I’ve been posting a bit recently on the "Cepheus Engine as the New OSR” notion I’ve been playing around with. The idea is that the Cepheus Engine (basically old-school Traveller) should be a lot better known, and would make an excellent core for a OSR-style community of players and developers. My Cepheus as a New … Continue reading The New OSR 4: Blades of Barsoom
I recently ran a one-shot of the mostly forgotten science fantasy RPG - Nexus, the Infinite City. Nexus was published by Daedalus Games in 1994. It apparently wasn't particularly successful, and only spawned one supplement. Daedalus Games went bankrupt in 1997, but not before publishing the much more successful Feng Shui, by Robin Laws. (Laws … Continue reading Nexus: The Infinite City – some pregens for a long-dead RPG
I've been posting a lot about a "New OSR", an attempt to encourage others to build a community and produce gaming material for the Cepheus Engine (open source Traveller). Introduction post here. List of Cepheus rulesets here. In this post, I wanted to list a lot of the resources and tools I've found useful for … Continue reading The New OSR 3: The Many Tools of Cepheus
In my last post, I tried to make a case for using the Cepheus Engine (open source Traveller) as the basis for a OSR-like community. Since it's a completely open-source game, anyone can make their own version, and a number of people have. In this post, I wanted to talk about some of the major … Continue reading The New OSR 2: The Many Engines of Cepheus
Later this week, I'll be running a one-shot of Dancers in the Dreaming City, a one-page weird fantasy RPG from Micah Anderson. It's designed to replicate the Elric tales of Michael Moorcock. The rules are based on the game Whats So Cool About outer Space by Jared Sinclair. The system is simple. Each player has … Continue reading Dancers in the Dreaming City: A character sheet for an Elric-inspired one page RPG
There's a fun little use universal RPG system by Cakebread & Walton called the OneDice system. The OneDice system The basic mechanic is simple - you roll a single six-sided die (hence the name), and add the appropriate ability score (Strong, Clever, or Quick), plus any skill levels. The result must beat a particular Target … Continue reading OneDice Pulp: Mini-Review and Custom Character Sheet for a pulp adventure RPG.
In the previous post, I discussed the setting I generated for Vaults of Vaarn, the science fantasy RPG. I thought it might be helpful to also post the pregen characters I provided for my players as well. These were made with the custom Vault of Vaarn charcter sheet I posted previously. vov_pregensDownload
I've just run a session of Vaults of Vaarn, the weird science fantasy RPG from Leo Hunt. It's one of my favorite settings, with lots of Dying Earth, post-apocalyptic flavor to it. Vaults of Vaarn #3 To prepare for the session, I used the region generation method from the Vaults of Vaarn #3 zine, which … Continue reading The Labyrinth – a mini-setting for Vaults of Vaarn
First of all, do we need a new OSR? No, of course not. There's no shortage of people still creating, playing, or just discussing D&D-style games, with oceans of interesting material available. Also, I'm not going to quibble over the definition of the OSR, or whether it's "alive" or "dead". A lot of photons have … Continue reading The New OSR: The case for the Cepheus Engine
I recently ran a session of Helm, the new OSR system from Jon Davis (sivads-sanctum.itch.io). It's a genuinely fun little system, very much worth picking up. Here's some system notes and a couple of character sheets. Making Characters The character generation system is quite unique. You roll a 1d6 for each body location - Head, … Continue reading Helm: A mini-review and character sheet for a low fantasy game
Polyhedral Nonsense 