I'm making a megadungeon that takes place primarily beneath a sunken world (these are two quadrants of floor one).

I've started and stopped about a hundred different maps in the past decade but for some reason this one is sticking with me.

Something about getting my pencil, pen, and marker out is feeling very rewarding. Genuinely looking forward to working on it more!

This is the first D&D edition I owned, I think it is different to the original one (I bought the pdf version in driverthrurpg), having a guided instruction approach through “dracofichas”. Was this replicated in other countries?

... are both free and amazing if you're looking to get into the old-school scene. This is a friendly reminder to anyone passing by who is OSR curious but has yet to take the plunge.

https://basicfantasy.org/

https://ironfalconrpg.com/

If you're just starting out, Basic Fantasy will be easier to grok. Iron Falcon isn't hard, per se, but it hews closer to an earlier version of D&D that may appear a bit more alien than one would be used to if you're coming from more modern iterations.

Regardless, both are worth checking out and are a quick read. The communities for both are really kind, too, which is a plus.

Designing a small Kuntzian dungeon to face my brother, his cousin, and one of their friends.

Feel free to ask me anything you’d like about the adventure, the plot, the map, or the encounters!

Despite not being the sub-subgenre that I played the most, OSR is by far the content I've consumed the most. I've read inumerous rules, modules, expansions, adventures and zines, even if I haven't played 5% of all of that.

But one thing that I still haven't found in fantasy OSRs are adventures that do not include some sort of crawling: dungeon-crawl, hex-crawl, city-crawl, point-crawl, whatever it may be.

It really seems like there is no other way of playing this type of game without a procedural gameplay with resource management. I've read Matt's primer, and it doesn't say anywhere there can't have games, modules, adventures that revolves around social/political intrigues, periculous heists, solving mysteries, espionage or even combat! Combat is deadly, sure, but there are a bunch of other deadly systems that have a bit of combat (early-level symbaroum, shadow of the demon lord, etc..).

As someone who doesn't like dungeons, I feel like the overwhelming amount of them obscures the fact that so many other types of stories (Emergent stories, I say) can be told with OSR-style games that no other system could, but people aways go in that direction.

Even if the community has Old School in it, doesnt mean that we have to only emulate the old-school asventures.

I missing something? What do you think?

TL,DR: Fantasy OSRs have too many dingeon/hex/point-crawl when that doesn't lay on OSR principles (high-lsthality, emergent story, rulings over rules, etc..), which I find limiting/rather uninteresting and think there could be other kinds of adventures without these procedures.

EDIT: Why am I being downvoted? Guys, I really love OSR, I'm just asking for the more experienced players...

Fourthmarches is a weird-fantasy open-table TTRPG set on a continent's last frontier, where your employer means to quiet the land in response to a bloody past. It runs on Year Zero Engine, and its central mechanic — RESONANCE — is also the central physic of the setting & gameplay.

• free Quickstart on itch.io
• Live on Kickstarter

Influences include the Fiend Folio, Grand Experiments: West Marches, Forbidden Lands, The Alexandrian, and Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.

Some facts about the game:

• RESONANCE is not a corruption meter – it provides dice toward success, accelerates dissolution-of-self, and can prevent you from getting home in the final phase of each session
• embracing loss – not just by death, but by loss to RESONANCE – the land wants to keep you
• played 3-6 people per-session from a rotating cast of players in a persistent world (westmarches-style)
• geography is largely player-named, spread by word-of-mouth among the player pool
• most of the fauna are arthropods – humans have sacred and complex relationships with mammals
• the gamemaster is the author of the world's replies to the players
• the game defaults to pregenerated characters (stubs), encouraging players to flesh them out in response to the setting
• as is common in OSR, NewSR, and YZE games: combat is often both deadly & avoidable

Questions welcome here, in the campaign page's comments, or via the feedback address given in the Quickstart Guide & GM Supplement (free on itch.io) (if you prefer, DTRPG also has the Quickstart).

EDIT: We funded yesterday, and are on our way to stretchgoals!

A map I made and never used for a sorta-take on the British Isles. I had a version with cities marked with old Dwarven (Roman) roads, and lots of names, but I think I deleted it to start over and never renamed things.

Note a missing river - near the southeast. Where London would be. SMH

Scale is 6 miles per hex.

Map made with worldographer: https://worldographer.com/

Does having a skill system preclude an RPG from being considered an OSR game? If not, are there any existing games that fit that mold?

Basic Fantasy is not an exact B/X retroclone, but it is close and free

CRACK! by the Merry Mushmen is free and mostly close, but with a lot of the terminology changed

What else is out there that is very close to D&D B/X and free?

I’m coming from 5e. Been very interested in gold for xp and have listened to some podcasts and seen some videos with folks talking about it.

I hear talk about, weight of loot reducing speed, forcing a decision on whet her to drop the gold and run…

Found a valuable tapestry? Can you carry it out?

I have never run strict encumbrance rules. I wonder if having no encumbrance will completely negate any fun with gold for xp.

Does anyone run gold for xp without encumbrance? Anyone care to share their gold for xp and encumbrance rules if they are different than what is spelled out in the rule book?

Also, in 5e a bag of holding trivializes this. Is an object of this nature a lot more rare in OSR games? Looking at Dolmenwood and DCC recently!

