First links of 2022! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.
Continuing to point to the D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is still open. This years topics include: Covid-19's impact on TTRPGs, Education and TTRPGs, Online Play Behavior and Future Tech and TTRPGs. The latest from the survey so far can be seen in their newsletter.
I Cast Light has a good frame in Inside The OSR There Are Two Wolves: OSR-V the Revival (Preservation) vs. OSR-N the Renaissance (Principles).
Some unusual hybrids on D&D Homebrew 5e such as aasimar/dragonborn and fey/celestial.
Hack & Slash has "How to Make 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons more Old School"
Spriggans Den has Shattered Empire D&D 5th edition modifications based on lessons learned from their last campaign.
Simple but cunning - Analogue ‘Fog of War’ hack … | Jigsaw over map by Goblins Henchman
Rise up Comus seeks "to invert the paradigm of "complicated wizard, easy fighter" in Crunchify Me, Captain!
Cavegirl creates a far future Vampire setting with "After Gehenna - A concept for a VtM chronicle"
03 January 2022
01 January 2022
How to get started in D&D
Rewritten and expanded from a response I wrote to someone asking 'how do you start in D&D' after a buddy of mine pointed them my way.
Starting from the baseline of 'I've heard about this thing, where do I start?' - I would say there are two paths.
First - the long route, which is pretty labour intensive - buy the books, figure out the game, round up a bunch of players yourself and throw dice. It worked for me but it takes a while and you are making a chunky time commitment before you ever get rolling. Lots of fun to be had world building, prepping and so on and when it works, it is magical but this is the high risk, high reward path.
Today, I would suggest the best way to start is to get stuck in; find a new joiners table and say 'I am new' - people are usually welcoming. You may need to hop about a bit to find the people you really gel well with but this is like finding a favourite pub, try it and see. Make contact with folk on forums or wherever and say you are interested - they will point you to the easiest way to get involved. As mentioned on this Adventuring Party episode, there is a ton of free stuff out there because people want to get you playing, this is a social game after all.
Starting from the baseline of 'I've heard about this thing, where do I start?' - I would say there are two paths.
First - the long route, which is pretty labour intensive - buy the books, figure out the game, round up a bunch of players yourself and throw dice. It worked for me but it takes a while and you are making a chunky time commitment before you ever get rolling. Lots of fun to be had world building, prepping and so on and when it works, it is magical but this is the high risk, high reward path.
Today, I would suggest the best way to start is to get stuck in; find a new joiners table and say 'I am new' - people are usually welcoming. You may need to hop about a bit to find the people you really gel well with but this is like finding a favourite pub, try it and see. Make contact with folk on forums or wherever and say you are interested - they will point you to the easiest way to get involved. As mentioned on this Adventuring Party episode, there is a ton of free stuff out there because people want to get you playing, this is a social game after all.
29 December 2021
Year In Review 2021
So 2021 has been a year with a bunch of milestones in it.
I turned 40, got this very neat sketch to commemorate the occasion by the bard in my home campaign.
I turned 40, got this very neat sketch to commemorate the occasion by the bard in my home campaign.
27 December 2021
Shiny TTRPG links #48
Links for the last week of 2021! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.
5 More Stupid yet Robust Games for Video Calls on Coins and Scrolls
d4 Caltrops has a great d100 Random Rules & Rulings
A thousand gods by Odd Skull.
'Write Adventures to fit their Worlds': Setting specific adventure writing by Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet
Where the Chaos Thing Fell by From the Sorcerers Skull - demonic whalefall, a great planar site.
Bayeaux Tapestry meme generator - lots of potential here!
Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us The Holiday One-Shot
OSR News Roundup for 12.20.21 - by Third Kingdom Games - everything that is not blogs in the scene.
Who's the New Guy Anyway? d20 Answers for OSR Games by Axian Spice - when you need to add another body to the party.
Knight at the Opera considers the Underdark in Subterranean Thoughts
5 More Stupid yet Robust Games for Video Calls on Coins and Scrolls
d4 Caltrops has a great d100 Random Rules & Rulings
A thousand gods by Odd Skull.
'Write Adventures to fit their Worlds': Setting specific adventure writing by Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet
Where the Chaos Thing Fell by From the Sorcerers Skull - demonic whalefall, a great planar site.
Bayeaux Tapestry meme generator - lots of potential here!
Whose Measure God Could Not Take gives us The Holiday One-Shot
OSR News Roundup for 12.20.21 - by Third Kingdom Games - everything that is not blogs in the scene.
Who's the New Guy Anyway? d20 Answers for OSR Games by Axian Spice - when you need to add another body to the party.
Knight at the Opera considers the Underdark in Subterranean Thoughts
25 December 2021
Building a bubble around the table
This is a repeat of a piece I wrote in ~ 2007 for Irish gaming blog Direweasel, now lost to bit-rot. I am putting it up here as a good round up of what I look for in a game, regardless of system, whether I play or run it.
