What I Will Carry

The last game-as-a-library I owned was Pathfinder 1e. A library-game is a line you add to for years without changing religions. New books become rooms in the same house. I tried to rebuild that house with Pathfinder 2e, and it never took. I tried again with 5E — 2014, 2024, Tales of the Valiant, Level Up A5E — and got four partial collections instead of one living shelf. The only libraries I still feed are GURPS and Palladium, and half the Palladium books are in a closet because 5E is standing where they used to stand.

Buying D&D 2024 was a mistake. I get the feeling two or three years from now, all of 5.5E will be replaced in the 6E announcement. This version will be a gaming history footnote at the end of the chapter titled D&D 2014.

But my shelves will change. I may give Palladium the shelf Tales of the Valiant is using. Of the 5E-shaped games, I will keep only one. Level Up stays because it is the pile I can run without flipping through a wall. The thinner support is not a drawback. There is already enough in that stack for a decade of play, and if I need a monster, a spell, or a whole adventure, I can pull it from the other 5E libraries and bring it over. This is not a console that refuses other discs. Everything still ports. I am just choosing to live in the smaller house first, the one I will actually open.

I am happier in the older games. They were written before a handful of design theories started getting repeated as law in a hobby that does not have one. D&D and Candyland are both games. They are not the same kind of game. Candyland does not need a thousand pages or 48 subclasses, and nobody calls it incomplete. The tent is that big. A lot of those early books were not trying to win a modern market, so they leave more room to invent. Fantasy RPGs have spent a decade trying to move on from 5E and then shipping 5E again, like another superhero movie the studio expects to open at a billion.

The official 5E shelf is already in storage. That part is finished. What is left in the room is two shelves of Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant, one shelf of Level Up, and a closet full of Palladium that got evicted so 5E could keep trying to become a library. It never did. I went around that fact a few times — keep the cousins, rank the cousins, donate the cousins — before the job got simple.

Tales of the Valiant comes off the shelf. I still have the PDFs. The game is playable. It just is not on display anymore as something core to how I game. That folder is not free. Cloud storage and the devices I read it on are a bill, same as wood and dust. Nothing in this hobby stays around at zero cost.

Palladium comes out of the closet and takes that space. Level Up stays as the one 5E I will actually run. Everything else in that family can sit in a box until I need to port a monster or an adventure over. GURPS does not move. It is already a library. I am not building a fourth 5E.

The room is simpler than the last ten years of buying tried to make it. Two libraries I still believe in — GURPS and Palladium — get to take up space because I will open them. One small 5E stack stays so I have a dialect I can run, and a box I can raid, without keeping four versions of the same game warm. Pathfinder 1e remains the last time a library game felt like a house I lived in. I am not going to rebuild that house out of every hardcover that looks like 5E.

I am going to play what I will carry.

A Universe from One Page

The last article I published on this idea was about the original Traveller Little Black Books. Three digest booklets, forty-eight pages each, 1977. Characters and Combat. Starships. Worlds and Adventures. No official empire in the box. You rolled a sector because that was the game. Tiny rules. Infinite map.

Kevin Crawford’s Without Number games are the best living version of that same concept. Stars Without Number. Worlds Without Number. Cities Without Number. Ashes Without Number. One small engine, reused. The rules you actually need at the table fit on a single printed sheet. The rest of the book generates a whole universe.

The engine is plain on purpose. Six attributes, 3 to 18. A short skill list. Foci instead of a phone book of feats. Combat any old-school player already knows. Skills on 2d6 plus attribute plus skill—that Traveller curve, sitting next to B/X fighting. Hand someone a pregen and that sheet, and they can play. The books are fat because Crawford spent the pages on the part a lot of modern design skips: tools that spit out places, jobs, factions, and trouble without a week of prep.

Where the pages go

Look at the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons player book—the one people call 5.5E. About 384 pages, and that is only the player half. Twelve classes. Forty-eight subclasses. Feats stacked on feats. Almost all of that complexity lives on your sheet. New level, new button. “Me, me, me,” written as rules.

