Video: ShadowSun Revision with Chubby Funster

This one is from three months ago, with the EruditeDM interviewing Greg Christopher for his Shadowsun Revised project, launching in mid-September. This is Shadowdark meets Dark Sun.

ShadowSun Campaign Setting by Chubby Funster — Kickstarter

This project needs to go big, like Deathbringer, and send a message.

This is what we want, and this is how you do justice to the spiritual successor to the classic setting. We don't want fantasy superhero splatterpunk with nudity and gore, where 20th-level characters can't die. We want the raw, gritty, tough, savage Robert E. Howard-inspired setting that we fell in love with back in the 1990s.

We want the fear of the desert and death. We want to live the lives of slaves in the pits who break their bonds, escape the gladiatorial arenas, and overthrow their masters. We want to free the overlord's city-state and start a revolution, or die trying. Or just find our way in the sands as we search for our path, uncovering the secrets of the past, and trying to change the world for the better.

Shadowdark is one of the best pick-up-and-play games ever created, perfect for conventions. This does not require giant hardcovers, a website subscription, or digital purchases to create characters. Shadowsun is instant immersion plus hardcore gladiator desert survival in a savage world.

Want to get new players immersed in this world? The Shadowdark model is the perfect way to do this. Just hand them a character card, or fill one out in the first five minutes of play. No D&D Beyond or (age-verified?) digital purchase needed. And this is the 5E they are used to.

Dark Sun and Shadowdark are a perfect match.

The Setting of the Dark Sun

I played Dark Sun when the setting first came out. I was the DM, running the brutality and oppressive heat of the slave pens, the players' dread of their characters being sent into the arena and not knowing if they would come out alive, and the stark hopelessness of the entire world. Very little metal existed, so the savage world fought with bone, wood, and stone. Bashing a monster's head in with a rock was a valid tactic and saved your weapons from wear and tear. The armor sucked and was whatever you found.

This was a mix of Mad Max, Gladiator, and Robert E. Howard's "savage fantasy" tropes turned up to eleven. The arenas were filled with savage monsters, and worst of all, other gladiators trying to kill you for the favor of the crowd and the dragon king's elites. If you managed to escape, where would you go? You would be hunted as an escaped slave, and fleeing into the desert to die was a terrible death.

Wizards announced Dark Sun for 5E with a mature content label, claiming it recaptures the original setting. What I saw was not Dark Sun. This felt like 5E's fantasy superheroes engaging in unhinged splatterpunk slasher violence. The original Dark Sun was a mature setting in theme and story, showing how the pursuit of power could devastate the world, not gratuitous over-the-top violence and nudity.

Shadowsun for Shadowdark is the spiritual successor to Dark Sun. We have the same savage setting with all the Dark Sun hallmarks, but laid on top of the brutal old-school experience of Shadowdark. Shadowsun does the pulp-adventure feeling of Dark Sun far better, in an easier rules chassis to grasp, without the power-gaming and superheroic power levels of D&D 5E. I don't need tables telling me someone ripped someone else's spine out; the fear and hopelessness are real in Shadowsun. The characters are not semi-godlike beings of power who can never die; they live close to the jagged edge of a sharpened bone blade that could shatter at any moment.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chubbyfunster/shadowsun-campaign-setting

Shadowsun’s revised edition is scheduled for a mid-September Kickstarter. The books (both Player and GM) will be finished on launch day. The original edition is already one of DriveThruRPG’s long-running bestsellers, and the new version expands the setting into a more dynamic campaign world that changes with each playthrough.

This is a version of the game that does not need violence, nudity, or gore to communicate the brutality of the setting. It stays closer to the original foundation of Dark Sun: the slave pens, the arena, the empty desert, and the long chance of one day walking back through the gates. For anyone who watched the Gen Con trailer and felt it missed the point, the Revised Shadowsun is worth a look.

Mail Room: Shadowfinder

I loved Pathfinder 1e, and its remix of D&D 3.5E, the original world, the almost brutal Conan-meets-D&D flavor, and the entire “do anything” 3.5E rules. The backgrounds, classes, and savage world just worked so well together, and it was one of the near-perfect fantasy settings.

I bounced off Pathfinder 2E hard, and while I have many of the books, the new system doesn’t appeal to me. The books are huge, the system is voluminous, and there is too much for one person to fully grasp and appreciate.

So I find myself returning to simple games like Old School Essentials and Shadowdark for easier play, faster pacing, and rules I can keep in my head instead of needing to reach for a book to look up. But what if there was a compromise between Pathfinder 1e, D&D 3.5E, and old-school gaming? What if there was a game to fill the 3.5E hole missing in my life?

Part of that hole is tonal. D&D 5E often feels like high-fantasy superheroes; magic is abundant, characters grow into larger-than-life figures, and the system leans into power fantasy. Old School Essentials and core Shadowdark sit at the other end: low-fantasy survival, where resources are scarce, magic is dangerous or rare, and the world feels harsh and unforgiving. D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e (and therefore Shadowfinder) hit a middle-magic sweet spot that still feels right to me. Magic is present, potent, and flavorful, but it doesn’t take over the entire system or turn every character into a walking special-effects show. The world stays dangerous and grounded while still allowing for the wonder and variety that made those earlier editions sing.

That middle register is exactly what a lot of us who loved 3.5e and PF1e are looking for when pure OSR games feel too stripped-down and modern 5E feels too inflated. For those players, the jump all the way back to four classes and extreme minimalism can feel like losing the texture that made the game feel like home.

You don’t have to go all the way back.

