Have a Difficult to Reach Dungeon

I wanted a scenario where getting to the dungeon was half the challenge. When I read about the Ikor Quag region in the greater Vaarn setting with its toxic swamps, I thought about how cool it would be to have a dungeon at the bottom of one. My initial concept involved necrotech cult(s) in a grand Bioshock type space, but when I started working in earnest for the Vaarn ‘25 game jam I needed to reduce the scope, and went with a 13 room sunken spaceship. The key idea though is a dungeon with valuables being challenging to reach. It adds verisimilitude by answering why no one has already grabbed the valuables? It’s in a place most would not think to go to! It also feels more in tone with the general structure of an adventure story.

There are downsides to this approach. If it’s really hard to get somewhere there’s a good chance your players decide they’d rather go anywhere else. Since I am a fan of West Marches style sandbox play I don’t see this as a problem necessarily, but it could be a source of bad friction for some tables.

The Dungeon as An Order of Operations Puzzle

This might seem like a tangent, but I have a bigger point here, so bear with me. Here is a universal principle of design I believe in:

When considering the introduction of a particular design element into a work, ask what is gained by its inclusion.

An example to illustrate the point: The creation of realistic spaces is a type of design element that can be incorporated into an adventure. So if your setting is in a castle, the castle has rooms and a layout that conforms to our understanding of castles. What do you gain from this? It adds verisimilitude to the space, and makes it comprehensible to players. Then players can make informed decisions about choices they make. That’s a nice property for your adventure to have! But there are some properties that are not necessarily gained from realistic spaces. If your setting is a tower, perhaps there is only a spiral staircase, with the occasional room jutting out. That’s realistic, I’ve visited lots of towers like that, but it isn’t a space that will offer up interesting choices in play. So if the goal is to create an adventure where exploration generates interesting choices, realistic spaces as a design element can be a tool in our toolbox, but it can’t be the thing we are striving for without being in tension with our goal.

I mention this because I was thinking about the value of Jaquaysed spaces. I used to think the real value of a dungeon like Caverns of Thracia is how it convincingly creates interconnected histories within a space. But I started thinking more about what you get from the loops and actual node-structure of a Jaquaysed dungeon. And one fun property that can emerge from this type of space is you can transform your dungeon into an order of operations puzzle.

By an order of operations puzzle I mean that the players have a particular goal in mind, and to achieve that goal they will need to take some steps in a particular order, but although some steps are pre-conditions to subsequent steps, the steps you take are generally not fixed. That’s a fairly abstract description so a trivial example should help clarify. When getting dressed in the morning undergarments will always get worn before shirt & pants, and socks always come before shoes, but it makes no difference whether you put on your shirt first or your pants.

A good order of operations puzzle should complicate how the players navigate the space without ever acting as a hard blocker to progress. You can think of it as an extension of Sean McCoy’s blogpost about writing rooms in pairs. Features in some rooms are needed in others, and figuring out how it all comes together is the puzzle of the dungeon.

In the case of the adventure I wrote, the central puzzle comes down to if the engine core is active or not. Certain opportunities open themselves up, or make certain actions easier when it is turned off, but it also closes off other possibilities in the space. Also getting to the engine core without dying is a challenge, as the room leading up to it is filled with toxic ichor. Navigating it likely requires tools found elsewhere.

The engine core is also connected to the toughest opponent of the dungeon, the destined autark praetor, which presents a dillema as permanently killing the praetor is highly desirable, but the praetor’s eye is needed to reach the most valuable room of the dungeon. There are a wide variety of tools the PCs can use to accomplish these tasks, but getting them done in an order where they achieve their goal and avoid a TPK requires quite a bit of skill.

Minimum Viable Settlement

The basic loop of OSR/adventure roleplay is to explore a dangerous space, and then retreat to safety with treasure in hand. Settlements should have some personality and sense of place in the world, but if you create too much detail you risk imbalancing the locus of play. So it is encumbant on designers to get that balance right with a settlement that offers relative safety, but isn’t a space to get lost in if the focus of play is dungeon exploration. Dark Souls and Caves of Qud (Stiltgrounds notwithstanding) are obvious touchstones here with settlements the player can retreat to with interesting NPCs to briefly interact with, but the settlements are a far cry from places rooted in civil society.

These smaller settlements are ideal for a few reasons. It helps keep the main thing the main thing. I find it demoralizing as a GM to read adventures where the town takes up pages upon pages of detail if it isn’t a social adventure. Another feature is that in smaller settlements not all of the PC’s needs can be met. This means it is in the party’s interest to leave and go explore more. To take the Zixmorth settlement of my adventure as an example, there isn’t enough water to indefinitely sustain players. So that creates a time pressure. Also, if the party acquires all the exotica in the dungeon, there isn’t enough stuff worth trading in Zixmorth, so if players want to get the most out of their trades, they will need to move on.

