I've read all the stuff you've written about the megadungeon and some of Alexandrian's posts on it, and I think the stuff about wandering monsters and restocking rooms is absolute gold. Do you have any advice on designing dungeon crawl puzzles and traps, or maybe an example of your favorites or go-tos? Everything I find is either the classic "anything can be a puzzle" non-answer or kinda lackluster. I've had some success looking at the Book of Traps supplement for 3.5e d&d, but it feels like advice for puzzle design is a bit thin on the ground.
I'll talk about traps first, then puzzles.
My favourite traps are situation traps. When the party triggers a situation trap, there's no immediate threat to their lives, there's no damage, but the triggering of the trap somehow fundamentally changes the situation and makes it more dangerous. In my big megadungeon post I mentioned an example of one of these: the party triggered a trap that rotated a room, dumping them in a new wing of the dungeon and triggering a long, terrified escape. I love traps like this because a lot of the best and most fun dungeon gameplay happens when the party is pushed to their limits and put in desperate positions. But smart play mostly means trying to avoid those situations. Traps like these create more opportunities for those types of moments.
Probably the simplest situation trap is the classic portcullis trap. The party is walking down a hallway and steps on a trapped floor panel or trips a tripwire or whatever, dropping a portcullis in the middle of the hall. But it doesn't drop in front of the triggerer, it drops a short distance behind, likely splitting the party on opposite sides. You can combine this with an ambush for a good time, but even without it, in a system where lifting a portcullis is non-trivial this becomes a whole situation.
Another one of these I've really enjoyed using is showing the party an extremely deadly monster, something they'd struggle to fight even in the best of circumstances, behind a magic barrier or something where it can't get to them. Later, deeper in the dungeon, they trigger a trap that they can hear cause the magical barrier to drop. No immediate threat, but suddenly the rest of the delve becomes incredibly tense.
The basic structure of a situation trap is that the trigger should fundamentally change the circumstances in a way that is notably more dangerous, but not imminent. The fun for the players is that it immediately becomes a problem for them to start working on. I tend to design these by thinking of fucked up situations and then trying to come up with a mechanical pretense to trigger them. Generally, if I can't think of how I would handle the new situation, it's too harsh, but if I think the players would knowingly trigger it, it's not harsh enough. Also don't invest too much energy into designing these, or you'll be tempted to try to hard to get the players to trigger them. Teleportation and portcullis traps are such classic examples of this in part because they're very low effort to design, so if the players thwart them, no worries.
The second big category of traps I enjoy are set piece traps. These are the big, dramatic traps that pose an imminent threat but are more complex than saving throw vs damage. The room is slowly filling with sand, the statue is rotating and shooting lasers out of its eyes, the floor is slowly turning upside down over a deadly pit, etc.
I think these are fairly easy to design. You have some kind of peril, which is easy to brainstorm (tip: think of things that kill people) in some configuration that is imminently but not instantly lethal. And then you let the players interact with it to try to stop it. I would usually try to make sure you can think of at least a couple of ways to interact with it, but as long as you are clear on what the actual mechanism is, these will usually suggest themselves. Block the sand spouts, cover the statue's eyes, jam the motor rotating the floor, etc.
One thing that I do value doing with these traps is telegraphing them. If the statue is going to rotate and shoot lasers, I'll describe groove marks along the wall, and perhaps with investigation the players will determine that they were burned into the wall. Reckless players can be surprised by these, but cautious players should usually have a sense when they're about to trigger a big trap and what. Usually I'll describe the mechanisms for these as sufficiently complex and deeply built into the construction that they can't be disabled by a basic thieving skills check, but if they can describe a way around the trigger, I'll certainly let them roll for it.
My last big category of traps is simple traps, the ones with a basic trigger (a trapped floor panel, opening a drawer, walking through a beam of light) and a basic effect (a pit opens, a poison needle shoots out, the room gets fireballed) that you get a saving throw against. I still think these are okay, but I think using them effectively depends on how you're using them. Any time I'm using a simple trap, the question I am asking is, what is this accomplishing?