There is joy in that. Builds are fun. I am not going to pretend they aren’t.

It is also a different product. The universe becomes the hallway you walk down between ability uses. The LBB idea, and Crawford’s idea, flips it. The character stays small. Marine, psychic, thief, operator. Enough person to have a job and a wound. The infinite sits outside the sheet: a world with two tags that will not sit still, a corp that has heat on you, a court that wants a favor, factions that move because you ignored them for three sessions.

You do not need forty-eight subclasses to matter at the table. You need a place that answers when you engage it. This hobby would rather catalog the world—and have that world still be there after the selves get killed and you roll up the next one.

Traveller Grows Up

The 1977 set gave you a Universal World Profile and trusted the referee to turn digits into Saturday night. Those books were not free. They were small, cheap, and enough to start. Later Traveller grew a huge official setting, and the current line is still a paid game. If you want the open-rules cousin, that is Cepheus Engine, from an old Mongoose SRD. Different family tree. When people say “the LBBs,” they mean Books 1–3 as a machine. Not a novel. Not a free PDF.

Stars Without Number delivers on the dream of the LBBs. It takes a few hundred more pages, but it delivers. Tags are the world-gen tables after they grew up. You do not get a blob of flavor and a hope. You get two tags, then enemies, friends, complications, things, and places that fall out of the mix. Collide the tags and the world already has work for the party. You have not even named the bartender.

Then there is the faction turn. Between sessions, the GM runs a short, mean little game with the groups already on the map. They grab resources. They fight. They fall apart. They send trouble whether anyone asked for it. The sector keeps moving while the table is off doing laundry. The sandbox has instructions now.

The books talk to each other. A spike-drive wreck can land in the Latter Earth. An operator out of Cities can bleed in Ashes. Same verbs. Different generator: worlds, courts and ruins, city heat, the wreck after the wreck.

The "universes" these games create are directly relevant to the settings they encapsulate.

Show the machine

This is the part a feat list cannot do.

You roll a world. Air you can breathe. Enough people for politics. Tech high enough to hurt and low enough to be hungry. Two tags: heavy industry, tomb world. So the colony is mining the bones of something older than the charter. The enemy is easy—a combine that will bury a worker to hold a claim. The friend is a surveyor who saw the wrong mural in a shaft and cannot let it go. Complication: a union, a sickness in the lower galleries, a pretech vault the company swears is empty. The thing worth stealing is a crate of sealed cans, or a name on a work order. The place is a canteen under a rusted gantry where everyone drinks with their back to the door.

That is not a setting guide. That is next session, in less time than it takes to pick a subclass. Do it twenty times, and you have a sector. At the end of the night, ask where they want to go next, and only prep that. The infinite is not more words. It is a small rule that keeps making situations.

These four books are what I would keep if I were forced to throw everything else out, and I would feel I did not lose a thing. Maybe I would keep a BX game like Basic Fantasy for a few more monsters and treasures, maybe a couple thematic spells, but that is it. A lifetime of gaming could fit in a single backpack, and I am good to go.

The free game

What Without Number adds—and what the 1977 box did not—is a real free game. Most of the rules and most of the generators are in the PDF you can send around tonight. Deluxe is more toys: extra classes, weirder tech, thicker toolkits. Not a locked door in front of play. That is his publishing choice, not a Traveller tradition. Still a good one.

“Download this, and we can start” should not be rare.

This should be the way the industry operates.

Why the small framework still feels like magic

There is a clean joy in a core that stays small and still applies to everything you point it at. One page of verbs. A universe that talks back. The sheet is a cheap, sharp tool. The map is the thing you came for.

The other school is not broken. It is buying a different feeling: a self that levels into more self. Popular for a reason. Also expensive. Every new button on the sheet is a page that did not go to the world, and one more rule to remember before anyone looks up and sees the gantry, the canteen, the mural in the shaft.

