My friend Warren messaged me a few days ago. “Ram,” he said, “reminder to write the Rammies, Ennies are in 2 days.”| Save vs. Total Party Kill
My friend Warren messaged me a few days ago. “Ram,” he said, “reminder to write the Rammies, Ennies are in 2 days.”Wait, what? The year zooms by and I’m always caught on the back foot. Even with the warning I didn’t really have time to g...| save.vs.totalpartykill.ca
Each year The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming highlight gaming books that are exceptional in their quality and character. To qualify for contention a book must have been purchased by Ramanan Sivaranjan during the proceeding calendar year—i.e. the awards given in the summer of 2016 are for books published from January 2015 - December 2015. Winners are chosen by Ramanan Sivaranjan based on his moods about gaming at a particular moment in time. The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards ...| save.vs.totalpartykill.ca
The Kickstarter for Wandering Blades is coming to a close. Wandering Blades is a new game from Daniel Kwan—who is notable for Ross Rifles, the Asians Represent Podcast, and living down the road from me. It’s an OSR game that swaps out your typical medieval-fantasy out for some wuxia vibes.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I finally managed to play a game of Xenos Rampant—two games in fact, it proved to be quick and easy to play. Xenos Rampant is written by Daniel Mersey and Richard Cowen, a wargame that takes Mersey’s Lion Rampant and brings it into the world of science fiction.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Ben is interested in getting people blogging about Mothership. People are good, so of course it wasn’t long before someone shared something: Hazards In Space! Adapting the Hazard Die For Mothership. Funny enough, this is something I had also done when running Gradient Descent a few years ago, and probably should have carried forward when I was running Another Bug Hunt.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The Fantastic is Fact has a great post about getting started playing OD&D, my favourite version of Dungeons and Dragons! This post has a good overview of all the various retroclones of the game, including my favourite, Delving Deeper, and Marcia’s Fantastic Medieval Campaigns. Also good links for further reading and resources, like Philotomy’s Musings, which I also host here.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Thomas M, who writes one of my favourite RPG newsletters, asked for suggestions about people producing games in “the NSR, post-OSR, and generally the experimental side of the OSR” for what I assume will become an article for Rascal or his newsletter.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Gus, Mr. Dungeon Crawling himself, asks the hard questions: why do most adventures suck? He suggests ways to improve the adventures you are writing (to sell for cash-money). Something he touches on, that gets glossed over in a lot of the discussions I see about writing and running adventures, is around that distinction between writing to be consumed by yourself versus writing to be consumed by others. You can run an amazing session with keys that look like the original keys for Dwimmermount. ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I met up with Emiel and Ava shortly after they arrived in Toronto for Breakout Con. I love to see my D&D friends in real life: that’s what it’s all about. (Our meetup also included Jon, the Retired Adventurer, who lives so close to me it’s embarrassing I only see him when Ava is in town.) I managed to see them a few times before they left, ending my convention crashing a game Ava ran of The Electrum Archive. We played through an adventure that was intended to be part of the second zine,...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Nirvana on Fire: Expanded Edition is a 36 page module for Mothership written by David Kenny, featuring art by Jéromê Berthier and top-tier graphic design by Eric Hill. As the name suggests, this edition expands upon an earlier release, featuring additional writing, art, a nicer layout, etc. The pitch for Nirvana on Fire has the players responding to requests for help from a remote colony:| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I love this post from Yochai about running a sandbox style game using his game Cairn and the advice and tools from its Dungeon Masters guide. I’m a big fan of people writing about how they actually prep and run games. I wrote briefly about the start of my Carcosa campaign, how I kicked it off, but never came back to talk about how it was going, or offer advice on running a hexcrawl. It’s something I keep meaning to do, and seeing this post makes me want to do so all the more.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I picked up Constant Downpour Remastered when I spotted it for sale over on Ratti Incantatti1. Constant Downpour is a survival hex-crawl for Mothership. The players crash land on Venus 3 during a routine mission. Unbeknownst to them someone had planned this crash as a hit. The players need to make it off the planet, before they go crazy or get beaten to death by the Venusians. The adventure was written by Marco Serano, and is inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story The Long Rain. David Simon...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The Bloggies have me thinking about blogging. As you well know, I am pro-blogging. I think everyone should write and share their thoughts. My personal blog has been chugging along for over 20 years! Social media is transient: blogs are forever. There is value in writing stuff down.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The 2024 Bloggies are just about wrapped up. As usual there are a ton of great blogs that were nominated to fight for the top spots. Over on the RPG CauldronSly Flourish asked if someone could put together an OPML file of all the finalists. I know how to do that! So I did. You can import an RSS feeds for all the finalists into your favourite RSS reader. Enjoy.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