I think the best place to start is to lay out where I am coming from - what kind of games I have played, what worked and what did not. I should probably focus on my area of expertise which is that I am a low-system Planescape GM and an Illuminati University (IOU) GM.
I think IOU forms the epitome of 'my style' because it is at it's core adapted bullshit sessions. I'm going to take it apart a little to show you where it came from and how it has just run and run periodically since. The very first game was run over Christmas 2001, four of us were parked in someones apartment late and night and I can't remember how exactly it got started but it did - we pulled majors in Intergalactic Sexual Heroism, Kinetic Physics and Sorcery out of the ether and all of a sudden bizarre fraternities, sororities, dissertation topics, familiars, lab experiments and traditions just sprang into being over the course of the night.
And then on another night I dragged everyone together, fed them full of coffee and again a story evolved, with the minimum of prodding from me.
I think the best place to start is to lay out where I am coming from - what kind of games I have played, what worked and what did not. I should probably focus on my area of expertise which is that I am a low-system Planescape GM and an Illuminati University (IOU) GM.
I think IOU forms the epitome of 'my style' because it is at it's core adapted bullshit sessions. I'm going to take it apart a little to show you where it came from and how it has just run and run periodically since. The very first game was run over Christmas 2001, four of us were parked in someones apartment late and night and I can't remember how exactly it got started but it did - we pulled majors in Intergalactic Sexual Heroism, Kinetic Physics and Sorcery out of the ether and all of a sudden bizarre fraternities, sororities, dissertation topics, familiars, lab experiments and traditions just sprang into being over the course of the night.
And then on another night I dragged everyone together, fed them full of coffee and again a story evolved, with the minimum of prodding from me.
22 December 2021
Review: The Kontext Spiel Collection
tl:dr; three light-weight free kriegspiel systems, a setting and lots of useful content generation tools in this compilation of tabletop goodness.
This is "a variety of resources for running freeform tabletop games" by Michael Raston of The Lizardman Diaries. Anyone who has tracked this blog for a while will have seen me plug Infinigrad and other pieces of genius scattered across the Lizardman Diaries blog. This book is a handy compilation with some of the best of those.
Bigger and slimmer than I expected - 56 pages of A4 in the soft cover I got off Lulu. The art is Michael Rastons trade mark out-of-copyright mashups. I respect the mans patience in searching up his source material and hacking it all together. A long time advocate of 'take your inspiration from an image', his works have always had a certain aesthetic that has tended towards the baroque in previous publications (A Blasphemous Roster being first to mind) but here I like how there is a clean seperation between the content and the tables making the crunch more accessible.
This is "a variety of resources for running freeform tabletop games" by Michael Raston of The Lizardman Diaries. Anyone who has tracked this blog for a while will have seen me plug Infinigrad and other pieces of genius scattered across the Lizardman Diaries blog. This book is a handy compilation with some of the best of those.
Bigger and slimmer than I expected - 56 pages of A4 in the soft cover I got off Lulu. The art is Michael Rastons trade mark out-of-copyright mashups. I respect the mans patience in searching up his source material and hacking it all together. A long time advocate of 'take your inspiration from an image', his works have always had a certain aesthetic that has tended towards the baroque in previous publications (A Blasphemous Roster being first to mind) but here I like how there is a clean seperation between the content and the tables making the crunch more accessible.
20 December 2021
Shiny TTRPG links #47
As we thunder towards the end of the year - more links! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find still more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR.
Continuing to point to the D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is still open. This years topics include: Covid-19's impact on TTRPGs, Education and TTRPGs, Online Play Behavior and Future Tech and TTRPGs. Some initial cuts of the data can be seen on their site.
An excellent "Maximalist Weird Fiction Nobleman Generator" from Grand Commodore.
Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice on highly dangerous systems by Chocolate Hammer.
Grumpy Wizard writes a good one in "What Is “The Game” of Dungeons & Dragons?"
Marcia’s Blog has Simulating Gygax's Stupid Economy
Some fun calculations from Wandering Gamist on ACKS Budget Dungeons: The Wages of Wizardry - how big a dungeon is your mad mage building on his budget?
Really cool set of D&D Flavor Generators by u/seriousd6
Some ultra-light mechanics ideas from Dare to DM
Continuing to point to the D&D Research Wizards Tabletop RPG 2021-2022 Survey which is still open. This years topics include: Covid-19's impact on TTRPGs, Education and TTRPGs, Online Play Behavior and Future Tech and TTRPGs. Some initial cuts of the data can be seen on their site.
An excellent "Maximalist Weird Fiction Nobleman Generator" from Grand Commodore.
Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice on highly dangerous systems by Chocolate Hammer.
Grumpy Wizard writes a good one in "What Is “The Game” of Dungeons & Dragons?"
Marcia’s Blog has Simulating Gygax's Stupid Economy
Some fun calculations from Wandering Gamist on ACKS Budget Dungeons: The Wages of Wizardry - how big a dungeon is your mad mage building on his budget?
Really cool set of D&D Flavor Generators by u/seriousd6
Some ultra-light mechanics ideas from Dare to DM
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