EXTRA Shiny TTRPG links

Happy GLoGmas to Xaosseed at Seed of Worlds! In honor of your Shiny TTRPG links posting, I've gone through all 254 of your Shiny TTRPG links posts and picked out my favourite from each, producing the following list of EXTRA Shiny TTRPG links.

1. Tolkienian Science Fantasy - Replacing the PC Species in which DIY & Dragons lays out a notion of Vulcan-as-Elf, Klingon-as-Dwarf, etc. and what it would look like if we had Tolkien's fantasy species in a Science Fantasy setting. Chiefly added here because it cites its sources (mostly From the Sorcerer's Skull) and thus packs a lot of good Science Fantasy Meat into a single set of bones.

2. MONSTER REACTION SUBTABLE FOR OLD SCHOOL D&D, which is exactly what it sounds like. Extended monster reaction tables (subtables) for Old School D&D. Yes, this manticore is Unfriendly / May Attack, but how exactly? Well, on a 3 on a d6, it is 'Surprised while eating prey' which is an encounter I probably wouldn't have come up on my own.

3. Film Noir Concepts in Dungeons & Dragons offering a sound introduction to what exactly Film Noir is and how you can do it in D&D 5e. Many of the mechanical insights are trite today but important half here is the second half, where the bare bones concepts of Film Noir are laid out alongside a bunch of film recs. Read the second half.

4. Planescape: Aeon Mechanisms, the Wreckage of Primordial Order in which Daily Adventure Prompts puts forward an alternate idea of what a Lawful plane could look like and how adventuring on one might be fun. The basic premise is that this was the broken down, prototype version of current reality. When it broke, it broke hard, scattering highly advanced one-off bits of technology and mechanical dungeons and little robot people all throughout the cosmos. Sure, that seems a lot more gameable than the standard version of Mechanicus.

5. Why we don’t like puzzles in ttRPGs, which gives a list of why a group might not like puzzle elements in their TTRPG. This is easily inverted into a checklist of things not to do with your puzzle.

6. Pickman's Guest, a four and a half minute short based off the HP Lovecraft story, "Pickman's Model".

7. 10+20 Setting Questions for Sci-Fi Games which is exactly what it says on the tin. Thirty questions (ten from Archon's Court, twenty from Throne of Salt) about your Sci-Fi setting.

8. Why is Your Villain Needlessly Exposing Themselves To Danger? by the Literary Mercenary, who lays out a fairly common problem for new storytellers: villains who do things not because they make sense, but because the plot demands it of them. It's a good introduction to the idea of character-first GMing.

9. My Top 3 Non-Violent Quest Hooks from The Graverobber's Guide. I'm particularly fond of the second one - production crew for a local playwright.

10. Adventure RPGs and Time, which invites us to explore the Bergsonian nature of time. That is, the qualitative differences between wilderness fast travel and ten minute turns, or between initiative vs. non-initiative time.

11. Part 2 of Pointcrawls Applied by The Adventuring Day, in which the Overloaded Encounter Die is actually gamed out. You don't see this sort of empiricism in OSR spaces, where people actually try out rules before suggesting them.

12. Another post from Daily Adventure Prompts, this time going into how Magocracies would work out in practice. Wizards as strongmen, magical infrastructure built in impractical locations, sorcerers as natural aristocrats.

13. Measuring long distances in D&D – time matters from Full Moon Storytelling, which advocates for the use of the League (how far a person can walk on foot in an hour) and Daylong Journey (ditto, but for an all day hike) in measuring D&D distances.

14. The post introducing MOSAIC Strict from Trilemma Adventures, which has been wriggling around the glogosphere ever since.

15. Adventure Lookup by Matt Colville etal. Exactly what it sounds like a - website that you can look up adventure modules on.

16. Creating monster behavior instead of monster abilities by the Luminescent Lich, wherein an approach to bestiary which centers monster behaviors and personality is mooted.

17. A Reference Sheet: On Creating (Outdoor) Dungeon Doors which asks the question "Why do dungeons have doors?" and flips it on its head to answer what we can use instead to serve those purposes in an outdoor dungeon.

18. some thoughts on domain-level play from Udan-Adan, mostly with the intent of easing the GM into that style of play as much as it eases the players in.

19. The Fated Symphonies from Goodberry Monthly, which is one of the few approaches to bardic magic that I don't find painfully twee.

20. Wizards in Rayon Stockings: Some worldbuilding notes on plastics. A great topic to visit if you ever worry about what the local alchemists are up to.

21. Knight at the Opera's Urban Crawl Series which I was using even before I saw this links post. Honorable mention to On Collective Nouns for Fantasy Dungeons & Dragons Monsters & Creatures from Hack & Slash.

