Grenzland no. 6 appeared in my mailbox last week, and now can also be downloaded from archive.org. A harcopy can be purchased for 5 Euros from Wanderer Bill (as long as copies last that is). It fea…| Stuffed Crocodile
People keep buying products. But all you need is paper and something to write one. Sure, for this I used 4″ x 6″ cards with pre-printed grids. But, I didn’t really need those. Just a pencil and paper would have done. If you are struggling to come up with a campaign map or dungeons. Here’s […]| Fluid — Druid
Call of the Wild RPG A few years ago, I started down the path of making a role-playing game about the Klondike and Alaskan gold rushes, tentatively titled Call of the Wild. I never finished it. Primarily because I came to the conclusion that I didn’t know how to make it fun. These gold rushes […]| Fluid — Druid
First Comic Previous Comic Next Comic Today’s Comic Latest Updates| Something*Positive
This post contains the first level map key for the cemetery plot and adventure introduction in Part 1 and Part 2. Ground Level A. Gate The fence around the family plot is made of wrought iron, eight feet tall, with ornate spikes across the top. The iron arch over the gate rises to twelve feet […]| RPG Wandering
The first time I learned about a nothic was when a friend was DMing Lost Mine of Phandelver. It was a very creepy encounter, as the DM played up the eeriness of the creature by having the nothic whisper unintelligibly in our minds as we entered the area around its lair. After reading the description […]| RPG Wandering
“It’s not easy being green” Even though this was my first time hosting an RPG Blog Carnival, it is actually pretty easy, and the folks of the community did not disappoint! I did not have a lot of time to write this month, but I did get two posts done: a little bit of magical […]| RPG Wandering
One of the players was not able to make it to the first session of my Rusheniya campaign, and I didn’t want to run the first adventure without everyone there, so I decided to run a set of prologue scenes, one for each PC there, and a final one with all the PCs. Each individual […]| RPG Wandering
We played a session zero for the Rusheniya campaign this weekend, and it was great fun. The players had enjoyed the work and detail I put into the setting so far, and did not disappoint with their connections to the city! We started the session with player introductions and a discussion of Lines and Veils, […]| RPG Wandering
My backyard is blooming, so I thought a list of mundane and magical plants might be interesting. It also works as part of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival theme: It’s Not Easy Being Green…| RPG Wandering
Have you ever wanted to play a game of D&D in a world of wonder? A game less about kobolds…|
Paizo is continuing its steady stream of releases this year,| POCGamer
So Shane Hensley, owner of Pinnacle Entertainment Group and creator of the games Savage Worlds and Deadlands also came out publicly to side with the fascist agitator Charlie Kirk, making himself a self-proclaimed neo-nazi. I feel bad for anyone who plays Savage Worlds or owns any Savage Worlds books. But buying anything from Pinnacle Entertainment … Continue reading "Savage Worlds and Deadlands creator Shane Hensley is also self-professed as a Neo-Nazis"| Spriggan's Den
RPG miniature shop Red Box Games posted on Facebook that the person running the account is a self-proclaimed Neo-Nazi. Really don't have anything more to say about this. Don't do business or associate with fascists. If you were to buy anything from Red Box, you would be funding hate crimes. Fuck Charlie Kirk. Good riddance … Continue reading "Red Box Games RPG miniatures is proclaiming to be Neo-Nazi"| Spriggan's Den
After having taken a few days off from writing this adventure module for The Secret World TTRPG, I sat down this morning to pick up where I left off and after making some grammatical and “voice” fixes, I was suddenly struck by a narrative idea, except that it was an idea that would require me to up-end the entire plot and focus of what I have done so far. | Scopique's
On Garlic Presses and tabletop roleplaying games| Amanda P.