Shadowfinder is a third-party conversion that takes the best of Pathfinder 1e’s player options and its entire six-book Bestiary line and rebuilds them on the Shadowdark engine. It keeps the content density and character-option richness that made 3.5e and PF1e feel like “your edition,” while delivering the speed, lethality, and modern table feel of Shadowdark. You get alchemists, bloodragers, gunslingers, magi, skalds, slayers, specialist wizards, alignment-flavored clerics, dozens of ancestries, firearms with mishap tables, and a monster catalog that still feels like classic Golarion, or a close cousin you can file the serial numbers off of for a custom world.

The project is still expanding. Menagerie Press has already released the Complete Bestiary and the Player Guide as the first two core books. A full GM’s Guide has now completed crowdfunding as the third volume in the set, with the books and PDFs coming soon. Once those arrive, Shadowfinder will have a complete core trio that covers player options, monsters, and referee tools in one coherent package.

What changes is the chassis underneath. Real-time torch timers still tick. Darkness is still deadly. Magic is still risky (roll-to-cast instead of pure Vancian). Hit points stay low. Combat stays fast. The incremental bonus stacking and long character-optimization loops of Pathfinder 1e are gone. The game still favors player decisions over character builds, but it no longer starves you of the toys that made the older system feel rich.

In practice, this means you can recapture a lot of the classic pre-PF2e Golarion flavor, or run a custom world in that same high-fantasy-but-still-grounded register, without the system weight that made Pathfinder 1e start to drag, and without the more radical minimalism of pure OSE or core Shadowdark. The conversion work for adventure paths and homebrew is lighter than it would be in either of those systems, because the content is already speaking a familiar language.

This isn’t a claim that Shadowfinder is “better” than Old School Essentials or core Shadowdark. Those games remain excellent for the tables that want pure procedures or the most focused possible dungeon-crawling experience. It is simply a recognition that not every 3.5e or PF1e veteran wants to make the full cultural and mechanical leap those games require. For the players who still love the option depth and the classic middle-magic tone but no longer want the bloat, Shadowfinder currently sits in a useful middle space that didn’t really exist before.

You don’t have to choose between keeping all the complexity or stripping everything down to four classes and a torch timer. There is now a more gradual off-ramp that still gets you into faster, more dangerous play while letting you keep more of what made the edition feel like home.

If the pure OSR versions have always felt like too big a step backward from the game that defined your table for years, this might be the compromise worth looking at.

The Gen Con Announcements

From what I hear, EDGE Studios is not losing the Star Wars license, but Wizards will still produce 5E Star Wars books. Wizards is also releasing a handful of D&D and World of Warcraft books.

I do not yet know how deep these two product lines will be, or whether they will be one-off books with little follow-up support. These two IPs alone deserve libraries of material: bestiaries, race and culture books, era sourcebooks (not just a couple of quick releases). If they turn out to be limited, self-contained products, I am far less interested. What I want is a full, complete game experience that can sustain years of play.

The announced World of Warcraft book includes 50+ monsters. That does not even begin to cover the depth of WoW’s creatures, which could easily fill multiple bestiaries. Every major race deserves its own lore, history, and background treatment.

At the same time, Dark Sun is returning, along with Dragonlance and Greyhawk. In some ways it feels like the 1990s again, when too many settings helped push TSR toward bankruptcy. We will also see the D&D engine power G.I. Joe, Transformers, Power Rangers, and other licensed games in the coming years, further splitting attention. Traveller 5E is on the way. Many other publishers are announcing 5E-compatible versions of their own games.

We are watching partners brought on board to share financial risk, and other companies spending time and resources on D&D books when that energy could go into their own systems and releases.

Does flooding the channel with 5E-compatible versions of every popular IP, and every classic D&D setting, risk the same kind of consumer fatigue that hit the video-game industry in 1983 and TSR in the 1990s?

This is not a question of popularity. It is a question of volume without focus.

Is D&D Only Good for D&D Stories?

When the first version of AD&D 2nd Edition came out, it looked more like a generic game than D&D. The art was all over the place, but it included historical imagery that felt more like a simulation of Greek myths and stories. It still had plenty of generic fantasy art and pieces from noted TSR artists, but the entire game felt more setting-neutral than many editions. The revised edition shifted back into the D&D norms, but it still had that generic feeling, and that game could be used as a generic fantasy game.

TSR felt pressure from GURPS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so it is understandable they shifted away from the "D&D lore" and more into generic fantasy tropes and imagery. AD&D 2E is peak D&D for the kind of flexible fantasy play I’m talking about; it does not have the Gygaxian prose, but it does have the modern tropes, including the bard. The best Open 2E version is For Gold & Glory, and one of the best alternatives to Wizards' D&D out there; it is a better game for generic fantasy than AD&D 2E since it removes the D&D tropes, and the art is fantastic and deeply thematic. If you go in expecting D&D tropes or demons and devils, note those have been removed, but the game itself is very strong.

When D&D 4E came around, Wizards went full "World of Warcraft," and we now had the official D&D setting, planes, and worlds firmly set in stone as the default setting. We never left this model of world delivery, and D&D 5E still feels like it is set in the "official" D&D universe.

The subclass design does not help things; they are designed for a specific world model and idea. These drag in a lot of D&D-isms, mixed with the high-and-flashy magic spells, and you are doing more work to remove things than enjoy a game with a neutral base. The cosmology, planar travel, and monsters all feel like a "World of Warcraft world, but D&D" and far out of the realm of generic fantasy. They drag their assumptions with them. Even the “simple” Fighter and Rogue have gotten more layered with subclass features that often feel anachronistic or tonally off for a grounded historical-fantasy game.

