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Powered by the OGL, inspired by the OSR Ever run a 5th Edition game and wonder where an important GM-facing rule is? Ever design a dungeon-crawl and grimace when all the PCs can see in the dark unaided? What are torches for in this edition, anyway? Throw out your game master guide* and use this...

All episodes of Enter The Nerdom‘s foray into the old-school goodness of Dungeons & Dragons are out now! Follow along as hosts Stan Moroncini, Chad Cook, and Watson Bradshaw join special guest Dan Mason, and delve into the depths of the Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum by Directsun Games! We...

Ernie proved he's no better than these people more than once. They were made for each other.

IME, games where the party is regularly "split", such that either not every player's (primary) character is present every scene because they may be off doing other things, and/or that feature troupe-style play to solve this (so every player is present, but not their "main" character), include...

The amazing and hilarious hosts of Enter The Nerdom invited me to run an OSR game for them and special guest Dan Mason (also amazing and hilarious!). We used Knave (with a couple tweaks) to run Directsun Games' Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum, and had an absolute blast! Listen to part 1 here...

I had the honor of chatting with the hosts of Enter The Nerdom about the history, editions, movies, and more surrounding Dungeons & Dragons (and TTRPGs, in general) recently. By the end of the convo, we decided we're going to do an actual play episode (or two, depending on how long the adventure...

Precisely why I love the Cortex Plus and Prime versions of the system: they have all of the crazy "dice tricks" from SFX, but the addition is ultimately going to be at most 3 dice, usually only 2, and most often d6, d8, or d10. The numbers remain pretty constrained, but there's loads of...

Pretty much this. For a long time, that description kept me at bay because I thought "Yet another superhero universe..." but when I finally got around to reading X-O Manowar (Kindt's run) through a comic book discussion group I joined, it blew me away. The universe as a whole is much more...

So sadly true. My mom had great insurance and still ended up with tens of thousands in bills because of a single ambulance ride. Apparently you have to pay the EMTs their full year's salary each time, plus the expensive ambulance jet fuel or whatever they run on.

That's great news! As a Cortex fanatic, I'm a little sad they couldn't make that work out even after all this time, but I suspect the system they'll create will be all sorts of awesome anyway!

Try closer to many thousands of Fresh Takes, by this point. There's a new one launching on itch or KS every 30 minutes, it seems.

Planescape, perhaps more than most campaign settings (arguably maybe Dark Sun?), had one of the most intrusive and implicit metaplots of all of D&D. See Faction War for how that all went, but the seeds of it were throughout most (all?) of the published adventures: Dead Gods, Modron March, and a...

For sure! If it helps at all, my personal "best of" monster books are: Most recent edition of the Hackmaster bestiary (Hacklopedia of Beasts, I think they are called), The Monster Overhaul, and AD&D's monster trifecta (MM1, MM2, and Fiend Folio). Each of these delivers some absolute "killer...

I believe one of the (many!!) versions of the Tome of Horrors by Necromancer/Frog God did this. I want to say it was the Swords & Wizardry version of ToH Complete, since it had a lot more "white space" in it converting the monster stats from 3.5 to S&W, so they made up for that with plot hooks...

I think you're going to see a lot of hypocrisy on this stuff as companies get a handle on what each aspect of "AI-generative creative" means. In this case, though, I think it's a legacy product, because I haven't seen anything released/updated on this since over two years ago, unless my...

I hope they do a good editing pass on it. I have the 5e version and it is a great book filled with at least 75% solid adventures (maybe as high as 90 but I haven't played THAT many yet!). But the editing was rough on a lot of adventures: missing references, vague intro text, tie-ins between...

Prime should always be three (two if you use one of the No Effect Die mods). In total, I tend to go with 4-5 sets because I love an optional set or two to differentiate characters. 6-7 is my personal limit, though I've seen 8 work... Kinda. Exactly. I'd just do a single die. Only make them a...

Up to the group. The description can be short but clearly be informed by the traits used, or the player can flat out state why they are using some/all of the traits, or whatever you prefer. It's probably easiest to get in the habit of stating why each trait is used at first, so players get used...

Glad to hear that! I'm also on the fence. Setting sounds almost verbatim what I've been trying to build on my own, but (unsurprisingly) more developed and fleshed out. ...but it's 5e, and unless I can convert it pretty easily to not-5e, it may be too much system-stuff I'm not going to use. The...

Something interesting to me is how Demiplane is capturing all the big name publishers and systems, while Role and Fari are focused on more indie/niche titles and systems. They're all solidly in the digital space, but are very encouraging of games that have healthy, sometimes even innovative...