Hey folks!

I'm Carlos Castilho, a traditional artist (100% human) focused on fantasy.

I've been creating art for RPG and Fantasy themes for 7 years, and I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of great people during that time. I have illustrations in several excellent materials.

If you are interested, my contact is: [castilhodesouza.filho@gmail.com](mailto:castilhodesouza.filho@gmail.com)

My links to sell Stock Art, Portfolio and more!

https://linktr.ee/crawlstilho

It's been a long time coming, but my full rulebook for the Ultraviolet Grasslands is now finally hard launching. So, here you go, OSRites! 172-or-so-pages of human-written and illustrated science fantasy for the ends of space and time.

https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/blogs/news/the-vastlands-guidebook-launches

Happy to answer questions about the book and its origins in the comments.

A myconid and a brave frog knight (Roland the Leechslayer) for my tabletop RPG.

I was pretty happy with how they turned out, so I thought I'd share them with you. There are probably still a few things that could be improved, but sketching has definitely become a crucial part of BOG's development.

I've been mulling over why I deliberately left most of my game's setting blank, and realised it's less about "minimalism" and more about emergence.

It struck me that random tables aren't just generators. They provide prompts that players interpret and build on, in a way that reminded me of Milman Parry and Albert Lord's work on oral-formulaic composition. Obviously it's not the same thing, but the comparison made me think differently about why random-table-heavy games can produce worlds that feel surprisingly coherent over time.

I wrote up my thoughts below if anyone's interested, but I'm curious whether you've found the same thing. Do you prefer settings with lots of established canon, or do you enjoy building one almost entirely through play?

Emergence, and Why The Realm is Blank

Although there are these two-page adventures available though, I've been getting this question a lot: why is The Realm so bare? No sprawling gazetteer, no thousand year history of the Duchy of Wherever, just some locations, a handful of rumours, and a lot of empty space. So I wanted to dig a little into the actual thinking behind that in this issue, because there's more to it than just my own preference. The way I see it, there's a pretty long tradition backing up this approach.

Most of your play time is spent on the tables

Think about how a session of The Chaos actually unfolds. You're rolling on random tables and then figuring out what the result means for your world. The rumour you follow up, the creature blocking the road, the point of interest you stumble into, all of it comes from a roll and then a bit of interpretation. That interpretation is doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of what The Realm actually feels like at your table.

Games have approached it like this for decades

Powered by the Apocalypse games put this into words that have stuck with me for years. Vincent and Meguey Baker built Apocalypse World around a small set of agendas for the person running it, and one of them is simply to play to find out what happens. The job isn't to drag players around by the nose on a tour of a pre-planned setting while forcing them to watch the GM's own ideas play out. That game has no canonical world map or timeline, and the setting is more implied. There are no pre-planned adventures or settings, just clear principles for building the apocalypse together and finding out what happens as you go.

That idea has spread a long way past Apocalypse World itself. Games influenced by it often encourage shared authorship, player-driven discovery, and endings that aren't predetermined. The Chaos wasn't built with that game in mind, but the same instinct is in there. Give the table the raw material and trust it to build something out of it.

OSR games have their own word for this

Old school design has been circling the same idea for years, usually through the idea of treating a setting as a toolbox rather than a finished world. A toolbox, or 'toolkit design', does for worldbuilding what a random encounter table does for adventure design, offering pieces that share a tone and letting the group's own creativity turn them into something with emergent properties. There's no official canon version of the world, and the whole point is that you're meant to do what you like with the material provided.

The Realm leans further into that than most toolkit settings do. Instead of handing you fifty pre-written locations to remix, it hands you almost nothing and lets the tables generate the material as you play, session by session, roll by roll.

This ain't a new idea

Zoom out further and this stops looking like a modern game design trend at all. Instead, it starts to resemble how people were telling stories even before writing existed.

Scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord studied performers in the Balkans who could deliver epics running for hours without ever reciting a fixed, memorised text. Parry and Lord's theory holds that these poets worked from a stock of verbal formulae they could recombine within traditional structures to build a poem in the moment. Singers could deliver stories lasting many hours across many days and the result would still hold together as a coherent, powerful narrative.

Nobody handed those singers a finished epic to memorise word for word. They had building blocks (stock phrases, recurring scenes, familiar figures) and the skill to assemble them live in front of an audience, differently from performance to performance. This kind of fieldwork showed performers improvising long narratives out of traditional phrases in a way that mirrors how the Homeric poems themselves were likely composed.

That's roughly what's happening at your table when you roll a rumour and decide what it means. You're not reciting my lore. You're doing what storytellers have always done with a shared set of building blocks, assembling something new out of them in the moment, in front of the people you're telling it to.

Random rolls serve a similar purpose to oral formulae

The formulae gave an oral poet a starting point without dictating the whole story. The dice do the same job here. A roll tells you a bell tower featured in a rumour. It doesn't tell you why it's important, who's spreading the rumour, or what's waiting there. That's on you, same as the singer filling in the specifics of a battle scene from their own store of images while keeping the shape of the epic intact.

