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The post Video of the Day – Disney Jr.: Spidey and His Amazing Friends, 2026 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

 In the world of Sword & Sorcery, treasure isn't just about "gold pieces." It’s about history, weight, and the lingering scent of ancient sorcery. Gold is heavy, cursed, or minted by kings long dead.Here is a D100 table designed for the grit of a monolithic ruin.The D100 Table of Ruins & RelicsRoll (D100)Item CategoryDescription01–20Currencies of the DeadStained silver dirhams, heavyNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

The Everyday Drop Hanging Basket is a simple, modern crochet basket designed to add flexible storage wherever you need it. It's a place to "drop" those everyday items and know right where to find them later. Make your own with just one skein of Bernat Future Inspire and the Moogly pattern below! Disclaimer: This post […]

The post Everyday Drop Hanging Basket appeared first on moogly. Please visit www.mooglyblog.com for this post.

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Though I've mentioned it before, I haven't talked about DC's Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus Vol. 1 since it came out, which is kind of a lapse given how many years I spent blogging about Warlord here. This volume collects the character's debut in 1st Issue Special #8, issues #1-50 of the series, and material from Amazing World of DC Comics #12. Hopefully we'll get the rest of Grell's run and his follow-up series in a second volume.

The first thing one notices about this omnibus is how much lighter it feels than most. Opening it, you can see why: it's on a different type of paper than most omnis. When it came out, there was a lot of discussion of it being "on newsprint" with some fans angry it wasn't on the glossy paper they were expecting, and others appreciating it being closer in appearance to the original issues. Well, it isn't on newsprint, but it is on a slightly off-white paper with a matte finish. I'm sure I've seen some trade paperbacks from DC on this sort of paper before.
Here's some images I snagged from reddit:

And here's a comparison with the interiors of an old issue. The omni is on the right:

By Edwin Nagy
Parallel Dimension Gaming
OSE
Level 1

Construction camps along a new mountain pass are being destroyed, and danger awaits along every twist and turn. Can your heroes uncover the source of these deadly attacks?

This 33 page adventure details a little wilderness journey and a small thirteen room mine full of murderous dwarf miners. It’s fucking weird; it’s got the underpinnings of something decent, but never goes all in on it and pads everything out terribly. Lost potential, I guess.

Getting trade goods from Town A to Town C means taking the river through Town B, which is run by a tough, and probably corrupt, business family who controls a portage. So Prince Dipshit builds a road through the mountains directly to Town C, bypassing Town B. Groovy. Except the road construction camps got attacked. Since this is an important project he hires a bunch of no-names to go figure it out rather than sending the army. Well, to be fair, the party is supposed to present each of the towns guilds, which does seem chiller. Playing up the guild angle would have been nice, but as is you don’t get anything more than “they represent each of the towns major guilds.”

And that IS the major problem with this adventure; it hints at things but never goes there. The “evil town” doesn’t get much more than the fact they are shrewd and a maybe a little shady. The freedom fighters get that “they meet in the basement of the local pub and are all talk.” Clearly these things, covered in the thirteen page intro, are meant to provide some play opportunities, false paths, other various sorts of entanglements and fun. But they don’t show up again. 

Instead you get to plod along a half-built road, with a work camp about a day apart, four in total. Here’s a sacked one. Here’s an abandoned one. Here’s one with three dudes in it. Focusing in on that last one, you have three guys patrolling camp. Nothing else. There’s a mention that they are charmed and that the party can roll to detect that they are. That’s it. Stats? No. Direction, like they attack, or challenge the party or something else? No. What do they know if they wake up? Nothing. In spite of this being about a column … of large type. What’s a boy in love supposed to do? “The horses are anxious to eat and drink not having been fed in a few days.” Ok. And the dudes? What about them. NOTHING. Absolutely Nothing. It absolutely boggles the mind how one could leave out something so trivial. And, there are lots of editors and producers and the like attached to this. 

