Links to some serious thinking as people purge their draft folders before the end of the year. 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.
Alone in the Labyrinth launches #City26 challenge for next year and also gives us City of 100 Gods, Traders Wake: They Who Store The Grain (35); The Deep One (36).
Viridian Void Productions shares Die Hard is OSR
Binary Star Games gives us Conflict as Motivation and Resolution
Billhook Blog writes In Praise of the Pit
Gorgon Bones shares “Boring” Combat is Fine Actually
Methods & Madness gives us Old school swarms/minions (B/X, OSE, AD&D, etc.)
dungeon doll shares Elves
Kill It With Fire! gives us Rotating Players, Stable PCs Campaign Plan
Habeeb (@beeboobubie) writes the default dungeon is colonial
Afraid of Encounters gives us Anti-colonial Dungeon
The Dododecahedron shares Crossing the Dungeon Rubicon
Patchwork Paladin asks Why Go Hexcrawling?
Old Men Running The World gives us How to get better at improvising
Connecting the Fictional Dots shares The Grand Table of Settings – and a Christmas Game
MurkMail gives us The Stakes of Grimdark
22 December 2025
20 December 2025
Apocalypse for thee, but not for us (RPG Blog Carnival )
This month the RPG blog carnival is hosted by Advantage on Arcana and has the topic of The End Times And After - which is an interesting one.
The End Times for a given world are not 'the End of all things' and things continue thereafter - see the weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls or last summers Blog Carnival topic "It Came From Beyond Time" where I went into some of the ways that things can survive through 'deep time'. We also see that 'the end times' of a given people may be little to nothing for their neighbours (d6 Sites of the Long Wars) and also that adventure can be found in the immediate aftermath of the end-times: d12 post-apocalyptic worlds (GLoGtober '22).
Things eventually bounce back - especially when we are dealing with a multiverse teeming with life - even a world burnt to a cinder is briefly a paradise for fire-elementals before turning into a rock suitable for dao, xorn and other rock-creatures.
All this assumes your apocalypse hit hard enough to disrupt the underdark and the oceans, both of which provide vast reservoirs of hardy life which can re-seed a devastated land.
Menagerieworld has four great extinction events - where "the fate lines pinched out" - running back to the distant past. Multiple devastating conflicts and continent shaking events barely register on such a scale.
One can have truly global 'end times' with nuclear winters, the fading of life and the long wait for re-seeding from the seas, underdark, wildspace of the planes - but one can get most of the same adventurable bang-for-buck from a continental apocalypse; sufficiently large that it is practically beyond escaping but still leaving the possibility of remnants out there.
One kind of 'post apocalypse as we don't generally understand them' is something unique to our fantasy realms - where a thriving civilization can essentially be cut down while its neighbours or even some of its citizens carry on.
d6 possible 'post-apocalyptic' games
1. The elves of this world all just withered away - their soul-tree in Arvandor died. What is found in their forest holds? What treasures slipped from their fingers? What gates they held barred now fall open?
2. An illithid invasion swept this world, nautiloids hang in the skies and subterranean cities are being constructed. You are one of the inedible races - warforged, plasmoids, dhampir - carve out a niche in the new order
3. The seas rose, much has drowned - you are in one of the few remaining spots of protruding land - adapt to this new water world and its now pre-eminent aquatic masters
4. Princes of Undeath - you and your peers have out-lasted the mortals, as was always the plan. They had some ragnarok, all souls went on and now, finally, the gameboard is clear and long-held grand ambitions can be pursued
5. The great chill - volcanic plumes have darkened the skies, sufficient to hold off the baleful sun - forests spread, the deserts shrink, the claw-locked grip of the lizard-folk empire are loosened. As they skulk off into hibernation or away to warmer climes, what to do?
6. The great migration - everyone just up and left, reasons unknown. Rumours of strange heralds beckoning and driving all through portals that opened everywhere. Are they gone for good? If not, when will they return?
The broad theme here is a massive shake to the system that opens a window for outsiders to potentially forge a new destiny in the abandoned palaces or ruins of the old.