This is the same approach as here. Read that first. Here’s a quicker version of the above. It eliminates the new weapon table and uses the original AD&D damage table. It replaces the previous armor dice with what is shown below. Otherwise, it is the same procedure.| Fluid — Druid
Overbearing in AD&D means an unarmed action where an attacker attempts to knock his opponent off his feet. The base chance of success is exactly the same as for grappling (discussed here and here). Where overbearing differs is in the effect. The biggest difference is effect is modified by only the attacker’s strength, not the […]| Fluid — Druid
In my previous post of unarmed combat in AD&D, I discussed the basic mechanisms and gave an example of pummeling. Here is an example regarding grappling human versus ogre. A few years ago, when…| Fluid -- Druid
First Comic Previous Comic Next Comic Today’s Comic Latest Updates| Something*Positive
First Comic Previous Comic Next Comic Today’s Comic Latest Updates| Something*Positive
Here’s a quick unboxing video of the Fiery Angels adventure for the Bladerunner TTRPG! Free League has been releasing heavily-produced adventures in box sets for both their Alien and Bladerun…| Laidback DM: SteveStillStanding.com
I don’t do these regularly, so here’s a catch-up post. I might throw out another one later, because I have Thoughts on a Thing that I want to get out ahead of tomorrow, but we’ll see how that goes. | Scopique's
My partner got me and herself really into Dandadan, which she described at one point as Mob Psycho for people who go to the club. It's so so so fucking good. Momo and her friends are my queens. Okarun is such a precious squishy boywife. The stories of the monsters they encounter and how others get wrapped into their life pull you by your heartstrings to the edge of your couch. Anyway, I was reminded that the most popular RPG in Japan is Call of Cthulhu, and it struck me how Dandadan is a p...| Traverse Fantasy
There's a really good post by Elmcat about prepping settlement-based adventures by designing neighborhood blocks and representing buildings (etc.) as people! But it also has a petty desire table that I felt like would be nice to generalize: that although people's relationships are often overdetermined by their relative positions in a social matrix (in TTRPG terms, we can refer to these as factional allegiances), it's interesting when a socially determined relationship is complicated by a pers...| Traverse Fantasy
Following Lich Van Winkle's post about dee-five-six , I wanted to post about a realization I had that I'm sure others know but thought would...| traversefantasy.blogspot.com
I have been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 the last few weeks, which spurred me on (see what I did there!) to give Boot Hill a look again, especially as RDR2, like other Rockstar Games titles, is us…| Stuffed Crocodile
One of the great things about Hal Foster’s seminal Prince Valiant is that from very early on, Foster demonstrates how medieval combat was inextricably entwined with wrestling. The sequence below is one of the earliest examples, Val is losing versus the quarterstaff and resorts to grappling. It’s an early example, but the strip is full […]| Fluid — Druid
Remember those heady days just after Magic: The Gathering came out, when all of a sudden any TTRPG related publisher decided to push out their own trading card game? Well, so does Atlas Games it seems, who have been sitting on unopened “On the Edge” boxes for the last 30 years and are still selling […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Y…eah. I mean, I have been doing these things for old DSA scenarios already, so now I get to do them for old Shadowrun ones as well. And Dreamchipper definitely is one of the oldest ones on the block, technically the second of independent scenarios after DNA/DOA (and the fourth after the venerated Food Fight […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Last week we had the 26th session of my Glimmermark Labyrinth Lord game, which makes for a game about every 2 weeks on average since I started in July 2024. Unfortunately sometimes it’s just not possible to find enough people to play, even if I offered the game as an open table game. We decided […]| Stuffed Crocodile
I have never done this in the past, but then again I’ve never worked on a TTRPG adventure which leaned on NPC interactions being a critical part of the plot. | Scopique's
Put some thoughts on a Discord server:| Traverse Fantasy
This is partly my attempt to modularize more complex rules from Cinco! (I can’t decide how to type that) as opt-in rules for characters, as well as coming up with additional ones because they’d make more sense as special abilities than as general (if complex) rules. The following subsystems would be impacted and restricted only to characters with the appropriate feats:| Traverse Fantasy
Hi all! I've been sneakily uploading changes to my home game Cinco! over the past month. Here's a changelog: Armor items act as a virtual ...| traversefantasy.blogspot.com
As of this date, I haven’t really done any product reviews. I don’t reckon I’ll be doing many. Unless, discussion of old games is considered a product review. But, nonetheless, I …| Fluid -- Druid
It might have been visible in my post from yesterday, but I don’t actually like Oriental Adventures. The original ’85 AD&D book that is. The book purports to give rules for an ̶…| Stuffed Crocodile
