Troy Press

DM: You can’t see any towers. The redwoods here are hundreds of feet tall.Cleric: As we fly above the trees, I use Locate Object to try to find the same type of stone used in the other towers.DM: The cleric follows his senses till it brings you to a pond among the redwoods. The pond is about six hundred feet in diameter. The wind whispers softly through the trees.Artificer: Let’s land about 120 feet away from the pond, just in case.DM: OK.Artificer: Can someone give me Water Walk?Wizard: I will.Artificer: […]

Twenty-five years and one week ago, I started an ASCII-email newsletter that I began posting on Compuserve. Its masthead and introduction: MODEL LANGUAGES The newsletter discussing newly imagined words for newly imagined worlds ————————————————————————– Volume I, Issue 1 — May 1, 1995 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HOBBY OF MODEL LANGUAGES Some people build model airplanes, some craft model trains and some… well, they invent model languages. Model languages can be everything from a few words of made-up slang to a rigorously developed system of interrelated imaginary tongues. It is not […]

Back in November, one of my players asked me to run a one-shot campaign for her son and his wife, as one of them always DMs, and they’ve never both played in the same game. I asked them what they wanted and they said that they would like “to have a one-shot with high-level characters, like level 15 or so, and possibly mostly a dungeon crawl with puzzles and games and things.” I’d never run a session for higher than level 7, so after first thinking about writing my own […]

My group played our first remote D&D 5e session last night. As it happened, my notes (written before I knew this would be online) called for them waking in the middle of a cavalry battle between centaurs and horsemen. It was certainly a lot easier to manage with a virtual tabletop! We had problems with the Roll 20 app’s audio and switched to JoinMe halfway through: that went much better. We will do that going forward. Unfortunately, virtual D&D brings all of the fun of conference calls to your gaming […]

My 14-year old son asked me to teach him to play Solitaire last weekend. This made me question my life choices: how had we never taught him Solitaire?! I can remember playing Simultaneous Solitaire all the time with my maternal grandmother and brother and sister before I was even ten. So we got out three decks and each played traditional Solitaire, my wife and I guiding him along. I even queued up a soundtrack (“Solitaire” by Suzanne Vega).  I explained to my son that when Windows 3.0 came out it was the […]

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 […]

Last night I got two hours of O5R play out of one sentence of my session notes! That sentence: A dead man, an arrow in his eye: you find no food or weapons but a saddle and shield. Reacting to my players’ actions, I ended up roleplaying the dead man (thanks to Speak with Dead), the grass (!) his body was found in (thanks to Speak with Plants), and his murderer. The key resource I used during play was a random name generator I had written at the start of the campaign, when the situations […]

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 […]

Thought experiment: What should a generic pantheon look like? For a hexcrawl module I’m writing, I didn’t want to go with specific gods, but I’ve struggled to come up with something generic that the DM could easily adapt to their setting. I want to make less work for GMs. This is prompted by me encountering things in modules like “A steep hill rises from the forest and at its top there is a shrine where stands an old statue of Yemathic, about 20 feet tall” and not finding enough about […]

I love the Dungeon Contest’s one-page dungeons, where you can see the entire dungeon and its contents at a glance. Especially those dungeons that get beyond the fixed narrative structure of five-room dungeons. My own attempt for the Dungeon Contest was thematic but probably unoriginal, though it did lead to three great sessions in my last campaign and the rise of a new Big Bad Evil Gal (you can download Catacombs of the Lich Queen here). So I was disappointed when I ran Hex Describe for the first time and […]

For my current hexcrawl campaign, the Hexedland, I created a 10-by-10 hexmap using Text Mapper. I used the random generator based on Erin D. Smale’s algorithm, then kept tweaking the results by hand until I got something I liked. For instance, I wanted the starting hex to border each type of other terrain (forest, mountains, hills, swamp, lake, grassland) so that players could choose the type of environment (and therefore monsters) they wanted to encounter. I lengthened a mountain range that divided the middle of the map, and had the […]

The general advice for DMs building their own campaign worlds is to recognize that most of world creation won’t end up being experienced by the players. While you can go full Tolkien if you wish (to obey your own muse), you’re typically better off creating simple systems and then using fractal design to zoom in on those parts that players show an interest in. For my Hexedland campaign, rather than write The Silmarillion, I developed a one-page pantheon, where the description of each god shared the major myth associated with […]

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: I would argue most of the rule changes have to happen “behind the screen” rather than for the players. For the players, though: Behind the scenes, there’s a lot more work for the DM to use O5R: I have players that only know the core 5e mechanics of combat, attribute checks, […]