The old bet still holds true. Keep the rules in your head. Point them at whatever is in front of you. Let the tables force a collision so you are not staring at a blank hex. Same promise as the Little Black Books, with better notes on how to run it. Tiny framework. Infinite application.

If you want to feel the difference, skip the build. Roll two tags and a reaction. The universe is already bigger than the sheet.

The Tiny Producing the Infinite

I play classic games the way some people read classical literature: not because the new stuff is bad, but because I want to get back to the basics.

If we want to understand literature more deeply, we go back to Shakespeare or Homer. If we want to understand poetry, we return to the classics. In religion, we read the source texts. In philosophy, we read the greats. The same impulse applies here. In this hobby there’s a quiet pressure to stay current. New systems drop constantly. Even “new editions” of old games often arrive loaded with ideas borrowed from everywhere else. Cross-pollination is real, and after a while it starts to feel like the hobby is eating its own dog food. Designers pull from the same pool of proven techniques, the same assumptions about what a session should feel like, the same standards and practices that have calcified over decades. The result is a lot of games that deliver very similar experiences with slightly different dice, slightly different procedure names, and slightly different branding.

I get why that happens. Modern design is highly tuned. It knows how to produce a specific kind of fun with remarkable efficiency. But when too many games are tuned toward the same frequencies, the original signals get harder to hear.

Going back to the early games cuts through that. You’re not dealing with a carefully refined product that has already absorbed thirty years of other people’s solutions. You’re dealing with the unfiltered source ideas as they first appeared: the weird assumptions, the gaps, the strange procedures that later designers smoothed over or abandoned. Those rough edges are valuable. They force you to confront the original inspirations on their own terms instead of through layers of later interpretation.

That confrontation is where new ideas start to germinate for me. Once you’ve sat with the original text and felt how it actually plays—not the modern reconstruction, not the OSR distillation, not the “this is how we fixed it” version—you have a cleaner foundation. From there you can decide what still works, what was always awkward, and what possibilities got left on the table when the hobby moved on.

I’m not interested in purity for its own sake. I’m interested in having the original materials available as living tools again, not as historical artifacts that only exist inside someone else’s revision.

Even the OSR, for all its stated fidelity, still adds an interpretive layer. An implementation such as Swords & Wizardry or Old School Essentials may stay completely true to the original rules text, yet it is always flavored by the designer’s own experience with the game. That experience shapes the method of play, the tone, and the implicit assumptions about how the game is “supposed” to feel at the table. The result is a version of the original, already filtered through one person’s (or one design team’s) long history with it.

Consider a simple historical possibility. Suppose one group’s way of playing D&D in the late 1970s was to draw a map of points and lines: each point a town, dungeon, or other location, each line a measured travel time. Play consisted of traversing that point map. Nothing in the original booklets forbids it. The rules are open enough that such a method could arise naturally from the text and the table’s own habits. Yet that style of play does not sound like any modern OSR presentation. Modern OSR materials, however carefully they reproduce the rules, tend to carry forward a set of shared assumptions about how the game was “always” played by the majority of groups—hex crawls of a certain density, dungeon procedures of a certain rhythm, wilderness travel of a certain texture. Those assumptions are useful, and they produce excellent games. They are still assumptions.

When you play someone else’s interpretation, even a scrupulously faithful one, you inherit those common assumptions. You lose the quirky, local, possibly hobby-altering ideas that could only have emerged from a particular table working directly with the sparse original text. The original games left room for those divergences. Later presentations, including many OSR ones, quietly close some of that room by folding in the methods that became standard.

The same pattern appears in Traveller. The original Little Black Books were small enough to fit in a coat pocket. In those books, the Imperium was not a finished setting. Players generated it at the table through random tables and dice rolls. Every group’s stars, worlds, and trade routes were different because every group’s dice told a different story. A few thin volumes could produce an infinite, personal universe. That is the part that still moves me: the tiny producing the infinite. Modern Traveller offers a fully realized, multi-shelf catalog—rich, supported, and highly playable. It is a different and valuable proposition. But once every star and planet has been mapped and filled out, the galaxy becomes a known commodity. The sense that this particular group is still discovering the universe fades.

