Links from around the web. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.
Grackle Court gave me a most generous GLoGmas 2025 post: EXTRA Shiny TTRPG links - delve into the best links of all previous 254 collections!
Did you game at all this year? Have you a blog? Share how your year went with The Endie Awards from Lady Tabletop. Some examples so far from MixUpPixels with A Landmark Year - The Endies 2025, Luck Roll and Indie RPG Newsletter
Sam Seer's Blog proposes JOIN THE BLOGWAGON: Your Rule of Three!
The greatest poster in the world launches Gloggies 2025 nominations
15 December 2025
13 December 2025
Pressure-points for domain-level faction (GLoGmas 25 for Dom)
I got Dom of 'Infernal Pact' for GLoGmas; taking their own understanding of it as "writing something inspired by [someones blogpost] I think" I found something inspiring tucked on the back of their "adding in domain play after the fact" posts (parts 1 and 2).
The conclusions on Infernal Pact - that adding in a 'Domain play' layer has benefits and you can do that by thinking about factions - had a couple of questions that boil down to a checklist for gameable domain-scale factions:
- what factions?
- what resources are they using, where are their military assets deployed
- what are they worrying about?
- where are their weak-spots for a group of ne'er-do-wells to cause maximum damage
You can combine this with lots of other generators to help create the faction but you then need to confirm that you have those points of interaction clear as those are the handles on which the players will grab. Even if you do not nail them down to the map using An Echo, Resounding or Birthright or similar, you can get a good sense of who and what is in play.
This is also a good tool to re-tension a setting after maybe players have been off doing things for a while, checking who remains active, who may have been harmed or helped by the players actions and taking it from there. After the players have been in action for a while, they will have attention of some factions, have moved away from the spheres of concern of others, so an exercise like this is good for a mid-campaign check for where the adventures ahead might lie.
Another really good point made is how to see PC's - as a powerful asset across most of the spectrum who is much quicker than most other domain level actors - so they can stick their fingers in a lot of pies and put their thumbs on lots of scales.
Test Case
Using my Hexcrawl25 campaign as a template, let us run the slide-rule over that. I have been using 'dweller faction' as the hook for each hex, so let us see if these can be batched up along the lines of who gets
First we have some distant, stronger actors influencing the locality through a small fraction of their force, and then groups with local strength; the list below is first three 'big, far' factions and then three locals:
- the loyalist goliaths of the Hissing Valley
- the kirianshalee goliaths of the Meandering Mountains
- marchlords
- goblins
- nascent kingdom of Ashley
- harpy coven and their swamp-magician allies
The two goliath groups are head-to-head with each other and the Kingdom of Ashley is the players own faction so the three players in the region that are 'rivals/threats' are the goblins, the harpy coven and the marchlords.
Looking at these three big and small factions as a test of the Dom's questions;
The conclusions on Infernal Pact - that adding in a 'Domain play' layer has benefits and you can do that by thinking about factions - had a couple of questions that boil down to a checklist for gameable domain-scale factions:
- what factions?
- what resources are they using, where are their military assets deployed
- what are they worrying about?
- where are their weak-spots for a group of ne'er-do-wells to cause maximum damage
You can combine this with lots of other generators to help create the faction but you then need to confirm that you have those points of interaction clear as those are the handles on which the players will grab. Even if you do not nail them down to the map using An Echo, Resounding or Birthright or similar, you can get a good sense of who and what is in play.
This is also a good tool to re-tension a setting after maybe players have been off doing things for a while, checking who remains active, who may have been harmed or helped by the players actions and taking it from there. After the players have been in action for a while, they will have attention of some factions, have moved away from the spheres of concern of others, so an exercise like this is good for a mid-campaign check for where the adventures ahead might lie.
Another really good point made is how to see PC's - as a powerful asset across most of the spectrum who is much quicker than most other domain level actors - so they can stick their fingers in a lot of pies and put their thumbs on lots of scales.