No one cares. Remember. No one cares. Your publisher does not care. If something decent pops out then thats great, but they do not gie a SHIT. Someone, somewhere, has to care about the adventure that’s about to get published. Sometimes we pay an editor to care. Rarely a small press publisher cares. And seldom does anyone else. If you pay them then they care. If they pay you then they do not care. Usually. Blech. I hate it when I’m not optimistic. 

Somewhere along the road you’re gonna be the victim of a rockslide. Caused by a dude who triggers it. I guess the party sees him do it? The entire layout isn’t clear, there’s the road being constructed and a ravine and a dead-end and a mine entrance and none of it makes sense. In my own head I don’t know who you see the dude who triggers the rockslide (and then retreats in to the hidden mine entrance.) And, therefore, I don’t see how the party finds the hidden mine entrance. And this is important because this is where the actual adventure is. I’m open to being wrong here (Page 14 of the document/page 15 of the PDF) in that I’ve missed something or an not understanding something. But I don’t think so. So, good luck finding the actual adventure.

Inside the mine you’ll get a bunch of boring rooms that described in a boring way. “Crossroads This is the first area of worked stone, with passages leading in each cardinal direction.” Exciting! And then six lines of text telling us where each corridor goes. Joy. That’s the fucking map. That’s the purpose of the fucking map. I know some of you fuckwits like it when the text explicitly describes the room exits and where they lead, but I think we can all agree that when it SUBSTANTIALLY outnumbers the room description/text then we’ve lost site of the goal. Don’t do things by rote. Do them because they make sense in the situation you currently find yourself. Yes, there are guidelines, but don’t follow them off of a cliff. 

Anyway, inside you find some dwarf miners. I guess this is a kind of illegal mining operation and they feel threatened by the road being constructed. I don’t think there’s really any way to tell this. You can see where a barge might come up one of the mine entrances and infer, I guess. But, also, the miners always come screaming out of the darkness and attack the party. That’s it. No playing dice or whatnot. They just come charging out of a hallway and attack. All … eight of them? In two encounters? Plus Lareth, of course, in charge of everything, with no foreshadowing or hint. Wasted potential everywhere, Lareth. Mom always knew you were gonna grow up to be a failure.

Not mentioned: the single encounter on the wandering table that only occurs once. About a messenger found dead on the road. Roll twice on the random message table to determine the contents of his message. Don’t fucking do this. That’s not how randomness is used in an adventure. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Joy. That seems to be a trend these days. We need a preview, a substantive preview that shows us some encounters, so we can make an informed decision on if to buy or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548592/arden-s-adventures-vol-2-highway-over-the-mountain?1892600

Adapting Steve Miller's The Ghost of Hong Kong (Mae Ling Chen) into the New Flesh RPG (the Red Room's Burroughsian/Cronenbergian biopunk setting) creates a perfect synthesis of noir-assassin tropes and body-horror mechanics. This session picks right up from here on the blog. In this conversion, Mae Ling Chen—the "Ghost"—becomes more than just a stealthy assassin. She is a master of Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

 Fusing the 1960s suave "cat-burglar-turned-bodyguard" aesthetic of Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat with the visceral, biotech-heavy world of New Flesh is a brilliant move. You're taking a classic "gentleman rogue" and dropping him into a setting where "breaking and entering" might mean infiltrating a living, breathing databank.So I've been slowly adapting the suave and sophisticated cultclassic TVNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

The post Video of the Day – Doctor Who: The Doctor vs The Weeping Angels, Slitheen and the Beast, 2026 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

 Plunging into the depths of a Stygian vault or a sunless underworld requires loot that feels heavy with history, a bit dangerous, and distinctly "other." This blog post picks right up from D100 Random Dragon from Conan's era Hoard & Treasure Table, The Lair: The Maw of Ben Morgh, For An OSR Sword & Sorcery Campaign Especially Castles & Crusades RpgHere is a D100 Stygian Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

This Crochet Project Bag and Yarn Giveaway is all about those cozy, slow-stitch moments. One lucky winner will receive an organic cotton project bag featuring the phrase “Coffee. Crochet. Sleep. Repeat.” along with two hanks of Cloudborn Highland Superwash Yarn in the beautiful Strawberry Fields colorway. It’s the perfect pairing for cozy crochet sessions, with […]

The post Crochet Project Bag and Yarn Giveaway appeared first on moogly. Please visit www.mooglyblog.com for this post.