Sometimes they're just there for verisimilitude. In a standard dungeon game setting, sometimes it just feels like "obviously this guy would have a trap on this drawer." In these cases, the trap is there to be found and disabled. I'm not expecting it to trigger. This can give me leave to make the trap really nasty. I'm a big fan of petrification traps in dungeons for example (getting back to where you left the statue of Morningwood the Elf with a Stone to Flesh scroll is a great little sidequest.) But the trap is nasty so the thief can feel good for disabling it. On the rare chance someone gets hit by one of these, it should always provoke a reaction of, "Ugh, yes, obviously that was trapped and I should have anticipated that." Not surprise.
The second way I tend to use these is as setting. The existence of these traps tends to say something about the location and it's denizens. The traps associated with Tucker's Kobolds are great examples of these. Pit traps that can support the weight of a kobold but not a human, trip wires above a kobold's height, trapped hallways that kobolds can avoid via tiny crawlspaces, these speak to the defenses of the kobolds and the way they make the space their own. When deploying traps this way, they're often not meant to be a challenge on their own. If the party is passing through a kobold warren without kobolds, they likely won't trigger any traps, and once they've described how they're proceeding (using poles etc.) I probably wouldn't even roll, I'd just assume they handle them competently. But during a fight these become an active component. And before a fight, they foreshadow the locations' inhabitants. Designing for this use case basically starts by thinking about how the dungeon inhabitants would fortify their space against their enemies and the mechanizing it in a handful of simple ways. Usually it's a good starting point to think of what traps the trap-makers could ignore. What's unique about them? Are they unusually small or large, can they fly, are they immune to poison or fire, etc.
The third way is to set tone, and in this approach I use these very sparingly. Sometimes you want to establish the dungeon as a place that hates you, a place that you should not be, and traps can be a great way to do that. But bogging the game down to a constant crawl of extreme caution isn't desirable. Throwing a handful of simple traps (some of them already triggered and expended, as set dressing) can establish this tone and reward caution without being too disruptive to play. And besides, if I really want to establish a dangerous tone, set piece traps are often more fun for this.
I've covered loosely how I come up with all of these, but in terms of extant examples, there are a few good sources I know. OSR blogs used to have a ton of these, some of which are still around. I won't link any specific ones for... OSR reasons... but if you search for OSR traps you'll find examples. Pathfinder 2e's hazards are also good for these, I especially enjoy their complex traps for set piece traps, and they tend to be conceptually pretty easy to port to other games. I wish more of them were available on AoN. I get the full list from foundry and there's some real winners in there. If Paizo published a full on Bestiary-type book of these I would buy it in a heartbeat.
This has gotten long, so I think I will cover puzzles separately in a reblog of this once I get a chance to write my thoughts down.
Okay, so, puzzle design is hard. If you can design good puzzles, great, but some people do that as their whole-ass job. I think it's a skill that needs to be developed and usually requires that you be clever and inventive, and "be very clever" is not great advice to give someone.
Instead, I'm going to provide two tricks I use to make puzzles for my games: isomorphism and composition.
Imagine the following puzzle: a magic symbol is carved into the floor of a room, and is used to control access to a treasure vault. The symbol is circular and composed of nine smaller circles, and within each circle are nine coloured and shaped slots, some containing runes and some empty. The circles also have either one, two, or three outer circles. Like this:
Through experimentation (probably with some minor consequence for mistakes) the party is able to figure out that each circle must contain all nine unique runes, but each colour of slot cannot contain any duplicates. If one red slot contains a ᚸ, no other red slot of any shape can. Slots that share a shape also cannot contain duplicates, but these only "count" duplicates within circles with the same number of outlines. For example, you could have three ᚻ symbols in square slots, but only if one was in a circle with one outline, another in a circle with 2, and the last in a circle with 3. The challenge, then, is to figure out how to place all the runes.
