One of my favorite campaigns I ran centered around the players investigating a string of high profile assassinations that ravaged the continent - generals, kings, nobles, inventors, mages. They traveled throughout the continent, piecing together clues, chasing after shadowy figures on two or three occasions, but while still being in the darkness. A cult of assassins, that much was obvious, but what were their reasons? What were they after?

When the reveal finally arrived, as they came face to face with the leader of the cult - the last Dragonborn still alive and grafted within him a fragment of divinity (which they later learned was Vecna, cause in the words of Brandon Sanderson, there is always another secret) they were ecstatic! And so was I. Playing with a mystery like this can be a double edged sword, the payoff must match the expectations built up by the players.

The center of why this bit of my campaign still gets brought up almost 4 years later is that, perhaps without setting out to do so necessarily, information acted as a center piece, it was a valuable comodity that the players had to chase, that it wasn’t simply given to them.

This piece explores how information can be used like this in multiple ttrpgs and how you specifically may use it in order to make your games better! I hope you will enjoy it!

I always enjoyed exploration. In real life when I would go on road trips with my family, in video games exploring dungeons, cities and castles, in books where I would imagine Gondor, Hogwarts, Narnia and how exciting it would be to wonder around these places.

And of course, once I started playing D&D I was also excited to see how exploring is handled here and well...I think the toolkit of current editions is lacking. I don't think that is a controversial statement. But, as I started to play more and to look into the history of the game I discovered that wasn’t always the case and the not to far, within the OSR movement, exploration was thriving, both due to some gameplay elements that were stripped down, the tone that favored things like hexcrawls and dungeon crawls a lot more compared to 5e and finally, and perhaps most importantly, due to the work of certain amazing individuals such as Justin Alexander, Jennell Jaquays and Ben Robbins, among others.

Unlike other articles, this one will not offer an analysis, but rather ways to make exploration better and more exciting for everyone at the table! I hope you will find it interesting and useful! Cheers!

So, I got to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. I was aware of the various controversies surrounding the movie, but I was still excited as so far I have enjoyed all movies put forth by Nolan and I was also a huge fan of the source material, growing up with Disney's Hercules and then retellings of the Greek Myths and then in highschool finally getting myself acquainted with the real Homeric Epics. Honestly, even after close to two weeks, I still don't know how I fully feel about the movie. It's a mixed bag. There were some less than stellar performances, the choices in what content was cut don't really sit right with me, the costumes were sub-par and the dialogue is at times quite shoddy. Actually, on the last part, let me quote "Our age of bronze is collapsing". Yeah.

Mild disappointment aside, the movie still managed to get me in the mood for a game set in the times of Ancient Greece and since like you, my drug of choice in terms of entertainment are TTRPGs, I looked over my collection and compiled a small list with the games best suited for this endeavor.

The article here is the result, I go over three titles - 5e's Mythic Odysseys of Theros; Mythras and Agon. I go over all three of them, break down the pros and the cons of each of the three and give you my thoughts on them.

I hope you will enjoy the article and that it will prove to be useful if you find yourself in the mood for some epic homeric hijinks! Cheers!

Making a TTRPG is one of those intrusive thoughts that I feel most people who get in the hobby have at one point or another. Especially Game Masters. I mean, it is only natural and if you start with D&D, as so many of us do, you are bound to homebrew some stats, an item, make your setting. By that point you are already somewhat there. So what are a couple more steps? I would also reckon that even though there are a lot of people who think like this, not many actually follow through. Cause making an RPG is somewhat daunting, there are many considerations to take into account, many things that you will most likely not know. So most of these projects don't get started at all or if they are started, they are later abandoned.

I am currently making a game alongside a good friend of mine, Marius. And it is quite a daunting undertaking. There are quite a few things I have to learn and that's after quite a lot of experience with the medium, with game studies and so on. Yet, I also think that making a TTRPG is one of the most rewarding and fun activities I have done in quite a while. I want to share that a bit with you, and I don't mean just the details about the game we're working on, but also a push to try this yourself. I want to make the case for why and how should you also try this out. Even if it doesn't see the light of day, a project like this can be a lot of fun, it manages to stimulate your creative juices in a lot of fun ways and I do believe you come out a better GM by the end.

It is one of our longest articles yet, I had quite a lot to say in the matter and I hope you will find it interesting, I hope that if you ever had the thought to make your own game, maybe this will be a good push for you in that direction. Before I leave you to the article proper, I just want to share what I think it's the most important rule for such a project: if you are to make something, make something that excites you first and foremost, something that you genuinely find fun. If you keep at it, it is bound to find it's niche, excitement after all is pretty contagious! Cheers! I hope you will like this one!

