Ailments for the Poor Fighter
My OSR Blog about fantasy world building and rules analysis for D&D. Also home of the B/X inspired 5e-clone "Into the Unknown."| mythlands-erce.blogspot.com
My OSR Blog about fantasy world building and rules analysis for D&D. Also home of the B/X inspired 5e-clone "Into the Unknown."| mythlands-erce.blogspot.com
I've analysed and critiqued the concept of Hit Points in the past. The gist of the critique is that whilst hit points conceptually are mostly "hero points", mechanically they are treated entirely as "wound points". And that grates.| Mythlands: The Setting to End All Settings
I've been anticipating reviewing "Mystara" as perhaps the most difficult of the setting reviews. | Mythlands: The Setting to End All Settings
edited 08-21-2025 after some feedback, shortening and breaking into sections One thing I picked up playing with some of the old Twin Cities referees is how action-oriented their tables are, especia…| Aboleth Overlords
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
A recent episode of Retronauts reminded me about the Chicken Stinger (or Chicken Leg, or even Cockatrice although that name sounds wrong), the monster used in both Golden Axe and Altered Beast. Wel…| Stuffed Crocodile
Twentieth Session – The long awaited festival of Temptation’s Embrace gets underway but our attempt to be helpful and enable two hot lesbians to make out runs afoul of the gods, as it sometimes does. But first we’re called down … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Eighteenth Session – We investigate the Black Manse and our new personas. There are a lot of tapestries in here, which causes Hemp to cry out “Behind the arras! A rat, a rat!” way too many times for the rest … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Seventeenth Session – This session is way more civilized. There’s brunch! Tales of local drug use and a Frisky Beaver Festival! We eventually ruin it by going to a haunted house. I totally cheated by missing last game to tour … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Sixteenth Session – The party pierces the heart of the dungeon… Then drags through its entrails… Then the horrors of wandering the wilderness… Fun? I was in Japan and missed this session. Which seems like it was for the best, … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Fifteenth Session – The Wizard of Oz sends us to a dungeon full of barfing cats. Film at 11! After we extract from the Yoda hole where we slew the Hound of Hirot, Morgan is better! Well, mostly, she’s not … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Fourteenth Session – We set up a hasty ambush for the Hound of Hirot and then track it back to its “Yoda hole.” Well, we figure it should be easy to free the hapless butcher’…| Geek Related
Just getting on the semi-regular GLOG bandwagon for single-level Cloak-and-Sword classes, this one comes from the future.| Craggenloch Tribune
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
Thirteenth Session – The dungeon we’ve broken into goes from bunnies to more horrible creatures quickly. But we discover that, as usual, the most dangerous animal is man. Giant unfortunate bunnies for Easter give way to a ghoul with a … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Twelfth Session – The aftermath of the rat manor in Wymoor, and we figure out how to go free Weebrook from the clutches of the great black dog of the moors. Plus, zombie bunnies! I am late to the session … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Eleventh Session – An abandoned manor house has turned into a rat pus factory that’s infecting nearby waterways, so we go kill a large number of rat-themed opponents. Our first opponent is a big mean rat-fiend that sprays quite damaging … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Tenth Session – As we make our way back to civilization, the island hopping and town hopping yields both short and long term plot hooks! First, Hemp talks to a sentient oak tree on an island that takes a magic … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Ninth Session – We brave the Tower of the Black Pearl to get its… Pearl! A little on the nose but we do get to murder pirates aplenty so there’s that. This is apparently from a DCC adventure called Tower … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Eighth Session – The Wizard of Oz and his minions, and a priest of the Deathbringer and his minions, compete with us to loot some tombs to find the Blazefire Bow! Hemp the Weaver, now more the archer, really wants … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Seventh Session – It’s death or glory in the tentacle pit as we face off against the lead cultist and his pet tentacles. The body count is significant. The woman we rescued is a hunter.…| Geek Related
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
Sixth Session – We murder and/or rescue people from the tentacle cultists’ lair, and Mordecai learns the “control tentacle” spell. Then we descend through the tentacle hole. Hey man, I didn’t write this adventure!!! There’s a lot of 3D clambering … Continue reading →| Geek Related
Mild spoilers for my future self-made adventure module. It has been a long time since my formerly semi-regular tabletop rpg reviews and analysis on this site. Serendipity struck recently with my de…| The Trickster's Guide to Geopolitics
"Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot." You have likely seen or been ...| knightattheopera.blogspot.com
In yesterday's game, one PC was rescued from captivity by the party, but not before undergoing some pretty severe torture. This presented me with a bit of a quandary: having him simply bounce back from such an ordeal after a couple of Cure Light Wounds spells felt wrong, but at the same time I didn't want the consequences to feel like a punishment. (The problem with most 'lasting injury' rules is that they make you weaker as a consequence for failure, which makes you more likely to fail again...| Against The Wicked City
I've been running OSR D&D more-or-less weekly for over five years, now, with a heavy focus on exploration, problem-solving, and diplomacy. Combat happens, but I learned early on that the kind of combat power-ups that most later D&D editions obsess over were almost irrelevant: when most fights are either one-sided ambushes or desperate fighting retreats, the shift from 1d8 damage to 1d8+2 damage is really not that big a deal. My players regularly forget which magical weapons their PCs are carr...| Against The Wicked City
I've long since lost count of the exact number, but I'm pretty sure that my current 'City of Spires' campaign has now run for almost as many sessions as the 'Team Tsathogga' campaign that preceded it. This has prompted me to think a bit about the different shapes that the two campaigns have taken. 'Team Tsathogga' was, from beginning to end, an extremely freewheeling, even anarchic campaign, with the PCs roaming randomly around the map getting involved in whatever seemed most interesting at t...| Against The Wicked City
On today's episode of Between Two Cairns, we discussed a module called Gone Fishin'. We mentioned that it is kind of hard to find, and that the original sources were lost in a forest of dead links and old forum posts. Fortunately the original PDF includes the following text:| New School Revolution
What Is?| New School Revolution
I'm very excited to announce that tomorrow, Friday Dec 1st, the Kickstarter for is finally launching! is an old school adventure module...| New School Revolution
The early history of D&D is pretty interesting. If you haven't yet, listen to When We Were Wizards. The dramas that play out in the "hobby with friends -> business -> multimillion dollar industry" are almost mythological in their parallelisms and ironic twists.| Rise Up Comus
At my day job, I’m a technical writer. In the evenings, I blog about RPG stuff. I am combining these professional interests into this series: I am using my career of instructional design to tell you how I play games. This makes me the most boring person alive.| Rise Up Comus
I had this "aha" moment a few weeks ago, sketched it out, and shared it. Unfortunately, that drained all the endorphins out of it, and I nev...| riseupcomus.blogspot.com
The cockroachatrice is, like all animals with a stupid name, the result of a wizard's bad sense of humor. Goddamn, those idiots ruin everything.| Rise Up Comus
In the comments to "Zenopus Built a Tower", Part 46 of the Holmes Manuscript series on this blog, reader Tony Stroppa wrote in about his adaptation of Holmes' Tower of Zenopus dungeon for the Mazes & Minotaurs RPG, a reimagining of OD&D as if it was inspired only by Greek mythology, and which can be found for free on DriveThruRPG. With Tony's permission, I'm sharing his comments here:| ZENOPUS ARCHIVES
This is written by my player and friend Will F.: Daytime Nighttime| Aboleth Overlords
This was written by my friend and player Rob L., posted here with permission: Went to Moldy Unicorn to inquire on owner of the purse + wooden nickel found at the bookshop. Barkeep Gorra identified “Latch” as the man with the scar, member of the Severed Hand Gang. Approached by “The Sage” of the Bloody … Continue reading Skies Shall Sunder Session 3| Aboleth Overlords
This report is written by my friend and player Peter P., I have posted it to my blog with permission, with a few NPC name spelling corrections:Following the rumor of: “There is a hidden entra…| Aboleth Overlords
About Duryan the Gardener | Homebrew Homunculus
A strange mummy wanders the sandy wastes, not bound to a tomb | Homebrew Homunculus
Here's a small adventure site/scenario. Plop it onto your hex key on the edge of a forest or something.| Homebrew Homunculus
I guess the Trollkin class set my mind on the track of "slightly monstrous adventurers with death-avoiding abilities". I googled "OSR skeleton class" and found only this: https://www.necropraxis.com/2014/02/06/skeleton-class/ so consider this class inspired by Necropraxis's. Essentially I've codified a bit more what it means to be an undead PC, and made the class rather more party-dependant.| Homebrew Homunculus
These are some of the kookier ideas I’m kicking about. The Elven one, I think, is a really flavourful and small change that makes them more Moorcockian/ Melnibonéan, which I dig. The Cleric change is something that makes sense to me fluff-wise, but I’m not sure if it might break the game too much - please let me know what you think. The Magic-User one is the most kooky, and has the biggest impact on how the game plays, so I've saved it for last. Any of these can be implemented separate o...| Homebrew Homunculus
