Category: Game materials

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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…