The Open 5E clones still feel like "different flavor D&D worlds" rather than generic fantasy, with Level Up A5E feeling the most generic of the three, compared to the heavily Midgard-ized Tales of the Valiant. Even then, Level Up A5E makes specific assumptions about races like Orcs, and still crafts its own setting in the rules.

Treasure, magic items, and gear round out the assumed pseudo-Victorian post-Renaissance setting, and once you introduce guns, all bets are off. Modern D&D is all over the place in terms of technology levels. Even the manner of dress has morphed into "trenchcoats and pauldrons" steampunk fantasy. In many modern games, the equipment lists help define the world.

Granted, with enough work, D&D can be used for historical fantasy, but I get the feeling it is a lot more work to do it, or you need a "5E compatible" game specifically designed for that setting and time period, usually a crowdfunding buy-in whenever it rolls around. The costs for supporting 5E are typically higher than other games.

The game has spent the last decade doubling down on its own identity rather than staying a neutral chassis. The D&D identity is popular and commercially successful, but it does make the system less transparent when you try to use it for something outside its preferred aesthetic.

While I play GURPS for these types of games, there are drawbacks. The rules weight and character creation times of GURPS prevent quick adoption, and many groups bounce off the system in the first 20 minutes, never to return. There is also a lot more referee work up front.

GURPS is better at supporting any setting without fighting you. Whether it is the better game for a given group depends on how much they value setting fidelity versus ease of play, speed of character creation, and built-in high-fantasy energy. GURPS is not low-prep or fast-starting; I would play Shadowdark for that type of "pick up fantasy game."

Shadowdark is a legitimate middle option, and it sits in an interesting spot between modern 5E and something like GURPS. It is deliberately lighter on baked-in setting and cosmology than current D&D. The core game gives you four classes (Fighter, Priest, Thief, Wizard), a short spell list, a focus on torch-and-resource pressure, and a tone that leans classic pulp fantasy rather than the high-magic, multiplanar, subclass-heavy world of 5E. Because so much of the “D&D-ness” has been stripped out or made optional, it is easier to tilt toward other flavors without constant subtraction.

I can do a classic Greek or Roman game in Shadowdark easily. But Shadowdark is not a blank slate. It is still a class-and-level, hit-point, armor-class, dungeon-crawling fantasy game at its core. Shadowdark wants to be dangerous, resource-aware, and slightly pulp. That is a feature if you like that feel. It is a mild constraint if you want something closer to pure historical drama or very low-fantasy mythic storytelling.

Shadowdark will not hand you a perfect classical or Norse game out of the box, but the amount of material you have to remove or rewrite is noticeably smaller than in current D&D. You are also not having to create everything yourself or leverage sourcebooks like you are in GURPS, though the GURPS sourcebooks are excellent. On the plus side, Shadowdark is far easier for new players to get used to, and the "flavor" of the campaign is "classic Greek" or "classic Roman," and the existing classes work as-is.

How much setting and tone does the system assume?

With 5E, you have a strictly defined world.

With GURPS, you have everything and nothing, and it is all DIY.

Shadowdark sits in the perfect center of this discussion: light, fast, and familiar - it hits the D&D notes. It is also far easier to mod and flavor than full D&D. It is far easier to start new players with than GURPS. Magic is already constrained and dangerous. The system can be modded into any setting with minimal effort.

D&D 5E: Centrally Planned Fantasy

They put your ideas into a box, define all your powers and abilities, and allow you to think that the few choices they give you are complete freedom and customization. D&D's class-based system has always tried to define your role narrowly to make the game easily approachable, but at the expense of constantly offering ways to break out of the small boxes it puts you in.

And these days, if you multiclass at all, you never get your 20th-level power. So we are back to punishing those who seek freedom and customization. The punishment is a lie, since almost no campaigns ever reach 20th-level play, but the threat is there. Disobey the centrally planned single-class paradigm, or the game-designer-as-state shall punish you for self-expression.

We had all this figured out in the 1980s when all of us AD&D players dropped D&D for GURPS. This happened, and it was partly responsible for the end of AD&D 1E. These pre-Battletech days were brutal, and AD&D declined in the late 1980s as other games took over. Magic: The Gathering in the mid-1990s was the nail in the coffin.

But we all wanted more character customization, which is why most hardcore groups went to GURPS and never looked back. The "central planning committee" of game designers at TSR could not contain our ideas, and we needed games that could do it all. Some went to Champions, and many flocked to GURPS. The only really strong class-based game to survive the 1990s was Rifts, which was greatly helped by the TMNT franchise.

And GURPS doesn't tell you that you can't have a power because you multiclassed. There are no classes.

These days, it is the crowdfunding grift crowd keeping 5E alive, and even this model is crumbling. We have far too many options in a game that can't support them; the character designers with a few dozen books have UI dropdowns to pick classes, feats, and powers that extend for a few screens and a few hundred selections, and the choices we were promised become shackles and confusing, messy, junk-filled lists to sort through. There are times in 5E character design when I feel I am digging through a garbage can of smelly, disorganized trash to find the one thing I am looking for.

GURPS? All options are equal; there are no class or level requirements, and they are all in one chapter. Buy them if you can afford them. They aren't scattered across six classes, with vaguely similar options with different names here and there, and only found in some "digital purchase" that took someone weeks to piece together in a database program and you paid forty-dollars to have the right to access.

