful ritual into the stones on the walls.
Paltry loot can be gleaned from the bodies of the skeletons. The sword has minor magics but is clearly an heirloom of the local ruling house. Beneath the cairn, buried with honors is a noble of that house, their body partially mummified in the cold. Armour long rusted, marred by the blows that killed them. A bright signet ring, the most significant prize here. Tens of gold to a nameless fence, hundreds returned to his family, the same for his sword.
Design notes
This is an 'activate the map' room - an information-trap where the damage just takes a long time coming. The remnants of the cult, the local nobles, dragon cultists, power-hungry arcanists - whisper a word that you were in this place and all of those will be after you.
Trade back the signet and sword to the nobles, they will reward you well. Give them any concern you are trying to unearth the murder cult and they will hunt you to the ends of the earth.
The true treasure here is information - the murder cult want to know where the last altar of their master is, any dragon cultists or arcanists would be very interested in the ritual carved on the walls. Most would be seek to kill rather than leaving someone else the chance to learn that knowledge.
Guidelines for the ideal Onegeon:
Make it system neutral as much as possible
Make it small
Make it either bland or entirely unique.
Make it weird
This site is either a room in a forgotten corner of a dungeon or in a barrow in the middle of an icefield.
The Grave of a Thousand Heads
A frozen stone door, carved with dragonshead, with signs of panelling long pried away. Behind the door a large staircase descends 20' into a 180' diameter hexagonal chamber. The walls glimmer, light reflect from black marble, the floor has mounds and scattered detreitus.
To one side, a pile of frozen headless bodies, hundreds of them, battle-marked and frozen beneath a sheet of ice. Draw close and see someone tried to burn them once before.
Ahead, a cairn of skulls, the missing hundreds, topped with a sword standing to show its hilt. Behind it a tipped altar, a shattered icon.
All across the floor signs a packed camp was destroyed in fighting.
Stepping from the stairs starts the skulls clattering and chittering, pin-pricks of blue light their frozen sockets. The bodies beneath the ice begin to struggle free.
A few skeletons will work themselves free continuously while intruders remain and lurch to attack. Destroying the skulls quiets them all.
Touring the perimeter finds black marble slabs making the hexagonal room, smashed through in places to reveal an older cavern behind. The marble is carved with the tale of a great ritual, strongly featuring undead dragons. The walls behind the slabs are daubed with ancient lore. The altar oozes evil, the smashed icon that of a forgotten murder cult.
Time spent here to piece things together - a murder cult laired here, was raided and wiped out. A noble fell in the battle and was buried under the heads of his foes. The site itself was being studied by the cult but is of an older time, a previous dragon cult having built it, etching their most powerful ritual into the stones on the walls.
Paltry loot can be gleaned from the bodies of the skeletons. The sword has minor magics but is clearly an heirloom of the local ruling house. Beneath the cairn, buried with honors is a noble of that house, their body partially mummified in the cold. Armour long rusted, marred by the blows that killed them. A bright signet ring, the most significant prize here. Tens of gold to a nameless fence, hundreds returned to his family, the same for his sword.
Design notes
This is an 'activate the map' room - an information-trap where the damage just takes a long time coming. The remnants of the cult, the local nobles, dragon cultists, power-hungry arcanists - whisper a word that you were in this place and all of those will be after you.
Trade back the signet and sword to the nobles, they will reward you well. Give them any concern you are trying to unearth the murder cult and they will hunt you to the ends of the earth.
The true treasure here is information - the murder cult want to know where the last altar of their master is, any dragon cultists or arcanists would be very interested in the ritual carved on the walls. Most would be seek to kill rather than leaving someone else the chance to learn that knowledge.
06 December 2025
Sunshine Blogger Award
This blog has been graciously awarded a Sunshine Blogging Award by Halfway Station - "peer recognition to bloggers who bring positivity, joy and creative content to the blogging world" - my first awareness of it but greatly appreciated nonetheless. Halfway Station specifically grants this "for the analyses of gaming data" - for which I am further gratified, those 'dungeons & data' posts can be a slog at times, glad to see people like them.
