Tag: osr

  • A Post-mortem of My Hot Springs Island Campaign

    My group recently gave up on Dark of Hot Springs Island. Given the campaign’s reputation, I think it’s worth trying to figure out why. How much of it is the published campaign has problems? How much of it is a skill issue on my part? How much of it is that the published campaign leads…

  • ,

    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…

  • Cut off the head and the body will fight everyone else

    A classic aspect of fantasy adventure RPGs is faction play. One assumption of faction play is that factions will follow the logic of balance theory, in which the factions fall into two sides based on the logic of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the friend of my friend is my friend, and…

  • ,

    Networks as dungeon generators

    In my previous post, I showed how we can use social network analysis to interpret dungeon maps. When I posted it to r/osr, u/abenf asked if I could use SNA to generate dungeons. As shown here, the answer is yes. However I want to be candid that dungeon generators are a solved problem so if…

  • Dungeons as networks

    A Melan diagram is a way to simplify a dungeon design to its bare topology to show if it is Jaquaysed (i.e., not linear or branching but with loops that allow meaningful choices). In the comments to a Justin Alexander post on Melan diagrams, there’s a discussion of whether explicitly invoking graph theory adds anything…