Classic fantasy roleplaying games and loosely associated thoughts
Creating house rules, custom rules specific to a local group or campaign, has been common throughout the history of D D. What makes an effective house rule or game hack and what, if anything, makes early D D (say, pre-WotC D D) hackable? Some properties of early D D that might contribute to this tendency include mechanical simplicity, reliance [ ]
Being an incomplete, visual review of the 2024 Player s Handbook. I got a copy of this almost entirely on the strength of the new cover art: (This is the alt cover which I think is limited in some way. I find the new standard cover somewhat less appealing, but still better than the strange monochromatic [ ]
I just recently finished my second reading of Elantris; I first read it last year during Summer of 2023. I came late to Sanderson, being repelled by the hard fantasy reputation, finally starting during Covid via audiobook. Now having read almost all of his Cosmere-related novels, I realize how misguided that prejudice was. There are [ ]
Back in March, prompted by a discussion on Discord, I was perusing Jon Peterson s Playing at the World to see if there was any discussion of rerolling HP on level up. Sadly, I was unable to locate anything about this topic, but reading several sections about XP did prompt another idea: what if the amount [ ]
I just finished listening to the audiobook of The Blade Itself, volume one in Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy. This was my first exposure to his work.
Above the summit of Le Bonnet de l Evêque, dentelated with scaffoldings, rose that second mountain—a mountain on a mountain—which was the Citadel La Ferrière. A lush growth of red fungi was mounting the flanks of the main tower with the terse smoothness of brocade, having already covered the foundations and buttresses, and was spreading polyp [ ]
There are many broad functions that rules can have. Here is one: representing the details of a broader fictional world. The fictional world might not work exactly like the world of day to day phenomenological experience that we inhabit and experience as the real world, but it nonetheless makes sense, loosely speaking. Sure, monsters might [ ]
Is there a founding myth of OSR? Here is one proposal: The founding myth of the OSR, that it is based either in an original play style or in the Gygaxian style, … My view is that many of the communities, past or present, which identify with the OSR are based on that myth despite [ ]
Sometimes I think about all game rules and supplements in terms of prosthetics. Broadly speaking, a prosthetic is an artifact to replace a missing body part or remediate some deficiency. Some prosthetics are useful to almost everybody sometimes (stepladder) while some remediate a common deficit (glasses) and others are highly idiosyncratic. Similarly, the tasks referees [ ]
The Worm Ouroboros is a proto-fantasy (the in the genre sense) novel by E. R. Eddison, originally published in 1922. It is an amalgam of mythological traditions, Greco-Roman epic poetry, and invented fantasy worlds. A historian of fantasy literature could probably draw a line of influence that ran from Dunsany, through Eddison, and to Tolkien. [ ]