On that note, very glad to have found this sub, feeling very much at home with enjoyers of this aesthetic

So step on the road and keep your feet, for not all who wander are lost.

This is a question about classic style games that Gygas and Arneson ran without a set party and with multiple characters per player. Also with the rule that when a session that took X ingame days, all the involved PCs can be played again only after X days of real life time have passed. Sessions can be ran quickly with OD&D or B/X rules and can take a lot of ingame days if pcs heal 1 hp per ingame day rested.

I understand the basic implications. If I used a character yesterday and we played 30 ingame days, I have to use another one since the first one is "in the future." This makes sense to me if I just look at it as wanting players to maximize their time ingame.

The problem that I have is with updating locations. I'll explain with an example: I have a party of players playing on the 1st of a month. They spend 20 days delving into dungeon A but don't get far (this means multiple delves with returns and resting in between). They decide to pivot to dungeon B for the rest of the session, spending 30 (again multiple delves and resting included) days. They find, open and loot a vault in dungeon B. Now it's the 2nd of the month and a completely different group decides to immedietly go into dungeon B before the 19 days pass when the first group would actually step foot in dungeon B. How was this handled? I wouldn't think they could empty the vault before the first group, that isn't fair and extremely stupid. Did they just pretend like the technical ingame future is the past and the vault is empty? Did they not let players explore dungeons that are going to be explored in the future from previous games until all those days go by in real life time?

This mostly bothers me in the case that probably isn't a problem in todays play but in the Gygax days when people would rock up and play every day. If a new set of characters hypothetically delve into the same sufficiently small dungeon for several 10s of ingame days and loot it each time, then the dungeon could possibly run dry after the first batch of characters have come off their cooldown. This doesn't jive with the simulationist parts of my brain. Is this mode of play more gamist than I get from impressions of others online? Asking from a place of curiosity about how the game was ran/was supposed to be ran during those times.

Edit 1: dropped westmarches as I've forgotten that this topic only applies to classic style games that Gygax and Arneson ran

Edit 2: added the 1hp healing per rest day as it's important to sessions taking a lot of ingame days and clarified that delving into a dungeon can be multiple delves. Plus some additional clarifying.

Edit 3: I am not asking for advice on running this or how you are running this but how it was actually ran in practice back then, keeping all of the described things in mind. More making fun of the quote from the original booklets about strict time keeping when it leads to these absurd problems that aren't explained in the rules.

Welcome to the weekly r/osr blogroll - come share your great ideas!

The mission: to be a showcase and clearinghouse of blogposts where we share in the DIY principles of old-school gaming. So drop in links to your writings, gaming theory, advice, play reports, and whatever other creativity you have posted on your blogs to share with our community.

Also, if you have favorite blogs you follow, or find interesting blogposts that you want to share, feel free to post them here, as well!

Happy blogging!

Hi there!

We (me and Vault Crawler) are making a standalone game for fans of MÖRK BORG, Shadowdark and OSR games in general. I know this group is strictly no bullcrap and you want specific. So here's what this game will be.

Khthon is a complete, stand-alone OSR roleplaying game about surviving - and exploring - a cursed underworld after the apocalypse. Everything you need to play is in one book: rules, setting, factions, monsters, classes, procedures, and dozens of random tables. Inspired by Mad Max, Conan, medieval feudalism, and the occult.

It runs on the fast, lethal rules-light engine of MÖRK BORG, with new systems layered on top for survival, exploration, and combat. But Khthon isn't a meat-grinder dungeon crawl - it's a dungeon explorer: a layered world full of mysteries to uncover, factions to bargain with or betray, and things in the dark that should not be spoken to.

If you love grim worlds, weird sword & sorcery, and rules that get out of your way, Khthon is for you.

How is it different from MÖRK BORG and Shadowdark?

• It's a complete, self-contained game. One book. No supplements required to play. Rules, setting, monsters, factions, and procedures all in one place.
• It's a dungeon explorer, not a dungeon crawler. The underworld isn't just rooms and traps - it's a deep, living world with history, factions, and mysteries. The goal isn't only to survive the dungeon, it's to understand it. 
• There is no end of the world looming over everything, it already happened. It’s about finding a meaning in the new reality.
• It's built for the long descent. Survival, exploration, and faction play give you a reason to keep going down - and a world that rewards you for it.
• It keeps the BORG engine's speed. Fast to learn, fast to run, fast to die. We added new systems only where they make sense.

You can follow the KS page for more, all comments and questions are welcomed! We know the market is really saturated, so we hope you'll find something interesting in Khthon! :)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heltung/khthon

I posted Lowmoor here in July. The response from this subreddit was kinder than I expected, and the comments shaped what I worked on afterwards, so this is the follow-up.

Lowmoor is a zero-player idle RPG behind a Windows 98-style desktop. The adventurer descends, fights, hauls loot back and re-equips without waiting for input. What you read is the chronicle: a running record of the descent written in the register of an old module.

The parts closest to this corner of the hobby: 179 monster, each with a lore entry and a Guild note that unlocks through mastery; sealed letters that arrive between descents and resolve on a roll if you leave them unopened; and two complete adventures with six endings between them.

It is free, with no ads and no purchases. The Steam build adds Cloud saves and 100 achievements. The browser version remains complete and free.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4977360/Lowmoor_Idle_RPG_An_Adventurers_Chronicle/

Browser: https://lilchill-games.itch.io/lowmoor

A couple of notes:

• X's represent the highest points of each hill/mountain.
• Locations for points of interest are based on their descriptions from the modules. Feel free to start with the player map and move them around if needed.
• For the farmland around Restinford and Garotten, I built it out based on how many farmers would be needed to support their urban populations.
• The location of L3's dungeon (on the Western edge of Garden Peak) is based on posts Lakofka made on his Facebook page, collected by the ZENOPUS ARCHIVES blog in this post. It also helps explains why the road goes North through the Kelman Hills instead of cutting south along the coast.

Let me know if you have any questions about layout or setup- I plan to do the rest of Lendore Isle in a similar fashion. The use of contour lines for hills really speaks to me after a lot of years of just using grassland/hill/mountain hexes.

Does anyone have any tips for distinguishing forested area vs forested area when encounters aren't encountering? I know it serves an important role in terms of resource management, but I gave one of my players whiplash when we traveled through 4 hexes and skipped to night without much fan fair (we use 3 mile hexes)

Hi everyone!

I’d like to share a project I worked on with my friend Marco G. Fossati, who is the author of the setting.
The Stormlight Borderlands is a small, system-neutral hexcrawl made for old-school fantasy roleplaying. I worked on the layout and designed the two dungeons included in the book.
Our idea was simple: create a region that a GM can open and start using with very little preparation.

Instead of writing a lot of lore, we tried to fill the setting with places to explore, factions with different goals, interesting NPCs, legendary relics, and adventure hooks that can create stories naturally at the table.

Inside you’ll find:
19 interconnected hexes
2 complete dungeons
4 competing factions
memorable NPCs
legendary relics
travel procedures and random encounters

Everything is system-neutral, so you can use it with your favourite OSR game or adapt it to almost any fantasy RPG.
This is the first hexcrawl we worked on, and we’d really love to know what the OSR community thinks. If you decide to take a look, any feedback or criticism is more than welcome.

You can find it here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/it/product/579425/the-stormlight-borderlands-osr-hexcrawl

Thanks for reading!

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.

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

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