[ click here for single-page PDF version ]| Homebrew Homunculus
Random LotFP class generator.| Homebrew Homunculus
Edit: It turns out most people just want the rules and not the editorial - If you don't want to know why you should use encumbrance and will just take my word for it, skip to the last section, or see the printable PDF of the rules here and the new inventory sheet here.| Homebrew Homunculus
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
| Smoldering Wizard
I don't think I'm the first person to make this observation (as an OSR blogger, I almost never am), but it occurred to me today how useful the saving throw names are for communicating the kinds of challenges your character will face in the game. | Rise Up Comus
I assume the Venn diagram of "people who read my blog" and "people who have already backed the Knock! Kickstarter" is a perfect circle, but if not, I wanted to say (shout! scream!) that the campaign for Knock! #5 campaign is one week from completion!| Rise Up Comus
A look at 2024: the D&D 50th anniversary, digital missteps, the OGL-inspired competitors, and more.| Designers & Dragons
A blog post about how Religion in D&D and other Fantasy RPGs approaches polytheism in the wrong way and how to fix that in order to have more mystery and adventure in your game sessions.| Widdershins Wanderings
Carrion is the endless city. Time began in Carrion, and in Carrion shall it end. When the world was new, the Hornèd Mother's child, the ...| permacrandam.blogspot.com
(Continued from Part 1, which looked at the state of TTRPG dungeon design pre-Jaquays. These two posts are cleaned upContinue Reading| Pathika
Random Tables d66 Reasons Why the Castle is Totally Deserted (Blog of Forlorn Encystment) Elemental Heretics (Elfmaids & Octopi) d100 Poltergeists (Elfmaids & Octopi) Let’s Build a Thieves Guild (OSRVault) 100 Urban Quest Hooks (OSRVault) Ideas Babies in Dungeons (Prismatic Wasteland) Random Magic User Generator (Remixes and Revelations) Sandbox Settlements: Downtime (Among Cats and Books) […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Another day, another GLOG blogosphere bandwagon . This time it's a classic monster; the Beholder. Also Spellweavers, a criminally underus...| craggenloch.blogspot.com
Clerics are odd ducks. Their classical image of the mailed crusader with a religious proscription against wielding bladed weapons deliberately evokes medieval warrior-priests of the Archbishop Turpin and Odo of Bayeux vein. But while those fellows were members of a powerful Church with clear heirarchy and vast political power, the adventuring cleric is free to roam the backroads and wildnerness, associating with thieves, bandits and witches, and if they run afoul of the authorities they can e...| Craggenloch Tribune
Originally intended to be GLOGTOBER content, but that ship has long since sailed, ho-hum.| Craggenloch Tribune
Megara is a world where the spoken word carries a lot of weight, all magic comes from Words of the lingua supernal, the ontologically perfect language from which the One God sung the world into being. If you are a sorcerer then you already speak lingua supernal, albeit like a grunting beast that has been taught to yowl a roughly understandable approximation of it's immaculate beauty. It's not really the sort of thing you use to converse with other mortals though, for its clarity of meaning is...| Craggenloch Tribune
A conversion of Locheil's Rotless, which I have been having tremendous fun playing in his Qal Ashen game, for Ransack by Justin Todd, who also writes a damn fine game;| Craggenloch Tribune
This being a play report of the first session of The Palace of Unquiet Repose played with Hyperborea 3e, which seemed a good easthetic fit.| Craggenloch Tribune
Over the past few weeks I've been running Greg Gillespie's Dwarrowdeep for two separate groups, one online and one in-person. The guts of the system we've been employing is Basic Fantasy, precisely because it is so basic that it provides an excellent framework for me to hang a bunch of ideas off. Also because as a Brit of a certain age it reminds me a lot of Kwik Save's No Frills own-brand, which I have nostalgia for in an internalised traumatic way.| Craggenloch Tribune
Quite by coincidence at least twoother noble-themed GLOG classes have been published in the last week. Much like busses, you wait all day for one then three come at once.| Craggenloch Tribune
The Magic Item Shop seems to be an artifact of many people's teenage flounderings with the game, one that seems to be almost universally scorned in these Latter Days. A lot of campaign settings I own explicitly state that such a thing as a place where enchanted goods are freely bought and sold does not exist, often in an attempt to reinject mythic quality to these wondrous objects. It's a laudable instinct, but I prefer to rehabilitate ideas rather than exclude them. To whit, here's a couple ...| Craggenloch Tribune
I rarely ever play fighters. Hybrids, sure. Gishes, paladins, monks, even barbarians, but seldom a farmboy with a sword and board and a yen for adventure. I've always just felt like I was missing out on half the system to play a character without any access to the kind of lateral advancement that spellcasters have. Part of this also stems from a conversation on the GLOG book club, specifically Spwack's idea that fighters need more options to do borderline 'impossible' things, because by stand...| Craggenloch Tribune