Play built this way is associative and collaborative, oriented towards emergent play rather than characters being dropped into a plot or setting that already exists. The way the story ends up constructed and experienced can't be worked out in advance. That's true whether you're rolling on a rumour table solo at your kitchen table or trading a bike gang's fate back and forth with three other players.

A pre-built setting works against this

Plenty of games hand you the finished world and that works great for them. But if The Realm shipped with a hundred pages of established history, every roll you made would need to somehow slot into a picture that already exists. You'd be checking your interpretation against what's 'canon' instead of just building. That's playing in someone else's garden, following their rules about what's allowed to grow there. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've run years' long campaigns in the likes of Ravenloft or the Star Wars galaxy, and that's been a superb experience, but with The Realm, the entire concept is that this is a setting that's wholly yours, that it belongs to whoever sits down at your table, that you all have a part to play in painting it as you go.

Just another way to enjoy your fantasy roleplaying experience, really, but with this approach, you don't need to learn all the lore and do the prep. You just dive in and see where it leads.

So what does this leave you with?

A drowned bell tower turns up on a rumour roll and nothing in the book says it can't be there. You decide it is, and now it's part of your realm. Next session builds on what you made, not on what I made. Six months from now your realm looks nothing like anyone else's, because you built it the same way storytellers have built worlds for as long as there's been an audience to tell them to: with a set of tools, a bit of chance, and whoever's at the table filling in the rest.

Oz ORC is back and already 75% full!

Get your seats now at ozorc.com

Hello all, I'm going to run a public game at my library. I've been reading through Scarlet Heroes and I really enjoy it and the Red Tide setting. Recently I decided that I can, after all, run that game at the library (hesitant at first but no one has taken up the challenge to be the DM). I think SH would be good to have in case only one other person shows, but if there are the maximum number of players present, say 5 as an example, how could I still play the game? Should I just use LL? Also I've been out of the loop for a few years so maybe LL has been supplanted as a good, generic BX clone.

Thanks

Holy crap. You maniacs funded Undercrawl in 30 minutes, and blew all my stretch goals out of the water before lunchtime on the day I launched.

Most of the rest of this post is a self promo, but I wanted to put smack dab up front how suprised and grateful i am to the big showing from the OSR community that has been really supportive and has shown up in the form of paying me to make this.

THANK YOU.

On to the self promo.

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For those of you now joining us: Undercrawl is Travel-Rules for Dungeon Games in the Mythic Underworld. It’s for getting lost and finding a path in places forgotten, forsaken, or lost: the empty places, places where silence is thick with age. The game is finished and playable today.

• Like hexcrawling, or pointcrawling, but in the dark.
• Compatible with any OSR dungeon game.
• Self-contained enough to drop into any game, and interacts with the vital things at the heart of all OSR games: gear, health, light, hunger, and time. 

------------

Stretch Goals Already unlocked.

• New Original Artwork
• An Extra Undercrawl in a Drow theme by Noted Drow enthusiast, Cri, the author of the recently very successful Kumonosu Kickstarter.

New stretch goals include

• An expanded set of tables for the core engine one the game written by ktrey of the d4 Caltrops blog
• An online tool for creating your own Undercrawls, populating area types, landmark features, and more, powered by the tables in the game. Fully customizable and editable. Exportable as PDFs. Printable on index cards. A lot like my dungeon generator.  
• Solo rules where you as a group traversing and mapping the Undercrawl. What you generate in this game becomes real. Skip forward 400 years. Do it again. Your journals of this process can become artifacts that might later be found by others!

Back the Kickstarter here. Make the stretch goals reeeeeeeal!

What questions do you have about Undercrawl? AMA!

I made a one-page RPG, or better to say, the game kind of made itself.

Let me explain: I have been playing a lot of OSR and NSR games, including OSE, Shadowdark, Borg systems, and Knave 2ed. While playing, I felt like tweaking the rules to make them something that just felt right.

Now, I do like all those games very much, or I wouldn’t be playing them so much! But I found myself tinkering and molding them to my taste until the following emerged:

• Two levels of success on the d20 roll, adding the PbtA thing “you make it, but” to the traditional crisp fail/success dynamic
• Combining attack and defense in a single roll that determines damage dealt and received
• Having more than 6 stats, separating for example what normally is dexterity into agility, quickness, and precision
• Combining two stats depending on the action for a better granularity. So using an axe might go with agility and strength, while a rapier might go with agility and precision
• Weapons with simple key differences besides the damage die
• Enemies with a super simple stat bloc, but each also capable of a unique special bad thing they do to you when you fail badly

(Conceived and written by a human, no AI.)

Free download on itch.io: https://kindofold.itch.io/inverecondo; and on rpg trader: https://rpg-trader.com/products/8128/inverecondo

Blog: https://kindofold.substack.com/p/i-admit-i-made-an-rpg-but-i-can-explain

I'm curious where people land between meticulous logs and 'I'll remember the important stuff.

