Category Archives: NSR

In Christmas of 1979, my dad bought me Dungeons & Dragons. This was the Holmes edition, first published in 1977, covering levels 1 through 3. It was a dramatic simplification of Original D&D, intended specifically for use by those as young as junior high school. Amusingly, it was still surprisingly complicated. One of the breakthrough innovations of OD&D was the wide range of types of dice, and the mechanics seemed design to center and celebrate using all those different types of dice: For instance, when creating a character, you’d roll […]

Melee, Missiles & Magic is my homage to the first edition of Tunnels & Trolls and is a streamlined 3d6 TTRPG suitable for solitaire adventures, GM-ed games, or for writing gamebooks. It contains a list of spells and a table of monsters. I played a lot of Tunnels & Trolls solo adventures (its key differentiator) when I was a teenager, and so I was thrilled last year when I found the first edition reprint of the 1975 typescript was now available. (First printed at the ASU copy shop! Go Sun Devils!) Anyway, […]

The goal of this survey is to provide feedback to the OSR and RPG community on what Level 1-3 spells are considered most useful. The results can then be used to create shorter spell lists and player aids – or to inspire custom spell lists for other designs. Spell descriptions take the form of “Name [120′, 2] Effect” showing “[range in feet, duration in turns]” before the magical effect. Spell descriptions © Zenopus Archives, http://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com. Used by permission. The survey was fielded from November 10, 2019, through June 1, 2020. […]

The very first published role-playing game was the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, with its three 36- to 40-page booklets (Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures) presenting the idea that RPGs should go big. Of course, the second RPG was Tunnels & Trolls, which fit everything into one 42-page booklet. Still the belief has been that RPGs need to go big, with the average length of main books about 250,000 words. So it may surprise you to learn that RPGs can be less than 0.1% that […]

As I’ve written elsewhere, when I started my current homebrew O5R campaign, I generated a 10×10 hex map using Hex Describe. Even though it is powered by nearly 2,000 tables (!), I found myself missing the cast of characters that populate a town. I came up with a design goal of, within a single page, emulating the keep from The Keep on the Borderlands (buy it!) as a useful starting location for the adventurers, but adding more elements of intrigue. Since Hex Describe is open source, and you can append your own tables […]

I’m amazed by the variety of implementations of spellcasting in OSR systems. I asked OSR Reddit what the problems are that these new implementations are trying to solve, what the most popular approaches to spellcasting are, and people’s preferences. I distilled the discussion into the following analysis. Perceived problems with OD&D— Boring Vancian magic isn’t magical enough Difference between spell levels and PC levels Set spell lists Doesn’t suit certain settings and types of campaigns Types of spells— Set spell lists: By spell level By player level (e.g., level 2 […]

I know O5R is seen as an oxymoron by many, but let’s go through the “Old School Principles for Players” section of Principia Apocrypha and determine what’s the least we have to change about 5e to live this philosophy. Its principles: Learn When to Run Combat as War, Not Sport Don’t Be Limited by Your Character Sheet Live Your Backstory Power Is Earned, Heroism Proven Scrutinize the World Interrogate the Fiction The Only Dead End Is Death Let Your Creativity Flow Play to Win, Savor Loss I would argue most of the […]