A new dark fantasy system-neutral micro-setting for my fellow dungeon reavers!

Come to Rootmark, a religious charcoal town on the edge of the Brazenwood, a haunted forest that has grown over ancient ruins filled with treasure.

Loot everything you can before the imminent collapse, or investigate the eldritch forces behind it and discover how to stop it!

Physical rewards include:

• A player-facing cloth map of the Brazenwood
• A paper map of the main dungeon
• A 24-page micro-setting zine
• A holofoil manticore sticker
• A revised one-page Dungeon Reavers mini-zine
• All digital downloads

At the highest pledge tier, you can also get all my Beyond the Borderlands and Archon Ruins zines!

Help us bring this project to life! Back the campaign, and share it with your friends and fellow game masters!

Kickstarter Link: >> CLICK HERE <<

Hey, I like listening to actual play osr podcasts. I also would like to run black wyrm. Is there a podcast playthrough of it?

Also, semi related, are there more osr actual play podcasts? I mostly only listen to 3d6 dtl currently

I've seen a whole lot of them by know, but I can only think of "B" being for Basic, and "X" being for Expert.

6 miles is a lot. Why would you use that for a hexmap? Maybe a very large manor might be 6 miles, in a medieval setting. But what else could possibly take up that space, even in adjacency?

Happy Friday,

Welcome to the weekly r/osr blogroll - come share your great ideas!

The mission: to be a showcase and clearinghouse of blogposts where we share in the DIY principles of old-school gaming. So drop in links to your writings, gaming theory, advice, play reports, and whatever other creativity you have posted on your blogs to share with our community.

Also, if you have favorite blogs you follow, or find interesting blogposts that you want to share, feel free to post them here, as well!

Happy blogging!

The vampire in the Expert D&D book and the AD&D monster manual feel a bit lame. They are a muddy mix of different vampires from folklore and literature. I suspect a lot of DMs do some surgery on the stat block if they want to introduce a memorable vampire in their game.

A couple years ago, a buddy and I set out to watch the classic vampire movies. The project quickly spiraled into a sprawling project with dozens of entries and we spent more than a year watching a couple vampire movies per week.

I wanted to incorporate all this great material into my D&D game but there's far too many great depictions of vampires to cram into a single monster. I suggest making this a modular stat block. What I call a Mr. Potato Head vampire.

Start with a stable core of the essential vampire elements; that's the potato. Next, gather all the cool powers & weird weaknesses; these are our detachable parts. Sort them into a few rough categories: attacks, vulnerabilities, kill conditions etc.

I posted a big parts catalog on my blog and a few examples showing the range from Buffy-type mooks to Strahd-type, campaign-defining baddies.

Assemble your monster from the parts-bin and you can quickly create the iconic blood sucker that fits your particular adventure or campaign. Make a bunch as a coven or rivals.

Let me know what I'm missing! Are there bits that belong in the box? Did I miss a key film on my movie project?

Am I wrong about the RAW vampire? If you've used it, let me know.

Hey all! In case you didn't catch it, the lovely people at Space Penguin Ink just launched by new game, Hellward Unto the Breach. I worked very hard at this (words, art and layout) and I'm very happy with the way it came out. Check it out and see if you can make a home out of (the) Hell (Dimension).

Been messing around with this map the last few days, I think it’s close to done. Building out the lore and such now. Image quality isn’t the best but the lighter greens are plains/grasslands and the dark greens are different types of forests. Went for overall UK vibes on the eastern landmass with some creative liberties. Let me know what you guys think!

Inspired by the old TSR Gazetteers

I'm currently tinkering on designing my own system, and I've found that most people consider a campaign lasting for around 40-50 sessions as a "long" campaign, based on asking around on the internet. When I look back at the sessions I GMed, a single 4 hour session might be enough to explore and possibly "clear" a single dungeon level, but only if the PCs don't run into any sort of major trouble. However, I've also had sessions completely consisting of PCs traveling and RPing with random encounters. Hell, I've even had sessions completely filled with players simply walking around the village and getting to know the villagers, looking for work and asking around for rumors. It feels like I can't really predict how quick my players will do things and progress.