As part of this I need to answer questions from the nominator and then select some nominees myself.
Courtesy of The Wonderful World of Cinema we have a recap of the steps to accept the award:
1. Include the Sunshine Blogger Awards somewhere on your blog and/or in the article
2. Thank the person who nominated you
3. Share the link to this person’s blog (it goes without saying)
4. Answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you. In my case, it will be 22 questions.
5. Nominate 11 bloggers yourself.
6. Ask 11 questions to these bloggers.
7. Notify the bloggers by commenting on their blogs.
So should you find yourself nominated below, and you would like to accept and pass it on, this is the process.
Courtesy of The Wonderful World of Cinema we have a recap of the steps to accept the award:
1. Include the Sunshine Blogger Awards somewhere on your blog and/or in the article
2. Thank the person who nominated you
3. Share the link to this person’s blog (it goes without saying)
4. Answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you. In my case, it will be 22 questions.
5. Nominate 11 bloggers yourself.
6. Ask 11 questions to these bloggers.
7. Notify the bloggers by commenting on their blogs.
So should you find yourself nominated below, and you would like to accept and pass it on, this is the process.
03 December 2025
Many Faces of the OSR
tl;dr: "OSR" is a banner flown over many folk, often unalike, occasionally strongly opposed - generalisations do not come easily.
Elmcat did a thing - Mapping the Blogosphere - pulled in a lot of blog feeds, looked at who linked to who, over a good long block of time. Threw them into some network-detecting software and out pops a neat hex of communities.
Noting the caveats of link-rot, blog-deletion, loss of G+, etc. that mean this is not the complete picture of all online effort around the thing known as the OSR, we can still discern a couple of true-enough to be useful facts.
First, this lets us put some kind of shape to the unsurprising intuition that there are a number of separate communities that travel under the banner of the OSR - some overlap more or less with others.
Second, there have been pulses of activity, some of these groups within the wider blogosphere are differentiated in time more than any approach to gaming.
We have a multitude beneath the OSR umbrella - and Elmcat's work gives us a sense of which bits were/are at the foreground and when.
We can assume that brickbats will continue to be thrown at the OSR based on the behaviours of the meanest, most unwelcoming fraction of assholes and while it is true that those folk are in there, they are not a majority and to abandon the OSR to them is to hand a great victory to a puny force. Similarly, those claims made by outsiders can now be countered with something more than vibes - they are demonstrably a small bunch of bad actors, just ignore them and soak up the rest of the good stuff in here.
Elmcat did a thing - Mapping the Blogosphere - pulled in a lot of blog feeds, looked at who linked to who, over a good long block of time. Threw them into some network-detecting software and out pops a neat hex of communities.
Noting the caveats of link-rot, blog-deletion, loss of G+, etc. that mean this is not the complete picture of all online effort around the thing known as the OSR, we can still discern a couple of true-enough to be useful facts.
First, this lets us put some kind of shape to the unsurprising intuition that there are a number of separate communities that travel under the banner of the OSR - some overlap more or less with others.
Second, there have been pulses of activity, some of these groups within the wider blogosphere are differentiated in time more than any approach to gaming.
Adapted from original logo by Matt Jackson
I hacked together the mashup above to reflect the truth, that whatever other facts there are, there are at least six meanings someone could have when they say OSR, one for each of those communities. From that persons point of view they are correct, that was a reflection of their experience of the OSR, thought it might have been a time and a community that is no longer extant. Another person going looking for just that OSR will not find it today, only its shadow, but that does not make the first person wrong.We have a multitude beneath the OSR umbrella - and Elmcat's work gives us a sense of which bits were/are at the foreground and when.
We can assume that brickbats will continue to be thrown at the OSR based on the behaviours of the meanest, most unwelcoming fraction of assholes and while it is true that those folk are in there, they are not a majority and to abandon the OSR to them is to hand a great victory to a puny force. Similarly, those claims made by outsiders can now be countered with something more than vibes - they are demonstrably a small bunch of bad actors, just ignore them and soak up the rest of the good stuff in here.