D&D is a centrally planned game, but with a deeply capitalistic and exploitative sales model. There is always something new to buy, and another brand-new platform to buy it again on. Yet, you get these shill gaming sites calling D&D a "deeply socialist game," yet that is a deeply dishonest lie, and everyone can see how the digital sales model flies in the face of that statement. Are you kidding me? Even with the Open 5E clones, I am buying multiple digital copies of the same thing so the character designer can work on the latest site to support it.

GURPS, with its "buy what you want" character design system, feels like a game that leverages capital and the buying power of character points, has zero crowdfunding grift, and is far, far, far less exploitative since if you own the core two books, you own the entire game with zero digital add-ons needed to create any character. In GURPS, you "own the means of production" of all your characters, and these powers aren't given to you by the game designers far away, piece by piece, always for another buck for a new option, always something new the next quarter.

To be fair, you also "own the means of production" in the OSR, too, for all your characters. So this concept is a universal selling point for most old-school games. Modern games? Mostly live-service models, and mostly forgettable. They will all go away when the websites go offline, and we will be expected to buy the next thing.

A universal, open, no-character-class point-design character-creation system solves all of D&D 5E's problems. You don't need to keep watching YouTube videos on how to fix the game. You don't need to keep buying books to fix the game. You don't need to invest in more and more DM advice books on prep and adventure design. When you realize all of D&D's scaffolding is there to entice you into a buyer's market and collector's FOMO mentality, it all becomes clear.

Also, if it is printed in a physical book, and the character creation system works offline, it is a real game. Many of these modern games trick you into thinking the "first few levels are fine," but by the time you hit level five, the software requirement to manage complexity hits hard and you are forced to open your wallet.

And the surrounding D&D 5E market feeds off that buyer's market; the YouTubers and add-on book sellers are all fighting for a piece of the shrinking pie, and the parent company will start cutting off markets and keeping them for itself. Of that crowd "willing to spend big for a game," everyone is fighting to get that money. Even the media sites surrounding this market have been compromised by this cash flow.

We had all this figured out in the 1980s.

Most of the kids we played with were so poor they were lucky to own one or two gaming books. A live-service model game back then? You're kidding, right? None of us had the money to buy imagination, nor go into debt for a game. We picked games that gave us the most flexibility for the money we had. We dropped AD&D 1E for GURPS and never looked back.

These days, with AD&D 1E making a comeback for nostalgia, I play it again and am right back in the 1980s. Wanting to switch to GURPS.

GURPS: Bundles of Holdings!

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/G4Essentials2026

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/G4Infinite

We have two GURPS bundles on the Bundle of Holding; they are really worth checking out if you are new to GURPS. Jump in now, and open your mind to a universe of gaming!

Resolved: Paizo & The Archives of Nethys

It is nice to hear that the issues between the Archives of Nethys and Paizo are resolved. This should never have gotten to the level it did, and it feels like a lack of communication on all sides. Our community sites are special places, and they help share and promote the games we love. I bounced off Pathfinder 2, as it is better for groups than solo play, but I still like the system.

It's good to hear that this part of gaming's current woes is resolved in these horrible times for everyone.

The Downfalls of Story Gaming

"The game doesn't provide any tools to help players engage with my world, have meaningful relationships with my NPCs, engage in my storylines, or support my villains if they should be defeated too early."

I heard that said recently about D&D 5.5E.

My, my, my ...how far we have fallen.

The biggest mistake here is the very pretentious overuse of the word "my" over and over again. People come into D&D thinking they can become a dungeon master and force-feed any random group of players their theater slop, and players have to accept it because it is brand-name D&D, or any other of these story games that promise to solve the golden calf problem of "what game can I play that the players must interact with my story?" 

Some games use narrative tokens and storytelling rewards, milestone leveling, and other tools to carrot-and-stick players down the dungeon master's preset narrative arc. In a sense, yes, you are a dungeon master in this case because this is a form of torture.

In "real D&D," players can kill all your meaningful NPCs, walk away from the villain and not care, ignore your world, blow off your storylines, and not care about your never-published novel, and that is okay. This is D&D; let them kill monsters and take the loot. Focus on running the combats well, and you will be fine.

Some story games are great and help me tell wonderful solo-play stories. But on the flip side, I could never imagine using those narrative tools against a group of players trying to do their own thing. Use them together with the players to collaboratively tell a story and reward story beats? That is okay, but what are you doing? We can tell a story together without all this story-game scaffolding.

Why am I giving bennies or narrative points to players for accomplishing story beats? I feel this is like treating your players like dogs and giving them a biscuit and saying "good boy!" Why do we need all these metacurrencies and out-of-game point systems? Too often, they can be used for negative reinforcement rather than the positive reinforcement the game pretends people will use them for.

And I don't need to drop out of the game and pat players on the head for doing something narratively important. They should know that in their heart and feel it. But, no, here are some story point rewards, and a narrative token for you. Good job; have a gold star too.

This is the difference between a DM coming in and expecting to be the director of a play, with the players their "hired actors," versus the DM coming in and being the neutral arbiter in the world who merely decides "what logically comes next."

Give me a strong simulation of a fantasy world and its characters, and my players can do all the rest. My NPCs have the stories, not me as the referee; talk to them if you are interested. They also have all the information about the world; if you are interested, go talk to them. Not me, the referee; I have nothing to do with this at all. I just run combats and make rulings.

Talk to the NPCs.

They are not even "my" NPCs, either; they are the world's NPCs.

If you don't and want to do your own thing, that's cool, too. Just don't expect the NPCs to react a certain way to your tomfoolery, and they will be fine. They may even be interested in what you are up to as well! You never know, and the dice will decide that.

