OSR musings from a journeyman referee.
This post isn’t directly related to the excellent “Permisiveness in RPGs” and “Yes and No, but… ?” , but their talk of yessing and noing got me thinking about some of my own reservations about improv theatre parlance and received wisdom in TTRPGs. Namely, our games are peppered with rules that purposefully lead us into an interpretive gray zone. They do so in the name of narrative surprise, but…
Warning: spoilers for Gradient Descent in this post. It'll make more sense if you're familiar with the module. I ran five sessions of Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent last year, and they kind of sucked. It’s a celebrated module and I’m a decent referee, so what gives? Logistics and Inexperience There were only three players initially, so scheduling was difficult. Sometimes we’d only play once a…
The Itinerarium Cambriae (“The Journey Through Wales”) is an account of a 1188 trip through Wales by the clergyman Gerald of Wales. It’s a brisk and entertaining hodgepodge of history, local folklore, theology and charmingly wrongheaded natural philosophy. I love medieval whimsy, so I loved this. The text is available on Project Gutenberg , though I can’t vouch for the particular translation. A…