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As I wrap up Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms, the Northern Marches, I am thinking ahead to my next major project, the full version of the Majestic Fantasy RPG.

While I still need to write the final manuscript, the rules themselves are written and have been playtested extensively. I started out with Swords & Wizardry by Matt Finch back in 2008 and adapted it to my Majestic Wilderlands setting. This involved adding a light skill system so players could have their characters be better at things other than combat and spellcasting, adding viz and other tweaks to the magic system to reflect how magic worked in my setting, tweaking the cleric class to reflect the diversity of religions, and so on.

The design process I used was iteration. Starting with Swords & Wizardry, informed by ongoing research into the origins of D&D, I added, tweaked, and modified the system until it took its current form. The final proof was always how it played at the table, measured against how I described the Majestic Wilderlands and what people actually did as their characters in past campaigns using other systems like GURPS or AD&D 1e.

However, the point of the campaign was never just to play these rules. How I used these rules mattered. I have discussed sandbox campaigns many times, along with my own specific variant, which I call a Living World Sandbox. My living world sandbox approach started out as me finding it fun to let my players trash my setting back in the late 70s and early 80s. Over time, it developed as I tried to make trashing the setting both fun and an interesting challenge.

In time, I realized that what I was doing to make this happen was bringing the setting to life in a way that left the players feeling as if they had opened a door, stepped into my world, and pursued some interesting adventures of their choice. The setting endured, reacted, and changed as a result of what they did.

Again, my design process here involved iterating across many different groups and using many different systems. I also applied my Living World Sandbox techniques to other settings in other genres, including Middle-earth, the Third Imperium, the four-color world of superheroes, and so on. In each case, I weighed what happened at the table against whether it left the players feeling as if they were in the campaign's setting and had the freedom to pursue the adventures that interested them.

While doing this, I experienced other RPGs like Fate and Blades in the Dark that played very differently from my own campaigns and those of my friends. As I learned more about RPG history and encountered various ideas and theories about RPG design, I noticed that all RPGs shared certain practices, regardless of how they were implemented or the rules they used.

• At some point, the campaign's circumstances were described, including the characters involved.
• The characters' actions were described.
• Those actions were adjudicated.
• The outcomes of those actions were determined, and the campaign's setting was altered as a result.
• The session and the campaign involved repeating the above over and over again, in various orders and at various levels of detail.

What makes individual RPGs distinct from one another is how these shared practices are implemented, including the order in which they occur, not just what the rules say. The rules are only part of the equation. To understand how a campaign or system actually operates, you have to look at how the rules are used, how they are practiced, and what the group does at the table. This includes the order in which situations are described, actions are declared, and outcomes are resolved, as well as how adjudication is handled and who is responsible for making those decisions.

As I discuss RPGs, campaigns, and design going forward. I will start with practice and work outward from there.

Wrapping up this post, I want to give a shout-out to my friend Greg, known as the Chubby Funster, who also made a good video on this topic. In the video, he tackles the same issue from the angle of individual referees' "spheres of practice".

The post Video of the Day – Sky TV, 2025 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

 In the Hyborian Age of Conan, a dragon's hoard is not just a pile of gold; it is a graveyard of lost civilizations, the plunder of fallen empires, and the grim trophies of a beast that may have lived since the days of Atlantis.Treasures in this era are heavy on ivory, jade, bronze, and blood-stained silk, rather than the high-magic items found in standard high fantasy. This blog post picks Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

By Graeme Davis
Mondiversi
OSE
Levels 1-5

Rudgen’s Square is a small open space in one of the more modest parts of a city. You can place it in any city or large town in your campaign. Named after a long-forgotten hero whose cracked and weathered statue – now headless – sits on a plinth atop a fountain at its center, the square sees a modest but constant stream of foot traffic, and a few small-time merchants have set up stalls around the edge selling all manner of goods

This 22 page adventure details about four hours in a street market as things happen around the party. It’s two pages of content, padded out, in a museum tour of an adventure. At least it ends with people shitting and puling their guts up in public while zombies attack. It just needed more of that.

