u/alexserban02

I don't know how things are in the US and elsewhere in the world, but in Romania, for a couple of years now, the TTRPG scene is growing exponentially. Of course, most of the people who start out do so with Dungeons and Dragons. This article is somewhat for them, cause I have been asked about the history of the game on a number of times when I mentioned the very first edition was released in '74 what the history of the game even is, if it's been on the market for so long (for the international audience who might raise an eyebrow at this, given that Romania was under a communist dictatorship and after its toppling the following decade was very rough economically, the first D&D players start to pop up in the very late 90' and early 2000's, and back then it was a very very minuscule fanbase, most of the players nowdays have started playing during the pandemic).

We tackled various aspects of D&D history before, talking about the evolution of certain classes, about older mechanics, but up until now, we didn't do a full on dive into all of the editions. Obviously it is a big undertaking so we're gonna split it into two articles, this week looking at 1st edition, B/X, BECMI, AD&D 1st edtion and AD&D 2nd edition. Next week is we return and talk about 3rd edition, 3.5 edition, 4th edition & Essentials, 5th edition and 5.5 edition.

So if you wanna take down a trip through memory lane or if you just aren't familiar with the history of the game, I invite y'all to read the article! For the veterans, please do tell if I missed something (to be completely honest, there is so much, we couldn't possibly gone through everything) and tell us when did you start playing and what nice memories you have from back then!

I hope you enjoy this one, cheers!

I think out of the, let's say more mainstream TTRPGs out there, those part of the World of Darkness are deceptively the hardest to properly play. For they ask of us something quite difficult: stop being human, be a monster. A supernatural kind, yes, but still.

Going with my beloved Vampire for example (although we also cover Werewolves in the article), yes I do enjoy playing it, yet I think I am not proficient enough at getting across the truly horror experience that is the life of a Kindred. No more warmth, no more sensation in your body, the inability to drink and eat, which as a foodie, truly horrible, the stuff of nightmares. You can't really trust anyone, there are so many rules and ways for you to die and good luck if you are a Nosferatu. No, most of the time, my games are a bit more lighthearted, the horror is dialed back a bit, as neither me, nor my players will necessarily be able to portray it in a believable manner constantly.

I did see games which managed to do so. A game run by Horia, Brasov by Night got a lot more closer to this portrayal of the actual horror of a newly embraced Kindred would find itself in. They recapped it in chapters and it was a pleasure reading through them. It kinda changed a bit the way I run and view my games, but I am not yet nearly as good as Horia.

With this piece I want to explore the challenges of this experience and to provide some ways in which you can improve this aspect, both as a player and ST. I hope you will enjoy it and find it useful!

Stormlight Archive might be my favorite fantasy series ever. So naturally when I heard that there will be a TTRPG released not only for it, but for the whole Cosmere, I was postively extatic.

I got the starter set as soon as I could, but unfortunately, life got a bit in the way and I wasn't able to play it for a while. Perhaps for the better, cause at the time I had few people in my circles who read Stormlight, yet now, when I finally managed to ran it, I had plenty to choose from.

I am still happy with what we've got, however, they did play it safe with the rules. They made it easy for anyone who plays 5e and enjoys Stormlight to jump into the Cosmere RPG without much struggle, the rules being a combination of 5e, 4e and Pathfinder 2e. Still fun, but I would've enjoyed to see something a little bit more out there.

The starting scenario is good, however I find it strange that there is almost no magic in it, given how magic is one of Sanderson's selling points, but oh well.

Thoughts at large can be found in the review, I hope you will find it helpful!

Today I wanted to tackle a... heavy subject. See what I did there?

We are going to talk quite at length about one mechanic that is seldomly used now, a mechanic with a less than stellar reputation, often considered nothing more than a artefact of a bygone era that amounts to needless and annoying book-keeping.

We are going to talk about encumbrance.

