The Grisly Eye

Bookplate for the Załuski Library, designed by Jan Filipowicz.

I first read Little, Big (John Crowley, 1981) in the nineties but didn't make it all the way through.

Engraving of St.

Dolmenwood (Necrotic Gnome, 2025) might be the apotheosis of the OSR.

Do you ever read books that seem to be written with a film adaptation in mind?

Image from "Book of Wisdom" of Francysk Skaryna 1518 An example of the use of wisdom can be given by noting that while the intelligent character will know that smoking is harmful to him, he may well lack the wisdom to stop (this writer may well fall into…

2025 was a hard pill to swallow.

A little while ago, the Discourse focussed on the OSR credentials of Elden Ring, Namco's wildly popular dark-fantasy CRPG.

Last week, my roleplaying table's book club picked Linghun (2023) by Ai Jiang.

Have we reached peak zombie?

Or do we frame a turbulent sky with our fingers and believe that, because we have narrowed our vision to that small sphere, we have captured and contained the elements?

CONT/EXT is a one-shot of cosmic horror for use with Mothership®.

This post is the second part of a two-part self-essay I wrote on how to portray aliens for games like Mothership.

This post evolved out of a series of self-essays I wrote on the subject of Mothership while developing CONT/EXT.

This post evolved out of a self-essay I wrote while developing CONT/EXT.

Caution this post contains spoilers.

This is a piece of world design I've been toying with over the last few years.

Witchcraft is a new magic discipline for sorcerers or druids that includes seven new spells.

d66 grim fantasy careers for Troika!

We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.

Status: At Concept Being a teenager on a zero-hour contract is tough, but then you get stuck in a remote gas station during a snowstorm.

Here is a (brief) list of languages for my homebrew setting.

This is a response to Josh’s article on Hexcrawl Dashboards.

The Brave English Gypsy, an illustration from the A Book of Roxburghe Ballads.

This is a tale of Fair Paralain, that rotten tooth of a city.

In a fair fight, the don's man would almost certainly paint the walls with Locke and Calo's blood, so it stood to reason that this fight would have to be as unfair as possible.

This article is part of a series following the design of my low-fantasy 5E hack, Three Meet.

A common kingfisher sitting on a branch of a tree.

The Keep throws a long shadow over the Borderlands.

Public domain illustration of Genua from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.

The gods are silent, but not quite gone.

This is the first campaign diary for my 5th Edition campaign, The Last Post.

You are not a hero.

The Assayer's Guild is a preview of a faction from The Compendium of Factions (working title, yet to be released).

Encounter blocks are an attempt to compress information about how to run encounters into a digestible format.

A little magic still lingers at the frayed edges of society.

This is a follow-up to my preview of Flawed Magic Items and includes two, new flawed magic items: The Head of St.

For centuries the ratfolk have lurked in the sewers and catacombs of the Undercity, unbeknownst to the citizens above.

This is an excerpt from The Wicked, an upcoming monograph about hedge magic and all things witchy and warlocky, full of toil and trouble.

The age of magic wanes and the fey retreat from the mortal world.

Copyright free woodcut from the History of the Nordic Peoples by Olaus Magnus.

In the 12th instalment of Black Griffin in which the party is court-martialed for assaulting an officer...

The Dance of Death, public domain image taken from the Nuremberg Chronicles.

In the 11th instalment of Black Griffin in which the party partakes of a double-cross and buys themselves some time...

In the tenth instalment of Black Griffin the party interrogate their prisoners, learn little of the mysterious Commonwealth and acquire a new comrade-in-arms...

In the ninth instalment of Black Griffin the party interrogate their prisoners, learn little of the mysterious Commonwealth and acquire a new comrade-in-arms...

Public domain woodcut from the Hereford Map of the World (Mappa Mundi).

In the eighth instalment of Black Griffin the party find themselves attending a war council and a new enemy makes their presence felt...

Recently I ran a new mission for my playtest campaign Black Griffin.

In the seventh instalment of Black Griffin the party find themselves attending a war council and a new enemy makes their presence felt...