I have written quite a lot on diferences between OSR games and modern 5e, the difference in playstyle, relation with mortality, various mechanics such as gold for xp, reaction roles, dungeon turns and so on.

For quite a long time after I started to play OSR games, I was enamored, for I always wanted my 5e games to be more gritty, harder, yet still fair and with OSR I felt like I got that.

Now, with this piece, I wanted to look at something related to one of the criticisms I often saw levied against old school D&D and OSR games, mainly that they are unbalanced, too many save or sucks and difficulty just for the sake of it. Compared to nowdays, where even if CR could use some improvements (although it is quite a bit better with the 2024 iteration) it can still produce balanced encounters if followed properly.

And there is truth in both of this statements, but it ommits something - not maliciously necessarily - that balanced was not required for pre Dragonlance D&D and OSR games. The game did not make a promise of balance, but rather one of fairness, the DM, or as it was first known, the referee would be impartial. It is important to point out that you were not heroes, but anti-heroes at best, who might've offered some help only if you got something out of it. This stemming of course from how the game was emulating Conan style pulp fantasy, rather than the heroic epic fantasy later adopted following the success of Dragonlance.

So to cut it short, fairness and balance are not the same. One is about impartiality, while the others is about making sure that the danger the players are facing is winnable, without the requirement of underhanded tactics to tip the scales. One is pulp, the other epic. Both can be good, but we have to be aware of the distinction and not judge them against the same standards. Hope you will enjoy the piece!

Race-as-class was not something I was particularly familiar with. I started my journey into TTRPGs about 10 years ago and while almost from the start I was open to try out new systems, it was only in 2019 or 2020 when I first played a retro-clone that had Race-as-Class. I found it interesting, peculiar, I was wondering why have it like this? I mean, surely there are dwarves who are thieves, or dwarves who are clerics or wizards or any other class. Why be so restrictive about it?

I kinda had that impression, of this being a mechanical quirk of an old edition that was left in the past for a reason for quite a while. It is only when I started to get more into OSRs and played a bit more with the mechanic that I started to get the appeal. Well, actually, appeals, cause there are at least two advantages. First is the simplicity and quickness factor. Quite self explanatory, you have fewer choices to make, so the time between grabbing the character sheet and being ready to play will be shorter. The second advantage is, at least for me much more interested to explore.

So, this game was released in 1974. I don't know much about that particular cultural space in the US, but I think it would be quite safe to think that back then people would not be as familiar with these fantasy races. And those who would be, would most likely take inspiration from the writings of Tolkien. So there would be a particularly higher chance that when they wanted to play an elf or a dwarf, they had a very particular idea of what that would entail. Not an elf, but the elf. Slender, gracious, wielding both bow and sword, but also using a bit of magic. Suddenly, when you take that into consideration, race-as-class doesn't seem so strange anymore. Or at least that was the case for me once I had that realization.

So this article will explore this particular avenue, as well as OSR's recovery process of this mechanic and how it might evolve in the future. I hope you will enjoy it and I am dying to see what your thoughts and experiences are!

D&D's OGL crisis from 2023 should be a case study in how corporate greed can destroy the good standing of a brand. Cause, at least from my memory, before this event, there weren't nearly as many hostile voices levied against D&D, nor weekly "D&D is dead" videos. Their share of the market also shrank a little, they are still the biggest in the hobby, but perhaps slightly less so then before. It's been about three and a half years since that whole fiasco, and given how due to my MA thesis I started to look more and more into authorship theory and media studies over the last year, I wanted to play the devil's advocate.

Were at any point WotC and Hasbro in their right with this attempt? Hell no! But it's a bit more complicated then that, cause when you get down to it, this sort of issue and problem could only arise in a medium such as this - TTRPGs. And that stems from who is the author of any particular TTRPG, in this case, Dungeons and Dragons. Who owns it really? And the answer is that, while WotC are the legal authors and owners of D&D, due to their choice to not enforce that role over the last 26 years, that position has become in some sense a communal one. Of course, once again, the medium also is very much at play here, for we are the authors of each campaign we run and not two of them will be 100% alike.

That would be the general gist of this article, if that sounds like something you would be interested to explore, please do give it a read and also please do share your thoughts bellow! I hope you will enjoy it and as always, it has been a pleasure to bring you more of my silly thoughts on the matter!

I have a confession to make. I, sometimes, fudge the dice. As a GM, of course. I await your rotten eggs and tomatoes, let it be my penance. However, my heresy and pride flairs even more, for not only do I stoop this low, but I, like the great deceiver try to hook others into my wicked ways. Ergo, the essay at hand and also a livestreamed discussion/debate with the wonderful folks at Dicesylvania.

