Here are some of my favorite posts from the Old-School D&D blogosphere. Other lists can be found at Traverse Fantasy, Papers and Pencils, Necropraxis, Links to Wisdom, and Knock! Magazine. The list below covers up to around 2021. My newsletter, The Glatisant, keeps you up do date with the best blog posts after that point.
- 1d124 OSR-Style Challenges
- 34 Good Traps
- 51 Black Doors
- 7 Myths Everyone Believes About Druids
- A 16 HP Dragon
- A conversation about the assumptions of OSR play
- A Procedure for Exploring the Wilderness
- A Procedure for Wandering Monsters
- A Spell Called Catherine
- A Structure for Classic Exploration Procedure
- Abstracting Missiles
- An RPG Lexicon
- An Updated Version of My Chase Rules
- Analog, Digital, Procedural
- Anti-Canon Worlds and the UVG
- Arts and Craft: Morbidly Encumbered Edition
- Black Glass
- Bryce Lynch’s Adventure Design Tips Summarized and Explained
- Building Houses for Murderhoboes
- Calibrating Your Expectations
- Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War
- Conceptual density (or ‘What are RPG books *for*, anyway?’)
- Cyclic Dungeon Generation
- D&D is Anti-Medieval
- D&D isn’t a Game, it’s Games
- d100 Minor Magical Items
- d100 Oddities for New Characters
- d50 Puzzle Monster Death Requirements
- Decisive Combat
- Dissociated Mechanics
- Do Not Take Me For Some Turner of Cheap Tricks
- Don’t Prep Plots
- Downtime Activities series
- Dungeon Checklist
- Dungeon Design and Stocking – with examples!
- Dungeon Layout, Map Flow and Old-School game Design
- Encouraging Scheming
- Encouraging Scheming
- Enough Dweeb Adventures
- eXPloration
- Expose your Prep
- False Hydra
- False Machine Guide to Adventure Design: Part 1, Part 2
- Fantasy F*ckin’ Vietnam
- Flux Space in Dungeons
- Game Design as Common Law
- Goblin Punch Guide to Adventure Design
- God Hates Orcs
- Guide to Adventure Writing
- Gygaxian “Naturalism”
- Have a Nicer Trip
- Hazard System
- Held Kinetic Energy in Old School Combat Arenas
- Hireling Morale and Fear
- How I did my megadungeon
- How I Run a Citycrawl Campaign
- How I Run Into the Odd
- How to Build a Dungeon
- How to Get Started Playing Old-School D&D for Free
- How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox
- I got your threefold model right here, buddy!
- I’d Hit That
- Impact
- In Corpathium
- In Praise of the Six-Mile Hex
- Interesting and useful Dungeon Descriptions
- Jaquaying the Dungeon (later renamed to “Xandering the Dungeon”)
- Just Three Hexes – Campaign Starters
- Just Use Bears
- Lair of the Lamb: Final
- Landmark, Hidden, Secret
- Less Rules to Do More
- Magic Items are Born not Made
- Making Encumbrance Work
- Medieval Price List
- Memory Problems
- Minimalist Gaming Doesn’t Exist
- Monster Design and Necessity
- Monster Menu-All Part 1: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual
- Morgan Brackish Meadows’ Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker
- My Trinity of Old School Gaming (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)
- Mythic Ecology
- Natural Language and Gross Positioning
- No Homework!
- Not all Balance is the Same
- Old School Space vs New School Time
- Old Schoolin’: How to Get Started
- On Callers
- On Romantic Fantasy and OSR D&D
- On Set Design
- On Thief Skills in Classic D&D
- On the Oracular Power of Dice
- One Page Dungeon Design
- OSR Aesthetics of Ruin
- OSR-Style Challenges: “Rulings Not Rules” is Insufficient
- Party like it’s 999
- Pathcrawl
- Phylotomy’s Musings
- Picaro and the “Story” of D&D
- Pleasures of the OSR series
- Pointcrawl Series Index
- Proceduralism and Doctrine of Proceduralism
- Punth: A Primer
- Quality Dungeons
- Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
- Ride the Iceberg
- Roleplaytime
- Sharpening the Axe – How I Plan and Write RPG Books
- Shields Shall be Splintered
- Six Cultures of Play
- Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine
- So You Want To Build a Dungeon?
- Solving 20 “Black Door” challenges
- State of the Art: Improvements the OSR has made over the original rules
- Sticky Goblins
- Structuring Encounter Tables, Amended & Restated
- Super-simple Combat Maneuvers
- Table-Centric Design
- Terminology – Diegetic vs Non-Diegetic
- The Auction of the first Hundred Words
- The Bryce Lynch Primer on Adventure Design
- The Classic Dungeon Crawl
- The Dark Side of OSR Traps
- The Death of the Wandering Monster
- The Elementary Principles of Dungeon Design
- The Genres the OSR can’t do
- The GLOG
- The Goblin Punch Guide to Secret Doors
- The Gygax ’75 Challenge
- The ICI Doctrine: Information, Choice Impact
- The Invisible Rulebooks
- The long haul: Time and Distance in D&D
- The New School, the Old School, and 5th Edition D&D
- The Open Table Manifesto
- The Perfect Potion List
- The Principia Apocrypha
- The Quantum Ogre
- The Sandbox Triangle
- The Secret Names of God and the Wizard Trap
- The West Marches
- Thoughts Regarding Character Mortality and Old School Dungeons and Dragons
- Three Step Dungeons
- Tomb of the Serpent Kings Megapost
- Towards a Taxonomy of Trick Monsters
- Toybox-style play
- Transparent DMing
- Twenty Questions for your Campaign Setting
- Two-week megadungeon
- Weird Materialism and the OSR
- What is Tested?
- When all you have is a hammer: item-based problem-solving in OSR D&D
- Why D&D Has Lots of Rules for Combat
- Why I Prefer OD&D
- XP for Exploration – Maps, Monster Drawings, and More!
- XP for Loot in D&D