15 November 2025
Querying OSR Blogging Scene Vibrancy
On Ye Olde Question of 'is the OSR dead' but this time with some data - based on community participation in jams and challenges and continued appearance of 'big idea' posts - not dead yet.
A bit ago there were a slew of posts on the OSR blogging scene losing vibrancy - and I had no way to tackle that in a non-subjective way. Hero of our times Elmcat has been sweating over a red-hot RSS feed to pull together a colossal graph of the OSR blogverse by back-tracking peoples blog feeds and linked posts. They have also generously provided us with 'top 10 posts' lists for the last ten years which allow us to at last have some sort of visibility on activity levels.
Another set of complaints is the channel-jamming effect of various awards, various crowd-funding seasons and so on - but those are social media noise complaints. The underlying concern is the reduction in new creative things. I think we must accept some repetitive blogging as new folk rediscover the basic truths of gaming styles and blog about it. Our institutional memory is nil so it feels unfair to get salty at folk when they write up something older hands already know - how were they to know what they just wrote was hotly debated on defunct social media sites years before they could even read?
So to try and find a handle on whether or not we are seeing creativity fall off or whether we are getting new ideas, we can turn to Elmcats great labour to try to spot whether big new touch-stone posts, those with a lot of link-backs, are still emerging.
A bit ago there were a slew of posts on the OSR blogging scene losing vibrancy - and I had no way to tackle that in a non-subjective way. Hero of our times Elmcat has been sweating over a red-hot RSS feed to pull together a colossal graph of the OSR blogverse by back-tracking peoples blog feeds and linked posts. They have also generously provided us with 'top 10 posts' lists for the last ten years which allow us to at last have some sort of visibility on activity levels.
The Blogverse, by Elmcat
To try and get a sense of vibrancy increasing or decreasing, what metrics are we using? The main complaints that seem to get brought up are a shift toward selling product in place of improving practice at table. Even there, one mans post refining practice at table is another mans "why is there yet another 'how to dungeon crawl' post?" A laudable retro-clone to one is anothers sign that everything is a rehash.Another set of complaints is the channel-jamming effect of various awards, various crowd-funding seasons and so on - but those are social media noise complaints. The underlying concern is the reduction in new creative things. I think we must accept some repetitive blogging as new folk rediscover the basic truths of gaming styles and blog about it. Our institutional memory is nil so it feels unfair to get salty at folk when they write up something older hands already know - how were they to know what they just wrote was hotly debated on defunct social media sites years before they could even read?
So to try and find a handle on whether or not we are seeing creativity fall off or whether we are getting new ideas, we can turn to Elmcats great labour to try to spot whether big new touch-stone posts, those with a lot of link-backs, are still emerging.
| Published | Post | Links |
|---|---|---|
| 31 October 2018 | Automatic List Generator v2 | 233 |
| 17 October 2007 | Grand Experiment West Marches | 143 |
| 19 December 2008 | Party like its 999 | 95 |
| 08 October 2019 | Landmark Hidden Secret | 80 |
| 06 May 2008 | Shields shall be splintered | 87 |
| 06 July 2024 | RPGADAY 2024 | 72 |
| 10 June 2017 | Tomb of the Serpent Kings | 71 |
| 06 April 2021 | Six Cultures of Play | 69 |
| 07 May 2016 | The GLoG | 70 |
| 24 April 2011 | twenty quick questions | 75 |
12 November 2025
Actual Test: Dungeon Creation Process from The Breakfast Ossuary
After seeing it praised on the purple OSR discord, along with the note that the original blog was lost to the internet wastes, I thought it might be useful to unearth and try out "Zero to Complete Dungeon Generation, Waffle-Style" - now only findable on the internet archive.
