One thing I do appreciate about #OSR games is the way that magical items have become lateral-thinking engines rather than combat buffs.
I've always been horrified by the idea of swords of orc-slaying - Did the wizard who invented that experiment on live orcs?
In LOTR elf-made things burn orcs but Mordor-blades poison people and it's a reflection of materials and methods rather than design.
Genocidal D&D wizards like South African military scientists gene-hacking sickle-cell anemia.
It's possible that Hasbro is inadvertently creating a new golden age for #pathfinder, #OSR, and other #indie #ttrpg publishers.
If #dnd contracts the way that many pundits are predicting, there's going to be a lot of space in the market ready to be filled by smaller publishers with lower operational expenses.
ttrpg fortunes
fortune is one of those classic unix programs that are available on basically all unixoid systems. The only thing it does is “display a pseudorandom message from a database of quotations”, or as the man-page of fortune for debian says: “fortune – print a random, hopefully interesting, adage”.
To be fair, the fortune part of the name comes from fortune cookies. So whatever is printed is not meant to be taken too seriously.
You wouldn’t think this is a terribly interesting or even useful program, but people have found uses for it over the last few decades. It might just be used to provide a human element to an otherwise sterile work environment, but I also found it used at least once to provide a noticeable update to an otherwise static website (by printing adages about project management. So the updates were functionally useless, but the program did fulfill an important task).
What the program does is this: it takes a file of adages, or sayings, or other small text snippets, and when called prints one of them. You can chose which file you want to take those from, you can choose the length you want your printed text to be, and a few other smaller options. It will determine one and output it. It’s one of those programs that breathes the unix philosophy that a program should do just one thing, but do it well.
You might encounter it every time when you log on to a shell, where the admin has configured fortune to print a quote. Or some people have it in their signature for forums or emails. (sometimes connected with something like cowsay which prints a bit of crude ascii art cow (or whatever) saying whatever fortune spit out.
________________________________________/ I could never be a druid, I just don’t \\ trust the trees. They’re too shady. / ---------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||There are a lot of different fortune files available, from the stock ones that are shipped with distributions, to other projects where you might, e.g. find Discworld quotes, or, I dunno, your favorite Chuck Norris facts.
Anyway, I was futzing around with our IRC network lately and while playing around with a bot that could use fortune, I realized that there was no actual file available for stuff about roleplaying (or wargaming, or boardgaming, or any gaming for that matter).
So I decided to make one.
Right now it’s only a small page on campaignwiki.org: https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/TTRPGFortuneFile/HomePage but the idea is to soon enough move that to github and do it on there.
If you want to add to the file: the page above is a wiki so you can just add what you want to add. (some people already did). I am looking for pithy sayings, jokes, DM advice, and everything else that might be interesting. Have a great quote about roleplaying games? Maybe even a more or less short story? Just add it on there.
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@stjepanlukac @Xenograg I backed TotV and for 5e it’s great. Personally I’m with The Arcane Library and Kelsey’s #Shadowdark …it’s 5e’s basics with an #OSR sensibility.
Another hand drawn map on #YouTube!
https://stevestillstanding.com/2025/04/13/hand-drawn-map-video-krakeni-outpost/
From Knight at the Opera: Urban Gameplay Part 5: Breaking Ground (without breaking your back), https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2025/03/urban-gameplay-part-5-breaking-ground.html #OSR #TTRPG
WHY DOES YOCHAI, THE LARGEST OSR DESIGNER NOT SIMPLY EAT THE SMALLER #OSR DESIGNERS?
Finally some birb representation in my adventure games!
Gourdin Konbo Club just released a module for Mausritter, fully illustrated, with character creation as a bird!
Will use it for sure in future mouse adventure games.
Fairy Dust in Altella's Tea House is out!
This is a FREE OSR adventure, with a cosy vibe, that you can easily slot into your ongoing fantasy campaign!
Get it at https://12sidedgoblin.itch.io/fairy-dust-in-altellas-tea-house
[Star Wars] Deathstars & Droids (was: Star Wars – Galactic Adventures)
Ages ago (2011?) I found a Star Wars OSR retroclone called Star Wars – Galactic Adventures on the venerable wizardawn.com page, now lost to the wages of net history.
(…that was before there was an actual Star Wars product, a kids’ book, using the same title…)
For some reason it never really caught on in the glut of B/X rules variations at the time, and when people were thinking about doing an old school DnD kind of flavor of Star Wars they seem to mostly do their own thing afterwards, trying to clone it into White Box DnD for example, or things like that.