So, depending on how puzzle-brained you are, it may be more or less obvious that this is just sudoku. In fact (unless I messed up), it's this easy-level sudoku:
This is an example of what I'll call puzzle isomorphism. These two puzzles look different, but they share the same underlying structure. All I've done to create the (fairly complex looking) former puzzle is convert the sudoku to a more dungeon-y, magic-y looking format, added some extraneous details that don't actually matter, and broken some of the conveniences of sudoku that make it easier to read. If I really wanted to further obscure the sudokuness of the puzzle, I could go even further and do things like place each circle in a different room. But, in my experience, even something simple like this works well.
This is how I make a lot of my puzzles for TTRPGs. I'll go find some puzzle, break it down into what the underlying structure of the puzzle actually is, and then dress it back up in some setting-appropriate way, ideally in a way that develops the space or the in-universe puzzle maker. This usually ends up creating extra details just in the process. In the above example, I'd expect players to spend some time puzzling over the meaning of specific runes, the relation to their slot, their position within the circle, etc. As the puzzle maker, all of this is obviously irrelevant, but if you don't know that, then they become something to chew on. Eventually, they might figure out that it's just sudoku, but that's fine. That's actually usually a great moment, when their experimentation pays off and now they know they understand the puzzle and all they have to do is solve it.
And of course, if I'm making an isomorphism of a more obscure puzzle than sudoku, there's a decent chance they'll never realize what the original puzzle is.
Composition is my other big trick for making puzzles. This is basically combining multiple existing puzzles to make a more complex puzzle. For example, you might use a basic word puzzle, let's say, "select the word that belongs in a set from a list of options." This is easy to put in a dungeon, the selection of words can say something about the creatures who put it in the dungeon. Maybe it's a list of dwarven virtues, for instance, and you need to select the option based on what you know of the dwarves. On it's own, this is honestly fine, but not very interesting. But we can stack another puzzle on top of this. For instance, what if the actual words are encoded? Then, the players need to figure out the cypher before they can actually solve the puzzle (or really even figure out what the puzzle is.) You can integrate this further into the dungeon by splitting up where components of the puzzle are. For instance, when the party finds the word puzzle, there might not be enough text there to crack the cypher, but some other room further in the dungeon contains more text encrypted with the same cypher, and then the party can solve it. (And perhaps even further in they can find the key to the cypher in case they can't crack it manually.)
Similarly, in my sudoku example, it doesn't really matter that I swapped the numbers for runes. But if instead of sudoku I had used a puzzle where the meaning of the numbers matter, I could layer another puzzle to figure out what the numbers are. There are plenty of "if ᚠ+ᚥ=ᚧ and ᚧ x ᚧ = ᚻ and ᚠ+ᚻ=ᚠ0" type puzzles to choose from, for example.
All of this, I'll note, is stuff I'll do because I have players who like this stuff. I often run for players who, when given a block of encrypted text, get really excited about getting to spend a few hours out of session by themselves trying to crack the code. If I wasn't, I just wouldn't put puzzles in.
But with these two tricks I'm able to create puzzles that seem elaborate and deep and interesting without actually needing to invent puzzles. I can just search for word puzzles or number puzzles or logic puzzles, whatever, and then turn them into something that will work in a dungeon and feel compelling.
Hi! Maybe you've said it before, but do you know of a good resource to learn the basics of mega dungeon design? Is there any like, guidebooks or something you would reccomend? There seems to be a lot to keep in mind
There are a few different guides I've seen over the years, and I mostly think that they're not very good. For instance, 2nd edition AD&D had a Dungeon Builder's Guidebook, and I went and glanced at my copy to see if I could recommend it here, and I don't think there's much of value in here? I've also seen some bloggers try to lay out some ideas and develop megadungeons of their own. Some of these have looked good! And some of them... had different philosophies to the ones that I would have gone with.