I think it is honestly quite an underated mechanic and one that has the potential to enrich any game that attempts dungeon crawling. But I agree, it is a mechanic that has to be handled with care so that it enhances the game and not bog it down.

Summarizing a bit the article, the reason I feel this mechanic has the potential to enrich games is that it changes the gameplay loop in a meaningful way and forces choices that can create multiple hooks for the narrative.

Let's say the party managed to travel through most of the dungeon, they haven't fully cleared it, but they nonetheless arrived at the treasure room. And the room has about 4000 gp in various denominations alongside jewlery, gemstones, some paintings that certainly do look valuable and even a gorgeously sculpted bronze frog statue. Normally, people will note everything down and in a very Skyrim-like manner put everything in the inventory and move on, exit the dungeon and make their way back to the town to buy stuff with their newly found wealth.

But, take this same scenario and add a encumbrance. The party won’t be able to take all of the loot, they might need to either come in with some hirelings or if the dungeon architecture permits it, even some pack animals. That whole process slows them down, we have established that they haven't cleared the whole dungeon, so they might face some dangers while they try to exit as well. In this sense, the gameplay loop becomes akin to that of an extraction shooter of sorts, as you go in the dungeon and then you also have to exit it with all that loot. Now, let's say they do manage to return from the dungeon with their loot intact. What if they are attacked on the way back to the town? They do move slower and all that wealth being transported is bound to attract some unwanted attention. What if they have to flee what seems an overwhelming force, as they are still wounded from traversing the dungeon? Maybe they bury some of the treasure, maybe they manage to parlay somehow, maybe they even make the hard decision to leave some of the treasure behind so that they may escape.

They go back to town, what then? Yes, they have gold and coins, but what about the gemstones, the paintings, that bloody frog statue? How do you liquedate those assets? The average village would not be able to buy then off them, so they might need to go to a bigger city, maybe the treasure even requires some sort of specialized fringe buyer, otherwise they won’t be able to cash in the full ammount it is technically worth.

There are countless options, depending on the level of detail you want to employ and if this is only the surface, as in the article propper I go quite at length on how you can use and implement encumbrance in a number of ways.

I hope you will enjoy it and more then anything that you will find it useful and it will spark your interest enough for you to give this mechanic a propper chance, despite the general discourse prevalent now. It might surprise you! Cheers!

I like OSR. If you've been following us for any length of time, that shouldn't be a surprise. I think the simplicity of most OSRs is elegant, I love how it often has a slightly more simulationist dimension and I do enjoy the general expected gameplay loop of going in the Dungeon, getting some treasure, returning to the town to sell it, train and get better gear so that you may return back to said dungeon and explore deeper levels of it. It is simple, but when run right, I think it is very much compelling.

I also think OSR is quite balanced, both in terms of characters and also in terms of attention to the three pillars - Social, Exploration and Fighting. We have made a number of articles by now about the Exploration Pillar, how it is currently less developed and underutilized in modern D&D. I think that is not the case with OSR games. However, there are some who look at some decisions OSR took in regards to exploration and its procedures, mostly things taken as legacy from older editions of D&D and scoff at them as merely book-keeping that takes away from the fun of the game.

This piece aims to explore these often ill-viewed procedures - things like inventory management, hirelings, encumbrance, the role of the town and the economy - and argues that while they are elements of logistics, they make exploration matter and they are the way in which you engage with this pillar. The act of stripping them down was how exploration lost its grit and how it became mostly a skip-over. There is value in this procedure and I wanted to go over every one of them.

I usually write these essays in advance from posting them, and this present text is written thereafter, closer to the date of posting, so in retrospect to the article, I also wanted to add that some of these procedures were churned inside the OSR community and evolved in perhaps more interesting ways then their initial form. Shadowdark and its torch timer and Mousritter's (and in general Into the Odd's game family) more physical inventory system made these aspects of logistic better than ever, at least in my opinion. I am looking forward, as I venture into more games, to see what innovations I will stumble upon and I call onto you, friends, to share below either rules which you encountered playing other games or houserules that you found or created that enhance exploration! I hope you will enjoy the article! Cheers!

