I needed a simple system for procedurally generating hexcrawl terrain and features, so I made one: Hexmancer. It’s two pages long, including design notes and acknowledgements, and you get to roll funky dice. What it does Hexmancer hexcrawls with your hexes, baby! Hexmancer is designed to procedurally generate a fantasy borderlands/wilderness region in “fantasy Western […]
Hexmancer: Procedural Hex Generation System Read More »
Richard LeBlanc, who produces wonderful, polished old-school resources, just published a free one-page tracker for exploration resources, and it’s glorious. (Here’s the direct download link.) It’s set up to help you keep track of torches, time spent in the dungeon, etc. in one-turn increments, and it includes notes for 0e, B/X, and 1e. This one’s
Free one-sheet time tracker for old-school fantasy RPGs Read More »
Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad (also available on DriveThruRPG; paid link) is a joint production by Wayne Snyder, Edgar Johnson, and Adam Muszkiewicz. Metal Gods is the “DCC is like the best heavy metal album covers” of zines. It’s rarr and gonzo and awesome and rawlished, and I love it. I wish there were more than
Zine roundup: Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad, issues 1-3 Read More »
Via a private share on G+, I followed a link to OD&D Setting, a free PDF by Wayne Rossi of the excellent Semper Initiativus Unum blog. It’s excellent. In 11 pages of logical observations, it pulls apart the components of OD&D‘s (paid link) implied setting — the encounter tables, the Wilderness Survival map, etc. —
OD&D’s implied setting Read More »
Terry Pratchett’s final Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown (paid link), came in the mail today, a bittersweet arrival to say the least. I almost never buy fiction in print anymore, but I’ve got every Discworld book in print; it felt right that I should read this one in print as well.
The Shepherd’s Crown Read More »
I commissioned some artwork for Bleakstone from one of my favorite old-school artists, Steve Zieser. Steve brought Bleakstone’s dominant intelligent species — humans, skurliths, uzbardim, null slimes, and gharrudaemons — to life, and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. (Thanks, Steve!) If you’d like to read more about any of these species,
Bleakstone artwork by Steve Zieser Read More »
I picked up 188 RPG products in 2014 (plus a few more than arent in RPGGeek’s database yet), 43 of which were published in 2014. Of those 43, I’ve spent enough time with enough of them to tease out a partial list of 12 favorites — partial because there are books I expect to love
My favorite gaming books published in 2014 (so far) Read More »
Bleakstone is my old school fantasy hexcrawl setting, parts of which have been kicking around in my brain since 2012. This post presents an overview, including an elevator pitch and all the high notes. In August of 2014 I finally realized that I do best when I design gaming stuff in chunks, rather than trying
Bleakstone campaign setting Read More »
I often see posts asking for Lulu RPG recommendations, and Lulu’s search functionality is pretty lacking, so rather than type mine up every time I wrote this post for easy reference. It’s up to several dozen recommendations, mostly old school products and story games, and I keep it more or less up to date with
Gaming books on Lulu.com that I enjoy Read More »
Since I first posted about Reading Appendix N, I’ve been pointed to several similar reading lists that are either contemporary with Appendix N or related to it in some other way. None of them are additions to Appendix N — to date, Gary’s 2007 additions are the only ones I’ve found — but they’re all
Other Appendices N Read More »
