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'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
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
This isn’t a pop-culture blog. I don’t do movie reviews, and I’m not going to start now. However, I just got back from a screening of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the new movie by Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, and I wanted to discuss it a bit, at least in RPG terms. I don’t … Continue reading Everything Everywhere All at Once: Initial thoughts on making it a game
There have been a number of RPGs that have held the official Star Trek license over the years: Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures (the current rights holder), the 1990s Last Unicorn Games series of books (one game for each TV series), the 1980s Star Trek RPG from FASA, and even the long-forgotten 1978 Heritage Models game … Continue reading These are the Unofficial Voyages…Non-licensed Star Trek RPGs.
In 1956, the English writer Colin Wilson released the book The Outsider. It was sort a cultural and literary analysis of so-called "outsider" figures, and served as an early introduction to existentialism. The book received a lot of early acclaim from critics, and Wilson was as feted one of the "angry young men" of his … Continue reading Planet of the Spiders: A campaign idea I’ll probably never get around to.
I’ve finished up my conversion of the OSR zine Lumberlands (DriveThruRPG / itch.io), the fun lumberjack fantasy setting, to the Black Hack ruleset.. I've assembled everything into two zine-sized (5.5" x 8.5") PDFs that can be downloaded and printed. Remember that you'll need a copy of both the Black Hack and the Lumberlands zine to … Continue reading Lumberlands: A Black Hack conversion in two PDF booklets
At Travellercon/USA 2021 I got to play in a great session of Traveller: 1700. This is a free setting for Classic Traveller created by Greg Caires, originally published in the Freelance Traveller fanzine. It's available for download over at the Freelance Traveller site. Though designed for Classic Traveller, it's easily compatible with more modern versions, and … Continue reading Traveller: 1700 – A custom character sheet and some recommended Colonial American RPG books
OK - It's not either of those things. But I make a lot of character sheets, and have occasionally been asked about my process. This isn't in any sense a complete guide, just some notes and ideas I've had while designing sheets that some might find useful. This is generally intended to create print PDFs, … Continue reading The universally complete and infallibly correct guide to creating your own custom RPG character sheet.
Polyhedral Nonsense 