22. Creature Series 2: Bramblet at Proxima Proletariat, describing the thorned pig in great detail. As suggested by the title, it's one of three similar such posts, each for a different monster.

23. Windfalls and Wyrmlings, a campaign seed from Daily Adventure Prompts.

24. Humanizing the Monster by Glass Bird Games, in which someone does something unspeakable to a basilisk, but also we get a very nice table of humanizing vs. dehumanizing monster traits.

25. Magic, Madness, & Sadness Part IV - A Sense of Enchantment, part of a series on how the non-necromancers 'go bad' in the manner that a lich might.

26. GLOG: Spaceships, Or: GLOGSTAR over on Mad Queen's Court, along with a series of mission hooks for the same from A Blasted Cratered Land.

27. Space Travel Procedures from Coppers and Boars. Most useful for the random space encounter table, which is fairly comprehensive.

28. Wildjammer: More Adventures in Space! from SurrealSage on reddit, who is putting out a hundred odd pages of Spelljammer content for free.

29. Kill Several Demons, a one page dungeon from Dead Tree, No Shelter.

30. The Best Of list from Wandering Gamist, with a focus on dungeon design, mapping and wildenrness as dungeon.

31. Key and Lock Arts from Whimsical Mountain. First post of theirs I've read and still just as charming.

32. A double feature of Mothership: Thoughts and Mothership: Further Thoughts from Iron & Ink, which were technically from links post 31, but in my defense 32 was very short.

33. A fun one this time: Prismatic Wasteland is Rating the Deck of Many Things, each card out of five stars.

34. Some encounters in the blue desert, which ought be experienced rather than explained.

35. Who, Whom, Why from Numbers Aren't Real. What if Dresden Files vibe, but not Dresden Files toxic masculinity? Also some musings on Pact.

36. Another double feature of Safety Tools and Advice for Running Horror Games over on Rise Up Comus.

37. More Cheap Tricks from Phlox, notable especially in that it links to the whole 'cheap tricks' bandwgon of 2021. Worth a read.

38. Luke Gearing on Using Markdown and Pandoc to Make RPG Documents for Free. Very useful for those among us who want to make a PDF.

39. Neo-classical Gaming Revisited from Trollsymth, wherein the game getting the neo-classical facelift is WotC's Strixhaven setting.

40. The classic Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items from Against the Wicked City.

41. Banking Wizards from Numbers Aren't Real, which are surprisingly fun to play. Audit that Dragon!

42. Donut Valley compares Travel Procedures from six different sources: BoB, AiME, DW, Colverse, Angryverse, ZH

43. Demographics Quick Rule-of-Thumb from Delta's D&D Hotspot. Assuming a population of such and such million people, how many cities, towns, castles and villages should we expect there to be? Historically speaking? Shit tons.

44. Inverse Ravenloft from Methods & Madness. A sketch of what would happen if you inverted the outward appearance of Curse of Strahd so that all darkness is light and all horror beauty, but kept the basic plot. The answer? Faerie Queendom.

45. Pink Mirrorcoat: A Sliding Scale of Shadowrun from Orbital Crypt combines two of my favourite things: Shadowrun and triangle diagrams.

46. Quality Reusable Traps from Lapidary Ossuary presents six fairly odd traps, but then breaks them down into their fundamental parts and rebuilds them as six new traps that operate on the same theme. Good thought exercise.

47. Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice a campaign retrospective on using Boot Hill for an intrigue focused campaign. It apparently works a lot better than you'd expect.

48. Subterranean Thoughts from Knight at the Opera, going into how the underground/underdark differs from the overworld in simple terms of mobility.

49. After Gehenna from Cavegirl's Game Stuff. What if you had a coterie of modern day VtM vampires go into torpor for a millenia or two and wake up after Gehenna has come and gone? This seems like a plausible enough answer.

50. Knight at the Opera's Untested Theory of Nautical Campaigns. The theory is that while you need a Sailing minigame, you want to have the minigame balanced against other flavours of gameplay so it doesn't get boring.

51. 17th Century Character Starter from the Luminescent Lich. Mostly here as a demonstration of a minimum-viable lifepath system generator. Which isn't to say that it isn't good in its own right - the baked in effort of doing one at all ensures it'll always be pretty decent.

52. Drinking Problems: The Trouble with Booze Rules in Games which offers us the core insight that there's a reason why people drink socially: it's to be social. Most game rules for drinking ignore that.

53. Fuck 5 Room Dungeons from Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet is part three of an attempt to get into, improve upon and eventually dismiss the then-popular five room dungeon concept. Good as an introduction to the concept of a 5 Room Dungeon. Once you know what one is, you'll start seeing them everywhere.

54. Role and Teamwork Features from Portals and Pegasi are a direct response to the mono-class party bonuses from Goblin Guts v2. It suggests having the mono-class bonuses apply even if just two members of the party are the same class.