There is an expanded edition of Skorne, which came out some time ago, but I only noticed recently. Skorne is a very simple OSR/FKR game, available as a PDF, which I printed out like a booklet. Skorne was created by Samuel James, who writes the blog Dreaming Dragonslayer. I have discussed Skorne on the blog, in passing, some time ago. The game deserves more than a passing glance.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
G+ died in slow motion. There were redesigns people hated. Tweaks and changes throughout its life, as Google tried to make it work the way they wanted. The site was shuttered in April 2019. The social network was never the hit Google wanted, but it was a weirdly popular RPG space—certainly the epicentre of the best parts of the OSR for a period of time. People never stopped posting, right up until the end.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
One of my goals for 2024 was to buy fewer minis, and paint more of the minis I already owned. I made a big spreadsheet of all the warhammer that litters my house: some real “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” energy. That saying is a bit dubious, but I do think there was value in seeing what my pile of shame looked like concretely. I would move units up and down my list, trying to plan out a rough order for painting.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Once again my friend Paul T. drops a blog post as comments in the discord server we use to organize our #TorontOSR meetups. As you are no doubt aware, I hate when interesting posts are lost to the ether of the Internet. So enjoy this discussion of campaign design, which makes the case for the infamous negadungeon, which he calls anti-dungeons below. Paul argues that existence of true crap-sack environments for the players to explore adds real tension to a campaign, makes the choices players m...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
BlueSky feels like it’s having a moment. I’m on the site using my domain as | Save vs. Total Party Kill
This is an update to an earlier blog post I wrote on rules and OSR games, which was published in the zine Mixed Success, which you should also check out.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Patrick’s launched his latest Kickstarter, Queen Mabs Palace. In a real plot twist, the book isn’t a D&D module, but a novel. I suppose novels were the first adventures. I’m reading Patrick’s last book now, Gackling Moon, which is a gazeteer for the Wodlands, a weird fantasy setting. It reminds me the Wanderer’s Journal from Dark Sun: pure vibes. There is some gaming material in the book, but it feels there is maybe just enough to still call it a gaming book and not have people moan...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Work was mind numbingly busy, and then I hopped on a plane to the East Coast. I saw people posting about the Ennies and realized those assholes hosted their awards before I announced the winners of the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming. What’s up with that?| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Clayton takes a look at what elements make for a compelling cover, highlighting some of my own favourite books in the process. This post was likely sparked by Wizards of the Coast teasing the cover of the Player’s Handbook for the next update to D&D. The cover is pretty boring and uninspired, but I think at this point Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t need a fancy cover to sell itself. It is Transformers to everyone else’s Gobots. The new D&D cover tells its fans, “don’t worry, this is mor...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I enjoyed this post from Ty over on Mindstorm, where he takes Jason Cordova’s Paint the Scene idea and tries to jam it into OSR gaming. Collaborative Worldbuilding: Glimpses is all about sharing elements of world building with your players. Mindstorm puts out consistently good blog posts: well worth adding to your RSS feed.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Alone in the Labyrinth talk about their solo campaging of Gangs of Titan City. I’ve had the game city on my bookshelf for some time now. I still hope to get it to the table one day. It sounds like my local gaming club is getting into Necromunda, and that might be a good spingboard for some Necromunda themed RPGing. I wrote a little bit about the game when I picked it up from my brother in the UK.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I’ve started running another Mothership campaign to hopefully play through all of Another Bug Hunt. I’ve made a new mini-site over here to catalog what’s happened so far, and share play reports and my thoguhts on running the module.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
