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Recent posts from across the ring.
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Earlier
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I have been hammering away at the City '26 challenge; running it faster and shallower than originally envisaged I would imagine. I have about ~37% of the wards done with ~16%...
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Several days ago, Julie - the Table Host of Tiny Table - and I were bitching about how it seems as though every licensed TRPG on the market is a D&D 5E conversion - a passtime...
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Last week, there was some discussion on the Prismatic Waystation Discord of how high danger or lethality in OSR-inflected play combined with the ease with which a character can...
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On the role of tags and descriptions.
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Whether your game is set in the distant future of the year 200X or the hundredth year of the Sword Age, sprinkling scenes with stupid made-up words is a fun way to create a...
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Alternative Holy Magic for Dolmenwood's Pluritine Church Prelude I swear this isn’t supposed to be a Luke Gearing fan blog. Also, this is at least nominally related to...
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not like this at all For a brief period in history, God lived on the earth. Leading by example, He built the first house, grew the first plants, and slaughtered the first cow....
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I elucidate the ways that the Pokémon games embody several principles of the OSR playstyle, which is maybe unsurprising when you consider the history of JRPGs.
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A cyberpunk fantasy setting. After centuries of exploitation and massacre, the goblins struck back, and now it's their world.Whether human or elf or orc, everything is too...
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Posted on February 27, 2026 This is part 2 of More Than Telling a Story, an open-ended series of posts describing aspects of TTRPGs that resonate with me that aren’t “telling a...
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Make Dice Work For You is a series where I’ll regularly talk through a new way to use dice in your game. It came out of conversation surrounding What to randomise when you’re...
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About month ago I made a Bluesky thread (follow me) some people found useful, and I wanted to share it here. This isn't me cannibalizing my thoughts across platforms. This is...
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Among the OSR blogosphere, there’s a lot of advice about how to make a sandbox. A whole lot of them involve breaking out a hexmap and populating it, creating a world for...
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There is a true purity in turning RPGs into products. Without all the products out there for us to buy, how else are we meant to show others what our personality is? If I can’t...
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How to convert monsters from Kolb's Oz book to Cairn, plus finished stats for six monsters: a Wheeler, a Nome Mason, an Outfit Soldier, an Outfit Underboss, an OZUltra...
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Last week, a microsingularity consumed a city block of Philadelphia before winking out. Unsurprisingly, the powers that be are hopping mad. Over the week, OSIRIS Weights &...
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For a horror-themed basementcrawl. Here's the proof-of-concept:oooo so slick so prettyI think hexflowers are fun in concept but in practice I don't care much to simulate...
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Pre-Order Into the Oddish, a Pokémon tabletop roleplaying game parody of Into the Odd, and Vileplume Mountain, a parody of the classic funhouse dungeon that is compatible with...
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I was lucky enough to spend a few hours trading questions and answers with long-time colleague and absolute GLoG luminary G.R. Michael on Best Case Scenario, the skirmish RPG...
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Here are some words from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: domes theatres statues lamps food-stalls staircases squares towers gates chimneys lamp-posts railings gutters...
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Using the Monster-Making d666 I made with Garamondia. On the island of Idaeg (not that far from the prosperous port of Uran Aeg) lies a gigantic old-world ruin, nowadays...
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Let's do some quick dungeon math. According to the AD&D DMG, 4 in 20 (or 1 in 5) dungeon rooms contain treasure (three guarded by monsters and one unguarded):When determining...
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This was prompted by hearing a discussion about tracking torches in a dungeon crawling game. This is something that I find that adds work, rarely becomes impactful, and the...
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With an upcoming campaign end in sight, I am looking at how to wrap things up for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. The fact that it is still going into 2026 is a nice fillip but with a...
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Here is a random lockpicking minigame idea I had:Lockpicking is guessing. Each lock has a number from 1 to 10. Without any skill you have a 1-in-10 chance of picking the...
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Dear Reddit: am I the asshole? I jumped into a conversation on the OSR discord about how people often write TTRPG adventures (or texts more broadly, I think) with such a...
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The Bloggies, the premiere awards for tabletop roleplaying game blogs, is currently on, and This Vorpal Coil has been nominated for Best Debut Blog! If you’ve enjoyed reading,...
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Many of you are worried that this is just another big tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That we’re creating a problem to justify invasive solutions....
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Using the Monster-Making d666 I made with Garamondia. Great old Uran Bael, the city of liars, is the capital of the Poison Isles, and between the western continent and the...
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If you can believe it, it’s an episode of Rose Playing Games once again! Watch it here! Today we’re talking about crafting systems in RPGs: gathering materials, assembling...