I wrote a review of Drought Dragon Desolation by The Merry Mushmen.

It’s a small, focused sandbox with a lot of concrete detail—locations, NPCs, encounters that are easy to run as written. What stood out to me is how much of the world’s dynamism comes from just a few moving parts (especially the rival parties), while most of it remains fairly static unless you actively push it forward.

Which made me think about a broader question:
how much detail is actually useful at the table?

https://ravaged-by-storms.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

A few weeks ago, I announced the release of The Knight Errant: Expanded Edition on itch.io.

Now, you can buy the adventure module in physical form at Copy/Paste Co-op! Shipping worldwide from the UK! It's a 32 page A5 zine.

The Knight Errant: Expanded Edition is a science fantasy old school Tabletop RPG adventure, designed for any Mark of the Odd games (Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Cairn, Eco Mofos!!), inspired by the works of Weird Fiction authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Michael Moorcock.

Featuring:

• A necrotic wasteland with five locations and a nine room dungeon for a short campaign, drawn in isometric style!
• Illustrations for the NPCs and creatures that the players will encounter!
• Portents for each location, inspired by Omens from Mythic Bastionland and Corpo schemes from Eco Mofos!! Islands of Weirdhope. The locations have their own story to tell!
• Three factions right out of the Weird Fiction genre. Cultists, Robot Soldiers, and Wasteland Survivors!
• Random Encounters Tables and Random Treasures Tables to support your GMing needs!
• PDFs, colored and black & white, single and spread
• Zip file containing the illustrations and maps!
• 3 - 6 sessions worth of adventure!

And thank you to those who already bought the digital version! Because of you, it reached #1 Most Popular on itch.io's Physical games category!

Hey everyone! We’ve created a line of minis for the Warpland - a sci-fi & fantasy TTRPG inspired by Heavy Metal comics and psychedelic worlds, created by Gavriel Quiroga.

We’re launching on Kickstarter in April - feel free to follow along if that sounds like your thing! Warpland on Kickstarter

Hello there! Last year, I shared about releasing The Knight Errant, an adventure that I made for Appx. N Jam and won the Audience Pick. Now, the expanded edition is available on itch.io! From what was only a 4-page dungeon is now a 32-page adventure module!

The Knight Errant: Expanded Edition is a science fantasy old school Tabletop RPG adventure, designed for any Mark of the Odd games (Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Cairn, Eco Mofos!!), inspired by the works of Weird Fiction authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Michael Moorcock.

I want to thank those who showed their love of the original 4-page module last year when I posted it here in this subreddit and made sure that this could happen!

Check it out! https://davidblandy.itch.io/the-knight-errant-expanded-edition

https://golemproductions.substack.com/p/designing-for-pirate-borg-part-33

As the final part of our series on designing for Pirate Borg, we wrote a detailed postmortem about making Ravaged by Storms.

Instead of focusing on the finished book, this piece looks at the production side of the project: where time actually went, which decisions created extra work, and what we would do differently next time.

Among other things we talk about layout work that looked finished but wasn’t, illustrations quietly piling up until late in the schedule, stretch goals expanding scope, a trailer that ended up costing ~100 hours, and switching production tools mid-project.

If you’ve worked on your own RPG book, I’d also be curious:

Where did your project unexpectedly eat the most time?

Something I’ve wanted for a while is an easy way to encode persistent encounters in say sandbox or multi-level dungeon without relying on bell curve style tables (2d6, 3d6). To that end, I’ve come up with a system that involves rolling an extra die when checking for encounters that uses doubles to access a secondary table of ‘special/persistent encounters’. I think it’s pretty neat, my write up is here!

We made this about a decade ago, but it keeps getting minor updates, like we made minimalist Character Sheets to go along with the Zine, One Page RPG aesthetic.

It's free as in free to download and share, but also as in it's Public Domain, so literally anyone may legally use it in any way they want. Like Open Source but for tabletop games.

You can conceivably use it to play any type of game, but we use it for Player-Driven sandbox games about helping farmers solve feuds or like, delivering an important family heirloom to a friend who moved 3 weeks' travel away.

You do you tho.

Hi everyone, my second Dolmenwood adventure is up on drivethrurpg!

Parliament of Owls is an adventure site for the Dolmenwood RPG by Necrotic Gnome.

It's designed to be a monster lair dropped into any Dolmenwood hex situated near a river.

The lair consists of a set of ruins on a river meander inhabited by a fractious parliament of Witch Owls warring amongst themselves, their Shadow servants and some unfortunate prisoners. The ruins are a deorling temple housing idols dedicated to their gods Howawi and Yorghan, and is where the twice-blessed blades of deorling stags were forged.

