I see quite a few engined-/fighter-type things in various Spelljammer homebrew and it leaves me surprised we do not have more 'attack critters' for the same purpose but more aligned to the Age of Sail flavour - packs of trained beasts or flying mounts.
The archetype I can think of is the githyanki knight on a Star Lancer from the "Behold... H'Catha!" Spelljammer Academy 5e adventure though there have always been nods towards 'getting monsters on the opposing ship' - with catapults flinging skeleton-balls or bottled green slimes in various Spelljammer 2e adventures.
It feels like there should be more 'ship-based monsters' for boarding action support than we see - especially since in 5e killing the crew is a far more direct path to victory than attempting to batter the opposing ship apart.
Ship-to-ship encounters could be made more interesting with the addition of such 'attack monsters' - it is the equivalent to changing the terrain to make ship-to-ship action feel fresh again when you might be constrained by the ship deck plans or opposing forces otherwise being quite similar - e.g. in a conflict against a faction where you might repeatedly run up against the same ship type (i.e. terrain) and fights might get to feel samey.
My thoughts are that there are a couple of potential options that achieve this while fitting a bit more into the 'age of sail' flavour
- flying-steeds / mounted attackers - as per SJA knight-on-a-star lancer
- attack beasties - harassers, swarms, like a wardog in a dungeon
- flung critters - as above, skeletons, slimes or other 'living munitions'
- the 'fast-moving, damage-flinging single thing' is a mage or a monster - or someone decked out with a flying-carpet and a wand of fireballs.
If there is the means for a small-fast craft lying around, I would see it being more used for sneaky boarding actions rather than engaging something with a lot of weapons while you only have a few.
I think best illustrated by a few examples.
d12 creatures arriving as that craft closes to boarding distance
1. A burly crewman with a boarding pike atop a small wyvern swoops under your hull to attack weapon emplacements from the far side
2. A gallant captain with polished blade and befeathered hat atop a comet steed directly challenges his opposite number
3. Robes billowing behind them as they fly, a mage loops over your ship firing spells at exposed crew
4. An ogre flings howling goblins into the rigging of your ship, some with shortbows, some with firepots, others scuttle down below decks to ambush your crew there
5. Giant wolf-spiders leap from the drow ship, biting crew and darting along the hull
6. Illithids just appeared aboard, firing spells and trying to devour your crews succulent brains
7. Giant toads with psurlons atop them leap aboard and start trying to swallow your crew, fighting over them
8. A flyby from the neogi ship drops a spread of piercers on your deck
9. A squad of dohwar atop space swine swoops down on you weapon emplacements
10. An elf flying a gadabout drags a rope with a trio of fellows into your rigging
11. An enemy catapult flings a jar with a tar-form gehreleth onto your deck with the intention of standing off and allowing the fiend to rampage
12. Catapult flung balls of skeletons land on the deck, un-fold and attack
25 April 2026
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.
20 April 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #273
Links of great interest from the breadth of the interweb. Not sated? Try last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
Ye Olde Revivalist posts d66 *Things Going On* in A Bog-Standard Fantasy Town (Table Jam 2026)
The Foot of Blue Mountain posts How to get a game going [on a server]
The B/X Undernauts gives us THE WHITE BOX CHALLENGE
Dungeons & Dragons (WotC) gives us D&D 80s Animated Series
Eldritch Fields posts Take-aways from running quick pick-up games
My Nerdy Hobby posts Masked Bastionland
Jface Games writes Did Usage Dice & Clocks just Evolve?
DIY & dragons posts Experimental Layouts for a Dwarven City Megadungeon
The Novel Game Master writes The Many Editions of D&D
AMONG CATS AND BOOKS writes Fullstack Refereeing
MOMMY'S BIG GLASS OF WINE ALONE TIME BLOG MOST FOUL shares Searching for the free games ecosystem (and designing for desire paths)
Mindstorm posts Quick Stakes For Tense Situations
Prismatic Wasteland writes Chain Stocking the Hex Map
Owl Knight Games gives us Roleplaying Games as an Expression of Fandom
To Be Resolved shares Dungeon Stocking with Markov Processes
Ye Olde Revivalist posts d66 *Things Going On* in A Bog-Standard Fantasy Town (Table Jam 2026)
The Foot of Blue Mountain posts How to get a game going [on a server]
The B/X Undernauts gives us THE WHITE BOX CHALLENGE
Dungeons & Dragons (WotC) gives us D&D 80s Animated Series
Eldritch Fields posts Take-aways from running quick pick-up games
My Nerdy Hobby posts Masked Bastionland
Jface Games writes Did Usage Dice & Clocks just Evolve?
DIY & dragons posts Experimental Layouts for a Dwarven City Megadungeon
The Novel Game Master writes The Many Editions of D&D
AMONG CATS AND BOOKS writes Fullstack Refereeing
Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau
MOMMY'S BIG GLASS OF WINE ALONE TIME BLOG MOST FOUL shares Searching for the free games ecosystem (and designing for desire paths)
Mindstorm posts Quick Stakes For Tense Situations
Prismatic Wasteland writes Chain Stocking the Hex Map
Owl Knight Games gives us Roleplaying Games as an Expression of Fandom
To Be Resolved shares Dungeon Stocking with Markov Processes
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?
15 April 2026
Mapwork in campaigns (Maps Blogwagon)
tl;dr: get a broad coarse view of your world; there are easy tools to use & you will not regret it when your players head for the horizons.
This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.
Ducal House Example
i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.
This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.
Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.
Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up
This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.
Ducal House Example
i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.
This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.
Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.
Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up
13 April 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #272
Links of great interest from the breadth of the interweb. Not sated? Try last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.
