Theory '23

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...

So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not...

Edit: This post was nominated for a Bloggie Award! Thank you for all your support everyone! My hill to die on this week, is just we need to stop moralising the type of games people play. This overl…

Assuming a long-term campaign, it’s common to divide the game into “low-level” and “high-level” play, but what this means has historically been

a short essay on filling the gaps in your empathy

A new video game title came out recently and a few other bloggists did Zelda posts, so I felt left out and jealous.  When you level up in a ...

Reflections on my favorite design feature of Knave, Mausritter, and Cairn.

What is art? A miserable pile of secrets. A week ago I woke up to this Tweet about the Mausritter  boxed set[[*4]] restock, and I thought "...

Adapted from the original I wrote for the fantasy audio magazine CANDLE. Under the Ogl's Gaze Recently there's been plenty of turmoil in the roleplaying hobby, especially among publishers, about the rumored moves by Hasbro to cripple the open-gaming license, which helped trigger the OG OSR

Read this interesting post on the author’s “12 favorite problems,” which is a callback to something physicist Richard Feynman talked about. Most people look for solutions. But few seek out problems. There are exceptions. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, liked to keep a list of his dozen favorite problems. These were big open-ended questions that could guide his life’s work. “Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!.’” Feynman realized that genius is not having all the answers. Everything starts with asking the right questions.

For the third post in my 'transcript analysis' series, I'm looking at a very different play style than I'm familiar with: Critical Role. For...

If you only ever listened to annoying AD&D fanboys, you might think that the OSR is strictly about crawling through big megadungeons as swor...

more theory than anyone should be legally allowed to possess