Operation Unfathomable is a super-fun, gonzo OSR underground wilderness crawl by Jason Sholtis. I've run it a few times using the Black Hack OSR rules set. The book comes with ten pregenerated characters for Swords & Wizardry and other old-school D&D-style RPG. To make it easier for myself, I took the characters and converted them … Continue reading Operation Unfathomable: Black Hack Pregens
There's a game jam on itch.io called the HexDrive Zine Jam. It's ending tonight. It's a collection of articles for the D&D Spelljammer setting, but only by people who have never actually read the setting. Just under the wire, I've added my own contribution - The Broken Shroud. It's a short article about a Sargasso-sea like … Continue reading A Spelljammer Zine by people who haven’t read Spelljammer
I've made an ODT (Open Document Text file) template to create custom classes to match the style found in the Black Hack Second Edition book. I've designed it in LibreOffice. You can add your own text and images. You can print it directly or export it to a PDF. BH2E_Template (ODT) You'll need the following … Continue reading The Black Hack: Custom Template for Classes
I just got my copy of Barbarians of the Ruined Earth, a gonzo post-apocalyptic RPG using the Black Hack rules by Mike Evans. I got a chance to play this at the last Gen Con, and I'm happy to finally have the finished version. It's heavily inspired by the old Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon from … Continue reading Barbarians of the Ruined Earth: Revised character sheets
Scarlet Heroes (DriveThru Link) is an OSR style fantasy RPG designed for use by a GM running a session with only one player. It uses the same stats as most OSR/D&D games, but the rules are modified so that a single player is still able to survive adventures designed for full parties. The free Quickstart … Continue reading Scarlet Heroes – D&D for one player – Fillable Character Sheets
For no particular reason, I've put together a comparison chart of the charm person spell between most early editions of D&D and all of the OSR games I own. While generating it, I noticed a lot of D&D/OSR systems use ogres as a dividing line ("no larger than a ogre") as to whether or not … Continue reading Charming an Ogre: Same Spell, different systems
For my one-shot of the Noir Hack, I created a new house rule called the Straight Dope. It's based on the Flashlight/Smokes idea from the Cthulhu Hack. The idea is to model the social connections a character might have for particular institutions, that they could use to get information or make things happen. Each community … Continue reading Noir Hack: The Straight Dope – House Rule (with new character sheet)
I've just tried running a one-shot of Noir Hack, the film noir version of the OSR RPG Black Hack. To prepare for my game, I created a few new classes. Reporter Ink-Slingers, Gossip Columnists, Muckrakers Starting HP: d8+4 HP Per Level/Resting: 1d8 Weapon and Armor Proficiencies: Any Attack Damage: 1d6 Armed /1d4 Unarmed or Improvising … Continue reading Noir Hack – New Classes: Reporter, Citizen, & Swell
I've been throwing together new character sheets all weekend, and thought I'd add one more: The Noir Hack is Michael Brown's version of the Black Hack, designed to replicate old noir novels and movies. It's main innovation is the Darkness usage die, used to track the characters trauma and dark past. I've made a fillable … Continue reading Noir Hack – Character Sheets for a film noir version of the Black Hack
I've gotten a lot of use from this list of old & obsolete color names for OSR games. They're great for naming places, ancient books, etc. https://www.wordnik.com/lists/archaic-colours Just attach a color to the name of of something, and you're set Porphyrous Ooze The Pyrrhous Sea Codex Rubiginous The Leucochroic Throne Etc..