I love Cyberpunk in almost all its forms. From the ttrpg, to the anime, to the videogame (which, I honestly think is the best one I have ever played). A lot of this love stems to the setting and the themes of the game.

Turning back to the ttrpg, I have a mixed feelings on the system. I enjoyed it for the most part, but I do feel it is slightly too crunchy and a bit unwieldy, especially in regards to Netrunning. With an experienced enough group you can get over these things and have an amazing time with it.

But, what if you have a group that simply played the game or watched the anime or saw that there is a new season coming up and has that rush to play something. The group who is not that experienced with TTRPGs, and for whom Cyberpunk RED might be a bit too much?

Well, for that group we have this absolute gem of a game here, CBR-PNK Augmented. Leaving aside this game’s apparent aversion to vowels, this game offers quite a tight package. And I do mean tight, as it presents us with a bare-bones minimalistic RPG powered by the Forged in the Dark engine. The size of the core rules for this thing? One freaking pamphelt, roughly one A4 page I guess.

It's short and sweet, punches way above its number of pages and might be one of the best way to introduce someone to ttrpgs, with some caveats that we go over in the review! I hope you'll enjoy it!

Games from the World of Darkness line certainly manage to hit a certain cord with the wide audience.

WoD is a product of the 90s through and through, the mix of gothic, philosophical temes, dark, brooding and corrupt world and you, often times cought in the middle of it all and often times, not your average good guy, trying to right the wrongs.

At best you will be an anti-hero, but most often someone who will do almost anything to scrape by, morals be damned. Cause who needs morals in this dark and corrupt world anyway?

Or... is it really like that? What I posit with this article is that all WoD games work due to putting hope at the center of their conflict in one way or another. Vampire and Humanity, Werewolf and Gaia, Changeling and The Dreaming, etc. We go through them all, we explore them all and we invite you to take this hopeful walk with us and share bellow your hopeful WoD stories!

I still have a complicated relationship with D&D. I initially somewhat came around with 5.5e, as they added some really neat things and the balance between classes and the changes to CR were quite good. Unfortunately, they did add some things that, unless handled carefully break both economy and balance. Still, I had some amazing groups as of late, so perhaps that's also part of the reason I am looking more favorable on the game.

A couple of months ago, I made an article about the various problems I have with high level play. It was more or less an extensive explained list on my issues with the game past level 8-10. So quite a missnomer regarding the high level part as well. But, where I want to get at is that, it was mainly a list of complaints with no real sollutions offered. And most of you did point that out. And you were right. If I point out the problems, maybe I can and should think about a solution. This is what this article is. A list of solutions and changes in design mentality one should make for higher level play. Actually, scratch that, some apply starting from around level 5, as I find that is a point where some of the challenges of earlier levels start being bypassed by magic, through things like Leomund's Tiny Hut, Revivify and Fly.

I hope you will enjoy the article and I hope above all else, you will find it useful! Also, if you ran or played in games past lv 7-8 do tell how you handled them, I am always curious to learn!

We have made it clear that there are few other IPs in this hobby that we love more then World of Darkness. And for good reason, sentimentalities regarding how this brought this team together aside, the world, the games and their atmosphere are absolutely amazing. More so, they offer plenty opportunity to analyze and discuss from a plethora of angles.

Take today's article for example, where we look at three of the splats of WoD, arguably the most popular ones - Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension - and analyze the themes so prevalent in them once you strip away the supernatural - the cruel hierarchy of VtM, the double combo ecological and spiritual crisis of WtA and the philosophical debate on the nature of reality in MtA.

Knowing and harvesting these themes for your chronicles will surely make them deeper and memorable so I hope you will find this article helpful and interesting. Analyzing these themes, so central to these three games also proved, in my opinion, to be surefire ways to present what these different splats are all about to the uninitiated.

