Review of Creature Building Tools

Region Development the Gnomestones Way

In Which A Marriage Is Arranged For Sir Tollix and Gnomepoleon Takes the Field

When first looking into OSR games, many people ask themselves the same question: "Which one do I start with?" In my experience, nowadays, the majority of the time, there are two systems that people will tell you to start with: Either Shadowdark or Old-School Essentials. Both of these games were created with a lot of love, care and attention to detail, with strong communities backing them up.

A Rankin/Bass Themed Holiday Hex

Welcome back everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and a great start of the year! As for us, both me and Yuno managed to catch a cold right before our exam session so things could be better. But nonetheless, I wanted to take some time to write this article to relax my brain a bit before delving right into uni projects and my dissertation.

In the aftermath of the the Malacath fanatics attack on the Temple of Ire, King Kurog has summoned me back to Scarp Keep. As I enter two huge wooden doors of his throne room, I see his figure slump…

Johnny Nine-Fingers returned smelling of moss and burnt hair, eyes wide like he’d glimpsed the soul of a houseplant. “Magic?” he rasped, slamming down a scorched notebook. “It ain’t spells, it’s feelings. They don’t cast, they emote.” I nodded slowly, pen in hand. Another system, another aneurysm.

Here is a scene that has played out at countless tables running D&D since, well, I think at least from the 3rd edition days. The party rounds a corner and lo and behold, here are goblins. The goblins are there because the encounter table said goblins, or because the adventure module placed them in this room, or because the GM simply needed something to fill the space between the last fight and the next plot beat.

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cyberpunk 1e RAW is a player-driven sandbox that begs to have a campaign turn structure added to it.

There is a version of Vampire: The Masquerade that does not exist. In that version, the vampire is still fundamentally a predator. Gothic, certainly. Brooding, perhaps. But essentially a monster: something took directly from folklore, something cold and inhuman that wears a human face as a disguise. That version of the vampire has a long literary history - Stoker's Dracula…

This isn't going to be a full review but I want to say, Draw Steel is a very fun system that makes combat a dynamic team based experience ...

I think it is somewhat fair to say that the break between the original World of Darkness (oWoD) and its 2004 reboot, Chronicles of Darkness (nWoD), is one of the most debated divisions in tabletop RPG history. The original line's fans see the reboot as a betrayal to the original setting they hold dear, while Chronicles of Darkness fans point to tighter mechanics, neater lore, and a more focused horror vision.

Heading down into depths of Graystone Quarry I see no signs of the fog, except perhaps the steam from strange brass pipes that adorn the cavern walls. I do however hear a monotonous chorus of hissi…

The principle source of stone during the rebuilding of Orsinium has come from Clan Tumnosh’s Graystone Quarry located to the south-west of the capitol. The quarry however has reportedly fallen well…

Usually there is this funny moment that most players who has cross from modern D&D into OSR territory experience. A sort of rite of passage, if you will. It usually happens in the first or second session. The character they built, the one with that nice backstory and all those personality notes and the carefully chosen starting equipment, walks into a situation that, in a more forgiving game would have resolved with a dramatic near-miss and a depleted hit point total.

Around this time last year, I wrote what is one of my favorite articles from the blog. An article about why TTRPGs feel so special to me. And part of the argument rested on the idea that these games belong to the tradition of folk art: communal, informal, passed hand to hand through enthusiasm rather than institution, truly alive only in the act of doing them.

Almost every edition of D&D has an endgame problem. How it goes usually is that characters gain levels, accumulate power, and eventually reach a point where the game's original structures, dungeons, monsters, treasure, kinda stop making sense from both a narrative and a mechanical standpoint. At the end of the day what do you do with a character who has cleared every dungeon, killed every dragon, and accumulated more gold than most kingdoms?