If you can't understand the invisible wall that a DM needs to have between the world and the referee, that this is not "your world" or "your NPCs" or "your story" - that all this belongs to the world, then you will never understand what it means to be a referee. Kill the king? Fine, I don't care. But the world will, and you will find that out. That invisible wall protects you, gives you necessary distance, and maintains your impartiality.

Like the referee in a sports game, you are not here to make one team win over the other. You are here to do a good and fair job where the players can say you handled their interactions between them and the world fairly, and you helped make the world's stories and NPCs come to life.

The players will tell their own stories, and the ultimate story is their rise to power or fall to tragedy.

The Perception Check

Something feels wrong about the perception check.

This is a "screw the players" mechanic that forces players to roll to learn secret information. In the old days, there was no perception check. The referee carefully described the environment, and players pushed, poked, looked, searched, and prodded the environment to find its hidden secrets. Even spotting an ambush did not force a roll; the referee described an environment, perhaps laid a few hints in there, and then the players could react accordingly.

The tracks stop right before they reach the pass.

If they look closer, then, yes, someone attempted to cover up the tracks.

And those tracks lead towards each side of the pass.

I am not forcing a Perception check for that. The players need to figure out if there is an ambush there on their own, using common sense and good judgment. Granted, those two things are in short supply these days, and with everyone a phone addict, many do not know how to interact with a natural environment or spot trouble like this.

"Why would people who hid in the bushes cover their tracks? I don't know! Hello?! Why are you hiding in there? Can you come out and explain why you covered your tracks?"

There is no rule to cover it in older games; it was what it was. The referee described the environment, the players were not on their phones, and they paid attention. Some skill-based games of the time did have perception-like skill mechanics, but D&D never did. Then again, the old D&D way of doing it was superior, and we only used those perception mechanics in edge cases and for situations where things weren't that clear.

These days, the entire passive perception "industry" and the "roll to see everything" sort of design slows the game down, and it sucks. It feels like the characters are looking through the world through tiny holes in cardboard boxes and rolling or having to check a number to see anything in the environment. Perception isn't a skill anymore; it is a set of blinders to view the world through.

In older games, we never needed the entire perception dongle.

Describe and let them react.

No rules. No numbers. No checking character sheets. No rolling the dice.

Player skill, listening, and using your head instead of your character sheet matter. The referee's descriptions matter. The skill on both sides heightens the experience.

Yet the perception trope seems overused, and this one mechanic defines 2/3rds of the interaction with adventures and the game. It is too important, too overused, and anything this prevalent should be designed out of the game. Otherwise, the game feels like it relies too much on one mechanic.

Imagine if every turn, you needed to "roll to move." Fail your movement roll, and you can't move. Fail your perception check, and you can't see or hear. The perception check is every character's eyes and ears into the world. Granted, it is only for situations where there is uncertainty involved in "if you see it," but the entire mechanic is far, far too overused, slows down play, and eliminates player skill.

The perception check is a terrible design.

Also, Wisdom should cover perception. This also falls into the category of having a "lift heavy objects" skill to replace the STR check. We have skills that duplicate ability score checks, and that is another sign of a terrible design. I don't know how you fix this other than admitting it is a flaw in the D&D 5E design and designing around these "rules bottlenecks" in the next edition.

When it started, it felt innocent and cool. These days, it acts as the default eyes and ears of every character in the game.

The End of Edition Blues

D&D is fading. We have other games replacing it, and there are a few very strong contenders. We will be in this mode for a while longer, at least until D&D 6 is announced and the hype machine begins again. This is how it goes with D&D: in the end-of-edition era, it is always this decline and malaise, and other games step up and steal the thunder.

D&D 5.5E did not live up to expectations. The rules update itself wasn't horrible, but the monsters were such an insult, a politically correct reimagining of classic creatures and foes; all they did was drive people into the OSR, or back into the 2014 Monster Manual. They leaned so hard into making every humanoid a fay, elemental, or other magical reimagination that they lost the world's gritty, grounded nature entirely.

People go to Shadowdark to get that gritty, hardcore hit these days.

People go to Daggerheart to do the modern cosplay streaming show roleplay. What D&D tries to do, Daggerheart does, and it speaks to that audience much better and in a clearer voice.

People play the OSR to get the original thing.

People will play gonzo games like DCC to experience the thrill of the unknown, in adventures, characters, and monsters. Through Deathbringer in with the mixed gonzo-plus-gritty audience, and we are in a bountiful era of gaming.

If I want hardcore reality simulation as fantasy gaming, I will just play GURPS and have it all.

But the larger problem is D&D is trying to be everything to everybody, and it doesn't really do it all that well. And here in the end-of-edition phase, we have lackluster 2024 books, and people sort of mix and match what they agree with. A few of us are playing Open 5E clones just to clean up the experience, with games like Level Up A5E or Tales of the Valiant. ToV works for me, and I do have a soft spot for A5E.

The only way D&D can fix this is by abandoning 5.5E and announcing 6E. Like Hollywood and the inevitable next Avengers movie, here we go again, and it is trying to capture lightning in a bottle another time. What we loved, that first time we did it, is forever gone, and the new team has no clue what makes D&D special and fun, especially if the 2024 Monster Manual is any guide. The changes they made to monster lore are embarrassing and invalidate every classic adventure and campaign setting.

Again, if I wanted this much fundamental change, I would have just played Daggerheart, Nimble, DC 20, or even Draw Steel. Not D&D. D&D at this point is McDonald's; please don't change the Big Mac and just give me what I am used to. Tales of the Valiant delivers the classic "meal" I am used to from 2014, so that has the best flavor of D&D for me at the moment. Sure, I could stumble along with 2014 books, but I prefer to have a 3-book game that works without patching and fixes, and a clean implementation of 5E with the classic look and feel.

