Maze Rats is Deal of the Day on DrivethruRPG! Get my best-selling OSR intro game for just $1.49! Today only!

From the product description:

“The referee advice is gold. I know of few better sources for concisely explaining what to prioritize when running this sort of game.” – Brendan S, Necropraxis, Wonder and Wickedness

“I often quibble with RPG magic systems either being too complex or too restrictive, but this hit a great balance between flexibility and ease-of-use, while adding a special dash of creativity and Lady Luck.” – Ars Magisterii

“Maze Rats is a light, brutal roleplaying game of fantasy adventure which is supported by random inspiration aplenty, which lends itself to a lighter, slightly whimsical tone. It is quick to learn, quick to teach, and easy to play,relying on player ingenuity and cleverness rather than a reliance upon the mechanics.” – Reviews from R’lyeh

Maze Rats is an RPG and sandbox toolkit for old-school-style adventuring. It contains a single, compact page of rules, a one-page character creation guide, a hand-drawn character sheet, and eight pages of 36-item random tables, rollable with two six-sided dice. Each page contains 9-12 tables, covering spell generation, monster generation, NPCs, treasures, cities, wildernesses, and dungeons. If you run (or have always wanted to run) open sandbox adventures, Maze Rats offers everything you need in a compact, easily-referenced format. Also included is two pages of advice for preparing and running open-world games in the OSR style.

The game system itself is 2d6 based. Character are extremely quick to generate, making it great for convention games, one-shots, or introducing new players. The game is highly lethal, and assumes a style of play where caution is essential to long-term survival. It is technically classless, but the leveling options allow players to specialize in fighting, thievery or wizardry or some mixture of the three. Magic is simple and chaotic, with new randomly-generated spells filling the magic-user’s head each night. Everything about the game is designed to be as clean, fast, and intuitive as possible, while driving players towards creative solutions rather than brute force (though brute force is always an option).

Buy it here!

Here’s a fun dice pool system. I’ve tested it and it works fine. There was a discussion about it at one point on Michael Prescott’s G+ feed, I think, but now that that’s going away I want to preserve it somewhere. Someone else (maybe Michael) started calling it Milton dice so now that’s what it’s called.

1. Your attributes and your skills give you a number of d6s to roll.
2. The GM sets a target number to hit.
3. Roll those dice.
4. Add up the results on all the dice, but 4s, 5s, and 6s count as 0s. (So for example, you roll 4 dice and get 1, 1, 3, 4. Your total is 5 because the 4 counts as 0, and you just add up the 1, 1, and 3.)
5. If your total is equal or greater than the target number, then you succeed.

What’s cool about this system?

1. By only counting 1s, 2s, and 3s, each die has an average result of 1. This is because 1+2+3=6 and there are six sides on a die. It makes things really easy to calculate. If I’m rolling 5 dice, then my average result is going to be 5. Likewise, setting target numbers is easy. A TN of 5 will probably be hit by a character rolling that many dice. It has a pleasing transparency that a lot of dice pool systems lack, as Luka pointed out. The odds are a little funky in the 1 or 2 dice range, but it evens out nicely after that.
2. You only have to add up 1s, 2s, and 3s, which makes the addition really fast.
3. You can distribute 6 points around a d6 in other ways, like make 1 and 2 be worth 0, 3 and 4 be worth 1, and 5 and 6 be worth 2, but that gets confusing without custom dice. This uses the pips the dice already have.

More and more books in the OSR have been making layout and information design a priority, in particular the “control panel” format that puts all of the relevant information from a single topic on a single page (or two page spread). It’s a term I first used on my video review of B/X essentials, but it seems to have hit a chord. Visuals often take priority, with flowcharts and diagrams replacing traditional text, in order to facilitate faster absorption of the information. I’ve put a bunch of examples below.

It got me wondering whether you could make an entire RPG in the form of cardstock handouts, somewhere between A4 and A5 sized. Player wants to play a wizard? Hand him the card with the magic rules and the card with the spell list. Going exploring on hex C12? The DM pulls out the card for that hex and places it behind the screen. Going shopping and need to see what goods are available at a high-end potion shop? Pull out that card and put it in the middle of the table.

There’s a questionnaire going around the blogosphere. In an attempt to get this blog going again, here’s my take:

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:

Goblin Punch’s essay on OSR-style challenges was the thing that really solidified in my mind what it was that I loved about OSR games.

2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:

3. Best OSR module/supplement:

Probably the Hot Springs Island books. They aren’t perfect, but they take so many advances that the OSR has made over the last decade and wrap it all up in one place.

4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):

The one that I’ve used the most is probably Shields Shall Be Splintered.

5. How I found out about the OSR:

I don’t remember. I most likely stumbled onto blogs like Last Gasp, PDnDwPS, and Jeff’s Game Blog while looking for ways to reinvigorate my RPG games.

6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:

The links to wisdom, hands down.

7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:

Google Plus, for now.

8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:

Twitter, Reddit, YouTube.

9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:

The most important attributes of a GM are speed, impartiality, and decisiveness.

10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:

The one I probably had the most fun with was the Faserip Marvel system.

11. Why I like OSR stuff:

I like having my problem solving skills challenges while in weird and unpredictable situations. I’m also a sucker for great worldbuilding, and no one does that better than the OSR.

12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:

Troika! is a planescapesque fever dream of wonderfully flavorful classes and a distinctly British sense of humor. A Thousand Thousand Islands has some of the best writing and art I’ve ever seen in an RPG product, and details a super-refreshing non-western setting.

13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:

I’m going to say Last Gasp Grimoire, but I try to never miss a post from Necropraxis, Goblin Punch, False Machine, and Cave Girl’s Game Stuff.

14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:

Maze Rats, currently game of the month on Reddit. You get a complete OSR game and toolkit in a single pamphlet you can print out at home. I needed a game I could hand out to my 5th grade players, so I made it.

15. I’m currently running/playing:

Tomb of the Serpent Kings using Knave.

16. I don’t care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:

What’s there to care about?

17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:

Michael Prescott, 2-page dungeon-maker extraordinaire, put out a crowd-sourced dungeon recently called the Halls Untoward. It’s pay-what-you-want on Drive Thru RPG and it’s really good, especially his fantastic illustrations. I’m planning on running it for my 5th-graders, so as usual I’m doing some reformatting. I’ve taken the minimaps of each part of the dungeon, cut them out, stuck them in the middle of a letter-sized page, and then cut out each room description and pasted them right next to each room. The original book is already pretty easy to use thanks to the minimaps, but the larger real estate of a letter page allows for zero information loss while eliminating page flipping and allowing for immediate visualization of each room’s layout and surroundings. Check it out.