The character class you never knew you wanted (and probably still don’t).| The Dododecahedron
As Dan pointed out in his post, the cleric's Turn Undead ability says something about the default setting of D&D: there are undead here. Indeed, for this to be a core class core ability, there has to be a lot of them. Barrows teaming with draugr. Unquiet ghosts lingering near their graves in cemeteries. Abandoned castles ruled by a vampire lord and his brides.| Rise Up Comus
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
fortune is one of those classic unix programs that are available on basically all unixoid systems. The only thing it does is “display a pseudorandom message from a database of quotations”, or as the man-page of fortune for debian says: “fortune – print a random, hopefully interesting, adage”. To be fair, the fortune part of […]| 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
The last few weeks I have been posting pretty often, daily even, which is interesting. I sometimes do get these posting spells for a bit with this blog, and that’s quite nice. Anyway, today I had business in Warsaw and wasn’t able to write anything before I was on the train back, so this post […]| 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
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
Adventurer was a rather short running UK RPG magazine. In the last issue, Adventurer 11, June/July 1987, there was an interesting interview with Terry Pratchett, where he recounted his experiences with D&D (he used to play and early Discworld has at least some influences from that) and why he stopped. My favorite part is this […]| 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
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
Cauldron 2024: Manor on the Borderlands …of Hessia and Thuringia that is. But that means in living memory the Iron Wall ran merely a few hundred meters away from the location. And I swear I wanted to go there and make a proper picture but there was simply no time. I managed to play more […]| Stuffed Crocodile
Item Quality Items come in three grades: Superior: masterwork items, four notches. They usually cost ten times the normal cost of such ite...| elementalreductions.blogspot.com
A blog post about how to handle death in OSR games, and some alternatives that are more dramatic than instantly killing a Player Character.| Widdershins Wanderings
In the last devlog, I talked about the practical design problems I sought to solve in my campaign by creating an adventurer city, and of course one of the reasons Pathika is going to be shared publ…| Pathika
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
Mall Rats are varied in kind and skills, but all serve only one master: the great god Greed. A Mall Ninja serves a greater power: Pride. In the service of Pride, you take a Lord. Your Lord is the best Lord, and protecting them is your purpose. Anyone who questions your methods is just jealous.| ふかひれスープ
So I was thinking about more 80s/90s cult classics to base 80s/90s cult classes off of, and I realized I'd never seen Buckaroo Banzai. And then I realized that I *had* seen Miami Connection.| ふかひれスープ
I just launched my zine quest kickstarter for A Blight Upon Sombreval, a dark fantasy, haunted manor style adventure for old-school and classic RPGs and their modern cousins: love for you to check …| Aboleth Overlords
The GLOG is going through a bit of a bandwagon again, this is mine . The Erĝeshmál are a rumour, albeit a persistant one - a hidden cab...| craggenloch.blogspot.com
PROABLY NOT BALANCED! (suggestions and feedback encouraged) Before I write this post, I think it is important to recognize and contextualize...| explodecorpse.blogspot.com
The adventure I spent the most time with this year was Skerples’ Tomb of the Serpent Kings (TotSK), running it for a group of 5e players. I also made good use of Itai Assaf Raizman-Greif’s 5e conversion notes. There’s more of the dungeon to explore, but I’m reviewing what we’ve had the chance to play so far. Spoilers etc. below.| The Benign Brown Beast
A random event or “random” is an idea I’m borrowing from the MMORPG RuneScape, although it may exist in other contexts or games also. I thought I’d see what I can learn from the design of RuneScape generally, and this is where I’m starting.| The Benign Brown Beast
I’ve had the pleasure to run three new systems in the last year or so, and I’ve collected some notes here.| The Benign Brown Beast
For a while now1, I’ve been dreaming of a maritime campaign, so I jumped on Weird on the Waves a year or so ago. It’s finally out, and it’s OK I guess.| The Benign Brown Beast
Dolmenwood has a very nice expanded equipment list, with sub-pages for dogs, horses, pipeweed, food and drink, herbs and fungi and more bes...| craggenloch.blogspot.com
Here's a course-correction that I wish had happened a decade ago. It's an idea surrounding the OSR that I wouldn't call a misconception , ex...| knightattheopera.blogspot.com
Recently, someone on the stratometaship (my patreon discord server) asked about thoughts on person-to-vehicle damage. Now, while I've always had a fondness for RIFTS-style megadamage ... I wouldn't really go there myself these days. In UVG (and SDM) I generally describe vehicles with 4 attributes| Wizard Thief Fighter