55. The start of Knight at the Opera's three part Alternative Economics series. Good to read through the whole thing once in a while.

56. +3 Swords from Profane Ape advocates for the (frankly objectively correct) opinion that numerical bonuses from swords should be due to their physical construction and independent of magic.

57. Romance plots in RPGs from Against the Wicked City, describing what you need to make a good romance plot in an RPG. It's easier than you'd think, once you remember you're writing for an RPG and not cooking up the next best selling romance novel.

58. Eldritch Fields presents a set of swashbuckling combat house rules for LotFP/OSR games. Notably has rules for grappling and knocking people out with trudgeons as well.

59. Dirt Simple Deterministic Group Initiative from Library of Attnam. The whole idea of deterministic group initiative is a fun one, even if you don't go for exactly this implementation.

60. Dave's Motel and Diner, a BUCKETS OF BLOOD-esque location from Haruspex's Hovel. The same shitty diner, anywhere you wind up.

61. Mythic Underworld: Ishtar and Ereshkigal from Semper Initiatvus Unum, which I have personally put to good use in my own Underworld hexcrawl. In particular: multiple gates, bird demons of various sizes, zombies serving goddesses.

62. Hexagonal Map of London from the rare non-OSR blog being linked, Mapping London. It's exactly what it says it is: a hex map of London.

63. Six Starter Spellbooks from Mazirian's Garden. It's a novel way to characterize your first level Magic Users, for sure.

64. Crab Dungeon offers a strong first post on blog with The Crab Approaches, a list of 1d10 crab themed monsters.

65. This was originally a link to five random tables from d4 Caltrops, but I've decided to substitute a link to their full random table catalog. Nine times out of ten, if I want a random table for something, I can find one there.

66. Defense by Bastionland, which is on the face of it a discussion of how the various defensive attributes (Hit Protection, Strength and Armour) compare. Good glimpse into how the rules sausage is made, though.

67. Making Good Rumors (And Later, Dungeons) from Dragonfruit. A good walkthrough for the 'make up some rumours, build a dungeon inspired by those rumours' genre of dungeon design.

68. Pas d'armes from Tales of the Lunar Lands suggests putting forward the practice of the same name into your campaigns. A knight guarding a narrow bridge, dueling any other knights who pass through and taking a token from any who are defeated.

69. A tumblr post from David J Prokopetz talking about what if the animated skeletons in the local graveyard were friendly. Which in turn becomes a discussion of what a skeleton is, when it's not a nameless deadite for you to fight.

70. Anti-Features — The Equipment List by Simulacrum introduces the concept of an anti-feature (a feature that people keep putting a lot of work into including, but which nobody is excited to have included) and then poins to equipment lists as one of the most common cases of this offense.

71. A double feature of Negative Space from Save vs. Total Party Kill and a response to it, Fuck-You Design from Distant Lands.

72. In the spirit of HD 1, AC leather, Sword 1d6, the Orc Rehabilitation Commission gives us A Visit from the Goon Squad - ways to make squads of low level goons feel different without changing their stats much.

73. The notion of Eliminative progress tables from Liche's Libram. It's a good way to structure a lot of different things, a tool for most GMing toolboxes.

74. The Retired Adventurer answers a question I recently found myself asking in Types of Terrain on Hex Maps: what sorts of terrain types go on your hex map?

75. Finding spells is better than choosing them from Methods & Madness puts forward that just as the Fighter doesn't get to pick what magic sword they get at the end of the dungeon, the Wizard shouldn't get to pick what spells they get.

76. Parts One Two of Running the City by the Alexandrian. Pretty good advice for urban pointcrawls.

77. Tales of the Lunar Lands weighing in with the suggestion that You Should Have Your PCs Get Captured More

78. Some Writing Advice is Crap from Grumpy Wizard, which helpfully reminds us that just because it worked for INSERT FAMOUS AUTHOR HERE, doesn't mean it's going to work for you.

79. The Golemist and All His Works from Iconoclastic Flow, a design journal for coming up with a Golem-making wizard.

80. In a similar spirit, Throne of Salt gives us some thoughts on Fixing Eclipse Phase with the self-imposed challenge of not being allowed to cut things that are just plain stupid.

81. A return to Crab Dungeon with Crab Shack Crafting, which is frankly a whole adventure in a can.

82. Computer Hacking in RPGs from Knight at the Opera lays out the problems with most Hacking minigames and puts forward yet another stab at doing a good one.

83. Notes on a semi-successful skill system from Against the Wicked City, which is another one that makes the link by virtue of having actually tested the mechanic the post is suggesting. Cannot stress enough how important that is.

84. Bamboo – 10-foot pole but better from Goobernut puts forward the fairly convincing argument that a length of bamboo is better than a standard 10 foot pole.

