22 June 2026 Old School Rules

 I've mentioned the BrOSR before. I'm reading one of their books, Winning Secrets, which is a re-hash of a blog run by the champion of this sort of play, Jeffro Johnson, along with commentary about how these ideas were (re)discovered, applied, etc. It's a fun read, and despite how acerbic all of this was on Twitter a few years back, I'm finding the movement's insights to be thought-provoking (there are some politics involved re: Jeffro's less than pleasant comments about...stuff, but at this point, I just don't give a fuck anymore). In any event, I'm thinking through all of this (again) and finding it compelling. A few points:

1. I have gotten rid of 75% of my ttrpg books. It's not that I don't love them: I do, but...with the exception of core rule books for systems I have/will play (AD&D, LotR, OSE, C&C, BRP, DCC) why have tons of games just sitting there? I'm not going to play Basic Fantasy, Dolmenwood, Shadowdark, Hyperboria, or any Call of Cthulhu variants (maybe Gaslight...someday). I love world books, so I'm keeping those (Glorantha, Midgard, Aihrde). I got rid of a bunch of modules. I got rid of a bunch of supplements. Why? Because I want to use my imagination, and not have others imagine things for me. This summer, I am going to use four or five books while I design adventures: the 1e DMG, PHB, MM, FF, and maybe MM2, along with my 1982 Greyhawk book. That's it. (Note: C&C, too, since that's the system I am currently running). Old school for sure. 

2. One of the more thought-provoking ideas in the BrOSR is having players with multiple characters running around in the same campaign setting. I love that idea! It will only work using 1:1 time, but I think it would be great, especially during the summer when I have a lot of free time (#teacher).

3. Having my players be factions--that is, have them actually run factions, bastions, and powerful NPCs to make the world move and feel alive is brilliant! They can make stuff up and I can adjudicate how all those moves go in the game. So imagine if Dan is the orcs, Ed is the elves, and Dennis is the humans. With proper background info. and some limitations on what they can do week to week...suddenly we have a ballgame.

4. Add mass combat rules, which might(?) be harder on a VTT, but not if we simply scale up (1 token =s ten guys or something ) and figure out a way for the PCs to interact with the fighting. Maybe each person could run their faction. I have to think more about this (and actually learn how to do Chainmail/Fields of Battle).

5. With regard to PC level play: 3d6 down the line, henchmen, adding the weeks of training to level up rules, and other fiddly things that will change the overall vibe of the game to make it more in line with AD&D. Maybe let the dice decide who your character is? Much to think upon!

15 June 2026 Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy

     I saw a Troll Lord's post on Instagram (which I no longer use; cancelled my account) that said "Three Word: Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy." The poster (Grace, I assume) is referring to the world of Aihrde, Troll Lord's house setting, which I really like a lot. It is a standard fantasy world--they are not trying to reinvent the wheel--but unique enough to be quite interesting. I've read the world's origin story, called The Andunuth, twice now and enjoyed it both times (it's about 150 pages long). 

    Fun fact: I learned on a podcast yesterday that andunuth is the dwarvish word referring to their oath to the All Father. In return for the gift of life, each dwarf has vowed to create at least one beautiful thing that will outlive them. Aihrde is a very dwarfocentric world, which I like. The elves are not exactly an afterthought, but they are not central to the world the way they are in many fantasy settings (I'm looking at you, J.R.R.!) The world is littered in the ruins of ancient dwarven kingdoms, and the rune magic is connected to the magic of the dwarves (and goblins, interestingly enough). 

    Without going into too much detail, at the beginning of all things, the All Father had a nightmare which became the a dark and powerful god called Unklar. Unklar dwelled in the deep void of nothingness for epochs. A wizard named. Trigal, attempting to learn and master dwarven magic, contacted this creature, and inadvertently summoned it to the world of Aihrde, beginning a thousand year period called The Winter Dark. No sun, evil reigns supreme, horrible horrible horrible stuff. A band of heroes--and I think this is what Stephen Chenault calls 'the Big Game' i.e. his home campaign--managed to banish Unklar back to the Undeeps of the Void, ending his reign and return the world to some semblance of normalcy. 

    All of this brings us to the present campaign settings, After Winter Dark. One hundred years after the war that liberated the world, we have what the Troll Lord's refer to as post-'apocalyptic fantasy.' That's not a trope you see too often in fantasy game (there are certainly plenty in sci-fi, like Gamma World or Mutant Crawl Classics). I think The Sword of Shannara, or The Prince of Thorns are examples of fiction, but I can't think of any other ones off the top of my head. I am noodling this through, and asking myself: what would it look like for players in this setting? You could certainly run it as a bog standard fantasy game with little hints and bits for flavor, but that seems like it's missing something really unique. So...then what?

    1. Fear. The elder races--dwarves, elves--would remember some of the final war the ended the Winter Dark. Their behavior would be shaped by this experience. There would be blame (Trigal was human), a lack of charity toward any who were seeking rune magic (which is what brought the world to ruin before), and wariness toward men. The halflings, in particular--they were hunted for sport by Unklar's minions--would be very insular and untrusting. Essenetially, these communities are experiencing trauma, which should inform how they act and react.