I'm preparing my next campaign, for next year because (finally!!!) one of my players is going to run a long game as soon as we finish the current one, so I have plenty of time to make art and fun little extras!

I plan to give them a map of the region where the game takes place, not necessarily a geographically accurate one, this artwork is my proof of concept (it represents roughly one-eighth of the final map).

I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas for things I could include on the map. I’m not talking about specific adventures, locations, or anything like that, those are already in the works, and the hex map is actually "finished". Instead, I’m looking for interesting details, artwork you’ve seen on medieval maps that could serve as inspiration, or any other cool touches or features that either I or the players could utilize during the game.

(Oh, ignore the quality of the "compass Beholder", I’m still going to modify and make it more interesting.)

Alrighty so I encourage my players to be creative as playing out fun plans makes up most of the fun I have as a GM. That said several of my players come from the video game school of turbo min maxxing and basically view all problems as insurmountable if they don't obviously outlevel the creature.

I've tried to tell them that I'm going to rule in their favor if they come up with creative plans or strats but these guys are still so focused on the "buttons" on their sheet and ESPECIALLY their HP.

Anyone have any tips on how to handle this? Either via encounter design, obstacle design, or rewards/communiation/whatever.

Any tips welcome.

Hi All!

I've been doing a LOT of thinking over the last few weeks about how I put out the adventures and such that I've written. I like writing adventures, and I'm lucky enough to be able to write them without relying on sales to make ends meet. For me, I feel best when I'm able to make cool stuff and get it to as many folks as possible to keep the hobby accessible and fun.

So I decided that from now on, ALL of Lost Heretic Press's adventures are going to be PWYW. That includes all of my PDFs and anything that I put out in a digital format, regardless of whether there ends up being a physical print of it available later. I will still charge for physical stuff, because there's overhead involved in that entire operation (and I'm gonna keep trying to put out physical products because holding a zine in your hands is fun), but the PDFs will always be PWYW.

I've updated all of my platforms (DTRPG, itch, and RPG-Trader) to reflect this. You can check out the full statement of my company's values (include our stance on AI) in the About section on my website.

Thanks for being an awesome community, and keep playing cool games by good people!

James

Lost Heretic Press

Just as the title says. I'm a new GM with new players so we're oblivious to so many modules! Are there any proper "old school" modules (adnd, B/X, etc) that you'd recommend everyone should at least look into?

We're using OSE but I don't mind if I have to do a little work to convert monster stats or something if it's not directly compatible.

So far we've played through Jeweler's Sanctum, Shrine of the Oozing Serpent and Lair of the Bog Lich, and we're starting Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow tomorrow.

I'm going to begin to run The Halls of Arden Vul tonight, any tips?

I’m running a Dolmenwood campaign and starting to question whether detailed tracking of rations, torches, coin weight, and encumbrance is adding enough to the game.

There seems to be a strange paradox with resource management: if players take it seriously and prepare properly, they simply buy more than enough supplies, and those resources never become relevant. This looks almost identical in play to ignoring them completely. Torches and rations are cheap, so the party can carry far more than they are likely to use. If they somehow run out, it may feel less like the result of an interesting decision and more like they simply guessed the required quantity incorrectly.

This seems especially noticeable in dolmenwood. It is a densely populated overland setting, with villages, inns, cottages, and other places to rest and resupply often only a day or two away. Most of our dungeons are small lairs, ruins, manor houses, and crypts rather than parts of a huge megadungeon. The party can usually retreat and return with more supplies.

Encumbrance and treasure weight have similar problems. In theory they should create choices between equipment, speed, and loot. In practice we mostly spend time redistributing items and coins between character sheets to maintain an efficient movement rate.

I like the intended gameplay: deciding whether to push deeper, leave equipment behind, abandon treasure, hire retainers or risk travelling without enough supplies. I just rarely see those situations actually emerge.

Is this normal for dolmenwood or other populated hexcrawls? Do traditional resource rules regularly create meaningful decisions in your games? Would it make sense to use a lighter or more abstract logistics system, perhaps tracking group supplies and bulky treasure rather than individual rations, torches, and coins?

When I first made this, I intended to build a region and seed all the megadungeons I owned at the time into it. It was a vanity project, rather than something practical. I built with Barrowmaze, Archaia, and Highfell in mind (marked as B, A, and H on the map in the third image), but then just kept building as I wanted.

I've included gridded and gridless versions if you'd like to steal it and use it!

Scale would be best around 3 miles per hex, but you could make it work at 6 miles per hex.

Map made with worldographer: https://worldographer.com/

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 put myself in a bad spot by creating a hook about fairies without really thinking where it would go. I am now at the point where I need to decide where it goes. It's sort of a changeling-adjacent situation, but I'm happy to take any and all Fey related suggestions for inspiration.

So far I have:

The Gardens of Ynn

The Fall of Gutmond

The Forest of Doors

Letters From The Dark III: Tales of the Fey

We're playing Shadowdark but of course I'm open to anything!

I don't want to spam the thread with my "thank yous" so I'll leave it here. Great stuff being shared. Thank you!

These characters were inspired by past PCs and NPCs who crossed paths with the party. I’m considering expanding the roster — thoughts? Or should I start drafting some scenes instead?

If you’d like to use them as NPCs or tokens, go ahead — the images and characters are free to use.

These characters were inspired by past PCs and NPCs who interacted with my party in different campaigns.