My copy of the Mothership Starter set arrived on the weekend. I love it. The box is dense, packed with all sorts of good stuff. What I was excited about was the new adventure, Another Bug Hunt. This will be the first adventure people new to Mothership will encounter. It’s quite possible this will be the first adventure someone new to gaming may run, period. The Mothership Kickstarter was wildly successful: I have to believe there are a non-trivial number of people for whom Mothership will b...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Some friends were discussing how one might approach making RPGs play a bit more like skirmish war games. From my perspective, playing with minis and measuring distances are the only ingredients you need in order to change how a game feels. A good wargame will make the choices you make around positioning matter.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I recently attended a Horus Heresy tournament organized by local gaming group Hogtown 40K. This was a full day of gaming, the most warhammer I have played in quite some time. (My last epic adventure in Warhammer was playing a never ending game of 40K in Lexington, with my friend’s husband before their wedding.) I have been painting my Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness boxed set in slow motion since it was released, so playing in this tournament felt like a nice conclusion to that hobby project.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I’m enjoying the latest iteration of Warhammer 40,000. With the release of its 10th Edition, the designers created a smaller scale game mode they dubbed Combat Patrol. The armies you play are all built from the models in the start collecting boxes they sell. There is no list building. The units (sometimes) have simpler rules than the corresponding unit in the full game. Most armies only have 5 or so units in their list. This all comes together to produce a game that is simple to play. I’v...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Since I last wrote about Mordheim I have played through two 10-game campaigns. The first was with the Undead warband feature in my last post about the game, Volchyakrov’s Wolves. The second campaign was set in Games Workshop’s Lustria setting, their take on Amazon adventures. I played a Pirate warband, the Motley Crew. After playing several games of Mordheim I can now its appeal. Mordheim does narrative war gaming incredible well. It is the model and inspiration for so many games that fo...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I am a man with too many hobbies and interests, but James’s lovely ode to OD&D has me thinking about the game once again. Some of the longest campaigns I’ve ran and played in have been OD&D games: impressive for a game that came out 6 years before I was born. The 50th anniversary of D&D is this year. I suspect we’ll see a lot of writing about the game over the coming months. For example, here is a great post from Gus that looks at the history and design of the earliest D&D dungeons: The...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Last year Prismatic Wasteland ran a cool little tournament of sorts called the Bloggies, where he picked an initial pool of really cool blog posts, and then had people vote to crown the best blog post of the year. Zedeck won last year, and so was tasked to continue the tradition into 2023. And so the Bloggies 2023 have begun. The first round of voting is taking place now, with a set of 16 posts on RPG theory.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I love this: nicer warband and campaign sheets for The Doomed, aka Grimlite from traaa.sh. If you haven’t seen traaa.sh before, it’s such a well designed blog. They always post useful stuff. So this is really par for the course. Evan and I have been playing The Doomed recently, continuing our epic multi-system neverending Warhammer 40,000 campaign. I’ll have to write about those games soon. I have been tracking everything in Google Sheets. Looking at these sheets gives me ideas for how ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I haven’t played Magic: The Gathering seriously since High School, though I stil have many of my cards and decks from the 90s. (Sadly most everything I have are the sorts of cards that no one cares about, nevermind my cards are hardly pristine.) Reading Jay Dragon talk about a diffferent format for playing the game, what he’s dubbed the Magpie Cube, was really facinating. I was only vaguely aware of the cube format of organizing games, which Jay sums up before expanding upon in ways game ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The Mythic Bastionland Kickstarter is wrapping up today. For those unfamiliar this is the Arthurian take on Chris’s games Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. I’ve been excited about this game since he first started talking about it, as it ties into my interests in this genre. (You may recall my aborted attempt to create a vaguely Arthurian / Dark Souls setting many months ago now: The Misericorde.) Chris is working with Alec Sorensen, and the art they have shared so far looks really in...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Patrick turned his blog into a giant bible sized book: Speak, False Machine. I have the more modest PDF, which I have been reading on my iPad here and there. When Patrick told me he wanted to make this book I thought him a bit mad: “who wants an absolutely beastly book of blog posts?” I thought. The scope of this thing is kind of incredible. Reading it now, though, I can see the appeal of this format: it’s a much nicer way to read his writing. There is some slight rearangement of texts ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Michael, of Trilemma fame, has started running a zombie survival game set on the Isle of Wight. The game takes place at the end of the cold war turned hot. The players are all crew of the cargo ship BF Fortaleza. I managed to join in for one session, and hope to make some more in the future. I love Zombie World, as you all ay now, but the system Michael cobbled together for his game worked really well. I think it illustrates neatly how you can really jam a bunch of ideas together and make som...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Eric’s Hobby Workshop takes a look at one of Game Workshop’s craziest games, Inquisitor! The video is a great overview of the game if you aren’t familiar with its whole deal. Eric managed to track down a bunch of 54mm models from the range which he’s built, painted, and shown off in the video. It’s been a few months since I last mentioned Inquisitor. I should write about my own experiences with the game. One day.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