The steps of the 'Waffle-style' method are:
Step 1 – Concept Shopping - vibes, mechanics, themes - pick 10-20
Step 2 – Monster Shopping - choose level, list 1-6 monsters
Step 3 – Rough Layout - 5-10 rooms in rough layout
Step 4 – Stocking the Rooms
Step 5 – Revisions
Step 6 – Keying the Dungeon
The steps of the 'Waffle-style' method are:
Step 1 – Concept Shopping - vibes, mechanics, themes - pick 10-20
Step 2 – Monster Shopping - choose level, list 1-6 monsters
Step 3 – Rough Layout - 5-10 rooms in rough layout
Step 4 – Stocking the Rooms
Step 5 – Revisions
Step 6 – Keying the Dungeon
01 November 2025
Review: Beyond Dread Portals
tl:dr; self-contained RPG of world-hopping fantasy, old-school system, great, concise setting.
My 'support your local gaming houses' campaign - this is from d101 games in the UK; I saw this pop up as a kickstarter, pitching a "tabletop roleplaying game of multidimensional world-travelling fantasy" which speaks to my plane-hopping interests and the pitch also noted that the "easy-to-learn rules are built from a core loosely based on the world's first fantasy roleplaying game, tailored to fit the setting" so I was interested in something that was setting-forward, with less focus on classes and sub-classes, more on the portal-hopping.
First impression was of a nice self contained book, fatter than I was expecting at ~320 A5 pages and with a nice ribbon. Within we have clean lay-out, no columns, black-and-white art by Dan Barker, Jeshields and Paul Tomes. The vibe is very much a cleaned-up old-school book, self-contained with everything needed in here.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
My 'support your local gaming houses' campaign - this is from d101 games in the UK; I saw this pop up as a kickstarter, pitching a "tabletop roleplaying game of multidimensional world-travelling fantasy" which speaks to my plane-hopping interests and the pitch also noted that the "easy-to-learn rules are built from a core loosely based on the world's first fantasy roleplaying game, tailored to fit the setting" so I was interested in something that was setting-forward, with less focus on classes and sub-classes, more on the portal-hopping.
Cover art by Jon Hodgson
First impression was of a nice self contained book, fatter than I was expecting at ~320 A5 pages and with a nice ribbon. Within we have clean lay-out, no columns, black-and-white art by Dan Barker, Jeshields and Paul Tomes. The vibe is very much a cleaned-up old-school book, self-contained with everything needed in here.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
18 October 2025
Actual Play: Waking of Willoughby Hall
tl;dr: lessons learned from bringing a good adventure to a bad open table.
I did a capsule review of Waking of Willoughby Hall a while back, noting I got good use out of this interesting haunted house - but while the adventure was great as an input to the session, the session itself annoyed me and I am going to try and unpack that.
I ran Willoughby Hall for one of the 'off week' sessions of my dual-mode hex-crawl. This meant I had a start point tavern, village, campaign etc. that I was dropping an open table of gamers into for a one shot. This was my first live-fire test of this but subsequent successful uses of the same model (for Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter) showed this frame for a session works.
System was 5e, since this is what the local open tables run so I doubled all the hp listed for the monsters and NPCs and otherwise used the 'HD = roll bonus' rule of thumb. Immunities and special abilities remained as written.
Session Recap
I got the usual pot pourri of races/classes.
Human Warlock (apparently a farmer)
Dhampire Illrigger (apparently a scholar)
Elf Rogue (apparently a sailor)
Yuan-ti Wizard (apparently a snake trader)
Leonin Barbarian (appears as they are)
Goblin Artificer (appears as they are)
I slotted the adventure in under a request to go investigate a commotion down near the outlying fields; there they found the flattened shrine with missing bell tower and a cowering attendant who pointed them towards the abandoned manor. They arrived to see the Bonebreaker Tom peering in the windows and shouting for his lost goose, Mildred.
The party decided to dash in past the giant to get in - I was pleasantly surprised at their biting on the hook as intended rather than fight or bamboozle the giant. One PC did decide to try and engage the giant, I warned them subtly, then told them it was death to face this monster and yet they persisted. Flexing a number of defensive tricks let them dodge-and-weave one round while Bonebreaker Tom tried to stomp them flat and everyone else got to fling themselves through various doors and windows into the Sitting Room or the Great Hall. The 'distractor' managed to dive in after them and we were inside the house.