I managed to keep the settlement details to a single page (page and a quarter if you include the list of hooks). The settlement description is a single paragraph, followed by details about how Zixmorthians react to outsiders. Then I have descriptions of the dozen inhabitants, each a sentence or two that gives some flavor of what they do, and perhaps some quirks about them. It is on the sparse side, and the NPCs could have benefitted from a bit more characterization, but it is also valuable to have all the information on a single page. There is enough here to give a sense of every NPC fulfilling a role within the logic of the space.

Doing Everything Myself

Unlike with my Mausritter adventure where it was a collaboration, and I only had to worry about the writing and dungeon layout, I wanted to do all the work myself for this adventure. This resulted in a significantly less slick product as I have no art training at all, and while I’ve learned a few things about graphic design, it isn’t something I’m well-versed in. But there is a great feeling of just putting something out into the world because you can. And you can still have a well designed work that looks nice and is easy to read even if it isn’t slick. We could use more of that in the indie RPG space, so this is also something I want to encourage others to emulate!

I will add that even though I planned for this zine to be art sparse, it ended up being extremely art sparse as I developed a wrist injury as I closed in on the deadline, and that limited the amount of drawing work I could do. So I ended up doing the bare minimum: a cover piece, and the maps. I plan to do an updated version that incorporates any feedback I receive, and to add a bit more art where it makes sense to more fully fill out the work.

As a glimpse into the process, here is the initial sketch of the dungeon and the final composition. In this case the changes from first pass to finish ended up being fairly minor.

Doing Everything in Typst

This section is for the design/layout/tooling/how-to sickos. The Mausritter adventure was done in Affinity, which has become the standard for just about everyone that doesn’t want to spend the money on an Adobe license. And Affinity is great, if you learned how to work with it more power to you! But I only know how to do so much with graphic design software, so if I was going to release something on my own I needed something else. When I learned about Typst I knew this might be exactly what I was looking for. It is a more powerful layout tool than writing a document in markdown, and although it may not be as robust as something like LaTex, it also doesn’t have as steep a learning curve. Typst is a great tool for anyone comfortable with the command line terminal, but there is also a web app for people that find that unapproachable/intimidating. And Typst is free, and the documentation is good. So it is very much worth looking at.

The two best features of Typst are that you can see your changes to a document as you save without having to recompile everything, and you can programmatically create UI components for your layout. For example, my keyed dungeons featured a main column that takes up about 2/3rds of the page’s width, and then a second side column taking up the remaining space where headers, NPC stat blocks, and additional information would go. Here’s what that looks like in Typst:

#let main-content(body, sidebar) = {
  v(1em)
  grid(
    columns: (2fr, 1fr),
    gutter: 2em,
    [
      #set text(size: 9pt)
      #set par(leading: 0.8em, spacing: 1.2em)
      #body
    ],
    [
      #set text(size: 9pt)
      #set par(leading: 0.8em, spacing: 1.2em)
      #sidebar
    ]
  )
  v(1em)
}

I’ll break down how this code works. It will take a bit to get through everything, but the nice thing is once you have this component defined, you don’t really have to think about this stuff anymore.