Had such a fun session of my home campaign! Got to use my new travel rules and (due to the all-you-can-roll nature of them) honestly I had to convince my friends to end each leg of the trip to actually play where they were wanting to go... But we love it when journeys aren't about the destination, right? The rulebook for Cinco! now has all the latest updates I've been using to play if you're curious :) I'm tired and a little buzzed so I'm gonna summarize this session with bullet points.| Traverse Fantasy
(Previous Post)| Traverse Fantasy
I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball”:| Traverse Fantasy
The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.| Traverse Fantasy
One common complaint about feats or even class features is that they foreclose particular actions from characters in general by cloistering them within specific character options. For this reason, I tend to like what I currently have going on in my home game CINCO, where a character's equipment in combination with their aspects determines their capabilities, which feels both more flexible and more natural.| Traverse Fantasy
I like fluxcrawls, but there's little choice involved as such. Instead of rolling for a random event or the quality of an event, check D20: on 9–, pick 1; on 10–19, pick 2; on 20+, pick 3:| Traverse Fantasy
In an earlier post, I discussed the spear versus the dagger efficacy versus the armors available in AD&D. I also present, more generally, the entire list of weapons and how they’d fare ve…| Fluid -- Druid
I have been thinking of making this table for a while, and right now am working on it for the Grenzland zine. The inspiration for this is of course the Campaign Event table in Oriental Adventures, …| Stuffed Crocodile
Random Tables d72 Squires (Bastionland) D6 Social Media Services of the Near-Future (Archons March On) D6x6 Sanguine Sirens (Archons March On) d100 – Wilderness Woes & Hinterland Hazards (d4 Ca…| Stuffed Crocodile
When a game has a lot of rules, very detailed character creation, and a generous helping of math, it is usually referred to as being “crunchy”. If that is true, then the horror RPG Dread is an adventure trope quicksand pit disguised as a bowl of pudding. When I arrived at RPG-A-THON on Saturday afternoon, I stopped at the Extra Life table. I had just missed their morning block of play-anything drop-in sessions, but I was intrigued by what they were setting up. The table had “character s...| therathole.ca
It’s time for an early access review of Starfinder 2nd The post Starfinder 2nd Edition Player Core! appeared first on POCGamer.| POCGamer
I love science fiction. Ever since I read Crisis on| POCGamer
Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. This is a jam for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , a free version of the original role-playi...| traversefantasy.blogspot.com
There was a certain graffiti during the attempted 1968 revolution in France: " Structures do not walk on the streets!" Žižek summarizing La...| traversefantasy.blogspot.com
104 days of summer vacation seems a lifetime away for you and I…. Nevertheless, today we join the boy geniuses of Phineas and Ferb in a social matrix game podcast actual play episode! Is it r…| DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER
I left my Switch at home so I've been borrowing my partner's to play her copy of Shadows Over Loathing , a silly quirky goofy point-and-cli...| traversefantasy.blogspot.com
This post is inspired by this video. Though this one pretty much sums up my conclusions pretty well. In summary, Shad’s argument goes like this, when held up next to one another a dagger and …| Fluid -- Druid
Crypts and Creatures! “I smite thee with a magic missile! MAGIC MISSILE!” My buddy Kyle Burger and I played a social matrix game, a kind of storygame with incredibly simple rules: Start…| DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER
Listen, I’m a snob in many areas, but especially in how I have fun. If a game is pitched to me as “popular”, I’m wary of it. “Everyone’s doing it” is one o…| DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER
Starfinder. It’s the literal future of the Pathfinder setting, taking The post The Starfinder Galaxy Guide appeared first on POCGamer.| POCGamer
There is sometimes a habit, when it comes to sci-fi| POCGamer
Last week I found Wanderer Bill’s Grenzland 5 in my mailbox. Topic “Science Fantasy”. The zine costs 5 Euros for a hardcopy, but can be downloaded for free. As the topic goes into the realm of science fiction there’s plenty of that in this issue. Most of the articles are in German, some are English […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Calibre, if you are not aware, is an open source ebook management system. It’s one of the best and most easily available ways to manage a collection of electronic books. It stores books in a …| Stuffed Crocodile
(This is a slightly cleaned up version of my two Bluesky threads on Jennell Jaquays, preserved in a hopefully easier to read format. Thank Amanda P for reminding me that having these things stored …| Pathika
I'm working on aggregating the posts on this blog into a big book so I can eventually delete it for my personal safety, considering the stat...| traversefantasy.blogspot.com
Subtitle: Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions I was woefully ignorant about En Garde! (mind the exclamation mark) until recently, whe…| Stuffed Crocodile
There are a lot of great generic (read: setting &| POCGamer
Writing adventure modules exercises two disparate skills: writing and design. When I studied design, the central thesis of our work was as follows: “Desi...| Amanda P.