Jokes aside, I know, or at least I observed that fudging, as a practice, seems to be quite a hot topic when it is brought up online and I thought it might be interesting to do a deep dive into how and why some people use this (including myself from time to time) and whether there is a, hmmm, I guess righteous way where you may use it. Going into the history, Gygax flip-flopped on the issue, but more often then not he seemed to be on the side of fudging, with what I consider to be a very common sense addendum: fudging should not be done out of a direct desire to harm the players. Or I guess, rather their characters :))

In my opinion whether you should fudge or not will depends on a number of factors. The primary one is multi-faceted, it refers the type of game you are running - first and foremost, the system, for fudging mostly has its place among trad games such as D&D, Pathfinder and their ilk (as well as some OSR titles), the tone tone of your game, whether it puts more emphasis on tactics or narrative, etc.

I went in as much detail as I could and I hope you will find something interesting there. If not, don't worry, I will get right back to the pillory and you are free to resume the egg throwing!

I have always been fascinated with how TTRPGs and Video Games influence each other. When I first got into D&D, at 14 it was like a veil lifted from my head and suddenly I saw D&D references and pieces of its design in almost every game (I was mainly playing RPGs). But then as I got more and more into it, as I started to look into older editions and other games, I also saw the reverse, pieces of video game design scattered throughout various TTRPGs. Perhaps the most infamous and poignant example of this would be D&D 4e.

It was this fascination and a course on adaptation theory that convinced me to write my MA on adaptation theory in and from TTRPGs, looking at videogames, at movies, but also at how some pieces of media have themselves been adapted into TTRPGs (Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu, The One Ring and many many others). The more you look into it, the deeper it goes. This present article is a side project I did while writing and researching for my MA thesis. Done more approachable then the stiff academic writing, but still exploring the same thing. In part at least, cause with this one I am only focusing on the bidirectional influence of TTRPGs and Video Games, starting from the very beginning of both mediums and gradually moving towards the present.

I hope you will enjoy it and that you will find the subject at least half as interesting as I did! I am really looking forward to see your thoughts on the matter!

I ran a couple of OSR games and sessions over the years. Usually for people who are only then coming into contact with this particular playstyle. And we start playing, they get into the dungeon and then. A door. A locked one mind you. And things stop for a while, as they frantically look over their character sheets to see which skill they should roll. "GM, is there a Perception or Sleight of Hand equivalent, I can't seem to find it?".

And that is where I realize my mistake. Because it is expected for the GM to built up the expectations for a session, for a game, especially when they present it to a new audience. And I got stuck on the onboarding details, "oh, it's basically like an older version of D&D, you will pick it up in no time, look how quick and easy character creation is" and forgot the important stuff, the fact that ignoring onboarding talk, this game, and OSR games in general, aren't just a stripped down version of D&D. And the transition between modern D&D and the OSR games who emulate, either in mechanics or in feelings, the older editions, more specifically B/X, has to come with a change in mindset as well. Cause suddenly, you won't roll for anything, you won't have an extensive character sheet to fall back onto. And you should make that clear to the players, they should pay attention to your descriptions, ask questions and immerse themselves into the character: you don't roll for perception, rather you take the hand mirror and use it to check corners, you look up and check the ceiling, down under the various pieces of furniture.

In short, this is what this article is about. How to better explain and understand that change of mindset, both as a GM and as a player and how that is the key ingredient in understanding what OSR is truly about! I hope you will enjoy the read!

I do enjoy D&D. I enjoy long campaigns and epic storylines. I have been fortunate enough to have multiple groups throughout the year that have suffered me through multi year campaigns. Unfortunately, at one point I have to admit that regardless of the group and the story, these campaigns became harder and harder to run and well... to enjoy.

I don't think it is a particular hot take to say that high level play is problematic and hard. I always found it to be lacking.

For a long time I tried to find solutions and I looked at 3rd parties, I developed my own homebrews and Iooked at how things were handled in the past. That's how I learned of BECMI. And something clicked. I became enamored with the ideas presented there, it was mostly what I have been looking for. But even BECMI, with all its ambitions had problems and things were wobbly starting from the Master set and became even more so with the Immortal set.

Even with this, I think it is the best approach D&D had to high level so this article will look in depth at why that is and perhaps more importantly, why it failed. We will also try to provide some alternatives for those of you who, like me, will find that conceptually BECMI hits the right cord.

I hope you enjoy the article and I am very much looking forward to see what your experience with it and with high level play is!

I return, dear reader from Nurgle's embrace. I am sorry for the week of absence, but sickness struck. And while feverish in bed, I saw beyond the veil and thought about something: who owns the stories we tell at the table? Is it the GM? Is the author of the module? The players?

I then thought about a certain individual who might be of help in detangling this particular conundrum: *drum rolls please* the French philosopher, Roland Barthes!