Test Case
Using my Hexcrawl25 campaign as a template, let us run the slide-rule over that. I have been using 'dweller faction' as the hook for each hex, so let us see if these can be batched up along the lines of who gets
First we have some distant, stronger actors influencing the locality through a small fraction of their force, and then groups with local strength; the list below is first three 'big, far' factions and then three locals:
- the loyalist goliaths of the Hissing Valley
- the kirianshalee goliaths of the Meandering Mountains
- marchlords
- goblins
- nascent kingdom of Ashley
- harpy coven and their swamp-magician allies
The two goliath groups are head-to-head with each other and the Kingdom of Ashley is the players own faction so the three players in the region that are 'rivals/threats' are the goblins, the harpy coven and the marchlords.
Looking at these three big and small factions as a test of the Dom's questions;
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.
08 December 2025
Shiny TTRPG links #254
Only the shiniest links out across the blogosphere. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.
Explorers Design announces The Bloggies 2026!
Quasiwizard gives us 12 Hexes
A shrike for my dreams shares Pruning 5e: A response to '5 Cuts To 5e That Make The Game More Interesting'
To Be Resolved asks Conservation of Game - How Resilient is your Prep?
The Ice Queen's Throne writes AD&D isn’t a burger, it’s a meatloaf
Says Who gives us METT-TC for Faction Play
Rise Up Comus shares [Early Worm Campaign] The Backstory of the Castle Automatic
Meticulous Mezzanine gives us Villages, resources, and gm facing tools
Coins and Scrolls writes OSR: Treasure for Dungeon / Room Stocking
TTRPG Insider gives us Pay-to-Play: The Business of the Professional Dungeon Master
Explorers Design announces The Bloggies 2026!
Quasiwizard gives us 12 Hexes
A shrike for my dreams shares Pruning 5e: A response to '5 Cuts To 5e That Make The Game More Interesting'
To Be Resolved asks Conservation of Game - How Resilient is your Prep?
The Ice Queen's Throne writes AD&D isn’t a burger, it’s a meatloaf
Says Who gives us METT-TC for Faction Play
Rise Up Comus shares [Early Worm Campaign] The Backstory of the Castle Automatic
Meticulous Mezzanine gives us Villages, resources, and gm facing tools
Coins and Scrolls writes OSR: Treasure for Dungeon / Room Stocking
TTRPG Insider gives us Pay-to-Play: The Business of the Professional Dungeon Master
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.
01 December 2025
Shiny TTRPG links #253
More shiny links from around the web. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.
d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - Brainfood for Burgeoning Blogs
Trick's Tales writes Seven Part Pact: An Extremely Complicated Game about Extremely Complicated Men
Connecting the Fictional Dots shares Character Death and Play Cultures
Fluorite Guillotine gives us quantum ogre reborn
Zedeck Siew Writing Hours shares TO DRINK UP THE SEA
Tree Climber gives us Alignment as Rock Paper Scissors
Messages From The Far Havens writes Being a Good Gamemaster at RPG Conventions
Wayspell gives us [HMtW] Encounters Upon the Astral Sea
Dungeon Bison shares The Map as a Tool for Conversation
monkeyX's games blog writes Gothic Feelings, Urban Nightmares: Playing in the Shadows of Buffy, Liminal & Vampire
To Be Resolved gives us Bee-Sized Anchors of Wilderness Play
I Cast Light! shares LAW, ORDER, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Gameable Suggestions from English Medieval Law
d4 Caltrops gives us d100 - Brainfood for Burgeoning Blogs
Trick's Tales writes Seven Part Pact: An Extremely Complicated Game about Extremely Complicated Men
Connecting the Fictional Dots shares Character Death and Play Cultures
Fluorite Guillotine gives us quantum ogre reborn
Zedeck Siew Writing Hours shares TO DRINK UP THE SEA
Tree Climber gives us Alignment as Rock Paper Scissors
Messages From The Far Havens writes Being a Good Gamemaster at RPG Conventions
Wayspell gives us [HMtW] Encounters Upon the Astral Sea
Dungeon Bison shares The Map as a Tool for Conversation
monkeyX's games blog writes Gothic Feelings, Urban Nightmares: Playing in the Shadows of Buffy, Liminal & Vampire
To Be Resolved gives us Bee-Sized Anchors of Wilderness Play
I Cast Light! shares LAW, ORDER, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Gameable Suggestions from English Medieval Law
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