A Monday Miscellany of Links pt. XVII I haven’t done a link post for a while, so this one is a bit bigger than usual. Maybe I should imply in the title that it’s some monthly thing instead of weekly. On the other hand I might just miss a self-set monthly deadline as well. Free Stuff Liminal Horror (itch.io) Wanderer Bill’s Grenzland Fanzine BLUELITE: A Holmes Basic Hack (Troy Press) Random Tables d100 – Magical Spears (d4 Caltrops) d100 – So You’ve Been Brought Back From The Dead… (d4 Caltrops) TTRPG Thought and Ideas Joy and Devilry in the Films of Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer (Ta ..read more

Dancing girls at Cairo illustration by David Roberts (1796-1864). I was reminiscenced about skills in Das Schwarze Auge again the last few days, mostly while trying to think about ways of including the parts I really liked into my own DnDish houserule-monster of a ruleset. Skills haven’t been part of DSA from the beginning. The original boxed set did not come with a proper skill system. Like DnD before some classes had special powers (e.g. the dwarf class had a “dwarf nose” that allowed them to find gold), but the first attempt at a skill system came with the Abenteuer-Ausbau Spiel (the extens ..read more

[Labyrinth Lord] Tomb of the Serpent Kings Session 1 (also MapTool) A while ago I started playing with some people on an online server. That was about the time when I decided that I should maybe be playing more often than just GMing. Unfortunately life intervenes a lot, and lately there haven’t been that many games in the main campaign to keep me busy. I am also co-DMing a Shadowrun game lately, so there’s that, but I am missing the OSR fantasy fare. So I decided to run a game on the server, specifically with MapTool, which I have been hovering around for a while, but never actually used. In ..read more

This is a 28 page “temple-crawling adventure” written by Munkao ostensibly for Into the Odd and Cairn (but actually largely system-agnostic), and set in the South-East Asian inspired world of Kala Mandala. I don’t think transferring it into other settings should be that much of an issue, as long as one can come up with a reason why there’s a vaguely Asian-coded monastic community around to set this at. My personal setting is set around a sort of crossroads of cultures so I have absolutely no issue with that), and this might fit in great in some of the areas I haven’t worked out that much yet ..read more

Bob Walters 1982, published without context in Dragon 63 Dungeons and Dragons was published 50 years ago, and almost immediately afterwards ‘zines and magazines appeared to give players and DMs more material to work with. And even beforehand things were published in Diplomacy zines and even mainstream magazines. And there have been a lot of attempts by fellow bloggers to go through these magazines systematically, although in a lot of cases they focused almost exclusively on the holy trinity of Dragon, Dungeon, and White Dwarf. Which after all were the biggest RPG magazines there were in the En ..read more

A Monday Miscellany of Links pt. XVI 100 Village Notable Features (OSRVault) d10 Graveyard Dressing (Azukail Games) d12 Mysterious Vapours & Miasmas (Elfmaids & Octopi) DnD turns 50 and something else turns 200 (Playing at the World) ‘The hobby is only just catching up to what Greg did 40 years ago’: Pendragon 6E, ‘ultimate’ edition of an RPG legend’s masterpiece, reclaims its crown (dicebreaker) Using TTRPGs to change the narratives around Autism (Roll for Kindness) Tips and Tricks: DIY TTRPG zines and booklet props (TTRPGKids) Save the Day: How Young Chinese Are Role-Playing Th ..read more

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A Monday Miscellany of Links pt. XV In the beginning I thought I’d manage to make this a weekly kind of article. But sometimes I barely get a morsel of content for it, sometimes my cup runneth over… Free Stuff Hardly something new, but the classic Barbarian Prince solitaire quasi-RPG is available for print and play (and if I remember well it has been since at least the aughts). Of course it also can be found online in reissued versions, so if you’d rather have that go for it. The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming, is a free pdf download at CMU Press dealing with the history ..read more

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From what I have found there were exactly two scenarios for The Dark Eye in Casus Belli, and this is the second one. Le suppôt de Satan (The Devil’s Henchman) by Jacques Dalstein and Jérôme Bohbot from Casus Belli 34 (still 1986, the same year as the previous one). This was after the release of the extension set in French, which is referenced and immediately almost completely ignored by the scenario. The main antagonist is specifically not using the extension set rules. Oh, yeah, the antagonist. You can see him in the illustration on the first page of the scenario. Wait, you might say, but DS ..read more