1. #let is a key word that lets Typst know that you are declaring a definition that will get used later. The # character is a way of letting Typst know you are doing something to the document, and not trying to write words that appear on the page.
2. main-content is the name of the UI component we are defining. It could be any name you want it to be. Like if you were creating a UI component for rendering an encounter table you could call it encounter-table. By naming the UI component we can reuse it later (I’ll show how that is done in a bit).
3. (body, sidebar) the words inside the parenthesis are called parameters or arguments. You can think of these things as inputs for the UI component. In other words, the body argument is going to be the text we have in the main body of the text, and the sidebar argument is going to be the text we include in the sidebar. This will become clearer when we show how the UI component is used.
4. = { The equals sign indicates that we are now ready to define what main-content is, and the angled brackets indicate that everything within the angled brackets is part of that definition.
5. v(1em) Our definition of our new UI component takes a bunch of built-in layout tools that Typst already has, and packages them together. The first of those built-in tools is v which is short for vertical. It creates vertical spacing between things. So in this case, it creates 1em worth of vertical spacing between our UI component and whatever came before it. An em is a unit of measurement that is based on the body height of a typeface, so it will vary depending on the font and font size you are using. You could also use other units of measurement like points, inches, millimeters, whatever!
6. grid Grid is an extremely powerful concept in graphic design, but this is what we’ll be using to actually define the column layout for our UI component. Our grid UI component takes a couple of arguments, described below.
7. columns: (2fr, 1fr). columns tells Typst how many columns they should be, and how wide they should be. We are using a unit of measurement called fr. fr units express measurements as ratios. So rather than trying to calculate what the actual width of the columns should be, we are telling Typst, however much width is available, dedicate 2/3rds of it to the first columns, and 1/3rd to the second column. If instead we wanted three columns of equal width, we would define it as columns: (1fr, 1fr, 1fr). Letting the computer do this work for us is great!
8. gutter: 2em A gutter is the space between columns since we don’t want two bodies of text to run right up against each other. By setting it to 2em we provide a comfortable amount of space between our two columns.
9. [...], [...] The square brackets represent the content for each column for our grid.
10. #set text(size: 9pt) Sets the text of our first column to 9 point. Note how we are using the # in front of our layout definition again. This might seem a bit confusing, but essentially because the square brackets can include text content that will appear on the page of our PDF document, when adding additional layout definitions we need the # again.
11. #set par(leading: 0.8em, spacing 1.2em) This is a layout definition for the paragraph. Leading is the amount of space between lines, and spacing is the amount of space between paragraphs. If there’s one piece of graphic design advice I can impart, it is that usually the default amount of space between lines is too small, so it is often worth increasing this value.
12. #body Remember how we had the argument for (body, sidebar) at the beginning of our UI component definition, and how it is a kind of input? That input is now getting deployed here. Again, this will become more clear when we see how the UI component gets used.
13. The same thing happens for the square brackets for the sidebar, only we use the #sidebar content instead of the #body. Note that although I used the same values for text and paragraph for both columns, they don’t have to be the same.
14. Finally, after our grid is defined, we include a bit of additional vertical spacing at the bottom with v(1em).

So we now have a bunch of layout work done with just a few sparse lines of code. It is a lot to take in, but the Typst documentation is very good so you can read about how to do all this stuff, and everything is explained in detail. Here is how we would now use our UI component for a keyed dungeon description:

#main-content[
Pale green light comes in from a crack in the ceiling. In the center of the room a throne of mammoth bones seats a quivering mass of pustulant flesh. Skeletons and zombies dangle from chains affixed to the rafters.
][
== 18 Necromancer's Throne Room
#v(1em)

*Pustulant Flesh* - 4 HD, AC 13, d6 necrotic touch, Ml 9
]

So the key is in the main content column, and a header and stat block in the sidebar. Note how #main-content has two square brackets together, with the content inside of them. Those are the inputs for our UI component. The first is the body argument, and the second is the sidebar. These inputs get taken by our UI component and passed into our grid definition as content that it will layout for us based on the definitions we have provided. The header is defined by having the = signs in front of it where the number of equal signs corresponds to header types 1 through 4, with 1 being the largest, and 4 being small enough as to be indistinguishable from bold text. Since this uses two equal signs it is a header 2 type. We also create some vertical spacing between our header and stat block. This illustrates another important point. Although we have defined all these layout elements in our main-content UI component, we can still include additional layout changes within the body and sidebar inputs we pass to it. So we get the best of both worlds, we have a definition that can be applied consistently across our document, but we also have the means at our disposal to make individual changes and adjustments that we might decide is appropriate.

You can copy this code into the Typst web app and play around with it yourself if you are curious.

I will do a future blog post very soon about the design goals I was trying to achieve with this, along with sharing some practical pieces of information about how you could create a zine like this yourself.

I remember visiting a geyser area in Iceland, and there were warnings about being careful where to step. The ground was fragile in places. If you stepped somewhere where the ground would give way, you would fall into an extremely geothermally heated pool of water and die instantly. I imagined how treacherous this landscape must have felt before it was transformed into a tourist destination. I thought about how it would be an evocative trap during wilderness exploration.

The most iconic of all traps is the spiked pit, which is a type of hole. The hole reveals all the pitfalls of designing traps. The original rules of D&D with its detect traps skill checks are an unsatisfying method of using the trap in play. Rolling to detect, and therefore avoid, a trap turns the trap into an HP tax, the trap is reduced to a game of attrition. By scrapping the detect traps skill check, we rely on the power of observation and reasoning of the players. From that gameplay design traps have a certain set of traits, all of which the hole easily illustrate.

Traps can be hidden but discoverable (a hole with false ground as the example of the geysers in Iceland), or they can be obvious, but the solution to overcoming them non-obvious (a gaping chasm).

The consequences of failing to avoid the hazard of the trap can vary from instant death (see again, geysers) to taking a modest amount of damage (it’s a 10 ft hole). For the sake of enjoyable game play, the more lethal the consequences the more the GM should telegraph that danger.

Traps can be used against enemies (they too can fall into a hole).

Traps can be trivialized with the right tools or abilities. The power of flight makes the hole no risk at all.

