Blogging about Trad & OSR roleplaying games
I'm not that into gaming conventions, as that many people tend to be a nuisance (or health hazard), and I certainly don't like traveling far just to visit one. Which is why it's great that the nice people from Nerds United are still into
Over at Methods & Madness , Eric Diaz is musing about how much you can cut down the average D&D character's statistic while still covering most of what you have to roll at the table. He's coming out rather negative at the end: In the
While he was in college, Bill Underwood wrote his own fantasy role-playing game. I appreciate every act of creation like this, but in the case of Beasts, Men & Gods , there's one especially interesting thing: This started in 1977, and the game itself was self-published in
A spectre is haunting the blogosphere – the spectre of the personal Appendix N. All the blogs have congregated to bow to this apparition, like Prismatic Wasteland , Rise Up Comus or Forlorn Encystment . For those precious few not in the know: In one of the many, many appendices of the
I finished another Jam!
It might not surprise you, dear reader familiar with RPG fandom, that I've got a lot of unfinished projects in my virtual drawer. There's a reason we've got so many "retroclones" and "heartbreakers", it's both easy to find
Recently I published a post about doing a simple, step-by-step approach to building a hex map that could last you for most of a campaign. I called this "cheating", as it disregards building your whole continent or even world from the ground up, instead focusing on
Fantasy map making used to be simple. You drew some lines for mountains and coast lines, any shape goes, and then some rivers, some of them even flowing from mountain to the sea. Cities can and do go anywhere. But we're living in a time of untold riches.
Fairy Army, by Sir J. Noel Paton, 1870 I've just been reading an interesting post on the Throne of Salt blog, where the author writes about Alternate D&D Frameworks . It's basically about what one could extract from two basic facts of D&D
There's a joke that seems to be popular in Eastern Europe & the Balkans, which I first heard from a Romanian co-worker: Once upon a time, God was walking the earth, visiting the faithful in disguise. He arrived at the hovel of a poor farmer in <
On Saturday the 22nd of February 2025, I was at a roleplaying convention in Munich, held by the esteemed Nerds United club: the Bavariacon. It was my second time, I attended two years ago and had to skip 2024 because of a heavy cold that got me the day before.
As a small side note, before I return to shoe-horning GURPS into the OSR, I want to talk about one of my favorite rules mechanics from the much-maligned German The Dark Eye RPG. As a short historical overview, "Das Schwarze Auge" (lit. "the black eye&
from oldboookillustrations.com In the last post I wrote about "GURPS 0E", the Man-to-Man combat-centered rules that were released before the complete first box came to market, with the final aim to construct some kind of "old school" rules out of this. One
As my first entry, let's try to marry one of the stalwarts of "traditional" play with an old-school sensibility found in the OSR sphere. I doubt that I'll achieve a match with the Old School Primer or the Principia Apocrypha , but as previous
On the front page of the blog I've got what amounts to the raison d’être of this blog, “talking about OSR and traditional games”. The arguments about what OSR games should be is big issue of discussion, there’s not even a