Here are some of my favorite articles by the Old-School D&D blogosphere.
DM Style Guides (DMs describe how they run D&D)
- How to Awesome-up Your Players
- Building a Better GM
- Swiss Referee Style Guide/Halberds and Helmets
- Hazard System
- Bryce Lynch’s Adventure Design Tips Summarized and Explained
- Last Gasp Grimoire
- How I Run Into the Odd
- The Principia Apocrypha
- How I Run a Citycrawl Campaign
- DM Tips (from Nate Lumpkin)
Getting Started in D&D
- Old Schoolin’: How to Get Started
- On a Guide For New Dungeon Masters
- Advice for the Newly Afflicted
- How to Get Started Playing Old-School D&D for Free
- Twenty Questions for your Campaign Setting
OSR Theory
- D&D isn’t a Game, it’s Games
- Roleplaytime
- Picaro and the “Story” of D&D
- Phylotomy’s Musings: Why the original edition of D&D (The White Box) was written the way it was.
- Why OD&D (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)
- On the Oracular Power of Dice
- An Introduction to Sandbox Play
- Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
- Why D&D Has Lots of Rules for Combat
- Analog, Digital, Procedural
- My Trinity of Old School Gaming (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)
- XP for Loot in D&D
- “D&D Is Terrible For Anything But Combat”: The Myth Asploded
- Game Design as Common Law
- Ride the Iceberg
- The Death of the Wandering Monster Table
- The West Marches
- Building Houses for Murderhoboes
- The Links to Wisdom
- OSR-Style Challenges: “Rulings Not Rules” is Insufficient
- Old School Space vs New School Time
- Encouraging Scheming
- Jeff’s Threefold Model
- The Secret Names of God and the Wizard Trap
- Conceptual density (or ‘What are RPG books *for*, anyway?’)
- Table-Centric Design
- Weird Materialism and the OSR
- The Classic Dungeon Crawl
Running the Game
- The Quantum Ogre
- Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War
- The Open Table Manifesto
- eXPloration
- Natural Language and Gross Positioning
- Held Kinetic Energy
- State of the Art: Improvements the OSR has made over the original rules
- Expose your Prep
- Volatility
- The Dark Side of OSR Traps
- Magic Items are Born not Made
Adventures, Challenges, and Situations
- The Bryce Lynch Primer on Adventure Design
- The Goblin Punch Guide to Secret Doors
- How Skerples Plans and Writes RPG Books
- 1d122 OSR-Style Challenges
- Party like it’s 999
- Don’t Prep Plots
- How Do We Start This Crazy Adventure?
- d50 Puzzle Monster Death Requirements
- Solving 20 “Black Door” challenges
Adventure Design
Dungeon Design
- Jaquaying the Dungeon
- Dungeon Layout, Map Flow and Old-School game Design
- What is Tested?
- The Elementary Principles of Dungeon Design and a follow-up Dungeon Mapping
- Tricks, Empty Rooms, & Basic Trap Design
- The Ice and Ruin Dungeon Maker
- Cyclic Dungeon Generation
- How to Build a Dungeon
- Quality Dungeons
- Megadungeon Resources
- Interesting and useful Dungeon Descriptions
- d20 Traps
- 51 Black Doors
- Three Step Dungeons
Wilderness Design
- Mythic Ecology (Essential Reading)
- Dispelling a Myth – Sandbox Prep
- A Method For making a D&D Sandbox
- How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox (Very in-depth)
- Have a Nicer Trip
- A Procedure for Exploring the Wilderness
- Ecosystem Generator
- In Praise of the Six-Mile Hex
- Text Mapper, By Alex Shroeder
Pre-built hexcrawls
Items, Tools, and Treasure
Characters