Traps can contain treasures. Perhaps another adventurer died at the bottom of the hole, and one can claim their ill-gotten gains for themselves, all one need to is descend into the hole.

Traps can be multi-faceted. One might think the trap is simply the hole, but as you descend via rope you discover spear traps that threaten impalement.

Traps can be secret opportunities. Sometimes a hole leads to the next floor of the dungeon.

What Does One Find in a Hole?

In my first campaign of Vaults of Vaarn I had one player who rolled up a new-mole character. While conducting overland travel and water rations dwindled, his solution was to dig to try and find an untapped source of water. Naturally I allowed this, but it meant eating up precious time, risking encounters, and finding water was not guaranteed. A reasonable ruling, but not very exciting. Vaults of Vaarn is supposed to be littered with the detritous of past societies. More appropriately, I have since constructed a basic table of what one might dig up in the blue Vaarnish desert.

Components

1. Name

Lets start with an obvious one. A faction needs a name. Sometimes the name will be highly specific like “the Shadow Order of Accursed Flame”, but a faction could also just be called “the bandits”. The important thing is that by naming a faction, NPCs are then able to it. That which is not named does not exist, at least not socially.

2. Quantity

Every faction has an implicit or explicit quantity of NPCs belonging to that faction. Factions come in all sizes. A very powerful individual such as a dragon or wizard can act as a faction of one, or a faction could be an army of thousands. In Desert Moon of Karth, it includes the “population” of each faction, and in the case of factions with class divisions, lists the numbers of each sub-group within the faction. It is more common to have a more vague sense of the quantity of a faction. This is fine, an exact number is unnecessary, but it is helpful for the GM to have a general sense of the faction size. Does the faction consist of a select few, some, a village worth, a hoard, etc.? How does that affect their behavior?

3. Goals & Desires

A faction wants things, and this is the most important component of a faction. Goals and desires make the faction open to negotiation. It also implicitly means the faction faces an obstacle that has kept that goal out of reach. Faction obstacles deserve greater consideration than they typically receive. Thinking clearly about them is what will distinguish your faction from some cliched video game style quest-giver. In Desert Moon of Karth it also lists fears for each faction. Fears can be thought of as a type of desire, in other words, a desire to avoid a particular outcome. A faction doesn’t need a fear, but I mention it as a way of broadening the scope of what counts as a goal. Good faction goals should be specific, actionable, and have meaningful stakes. A band of knights might seek glory, but that is a banal goal unlikely to elicit concern from a party. On the other hand, if that band of knights plans to make a name for themselves by slaughtering a group of trolls, and those trolls will then obviously seek revenge on the neighboring village that the party is on good terms with, we now have a specific situation more likely to grab the party’s attention.

4. Resources, Benefits & Advantages

Resources and benefits provide reasons for why NPCs might join a faction, and will color negotiations between players and the faction. Resources are things the players might utilize if they ally with the faction, and inversely threats they reckon with if they cross a faction. As with goals and desires, it is better if resources are specific and usable within the context of the game. For example, in Fever Swamp, it is said that the warriors of the Tree-Wearing House “are skilled ambushers, and their warriors have mastered the use of breathing-tubes to allow for amphibious attacks.” One important resource that is often inadequately considered is faction knowledge. This is particularly relevant within the context of a dungeon crawl. What can a faction tell the party about the surrounding area?

5. NPCs

Factions consist of NPCs. Therefore it can be helpful to include a few specific NPCs that the party are able to interact with. Specific NPCs provide an opportunity to add depth and texture to a faction, as NPCs can have different relationships within the faction. There can be a mix of specific and stock characters for a faction. In the first edition of Vaults of Vaarn, the factions of Gnomon all have leader NPCs that have six or so traits or details, but also some stock rank-and-file type NPCs that just have standard NPC stat blocks.

6. Scope

Factions possess different scopes depending on the needs of the table. Sometimes factions exist purely within the context of a single adventure, and other times they are a persistent feature of the social fabric of the campaign. The scope of the faction will determine the amount of care to detail that they deserve. Not every faction should be equally important to your campaign. It is much more manageable to have maybe 3 or 4 factions that persist through play, interspersed with minor factions that make brief appearances in adventures.

7. Ability to Take Action

Factions should be able to have an impact on the world. Otherwise they are just cheap props, and the game world will feel less alive. How factions make that impact on the world is not always considered, although there are a couple of notable techniques. In Mausritter, between sessions the GM is instructed to roll a d6 for each faction, and on a 4+, they make some progress towards a goal that has between 2 to 5 progress pips. Additionally, players have the ability to advance or set back these progress pips through the course of play. This strikes a balance between a simulation style of play where the world operates independently of the players, while also preserving the ability of players themselves to have an impact on the game world.