2022 was a slog from beginning to end. I was glad to be done with that year. Whenever my mood is sour I end up spending too much money: they call it retail therapy. My longlist of RPG books going into these awards was very long. My shortlist was anything but short. This has been another year where zeroing in on my final picks was a struggle.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
My current obsession is the 2021 edition of Kill Team. This game is probably most famous for using shapes to represent distances, but not having those distances have anything to do with the shapes used. How many inches do you think a square represents? If you said 4” you’d be wrong, it’s 3”. You might be asking yourself, why wouldn’t you use a triangle for 3”. Well, they had already used the triangle to represent 1”. For reals. Anyway, this is a big tangent, because the game is ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The #TorontOSR posse met up recently and Paul ran a game of D&D for us using his tweaks and house rules. When I run games, I have players re-roll their hit points at the start of each session. This is something I picked up from Brendan. This mitigates how overly impactful a poor dice roll when rolling your hit points can be. Paul takes this idea further, with a scheme that reminds me of the hit dice mechanics from Carcosa, but a little less bananas.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Tom over at the Beard Bunker writes, “Inquisitor was a bad game, and that’s why I loved it.” The game of Inquisitor I played with Patrick and Evan, with Brendan acting as a GM, was probably one of the most interesting war gamming experiences I’ve had. Patrick blogged about both of our games, Hunt the Fat Priest & Rise of the Meta-Coral, and I think manages to capture just how bonkers the game is. I grabbed the rulebook for cheap a few years back. If you spot it in the wild you should ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I loved this essay by Tim Colwill about the Warhammer 40,000, its not-so-slow march towards bland corporatism, and being ineffectual at dealing with people who love the fascism of the setting: Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places.1| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Nick writes about one of my favourite video games, and probably the most difficult Final Fantasy game in its series, FF1. It’s an excellent game, and wears its D&D inspiration quite heavily on its sleeve. The monsters are so clearly taken from the Monster Manual. It even has Vancian magic! It’s genuinely challenging. I remember having to try some dungeons several times. Resource management plays such a heavy role in this game, something that became far less important as the series would m...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Chris recently shared a draft of a war game set in Bastionland. It’s a simple war game, where he looks to be experimenting with squads of random starting strength and the sort of grotty mood of Turnip28. I thought some of the ideas he was trying out looked interesting, and decided to give the game a go.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I was looking for minis at the Sword and Board when I spotted a copy of CY_BORG sitting on a shelf. I’ve been waiting for this book to show up locally since it was first announced: I hate paying for shipping. I’m honestly not that interested in Cyberpunk as a genre, but I am very interested in most everything Johan Nohr is involved in. Mork Borg has some of the best art and graphic design you’ll see in an RPG book. Paired up with Christian Sahlén, the duo have created quite the book.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
When I met up with Patrick at Warhammer World he picked up the second Realms of Chaos book, the Lost and the Damned. The two Realms of Chaos books are bananas, jammed full of all sorts of nonsense. Patrick decided to attempt to create a Choas Champion using the rules outlined in the books. It’s as silly as you might imagine.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
