Category: Game materials

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    Gonzo cowboys

    People occasionally ask on fora like r/osr “what is gonzo?” and my new answer is the 1935 Gene Autry serial Phantom Empire. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. It is totally bananas. It has singing cowboys, kid investigators, gangsters, an evil scientist, and a subterranean lost civilization. When I told a friend about…

  • objet trouve one-page dungeon

    In late November 2001, The Times of London published a remarkably, ahem, speculative illustration of where Bin Laden might be hiding. I only had to change a couple of the captions to make a passable dungeon. At first glance it seems linear but the ventilation ducts and multiple entrances effectively Jaquays the dungeon. Stupid journalism…

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    Shadowdark review

    As a Kickstarter backer for Shadowdark I have read the PDF and my bottom line is it’s a really great game that skillfully synthesizes many different ideas and mechanics. If you were turned off by the hype, don’t be. I see it as a really well executed effort for what it intends to accomplish. I…

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    Gygax’s Finches

    The dungeon is a strange environment. And I don’t mean that just in the mythic underworld sense, but in the sense of Gygaxian naturalism. One of the basic issues is where do the monsters come from? For undead and demons and such the answer is basically “magic,” which settles the issue. Often these undead or…

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    Rifts Atlantis for D&D and OSR

    Rifts is a post-apocalyptic giant robots firing missiles at demons game, which isn’t exactly the kind of thing you think of for OSR or D&D, but Rifts: Atlantis is readily adaptable to the OSR. Atlantis has relatively little of the fascists and giant robots world-building that characterizes most of Rifts but rather is sword and…

  • Thieves’ Guild as Stationary Bandit

    Among the most familiar tropes of D&D is the thieves’ guild, one of many ideas D&D inherited from Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. In a lot of D&D-related material (e.g., Gygax’s Saga of the Old City) you get the sense of the guild as, well, a guild, where apprentices train under master…

  • Waqf

    The economist Timur Kuran has written a lot about Islamic financial institutions. Long story short, he doesn’t like them. Nonetheless, they’re really interesting in ways that are potentially good for gaming. One in particular that could be useful for gaming purposes is the waqf. In secular American law, a waqf is like an NGO with…

  • Strange Rites

    One of my pet peeves about RPGs is that they reflect the ethnocentrism of a culture where we take for granted that religions are based on ethical monotheism with an essentially congregational structure. Sure, it’s a conceit of RPGs that religion is polytheistic, but look at the maps of any kind of temple in a…

  • What’s the Treasure for Anyway?

    One of the conceits many OSR games inherited from TSR era D&D is that most experience points should be for treasure, sometimes called the GP=XP rule. Or, for people whose notions of realism can survive the premise of mighty thewed barbarians slaying serpent folk but not that it takes 8oz of gold to buy a…