Lastly, if you enjoy this, I do promise a part two, going over Changeling, Hunter, Wraith and Demon as well, as all four deserve more love!

This one is somewhat of a companion piece to the article I wrote earlier this week about character builds in D&D.

While writing that piece, I started thinking about how much the character sheet itself contributes to the tendency to think of characters primarily through their mechanics. Modern D&D sheets are packed with abilities, modifiers, feats and other mechanical details, leaving comparatively little room for the character themselves.

Compare that to many OSR games, where sheets are much lighter, sometimes even more artsy, and leave more space for possessions, quirks and character details. There’s an idea you hear quite often in OSR circles: the character sheet is not the character.

So I wanted to explore that idea through White Box, Old-School Essentials, Into the Odd, Knave and Cairn, and look at how reducing mechanical definition can actually leave more room for characters to develop through play.

It's not an argument that minimalist games are inherently better, but rather an exploration of what happens when the rules stop telling you who your character is and leave some of that work to the table.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Knave somewhere with a broken sword and one spellbook left, and absolutely no idea who he's going to become yet.

If you enjoyed the article, don't forget to toss the proverbial coin to your favorite Gazette!

Soo, I love building characters, looking at how various classes combinations mesh together and how much damage/healing/etc. I can dish out with a character. I will not be a hypocrite and pretend that's not the case. But I reckon that comes at least in part from the fact that I arrived at TTRPGs after growing up with video games, with MMOs and other such things, where character builds where quite central.

I would also make the argument that, TTRPGs shouldn't necessarily be about that. Or at least that the primary focus shouldn't maybe be on that. That the character's story should take precedence to its build. It's identity tied more to his story and the world it is part of then to the combination of race, class, background and feats. Of course, speaking now mainly from the perspective of trad games, like D&D and Pathfinder. I also don't want to present this as if this should not exist, but rather a slight change regarding focus.

I also wanted to look into D&D's history and see how this trend evolved over the years, from the first editions to the current day. And I have to say, this look into the past has been quite interesting. Might do a more in depth article about AD&D's kits in the near future, I found them quite an interesting design space. I hope you will also enjoy it, find it interesting and that you see the perspective of this argument. I know there are other TTRPGs where this issue is not as prevalent, but D&D is usually the first point of contact with this hobby and for many it remains the only point of contact, so I thought offering this perspective might be desirable.

Vampire: The Masquerade is perhaps the most important TTRPG for this blog, and dare I say, for us as a group. Yuno and I met while playing VtM v5, then Yuno met Horia and Andreea while trying out v20 for the first time. So we met, became friends, and, at least in the case of me and Yuno, got together because of VtM. It has become something very close to our hearts, very dear to us.

When we learned of the new v6, there was a chorus of reactions: skepticism, cautious optimism, curiosity, excitement. The four of us got on Discord and did an almost seven hour long close reading of the document, ran the starting scenario, debated among ourselves, and found a lot of things we liked, a lot of things we abhorred, and sometimes we did not agree on what was deserving of a quick Final Death and what deserved to live another night.

So when Horia and I sat down to work on this article, we decided it would be best to offer two distinct perspectives: that of somewhat of a newcomer to the franchise, who started with v5 and only briefly dabbled in v20 and Dark Ages, and that of the veteran with experience across all of the editions and, what, over 15 years of being into this fandom? For the most part we are in agreement, but as always it is most interesting to see where we diverge. Horia was the main writer for this review, and he had quite a lot of thoughts on the newest iteration of the game... almost 8k words worth of thoughts.

With this being said, strap in, this is going to be a long night, but I hope you will enjoy this very in depth review of the v6 playtest! We are very curious to see your thoughts on the matter as well!

So, I recently had a D&D PvP match with Ionut, from the cast of Dicesylvania. I am not here to talk about D&D and PvP, I know it is not generally popular, but I do enjoy it. It is also not important for the discussion at hand, but there is a link.

