A brief history of the OSR as an artistic movement and some thoughts on what comes after it.

SOB, SOB by Kerry James Marshall “For this too is what W. E. B. Du Bois might have us think of as the gift of black culture, the gift of bla...

It has not escaped my notice that GLOGhacks are sort of a thing . There's even a subreddit with a list of GLOG resources . (And a lot of the...

A blog about table-top role-playing games after a break of two decades.

SLOUCHING TOWARD PROCEDURALISM “Here we come across another, very positive feature of play : it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect...

At the time of this writing, my cozy game Under Hill, By Water is part of DriveThruRPG's "Cozy Game Indie Gallery." I'm extremely flattered...

Creators often live in the shadow of their own previous work, the big thing they're known for. Danial Radcliffe isn’t called the guy from Guns Akimbo or Swiss Army Man- he’s Harry Potter to the average person on the street. Steamtunnel at the Hydra’s Grotto can be counted among these shaded creators by their well known 2009 blog post “In Praise of the Six Mile Hex”. In it they laud the 6 mile hex scale as the most convenient for computing distances at the table.

I recently reviewed John Battle's My Body is a Cage for Bones of Contention . Battle’s game combines slice of life real world downtime wi...

This is a post I had hoped to write back at the start of July, and so by now the little conversation I hoped to contribute to is far from au...

A guide on how to create procedures to structure your RPG campaign

I want to talk about a long-standing tendency that's been bothering me in OSR-inflected design spaces. I'll start this off with a working d...

Late anaphase of mitosis (sciencephototlibrary) I hate when I write a thoughtful response on Reddit and not this blog. So here it is repeate...

So a game has “procedures” but what does that mean? This post presents a basic definition for an aspect of TTRPGs that is garnering more and more critical attention.

Who's ready for another stupidly long post? That's the spirit! The "Skill Challenge" is an interesting type of generalist gameplay procedure...

First up, a brief announcement: the kickstarter for Knock! issue three has now gone live, packed with material from the old-school blogosphe...

Click Here for 'Basic Edition' Is the OSR dead yet? If you asked a couple of my friends, they would say yes: there was a body of cultural kn...

Take a calm, pleasant moment to think about your most cherished piece of media: The magical movie, bewitching book, scary song, terrifying t...

Like virtually everybody else in the TTRPG space I downloaded One D&D’s playtest document to see what the fuss was.

One Example, Many Systems

My unexpected descent into the Classical gaming playstyle from Modern Adventure Gaming (aka the modern OSR)

The megadungeon has a creative call to it, this grand and imposing space mapped out for adventure, a beckoning otherworld to explore. People dig superlatives, the biggest, the tallest, the most dangerous, the most powerful, the deepest. But the challenge of making something epic in scope can swamp even the most dedicated GM. It’s very […]

Not really. But maybe, with your help, we actually can. Let's give this a shot. Every now and then I've seen a blog post attempting to cover...

Why wouldn’t a bear flee from a house cat?

Recently I came across a by Suarachán discussing their annoyance at how vastly different Dolmenwood is compared to how it presented itself in its early s...

The OSR space has discussed the importance of framing interesting combats. It has not done the same amount of work to provide concrete advic...

Exploring the concept of "fragility" in tabletop game design, and why it matters

For our purposes let’s just say that lore is “setting background”: information about the setting of a campaign. The paradigm is perhaps the ...

Gary Gygax is probably the best known name in Role Playing Games -- still, nearly 15 years after his death.  Considered Dungeons & Dragons’ ...

30 Dec 2024—This is an updated version of my October blog post. The original conatins several factual and mathematical errors, but is archived here