With the original, the generative toolkit becomes a finished product.

Both the OSR reconstructions and the modern lines of classic games are achievements. They make the material accessible and often improve the experience in practical ways. Yet each adds a layer of interpretation that the original text did not contain. If the goal is to hear the source signal before those layers settled into place, the early booklets remain the place to go. They are still the only versions that leave the most possibilities open—including the strange, local, and potentially transformative ones that never became the majority practice.

The point is not to reject the modern lines or the OSR reconstructions. Both have made these games more accessible and, in many ways, more playable. The point is simply that the original texts still offer something those later versions cannot fully replace: the largest open space.

When you sit down with the early booklets, you are not inheriting a finished method of play, a settled tone, or a pre-mapped universe. You are inheriting a sparse set of procedures and the permission to fill the rest yourself. That permission is what allowed the quirky, local solutions—the point maps, the personal Imperiums, the odd procedures that never became standard—to appear in the first place. Those solutions are still available. They just require returning to the source before the interpretive layers settled into place.

I keep going back to the classics for the same reason people keep going back to Homer, to the early philosophical texts, to the original scriptures. Not because later commentary is worthless, but because the source still has the power to surprise. In the gaps and the rough edges, new ideas can still take root. The tiny books can still produce the infinite. All they need is a table willing to roll the dice and find out what kind of universe appears this time.

And the Truck Keeps Rolling

But we will get new toys! But I have already spent so much money! Who cares? The caster-martial divide is a mile wide at this point, and who plays martials? I want more power gaming!

There comes a point in the hobby when the rolling ball of junk is so heavy and loud that it sustains itself just on momentum and greed. Official D&D no longer has to be good, coherent, or even honest about its own settings. It only has to keep moving. New subclasses, new feats, another limited-edition PHB - that’s enough to keep the people who have already spent the money from walking away. Momentum and sunk cost do the rest.

The state of 5.5E is sad. It feels like a late-stage game. The designers know the next edition is coming, so they stopped caring how much power creep they throw in and decided to ride this one out for as much money as possible. The whole thing is an out-of-control garbage truck, filled to the brim, rolling downhill.

I like 5E. The rules were never the problem. D&D and its settings are beginning to become nauseating to me, and I don’t even recognize them anymore. Greyhawk, the Realms, Planescape, Spelljammer, and every other one? They deserve better than they got today. Just go away.

I’ll pick up a discarded 3.5-era setting book and just play that. Scarred Lands. Kingdoms of Kalamar. Freeport. Something like Savage Thule. The kind of book that still assumes the world is allowed to be ugly, specific, and a little embarrassing. A setting that didn’t need a committee to decide whether the city could be rotten, whether the elves could be treacherous, or whether the map was allowed to have a wound in it. Those books still have an identity. They still have an edge. They still sound like someone actually wanted to say something about the world instead of just selling the next subclass.

Why is everything so censored in a hobby built to simulate difficult topics? Death. Loss. The unknown. The myth of the monster. The acquisition of wealth by going outside the system and into the dungeon. Taking risks. Becoming a hero and fighting evil.

That is the version of the hobby I miss. Not the rules. The voice. The stretch when you could still open a setting and recognize it, before every classic world got sanded down and sold back as an update. I would rather run one of those old books at my table than keep paying for the official version of a place I no longer recognize.

These days alignment and evil itself are gone. The game has become a “me me me” story simulator—hollow, empty, lifeless, an introspective ego-masturbation identity simulator. Good and evil mean nothing. Wealth means nothing. Heaven and Hell mean nothing. Do what you want and get away with it all. Power and identity are everything. And now the worlds are being built around the same stupid “nothing is important except you” ego-stroking mentality.