After a brief pause to search the sitting room and find the snuffbox they regrouped in the Great Hall and headed upstairs. They eplored the western rooms - poking about the oddments in the Museum and encountering the NPC adventurers at a distance. The NPCs ducked away and the players progressed. They moved on to the gallery and ran into Bonebreaker Tom again - at this point the Death Knight woke and they ended up in a strung out fight between the Death Knight in the Museum and trying to negotiate with Bonebreaker Tom on the balcony. They defeated the Death Knight and its skeletons - meanwhile promising to fetch Mildred for Bonebreaker Tom. From here the party splintered and things got a bit slow - people headed off to different floors, interacted with different things and were poking around all over the place.
Enough seals were broken by now to shift the hall to 'Restless' and they were properly spooked. They managed to corner Mildred the Goose after a lot of running around, and 'nova-ed' their way out of fighting the taxidermied owl-bear with some ability that tosses something into the feywild. They faced down the NPCs and convinced them to try and run for it - it did not end well for the NPCs as the players tipped off Bonebreaker Tom who outpaced the NPCs and messily dealt with them.
Eventually, the Death-Knight reconstituting and coming after them got them to return Mildred the Goose to Bonebreaker Tom and then fleeing the manor, much of the ground floor left un-surveyed.
DM notes
The players came to it with the 5e assumption of all combat is survivably through their suite of abilities - and so the 'plot forcer' of Bonebreaker Tom needed a lot more pushing from me to emphasise that they could not just fight them, nor hope to stand against them.
I missed a trick with counting a seal broken every time Bonebreaker Tom flails the hall with the bell - that would have accelerated things.
The adventure gave me a good template that let me pull an enjoyable game out of the whole thing. Despite being statted and designed for OSR, it survives contact with 5e the system pretty well; if I had more motivation I might have tried to make it a 'teach the old school ways' session but I decided just to see how it would get approached by relatively frequent 5e players doing their usual thing.
As the open table filled up, the first block of sign-ups were all people who had expended my goodwill with them previously and up to the evening before I was strongly contemplating just yanking the table. Three were folk that ground my gears, one I had no problems with but only when the last two joined did I figure the nonsense was dilute enough that I was happy to run. I had tried to catch the old school vibe by pitching the game as 'think hobbit or lord of the rings' and two players rocked up with a yuan-ti abomination and a dhampire illrigger. I sat to table with very low expectations, I should have cancelled.
I run these open tables to decompress after my work week so a session like this where I leave frustrated is too costly a use of my limited free time. I am aware that others similarly do not get to play that often so TPKs have a high opportunitiy cost. On a similar vein when I get a table of players who are just going to argue with me if things are run to their expectations, it is not worth the effort of having the fight to uphold the principle of the thing - because while I am arguing with those folks, everyone else is having their session frittered away.
I took other old school adventures - Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter - to newer groups of players and to other of the 5e players they leaned into the old-school style a bit more, maybe did not poke and pry at things like real old-school OD&D folk might have but they treated hazards as hazardous. Here we had a table steeped in the 5e tradition of 'I can fight my way through anything' and it showed in splitting up, charging into threats alone which slowed things down as I had to juggle multiple people tripping things at the same time and then decide to either run through a time-consuming proper consequences version of what could happen or skip the consequences of some of it to try and keep the table as a whole rolling.
Waking of Willoughby Hall was fun to run despite all that; the lesson learned to me was trust my gut and just pull the session when I see sign-ups I know will be annoying to deal with.
Edit: as I saw the question posed elsewhere - did the players have fun? They said they did at close of the session.
I did a capsule review of Waking of Willoughby Hall a while back, noting I got good use out of this interesting haunted house - but while the adventure was great as an input to the session, the session itself annoyed me and I am going to try and unpack that.