Dungeons & Possums posts A Commenting Campaign
Backwards Tabletop writes Essay: The GM Is Dead
A Knight at the Opera posts How to Talk About Difficulty
Prismatic Wasteland gives us Play Is Canon
The Play Reports posts Fleurons, Mother of all Bullets
SandroAD shares What the Heck is a TTRPG?
Lonely Star writes De-Abstraction rocks, yo - or "I Finally Get Cottonmouth"
Patchwork Paladin posts Let’s Talk About Player Skill and Equipment
New School Revolution posts Module Writing Tips
I Cast Light! gives us JUST THE FACTS MA'AM: Using Sean McCoy's Investigation Sheet in CoC
sarene! blog writes Quick & Cheap Perfect Binding
Dungeons & Possums posts A Commenting Campaign
Backwards Tabletop writes Essay: The GM Is Dead
A Knight at the Opera posts How to Talk About Difficulty
Prismatic Wasteland gives us Play Is Canon
The Play Reports posts Fleurons, Mother of all Bullets
SandroAD shares What the Heck is a TTRPG?
Lonely Star writes De-Abstraction rocks, yo - or "I Finally Get Cottonmouth"
Patchwork Paladin posts Let’s Talk About Player Skill and Equipment
New School Revolution posts Module Writing Tips
I Cast Light! gives us JUST THE FACTS MA'AM: Using Sean McCoy's Investigation Sheet in CoC
sarene! blog writes Quick & Cheap Perfect Binding
11 April 2026
Actual Play: converting work colleagues to the cause
I was geas'ed to run D&D for one of my colleagues. They ambushed me at the office Christmas party and asked could I do it. This was a fair bit into the party so I filed it away as 'reconfirm later' - and when I was heading back to London I did check and lo, they were actually interested. I rounded up a few of the folk I *had* actually previously discussed D&D with, the geas-er roping in one of their pals too for a table of four.
I was honestly shocked at this level of interest among... ordinary folk? I mean, never mind the fact that I cosplay high corporate every day, I am still surprised that people have heard of it and are interested enough to try. These are folk who had not played Baldurs Gate 3, not seen the D&D movie, nor Stranger Things. The closest they had as a reference was some episode of Community (which I had never seen).
So with a certain sense of responsibility, I decided to book the Arcanists Tavern for some initial wow factor. Billed as "London's first immersive tabletop gaming cafe" near Hoxton, I have been in and run games there before but this was the first time I went full hog, booked a booth etc.
Facilities in general were great, booth big enough for the table, benches for the players and a seat for me all closed off with a curtain. We could tell the other tables were there but noise levels were better than a busy night at my usual Friday night venue. The tables were cool with baize pits in the center for all the dice rolling which kept things from getting lost. We got food and drink there, tasty toasties and a few beers - fairly abstemious compared to a typical work night out truth be told, practically a visit to the gym. Cost is value for what you get, I will be using it again.
Setup for the session
I generated a set of character from Fast Character - mostly because it is quick and easy button mashing and gets you most of what you need. Very good for martials or partial casters, not great for casters because it just names the spells, no info or stats, but it was good enough to get started.
I decided I was going to run a 'Splinters of Hope' session - planar scavenger hunt for wood from a now-dead world to save dying elves - and start in medias-re to really get things going.
I cooked up the session up as a classic 'quest' - sneak into a place, get a thing. Recycled setting by having the objective be set on the edge of my Hexcrawl25 map, so I knew all the factions, background activity and just used that. Decided to drop in 'thinky' challenges more than raw combat crunch. Threw in some good old Goblinpunch non-Euclidean weirdness. Decide it would be full of skeletons on 'automated rotas' so they could potentially sneak through them all if they figured that out.
Talked through all this to a transcription app while doing laundry then grabbed an envelope and blocked out the session linearly which became my session sheet.
Session Report: The Templars Villa
I was honestly shocked at this level of interest among... ordinary folk? I mean, never mind the fact that I cosplay high corporate every day, I am still surprised that people have heard of it and are interested enough to try. These are folk who had not played Baldurs Gate 3, not seen the D&D movie, nor Stranger Things. The closest they had as a reference was some episode of Community (which I had never seen).
So with a certain sense of responsibility, I decided to book the Arcanists Tavern for some initial wow factor. Billed as "London's first immersive tabletop gaming cafe" near Hoxton, I have been in and run games there before but this was the first time I went full hog, booked a booth etc.
Facilities in general were great, booth big enough for the table, benches for the players and a seat for me all closed off with a curtain. We could tell the other tables were there but noise levels were better than a busy night at my usual Friday night venue. The tables were cool with baize pits in the center for all the dice rolling which kept things from getting lost. We got food and drink there, tasty toasties and a few beers - fairly abstemious compared to a typical work night out truth be told, practically a visit to the gym. Cost is value for what you get, I will be using it again.
Setup for the session
I generated a set of character from Fast Character - mostly because it is quick and easy button mashing and gets you most of what you need. Very good for martials or partial casters, not great for casters because it just names the spells, no info or stats, but it was good enough to get started.
I decided I was going to run a 'Splinters of Hope' session - planar scavenger hunt for wood from a now-dead world to save dying elves - and start in medias-re to really get things going.
I cooked up the session up as a classic 'quest' - sneak into a place, get a thing. Recycled setting by having the objective be set on the edge of my Hexcrawl25 map, so I knew all the factions, background activity and just used that. Decided to drop in 'thinky' challenges more than raw combat crunch. Threw in some good old Goblinpunch non-Euclidean weirdness. Decide it would be full of skeletons on 'automated rotas' so they could potentially sneak through them all if they figured that out.
Talked through all this to a transcription app while doing laundry then grabbed an envelope and blocked out the session linearly which became my session sheet.
Session Report: The Templars Villa
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