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12
November
2022

I’ve been looking forward to Marcia’s tidied up version of OD&D. It’s a straight up retroclone: she hasn’t tried to fix the gaps in the game, the gaps are the best part. Enjoy. It’s free!

If you haven’t read OD&D you should, it’s really wild what they thought was enough for people to play a game. And really, they were right. People figured it out and made amazing things.

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09
November
2022

I met up with Alex, Brendan and Paul last night from the #torontOSR posse. We tried to play through James’s The Cursed Chateau, but spent much of our time together drinking cocktails and catching up. Almost certainly inspired by this experience, Alex writes about one-scene adventures as another form of one-shot play.

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07
November
2022

Man, Twitter really does feel like a hot mess right now. And if we are all being honest with one another, it already felt like a hot mess, right? Warren from I Cast Light explains why you should be getting back to blogging: BLOG! Good God! What Is It Good For? When I started blogging (a million years ago) social media didn’t really exist as a thing, and people would share all the ephemera in their heads on their blogs. Some of your tweets are probably stupid, and should just disappear into the ether. Some of your tweets are probably worth simply posting to your blog: especially those that spark discussion. I wrote about “microblogging” here at Save vs. Total Party Kill some time ago. Anyone can start a blog and contribute to the wider RPG scene.

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04
November
2022

Josh from Rise Up Comus almost lost 6 years of notes about his D&D campaign! This moment encouraged him to blog about how he went about building up the trove of writing and prep that went into running his megadungeon campaign. I love reading about the processes people go through to run games.

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04
November
2022

In a project that seems like pure madness, Patrick is compiling the entirety (give or take) of his blog False Machine into a book. It’s over 650 pages! Over half a million words! Bananans. You can back the project on Kickstarter right now. Go do that now!

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29
October
2022

I suspect the death of Twitter is greatly exaggerated. No one pays 44 billion dollars for something only to drive it into the sun, though that’s honestly the best outcome one could hope for when it comes to Twitter. I’ve been on that site since the dawn of time—I’m twitter user 3,321—and I will be a little sad to see it go, but honestly not that sad. It’s been dreadful for many years now.

Just to get a little bit ahead of any exodus, here are a few places you might see me besides this blog:

• Mastadon, which honestly kind of sucks. It’s like the Linux of social media. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. But, at least we can trust it to chug along while not selling your data to advertisers. I’m on tabletop.social, but another popular choice with open registration is dice.camp.
• Cohost.org, which seems promising, but I am unsure how they plan to keep the lights on. It reminds me a bit of G+, in that you can create public (or private!) “pages” for people to follow, and you write posts with comments: no stupid threads.

At the end of the day, the OSR is about blogging, and I’m always up for more of that.

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11
October
2022

The first part of the infamous follow up to Deep Carbon Observatory is finally out, Demon Bone Sarcophagus. Time to buy while the Tories are demolishing the value of the British Pound! I’ve been reading the PDF on and off: there is so much going on it’s kind of bananas.

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11
October
2022

Sean has shared some interesting thoughts on player safety tools in RPGs, something that’s been on his mind as he writes the dungeon master’s guide for his game Mothership: Thinking about Safety Tools in RPGs. Here Sean frames safety tools as a form of hospitality.

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10
October
2022

I had been not so patiently for my copy of Into the Odd to arrive. Chris teamed up with Johan Nohr of Mörk Borg fame to produce this new edition of the game. They have made a really incredible book together, it’s really quite beautiful. My love of this system has grown slowly over time. Paolo published Wonder and Wickedness and Into the Odd around the same time, but I next to no interest in the game. The implied setting seemed wasn’t really to my taste. Also, I was all about OD&D at the time. Over the years, perhaps with the release of Silent Titans, I have become much more aware and interested in Chris’s works. He’s one of my favourite OSR game designers now, and Into the Odd seems like one of the more important and influential works to have come out of the OSR.