The End Times for a given world are not 'the End of all things' and things continue thereafter - see the weird time epochs collected on Coins and Scrolls or last summers Blog Carnival topic "It Came From Beyond Time" where I went into some of the ways that things can survive through 'deep time'. We also see that 'the end times' of a given people may be little to nothing for their neighbours (d6 Sites of the Long Wars) and also that adventure can be found in the immediate aftermath of the end-times: d12 post-apocalyptic worlds (GLoGtober '22).
Things eventually bounce back - especially when we are dealing with a multiverse teeming with life - even a world burnt to a cinder is briefly a paradise for fire-elementals before turning into a rock suitable for dao, xorn and other rock-creatures.
All this assumes your apocalypse hit hard enough to disrupt the underdark and the oceans, both of which provide vast reservoirs of hardy life which can re-seed a devastated land.
Menagerieworld has four great extinction events - where "the fate lines pinched out" - running back to the distant past. Multiple devastating conflicts and continent shaking events barely register on such a scale.
One can have truly global 'end times' with nuclear winters, the fading of life and the long wait for re-seeding from the seas, underdark, wildspace of the planes - but one can get most of the same adventurable bang-for-buck from a continental apocalypse; sufficiently large that it is practically beyond escaping but still leaving the possibility of remnants out there.
One kind of 'post apocalypse as we don't generally understand them' is something unique to our fantasy realms - where a thriving civilization can essentially be cut down while its neighbours or even some of its citizens carry on.
d6 possible 'post-apocalyptic' games
1. The elves of this world all just withered away - their soul-tree in Arvandor died. What is found in their forest holds? What treasures slipped from their fingers? What gates they held barred now fall open?
2. An illithid invasion swept this world, nautiloids hang in the skies and subterranean cities are being constructed. You are one of the inedible races - warforged, plasmoids, dhampir - carve out a niche in the new order
3. The seas rose, much has drowned - you are in one of the few remaining spots of protruding land - adapt to this new water world and its now pre-eminent aquatic masters
4. Princes of Undeath - you and your peers have out-lasted the mortals, as was always the plan. They had some ragnarok, all souls went on and now, finally, the gameboard is clear and long-held grand ambitions can be pursued
5. The great chill - volcanic plumes have darkened the skies, sufficient to hold off the baleful sun - forests spread, the deserts shrink, the claw-locked grip of the lizard-folk empire are loosened. As they skulk off into hibernation or away to warmer climes, what to do?
6. The great migration - everyone just up and left, reasons unknown. Rumours of strange heralds beckoning and driving all through portals that opened everywhere. Are they gone for good? If not, when will they return?
The broad theme here is a massive shake to the system that opens a window for outsiders to potentially forge a new destiny in the abandoned palaces or ruins of the old.
17 December 2025
Review: Green Corridor
tl;dr: an eco-restoration-themed map-crawler pamphlet game with some interesting resouce balancing mechanics.
I looked at this as a part of Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle but a chance draw from a review round-robin has geas-ed me to take another look - so let us delve deeper.
GREEN CORRIDOR has up to five players be agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aiming to reconnect them by exploring a hex-map and rebuild the world one ecological pathway at a time.
A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, print it out and fold it, works well - good contrast, clear layout, nice piece of art for the front cover. So what do you actually get?
I looked at this as a part of Capsule Reviews #9: HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle but a chance draw from a review round-robin has geas-ed me to take another look - so let us delve deeper.
GREEN CORRIDOR has up to five players be agents of REWIND, a group of survivors of the climate catastrophe and corporatism that has ravaged the world. Agents seek out pockets of The Green, habitable regions where people and wildlife can flourish, aiming to reconnect them by exploring a hex-map and rebuild the world one ecological pathway at a time.
A punchy tri-fold pamphlet game, print it out and fold it, works well - good contrast, clear layout, nice piece of art for the front cover. So what do you actually get?
15 December 2025
Shiny TTRPG links #255
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
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
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
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