    2. The search for answers. This is a pre-literate society, for the most part. The average person would know about the Winter Dark from stories passed down from generation to generation. This is about four generations removed from the end of the war, so great-great grandparents were children when it ended. I keep thinking about the English king in Vikings who was collecting Roman artifacts, but had no real idea who they were because that knowledge had not been passed down to him or his people.  The powers in this world--royals, mages like the White Order, the Paths of Umbra--would know more about what happened but your average human is just trying to survive day to day. 

    3. The looming threat. The powers that were aligned with Unklar want him to either return, or to replace him with themselves. They will constantly be working toward that end. There would be an alliance of evil: all sentient, evil creatures are, in some way or another, working toward that end. Sewing confusion, attacking nascent powers that oppose that objective, searching for magic to help them further their goal, etc. 

    4. Mystery. As above: there are things related to the Winter Dark--runes, magic, locations, bits of stories and songs-- that the average character may find, or experience, but not know how it plays into the overarching story of the apocalypse. There are deeper things, too, that pre-date the Winter Dark, that they would have no understanding of unless they very purposefully sought out knowledge. 

    I'm not sure when or if I'll run a game in this world. I have The Undying War and Beneath the Canopy Green, which are two full-length campaigns in Aihrde. We shall see!

    

12 June 2026 Cleaning House

  This week, I sold 50 books (well...two of them were bundles of scratch-off character sheets for DCC) to Noble Knight Games, who offered me $350 cash/$450 store credit, which was a fair deal. I took the cash, and here is why: I have to stop buying so much stuff. A lot of it--not all of it, but enough--just sits on my bookshelves. I have enough games that I already like--Castles&Crusades, OSE, BRP--and I don't need any more. I have found that, because I like this stuff so much, I am trying to 'keep up' with what it being produced, even in just one silo of the hobby--say OSR--and I am wasting money and attention on things simply because I get game FOMO. It is a waste of money at a time when my wife and I have just purchased a very expensive second property. It is also an enormous distraction from my own imagination, something I recognize can be stunted by those books because I am allowing people to imagine things for me. That's not bad per se: there is something important to be said about inspiration and evocation (especially through fantasy art), but generally speaking, I want to make up as much of this stuff as I can. I have gotten much better about this as I've moved through the current era of gaming (2019-present), and I know what my sweet-spot is: give me the world, the place names, the gods, some NPCs, some factions, and a map. The rest of it is all me. 

    Also, I have about 500 PDFs that I can have bound and printed very cheaply should I choose to do so. I have a small binder-making tool myself if I really want the paper version of something small. I can do a lot of this on my own, in other words. So I jettisoned a lot of stuff: some DCC stuff, some C&C stuff, my Shadowdark/Hyperboria/Dragonbane stuff. Some CoC stuff that I'll never use (I may get rid of more of that), and a bunch of random things. I will not miss them. Less is more. 

None of this stopped me from backing Hellcrawl, or planning on buying the Demonic Grimoire for OSE.

9 June 2026 "There are other worlds than this..." Module vs. Campaign vs. World

     There is a small but vocal (and caustic!) faction online the the TTRPG space called the BrOSR. These guys tend to be Christian, conservative, and deeply knowledgeable about the roots of Dungeons&Dragons. They are often bombastic and drive the sparkle-trolls insane. While I am reminded of the old saw about academic politics (they are so viscous because the stakes are so low), I admit that I often find their gleeful dick-slappping-across-the-forehead of 5e players to be...satisfying. 

    Yesterday I got sucked down into a BrOSR rabbit hole by one Jeffro Johnson and another dude who goes by Crossface. The essential point taken by these two (and this is a generalization) is that all of us who have been playing D&D have been playing it wrong. That the rules exist for a reason, and if you are not playing with the rules as laid down by Gary Gygax (he of blessed memory) you are doing it wrong. We can call this point provocative, to say the least, but like the best Biblical scholars, they back up their assertions with chapter and verse: the words of Gygax himself, in the seldom (never?) read introductions to books like The Dungeon Master's Guide, or in Dragon Magazine, or wherever else. It's a jarring thought: I have had my DM's guide since 1981, and played a melange of D&D/AD&D for a decade without using 1/2 of the rules in the book. So what was I playing? Folk D&D, I guess, not 'fantasy wargaming D&D' as envisioned by Gygax, with his weapons speed tables, his strumpet tables, his wind effect tables...In the olden days, someone had to show you how to play; there was an oral tradition behind the game, and I think it is safe to say that Gygax was writing--at least at first--for wargamers who already knew how to war game, and who were adding his rules to games they already played. 

    All of this got me thinking about how I play D&D. In the olden days, 1981-1992 or so, I just ran modules. There was no idea of a 'campaign' in our games: they were episodic adventures based in whatever TSR was selling. I did linked modules for sure: Pharaoh/Oasis of the White Palm, Giants-Descent-Demonweb, Master of the Desert Nomads, etc. but overall none of these adventures had any connective tissue going between them. They were more like Conan stories: in one story he's in Aquilonia, in the next story he's in Stygia, etc. Call of Cthulhu was similar: I ran modules and investigations that had no real connection to each other. I wouldn't have occurred to me to run a campaign, at least in the modern sense of the word.

