Unpacking reaction rolls
Expanding the traditional OSR NPC reaction roll
As a start, http://questingblog.com/blog-roll/, and try following blogs mentioned in https://questingbeast.substack.com/
Here's what I follow. You should be able to download this and import into any RSS reader https://pastebin.com/6Fsiv0tm
The bag of holding is a small sackcloth bag filled with down, with two glassy eyes sown to it, and perhaps a pleasant mouth painted on. It is intended as an attachment object for children, and is not dissimilar in that respect to companion cube from portal.
"I consider A Thousand Thousand Islands (ATTI) ended, as a project."
Due to a disagreement over ownership, Munkao and I have severed ties. I have no further involvement with Centaur Games. I consider A Thousand Thousand Islands (ATTI) ended, as a project. ATTI was...
Patrick Stuart discusses how to give more context to forks in a dungeon
Choice Theory So you come to a split in a dungeon, or you come to a room set with three portals, each seems to lead in a different direc...
You can quit playing your pretend games wholesale and go back to living an undisturbed life not worrying about what a lyric game is or wheth...
No, a community post as in a text post submitted as a new thread. Downvoting doesn't scale - you can imagine increasing the threshold later, and also consider the spectator experience. Upvoting = notable should be maintained
Rules changes should instead be submitted as top level community posts and considered to be adopted when they have a score above 1, measured 24h after posting.
I link here to the Cabinet of Banes and Boons, which is intended to be easily added to an existing dungeon location to give it a bit more p...
I can't link it in the youtube description atm because my account is new. The post is at http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-v.html
Reading A Historical Look at the OSR — Part V by OSR Simulacra
This (excellent) blog post came up in a 2h conversation with a friend with dyslexia so I spent an hour or so today recording it.
How much you consider this an issue is a function of how terminally online you are. I mean this a bit more charitably than it sounds. If you consider the OSR a loose design and play philosophy you are picking from, then whilst you may be non-plussed that e.g. Prince of Nothing deadnamed Jannell Jacquays in his review of Caverns of Thracia, it does not substantially affect the ways you prep for your game. If, however, you consider the OSR to be a specific cultural space in dialogue about design, which I am lead to believe was actually the case back in the G+ days, then who is in your spaces becomes a much more salient issue to your day-to-day interactions. This is true regardless of your political positions or which "gated" (by which I mean containing a higher coherence around particular norms) community space you occupy, be it the OSR discord, NSR discord, Tenkar's Tavern, therpgsite, etc. To some degree, these spaces are often culturally downstream of a much looser network of design discussion happening over on blogs, but this is not always the case, and I recommend this post https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/01/steps-to-demonetize-ttrpg-hobby.html as a consideration of the additional dimension of the base (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure) of licensing and commercializing that shapes interactions in ways that don't always align to what you might expect a grouping based on politics was. For example, I associate Yochai Gal politically with roughly the same group of people who participate in Zinequest and hang out on the OSR discord server, but the Cairn is published for free online under CC-BY-SA 4.0, which changes the design culture around it as a result.
I recommend this post (http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-v.html) for some history that's useful context.
As a heuristic, I think it's generally true that the people who spend the most amount of time talking about meta-level issues like this are not likely to be fruitful sources to follow for gameable content. Unless you're a moderator of a community space, you're unlikely to have to power to exclude people, but you do have the power to shape ideas through publishing content freely into a gift culture akin to open source. Spending time discussing values instead of publishing materials that embody them is a miscalibration wrt the ways the average person can have an impact.
The Sadim Sausage (Midas backwards) is a kind of soft nduja like cured meat sausage that displaces itself with gold. Touch a bar with it and the metal will percolate upwards through the meat like a lava lamp, leaving meat in its place on the bar that will dull and become non-magical after a turn. It is safe and delicious to eat.
What have you been reading recently?
I'm playing a campaign that's LotFP plus slot based encumbrance house rules, and I've been disappointed in a lot of hexcrawling rulesets I've seen from the OSR. I particularly don't like Black Hack type usage dice / the Necropraxis overloaded encounter die, and that seems to be where thought has coalesced, with Errant being an example of a game that goes all in on that.
So I was delighted to discover that 1e AD&D has a supplement with workable mechanics for temperature (including wind chill!), foraging, hunting, etc. I need to massage it a little to fit into the LotFP skills system because it comes with its own but on the whole I'm excited that I have a way to go inside hexes and give players meaningful decisions about how they dress, where they camp, etc.
What about y'all, what material have you been reading recently?
Keystone blog posts of the OSR
Blogging has been a central mode of discourse since the early years of the OSR play style, and it has remained as such across different peri...
There is a monster book, but it's a book about generating monsters rather than using existing ones. This is a deliberate choice that's explicitly stated in the guidance Raggi gives to writers interested in submitting new content you can find posted... uh... somewhere.
Dyson Logos has some mapping tutorials and timelapses on the web
https://dysonlogos.blog/maps/tutorials-help/ has a couple of these images along with links to youtube