Sales
All Lamentations of the Flame Princess PDFs are 50% off, including Veins of the Earth, The Yellow Book of Brechewold, and A True Relation of the Virginia Disastrum.
Reviews
Three new adventures made “The Best” on Ten Foot Pole: The Carnivorous Caverns, Zjelwyin Fall, and Cult of the Sky Titans. From the Zjelwyin Fall review:
The rooms here are well constructed. These are not throw away puzzles. This is the epitome of a dungeon for experienced PLAYERS, at low levels. I wish things were different here and there, making more sense, a little tighter, descriptions a little less cumbersomely evocative. Seven rooms? With an overland? Huso claims three sessions out of this, and I believe him. But it’s a GREAT work.
The art, the writing, and the design of the Painted Wastelands is absolutely S-tier, and I recommend it on the grounds of that alone. However, this is not a simple setting, or one easy to run: Gauge your table well, because this is a level of weirdness beyond that of Ultraviolet Grasslands or Troika!
The I Cast Light blog recommends 20 adventures for gamers new to the OSR, including my adventure The Waking of Willowby Hall.
Geek Gamers looks at her favorite RPG books of the year for solo players, including my system Knave 2e! Sly Flourish also features Knave 2e on his show as a favorite “High-Use RPG Product.”
On Questing Beast I reviewed Ennie Award Winner The Valley of Flowers, one of the most dense and interactive settings I’ve seen in a while.
I also looked at six worldbuilding books that are wells of RPG inspiration.
And Now a Word From Our Sponsor…
Hyena Child is an OSR sandbox-campaign set in the harbor of Alexandria. From tunnel fights to mercantile intrigues, from mummy-dust-addicts to hyena-cultists, danger and opportunity lurk around every corner. Beyond the 5 (!!!) adventures, the book provides everything the referee needs to allow the players to pursue their own plans.
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News
The Bloggie Awards are back! Submit your favorite RPG blog posts of 2024 here before the end of December.
I have updated my recommended RPG lists on my blog and on Amazon.
The Knave-based science-fantasy setting Vaults of Vaarn is getting a second edition.
There was a lot of talk this month over rumors that Elon Musk would buy Hasbro, and who would be the best person to own the D&D IP. I gave my reaction below:
A Knight at the Opera has a three part post looking back at 10 years of DnD 5e, its successes and failures.
The always-delightful GGNORE actual play crew do a crawl through the Hogwarts-themed Brewkessel module.
Jordan Sorcery interviews Rick Priestley on the Warhammer games that never got released.
Theory and Advice
Mythic Mountain Musings: My friends played a wargame and it wrote my setting for me
I can't imagine a better way to start a campaign now. I know I'm not the only one that has done this, but if you have the time and are going for a big, grand, living world, with realism and simulation in it (the way we who play in our “Otherworld” OD&D campaign like it), what better way than to have a strategy game with friends decide what the world looks like? Starting with a strategic wargame and then dungeon crawling in the aftermath is incredible.
Questing Beast: Roleplaying games aren’t about roleplaying
Grognardia responds to my video here.
Raphael_Sadowski on the OSR subreddit proposes tables of contents that work as game flowcharts. I don’t know if I would replaces a ToC with one of these, but diagrams for the order of play are really useful to have in RPGs.
Trilemma Adventures: The Tarot of Pips
Burn After Reading: No Such Thing As An Overshare – Breaking down Player and Character Knowledge
Fae Errant: Corridors > Rooms
The corridor is just a liminal space, a moment of transition between two places that might, if the designer was feeling weird that day, have a trap in them.
There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, but it’s a real shame, because the corridor holds so many possibilities, especially for dungeons that are expected to be breached multiple times (and by multiple groups, this becomes even more important).
Fail Forward: Just One Thing Per Hex
We Live in the Same House: Race Table for Maze Rats
Cryptic Keyway: Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint
When I run Knave for players who have no background or investment in the OSR, they very quickly grok the danger their characters are in, and intuit the risks of acting in defiance of the world they find themselves in. They start asking more questions, thinking further ahead, and generally taking the world and its factions seriously. Give a player a character with 2 HP and a rusty knife, and they don’t need you to explain styles of play to them; they figure it out very quickly all on their own.
Worldbuilding
Goblin Punch: Brain Worms and d6 More Dungeon Merchants
Monsters and Manuals: Twelve Module Ideas
Archons March On: Twelve More Module Ideas
False Machine: Soft-Heads and Ælf-Adal
Dungeonfruit: Thirteen Tongues (Making Languages Interesting)
The Nothic’s Eye: Six Dungeon Gods
Whose Measure God Could Not Take: Cursed Objects and Double-Edged Swords
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