I ran Willoughby Hall for one of the 'off week' sessions of my dual-mode hex-crawl. This meant I had a start point tavern, village, campaign etc. that I was dropping an open table of gamers into for a one shot. This was my first live-fire test of this but subsequent successful uses of the same model (for Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter) showed this frame for a session works.
System was 5e, since this is what the local open tables run so I doubled all the hp listed for the monsters and NPCs and otherwise used the 'HD = roll bonus' rule of thumb. Immunities and special abilities remained as written.
Session Recap
I got the usual pot pourri of races/classes.
Human Warlock (apparently a farmer)
Dhampire Illrigger (apparently a scholar)
Elf Rogue (apparently a sailor)
Yuan-ti Wizard (apparently a snake trader)
Leonin Barbarian (appears as they are)
Goblin Artificer (appears as they are)
I slotted the adventure in under a request to go investigate a commotion down near the outlying fields; there they found the flattened shrine with missing bell tower and a cowering attendant who pointed them towards the abandoned manor. They arrived to see the Bonebreaker Tom peering in the windows and shouting for his lost goose, Mildred.
The party decided to dash in past the giant to get in - I was pleasantly surprised at their biting on the hook as intended rather than fight or bamboozle the giant. One PC did decide to try and engage the giant, I warned them subtly, then told them it was death to face this monster and yet they persisted. Flexing a number of defensive tricks let them dodge-and-weave one round while Bonebreaker Tom tried to stomp them flat and everyone else got to fling themselves through various doors and windows into the Sitting Room or the Great Hall. The 'distractor' managed to dive in after them and we were inside the house.
After a brief pause to search the sitting room and find the snuffbox they regrouped in the Great Hall and headed upstairs. They eplored the western rooms - poking about the oddments in the Museum and encountering the NPC adventurers at a distance. The NPCs ducked away and the players progressed. They moved on to the gallery and ran into Bonebreaker Tom again - at this point the Death Knight woke and they ended up in a strung out fight between the Death Knight in the Museum and trying to negotiate with Bonebreaker Tom on the balcony. They defeated the Death Knight and its skeletons - meanwhile promising to fetch Mildred for Bonebreaker Tom. From here the party splintered and things got a bit slow - people headed off to different floors, interacted with different things and were poking around all over the place.
Enough seals were broken by now to shift the hall to 'Restless' and they were properly spooked. They managed to corner Mildred the Goose after a lot of running around, and 'nova-ed' their way out of fighting the taxidermied owl-bear with some ability that tosses something into the feywild. They faced down the NPCs and convinced them to try and run for it - it did not end well for the NPCs as the players tipped off Bonebreaker Tom who outpaced the NPCs and messily dealt with them.
Eventually, the Death-Knight reconstituting and coming after them got them to return Mildred the Goose to Bonebreaker Tom and then fleeing the manor, much of the ground floor left un-surveyed.
DM notes
The players came to it with the 5e assumption of all combat is survivably through their suite of abilities - and so the 'plot forcer' of Bonebreaker Tom needed a lot more pushing from me to emphasise that they could not just fight them, nor hope to stand against them.
I missed a trick with counting a seal broken every time Bonebreaker Tom flails the hall with the bell - that would have accelerated things.
The adventure gave me a good template that let me pull an enjoyable game out of the whole thing. Despite being statted and designed for OSR, it survives contact with 5e the system pretty well; if I had more motivation I might have tried to make it a 'teach the old school ways' session but I decided just to see how it would get approached by relatively frequent 5e players doing their usual thing.
As the open table filled up, the first block of sign-ups were all people who had expended my goodwill with them previously and up to the evening before I was strongly contemplating just yanking the table. Three were folk that ground my gears, one I had no problems with but only when the last two joined did I figure the nonsense was dilute enough that I was happy to run. I had tried to catch the old school vibe by pitching the game as 'think hobbit or lord of the rings' and two players rocked up with a yuan-ti abomination and a dhampire illrigger. I sat to table with very low expectations, I should have cancelled.