85. Stealth Turns from Mindstorm, which combine Just in Time resolution with a Bergsonian sense of textured time - but this time for sneaking.

86. The Rotless from the Nothic's Eye, part one of several posts for the Qal Ashen setting. Go read through them all, they're worth it.

87. The GLOG Book of Spells from Coins and Scrolls, listing nearly 300 spells from across Skerple's works. Also links to Library of Attnam's big list of wizards.

88. Homicidally Inclined Persons Of No Fixed Address puts forward the idea of a Waqf - a kind of permanent charitable endowment under Islamic law - as a quest giver. The idea is that while the trustees cannot change the underlying purpose of a waqf, they can creatively re-interpret an endowment to 'protect and maintain this site' as 'hire adventurers to kill the monsters that keep people from reaching it'.

89. The Masquerade Grid for VtM by Gavegirl's Game Stuff. Not just useful for VtM though - the procedure can be translated into any other game where there is a focus on coverups.

90. I'm Not Familiar, a procedure from Tales of the Lunar Lands for generating weird-ass familiars.

91. Mangayaw’s Economy of Commodities and Debt from Goobernut's Blog lays out a fairly workable barter economy, integrated with social caste in their early Philippine-inspired Mangayaw setting.

92. Languages for This Haunted Land by Rotten Pulp. The premise is a familiar one - what if everything could speak? - but instead of assuming normalcy and a depressing world in which nothing wants to talk, it assumes a fairy tale setting (This Haunted Land) where everything is indeed willing to talk.

93. Magic Mirrors from Dead Tree, No Shelter. Eight of them.

94. Another link to outside the community: homunculus argument on how having weird impractical cultural customs. Like, in the example given, a city that's full of sacred white doves who (being doves) shit everywhere constantly. Don't edit out the shit or the doves - edit in a well-funded public sanitation department that cleans up after the sacred pests.

95. A polemic on how there are already Enough Dweeb Adventures from Kight at the Opera. Runs through the contemporary aventure module offerings from WotC and finds them lacking 'the sauce' and guilty of pulling their punches.

96. A historical treat, RPG Blogs as Fantasy Taverns. With beautifully rendered tavern signs, even.

97. A Slow Circle puts forward part two of their Social Interaction series, the one with the actual look at the framework in it.

98. Action-Intent Duality is a bit of a philosophical one, aimed at GMs. The difference between 'What are you doing?' and 'What are you trying to do?' is important, though.

99. Ask the Alexandrian #9, in which the very basic concept of 'rulings not rules' is laid out for the general public once again.

100. Despite the name, What's in that sketchy bottle? from Leicester's Ramble starts out with some musings on how going slow can be faster than hurrying up when making a ruling as a GM. It does have the random bottle table, to be clear. But it's also got other stuff. Hence the name of the blog being 'ramble'.

101. Away with you, philosophers! Talaraska has a nice safe d100 table for Wilderness Oddities.

102. The Tower of the Archmage issues an editorial: Hey #BrOSR! Grow the fuck up! in response to a bunch of twitter dweebs proclaiming that the OSR should be more racist, sexist and homophobic. Insert eye roll here.

103. Meanwhile, Mythoi gives us Kobolds: Fairy, Lizard, Dog?, a summary of historical appearances of the D&D Kobold.

104. The Secret of Wealth (plus Bonds, Arbitrage, and More) from Coins and Scrolls. It's an in-universe pamphlet for Magical Industrial Revolution.

105. Okay, maybe a little more philosophy. A Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v0.1 from Trilemma Adventures aims to classify all the things that normally get said at a D&D table by what role they play in the fundamental TTRPG gameplay loop.

106. Archons March On on Mud Flood Dungeonry. Take a normal castle or village or existing dungeon, then bury it under a huge pile of mud due to a cataclysmic mud flood. You now have a very different dungeon. Exciting!

107. Caravans from A Blasted Cratered Land lays out extensive procedures for playing a caravan focused game.

108. 15 More More Magic Items from Whose Measure God Could Not Take, acompanied by three more lists of similar scale. Delightful.

109. Untested 5E – Dynamic Save Responses from the Alexandrian. It limits itself to movement on Reflex saves to start out with, but I wonder if you couldn't extend this further.

110. The Rose Army of Dzorum from Goblin Punch, who are a delightfully Elden Ring-esque faction of NPCs.

111. Sci-Fi: An Optimistic Setting Sketch from Coins and Scrolls, the start of their Bright Conference setting.

112. Swamp of Monsters reports that "we tried estus!!!" (the healing flasks from Dark Souls) and liked them.

113. The Universal Borough Profile and its companion Universal Hex Profile offer a way to summarize what an urban area or a hex has going on in a four digit code. Good for mappers.