This puts me at odds with the idea of campaign planning. If I want a campaign to go roughly around 50 sessions, I should have progression somewhat compliment that. So if my intention is the players reaching late game at the end of the campaign, they have to reach late game in around session 40 or so. This means proper campaign progression calculation. For that, I require more insight on how much PCs actually "do" in around 40 sessions. That's what I want to ask of you, dear GMs! In a classic OSR campaign, what have your PCs accomplished after around 40-50 sessions (if your game lasts that long), taking PC death into account?

PS: I'm not sure if this is the proper tag, if it isn't, I'll try to change it!

Hello there. I am about to finish a 6 session mini campaign of Mausritter that I began to learn the rules, try a bit of OSR table etc and have a bunch of fun whilst not committing to a larger open ended campaign.

I know realise that maybe I love that shape and want to attempt another 4-6 session mini campaign and thought to try OrcBorg. I have run a few sessions of it at conventions. But has anyone run a campaign of it?

What worked? What didn't work? Should I make a mini hex like Mausritter but of spaceship nonsense? Or keep it more local to just one spaceship?

In my one shots I used small derelicts I made or my attempt at designing Tomorrows Tomorrow and it was just a human slaughterhouse to find beers.

So yes. Anyone run Orcborg campaign, or anyone know of a MorkBorg mini campaign I could just smash onto the derelict.

I haven't seen anything on this since 2025, coming into the close of 2026 has anyone in the community worked on or seen anything related to this project?

“Beyond the Cinarian Mountains lies the heart of civilization, where the Immortal Basileus sits upon the Phoenix Throne. There reigns the glorious Zankhanian Empire, eternal master of East and West, or so its poets would have you believe. For even now, beneath its gilded domes, the rot spreads. Its mages descend into madness, its palaces drown in decadence, and the mightiest empire beneath the sun slowly, ever so slowly, begins to devour itself.”

A more detailed illustration than what I've been drawing over the past few weeks. Getting the expression on this lady's face just right wasn't easy.

Hi everyone, I have an unusual request.

When I was 10 years old or so (in the 00s) my father taught me how to play D&D, and let me read his old modules and advantures that he had. Village of Hommlet, Die Vecna, Die!, ect

These modules and books were tragically destroyed in a house fire around 2009 or so. What wasn't burned , got destroyed by water damage from the fire department, so I have no way to access them anymore.

One of the modules that really stands out in my memory was one where the players are in... I think the setting's equivalent of The New World, or a continent that was only recently discovered.

Anyhow, the thing that burned this into my brain was that in the module, the players enter a tavern and encounter a juggler who is juggling three live rats. The juggler tosses the rats to the players as they enter, and if the players manage to catch a rat they get some kind of blessing?

Does anybody know what module this could be? I'm sorry if this is jumbled or vague - it was literally around 23 years ago, I think, and I was a little girl at the time and just the memory of a juggler juggling rats and the players getting a blessing if they catch them has stuck in my mind for literally over 20 years.

EDIT: It is either from ebberon and 3.5 in "Prophecy's Unwitting Servant" where the players encounter a urchin juggling rats, or %he New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game (Black Box) that also has someone juggling rats, and you do get a blessing for catching them.

The dwarven dungeon is vast, with tens of thousands of rooms to explore. Although exploration can be exciting on its own, having a goal can make players' engagement much easier. To facilitate this, patrons become an important part of the adventure. Patrons ask characters to accomplish tasks in exchange for a reward. Some patrons offer payment to everyone, but some limit quests to certain classes or races. As characters complete quests, they will unlock new quests with greater hazards and greater rewards.

Some patrons start in Thelsberry. They provide quests to help the characters begin their adventures. These help players focus their attention on specific things rather than wander down the rabbit hole of passageways and rooms. Other patrons will arrive in Thelsberry once the characters exit the dungeon with an item. For example, an ancient religious tome might attract a cleric of that god. The cleric might desire more tomes or the location of temples. Their quests might focus only on clerics. Or artwork removed from the dungeon might draw a collector who will purchase paintings, tapestries, and the like at a higher rate from any group that finds them.

As buildings are built and new shopkeepers arrive, new quests might become available. The alchemist will commission adventuring parties to find components they need to make potions. By finding and selling the components, the characters not only get paid for their discoveries but unlock potions they can purchase. Even the thieves' guild, which will form over time, might offer to buy poisonous molds or venom sacs that they can turn into poisons that thief characters can buy.