6E? We have 5E and ten years of books. Why, other than trying to own the market again?

I got all I want or need here, and I doubt Wizards knows what D&D is anymore in order to deliver an experience that most people want. That middle ground today doesn't really exist anymore.

Too Much Magic

There is too much magic in modern fantasy gaming. It is everywhere, in most subclasses; some classes are entirely magic, and it is magic, magic, magic everywhere and all day long.

It gets tedious. Nobody can be skilled at anything anymore. You need the magic crack to do anything.

AD&D 1E featured anti-magic fields, creatures, weapons, and even planes. Put any modern D&D 5 characters there, and they will be helpless. There is too much magic in the game, setting, and universe. It isn’t high fantasy anymore; it's ultra-fantasy and magic overload.

Some of the old modules had lists of spells that were not allowed to be used in certain dungeons, and too much magic was a problem back in the early days of D&D, too. There were dungeons where a simple passwall spell would ruin the whole thing, the Tomb of Horrors being one of them.

I doubt there are many 5.5E classes that aren’t magic-touched anymore. Look long enough, and every class has to have overpowered magic options, which begs the question: Are you anything without magic? Do skill and non-magical training matter?

Magic in D&D is like sex on the Internet: it's everywhere, there is too much of it, and I am tired of it all.

In Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy, four of the seven classes were non-magical. In Advanced Fantasy, eleven of the twenty-two classes are non-magical. That is about half or more of the classes have no magic whatsoever. While there are magic items, half of the classes themselves are entirely non-magical. The game is set in a low-magic world, which is the norm.

I could easily play OSE without magic; you can do the same with both BX and 1E. It wasn't a problem, and the game had enough to it that removing magic would not feel like you were losing too much.

There is so much magic in fantasy these days that it does not feel like "magic" at all; it feels like power entitlement and magic being used to prop up weak class designs and lackluster combat options. The amateur game designer uses magic as a crutch. If your game works without magic and is exciting and engaging, you've got me.

The default setting for fantasy should be a low-magic world. This keeps the game grounded and believable. This is also the reason humans should be the default choice for races, since they are the most diverse and familiar race to which we are accustomed. I find that in a game where everyone is forced to play humans (ACKS II being the best example of this), we get a wonderful diversity of cultures, whereas in fantasy games that allow the typical fantasy race selections, the diversity of the average tiefling, dragonborn, or dwarf is actually quite low, and they fall into stereotypes and parody way too often for my tastes.

In GURPS, I have the freedom to create campaigns without one bit of magic at all. I can play a historical game without being weighed down by magic, witchcraft, divine magic, nature magic, or planar interference. Not all humanoids are magical, elemental, or fay, as they are in D&D 5.5E. I can create a compelling fantasy game with not one iota of magic in it. I can craft authentic fantasy campaigns based on real historical settings.

I don't have to default to a multiverse planar setting at all.

I can play a pirate game in the Age of Sail and not worry about a mage flinging fireballs at the other vessel. Use the cannons, please, you aren't a cannon yourself. I know, that's not fun, but in a game where I expect my scurrvy dogs to be able to learn how cannonry works, what is the point if half the party can fling equal death from their fingertips? Use the cannons like a pirate and stop complaining, or you are walking the plank.

Better yet, without magic, players have to drill down and focus on melee weapons, how to fight, archery, thrown weapons, special attacks, advantages that give them the edge in combat, weapon reach, defenses, and attack and defense actions. The flow of combat becomes the "magic" in the game and the key to victory. Knowing how to fight, stacking the odds in your favor, and never giving the enemy a chance are your "spells," and there is no easy solution to a fight.

Players need to pay attention to the combat system and rules to do well, and they can't lean on spells or special powers to save them. Thank you, finally, sanity is in my game. Immerse yourself in the world and realistic fighting techniques and tactics, and you will find a much greater satisfaction in mastery there than you will in casting an infinite-use cantrip every turn and being bored with your choices.

Too common magic isn't magical.

It is the mundane and the everyday.

There is no mystery or unknown.

And it becomes boring.

Self-Destruction as Marketing

This happened to me in D&D 3.5E: players came in, bragged about broken builds, and wanted to play them in my game.

I said no. I knew the build. I knew the site he got it from. What is the point of this exercise? For you to come in, find something online, and use it to wreck my game so you can get a few laughs? To ruin the game for everyone else who makes time every week to come to the game?

I said no.

Not in my game.

We are entering "late phase 5E," and what I see coming out of D&D Beyond are horribly broken player options. This is, again, the corporate gaming playbook. At the end of an edition's lifecycle, they purposefully make more and more outrageous and broken builds just to keep player attention and make the game "fun again," and it ends up wrecking the game to the point where people are screaming for a new edition. In a game with declining interest, the only way they can attract interest is through shipping broken mechanics and options to generate buzz and excitement.

Everyone "still hot on 5E" is having the edition slowly ruined for them, and they don't even know it.

Players will seek out groups to try the "next broken thing" and laugh as the abuse is enabled from up top, and another table's game is ruined by stupid ideas coming from corporate.

I saw this same thing at the end of every edition: the company hits the self-destruct button and wrecks the game with OP, power-gaming, and completely broken player options.

If you are a 5E purist and can play with a limited set of books, fine, you will probably never see this happening at your table. The players are there for the stories and heroism, and that's great. If you limit your options to the classic choices or play a 5E version that cares about balance and game integrity, wonderful. The small fish in the industry, like EN World and Kobold Press, don't have much of an incentive to ruin their games with powergaming options, since they can't create a new edition out of thin air.

