Rended Press

(via College Humor )

The first community project, The Trouble With Troglodytes , is complete. While I take my time compiling, editing, and making a pretty, downloadable version for your reading pleasure, here is something else to keep you busy. In The Trouble With Troglodytes , the PCs learn that Breygataya's disappearance is a MacGuffin --she isn't in the dungeon at all. So where is she? According to The Book of Unpleasant Truth , she might be in the clutches of a green dragon over the next hill. So. . . You guys fill this thing out, and I'll compile it into a PDF when it's done. Note: I reserve the right to edit entries. Some guidelines: Use whatever retro-clone stat block you like for monsters & spells & magic items: Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, or Dungeon Crawl Classics. Everything you post is considered to be Open Game Content, freely offered and free to be reused or remixed once the whole shebang is compiled. So, here we go: THE YOUNG GREEN DRA

I just read this blog post by fantasy author N.K. Jemisin: But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense? In it, she makes several excellent points about how RPGs have impacted fantasy fiction because they have trained us to think of magic in terms of systems, and that systems of magic take away the one thing that makes magic special: it's unpredictability. While she is specifically dealing with fiction where magic just "is", this criticism got me thinking how we can mirror unpredictability in a game by dismantling some of the systems around it. But because this is a game, we still need a system of some sort--just one that results in wide unpredictability. Traditional D&D games and their retroclones approach magic as a knowable science in actual play--and even though the 1e DMG clearly laid out that their is great personal & material cost to a PC in gaining spell levels and doing magical research, most folks throw those out the window and concentrate just

You've probably seen this, but it still makes me laugh : No foolin' - Unicorn meat is real! Excellent source of sparkles! Unicorns, as we all know, frolic all over the world, pooping rainbows and marshmallows wherever they go. What you don't know is that when unicorns reach the end of their lifespan, they are drawn to County Meath, Ireland. The Sisters at Radiant Farms have dedicated their lives to nursing these elegant creatures through their final days. Taking a cue from the Kobe beef industry, they massage each unicorn's coat with Guinness daily and fatten them on a diet comprised entirely of candy corn. As the unicorn ages, its meat becomes fatty and marbled and the living bone in the horn loses density in a process much like osteoporosis. The horn's outer layer of keratin begins to develop a flavor very similar to candied almonds. Blending the crushed unicorn horn into the meat adds delightful, crispy flavor notes in each bite. We are confident you w

I'm a fan of the Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying Game published by TSR back in the 80s, the one that used the FASERIP engine. You know, this one: You might even be familar with ClassicMarvelForever.com , where you can download most, if not all, of the official MSHRPG materials in PDF format. If you haven't heard of this site before, go check it out. Seriously--it is worth your time. Anyway, this is all an introduction to get to my main point. This morning while doing some mindless googling, I stumbled across a few cool links. These have been around, but they are new to me, so I thought I would share: Spider-Man's Guide to New York : Here, you can download a 109-page fan-made compendium of Spider-Man's world. Very cool. Gaming Nerds R Us - MSHRPG Downloads Section : A fantastic resource of material--including adventures extracted from Dungeon and Polyhedron! Game Nerds R Us - MSH Netbooks : A sub-forum of the above downloads section, this is an archive of 24

Richard over at Save Vs. Dragon (he of the most excellent d30 DM Companion ) is hosting a new community project with a twist: The Community Geomoprh Project . I'm not that great of a map creator, but I'm going to come up with something--and you should, too! Head on over to his blog and check out the details!

The Community Project is done! Mostly by Marc Pavone. But still, it is done! In the coming days, I'll turn it into a PDF for easy download.

NOTE on 2014-01-25 : This project has been canceled. See this post . For the past two years, this blog has served as my small foothold in the OSR gaming community. I like to think I've done an admirable job of sharing with the community— the zine list and downloads page hopefully attest to that. So now I've been thinking about starting a zine again—a compilation of stuff from the OSR/RPG blogosphere that I think is cool. I'm not going to be doing a lot of writing—no, I'm a better arranger, compiler, and editor (although I will need help with copyediting, most likely). Notice that I said "again." I founded and edited an online poetry zine for almost ten years. I retired the zine when the quality of submissions sank so low that I couldn't meet my self-imposed deadlines and kept sifting and sifting through the slush pile and second-guessing rejections until I got headaches. I was a one-man operation because I am a bit of a control freak. In 2009, I

UPDATE: It is done! Since Marc Pavone has been hitting the comment button, The Trouble With Trogdolytes is almost complete! This has almost turned into a one-man show, folks. Marc is really flexing his creative muscles and creating some extremely interesting encounters--many of which tie back to stuff the other contributors have written, too. Rooms 6 , 12, 12b, 15, and 17 are all that are left. If you want to help out, it looks like this might be your final chance. Come on over and finish this sucker! Oh, and stand by for a big announcement tomorrow. Yeah, that's a teaser. You'll just have to wait for it.

Dylan Hartwell, otherwise known as The Digital Orc , has a new adventure (or module if you are a real old schooler) for Labyrinth Lord for sale at all the usual OneBookshelf.com outlets: The Veiled Invocation This adventure contains NPCs based upon characters submitted by various OSR bloggers. Mine's Vlark, a 3rd Level Dwarf. Dylan even went as far as to create ads based on the NPCs. Here's mine: I just downloaded my copy from RPGNow.com. Go get yours today! (note: the image of the ad isn't showing up in some versions of Firefox. I can't figure out why.)

Marc Pavone has been hitting the comment button pretty heavily over on the Community Project: The Trouble With Trogdolytes . He's filled in nearly half the dungeon on his own. Why not head over and see what he's added? While you're there, leave a room of your own!

David Lawson over at Weekend Wizardry just finished up his second annual week of posting a variety of magical containers under the heading " Hitting the Bottle Week ". With his blessings, I've compiled both series of posts into a PDF for easy use at your gaming table. You can download it from my Dropbox account here: Hitting the Bottle.pdf

The trolls at YDIS have done me great service! Thanks for the free advertising, suckers! You know the old saying: any publicity is good publicity! And here's another sentence that ends in an exclamation point!