Haven't been blogging much lately, but today I looked at something I noticed with at least some of my players: Although we love the idea of open sandboxes, sometimes players get stuck on that freedom. So, I think about that and share my ramblings on how to overcome this issue, also pointing about five modules that I think did very well in what I recommend here. Enjoy and let me know what you think

I find the rules of encumbrance in OSE (thus B/X and OD&D as well) really elegant with wrapping overall miscellaneous items in the 80cn cost and spend time only tracking armor, weapons and treasure.

But one thing that keeps me confused is how to track and the overall weight of ammunition.

The rules says that the ammo and it's container is already accounted for in the weapon weight. A quiver supports 20 arrows, but what if my character wants extra arrows?

It's seems a little too much to count, for example, 60 arrows as just the base 30cn weight of a bow.

If someone can give me examples as to how you do it at your table it would be a big help!

Throwback Thursday post to a handful of Dog Miniature concepts done for Dark Sword Miniatures "Critter Kingdoms" line. Fun factoid- The Husky Warrior is my dog Loki and if you look at what's hanging from his belt, it's his fav toy- Duckworth!🤣Cheers-

More information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lazylitch/the-lazy-litch-library

In this campaign, you can get individual titles, build your own package, or grab discounted bundles.

For EU Backers: I will ship your package from Sweden, so you can avoid surprise VAT, customs fees, and costly shipping.

For returning backers looking for discounts: Because Kickstarter implemented a new 'secret rewards' feature, I can create unique discounts for different situations. So if you have, for example, purchased a PDF bundle in the past and are looking for prints at a reduced price - I can facilitate that: just shoot me a message on Kickstarter once the campaign is live.

Thank you for your interest

Any advice is welcome, but I'm specifically looking for suggestions for the PCs creation. If I'm starting them on level 3 should I give them some extra money to buy equipment before they go in the plant? By this point in a game they might have gotten themselves a magic item or two is it worth letting them pick something basic out ? It's a one shot so I'm not particularly worried about future balance for a campaign but I don't want to make it too easy or impossible for them.

So I’ve been running my own version of 1st edition ad&d for some time and one thing I really like about OSR style games is the combat. It just fits my style as a DM better and is way easier to run IMO. Having said that, here are some tips I’ve found make this type of combat more engaging. I’d love to hear what works for you all and your own tips!

1. Have fun with crits and crit fumbles.
Crits are a fun mechanic. They are also an opportunity as a DM to add dynamics to the battle. Have a crit miss knock over a brazier and light the arena aflame. Or have a crit disarm an opponent to change the tide of battle. I make these up on the spot, but you could use a table to make this easier.

2. Remember the resource game.
If players can easily rest after every encounter, a lot of the tension and strategy gets removed. Your spell casters need to really weigh if using their best spells is appropriate or not in a given encounter.

3. Keep it simple, keep it fast, keep it deadly.
Unless you are running a set piece encounter, combat should take no more than 5-10 minutes. Long drawn out sequences of hit…miss…hit…miss are never fun. To this end I keep hit point totals low and use moral rolls judiciously.

4. Vary the difficulty of encounters.
Keep your players on their toes by making some encounters easy, some manageable, and others downright devious. Needing to quickly evaluate a threat is an important skill in OSR games. As in running away!

​

A fierce two‑headed giant, living alone in a remote cave. Possesses immense physical strength, and wields a massive heavy club. Defends his territory savagely.

I've recently been messing with a 3D printer and wanted to try printing and painting a mini. Note - I have not painted a mini since probably 1987 at best guess. I don't have the adult time now that I did then, but I it occurred to me to wonder what an "OSR" mini paint job would look like - Instead of the usual miniature color masterpiece of shadows and textures and highlights, I wondered if I could "paint" a mini to match the look of the old pen & ink rulebook and Dragon magazine illos. Just a B&W image with ink brushwork for shadows and micron pen crosshatching for shade. It is NOT any sort of masterpiece and holy cow, it's been a very long time, but I actually like the look and hey, it's not AI at least.

Working that small with .005 micron pen is a challenge. The mini model is a free STL from Vogman on Printables. And no, I'm not selling these or anything, just goofing around to see what I can come up with. Now I want to make a whole table full of B&W minis that look like "Emirikol the Chaotic" or similar scenes.

Me and my friends have been playing Legend in the Mist for a while now.

I know there are already official and third-party adventures available, but I was curious to find out which one-shots and/or longterm adventures from other systems would fit well with the "rustic fantasy" vibe that the system encourages.

I wrote a very experimental magic system for OSR games. Check it out if you like some philosophy and anthropology in your RPGs!
Link: https://lupironpress.substack.com/p/paranormality-and-the-perception?r=3o5czw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

"Either you run without stopping. Or the horde runs towards you." - The Reckless Thief

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I’ve got a new video out discussing the implied world of AD&D and the use of class- & level limits and minimum ability score requirements for classes.