If a player is on D&D Beyond and has access to broken expansion material, and is all excited to play, that is a red flag to me. I know the type. The power gamer is too interested in wrecking games and looking cool, rather than in everyone else's enjoyment at my table.

No.

Not in my game.

Must Have Skills vs. Mechanics

Perception is a skill everyone must have in 5E. I really do not know why this is a skill at all; it is so common that it should just be made an ability score at this point. Some skills are so common and "must-haves" that they should be removed from the game and made core mechanics.

If your life depends on your ability to spot things in a dungeon, why wouldn't everyone have this trained?

Just give this to everyone trained and skip having to buy it, or get rid of these "perception skills" (like insight) and fold them into the rules. Create perception secondary abilities (physical, mental, magical, and social) and get rid of them as skills.

These "non-job" skills always bugged me. Blacksmith? Fine. Survival? Okay, passible. Religion? Good. Climbing? Another okay skill.

Perception? Who can get a job as a "Perception Expert"? Insight? What are these other than "screw the player" skills to punish those who don't buy them? Skills should mirror professions, not activities.

If something is in the game that is a core ability in perceiving, understanding, or participating in the natural environment, it should not be a skill. These should have baked-in mechanics in the rules, since they are so common that they are core to the game's experience. Remove perception from the skill list and bake it into the game.

Even movement skills should be trained to open up movement types, such as climbing, balance, hiking, or swimming, and the rest of the movement-related checks should be ability score rolls. They should just be checkboxes.

The entire skill system has always been a core flaw of Wizards' D&D, to the point that they rarely get things right, and have some situations where they lean on the skill system too hard to drive the game engine.

Kickstarter: Hackmaster XXV

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kenzerco/hackmaster-25th-anniversary-edition-a-fantasy-rpg

Well, this is interesting. HackMaster is getting an updated version of the rules. The Kickstarter announcement page just dropped, and it looks like they are cleaning up and patching the 5th Edition of the game.

"We painstakingly honed the mechanisms and strategy of HackMaster to continually improve and streamline game play and make it something truly unique in the RPG world: a perfect blend of old-school feel with modern mechanics, offering fast tactical play combined with the most immersive roleplaying experience." 

-HackMaster Kickstarter announcement, July 2026  

This is an interesting development, and a welcome return. Hopefully, the new edition balances the expansion books more toward the 4th Edition (which covered all classes and also had adventures) than the 5th, which seemed to focus only on cleric classes. But it is also true that a great game needs no expansions.

I am looking forward to this, having been watching from the sidelines and never really into the game, but appreciating HackMaster's unique take on fantasy. There is a lot of room in the Grognard OSR for this game, which includes DCC and many other greats.

Science Fiction Gaming

Why? Why play sci-fi?

Fantasy gaming has built-in motivation, especially old-school or modern gaming. In modern gaming, everyone typically comes in with "their ten-page backstory," and you have built-in motivations to complete those arcs. In old-school gaming, XP = GP, dominion play, leveling, and getting treasure.

Exploration exists in both genres, uncovering those sweet blank hex-maps and filling in what is out there. Fantasy gaming has an edge over science fiction in terms of exploring culture, family, and local politics. In science fiction gaming, you get more of a modern bent and experience, like trying to find local culture in a mall.

Especially if the science fiction culture is anywhere close to modern, you begin to pull in cyberpunk elements, local law enforcement, governments, military, and all sorts of "big picture" factions. Fantasy tends to be easier since most everything is close to home, based in family and ethnic groups, and local relations. The rare exception is "Wild West science fiction," which leans more into the local style of relations and interpersonal interactions than the more modern takes.

Fantasy tends to be more popular because its focus is tighter and its conflicts are more personal.

There are times when science fiction feels too big to wrap my head around, unless it is the day-by-day of exploration and survival. On a low level, things work. Try to pull in too many sweeping space wars and galactic conflicts, and the characters feel very small, and the nature of a space war feels too large to even comprehend, let alone change the course of. Even Star Wars works better as a low-level, interpersonal, survival, and smuggler-based game.

Cyberpunk works better as street-level drama. So do Wild West stories. This is also why we see a lot of science fiction stick to these stereotypes and archetypes.

Also, ship combat matters. The Star Wars, Cepheus, and Stars Without Number ship combat systems work well in the abstract and don't require calculus or a physics degree to figure out. So many science fiction games fall flat on ship combat that it is a real problem with the genre. Some games omit ship combat entirely.

The setting matters. A great, classic, compelling setting works well for me, but I can also get into hex-crawls in space and the feeling of discovering something new. A Forbidden Lands-style start also works well, where the galaxy is recovering from a massive event that disrupts communication and travel for a few hundred years, records are lost or out of date, and everything out there changes. At this point, a hex-crawl makes sense, and your campaign universe can slowly expand.

Star Wars? Expanded Universe only. Otherwise, the New Republic and Leia's leadership were all for nothing, since nothing ever changed. Leia was running around tarmacs as a grandmother, still fighting the Empire. The whole idea is stupid, and it robbed her of the chance to ever be recognized as a transformative leader, mother, Jedi, and figure. The sequels trashed the original universe and continue to rip off the EU, which only proves that we had it better before Disney, and that today's creatives can never get out from under the shadow of better writers and creators.

Traveller feels too huge for me. It is the best universe in gaming, but it is far too big for me. I know, pick a small spot and start there, but the universe feels stuck in one point in time, unchanging, and written in stone. The universe has undergone various iterations as it tried to change, but it is sort of set in stone at this point and is unable to change. It is a starting point for campaigns and ideas, and a great one, but I like to roll my own or start smaller with less.

