A short review of "5e-ish retroclones" by Robot Goblin

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Robot Goblin has posted a short review of three old school games with modern mechanics.


I am slightly peeved that 5TD gets full credit for "every class, and all core rules fit on a single spread or page" when I've sweated blood, sweat and keyboard-ink to achieve the same for ItU (if I hadn't been so slow to produce the thing, I could have claimed credit ahead of Necrotic Gnome for this!).

But mostly I am glad to see someone else recognise the effort I put into book 4. 
"But Book 4: Running the Game is worth the price of admission, even if you ditched everything else. I think it may be the cleanest, most interesting guide to running a game I’ve ever read and incorporates outside thinking like Fronts from Dungeon World. Its sections on dungeon and hex crawls are short and solid as a beer keg."
It was definitely the hardest to write of the five. In the other volumes, I had a skeleton to go off and a clear idea of what goes into it. In the GM guide, I was starting from scratch and relying a lot more on my own creativity. Simply figuring out what chapters to have (and not to have) took a very long time.
I consider that booklet my magnus opus in a way. I had set set myself the challenge of taking everything worthwhile I know about old school DMing and condensing it into a volume that is actually usable at the table and speeds up preparation. Really pleased to see it wasn't for nothing.

I've been glancing at 5TD, mostly a bit nervous that they were going to do a better job of it all than me. On the back of that review, I might pick it up and do a review myself. I think it's terrific the O5R movement is taking off in 2019!

Comments

  1. Spellfilcher29 October 2019 at 19:56

    Well, I for one have been head over heels for your system since i first discovered it. Looking forward to your next release. Is this blog the best place to keep up to speed on ITU?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anders H29 October 2019 at 20:58

      Yep.. The other blog will be probably be reduced to more formal 'timesafe' announcements and this one is where the interesting stuff will be posted.
      Glad to hear you like it.

      Delete

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