A TTRPG enthusiast and amateur designer, particularly enamored with the OSR/NSR movements. Currently working on Plunderer! and Dwellers in Darkness. Check ou...
(Challenging myself to express this thought in under 500 words) What kinds of obstacles do OSR characters typically encounter? The broad categories of traps, puzzles, combat encounters, and social encounters encompass many of them, but what fundamentally separates a combat encounter from a trap or a social encounter from a puzzle? I think the prototypical dungeon threat is not the monster, but the…
After writing Rules Don't (Necessarily) Elide , I've been thinking a lot about mechanics that exist not to simulate a fictional space but to create other kinds of associations and incentives for players. I had this thought recently that the nature of the diegesis in most tabletop roleplaying games is such that players have very little mechanical connection to the sensations experienced by their…
This is a shortish post about a moment that happened today in my ongoing Veins of the Earth campaign (set in 1980s Thailand, using Liminal Horror) and a principle I'm beginning to think is very useful for OSR GM-ing. I'm sure other people have had this insight (it's not particularly difficult to stumble upon) but developing it for myself has helped me discover what I consider some good GM-ing…
This post is the result of two post ideas I had around the same time and thought would be better as one interesting post than two mediocre posts. I've been thinking about something I call The Silurian Game, which is where you play your preferred dungeon game but simply "palette swap" medieval Europe for the late Cretaceous period. Instead of humans, dwarves, halflings, and elves, you play…
This is an outline of a solo dungeon game (game, not necessarily TTRPG) inspired by this Tumblr post by Carlos, a.k.a. imsobadatnicknames about turning the Escape from Terminus creepypasta into an actual, (theoretically) playable TTRPG. I wanted to noodle around with this idea a bit myself, though I ended up going in a very different direction from him. For me, the thing that is most interesting…
Thinking about putting my pitches for campaigns I won't get around to for a while here, both to hopefully inspire others and just as a sort of archive. Pitch: The Society for Exonautical Research is dedicated to exology, the study of parallel and imagined worlds, funded by generous grants from interested members of the aristocracy. A revolution in their endeavors came with the invention of the…
This is a kind of chaser to my post describing the Rainlands subregion of the Woland collaborative Mythic Bastionland realm. In the MB campaign I'm in, our knights have just recently arrived back in their Realm from the realm of the fae. Due to portal shenanigans, an entire age had passed during the week or so the knights were gone, and even though it was just the result of a fumbled luck roll, I…
Introduction I love Mythic Bastionland. It's one of the only games I've played but not GMed, and I'm currently in an awesome long-running campaign. I've actually gone to great lengths to avoid learning anything about the referee-facing procedures, in order to preserve my own sense of wonder and uncertainty when things happen in-game. Obviously, that makes what I'm about to do a little bit more…
I find the ubiquity of the sentiment that "rules elide" genuinely puzzling for a couple of reasons. This argument comes from a blogpost by Jared Sinclair , but similar sentiments are echoed by other designers , especially in the OSR sphere . 1 I find it very strange that this deprecatory view of game mechanics is constantly being proposed by game designers, the people one would most expect to be…
This is an archive of sorts for all my random monster ideas I'm not able to put anywhere else. Many of them are dumb, but that's what I like about them. Last Updated : July 11, 2026 Giant Tardigrade The size of a fingernail. Invincible. Good thing they just eat leaves. Slumberhulk Giant termite. Soporific gaze. Brain-eater Eats brains. Not a problem for most adventurers. Watch out for its mind…