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Right, compatibility is great! Everything I write is compatible with a game from 1981 and so converted to things based on that either without change (OSE, Lab Lord) or with trivial change - most other OSR systems. Great - I wouldn't use these rules ... unless they were useful to the specific...

No shade to cast on this system, and the design looks excellent - but I reamin baffled by designers choice to make ever more B/X/AD&D/OD&D clones. I honestly can't think of a reason why one wouldn't look to this for OSR style play ... but I can't really think of why one WOULD look to it either...

Seem like a lot of world building (demographics and such) for what is essentially a point on your map that the party will pass through. Rather then start from "how many elves" and "who are their allies" and such it's often good to start with "What kind of adventure do I want to run here"? If...

Sure and maybe? The fairytale setting gloss has been around a while. In the Mid OSR days gonzo and grimdark battled it out for official "OSR" aesthetic and I guess grimdark largely won. It's never been the only thing though? Currently dark fairytale has a bit of an upsurge, and it's not a bad...

Makes sense! Thanks for responding! My reply is that I think you're conceiving of playing a campaign where you A) intend to go from 1st - 36th level and B) things like picking locks and opening the doors will be both equally challenging and equally important throughout the campaign this makes...

Why? I'm honestly curious why how you feel this would be broken in play - no shade or criticism intended. I believe that it would be bad in your game - I just want to know how you are playing that makes it a problem? For me, as noted above, the way I tend to handle simple, mostly mechanical...

Thief skills have always been a funny fit, but I don't have a problem with OSE's use of the X in 6 method (I first saw this in LotFP which I think popularized it). In general thief skills fall mostly into an issue of how one plays. X in 6 is likely better for lower level play but a few levels...

For many yes. There are however ways (slot encumbrance, good turnkeeping or overloaded encounter dice) that allow for Dungeons with fewer keys, but they need some design changes as well. A Jewelbox dungeon can work, but I think the lower limit is somewhere around 10 - 20 keyed locations. It's...

Oh I agree - and I won't say that a game with complex rules for exploration can't do it. Only that it's not the way OD&D manages it (though it has a solid set of rules for exploration - likely better then any subsequent edition of D&D or any other system I've seen honestly - maybe Errant gets...

There's the second and third parts of the problem though... A) Can you have a functional system that heavily mechanically supports EVERYTHING. I don't think you can, not if you expect to actually prepare and play games. Complexity takes play time, it takes prep time and it takes both player...

I'm with you so far, but... I think here you're placing the typical fantasy genre dressings in the front rather then the underlaying mechanics that make classic Dungeon Crawls work. Nonsensical "Funhouse" or "Mythic Underworld" style dungeons are one way to design for dungeon crawls - but so...

Having been writing about, playing and writing old school dungeons for a decade plus now my take is that we use the word "Dungeon" too flippantly in RPGs. It's often used as very specific or very general descriptor: a dark maze of stone corridors or any location the players enter. I think it's...

Much of the foundational OSR stuff is in blogs - here's a good list: https://chiquitafajita.blogspot.com/p/keystone-readings.html Questing Beasts List of Posts (QB is a bigger name Post OSR Youtube channel). https://questingblog.com/posts/ and blogs: https://questingblog.com/blogs/ Another...

Here's the thing though... OSR play and B/X play (Not BECMI - because play style is the major difference) is a style focused on exploration. Combat, intrigue, and puzzle solving are all part of it, but in general it's about what I like to phrase as "The procedural navigation of a fantastical...

The short answer is that it's very much a BECMI adventure - meaning it can be summed up with the reoccurring BECMI design mantra "The monsters attack until killed" ... more specifically the advice isn't terrible, nor is some of the keying, but what it teaches a new referee strikes me as some...

I can't fault that - but I don't think most of it today really touches on "OSR", which is fine in that we're in a Post-OSR period and the sort of ultralight/classic system with 5E sensibilities is one of the dominant Post-OSR scenes. Sort of the equivalent of 1980's Pop-Punk vs. 1970's Punk...

I mean ... I think we can find worse? Can we? Undermountain? DL2 - Dragon's of Story Arc? Railroad of the Slavelords? B11 - Welcome to the World's Smallest Orc Hole?

One example would be that posting links to one's blog is basically forbidden as self promotion for example ... this is absurd given that the OSR was for most of its formative period a blog driven scene. Then of course if someone else actually links your blog or product Reddit (and identifies...

Hommlet always feels to me like Gygax being his most excessive and actuarial. Keying the town like it's a dungeon rather then making its social connection clearly structured, and then the dungeon is a bit much at times - Those 6 concealed 2 HD frogs in the moat for starters. It's not bad for...

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...