A million years ago Rey started talking about a game he was working on called Break!!, I suppose building on top of the ideas began in his OSR setting Baroviania. Back in 2017 Grey or Rey sent me an early draft of the game, but it was so full of stuff I honestly thought the games release was imminent. Honestly i’m sure they did too. But no! The years ticked by and I was worried this game would never happen, as Rey improved the rules or Grey improved the layout and art. This game is such a c...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I picked up Luke Gearing’s adventure for the Best Left Burried system, Behind Closed Doors. It was also waiting for me in my brother’s flat in London. If you were looking for something with some strong old-school Warhammer Fantasy RPG vibes look no futher. The players are given license to hunt down witches, and are set off into the world to do just that. There are some witchy things going on, but no overarching plot to this sandbox adventure. There its lots of love in this book. There is ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I had shipped several books to my brother in UK, one of those was Gangs of Titan City. I don’t think it’s unfair to say this is a Necromunda RPG with all the serial numbers filed off. The RPG is what I’d describe as OSR, but you can see the influence of games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark. The game has a clear structure to play, starting with an escalation phase where you figure out what’s going on and prepare for your operation, an operation phase where you’ll play ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I was in England over the last couple weeks to visit my brother. As has become somewhat of a tradition, I met up with Patrick at Warhammer World in Notthingham. This time we were also joined by Chris. He drove down from Manchester, so was able to cart us off to Bryan Ansell’s retirement project, The Foundry. Ansell turned part of his home (I think) into this storefront and museum for OldHammer style miniatures. I picked up some pirates I may try and use in the next Mordheim league. The minu...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
They announced the latest edition of Warhammer 40,000 last night at AdeptiCon. I never even managed to play a game of 9th edition, the pace of their releases feels a bit ridiculous. I had told friends I was going to ignore whatever comes next in protest. Except, in a real plot twist, everything they’ve announced sounds weirdly amazing. The rules are going to be free. The army rules, normally sold as (expensive) Codex books are also going to be free. The rules are going to be simplified. (No...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
With some serendipitous timing, Luke Gearing has written a blog post comparing room descriptions written in long form prose rather than bullet points. I think prose falls down as the descriptions get too long, as I noted in my review of Demon Bone Sarcophagus. If you’re presented with a page of information, that’s a lot to process, even if you’ve read it previously. Luke’s examples, written out nicely, are a good example of how to do prose well. They are still quite short and easy to ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I finished reading the rest of Demon Bone Sarcophagus this morning. This adventure is a big dungeon crawl, a tomb for the Empress of Fire, now resting in the titular Demon Bone Sarcophagus. The adventure was made by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess, produced as part of a Kickstarter that concluded during the pandemic. I waited for the hardcopy to arrive before giving it a proper read.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Patrick could have given this monster a dumb fantasy name, but like a true professional tells you what it does on the box.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
BreakoutCon is this weekend. Sadly I will miss it, i’m out and about, but I did manage to meet up with some friends last night, before the convention began in earnest. It was a bit of a G+ reunion. Zzarchov drove down from middle of nowhere Ontario. Richard G drove up from Upstate New York. We rounded out the posse with some torontOSR regulars: myself, Brendan, Alex, and KYANA. What a crew! KYANA gave everyone G+ buttons she made. An advantage of meeting up with Zzarchov is you get to see w...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I ran Temple of the Peerless Star1 using Trophy Gold for some of the TorontOSR posse. We split our game over two weeks. We normally play for about 2.5 hours nowadays, and that felt a bit too tight to get through the adventure. Our first evening began with two players, Alex and Brendan, and ended the night with three, as Paul managed to pop by. Our second game was back to just Alex and Brendan.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Trophy Gold has some optional light weight rules for journeys that have the players slowly building up a point crawl style map of the world. One thing I like about the suggested approach is that it feels very much like Dark Souls, where part of the fun will be discovering the unusual connections in the world. The game is very collaborative in nature, and there is an expectation that things develop organically through play, with input from the players alongside the GM. You could certainly run ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
My boy Nate–the man running what sounds like the greatest 5E game ever–reviews one of the greatest video games ever, Elden Ring. I am a huge fan of Elden Ring, and plan to write about it one day. (I liked this game a lot. Nate’s feelings are a bit more thoughtful, nuanced, and mixed.) There is so much you can steal from that game for your games of D&D. If you have a PS5 I would strongly recommend you check it out.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Goonhammer writes about the history of GorkaMorka, which proves to be far more interesting than you might expect. This is a look back at Games Workshop, and how it grew into the corporate behemoth it is today, through the lens of this one game. It’s a fascinating read.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