I run these open tables to decompress after my work week so a session like this where I leave frustrated is too costly a use of my limited free time. I am aware that others similarly do not get to play that often so TPKs have a high opportunitiy cost. On a similar vein when I get a table of players who are just going to argue with me if things are run to their expectations, it is not worth the effort of having the fight to uphold the principle of the thing - because while I am arguing with those folks, everyone else is having their session frittered away.
I took other old school adventures - Hole in the Oak and Winters Daughter - to newer groups of players and to other of the 5e players they leaned into the old-school style a bit more, maybe did not poke and pry at things like real old-school OD&D folk might have but they treated hazards as hazardous. Here we had a table steeped in the 5e tradition of 'I can fight my way through anything' and it showed in splitting up, charging into threats alone which slowed things down as I had to juggle multiple people tripping things at the same time and then decide to either run through a time-consuming proper consequences version of what could happen or skip the consequences of some of it to try and keep the table as a whole rolling.
Waking of Willoughby Hall was fun to run despite all that; the lesson learned to me was trust my gut and just pull the session when I see sign-ups I know will be annoying to deal with.
Edit: as I saw the question posed elsewhere - did the players have fun? They said they did at close of the session.
04 October 2025
Review: Hyena Child
tl:dr; a city sandbox with a grounded feel, packed full of hooks, sites and factions to sustain a good chunk of play.
I grabbed this in the last days of Planet Harry's, spotting that it was by Gazerpress, a local RPG shop here in Vienna that I had been on the lookout for. It got brought home and admired but not brought to table until I met the writer at the recent Indie RPG Con which prompted me to pick it up again with a focus on bring it to play - and reading at the level of detail a review requires. I liked it on first impression and after reading it in detail, that has changed to I like it a lot.
Looks wise this is a gorgeous chunky A5 hardback, distinctive black-and-orange, two ribbons, black and white watercolour art by Marianne Musek throughout plus maps by Markus Schauta. Within the text is all double column per page, overall the layout and artwork are great, giving us a clean, clear, uncluttered book. Statted up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, relatively light mechanical ties throughout mean you can easily adjust to whatever your system of choice is.
So what is do you get in the book?
Introduction 33 pages on Alexandria circa 1632
The Adventures 62 pages with five adventures
The Dungeon 81 pages on the catacombs beneath Alexandria
Appendices 23 pages of factions, rumours, encounters and items
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
I grabbed this in the last days of Planet Harry's, spotting that it was by Gazerpress, a local RPG shop here in Vienna that I had been on the lookout for. It got brought home and admired but not brought to table until I met the writer at the recent Indie RPG Con which prompted me to pick it up again with a focus on bring it to play - and reading at the level of detail a review requires. I liked it on first impression and after reading it in detail, that has changed to I like it a lot.
Looks wise this is a gorgeous chunky A5 hardback, distinctive black-and-orange, two ribbons, black and white watercolour art by Marianne Musek throughout plus maps by Markus Schauta. Within the text is all double column per page, overall the layout and artwork are great, giving us a clean, clear, uncluttered book. Statted up for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, relatively light mechanical ties throughout mean you can easily adjust to whatever your system of choice is.
So what is do you get in the book?
Introduction 33 pages on Alexandria circa 1632
The Adventures 62 pages with five adventures
The Dungeon 81 pages on the catacombs beneath Alexandria
Appendices 23 pages of factions, rumours, encounters and items
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
27 September 2025
Campaign Spin-Up X - Back of the Envelope Campaign Planning
I wrote about "rebooting a campaign with 2d20 Conan" - spinning up a new campaign in the Scaled Lands.
In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.
Altogether this serves as a nice illustration of constraint breeding creativity. This world had been the campaign where I 'applied the OSR' after discovering all the blogs and wisdom, I had put a lot of thought into it pre-pandemic, including using it for NaNoWriMo, but I had none of that with me when I did this.
First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.
Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.
I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.
With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.
One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.
In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.
First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.
Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.
I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.
With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.
One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.
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