Lucille L. Blumire

Following from Chainmail, all the way through to the most modern iterations of the game: D&D 5e and OSE Advanced Fantasy. Yes I'm putting OSE on a pedastal and treating it as canonical despite not being connected via intellectual property rights, but it deserves it. Link to fullsize

Ability checks, those things that power the skill system of 5e. In this article I would like to explain why I think they are basically worthless, and that within old school roleplay, particularly within the rule system of Old-School Essentials, there is almost always a better choice. Ability Checks The

Jojiro has churned out a bunch of these over on his blog, it has now come time for me to produce the easiest content ever: responding to someone elses blog. Orthodoxies I Your players arrive in an abandoned city – the first thing they do is enter a home, asking what’

The thief is probably the most discussed class in all of Basic D&D. It has strange percentile mechanics not shared by any other class. It has backstabbing with poorly defined mecahnics. What even is hiding in shadows anyway? We're going to explain all of this, from the context

There are a lot of rules for the passage of time in D&D. Most take to my tastes completely the wrong approach. The most egregious place for this is during wilderness adventuring. In which time is measured in days. Over the course of a day, a party might

If there's one thing the OSR community can debate until the heat death of the universe it's skill systems. Some people hate them and want none of them, some people like something simple, most people agree that the 3rd edition onward have too much crunch. Every new OSR game seems

The 1st Edition of AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is a wonderful resource for any referee to possess. In the section "Money (Gems & Jewelry)" there are roll tables  for determining the precise values and types of gems and treasures rolled. These sadly don't exist for my preferred edition:

Modern Dungeons and Dragons (3rd Edition Onwards) have all adopted a unified hit resolution system. \[\text{d20} + \text{Attack Mod} \ge \text{Armour Class} \implies \text{Hit}\] Those well versed in gaming history, or experienced in Old-School Systems, will almost certainly be familiar with the older variant of this, introduced

There's always a bit of ludonarrative dissonance in gaming. It's something that's always impossible to avoid—when the narrative of a game and it's gameplay disagree slightly. The biggest place I find this happens in tabletop gaming is with hit points. Especially in D&D and it's various offshoots,

Saving throw names are a biproduct of the very traditional dungeon crawling environment they were built for. As such, their names can seem awkward and difficult to assign to certain effects and traps. The first thing to understand when determining what type of save should be given to the effect

Retainers are a core part of the old school D&D experience. Specifically here as in all posts on this blog I’ll be focusing on the basic and expert system, and specifically the OSE expansion to this system. There are a number of rules I use to help