Dude claims to be the inventor of the “multi-plot” adventure, for Warhammer, back in 87. I don’t know, it’s just a lot of things going on at once. Maybe. I take it for granted now, but, also, the concept of Romantic Love, right? In any event, our definitions of “a lot of plots going on at once” are a little different.

You are sent to the marketplace to find The Maltese Falcon, or whatever. Slimy junk merchant has it and he wanted like a bajillion million dollars for it. This is the first place the adventure breaks down, and maybe the most critical. Do they just stab the dude and leave? Do they steal it and leave? Or do they hang around for a minute? The entire adventure hinges on the party hanging around for a bit. If they do not hang around the marketplace then the adventure is not going to work. For it relies on, about every fifteen minutes, some kind of event happening in and around the party. There are a number of plotlines, seven or so I believe, and they unfold over the next four hours at about one event every fifteen minutes, related to one of the subplots. A dude smuggling himself out of the city as a poly’d horde. Food poisoning. A Romeo & Juliet lovers tryst. The dude that has the Maltese Falcon has sold a crime lords kid a love potion that actually turns him green. Maybe the answer to DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! Should be Yes if its the crime lords son and you’re a shady merchant? 

Anyway, every fifteen minutes or so some observant person in the party, asking questions about whats going down, is going to be asked to make an intelligence check to get some kind of extra knowledge. I hope they succeed on the roll. A lot. Or else everyone is going to be quite bored tonight during the game.  

The inherent concept here, of having a lot going on, is in fact correct. That should be the default for just about any adventure, and a town and/or social adventure adventure especially. There SHOULD be a lot going on at once. That gives the world a lived in feeling and creates a sense of urgency; you can’t deal with everyone at the same time, right? Faction play in a dungeon. The outdated mind map relationships I like for villages/social encounters. But the problem, gere, is one of passivity. 

In a perfect world, for the party at least, you steal the Jade Skull and/or kill the slimy stallkeeper. And then leave the square. So don’t stick around. So nothing happens after you get the skull. That means that the action must take place between the initial bargaining dialog (“ONE BILLION DOLLARS!”) and the party putting in to motion their inevitable wacky scheme. And during that time they must succeed in a number of intelligence checks to see other trivia going on. And there scheme must take more than four hours to implement, all while they stand in the fucking square, so they can the rest of the plotlines develop. Oh, chick sitting by a statue alone. Dude comes up to her, her obvious lover. They approach the horse merchants. They go off together. Noblemen come in to the square looking for her. They leave. Couple comes back to hide ta the horse merchants. Etc. And this sort of thing unfolds for each of the plots. 

So the entire concept here is for the party to NOT take action. You must be in the square to see whats going on. You must be there at the end for the shit/puke/zombie fest. You must succeed on your rolls to get the context of what is going on. There are these competing passive things going on. It is, obviously, putting interesting things behind skill checks. Don’t do that. Share interesting things. Don’t make the party beg and plead over the course of four hours in order to be able to get the hook from the king. You WANT the party on the adventure and them invested in it. Watching what happens with the check, understanding a bit of the situation and missing other parts, is what is going to make this a fun and zany side-quest that the party is invested in. And then they must stand around, taking four hours to implement their plan, in order to see any of it at all. You want the party invested, so don’t put that shit behind skill checks. And rework the adventure such that the timeline is greatly advanced or something else, in order to handle the “stab and grab”, or some derivation therein, of the party. 

You know the deal, other than that how was the play? Meh. Some decent chaos at the end when people start shitting themselves and vomiting and a bomb goes off killing a bunch of people and then they reanimate and start Brains!’ing. That, alone, as the climax, perhaps deserves some set piece treatment instead of just another paragraph. The rest of the adventure is full of long timeline events that lean toward the prescriptive end of the spectrum as well as long descriptions of “The Stall of Martha Johnson.” And the bombing is pretty random. Some old woman drops off a bomb at the junk dealers, leaving her shopping bag, and then sprinkles poison on food at several food stalls. Which is weird. I thought it was just some kind of rando deus-ex thing, but there is another thread, one event in which a protection racket causes a mess at a food stall. So maybe its a protection thing? But blowing up a stall and killing a bunch of randos? I get that the bandits want revenge for a fake love potion, but, mass murder? That seems a tad excessive, even for an RPG?