And of course there’s the whole point that the whole structure of old school Dungeons and Dragons does not really fit with most people’s idea about the Star Wars universe. And believe me, people have tried. They even tried it officially, there were after all multiple editions of a licensed Star Wars roleplaying game from Wizards of the Coast to cash in on the prequels and the concurrent release of 3e.
And yet when you ask people about Star Wars as a tabletop roleplaying game most people will go back to the old West End Games D6 Star Wars game. That one seems to have captured the sheer cinematic feel of the setting and the hearts of Star Wars fans.
In fact, they did so more than you might even realize: at a time when there was not much more Star Wars stuff coming after the first three movies it was the D6 Star Wars system that came up with new information about the whole setting. When Timothy Zahn started writing his Heirs to the Empire trilogy, which kickstarted the whole expanded universe started coming together, he was given a setting guide of the West End Games RPG as a guide. Arguably the Roleplaying Game shaped the whole of Star Wars afterwards. Even things like Coruscant were introduced first in the game, then the novels, and only showed up in the actual movies very belatedly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2nn_q1xAXI
(Specifically Coruscant first appeared on screen in the 1997 Special Edition of Return of the Jedi, and no, younglings, that small snippet wasn’t even there in the first release. In fact the current version on Disney+ is an even more altered version that shows Naboo as well).
Which of course goes to say that… yeah, I don’t actually want to play the D6 system. It’s fine. It’s a fine system. I appreciate it. But I kinda want to do a Star Wars DnD game. And not the D20 system either. The whole trend of putting the D20 system EVERYWHERE was a cancer on the hobby in the early 2000s.
I want to play Star Wars as if it was a DnD ripoff from the early 80s. Like what Starships and Spacemen basically did for Star Trek (before there was a proper Star Trek RPG).
Anyway, D20 Star Wars was not bad as D20 variants go…
…but I really enjoyed this little retroclone when I found it. You see, D20 Star Wars did an interesting thing where they put much more emphasis onto saving rolls than normal D20 DnD had. And this was something done here as well. In a way it feels like the author took D20 SW and retro-fitted it into a B/X framework, which is way more work than I would have done but also kind of cool.
By this point I am on my second house-ruled version of it. I took the original document and condensed it down into a variation I called Darths and Droids (after the the eponymous webcomic which imagines the movies as a science-fiction DnD campaign), while using all kinds of Ralphy McQuarry concept art for it. Lately I did that again, condensed my previous version even further, and replaced all the art with black and white art I found on the net (also because we only have a black and white printer at home), and called it Deathstars and Droids.
I think I need a better name for that.
Anyway, the actual reason I was doing that was because my kids are really into Star Wars lately, both the movies, the animated series, and playing the last LEGO game, and I was hoping that it would be a good way to introduce them to roleplaying.
My older son already decided he wants to play a B1 battle droid, which kinda killed my ideas for the first few scenarios I had. Oh well.
I also have to adapt the rather freeform droid rules into something that gives him the satisfaction of playing a B1 droid instead.
Which goes to explain why there might be some Star Wars content coming up on the blog which doesn’t actually concern any game you might have heard of.
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@DM_Zeppelin Coming from an old-school background, it seems that 5e players are looking for answers based on numbers on their character sheet rather than their own creation.
But, this may be a matter of what you're used to more than what's 'better' or 'worse.'
In the end, other than Passive Perception, the player still has to ask, "Can I make an Investigation check on that strange-looking chest in the corner?"
My manifesto on why I prefer old-school D&D #osr #ttrpg saves (death/spell/wands/etc) vs saves that refer to specific ways to avoid danger (from 3e onwards, reflex/fortitude/will): the former _don't_ refer to a specific fictional way of avoiding some effect. So you get to invent how it works.
You made your save against Charm Person - maybe you remembered a rhyme your grandmother taught you about a witch and said it just in time. Classes with good spell saves spend time researching that stuff.
Interesting piece about the #OSR as a 'tradition' and how a lot of younger gamers look on YouTube personalities as mentors. This explains a lot... and not in a good way.
https://wardagainstevil.com/2025/03/10/the-shared-tradition/
@cynical13 When you run an #OSR game what system do you like to use?
I know a lot of the systems by name (OSE, OSRIC, Cairn, Knave, etc.) but not what makes them distinct or what play styles they favor.
Oiselarius (he/him) 
