Bloggies 2022

Histories of D&D and TSR have become thick on the ground. Representing the gold standard – in terms of completeness, standard of scholarship, and avoiding a slide into hagiography –…

I have a hypothesis: Wizards of the Coast's 5E adventures are for fucking weenies. I know, it's a tall claim to make. Let's prove this throu...

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of depthcrawl mini-campaigns by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen. It would probably be more accurate to describe them as THE depthcrawl mini-campaigns,

There are several things that you need to know about Kelvin Green. First, he is entirely wrong about which version of Invasion of the Body S...

A small story When I was 12, I was introduced to RPGs. I said "Oh I will make one for Lord of the Rings." I went home and wrote it in a note...

This article is a review of the Mothership RPG, a review of Desert Moon of Karth, and a report on our 8-hour bachelor party adventure. Buckle up, space cowboy!

Where the Wheat Grows Tall A review by Yochai Gal The Introduction Where the Wheat Grows Tall is an old-school adventure for low-level chara...

Devoted to speculative fiction on the page, the screen and the tabletop. Also featured: the OSR and its offshoots, history, literature, architecture.

A Book of Beasts Review by WFS This bestiary is a supplement for a supplement. In 2015, Jason Lutes wrote “ The Perilous Wilds ”, a supple...

Preface Wolves Upon the Coast is a “grand campaign” written by Luke Gearing—of Gradient Descent , Fever Swamp, Acid Death Fantasy , and ma...

Some might say that the unique setting proves detriment to a dungeons utility as a generic or learning dungeon. This might be the case, howe...

One of the things at which the OSR excels is categorization and the creation of jargon to encapsulate these new categories. Though perhaps i...

The book begins with “What is the thing that we call a role-playing game?” Jon Peterson doesn’t answer that question but he did document the first conversations of people attempti…

Below is a shared review of a 2021 adventure released for Old School Essentials: Holy Mountain Shaker , written and illustrated by Luka Reje...

Editor: Guest author Jason Lutes writes about his lengthy fantasy sandbox game and how he made it happen, West Marches style! I recently wrapped up a 40-session “sandbox” fantasy campaign, taking a cue from the “West Marches” approach popularized by Ben Robbins (of Microscope fame). According to a series of blog posts Ben wrote to… Continue reading Western Wilds: an Expedition into the West Marches →

In fiction, time travel typically falls into the following categories: Time travel can affect the past in details, but not in broad outcome...

The following was written with Cairn in mind, but would work just as well for Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and heck, D&D 5e if you’re doing a complete revamp. Performing actions inv…

In order for a sandbox region to have a sense of verisimilitude it's important for it for many of the  locations to be actually connected instead of a series of unrelated vignettes. This interconnection creates a web of hooks that pulls players from location to location and unites the patchwork quilt of locations into a unified whole.

Communal world creation done on-the-fly at the table.

I have bigger, better articles in the works but I noticed my output has slowed down, so back into the vaults I go. I've dug up this list fro...

One of my fave GLoG blogs - Whose Measure God Could Not Take - did a fun meme about listing cheap tricks that GMs can use to make their game...

Shipwright Thinking about CosmicOrrery’s post about diceless violence and the reference to this post about combat maneuvers. Skorne’s no to-hit rolls or even damage rolls is something I…

I don’t know how much I’ve ever spent on TTRPG materials in total. I’d probably put it under $200 [1], with the most expensive (yet worthw...

A dynamic encounter for sure It is entirely possible by playing D&D for any amount of time you have encountered or have written some variati...

Since I'm getting a dungeon into publishable form right now for a new project, I thought it might be useful to share a little bit about my p...

This is me thinking out loud about intrigue in role-playing games, and a bit of scaffolding to make it happen. For the moment I'm thinking a...

This  Bastionland Editorial  was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site a week after its...