Another technique is the use of conditionals for scripting faction behavior. If a happens, then the faction does b, but if x happens, then the faction does y, and if all else fails, then the faction does z. In Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, it describes what happens if any of the powerful NPCs achieve their goals, leave the dungeon, and so on. Conditionals are a powerful tool, but should be used sparingly. Going overboard with conditionals leads to difficult to follow logic. Also conditionals are not the best use of prep time since the party will only end up making one decision. Including lots of conditionals is anticipating things that could happen, but won’t. In the end the party is just as likely to make an unanticipated choice. Every conditional considered that isn’t utilized is wasteful prep time. Overall, it is better to have a clear sense of general principles of how the faction operates without trying to rigidly define its actions. Consider the resources at its disposal, and how it might use those resources to achieve its goals.

8. Relationships

Factions will have relationships with other factions, and they will have a relationship with the party. Relationships can either be fixed or in flux. Sometimes fixed relationships make more narrative sense, but in flux relationships are more interesting and can be gamed. So they should be heavily preferred. Relationships are one-sided or mutual. That is, sometimes factions despise each other, but also sometimes one faction is envious of another faction, but that faction is unaware of the former. Goals can be used to determine the relationship between the factions.

When handling long-term factions attitude to players in place of a reaction roll, you can have a reaction index. In other words, a numeric score equivalent to a reaction roll that determines the faction’s relationship to the party. As the party does things that the faction likes or dislikes, you adjust that score as appropriate.

9. Territory

One final consideration for factions is they occupy space in the world. Presumably the faction is not ubiquitious. Where can they be found? Do they have a lair or center of power, or are they nomadic? Where would it not make sense to see members of the faction, and if one were to see them there, what would that say about the state of the world? What does their existence in a particular place say about them? If in the context of a megadungeon, how does that affect the overall ecosystem of power in the megadungeon? Faction territory does not need to be explicitly defined, but is an opportunity to more carefully consider the material history of your game world.

Final Thoughts

Factions are good, and as a GM you should use them. They introduce easy opportunities to inject interactivity into your adventures, and don’t require a ton of prep to create, although you should make sure they have sufficient specificity to have an impact in your game. It is rare to see all the specific components laid out in this post when you read a faction section in an adventure. This can mean there are some creative gaps you can fill to make a faction a more memorable and interesting experience at the table.

How does the party know if an item has magical effects? In B/X you don’t. You would need to cast a detect magic spell which causes magical things to glow. If you don’t have a magic-user with that spell in your party, you’ll need to pay an NPC. You don’t gain XP for acquiring magical treasure. The idea is you are selling off the other stuff you find in the dungeon, and spending that money to ID the magic items you’ll be using in the future. Since most things an adventurer is looking to buy is trivial in cost this is an important aspect of the game economics.

This is all perfectly functional, but not necessarily satisfying. Detect magic is an “eat your vegetables” type spell. Paying someone to identify a magical item makes an item feel mundane, not magical. In every town a wizard who has nothing better to do than take the coin of strangers who want to identify miscellaneous trinkets they found in a hole? Feels goofy.

Magic items are a type of trap. The best kind of trap. Instead of the contrivances of an Indiana Jones style temple defense, simply present something the players will want, but can mess them up if they aren’t careful. First rule of OSR style traps: always tell the players this is a trap so that the stakes are set. With magic items just tell them it is magic. It can be as simple as you just sense a magical aura. Now the players have to figure out what to do with that information, how they can use that to their advantage.

Magic items are another kind of trap. The players may have figured out what the magic item does, and can now use it to their advantage. But if they can sense that an item is magic, other NPCs can to. Maybe they will want that magic item for themselves. Players will now have to play “I know that you know that I know…” psychology games with all NPCs they meet going forward.

The divine daemon are incomprehensible beings. They have consumed and appended the parts of mythical and fantastical creatures such that their forms are bewildering and humbling to mortals. They possess great vanity, and therefore appreciate the fealty and tribute received by mortals. Most drink the blood of cattle, although there are rumors of those that drink human blood and confer dark powers to the wretched. To the faithful they speak miracles and blessings.

A divine miracle can be acquired at a temple dedicated to the daemon. The centerpiece of every temple is a sacrificial altar where one bleeds out cattle or other tribute, and offers the feast to the daemon. Roll 1d20 adding +1 for each sacrifice that is at least the size of cattle. On a 21+ gain a random miracle. Any given daemon typically has 2 to 4 miracles to teach their devotees. Miracles typically reflect some aspect of the mythical creatures the daemon has consumed.

To use miracles a devotee must possess some sort of sacred relic. An object of significance from the priest caste of the daemon. Sacred relics vary in power, and affect the power of the miracle performed.