Dude might be a fine DM. And he might have invented the “multi-plot adventure.” But this is not a good implementation, either in its form or function. Long backgrounds and trivia. Detailed events to dig through, a set piece end that is not a set piece. And an overall assumption about the length of the time in the market that is almost certainly not accurate. Yeah, we want to play the game tonight, but too much of that, or too blatant, breaks the illusion of agency.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad Publisher! No cookie for you! We need a substantive preview to determine if we want to buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548756/mayhem-in-the-market?1892600

The malefic Outsiders of the astral void beyond the Earth are myriad in the Latter Age, but few are as distinct from the hosts of horrors as the beings known popularly as Mind Flayers.  Though they are believed to be long extinct, they still feature promptly in folklore and popular entertainments, attesting to their hold over humankind's collective imagination.

Little is known for certain about these beings. In Denizens of the Beyond by Pseudo-Vespydron, the most widely known work to examine them in detail, Mind Flayers are said to have come from the sphere of Mars, but whether they are natives to that world or from some even more distant home, even Denizens rather credulous author does not say. 

Pseudo-Vespydron uncritically accepts the cephalopod-headed humanoid appearance of popular portrayals and the idea that they were obligate consumers of human brains. The later (and comparatively more sober) histories of Malgrunda note no reliable descriptions of their physical form exist and put forward the theory that their purpose in preying upon the Earth was to acquire not foodstuffs but slave minds, derived from the destructive mapping of the brains of still-living captives. Perhaps the only place where she might be criticized in straying from established fact is in the time she devotes to Hseng's baseless assertion that the cephalopod skull is actually the memory of an environmental helmet with attached manipulators.

The post Video of the Day – The Whoniverse Show, 2026 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

So, I'm finally free from the insane sinus headaches that went right into my upper jaw. Not fun. They lasted off and on for the better part of the past month. This year's flu is nothing to f' around with.

Well, it's time to clear the plate of OSR Christmas 2025. 

As the failure lies in my hands, I'm doing the following:

I'm putting 10 $20 DTRPG Gift Certificates and 1 $50 DTRPG Gift Certificate into the gift pool.

The Emperors Choice Kickstarter Boxed Set is still in the mix.

I'll reach out to our other donors and find out who's still in.

All gifts will be awarded on January 31st, this coming Saturday @ 2 PM ET

If you have already emailed OSRChristmas@gmail.com, you are in the mix to be gifted.

If you HAVEN'T emailed yet, do so by NOON, January 31st, to get into the mix to be gifted.

Thank you for your patience - Tenkar

 Porting Warriors of the Red Planet (WotRP) into Barrows & Borderlands (B&B) is a fantastic idea because both games share a "Science-Fantasy/Gygaxian" heart. B&B is explicitly designed to be a bridge between 0E and 1E, while WotRP is a sleek 0E-based system.Here is the blueprint for porting the classes and mechanics effectively.1. The Four WotRP ClassesSince B&B uses a "Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

TSR module A1, Slave Pits of the Undercity, is the first and the most coherent of the Slavers modules: inventive and challenging while being the most sensibly drafted of these disorderly villain lairs.

The history of the series further emerges from a thread on Dragonsfoot remembering the specifics of the GenCon tournament that gave rise to the four A series modules. The temple and dungeon levels of A1 and A2 each were a single, linear adventure. Player groups in the first round were randomly assigned into one of these four qualifiers or a fifth one corresponding to the early section of A3.  From these five, the best-scoring made it to the semifinal and final rounds, which respectively used versions of the later (city) part of A3, and all of A4.

From such a genesis we can trace the design of Slave Pits of the Undercity (and here, perforce, the spoilers begin). Helpfully for our archaeology, the module includes the original tournament railroad maps for the top and dungeon levels.