During the match, I caught both myself and Ionut doing various small rituals with the dice before rolling important saves or attacks. Blowing on them, rubbing them against the neck, mumbling some sort of prayer. And it struck me as odd. Consciously I know that no such ritual influences the result on the dice roll, yet at the same time, when things become stressful, I would do these things. It helped put my mind at ease.

I found the whole concept fascinating and so I decided to look more into it and well, here is the result of that!

So if you were ever curious what D&D and open sea fishing in the Trobriand Islands have in common, grab your dice and fishing supplies, strap on and let's see! I hope you will enjoy this one!

I am giddy. Perhaps I did not show it at the time, but I am giddy. I was talking with Horia about V6 and our various thoughts on it, me starting playing VTM and WoD games with V5 and only after a while trying out the older editions and Horia starting with Revised and later on moving to the 20th anniversary editions.

But, while we were talking about the playtest (we will have a full article going over that, probably next Friday), I also showed him that for V6 they are also planning to release editions of Mage, Dark Ages and Changeling. We stopped at Mage, for, as Horia put it, "there is no Mage without Satyros". And I wondered a bit, hmm, I wonder what is Satyros' take on all of this, is he in any way involved. And I voiced this to Horia, who had a brilliant idea: what if we message Satyros and interview him.

To our delight, he was more than willing to do so and well, two hours and a half of recording + way too much time spending on transcribing and trimming what amounted to almost 20k words, here we are! We talked about the history of Mage, V6, video games, magick, Dungeon Crawler Carl and many many other things that I 100% invite you to listen to if you are in any way shape or form a fan of his work and White Wolf in general!

Cheers!

One of my favorite campaigns I ran centered around the players investigating a string of high profile assassinations that ravaged the continent - generals, kings, nobles, inventors, mages. They traveled throughout the continent, piecing together clues, chasing after shadowy figures on two or three occasions, but while still being in the darkness. A cult of assassins, that much was obvious, but what were their reasons? What were they after?

When the reveal finally arrived, as they came face to face with the leader of the cult - the last Dragonborn still alive and grafted within him a fragment of divinity (which they later learned was Vecna, cause in the words of Brandon Sanderson, there is always another secret) they were ecstatic! And so was I. Playing with a mystery like this can be a double edged sword, the payoff must match the expectations built up by the players.

The center of why this bit of my campaign still gets brought up almost 4 years later is that, perhaps without setting out to do so necessarily, information acted as a center piece, it was a valuable comodity that the players had to chase, that it wasn’t simply given to them.

This piece explores how information can be used like this in multiple ttrpgs and how you specifically may use it in order to make your games better! I hope you will enjoy it!

I always enjoyed exploration. In real life when I would go on road trips with my family, in video games exploring dungeons, cities and castles, in books where I would imagine Gondor, Hogwarts, Narnia and how exciting it would be to wonder around these places.

And of course, once I started playing D&D I was also excited to see how exploring is handled here and well...I think the toolkit of current editions is lacking. I don't think that is a controversial statement. But, as I started to play more and to look into the history of the game I discovered that wasn’t always the case and the not to far, within the OSR movement, exploration was thriving, both due to some gameplay elements that were stripped down, the tone that favored things like hexcrawls and dungeon crawls a lot more compared to 5e and finally, and perhaps most importantly, due to the work of certain amazing individuals such as Justin Alexander, Jennell Jaquays and Ben Robbins, among others.

Unlike other articles, this one will not offer an analysis, but rather ways to make exploration better and more exciting for everyone at the table! I hope you will find it interesting and useful! Cheers!