    When we played 3rd edition in the late 90s-early aughts, I was a player in my brother's campaign, and that's just what it was: all of the modules were connected together in an overarching story. When I returned to GMing in 2019, I did the same thing: a group of adventurers playing through a bastardized version of Tyranny of Dragons. The characters had backstories, there was an overarching narrative (Tiamat's return) and all of what we did was related to that larger story. It was set in the Forgotten Realms, where most of my games took place post-high school (vs. Greyhawk, which was the assumed setting in the early days). My second 5e campaign was based--again, loosely--on Descent Into Avernus, although I mostly used Adventurer League stuff vs. the main book. I made up a lot of this game on my own (believe it not, for the first time!) and played very loosely with the actual published book. It was fun! By the end, when the party had moved to the Moonshaes, it was all home brew setting and storyline. 

    What I have never done is a sandbox. I have never let the game emerge from player choices, and have things I've already put into place and lightly penciled in--factions, say, or NPCs, or 'campaign characters'--evolve and change in reaction to what the players do...or even harder to grok, evolve and change on their own! So that's my next challenge: an emergent game world using 1:1 time with some kind of verisimilitude in regards how the world operates. Ed did a little of this with his DCC campaign: as my group moved through the world, we heard tell of things his other group had done, like legends and rumors and tales of their adventures. This kind of world building creates a 'subreality': a sense that things are happening in the world despite, or inspite of, the players' actions.

    On interesting idea: keep NPCs and campaign characters (kings, wizards, demigods) on index cards.

    I am hoping to do this using the OSE rules, set in Greyhawk. I also am going to sell a lot of my stuff: games I am not playing (or going to play), books I purchased on a whim, just stuff that is imagining for me vs. sparking my imagination. I want to have a little of this imagined for me as possible. I want it to come from my own mind (with a liberal helping of the many, many, many fantasy books I've read thrown in!) We shall see how all of this develops. 

 

 

7 June 2026 The Harlot's Tale-- Shadowdark and OSE

     Yeah, yeah, I know: I am a game whore. I admit it. I spend more time thinking about games than I ever will playing them. This week I have been thinking about Shadowdark, and here is why: first, I own it (because...of course I do). Second, it is very popular. People love this thing! Third, I have listened to a bunch of podcasts interviewing the creator, one Kelsey Dionne, and she is just good energy; a lovely person who loves these games and seems incredibly sweet. The rules of Shadowdark are simple (to say the least).  The designer basically took the parts of OSE, 5e, and DCC that she liked, disregarded the parts that she didn't like, and poof! Here's the game. Interestingly, Shadowdark is written at an 8th grade reading level (vs. Castles&Crusades, which is written at a college level). So we end up with a game that is a melange of modern rules--unified d20 system, funnels, advantage and disadvantage, luck points, etc. and written in very bare and simple prose with really cool black and white art. Even the torch system--something I've never seen before--is derived from Index Card RPG (I think...)

    I have not played this game, but I think I could pretty easily. There isn't really anything "new" here ("new" meaning post-2014 #I-am-old); it is instead a culling, and reorganizing, of modern RPG rules. It looks like it would be great for crawls, and probably serviceable for overland adventures. The role playing is on the players and the DMs; you don't really need a lot of rules and/or tables for that (do ya hear me, 5e?). It is a highly lethal game (like DCC...). Naturally I backed The Western Reaches Kickstarter because...have you met me? I also think my crew would find it a bit boring, to be honest. With the exception of the torch timer adding tension, this might be a bit too basic. Maybe I'll do it as a one-shot or something, just to see how it plays. 

    Which brings us to Old School Essentials. OSE is a redo of the old B/X rules of blessed memory (Moldvay and Cook), with a further reorganization of Gygax's AD&D (the Advanced Fantasy Player's and Referee's Tomes). The rules are essentially the same as they were in 1981, with an option for an ascending AC (vs. THACO, which is in there). The art is beautiful, the books are beautiful, and the rules are...well, old school. Roll high saving throws (only five!) Roll low attribute checks. THACO or ascending AC (either/or).  Very retro action economy: declare spells and melee movement, initiative, monster morale, movement, missile attacks, spell casting, melee attacks, repeat). It has been decades since I've played this version of the game, and I remember being a bit frustrated by it at higher levels because combat felt like chopping down a tree. In modern D&D, the action economy is very different: readied action, action, bonus action, movement variance, etc. I suspect this game will play great, but I'm unsure of how my crew will react to it, although I have to say: no one seems to miss the superhero vibe of fifth edition. 

    I also noticed that the amount of arguing with the GM (me!) is vastly reduced in both DCC and C&C because the expectations of what the character can do are vastly reduced. All my guys did was fight with me when we played 5e; it was like someone cast Rules Lawyer on all of them. Super annoying. So I am looking forward to running OSE in the near future, but I think I'm going to solo-play first and see how it goes. 

    I wonder if Pirate Borg is any good...