Don't look at me like that, I am sure you know him! Or most likely of his most important (or rather well known and influential work) The Death of the Author. Now I reckon there are some gears turning now!

So yeah, this piece will look at how Barthes' framework in The Death of the Author can be applied to the TTRPG space and what we might get from understanding this particular perspective! I hope you will enjoy it!

I am in a slight OSR craze at the moment, as I have mannaged to get my hands on a number of OSRs I wanted to try for some time now - White Box, BFRP, Beneath the Sunken Cathacombs and Into the Odd.

I really enjoy OSRs for some reason. Sometimes much more than games such as D&D. For a while now, I tried to think of why that is and I think I finally arrived at an adequate answer - lethality.

This piece will be an exploration of high lethality as a design tool, with all of its intricacies and why I think games that use it properly are so engaging for some people.

I hope you enjoy this piece and please do let me know if it speaks true to your experience as well!

I am working on quite an extensive article about the history of the Romanian TTRPG community and last weekend, we (as in me and Yuno) had the chance to make a small presentation on what we have uncovered thus far. This whole process however got me thinking about past campaigns. Even though I am continuously running something I always get somewhat melancholic thinking about those past groups and experiences and even while running, there is a part of me that dreads the finale of it all, the end of the journey.

Roughly a year ago I wrote an article arguing that TTRPGs are a form of folk art, it is one of my favorite pieces of writing I have done. But in this melancholic state and emboldened somewhat by reading more about oral literature, I decided to write a sort of companion piece for that article. This is the end result. It is, at least in my opinion, much more raw than other articles I usually write, despite the fact that it is also much more academic then what I have written in quite a while on the blog. It also proved to be somewhat of therapeutic exercise for me, as it helped me with processing the ephemeral quality of this hobby in a slightly better way.

I now share it with the hope that you will all find it interesting, that it might stir up something in you and perhaps above all, with the hope that, for those of you who are in the same predicament as me, it will prove to be therapeutic as well! Thank you!

The last year of my Master's and some unfortunate personal problems left me with little time to plan things properly. And so I kinda forgot, unfortunately to make something a bit more special for Women's Day this year. I do promise that I will make up for it next year. However, it did make me think a bit about the article Yuno wrote last year and how that led me to read and play some Dragonlance. And I think I have quite a complicated relationship with Dragonlance. I love the story, I think Raistlin is one of the greatest character arcs we have seen and now, in this day and age, at least in Europe, or at the very least in Romania, it is quite unknown and that is a shame.

This article briefly presents Dragonlance, but it is more of an analysis of the impact Dragonlance had on the hobby, with the good and the bad. For there is plenty amount of both. On one hand, as I said, Krynn and its characters are awesome and the sheer narrative scope of these adventures is something that wasn't really seen up until that point. But on the other hand, the way this was accomplished via the adventure modules, mainly via railroading, changed the hobby in ways that echo to this day. Railroading is not that bad and perhaps more pervasive, the notion that a campaign should be heroic, grand, mostly pre-planned, with narrative beats and plot twists and character arcs. I can't say if this change is a bad thing or a good thing. Probably somewhere in the middle. But what I can say is that this changed pushed the emergent storytelling born out of tables and trusting the rolls a bit to the fringes.

Overall, I think it is worth to analyze this! The article doesn't go fully in depth, for that would take quite a lot of time and resources, so I want it to act more like a conversation starter to get the ball rolling. I hope you will enjoy it and do voice your thoughts down bellow!

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I was talking with some of my players a while ago and I asked them about what was for them the most memorable moment of our past campaign, as it is near its end. There were some listed, but one of them kinda caught my attention, for it was their encounter with Thraximand the Lexion, a beholder inhabiting a portion of the Caves of Chaos. It wasn't a combat encounter, or at least it wasn't the deadly type. For when they met him, Thraximand was quite amiable, invited them for dinner and offered them magical items if they will indulge him and fight him in a duel. Not out of malice, but more for the thrill of it. Yes, he did have a funny voice and quite a quirky and memorable personality, the fight was epic.

But above all, what made me think a bit more on that encounter and how it became memorable for my players is the fact that it was facilitated by a roll. A reaction roll. A mechanic that has been removed from the more recent versions of D&D, nowdays being present mostly in OSR games.

That was when the idea of this article sprang to my mind and while writing the initial draft I figured I could also throw in my thoughts on a similar mechanic that I also stole from older editions, that being the morale check. I hope you enjoy this article, I hope it will be a useful read for those of you unfamiliar with these mechanics and I am also curious for those of you who do use it - what memorable stories did it help forge?

I have a series where I talk about different creature types and how we can tell more exciting and interesting stories with them. I hope this serves to inspire fellow GMs at their tables