This winter the Sword & Board is running a Mordheim campaign. Mordheim is a beloved skirmish game made by Games Workshop many years ago. Players each control a warband exploring the ruins of the Mordheim, collecting the remnants of the meteor that destroy the city, Wrydstone. The game is famous for its John Blanche art, flavourful setting, and its rich detailed campaign system. As you play Mordheim your warband will grow in power game, end up maimed, likely both. I have wanted to play Mordhei...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Sean shared a pretty cool project on Twitter, which has really blown up: #dungeon23. The idea is simple: grab a day planner and write a dungeon room a day. At the end of the year, you’ll have a Megadungeon. I love it! Not enough to do it, of course, but I have been enjoying seeing what people produce. If you decide to start this endevour, I suggest you follow Sean’s advice: keep things simple and have fun. Treating a project like this as if it was your second job is a recipe to give up by...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I have been reading the Mothership Warden’s Manual over the last week, the “DMG” for Mothership. I find a lot of dungeon master’s guides fall short. People manage to run D&D in spite of its rulebooks, not because of them. Mothership’s Warden Guide is superlative because it breaks down how to get the game you just bought to the table: it understands why these game master books should exist in the first place. There are very few books that pull this off well.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I’ve been looking forward to Marcia’s tidied up version of OD&D. It’s a straight up retroclone: she hasn’t tried to fix the gaps in the game, the gaps are the best part. Enjoy. It’s free!| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I met up with Alex, Brendan and Paul last night from the #torontOSR posse. We tried to play through James’s The Cursed Chateau, but spent much of our time together drinking cocktails and catching up. Almost certainly inspired by this experience, Alex writes about one-scene adventures as another form of one-shot play.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Man, Twitter really does feel like a hot mess right now. And if we are all being honest with one another, it already felt like a hot mess, right? Warren from I Cast Light explains why you should be getting back to blogging: BLOG! Good God! What Is It Good For? When I started blogging (a million years ago) social media didn’t really exist as a thing, and people would share all the ephemera in their heads on their blogs. Some of your tweets are probably stupid, and should just disappear into ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
In a project that seems like pure madness, Patrick is compiling the entirety (give or take) of his blog False Machine into a book. It’s over 650 pages! Over half a million words! Bananans. You can back the project on Kickstarter right now. Go do that now!| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Josh from Rise Up Comus almost lost 6 years of notes about his D&D campaign! This moment encouraged him to blog about how he went about building up the trove of writing and prep that went into running his megadungeon campaign. I love reading about the processes people go through to run games.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I suspect the death of Twitter is greatly exaggerated. No one pays 44 billion dollars for something only to drive it into the sun, though that’s honestly the best outcome one could hope for when it comes to Twitter. I’ve been on that site since the dawn of time—I’m twitter user 3,321—and I will be a little sad to see it go, but honestly not that sad. It’s been dreadful for many years now.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Sean has shared some interesting thoughts on player safety tools in RPGs, something that’s been on his mind as he writes the dungeon master’s guide for his game Mothership: Thinking about Safety Tools in RPGs. Here Sean frames safety tools as a form of hospitality.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The first part of the infamous follow up to Deep Carbon Observatory is finally out, Demon Bone Sarcophagus. Time to buy while the Tories are demolishing the value of the British Pound! I’ve been reading the PDF on and off: there is so much going on it’s kind of bananas.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I had been not so patiently for my copy of Into the Odd to arrive. Chris teamed up with Johan Nohr of Mörk Borg fame to produce this new edition of the game. They have made a really incredible book together, it’s really quite beautiful. My love of this system has grown slowly over time. Paolo published Wonder and Wickedness and Into the Odd around the same time, but I next to no interest in the game. The implied setting seemed wasn’t really to my taste. Also, I was all about OD&D at the ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The Ennies are today? Well, this year has certainly zoomed by. I should say what I have to say before the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG scene monopolize the conversation. When I looked back on the games of 2021 I found an odd mix of stuff. The quality of material coming out nowadays is quite amazing. We are really spoiled right now when it comes to indie RPGs. Someone needs to tell you about them: why not me?| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I recently shared my Gygax 75 draft and was complimented on putting a Dragon as the last entry on the example encounter table for the region. I stole this idea from my friend Nick, who wrote I feel is the best blog post on this topic: Structuring Encounter Tables, Amended & Restated.. A nice follow up blog post is this Encounter Checklist from Prismatic Wasteland, which breaks down elements you should keep in mind when trying to build an interesting an effective encounter for your players.