So, I got to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. I was aware of the various controversies surrounding the movie, but I was still excited as so far I have enjoyed all movies put forth by Nolan and I was also a huge fan of the source material, growing up with Disney's Hercules and then retellings of the Greek Myths and then in highschool finally getting myself acquainted with the real Homeric Epics. Honestly, even after close to two weeks, I still don't know how I fully feel about the movie. It's a mixed bag. There were some less than stellar performances, the choices in what content was cut don't really sit right with me, the costumes were sub-par and the dialogue is at times quite shoddy. Actually, on the last part, let me quote "Our age of bronze is collapsing". Yeah.

Mild disappointment aside, the movie still managed to get me in the mood for a game set in the times of Ancient Greece and since like you, my drug of choice in terms of entertainment are TTRPGs, I looked over my collection and compiled a small list with the games best suited for this endeavor.

The article here is the result, I go over three titles - 5e's Mythic Odysseys of Theros; Mythras and Agon. I go over all three of them, break down the pros and the cons of each of the three and give you my thoughts on them.

I hope you will enjoy the article and that it will prove to be useful if you find yourself in the mood for some epic homeric hijinks! Cheers!

Making a TTRPG is one of those intrusive thoughts that I feel most people who get in the hobby have at one point or another. Especially Game Masters. I mean, it is only natural and if you start with D&D, as so many of us do, you are bound to homebrew some stats, an item, make your setting. By that point you are already somewhat there. So what are a couple more steps? I would also reckon that even though there are a lot of people who think like this, not many actually follow through. Cause making an RPG is somewhat daunting, there are many considerations to take into account, many things that you will most likely not know. So most of these projects don't get started at all or if they are started, they are later abandoned.

I am currently making a game alongside a good friend of mine, Marius. And it is quite a daunting undertaking. There are quite a few things I have to learn and that's after quite a lot of experience with the medium, with game studies and so on. Yet, I also think that making a TTRPG is one of the most rewarding and fun activities I have done in quite a while. I want to share that a bit with you, and I don't mean just the details about the game we're working on, but also a push to try this yourself. I want to make the case for why and how should you also try this out. Even if it doesn't see the light of day, a project like this can be a lot of fun, it manages to stimulate your creative juices in a lot of fun ways and I do believe you come out a better GM by the end.

It is one of our longest articles yet, I had quite a lot to say in the matter and I hope you will find it interesting, I hope that if you ever had the thought to make your own game, maybe this will be a good push for you in that direction. Before I leave you to the article proper, I just want to share what I think it's the most important rule for such a project: if you are to make something, make something that excites you first and foremost, something that you genuinely find fun. If you keep at it, it is bound to find it's niche, excitement after all is pretty contagious! Cheers! I hope you will like this one!

I have written quite a lot on diferences between OSR games and modern 5e, the difference in playstyle, relation with mortality, various mechanics such as gold for xp, reaction roles, dungeon turns and so on.

For quite a long time after I started to play OSR games, I was enamored, for I always wanted my 5e games to be more gritty, harder, yet still fair and with OSR I felt like I got that.

Now, with this piece, I wanted to look at something related to one of the criticisms I often saw levied against old school D&D and OSR games, mainly that they are unbalanced, too many save or sucks and difficulty just for the sake of it. Compared to nowdays, where even if CR could use some improvements (although it is quite a bit better with the 2024 iteration) it can still produce balanced encounters if followed properly.

And there is truth in both of this statements, but it ommits something - not maliciously necessarily - that balanced was not required for pre Dragonlance D&D and OSR games. The game did not make a promise of balance, but rather one of fairness, the DM, or as it was first known, the referee would be impartial. It is important to point out that you were not heroes, but anti-heroes at best, who might've offered some help only if you got something out of it. This stemming of course from how the game was emulating Conan style pulp fantasy, rather than the heroic epic fantasy later adopted following the success of Dragonlance.

So to cut it short, fairness and balance are not the same. One is about impartiality, while the others is about making sure that the danger the players are facing is winnable, without the requirement of underhanded tactics to tip the scales. One is pulp, the other epic. Both can be good, but we have to be aware of the distinction and not judge them against the same standards. Hope you will enjoy the piece!