Search results

As James Brown once said "GODDOG!" The idea of "science" and "race" in the same room as each other makes me a pretty queasy. Because history. Now kindred, folk, lineage, culture etc - it's all equally fine... But ... the core assumption of fantasy "races" is going to be near impossible to...

So "His Majesty the Worm" just came out, and I haven't read it yet, but Playful Void dropped this hope review and she thinks it's pretty cool. https://playfulvoid.game.blog/2024/07/18/i-read-his-majesty-the-worm/ I think it sounds interesting and will put some of my absurd amounts of DTRPG...

Seems fine as far as it goes. In general I dislike flat bonus weapons, they seem like an artifact of a war game. Likewise the "baseline" abilities of all magic swords (glow like a torch and such) make them far more boring then I think they need to be. When all magic swords are the same, with...

The Old School Baroque designation is Marica's, I don't necessarily buy it fully, even though I count many of these designers friends and have been involved in a lot of the discussion of "Proceduralism". I see some similarity in their work, but I'm not sure it's fully a unified design trend...

I find Errant quite interesting, and Cairn is very well supported by its community. The Cairn 2nd edition certainly seems to fit into this category that Marcia designated. Electrum Archive is also fun, but I'd call it a setting more then a game (though it has one attached). In general these...

I think J Mal of Grognardia was doing so for a while? There's some post son it over there. Personally I'm indeifferent to Mork Borg. Pros: Grear aesthetic, strong supportive community, for getting started creating things with an OSR style system. Cons: No real exploration mechanics...

Yes - that was a point I made within the post. I may not have been clear enough - I write boilerplate for a living, so I love the hidden gist. See: As to your general point: I trust my own gaming community, but if the past 10 years have taught me anything it's that people are awful, hiding...

I think slavery in RPGs, especially older style D&D is a tricky subject because while the text may make it clear that the slavers are evil and bad, the open nature of play and the fact that human (or humanish) chattel have value in a game where success is often judged by how much value the...

It looks to me like NY's "new-new" anti-SLAPP is still getting tested right now... though the Trump v. Trump case from 2023 suggests that the courts are ready to use it fairly effectively. The plaintiff here and/or his attorney may not have realized that NY Anti-SLAPP finally had teeth, because...

So this is one reason people have criticized B2 - it can be played as a monster zoo of endless fights. It becomes more interesting if the players don't do that and treat it as a chance to enter into schemes and negotiations. The best way to do this is actually make the monsters a bit friendlier...

Philotomy's is well worth a read. I keep wanting to write a follow up on how I see his "Mythic Underworld", its sources and ultimate evolution. In some senses the design sensibilities of a lot of the mid-OSR come out of Philotomy, certainly the OSR megadungoen feels deeply connected to his...

I think this is a lost fact, or at least a very sound interpretation of OD&D - which of course demands interpretation. It's like the other stocking advice you point to ... great and easy to miss, meaning I suspect that a lot of people have missed it over the last fifty years. Of course there is...

Not that I know of - I think you can maybe break things down into Twin Cities and Lake Geneva for a few things, but it's not that much of a difference once D&D is published at least - both sort of become team TSR pretty quickly. Alarums & Excursions is worth a read btw.

So OD&D's monster and treasure distribution scheme is part of the confusion - it presents seemingly multiple options (I like every other OD&D fan have a "100% CORRECT WAY!") ... but I also think OD&D giant rats have 2-13HD...so ummm...It's OD&D! What's interesting here, and part of the point I...

Glad you liked it. I think looking at the OD&D design ideas is helpful because it really drives home that the large mega dungeons are a design choice of both the late 1970's and the early-mid OSR. They aren't bad, but they are difficult to run in the shorter sessions online play demands. I...

Thanks! Should be fixed now! This I think is largely correct - at least for what the Lake Geneva style becomes (very quickly) by the time D&D is fully published and propogating in the wild. I also think it's a style that defines the early OSR (The "Revival" or "Forum" OSR) and maybe even what...

I have an interest in some of the ways that D&D has evolved in the last 50 years, especially in how the dungeon crawl is played and portrayed. Lately I've been thinking about the "design forms" for dungeons and how different editions and sources from OD&D "Underworld and Wilderness Adventures"...

Of course it's more complex - and yes Game Wizards has interesting things in it. I don't intend to reduce things to a simple Gygax Good/Arneson Bad, but think it's definately worth looking at some of the developments in D&D, and especially the shift towards AD&D, tournament play, and Gygax's...

Alternatively ... B1 exists to make Arneson feel bad about how his royalties for Basic cut into his friend Mike Carr's money.... At least this is a story I've heard, it's hard to say if these are true - only that pushing Arneson out and cutting off his royalties seemed to be important to Gygax...

There's actually an interesting bit of legal scholarship to be written about Gary Gygax's litigation history, starting with his acting as a witness in an Insurance case around a guy that tried to pull the "I'm buying life insurance and then doing myself in" thing. The decision around the...