114. Bracklings from Ten Foot Polemic, a species of plant people who only live for a year. Shockingly playable, all the same.

115. The first part of the Architectural History for Gamers series by Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse. It addresses the topic of 'Why Build City Walls?'

116. A Knight at the Opera with Genres OSR Can't Do. Mecha, Wuxia and Superheroes are given as examples if things that are potentially fun, but necessarily contradict one or more OSR principles.

117. No one cares about anything that happened 1,000 years ago. says Rosalind Chapman, who would much rather you set whatever you were going to put that far back roughly 1-5 kings ago.

118. Delegation, Dismemberment, & Disability touts itself as half-formed, but I'd call it salient today. The central premise is that if you allow for delegation, you prevent for disememberment and disability from being character-ending conditions. The pirate captain with a hook for a hand can still triumph specifically because they have a crew to command.

119. The Cosmic Orrery proposes that Wizards Rule The World (badly) be a cornerstone of OSR history. You accumulate magical power, get a fortress, muster armies and then get ganked, leaving behind a dungeon and disgruntled minions scattered in all directions. This keeps happening, over and over again, until the whole world is cratered with doomed wizardly ambition.

120. Roles, Rules & Rolls asks Why's There A Dungeon Under Your City? and then proceeds to answer with a d6 table featuring six real life cities with dungeons.

121. Tales of the Lunar Lands gives us Interesting Terrain for Better Combat, including a long list of 'terrain tags' (with mechanics for each) and then terrain-specific tables for each, incorporating the tags.

122. The Astral and Ethereal Went From Interchangable to Overcomplicated. How Can D&D Fix Them? by DMDavid gives us the history of the Astral and Ethereal Planes, followed by a set of suggestions for simplifying them.

123. Making Portals from HexBrawlers gets into the nitty gritty of drawing doors on maps.

124. A double feature of OSR aesthetics of ruin from Against The Wicked City and Bundling Inventory from the Cosmic Orrery, for the full ruins-loot experience.

125. False Machine admits to starting a series of posts about Soft-Ass D&D, a be nice to people, solve problems without violence, Ghibli-esque sort of game.

126. A double feature of My Orcs are Different from Archives of Mu and Orcs: an Elven mistake from Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet, both of whom have thoughts on Orcs.

127. "B" is for Botanical remedies and poisons (aka Herbalism) from A Hermit Gamemaster Gazing Upon Scratched Edicts, reviewing the Herbalism NWP from 2e.

128. Ashiel of Paizo Forums gives us a high level demon army which (according to the Pathfinder rules used) is supposed to be equivalent in challenge to a single Pit Fiend. Given how the Pit Fiend obviously and woefully falls short, it's a compelling argument not to have a single beatstick boss monster in any fight that you want to really be scary.

129. The Pastel Dungeon gives us Hacking: Environment Based Magic, a vision of Hacking (in the cyberpunk sense) that is effectively spellcasting, but your spellbook is 'everything in this room with you'.

130. An Alternate Necrology of Skeletons and Zombies from Of Gods and Gamemasters suggests putting more free-willed, spontaneously generated skeletons and zombies out there. One with basically human motives - a skeleton that wants to taste its favorite food or a zombie out for revenge. Fewer necromancers.

131. Bad Weather after Judgment Day from Ten Foot Polemic directs our attention to the earlier Six Dimensional Weather from What WOuld Conan Do?

132. Better Torches by the Pastel Dungeon puts forward a model of torches where they gradually dim over time: three turns at bright, two at dim, one at fading and out.

133. A Knight at the Opera reveals a forbidden narration technique: The Family Guy-Style Cutaway Gag

134. The Nothic's Eye with Inadvisable Decisions (GLΔG). One of the most popular delta advancement posts out there.

135. Monsters Reimagined: Bandits from Daily Adventure Prompts gives us an open-eyes look at what exactly a bandit is and how you could make them deeper and more interesting than a generic nefarious outlaw.

136. The Blog of Holding suggests replacing the four classical elements with the five draconic elements of Fire, Frost, Lightning, Poison and Acid. It drops the ball on coming up with an Acid plane, but don't worry - you can just use the flying cloud kingdoms Air Plane again, except the clouds are mostly dangerous gases of every description.

137. Advice on Running War in RPGs from Cavegirl's Game Stuff proposes focusing on the bits that can be simulated easily (PC intervention into decisive fights; routine encounters to establish the 'feel' of being in a war zone) and abstracting the rest.

138. A six part series on Re-inventing the Wilderness from sachagoat. Theoretically a seven parter, but chapter seven never got written. Alas.

139. Paer Elemental points us to The Exclusionary Principle, a free worldbuilding PDF for Alexander's Worth the Candle setting.