At shrines the daemons accept other types of material tribute. Leave valuables at the shrine. Roll 1d6 and multiple that by 10 and the character’s level. If the offering is of greater value in coin receive a blessing for the day.

Those with knowledge of miracles can pray at temples or shrines to reuse miracles that have previously been performed.

The economy of cattle for miracles has important dynamics on the world. It makes livestock rarer and more expensive. Polities form raiding parties to steal cattle from their neighbors. The peasantry are wary and fearful of the priest caste.

Creative constraints are good to have, so I decided to give it a shot for the adventure scenario(s) I’m working on. The particular constraint I landed on was only allowing a single monster type for each letter of the alphabet. This felt natural to me from playing roguelikes where on the ASCII grid that you play a “D” is a dragon, and a “T” is a troll, etc.

Of course in a game like Nethack it utilizes upper and lowercase letters, colors, and symbols like “@” or “&”. But our aim is minimalism, so working with the English alphabet we get 26 monsters at most, but most likely will not use all the letters like Q or X. So perhaps we end up with 24 or 20, which gives us some flexibility for how we generate our encounter tables. And this constraint means that if we create an entry for a ghoul, there are no goblins or ghosts in this world. So you really have to think about what is important to include in the world, and why. The same artificial constraints though also give you some flexibility. There may be no ghosts, but perhaps there are spirits. If you need skeletons and goblins, maybe they are haunted spirits, and therefore no hill giants.

If you do need some extra flexibility an entry could contain tables for variations. Gus L has a nice post for mantichora, and I’m always down for chimera type creatures where you roll a few dice to see what mashup of giant beasts you get.

For statting monsters I like Luke Gearing’s system neutral approach where you compare the AC to a particular armor type, and just state the weapon/special abilities.

Ettin

6 HD. AC as chain mail. Giant mace, and 3 spells of a battle mage. Ml 9.

Head of a warrior, and head of a wizard. The ultimate killing machine.

The actual reality is not this simple.

Typical conversations in my gaming group:

“It’d be cool if the next game we ran was Shadowdark”

“I want to get back into Mork Borg!”

“It’s frustrating that we haven’t played Errant”

This is not unique to my group. If you look at the OSR subreddit, there are regular threads about which OSR system is “the best”, or “Thinking of switching to OSE, Labrynth Lord, Cairn (etc.)” To me, the best OSR system out there is the one you are using to get games to the table. But this is not a typical attitude. I see three reasons for this:

1. The impact of influencers & hype. We’re all suceptible to the idea that we could buy something that is new & improved.
2. Most people playing roleplaying games are players.
3. We’re all chasing a certain type of unanticipated serendipity.

The first point is such a typical experience under capitalism, hardly exclusive to RPGs, that it doesn’t warrant additional discussion. It’s the second thing that I find interesting. Typically, a RPG session is going to have one GM, and multiple players. And the players are only going to be familiar with the core ruleset (maybe). It’s the GM that is exposed to the adventure content. For the players, that stuff is more opaque. So for players the more exciting thing is going to be, hey, here’s this new way to play roleplaying games. From the player’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether an adventure is from a zine or something the GM cooked up.

It’s not just players that get excited about new RPGs though. Despite the GM being the one that will end up having to do a lot of homework to play a new game, are also just as suceptible to the allure of thinking a new game will be better. And while you can probably guess (correctly) from everything stated here that I think people tend to overvalue the importance of systems, it’s not as if they’re unimportant. You could play a game where anytime something uncertain happened, you flipped a coin to determine the outcome. Easy enough to run, doesn’t seem that interesting though. But add some different polyhedral dice, and suddenly you’re dealing with probability systems that can be gamed. There’s more at interest here now. A system should help facilitate play. It steps in where needed, and gets out of the way where it would be burdensome. And sometimes the dice rolls do something magic, something you couldn’t have planned out in an adventure or your prep work. And I suspect that is the high a lot of GMs are chasing at the prospect of a new system.

So this is why it’s 2025, and designers still develop new games that retread the same grounds. And yet the work the OSR community puts into adventure modules is one of its great strengths, and I think that lack of visibility is why we don’t see even more players in this corner of the RPG sphere. So this becomes the question: what do we need to do to help make sure writers of high quality adventures get due attention?