New monsters, meant as a surprise, were regularly "spoiled" on the A series covers - here, the aspis

TEMPLE LEVEL

The tournament scenario gives the players inside information about a secret door in the wall of the temple. This door is trapped but not guarded - such is the security protocol of a disorderly fortress - and leads to a twisting corridor through an abandoned area of the building. The "railroad" takes the party past some well-set fights, and other situations that act like puzzles without seeming contrived, such as a deceptive plank over a pit, or a combat dilemma involving a new plant monster, the giant sundew, that becomes much easier if the party realizes how the fortress forces manage this menace in its midst. After this gauntlet, the party will run into the actual slaver forces, and these encounters are devised with the same art, combining trickery, interesting combat problems, and traps.

That's the end of the railroad; but even the tournament scenario has a couple of distractions and dead-ends. One of them, a roughly patched wall that if broken through leads to a face-to-face encounter with a basilisk, had the distinction of taking out a player-character in my own 5th edition campaign.  And in the campaign version of the module, more areas are added branching from the tournament path - a stable guarded by slaver forces, a haunted cemetery and a garrison of terrified orcs, and a spacious courtyard, possibly a shortcut, but where more undead lurk. The reissue of the module in 1986 added a gate from this courtyard into the midst of the organized opposition area, further adding options for the attack.

This expansion allows different approaches to the temple complex. Jason Thompson's cartoon walkthrough of the module shows two of these: one party sneaking in through the tournament entrance, the other masquerading as slave-buying customers to go through the front door. Entering by the stables, by the graveyard orc door, or simply climbing the wall in an unguarded spot are also possibilities.

DUNGEON LEVEL

There are ways down from the temple, most obviously at the end of the final boss fight of the temple railroad; but the full module places two more descents to vary play in the dungeon level. This underground jams together four quite different areas: the eponymous slave pits, with slaves, slavers, and minions; a set of caves that hosts a tribe of orcs allied with the slavers; another set of caves that hosts a population of another new monster, the fearsome four-armed insectoid aspis folk; and a network of wet and filthy sewer passages that ties the whole place together.

The railroad version of the dungeon has the players first encountering some nasty larvae in the acidic spawning pool of the aspis; then crossing the sewer to muscle through a protracted fight with most of the orc tribe; then finally engaging the slavers, including some of their aspis allies, before confronting the slaver leader - who, it has to be said, is less formidable and treacherous than the final encounter of the temple. 

The open version develops the aspis zone and has more connections to approach the bad guys. While the temple is infested with ghouls and a wight, the underground is only semi-unruly - these are groups cooperating with the slavers for now, but if a way can be found to communicate, faction bargaining in the classic big-dungeon style can happen.

BEST OF THE SERIES

My current party cleared out most of A1, using a conversion to 5th edition. Running it was a delight -- the combat challenges tough and packed with surprises, but not in a way that felt forced or unfair. The tricks and traps have a gritty, naturalistic feel to them, and the different areas of the complex are balanced between abandoned/haunted, main bad guys, and side factions. We see how the garrison of orcs, half-orcs, and evil humans deals with the unruly forces in their midst - finding a way to tame the sundew, cringing in fear from the haunted cemetery, hiring some of the aspis. This was also the deadliest module of my campaign, claiming two PCs. Probably, this is just due to incautious player mistakes snagging on two of 5th edition's few remaining teeth. One, doppelgangers have an absolutely deadly surprise attack if they can catch a party member alone; two, even with two saves, there is no easy answer to petrification until characters hit ninth level.

As we'll see in the pieces to come, the other A-series modules, in my opinion, are less deft at presenting an unruly stronghold: A2 is ambitious but strained, A3 a mess, and A4 returns to better form but famously hangs on a railroading premise that may not sit well with new-old-school values.

 This d100 table blends the atmospheric, weird-pulp horror of C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories with the industrial, desperate sci-fi of The Red Room’s Orbital Decay. This blog entry picks right up from here on the blog. In this setting, space is not a vacuum of physics, but a "cold void" inhabited by ancient, psychic vampires, forgotten gods, and the debris of a solar system Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0