The adventure has story hooks, interactive elements, faction play, detailed npcs, detailed location keys, a table of hallucinations caused by magical mist, event tables, a keyed map and some typical Dolmenwood fairytale strangeness.

Writing, editing and layout by Dougal Cochrane, owl art by Per Österlund.
All other art by Perplexing Ruins and Dead People. Cartography by Dyson Logos.

Hi everyone!

I just published my first ever full length RPG on Itch.io, and I want to share it with all of you! It's completely free and always will be.

A little about the game. I think it qualifies as NSR. Let me know if you disagree.

Winter's Bones is a survival horror RPG where the players become mice, struggling to survive in a world where every winter, horrifying creatures emerge from deep underground.

These creatures are the spawn of the Deep Still, a cold malignant presence far below the frostline. The Deep Still's true nature is unknown.

The game is designed for short campaigns, and bittersweet, tragic stories. Your mice will die, the game is about what they stand for, and what they leave behind.

Download Winter's Bones here for free - https://webedangerous.itch.io/winters-bones-an-rpg-for-doomed-mice

Hope you enjoy!

A little while back, I looked at 2 different ideas: encounter sequences/chains and a d6 encounter table template. Today I’m combining those together to help make creating encounter chains a bit easier by using that d6 template a a prompt generator. I think it makes creating encounter sequences just a bit less intimidating!

Tales from the Tape Deck (TTD) is a rules-lite roleplaying game system that fits in a cassette tape box! Inspired by the OSR, Mork Borg and one-page RPGs, we wanted to push the “lite” format with TTD and create an ultra-portable game–with flair. https://www.suffety.com/landing-page-tales-from-the-tape-deck-casette-tape-ttrpg

This is not mine, I just want people to see it before the crowdfunding is over

This CyBorg module premised on people that are uploading their consciousness to a "deluxe virtual retirement community". Which sounds badass for a Cy module!

The campaign part of Zinetopia, and is less than $100 from fulfillment! It's in the final week of crowdfunding.

Here's some bullet points of things in the module: The module contains: • A cult of demon worshipping tech-bros • A network of black market brain dealers and researchers • A cult of sewer dwelling mutants • A finance firm megachurch's basement cult compound • A secret offsite research lab • A virtual resort depth crawl (stretch goal) //There are more stretch goals, found on the campaign page.

If you're even remotely interested, I recommend pledging at least for the digital tier while it's still up so you don't miss it. I can't wait to run this game for some willing victims participants...

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/david-h-k-jackson/dead-internet-theory-an-adventure-module-for-cy-borg?ref=bk-social-project

All rules here: https://goldenachiever.github.io/year100millionbc/

Including a free PDF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F1vpj0m6Ys

Hey there, I made an OG Fighting Fantasy RPG Hack, not from Advanced Fighting Fantasy, but the Blue Tiger Man book by Steve Jackson. This is the 2nd edition. It is simpler than Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e.

You can find it here https://rob-jr.itch.io/spellzard-2e

Go download the community copy while it lasts!

WHAT IS FLAIL?

FLAIL is my personal take on the OSR genre. You play as bards, cutthroats, clerics, wizards, etc and it's, in a nutshell, a curated distillation of my go-to rules from 15 years of playing these games. Two things are to be highlighted: inventory and combat. Inventory is based on physical tokens that players place atop their character sheets - like Mausritter! - which actually makes tracking gear interesting. And combat is based on what i'm calling the POKER DICE COMBAT system: players roll a pool of d6s, trying to score as many 1s as possible to hit their adversaries, while a lot of abilities and bonuses can be triggered by rolling pairs, triplets, full-houses, etc. It's addictive!

You can download the 124-page rulebook 100% free here: https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/da410ac0-76a3-4877-b5a0-61f278144238/landing

OTHER USEFUL LINKS

• FLAIL official page: visit the website for more info on the game. 
• Patreon: please support the patreon! By pledging $3 per month, you get monthly drops of new content for FLAIL such as new adventures, guilds, monsters, religions, classes and more.
• Discord: join the server to connect with other players and creators.
• Online tools: create new items for FLAIL and generate hexcrawl maps instantly.
• Resources folder: click to download printable and digital character sheets. Also hireling and construct sheet, cheat sheet, style guide, GM tracker sheet and more. 
• Third-Party License: FLAIL has a 3p license for fans and creators to create content for the game. Do what you want, we take no cut. 

i hope you dig all of this.