That said, I shan't leave you without anything useful.
The first thing I'm going to call out is that your dungeon is going to change and evolve as you run it. And I don't just mean in terms of how play evolves the space, you're going to end up making changes as you go. In fact, early versions of the DMG basically state that you only really need to have one floor ahead of your players done. Wings of the dungeon further from your players can be a rough sketch of how spaces relate to each other, and if they're a cul-de-sac they don't really need anything at all besides that they exist. Factions, similarly, can be developed as things go on. You only really need to know how they relate to the parts of the dungeon the players can get to early on. I also really like developing factions as play continues. It's not unusual for me to introduce new factions in the progress of play, especially if the players do something that might cause that.
The second thing is this: only do the parts you're excited about. Steal or generate the rest. This may be an odd thing to say, as a girl who has been posting nonstop about megadungeons for weeks now, but I don't actually like making dungeons very much. I like running them, but the actual dungeon creation is kind of a chore. There are great tools for this, though. Atelier Clandestine includes a megadungeon generator in their sandbox generator that I hear is quite good. The last time I made a megadungeon from scratch, huge chunks of it were just Dyson Logos maps stitched together, with only a handful of rooms I made from scratch, either as connectors or specific weird things I wanted. Similarly, for initially stocking rooms, I'll often use random tables to figure stuff out. A bunch of these are from old G+ OSR blogs and stuff like that, but if you go looking for roll tables of weird stuff for dungeons, you'll find a lot of interesting stuff.
The third thing is to just iterate. Start with a vague sketch of the dungeon. What are the zones and how do they connect? What are the general factions, and what do they want? Then, in passes, make it more specific. Fill in one area, flesh out one faction, populate some rooms. As you're doing thing, think about how they interconnect and interrelate. When you decide something about one faction, that'll inform relationships to the other. When you iterate the layout of one zone, that'll inform its connections to others, etc. And you'll keep doing this iteration as you run the dungeon, it really never stops.
Finally, here's a checklist of stuff I like to make sure I'm thinking about. But it's your dungeon, so I would highly encourage figuring out what your own checklist looks like.
Zones. How are they distinct from each other, and what do they have for players and NPCs to want? I'm happiest when I could describe a room to my players and they can know what zone it's in just from the description.
Factions. Who are they, and what do they want? I find these work best when allying with any one faction implies causing tension with at least one other, and when there are no factions with whom allying is completely uncomplicatedly good.
Connections. How do different parts of the dungeon connect, and what are some interesting connections? Things like shortcuts that can be unlocked, one way connections, unconventional connections, ones that require unusual forms of movement to use, or special powers.
Cool stuff. Both in terms of cool stuff to use, and cool problems to overcome. Loot falls in this category, as well as big cool things to interact with in the dungeon. Here's an apparatus that permanently polymorphs anyone who goes inside. Here's a circle that fully heals anyone who enters at the cost of aging you a random amount. Here's a powerful treasure in a box submerged in a lake of acid. Stuff for the players to play with and come back to.
As long as I have those things I'm happy, so as I'm iterating I'll look at my list and see if there's anything I need to add or spice up. And then once I'm at the table, I'll often find I want to make changes and I'll tune things between sessions. Nothing is set until the players have observed it, so if I find my players are coming up to a wing of the dungeon and I'm not happy with how I expect it'll play out, I can always change it.
what's an OSR? it's a game that's kinda like old-school D&D. or is old-school D&D. or is compatible with old-school D&D. an OSR game generally has some or all of the following principles:
low character power with highly lethal combat. in old-school D&D a 1st-level fighter has d8 hit points and a longsword does d8 damage, and you die at 0HP. this is not to ensure characters die all the time but to emphasize the next bullet point:
emphasis on creative problem solving. most situations cannot be solved by straightforward use of your abilities (such as charging into every situation with swords drawn, if a fighter), so the game tests lateral, outside-the-box thinking.