Like a great many people who witnessed WotC’s fall from grace in January of 2023, I was filled with a sudden curiosity to play new tabletop games. I had already been playing small indie games from itch.io such as Apothecaria and Ebb Tide, but those were all solo games; I wanted to bring something to… Continue reading TTRPG Thoughts: Call of Cthulhu 7e Starter Set→| A Queer Dungeoneer
A Torch in the Dark is a solo TTRPG by Michael Elliott with a focus on fantasy dungeon crawling. One plays as a survivor of the Peoples’ Revolution, a person who is haunted by the ghost of the mother of that revolution as they attempt to silence the unquiet spirits of the slain nobility through… Continue reading TTRPG Thoughts: A Torch in the Dark→| A Queer Dungeoneer
Goblin Market is a journaling RPG created by Eliot Silvarian. It requires no GM and can be played solo or (as Eliot recommends) with 1-4 players. This game was inspired by the poem of the same name by Christina Rossetti, as well as the creations of the early twentieth century British illustrator known as Arthur… Continue reading TTRPG Thoughts: Goblin Market→| A Queer Dungeoneer
This table was inspired by a quote from Robin D. Laws’ saying When in doubt, blindfold yourself, take any two GURPS sourcebooks off the shelf at random, and combine the results. Ok, this is a bit pointless but also… not. I mean, who has a d140 anyway? Or in fact even so many GURPS books? […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Last Thursday we wrapped up the Grenzland Diplomacy play-by-post game we were playing for the last few days. At least for the season.So the Grenzland campaign (tl.: Borderland) is an ODnD campaign run by Wanderer Bill for the last few years. There already was a lot of history that has been happening in this campaign, […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Ages ago (2011?) I found a Star Wars OSR retroclone called Star Wars – Galactic Adventures on the venerable wizardawn.com page, now lost to the wages of net history. (…that was before there was an actual Star Wars product, a kids’ book, using the same title…) For some reason it never really caught on in […]| Stuffed Crocodile
I currently am running a Labyrinth Lord Open Table every Tuesday at 8.15pm CET for 2 hours on the Grenzland Discord Server. Sign-ups are via the Norn bot in channel #glimmermark. A wiki page for the game exists. The Glimmermark is a is a border march of the Kingdom of Brillon, once a core province […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Not sure how many people are interested in it considering this is an English-language blog and this is a (largely) German-language campaign newsletter… but anyway, here is issue 2 of Glimmermärkische Zeytungen. I decided to create an In-Game chronicle here, as written by the scribe on Castle Aberwacht. Which largely concerns the doings of the […]| Stuffed Crocodile
It’s the first time I actually feel the amount of times I played in a year worth mentioning. I had a rather successful 2024 in terms of ttrpg gaming. If my reckoning is correct (and I think I might miss a few) I played 56 sessions of roleplaying games this year. And this doesn’t take […]| Stuffed Crocodile
There are no Glimmermark games for the next two weeks. Which means there also are no expeditions into the wilderness or the local dungeons as we are running on a 1:1 campaign time scale, with every week in real life being about a week in the game.But why is that? I mean, why is that […]| Stuffed Crocodile
During my excursions into reaction rolls for Traveller lately I realized that the Traveller book has a template for how to create rumor tables (or just come up with rumors on the fly). Unlike other games (uhm… DnD) which never get into this deeper than having a rumor table in some of their scenarios. This […]| Stuffed Crocodile
As we all know Shields Shall be Splintered! Shields For our Glimmermark game we agreed that shields are a necessity for the aspiring adventurer, as they allow you to soak one damage roll by sacrificing the shield. Critical Fails and Critical Hits The whole idea of a crit on a natural 1 or 20 was […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Ho humm… these link collections are getting a bit long sometimes, especially if I don’t actually post them for a while. Free Stuff Goblinoid Games offers a draft of the Labyrinth Lord 2nd edition on their website Pocket Basic Rules for OSR (drivethrurpg) Random Tables Where Did I Get These Spells From? (Elfmaids & Octopi) […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Goblin (Character Class)Req.: DEX 9 and CON 9Prime Reqs: STR and DEXHD: 1d8 (as monster HD)Max Level: 6Fighting: As equivalent monster HDSaves: As Fighter Goblin Level Progression Experience Level Hit Dice (1d8) 0 1 1-1 1.000 2 1 2.000 3 2 8.000 4 3 32.000 5 3+1 65.000 6 3+2 A goblin usually is slightly […]| Stuffed Crocodile