140. Periapt Games Design Blog offers a two-part series on fantasy pseudo-anachronism. That is: things which either fit in a fantasy setting vibes-wise, but are anachronisms to the equivalent periods of history, or which don't fit, but historically would be anachronistic to leave out. Plus a bunch of tailored excuses for ignoring the issue of eg. large pane glass historically not having been invented yet.

141. All Dead Generations describes to us 7 Maxims of the OSR, an attempt to consolidate the OSR ethos into one post, instead of leaving it to be picked up by osmosis.

142. Traveler's Rest gives us a guide to Generating Elevation in a Hexcrawl using a die drop methodology.

143. Pidgins and Creoles from Homoicidally Inclined Persons of No Fixed Address expands on an Alexandrian post on Pidgins.

144. One for the newbies out there, Dawnfist offers advice on How to improvise as DM? The Art of improvisation in TTRPGs?

145. Coins and Scrolls answers the eternal question of whether you can convert 5E to OSR with a lengthy explanation of why you shouldn't and what you should do instead.

146. Methods and Madness gives use the helpful advice to Make it Light and Realistic when running a Horror RPG. Rules that come up too much or require too much thinking about the rules-as-rules draw one out of the story. That's the opposite of what you want in horror.

147. Tales of the Lunar Lands informs you that You're Sleeping On Perytons. A wonderful but underused monster.

148. Methods & Madness asks if anyone has good generic wilderness encounter tables and concludes the answer is no, after looking at how B/X vs. AD&D vs. 5e handle the question.

149. Eliding Perception: What perception mechanics do to your game from Dado's Tostados makes the argument against including perception checks in your games.

150. OSR Vault gives us 100 Interesting Rumors (Or Potential Plot Hooks!) in a single convenient table.

151. Rotten Pulp points to 10 great ideas to steal from The Boy and the Heron, with an eye toward a campaign themed after the film.

152. Sabatini's Scatterbrained Place invites you to Swindle Your Players. Possibly with a gold-sniffing gopher for sale. But possibly with something else on the table.

153. Roll to Doubt presents Social Skills-Attributes as Saving Throws. Roll to see if your character will avoid the faux pas you-as-player just committed or not.

154. Kicking off 2024, Goblin Punch gives us a vision of a world where Everyone Has 10 HP and the mechanics make people tougher or weaker by other means.

155. You're Doing Demons All Wrong, again from Goblin Punch. With examples and AI-generated pig demon art.

156. Open Hearth RPG on tumblr give us Don't Roll: Great RPG Mechanics, an essay on how sometimes the best mechanic for a situation is to just not roll any dice and let the GM decide.

157. Diving into some drama, Xandering is Slandering summarizes the situation around the Xandering vs. Jaquaysing debate.

158. Playful Void gives us Diagetic advancement and inventory, which is to say badge-based advancement.

159. through Staring Back at the Invisible gives us a look at what rules secretly exist when the rulebook is silent.

160. Potion Clues from Prismatic Wasteland gives us a three-part potion identification minigame.

161. Throne of Salt argues (quite convincingly) that D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are.

162. Le Chaudron Chromatique proposes a system of alignment languages miscommunication , wherein trying to speak an alignment language for an unalignment you don't possess risk you saying something very different from what you'd hoped to say, in a way aligning (pardon the pun) with the language used.

163. Whose Mechanic is it Anyway? from Trilemma Adventures reminds us that a mechanic is much more likely to be used if the procedure for a mechanic instructs the player who desires the outcome of the mechanic to bring it up at the table. For example, if the rogue can do a sneak attack, it's better for them to be able to declare that to be the case (and maybe wait a few IRL seconds for objections) than for the rogue to wait for the DM to point out opportunities for a sneak attack.

164. Rotten Pulp gives us Morgan Brackish Meadows' Anti-Hammerspace Item Tracker, where items are physically drawn inside the containers they occupy.

165. Coins in the Dungeon by Dice in the North remind us of the physical reality of coins and the fact that players can do things with them like try improvising them into a screwdriver or stuffing them into a sock and coshing someone. We can only guess as to the physical reality of dice all the way up North.

166. No Foolproof Illusions from A Knight at the Opera introduces us to (and expands upon) Blorb Principles from Sandra Snan.

167. from Osse Rota's Weblog gives us a reframing of the since deleted Rules Elide post by Jared Sinclair.

168. On Incentive from Gno Mann's Land argues against Luke Gearing's Against Incentive.

169. Gorgo Mormo asks How Much Gold is That? and then comes to a conclusion of 'use sp standard' after comparing treasure horde sizes in movies and real life.