emphasis on diegetic progression. spells are found, not obtained automatically on level-up. you get XP by finding gold more than killing monsters. most of your cool abilities come from magic items. making alliances & hiring followers is encouraged.
focus on managing inventory, resources, risk, and time. the players are constantly faced with meaningful decisions; this is the heart of the game.
very sandbox-oriented. the focus on creative problem solving means the game must be accommodating to players taking a course of action the GM didn't plan for. use lots of random tables to generate emergent story. some elements of new simulationism.
high tactical transparency, i.e., the optimal course of action is rarely system-specific, and ideally very possible for a new player to intuit.
usually semi-compatible with old D&D, but not always. usually rules-lite, but not always.
what does the OSR mostly NOT do?
focus on character builds. these change the focus too much to be on the rules than the fiction, can create situations where stuff everyone should be able to do is an ability locked to one class, and impede tactical transparency.
resolve everything with a die roll. combat uses dice to be scary, unpredictable and most importantly not your default course of action. everything else should bring up dice rarely - dice are your plan B when your plan A fails. the best plans need no dice.
use linear storytelling or put players into a writer/GM role. linear storytelling gets in the way of the decision-making so core to the playstyle; letting players write details into the setting is mutually exclusive with them discovering it.
rules for everything. 400 pages of crunch is worse at simulating a believable world than the GM and players' shared understanding. OSR games rely constantly on GM ruling.
mostly still applies to all the above. making your system a "pure" OSR game comes second to doing what's best for your game.
System recommendations
old D&D or a retroclone
old-school D&D - or old school essentials or basic fantasy or swords & wizardry, which are old D&D's mechanics repackaged with quality-of-life tweaks (and the upside of not giving WOTC your money) - are usually the go-to when recommending someone's first OSR game. they're actually not my first pick, though!
PROS:
very complete, with more robust rules than a lot of the lighter games on this list.
100% compatibility: most OSR adventures are statted for old school essentials. converting them to other OSR systems is usually simple, but not 1-for-1.
easier to find games for. anyone interested in the OSR space knows what old school essentials is.
CONS:
jank. these games largely still have weird saves, level limits for non-humans, some still have descending AC, etc etc. it's not that bad but it is there
i hate thief skills. lots of essential dungeoneering actions are locked to the thief class as abilities, with abysmally low success chances. this is stuff i prefer being handled without a roll. thieves in this system suck and make everyone else worse at dungeon crawling by existing.
there's just lots of really cool shit in other systems i'm about to go into that you just don't get here
Knave 1e and its various hacks
this is a 7-page super-lightweight system that boils everything down to just the essentials.
rolling a character takes like 5 minutes. roll stats, roll gear, roll traits, go. done. it's great.
characters are defined entirely by stats and gear, no classes. wanna be a fighter, have high strength and carry a big sword and armor. wanna be a wizard, have high intelligence and fill your inventory with spells. item slots are elegant and pretty limited.
initiative is instant: roll d6. 1-3, monsters go first. 4-6, PCs go first. swingy, but god it is so smooth and shaves like the most boring 5 minutes off of every combat
monsters are so very elegant. old D&D gives monsters a "hit dice" rating to determine their HP, e.g. a 3HD monster rolls 3d8 for hit points. knave takes this number (HD) and uses it for attack rolls and saves (aside from exceptionally bad/good saves), so a knave statblock looks something like this.
spells are all one or two sentences long & extremely easy to remember.
7 pages is so light. i have the system basically memorized.
DOWNSIDES: there's no dungeon crawling rules (standard for meatier OSR games & something i consider essential) and no real bestiary, though the second point isn't a huge deal cause they're so easy to make. it also kinda assumes you already know how to run OSR games, so there's very little real advice or guidance.
KNAVE HACKS
knave 1e is in creative commons & comes with an editable word doc for you to publish with modifications, so there's a ton of variants (there was a spreadsheet of them somewhere, but i can't find it).