Although this solves the issue of combat dragging on too long it doesn’t necessarily make combat more interesting. Especially low level characters tend to not have a lot of good options available to them. Of course players can try and propose an action for their character to take to give themselves some sort of tactical advantage. Since you might not want to let the players automatically succeed for stuff like this though, you’ll have them make some sort of stat or skill check. And at lower levels players are likely to fail those rolls. And so that means the optimal play is usually the boring play: stick to the action that does damage. Surely there’s got to be a better way…

Enter Mystic Bastionland with its combat gambits. When you make an attack in Mystic Bastionland you form a dice pool with everyone attacking the target. The highest number rolled is the damage you do to the target. The other dice in the pool can be used for gambits if they are a 4 or higher. Gambits are various sorts of combat advantages from bolstering the attack (+1 damage) to temporarily disarming a foe, stopping an action next turn, etc.

There’s a lot to be excited about by this system, and I think I probably plan to implement it into any games I’m running going forward. It’s tactically interesting without being overly complex. It’s extremely hackable. You can design environments and enemies that have special gambits. Gambits could be slotted into a enemy puzzle design. The possibilities here are really exciting. I hope we start seeing a lot of new design work around the gambit system.

There is a great amount of discussion about the change in perspective needed to go from playing 5E to playing in the OSR style, but I’ve seen less talk about making the leap to go from story to OSR games. So lets see if we can’t provide a bit more guidance to anyone from that world that is OSR-curious.

The Fear of a Black Dragon podcast demonstrates that it is certainly possible to use story game rules to run OSR modules, and more power to your table if that’s how you like to play, but for my purposes I am going to assume an interest in running a rules engine in the OSR lineage.

The two play styles differ in both means and goals, and yet they share one common goal: “Play to find out what happens”. Both game styles eschew the sort of narrative railroading that was all too common when I was first exposed to roleplaying games. In nearly all other aspects though the play styles part ways. They differ in the type of game being played, the relationship between the GM and players, the method of GMing, and the purpose of rolling dice.

The Type of Game Being Played

The biggest and most complex adjustment is understanding the type of game you’re playing. The story game engine is a set of rules to empower collaborative storytelling. There is room for that in the OSR, but it isn’t the emphasis. Story games give players a character archetype/template, and some tools that allow them to put their own unique spin on it. In OSR play characters typically have much less detail because the point isn’t to see how the players express themselves in a given scenario, but is instead about overcoming challenges and adversity. If story games are like Disco Elysium and have a fail forward philosophy, OSR games are more like immersive sims (System Shock, Dishonored, etc.) where you are plopped into a complex environment, and it is up to you to puzzle it out, and see how you can take advantage of your surroundings. For exploration to be interesting, there have to be good details about the environment which is why adventure modules have an outsized importance for the OSR compared to other tabletop RPGs.

Questions ruffled play. “So none of my skills are actually useful anywhere in this scenario?” Nope.

The problem with player skills in OSR games, the reason why the thief class is so maligned in the OSR blogopshere, is being able to roll the dice to bypass a challenge robs the players of the opportunity to overcome the challenge diagetically. It’s more satisfying to discover a hidden trap because as a player you were keyed into something off about the GM’s description of a room then from a successful perception check. So in Mothership skills are mostly there to provide some flavor, and to occasionally provide a minor bonus to stat checks. The design goal here is to make sure players aren’t typecast too tightly. You’re here to do some problem solving, not be the guy that chills out until a particular skill is needed. Ideally, this keeps the whole table engaged throughout play, rather than waiting for a particular time to shine. Jim acknowledges all this when accepting the philosophy behind the lack of a stealth roll, but the table still gets tripped up:

The same sort of reasoning must apply, perhaps even more to social stuff than to stealth. Talk it out at the table! Just do the role-playing part.

And dutifully we did so. My players like to create friction, tension, drama, and they played that out in characterful clashes, betrayals, discussions, conversations. Yet through it all they were nevertheless able to reason that we also did this in other games while applying the dramatic denouement of a roll to top out the process. Actions, rules, and abilities that other games had provided were both a prompt for what to do (by giving you a good chance of pulling it off) and a spice to heat things up by being offbeat, weird, or personal in a way that wasn’t down to fear or guns. In Mothership there’s nothing other than awkwardly applying a save to make a roll anything that isn’t fear, guns, or your limited range of skills. There just weren’t any good avenues for the resolution of those particular struggles. For example: two characters wanted to contest each other. We had to ad hoc a way. It felt wrong.

There’s a lot to unpack here! One significant misunderstanding is that OSR play isn’t trying to prompt players into roleplaying. Players do that naturally. So from that perspective it follows that you don’t need actions, rules, rolls, and abilities to facilitate that. It will just come in the natural course of play. The other thing though is the adjustment to this challenge based play. Whereas story games often include some resolution mechanic to handle inter-party conflict, you almost never see rules for this in OSR games because the social convention is the party is trying to work together to overcome a challenging environment that is trying to kill them. Inter-party squabbling decreases your odds of survival, so it’s better if everyone gets along for the common good. An OSR game is about the joys of camaraderie in overcoming difficult odds.

