Orkish Odyssey

In the predominant strains of DIY elf games, gold coins are the currency par excellence and often the most player-facing mode of advancement.

I ran a three-month campaign of Veins of the Earth, which to my understanding makes me one of the select few who actually attempted to run that beast of a book!

Something must be in the air, because it seems like everybody is blogging about magic.

I was listening to the Dead Letters episode on Magical Industrial Revolution, and they were talking about the difficulties of representing cities in tabletop roleplaying games due to their sheer physical size and density.

In Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast, there is an ogre that lives on the isle of Ruislip, and can be encountered randomly within a three-hex radius of his shack.

A work in progress.

In a lot of media (especially games), the purpose of magic, from both a Doylesian and a Watsonian perspective, is in part to elide logistical concerns.

I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I was listening to the Dead Letters podcast's newest episode about Mythic Bastionland.

(Challenging myself to express this thought in under 500 words) What kinds of obstacles do OSR characters typically encounter?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.