Grave is a favorite - i'm two years into a grave campaign and it's fantastic. it's a dark-souls-y version of knave with some really elegant innovations.
you have a set number of deaths before you for-reals die, as every character plays an undead as is dark souls tradition. makes it good for OSR beginners! being able to tell when you're close to your final death is really good - it lets you emotionally prepare for losing your character & raises the stakes more the more you die. (though honestly you should probably cut the number of extra deaths in half, it's super generous)
XP and gold are combined into one resource, souls. legendary creatures drop big souls you can make into magic items. this has ended up being the coolest thing in my current campaign. my players love finding powerful souls to make into magic items it's so fun
uses preset packages of stats/gear instead of knave's rolled ones, filling the role of more traditional character classes. has the wonderful side effect of not making you get stuck with low stats cause you rolled bad one time.
you have stamina equal to your empty item slots. you spend stamina on spells if you're a caster, or free maneuvers (on top of your attack at no action cost) if you're not. it's super elegant.
there's 3 classes of spells: wizardry for intelligence, holy magic for wisdom, and witch stuff for charisma. nice and intuitive.
there's a page of 50 magic items each a couple sentences long. this PDF is worth it just for the magic items.
DOWNSIDE: see the downsides for knave 1e. all still apply.
i enjoyed grave so much i made a variant of it with the dark souls bits removed (and some dungeon crawl rules added!) to use for my standard fantasy campaigns.
Knave 2e
sadly knave 2e is not purchasable yet (i backed it on kickstarter so i have access, though). but when it comes out i highly recommend it.
much larger and denser than knave 1e. it finally has dungeon crawling rules, it has GM and player guidance, everything is refined and the layout is so so nice and readable.
combat is a bit more interesting than 1e. you can break your weapon against an enemy to deal max damage. you get a free maneuver on high attack rolls.
there's rules for stuff like alchemy, warfare, building a base. it all kicks ass.
there are so many goddamn tables. i rifle through it anytime i need inspiration.
DOWNSIDES: some of the new rules are a little untested & wonky. introducing randomness into how often your rations spoil or your lights go out can cause issues.
Mausritter
you play tiny little mice! in a world full of big dangerous things that want to eat mice. cat = dragon. you get it. what more could you want
the mouse thing is just super intuitive. you get the dynamic between you and the big scary lethal world. fantastic OSR game to introduce kids
nice and robust ruleset; nothing feels missing
tons of super nice GM stuff! faction rules, tools for rolling up hexcrawls and dungeons, plenty of tables
super clean readable layout. font isn't too small to avoid being intimidating. guidance is really nice and clear.
combat is autohit. super fast & lethal.
100% free
look mausritter is just. good. i wanna run it so bad someday
Worlds Without Number
sort of a middle ground between OSR stuff and 5e.
paid version here
free version here
lots of classes, at least in the paid version. the free version comes with just the warrior, expert and mage. there's feats and more of a focus on builds than most OSR games. if you like more mechanical build variety than a typical OSR game, this is a great game for you!
extremely good multiclassing. y'know how in most games if you just mash together two classes you think are cool you'll end up with a total mess? not here! every combo is viable and works fine! easily the best multiclassing of any game i've touched
an absurd amount of GM stuff and tables. easily more than any of the other stuff i've praised for also having them. but personally i haven't dug into them as much, so i can't really comment on them
skills the way modern D&D has them. you roll dice and try to beat a target number. i don't tend to like rolled skills, but most people do, so if that's your thing WWN has them
DOWNSIDES
the layout is terrible. everything is a huge wall of text with very little use of bold text or bullet points to draw attention to the important bits. the table of contents has like 15 things in it for a 400-page book! i couldn't find any of the paid-version-exclusive classes for like a month after i bought it! looking up rules is a nightmare.