The problem is what the name is now attached to: updates that no longer sound like themselves, books that exist to keep the truck moving, the smell of a company that would rather sand a world down than risk saying what it used to say. I would rather take the 5E chassis and get away from that entirely. Tales of the Valiant will do it. Level Up Advanced 5E does it better. Same math, same table, none of the official voice I no longer want in the room.

Here’s the rub. If I am already giving up the official books, the official settings, and the official smell, why stop halfway? Why not go the rest of the way and play Shadowdark, or something out of the OSR, or Castles & Crusades? Dungeon Crawl Classics will do the whole job with more fun per hour and a lot less complexity. Once you start giving things up, giving it all up becomes a real option. The only reason to stay is the rules you actually want to keep.

If I am still in that neighborhood, I will go to the best version I can find. Shadowdark when I want speed and ease of play - it is not a 5E clone, but it is close enough to the same instincts that it belongs in the conversation. Level Up Advanced 5E when I want depth. Depth can be deceptive, though. A thicker book is not always a better game. Sometimes it is just more weight to carry down the same hill.

Level Up A5E gets close to the point where the complexity stops paying you back. You are already carrying a heavy book, already making more decisions at the table, already spending the kind of prep time that used to belong to a different kind of game. Once you are that far down the big-and-heavy path, GURPS is only a few steps farther, and it gives you more for the same investment. It is an acquired taste. Most people bounce off it. When you can make it sing, though, it is better than another thick 5E variant trying to be everything at once. If I am going to accept that much weight, I would rather accept the game that was built for it.

I am not going to keep buying the official thing just to protect the money I already spent, or because the next book has another toy in it. The truck can keep rolling. I don’t have to be on it.

Aftermath Archives: Dice Before the Chain

Aftermath Archives: Dice Before the Chain

A fun little observation on my Aftermath! blog, the DCC dice are directly compatible with the Saving Throw system in the Aftermath! game. The concept of dice chains started 32 years before DCC's release, but, to be honest, some of the DCC dice never formally existed back in 1980.

Using the d30 (and other dice) was mentioned for Saving Throws in Aftermath!, instead of modifying the target number. This technically extends to any dice, including DCC's d14, d16, and d24 - and others.

The two systems are dice-compatible. Goodman Games needs to reach out to FGU, work on a new edition, and write the Zochi dice into the game. This is a classic system that theoretically uses the same dice and was written 46 years ago. It would be amazing to have another game that uses the super-fun Zochi dice to collect and play with.

DOA Sun

https://www.ttrpginsider.news/p/fighting-oppression-in-new-ways-d-d-s-designers-on-adapting-dark-sun-to-modern-times

Forget it.

Cooked.

It's done.

There Is No Ethical Brain Donation

https://www.polygon.com/dnd-baldurs-gate-3-mind-flayer-tabletop-transformation/

I hate to be the spoilsport, but there is no way around it.

Vampires can live on animal blood or willing donors. You can write a tragic, even sympathetic vampire if you want. The hunger is a problem you can negotiate.

Mind flayers do not have that option. Their food is the entire mind of an intelligent creature. Their colonies do not function without a steady supply of thinking beings kept as livestock. That is not flavor you can file off. That is the creature.

Wizards has spent years scrubbing slavery and “people-owning” out of every other culture they print. Then they release a feat path that lets a player become one of the few monsters whose entire society is built on exactly that. They will give you the tentacles and the Mind Blast. They will not give you an honest accounting of dinner.

As a story option that mimics the BG3 struggle, it is fine. The tadpole, the slow loss of self, the choice to stop or go further - that can be a good character arc. But if the transformation ever completes, you should lose the character. What remains is an evil NPC. That is the traditional take, and it is the honest one. Ceremorphosis is not a prestige class. It should not end up as a power-gaming feat chain you take because Mind Blast looks fun.

D&D has spent years making sure you never lose control of your character. So of course they won’t take the sheet away when the transformation finishes. They’ll just let you keep playing the thing whose society they refuse to describe.

They want to sell you the squid. They just don’t want to talk about the farm.