Patrons are quest givers, buyers, sellers, teachers, and more. They offer characters opportunities to enrich themselves, learn new skills, and gain reputation as they become legendary heroes. Not every character will benefit from every patron, but a broad mix of quest-givers will ensure that all players can engage and benefit from the dangers they undertake.

So my #dungeon23 megadungeon The Blades of Gixa continues to grow, with a new Documents section, currently featuring two in-world documents, the Baths Plunder Proclamation and the Highfleet Embassy Proclamation.

They're appropriately florid, so depending on taste they can can be used as-is as handouts, read aloud with some pomp, or DMs can just summarize and describe their effects. Each has a bunch of notes along the side for DMs, to contextualize them and describe in plain language what their ramifications are for the game world.

The Baths Plunder Proclamation is basically the fundamental OSRish adventure hook for the dungeon: the noble that rules the island above the dungeon puts out a call for adventurers to come delve beneath, clear out "dangers" (some of which are rival factions), and recover treasure for her (she lays claim to everything beneath the island). She offers big rewards for both--in fact, adventurers get to keep half the loot they recover for their trouble! (Players will, of course, see this as a 50% tax on their hauls, and they will plot and scheme endlessly to get around it. At least that's how it's gone in playtesting.)

The Highfleet Embassy Proclamation establishes an embassy on the island for the Highfleet, a society of ship-bound elves that threaten the Grand Admiralty, this world's hegemon. Is this a good-faith normalization of relations between rival powers? Of course not! Both sides bring various ulterior motives to the agreement, which your players can get deeply embroiled in (mine certainly have). Some of these secrets can lead inquisitive PCs deeper into the dungeon and towards some profound revelations about the nature of this world...or maybe it's background fluff and their greed will do the work. Again, up to how your table runs things.

The last image shows revisions to the Town of Baintoch spread. This is the town that sits atop the megadungeon. Playtesting showed me that the way I'd distributed information on the town spread wasn't really working for me: the original spread tried to cover both the town itself and, in an inset, the entire island it's on. Both locations suffered for it: the town lacked space for the encounters and more fleshed-out descriptions of services that would make it more runnable, and the island map was just too tiny and its keying too minimal to be useful. So I broke out the island into its own page, and updated the town spread to be much more useful, with day & night encounters, and more useful descriptions of the town's various services.

I go into more depth in a video update: https://youtu.be/GxH4M2ZTtwc

Hi! I created a very simple, two-page OSR-compatible system for me to use with busy people, and I decided to share it with you.

It's free to download and it's both in English and Portuguese (EU) on itch.io at:
https://maratae.itch.io/malmortos-lite

I'm currently working on a more evolved version, but meanwhile I hope you enjoy and that someone finds this useful.

Thank you.

Last ZineMonth I crowdfunded an experiment in OSR-style adventure paths, reworking the classic B1 -- In Search of the Unknown as the first part of a campaign and extrapolating events based upon the broad strokes of that module. I released that adventure last month, and am now crowdfunding for Book Two, which sees the players make the journey from the town of Cedar's Ford north to the Forbidden Plateau, to try and determine what happened to the two heroes of old and if, in fact, the threat of barbarian invasion is real.

It's written for Old School Essentials, Shadowdark, and Bree-YARC, and should take the PCs from levels 3-5, incorporating overland travel with classic dungeon delving. The cover art is by Dan Smith, and all interior cartography is by Ways Unseen. If we hit the 5k stretch goal I'm going to have fold-out poster maps printed for the offset version.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thirdkingdom/quest-for-the-unknown-to-the-forbidden-plateau

As in title: if you were making a character sheet for a single hex, which forms would be fillable on said sheet?

It's a thought I'm having while trying to give myself a sort of "checklist" approach to stocking a hex, and thought I'd try to shamelessly steal the good ideas of others!

Arts for DUNGEON, INC published by The Merry Mushmen

Oh, and btw, I’m open for commissions! So if you’re looking for some art, just hit me up in DMs or shoot me an email at [yuri.perkowski@gmail.com](mailto:yuri.perkowski@gmail.com)!