the way the default setting handles "evil races" is like an exaggerated parody of all the problematic aspects of how D&D handles it. like, it wants so bad for you to have an excuse to genocide sentient free-willed people. but at least the default setting is easy to chuck in the trash
Dungeon Crawl Classics
the goal of this system is to take all of the crazy gonzo moments people remember playing old-school D&D in their childhood and turn all of that up to 11 while cutting the stuff that doesn't add to that. i think a lot of its innovations have ended up kind of standard in newer OSR stuff (like fighters getting maneuvers with their attacks), but it still has more to offer.
the funnel: you start the game with four randomly rolled dipshit peasants that you then throw into a meatgrinder to get horribly killed. you pick one of the survivors to be your 1st-level character.
maneuvers: fighters roll an extra die with each attack that gets bigger as you level. if it's a 3 or higher, you get to do a cool thing on top of your attack. pretty standard for OSR games, but this game popularized it!
crit tables: fighters also get more crits and nastier crits as they level. every crit, you roll on the crit table. maybe you chop off a dude's arm. maybe you just knock them over. maybe you shatter their shield. it's very cool
spell tables: i don't really like roll-to-cast mechanics, generally. but DCC goes so all-in on roll-to-cast that it still looks fun as hell to watch. you cast a fireball and maybe it goes how you want. or maybe you explode, or you nuke everything in a half-mile radius, or from now on you permanently ignite flammable materials you touch, or whatever. casters just have to put up with turning into a weird mutated mess across a campaign
there's no dungeon crawl rules, no encumbrance - this game is all about the big over-the-top wacky shit, and is not really interested in the more down-to-earth number crunching. it's more in the you-die-hilariously-all-the-time area of OSR than the you-avoid-death-through-clever-play area. not really my thing but the system knows exactly what it wants to be and i respect it
iron halberd
this one is mine! as the author i'm not qualified to tell you what isn't good about my system, so just assume it's worse than i make it sound, but here's a bunch of the selling points
semi-random character creation where you flip back and forth between rolling dice and getting your own input. roll stats, pick ancestry. pick starting gear kit, roll different dice based on which kit you picked. etc etc. stats are random but all equally viable (no rolling incredibly low or high stats). every time i run this game the character creation is a hit. seriously go roll up a character it'll sell you on the whole thing
you start out a lot stronger than a standard OSR character but grow way more slowly. i don't like 4th-level characters being 4 times as strong as 1st-level ones; HP never gets that high. emphasis is more on diegetic progression instead.
way too many subsystems for alchemy, crafting, strongholds, warfare, renown, rituals, likes 9 pages of magic items, a whole subsystem for becoming a cleric mid-campaign. i couldn't help myself i love this shit
in my current campaign we had a player permanently sacrifice some max HP to become a necromancer after deliberating on whether that's a good idea for like thirty seconds, which instantly made me think my necromancy system is a success
also free
Adventure recommendations
(in rough order of size)
Moonhill Garden (by Emiel Boven): look at this. look at it! this is like the best template for a little dungeon in an OSR game. all of the little factions are tied together. this would be a great oneshot to introduce people to an OSR system with.
A gathering of blades (by Ben Milton): a system-neutral, one-page sandbox. i ran this for an iron halberd game and it went super well. lasted like 7 sessions. highly recommend.
The Waking of Willowby Hall (by Ben Milton): a single dungeon with a million things going on. it's super chaotic with half a dozen different factions crashing into each other and a big angry goose. highly recommend, especially for kids
The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford (by Chance Dudinack): small sandbox with a fun fairytale vibe and a very fleshed-out little town. and a big nasty dragon.
Evils of Illmire (by Zack Wolf): this is a very dense, entire campaign's worth of hexcrawl in a very compact package for like $5. it doesn't do anything particularly new, but the value-for-money is absurd and it's a really good template for how to do a sandbox if you're used to 5e adventures
Ask me anything!
if anything here is unclear or intrigues you, send me asks! i love helping people get into OSR games. i'll link frequently asked questions here if i get any.
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snowghoul
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