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Mateo over at Hex Culture has written a great post about how to make the lore of your setting more interesting and actionable for your players. He discusses an idea called Situational Narrative Design. Richard jumps in with a related discussion on how to make the player’s characters central and impactful in the wider world they play within: The PCs are a Faction. Finally Emmy has a nice short post on Environmental Storytelling, “using objects and locations in RPGs to tell a history or fic...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
There are three books that make up Original Dungeons & Dragons. Book 2: Monsters and Treasure, as the name implies, is all about monsters and treasure. OD&D isn’t a particularly mechanically complex game, so monsters can be described quite simply, mostly via prose rather than complex stat blocks. As monster manuals go this one is a bit all over the place. Some monsters have a brief description. Others ask you to look things up in Chainmail and make some corrections. Many simply suggest some...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Over at Prismatic Wasteland Warren discusses how to make sure your D&D encounters are their most impactful. I am a big fan of practical DM’ing advice like this. You could write out his check list on a post-it note and refer to it when prepping a dungeon or an encounter table. If you need to quickly improvise something you could pick one of the elements he suggests and lean into that.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I was visiting my local game store and saw an art book featuring the work of Ana Polanšćak, the woman behind the incredible blog Gardens of Hecate. As part of the Inq28 scene, Ana produces some really unique and moody miniatures and war gaming ephemera. The art book chronicles her journey through the hobby, and is a real deep dive into her whole process when it comes to producing her work. A lot of the book is about how she thinks about world building, and is likely of interest to RPG nerds...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
These notes and Arneson’s would ultimately become Dungeons & Dragons, but only by being codified could the game really be propagated and begin to gather a following. This same problem persists for designers today.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
An idea I read on James’s blog Grognardia long ago, which I quite liked, was what he called “D&D is always right”. Rather than assume the idiot choices the designer of some old module from the 80s made are incorrect, give them the benefit of the doubt! Try and work out how the oddly placed monsters, treasure, and traps fit into a coherent whole. Treat it like a creative exercise and you’ll end up with something good. Wayne Rossi reverse engineering the OD&D setting based on the rule b...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Thanks to Sean McCoy we can enjoy this interview with James Maliszewski about Empire of the Petal Throne. They cover a wide range of topics. “I wanted to talk to James about Tekumel, long campaigns, Barker and his tainted legacy, and where true ownership of an RPG setting lies.” Tekumel is such an unusal setting. Seemingly so thoroughly divorced from your typical tolkien rooted fantasy. James ran several sessions of Empire of the Petal throne for the TorontOSR peoples before embarking on ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Jason Tochi of 24XX fame wrote a great post a little while ago about what he calls the three layers of rules: social, fictional, and abstract. If you’re interested in game design it’s a great way to think about things, especially in more rules light games. Where do the unspoken rules go? Probably to the social and fictional layers. This post is in the news again as Jason shared a version included in the rules for his new game, Alight.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
As I have discussed in the past, I got started with D&D playing with the Rules Cyclopedia. When I went to buy my own D&D books I ended up grabbing the AD&D 2nd Edition Players Handbook instead. I didn’t realize the games were quite the same, and assumed I’d want the “advanced” version anyway. I’ve wanted to track down the Rules Cyclopedia for ages, but they are often hard to find or collectables. Alex, a player from my recent Torchbearer game, was given two copies by a friend of his...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
My friend Alex discusses Fuck You Design, an interesting response of sorts to my post about negative space in RPGs. His post in turn has me wanting to write more myself. I love simple systems, so I am always looking for a good minimalist one. The problem is so many miss the mark. It takes a lot of care to make one that isn’t just you filling in all the holes with D&D as you remember it. Carcosa is a good setting in my mind despite missing a lot of details because what’s there is enough to...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I updated this blog post for the zine Mixed Success, which you should also check out. The essay published in the zine is now republished on this blog as Negative Space Reprise — RAM 2024| Save vs. Total Party Kill