170. Dice in the North gives us a series on tools for Cavers, Miscreants, Travelers and Delvers.

171. Against the Wicked City on Cults, cultists and D&D.

172. An attempt at Deconstructing Healing, Potions, and Shrines by Goblin Punch.

173. Prismatic Wasteland kicked off Barkeep Jam! You can read the entries here.

174. Nick Hendricks thinks The 5e Petrification Mechanic Rocks.

175. B/X BLACKRAZOR'S Illusionary Post has a LOT of thoughts about illusionists.

176. The Dododecahedron explores slot based design with Tinkering With the Toolbox, a list of tools that can go in that particular design toolbox.

177. Explorers puts forward the notion of Phantom Cogs - rules obfuscate other rules without ever connecting back to the world or the players.

178. Roleplaying Tips gives us Privilege & Power: Using Nobility in Your World-Building and Plots, along with a d20 table of Noble Perks.

179. LOW OPINION: Short-Sighted Focus on Fun Ruins Long-Term Enjoyment of Tabletop Games from Torchless compares TTRPG rules to cola taste test comparisons, with implications for rule design.

180. Squishy Space, OR: "the galaxy's least functional polycule steals Space Bezos' yacht", the free RPG from Coins and Scrolls.

181. You Got Your Boot Hill In My Flashing Blades! Reputation and Non-Player Character Reactions from Really Bad Eggs fuses the social rules from Flashing Blades, Boot Hill and Traveller together into something workable.

182. Put Your RPG Campaign on a Deadline (It’ll Be Okay.) offers the shockingly reasonable advice that if you want your campaign to come to a satisfying conclusion, you should plan for how you're going to conclude it at the outset.

183. Sheep and Sorcery posts Dragons: The Great Victims of Worldbuilding, decrying such heresies as Dragon Riders, Scale Colour Alignment, Draconic Shapeshifting and more.

184. The Nothic's Eye provides a Howl's Moving Castle themed wizard in Heartless (Class: Wizard of Outshire).

185. An ogreload of ogreposting from Sinusoidal freakshow and Shadow & Fae

186. CRAFTSMAN

187. Traverse Fantasy discusses the difference between 5e (2014) and 5e (2024) in D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

188. Use skulls of dead mages instead of spellbooks in your games says the (totally unbiased) Crypt Of The Rambling Dead.

189. All Dead Generations gets into the difference betweenClassic Vs. Five Rooms dungeons.

190. Coins and Scrolls engages in some High-Level Ilusionist Spell Rewrites

191. 21 Lessons learned after running 100 sessions from Attronarch's Athenaeum.

192. The Redgoblin wishes for you to know How to Cause Wounds and Mutilate Corpses. That is to say, with his injury table.

193. Sword of Mass Destruction has been rethinking clerics and religion in two parts.

194. Trilemma Adventures kids us with his definitions of Standard RPG Terminology

195. Double feature of old posts: Trollsymth with Shields Shall be Splintered! and DIY & Dragons with Landmark, Hidden, Secret.

196. Vampire Weekend: Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood from Whimsical Mountain meets Being a Vampire Doesn't Suck from Prismatic Wasteland with a hint of Vampiric Temptations and Tyranny from Amanda P.

197. DIY & Dragons gives us several Alternatives to Darkvision.

198. OSR Social Resolution Procedures as put forth by Occultronics.

199. Sword and Scoundrel asks about the place of Sex & Romance in Role-Playing Games

200. I Cast Light! starts up his Practical Magic series with "What to do now that your 1st-level magic-user cast their one spell"

201. Retrospective: Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures from Grognardia.

202. Prismatic Wasteland (over on the Prismatic Weekly substack) provides Blog Friday Roundup with this week's theme being "Economy".

203. Monarchsfactory reinvents the hanky code, but this time for criminals in Dodgy Thieves’ Cant Flowchart to Simplify Things 2

04. Legendary Resistance-less from the Library of Attnam proposes alternatives to 5e's Legendary Resistance concept.

205. A brief dip out of the community to look at The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor from history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

206. Thirteen Tongues from Dragonfruit is exactly that: thirteen languages of supernatural importance, intended to make languages more interesting.

207. Idraluna Archives suggests practicing Notebook Kayfabe, wherein the GM always pretends to have pre-written answers for any question the players present, no matter how unlikely.

208. Bottomless Sarcophagus starts a series on The Parthenogenesis of the Mayfly Elves. Be sure to go look for the other half, elsewhere on the blog.

209. Tales of the Lunar Lands writes in defense of Cloakers with Friday Encounter: Cloaking Devices

210. Wampus Country suggests a Getting Worse house rule, wherein you can always choose to survive death at the cost of going from the frying pan to the fire in terms of surrounding situation.