The other misunderstood aspect is the purpose of those sanity/fear saves. OSR games need time pressure to function properly. If you have all the time in the world, eventually you will solve the puzzle perfectly. In classic D&D play you have random encounters and need torches to explore the dark environs, and over time you will run out of torches, which will likely be fatal, and you will get overwhelmed by random threats. Fear and sanity checks serve a similar purpose in that the risk to the character increases over time. The players shouldn’t need to create their own drama, the drama is in making their way through a hazardous environment, and deciding when they need to cut loose before its too late.

The Method of GMing

The role of the GM, and how they conduct play is quite different in the two play styles. In story games a GM needs to be a good improviser to facilitate play, and so it typically involves doing prep with a light touch. Since it is a collaborative approach with the table, you really just need to have a solid enough initial scenario, and see where things go from there. By contrast, many OSR games use blorb principles, which is more prep heavy, and avoids improvising when possible. I don’t have to much to add here, I think the blorb principles post is brilliant, and a short read, so go ahead and check it out! Not all OSR play adheres to it, but it broadly articulates a style of play that is frequently adopted in the OSR and can cause friction for people coming from story games.

The Relationship Between the GM and the Players

A common piece of GM advice in story games is to “be a fan of the players”. In the OSR a GM is a neutral arbiter. Not an antagonist trying to thwart the players, but a facilitator of a challenge as laid out in the prep work. The GM needs to be even-handed and fair for the challenge to work. Stacking the odds in the players favor, or trying to “defeat them” interferes with the experience of overcoming the challenge. This also means players have less agency compared to in story games like in Blades in the Dark where on a successful roll you get to improvise a solution to a conflict. The GM has much more control over the world, and so having that credible neutrality is crucial. Dice only get rolled if you decide for a roll, instead of because a player makes a move, and that move needs to be interpreted. You have to describe things fairly. There will be situations that aren’t covered in the rules, so you sometimes have to make something up. You try to get player buy-in when that happens because there is no worse feeling than to feel something arbitrarily bad happen to you. This is different from the story game relationship where what the rules do is carve out particular spaces for the GM and the players to make their respective moves, and give them wide latitude in what is possible with those moves.

The Purpose of Rolling Dice

In story games dice enable play, and in OSR games dice are a device to determine an outcome. This is most obvious in the perennial question from GMs new to story games about how to interpret a mixed success. Whereas in traditional roleplaying games a die roll is used to resolve a binary “do you succeed at the task or not?”, in story games these rolls are a creative prompt. Depending on the roll, you fail, partially succeed, or totally succeed. But it is now up to someone to decide what failure looks like, what success looks like, or what partial success looks like. And failure generally should never simply be, “well, nothing happens”, but instead means that dramatic tension should be ratcheted up in some way. Dice are a tool for letting events unfold in unexpected ways.

OSR play hews more closely to traditional play in this regard. You roll to determine an outcome. Since OSR is about overcoming a challenge, it doesn’t have the same type of fail-forward philosophy as story games. For something to be a challenge, you have to accept the possibility that the party could experience a hard failure, isn’t able to progress, and will either get wiped out, or retreat from the adventure site without much to show for it. As such, dice rolls are interpreted much more narrowly, the application of risk and danger. The creative play in OSR happens in between dice rolls. Because of the level of control afforded to the GM in an OSR game, there is less need to rely on dice for creative prompting.

An Aside on Androids

Jim also discusses how vague androids are in the game setting. It is worth mentioning he is in very good company here, and this isn’t a difference in play culture at work here. Lots of people feel this way. If I was running Mothership, I’d be tempted to remove androids as a player character option because they are underexplained on details players will actually need to care about. In a lot of cases hand waving away how things work in a sci-fi world is fine, but in this particular case more detail would be beneficial to play.

Final Thoughts

One interesting aspect I find of running roleplaying games is that teaching new players how to play a game is typically straight forward, but getting someone that is used to a different style of play to try a different kind of game has a lot of pitfalls that are difficult to avoid. They require different habits, ways of thinking, and relationships. Until you are able to shift your perspective a game can feel incomplete or lacking. But like the Ambassadors, upon changing your perspective suddenly the meaning of everything can come into focus. But unlike the Ambassadors, where all that is needed is to change your position relative to the painting, getting there with RPGs takes more work. In the case of the OSR, most of us working in this space have internalized over a decade of blog posts at this point. Resources like Knock! help in consolidating that information, but it is still a lot to take in. Sometimes it just takes time. And sometimes it just might not be what you are looking for. But with any luck I hope I elucidated where some of these tensions in play style might emerge, why these differences exist, and help better understand why these systems might or might not work for your table. With any luck, you will find the magic and the highs.