You should check out this name generator from Elijah Mills which I discovered on the NSR discord server. This is pretty fantastic. As he describes it: “I made a post-apocalyptic name generator for an upcoming collaborative project. We combined 200+ names from the Iliad and Odyssey with hot-rod terminology to get some really whacky results that are perfect for our setting.”| Save vs. Total Party Kill
This is a little bit of an experiment. This post is what some might call micro blogging. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader it’ll look the same, but on my website this post is displayed a little bit differently. It should look a bit demure next to a bigger grown-up blog post. 20 years ago a lot of blogging felt short and casual. Nowadays it feels like people feel the need to say a lot, and find friction in the format. People move their casual messages to sites like Twitter or Faceboo...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Jahtima, a new book in my mail via FourRogues. (Between them and Ratti Incantati my RPG spending has become … well more, anyway. No regrets!) I saw book and was intrigued: an RPG about hunting monsters in early “medieval” Europe, which is currently what I am interested in. The graphic design is quite pretty or bold at times, but maybe also gonna give you a headache? This isn’t a novel, though. Maybe a headache is fine if you can find the page quickly.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
In a plot twist of sorts, the #TorontOSR has been playing more narrative games of late. (You can call us #StorYYZ, of course.) We recently wrapped up a 4 session arc of Cartel, which prompted some interesting discussion in our Discord. In a double plot twist, Paul T, who you may recognize from storygames.com, was the person who ran the game. He has somehow been sucked into the #TorontOSR, and joins us often, like some sort of ethnographer. Paul writes way too much and just throws it into the ...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I bought two games that feel like they exist in sharp contrast to one another. The first was Skorne, an OSR/FKR game. It was a $3 PDF I printed at home and folded into a zine. The second is probably the most famous Belonging Outside Belonging game at this point, Wanderhome, which arrived at my door in its fancy coffee table book form.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
In 1975 Gary Gygax wrote an article describing a simple approach to creating a campaign world over 5 weeks, which you could then expand upon through play: like God intended. Ray Otus took this article and expanded on its ideas to create a structured work book with concrete steps for each week and his own example of creating a small campaign setting. Recently Dungeon Possum posted about his plans to go through this process. This got me interested in doing the same. I am keen to create a basic-...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Every so often Nate will pop into the discord we’re both in to chat about his super-high level D&D 5e game: it’s totally bananas and inspiring. He made this off hand remark about the Red Dragon in his game:| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Patrick and Scrap are currently running a Kickstarter for the follow-up adventure to Deep Carbon Observatory, Demon-Bone Sarcophagus, so now seems as good a time as any to talk about their work. I like seeing them succeed. When I first reviewed Deep Carbon Observatory I had the following to say about Scrap’s work:| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Patrick and Scrap are currently running a Kickstarter for the follow-up adventure to Deep Carbon Observatory, Demon-Bone Sarcophagus, so now seems as good a time as any to talk about their work. This is easy to do, as I’m planning on running Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered) tomorrow, it made its way from the UK to me via my brother after a good long while. When I first reviewed DCO it was simply from having read it. I have more thoughts now as I prepare to run the module and talk to oth...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Certainly. Luke’s latest work for Tuesday Knight Games is Gradient Descent, a megadungeon written for the sci-fi horror game Mothership. The braintrust at Mothership HQ asks the question, “can you fit a megadungeon in a small zine?” Yes, apparently you can.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
The Ennies are in September? I need to remember to not set my clock to the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG scene. Fear not, the awards you care about are beholden to no gaming convention, large or small. 2021 zooms by and was honestly kind of a garbage year as well. These are still dark times, but perhaps a little brighter, thanks to the power of science at the very least. And certainly in terms of RPG books 2021 is shaping up to be another good year. But I’m getting ahead of myself.| Save vs. Total Party Kill
Kingdom Death is a game where you can be playing spectacularly, and then roll a 1 on a random table and lose your star survivor. Frustrating, certainly, it’s happened to me! But, it can also be memorable and fun. I remember with much amusement Evan losing our best survivor to a bad roll on the Dark Dentist settlement event during our first campaign. Coming at the game with the mindset of an RPG player I find the randomness of the game’s story events enjoyable. When it works well, it bring...| Save vs. Total Party Kill
I am wondering if I should set up Kingdom Death and play a campaign. I just can’t imagine running all four characters. On the other hand this seems like the ideal time to play. - Me, March 28th, 2020.| Save vs. Total Party Kill