It wasn’t all doom and gloom and Satanic panicking in the 80s about rolepaying games. Dynamite Magazine actually had a few features about this new sort of game, and they all have a rather positive spin on the whole enterprise. The famous one is of course the one with the cool homebuilt Dungeon Grognardia and […]| Stuffed Crocodile
I am preparing for a Traveller game, and so here are a few conceits that bear repeating for understanding the setting and the rules properly. In a lot of cases those are truisms or commonplaces, but I think it helps to keep them in mind. Space is vast “Space is big. You just won’t believe […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Learning Magic in the GlimmermarkWhen I started to plan for the Glimmermark one of my main ideas was to make it even more Vancian, instead of getting rid of the Vancianess like many people would prefer to. Magic needs to be rare, mystical, and hard to get. Magic effects need to be dangerous and closely […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Reaction Rolls and Morale for MGT 2e I am prepping for a Pirates of Drinax campaign right now, and as the current version of that is for Mongoose Traveller we are going to use that edition. There is something to be said about the way the newer edition (now even with a refreshed look for […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Settlements are the cornerstone of a lot of tabletop RPG| POCGamer
Her Odyssey is a solo journaling TTRPG that uses the Caltrop Core system developed by Titanomachy. The game was created by Kaiya and is free to download and play. In Her Odyssey, you play as a wand…| A Queer Dungeoneer
NPCs are a continuous challenge to a GM. Stat lines,| POCGamer
Let’s face it, does AD&D 1e really need another pole arm? Not really. Gary Gygax already provided a pretty detailed list. Plus, given the variation in historical pole axes, the already pr…| Fluid -- Druid
At the end of the recent Arbiter of Worlds stream, with Alexander Macris and Harmony Ginger, the issue of game rulings and precedent came up. I commented in the chat my view that rulings should not…| Fluid -- Druid
In AD&D, a typical movement rate is 12″ per round. Cursory review of the missile weapon ranges shows that for most weapons an infantry unit moving to engage in melee with a unit of missil…| Fluid -- Druid
In my previous column here, I suggested that cavalry may be the best unit type to use against trolls in AD&D. Not just because the damage advantage of the lance at the charge, but because the c…| Fluid -- Druid
If you want some persona-like or magical girl narratives in your ttrpgs and like your DnD 5e games, then here are two reasons Magi Knights Awakening should be your next game. What is Magi Knights Awakening? Magi Knights Awakening, designed by Derek Salgy and published by Magi-Knights Project LLC, is a ttrpg which builds on […]| The Bardic Inquiry
Node-based design was created by Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian and was, primarily, a method for planning and running mystery ttrpg campaigns. Though it can be divisive in the ttrpg community, I was planning to run a mystery campaign in Night’s Black Agents and I did not believe my usual method would work. I thought […]| The Bardic Inquiry
[Leckie rolled a Shining Headgear on the Kata Kumbas Mage Starting Equipment Table, so as it is tradition I am compelled to do some worldbuilding, and trying to write for fun. The Shining Headgear is a conical wizard hat with a rounded top, ear covers and a cute trim, with Continual Light cast on it. […]| Lost Pages
Beautiful Yet Lost features, tuckered away in its ruins, sort-of-industrial, mostly broken down machinery. Maybe it’s an automated pita maker. Maybe it’s a vat that brews brews. Maybe it’s a statue-replicator. Maybe it’s an ornithopter. Regardless: They often do not work perfectly. And, sometimes, fail catastrophically. This is how I’m trying to handle them. Machine […]| Lost Pages
This blogpost was first released in my Patreon last week. Consider supporting! I wanted to make warrior backgrounds this month. Again, these are all subjec…| Goobernuts' Blog
So we talked about Drinax and what the UWP implies, but what does life there actually look like on the ground? Well, quite terrible really. There’s not too many people around. The population …| Stuffed Crocodile
Two gamifications of contemporary political resistance| Līber Lūdōrum
This blogpost was first released in my Patreon last week. Consider supporting! It’s been 2 weeks since my first post here on Patreon. I’ve b…| Goobernuts' Blog
Modern gaming isn’t “broken”. It’s not “pandering”. And diversity doesn’t| POCGamer
There has been a recent trend towards “point crawl” style dungeons, and for a long time people have planned their dungeons in this way only drawing the actual spaces later. I think this kind of design is very visible on these maps. Rooms connected by single neglected corridors. This trend makes sense in the history […]| Fae Errant