211. A Knight at the Opera reveals the Rivers & Lakes Beta, a Wuxia game with OSR sensibilities.

212. Daztur over on ENWorld posts about Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War

213. The Creature Codex on Tumblr posts If I Ran the Zoo: Energy Types

214. Ten Foot Polemic expands on the Underclock concept in Another Underclock

215. Ward Against Evil suggests that we Treat Illusions As You Would Any Other Lie: No Rolls

216. In a return to philosophy blogging, Explorers ponders the OSR maxim that Combat is a Failstate.

217. Dazzling Prismatic Hemicycle asks (then answers) Why Worlds Without Number?

218. RANDOM ENCOUNTER TABLES AS ADVENTURE RAM: Adding “Memory” To Encounter Checks from I Cast Light! proposes putting delayed events - rocks falling, monsters looting, etc. into the random encounter table. Various implementations are discussed.

219. Carouse, Carouse! gives us their Difficult Sophomore Album

220. Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders, says Dice Goblin.

221. Wastoid and the unwritten rules of rolling from Loot Loot Lore talks about an innovation from the Wastoid RPG: having bonuses decide not just what you roll, but if you are allowed/required to roll in the first place.

222. The April 2025 Parts Bin post for 400 independent bathrooms.

223. Newt Young gives us practical rules for Gandalf Magic in The Lost Art of Truth-telling.

224. Prismatic Weekly opens up the Emergency Papal Blogclave in honor of the Pope dying. See results here.

225. Onslaught Six gives us 2d6 Hirelings. That's hirelings using 2d6 as the dice to resolve their Hireling Business, not a random number between 2 and 12 hirelings.

226. fun behaviors to give dragons that aren't feline/canine based from chipper-smol of tumblr.

227. Design Your Locks With More Keys says Explorers! More than one person should have the key to a given lock, in most cases. But more metaphorically, there are many 'kinds' of keys and you should think about which kinds you can include.

228. The Frickerverse asks: X-Card: Is it Safe?

229. Roll to Doubt starts up a How I Prep bandwagon.

230. In what could have been two blog posts, d20 Animating Conflicts and Wierd Terrains from Sundered Shillings.

231. https://dragonpeakpublishing.substack.com/p/hexcrawling-non-geographical-landscapes from Dragon Peak Publishing gives ideas for hexcrawling as multiple-universe time travel or the like.

232. Dungeon Scrawler lays out the possibilities of a 'relationship crawl' in two parts.

233. The Twenty Unspeakable Substances from Whose Measure God Could Not Take.

234. 1d100 Seduction Side Effects from Coins and Scrolls. Originally for the Goliard, but anyone can get seduced.

235. Twenty OSR Systems Reviewed by Unsound Methods.

236. 24 Petards to Be Roasted Upon (or, How to Be a Player) from the Tao of D&D.

237. Counterspell Hacks for More Interesting Worldbuilding from cryptickeyway.

238. Writing Encounters in Pairs Bommyknocker Press translates the advice of Sean MaCoy to Writing Rooms in Pairs into the random encounter table.

239. Dwarven Gender, Continued from Goblin Punch presents the plight or poor Podrick, who has to explain human genders to a Dwarf.

240. Same Seer presents an OSR Pattern: One, Two, or Three Exits

241. Roles, Rules, and Rolls presents a theory of Analog, Digital and Procedural information presentedto the GM.

242. Crow’s Corner Playing With Care: A Guide to RPG Safety Tools

243. Fun in the Stun: Alternatives to Paralysis Mechanics from Sealight Studios gives alternatives to the various 'you cannot take actions this turn' status effects.

244. How I Use Henchmen and Hirelings from Daddy Rolled a One.

245. Sly Flourish reminds you to Go Easy On Yourself

246. There are no system neutral rangers from Spiceomancy hits the nail on the head for why people keep writing bad rangers.

247. Froward Friend and 400 independent bathrooms both suggest having rules that expand a class's shtick instead of erasing it. Rules that make for more fights for your fighter, more exploring for your explorer, more theft for your thief.

248. Alignment Languages are Socially Repulsive by the Blog of Forlorn Encystment gets into the nitty gritty of what Alignment Languages are supposed to be for.

249. My Hole Theory of Interesting Combat from the Sage's Sanctum posits that any combat can be improved by adding a giant hole. Metaphorical or otherwise.

250. What’s in a Core Dice Mechanic? from Domain of Many Things lays out the basics of core dice mechanics and why anyone should care about which one a game uses.

251. d20 dungeon critters you can just snatch up and gulp down, plus 1d4 critters you really don’t want to snatch up and gulp down from Beneath Foreign Planets

252. Uncanny Spheres tells us how to run MEGACORP: The Evil Mothership Campaign

253. I see you, and you're beautiful. is a series of love letters to various members of the community, from 400 independent bathrooms, who is ever a delight to hear from.

254. Everything is pointcrawl! Despite the name, the premise of this article is more that everything might as well be a pointcrawl, if you don't give people reasons to care about the parts of the map that aren't along the shortest route from A to B.