*Adventures in Middle-Earth Player's Guide" is in my hands.mwuahahah

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Just scanning the Overview Chapter so far and I am already seeing stuff to strip mine for my own game. dis gun be good.

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Top 6 most viewed posts in the last 12 months

ACKS II Review

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tl;dr A giant-sized core ruleset that nonetheless offers the best take on an Advanced version of D&D you are likely to find. I never really looked at the Adventurer Conqueror King System, though I had heard good things about it, as an elaboration of classic D&D with a proper domain game. When the new Imperial Imprint (II, aka v2) came out, I decided to spin up my drivethrurpg account and plop for the pdf. Let's start by saying this is not classic D&D. It is evidently based  on BX/BE D&D, with its math and level progression advancing only to 14th level.  But the scope and detail of this game is far more ambitious than anything Classic and those who enjoy the restrained core of Classic D&D will find the wealth of options and systems overwhelming.  It is rather an alternate attempt at making an Advanced D&D, based on Classic D&D.  And it is epic/monstrous in scope. Let's look at word counts of core rulebooks (not including monster manuals): ...
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How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying

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It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides ...
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The 3 Mile Hex - The Natural Unit for Exploration

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There will be interludes between the AD&D Appraisal series, to keep my own writing motivation going. I was going to do a 3-mile hex post outlining the virtues of it, but turns out Silverarm did that already and stole all my points  (even down to the "Outdoor Survival also uses 3 miles") and added more points I wasn't aware of myself. So go read that excellent piece and come back here. What I instead want to talk about is how the 3 mile hex is a very close fit to our natural sense of distance and visualisation and how the that makes the 3-mile hex the perfect blend between immersion and usable game artifact and how to actually bring that into your game.  Minaria hexmap. Scale: 1 hex = 50 miles. Not what we're going for here. A while back, Noisms contemplated the difficulty of creating a sense of wonder in journeys . The difficulty with journeys in RPGs is the scale of it. It becomes too big, and thus too abstract, to visualize, to immerse oneself into.  I tried, un...
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The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

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I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be th...
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Forgotten Realms: Old School Redux

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I've reviewed the Forgotten Realms as a setting before.  To sum up the issues with the setting: In its present incarnation it's an unmanageable mess, plain simple. The tabletop equivalent of the Marvel universe - Overburdened with an absolute immensity of 'canon' , loads of 'story line' developments that have no relation to gamers, universe-wide 'crossover events', desperate retcons and a handful of mary sue novel characters blazing a trail of shit through the setting that no one cares about.  WotC have done what they can to salvage the wreckage in 5e. An ill defined event to normalize the wreck that was 4e, move the timeline forward to let the passage of time erase as much of the canon baggage as possible, be intentionally vague about what has actually changed and otherwise just leave the setting the fuck alone, so gamers can walk around without tripping over 'setting lore' at every step. It's ok I guess, as a cardboard background f...
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White Box: Cyclopedia Review

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OSR Stalwart James Spahn kickstarted White Box: Cyclopedia this summer and raised a whopping 50k. I missed it and have now paid 25 dollars for the pdf, when I could have paid 15 in the summer. It's a 290 page product and let me start by saying it's a ridiculous game. I mean this in the best possible way. The idea of a 290 page rulebook with "whitebox" appended is of course in itself a ridiculous notion - whitebox is D&D shaved to the bone, so what can a "Cyclopedia" edition of such a game possibly be if not the antithesis of whitebox? It's not though. What it is, is the OSR from its loveliest side. Not artpunk reinterpretations or pushing-the-limit [color] hacks on just how lite an RPG can be and still be an RPG. It's about loving the old games and applying your craft, experience and creativity to that; flexing your DM moves in a blog or forum post for others to +1 and say "stolen!". With the Whitebox Cyclopedia, James has flexed all  h...
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