Fantasy is easier since it is so generic, and sci-fi tends to be a harder sell. Very few want to get on board with a campaign, since the genre is either tightly tied to an IP and played with the official game, or it is so vague what your motivations are that people can't connect. What are we doing? What is the point?

Another problem is that science fiction, as a genre, borrows so much from the Western that playing the Western is the easier game to pitch and put together. Why are we playing a space western when we could play the for-real western, ride horses, wear cool hats, and talk like cowboys? The cowboy movie may be dead as a film genre, but it is still a far better gaming genre than most science fiction IPs.

Part of why Western beats science fiction is that too much science fiction is a "do anything" genre with no rules of physics, and creators feel free to break those rules. Any of the rebooted Star Trek movies are great examples, as are the Star Wars sequels, which used hyperspace as a magic teleportation system. You might as well invent a "hyperspace belt" and get around that way. When you start pulling the rug out from under players with "anything magic," they often quit.

With the Western, we have rules, partner. Even the "Weird West" genre has rules and expectations.

Sci-fi is a tough genre to sell to players.

You almost have to avoid the rules and sell the campaign concept first.

Are Modern Games Doomed?

https://www.archivesofnethys.com/agreement.html

Some terrible news for open gaming today, as Paizo ends its partnership with the Archives of Nethys, the free online rules resource for everything Pathfinder and Starfinder.

At this point, if you invest in digital, ot support games that live behind paywalls, you need to ask yourself some hard questions. Many games are guilty too, such as 5E versions, where the SRD is free, but what you actually need to play (subclasses and character options) are locked behind book or PDF purchases.

When the major VTTs shut down and all those digital books are lost, nobody will get anything back. If D&D Beyond ever folds or is sold to a group that shuts it down, all of that is gone.

I also get why Paizo would go this way. Who would ever buy digital copies of Pathfinder 2 rulebooks with Nethys out there providing the more popular and free alternative? Major VTTs don't see any money from supporting Paizo games, nor will most people buy VTT books for something they can get for free, better supported elsewhere.

At this point, why wouldn't I only support games like Basic Fantasy or OSRIC? Kevin Crawford put a few of his core rule sets under a public domain CC license. The excellent 2E clone game For Gold & Glory, you can distribute the PDF for free as long as you aren't selling access to it; you can share it freely and post it on a website. Basic Fantasy's PDF is free, and the books are printed at cost.

We have far better alternatives.

When does modern gaming get to be too much?

If this were the world of open-source software, Pathfinder would be forked and cloned, and the free version would start development. It took far less for OpenOffice to be forked into LibreOffice. This is how the real world works.

But this isn't how the silly world of gaming works.

One group would attack the other for "hurting the game," and nothing that people swear they believe in, open and free gaming for everyone, would ever get done. People who complain that capitalism is ruining gaming will not support games owned and run by the community, and will go out of their way to attack those communities as they keep playing games printed by Wall Street. They won't consider free and open alternatives.

I will miss the old Nethys site.

It is the end of an era.

Deathbringer TTRPG by Professor DM

Backed.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/roll-for-combat/deathbringer-ttrpg-by-professor-dm

Why?

Because the hobby needs it.

Mail Room: Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: The Northern Marches

Highest recommendation.

Let's just get that out of the way. This is an OSR-style living sandbox campaign with enough room for your ideas, plus a book full of hexes described with history, story, and current events. We get city maps. We get locals. The art is flat-out beautiful.

This is the setting the Forgotten Realms should have been. Not an author's setting where your characters are allowed to play alongside a cast of unkillable GMNPCs, but your setting where the characters are the important characters in the novels and stories.

The book uses BX-style hit-die rating for monsters, but this is usable by and large with any fantasy ruleset.

This is sort of the Holy Grail of old-school style settings, clearly on the same level as the amazing Harnworld. While Harnworld leans more into historical accuracy while folding in fantasy concepts, this starts with fantasy concepts and works to give them historical accuracy and a weighty feeling. Harnworld, at times, feels like magic, dragons, monsters, and fantasy elements are optional and not central to the "alt-history" realistic setting. The Northern Marches feels like fantasy was already there and helped shape the world, yet the setting doesn't "go modern" and remains grounded in the medieval fantasy baseline.

An insanely great book, replacing a shelf-full of fantasy settings for me.

This one feels like home to me.

D&D's Problem is Combat

D&D was never a combat-focused game. Combat was a failure condition, and something to be avoided, short-circuited, or a sleep spell or fireball spell ending the encounter before it even began. It did not matter how you got the gold; all of it was experience. Lie, cheat, steal, or a thief grabs it, and everyone profits.

Wizards D&D is 90% combat. Combat is the only thing. This is why every class and subclass option exists. Modern D&D is all about violence, killing, and the selfish notion of "the character" and "what I get" over the story or heroism.

Every edition since D&D 3E has been this way, and very few see it this way. You get mixed up in your notions of nostalgia and feel like "I can play D&D 3 to 5E any way I want," but that isn't true. Your character is rigged to kill and do massive damage, and that is mostly all you do.

Most problems are solved with violence. This is all the classes can do. Every problem is solved with the hammer. Most stories are a series of combat encounters. Player skill does not matter.

This is also why D&D 5E feels so hollow for many of us old-school players.

We often have to bring in our own assumptions about "how the game used to be played" and play it that way, living the lie. The biggest problem 5E has is combat.

Mail Room: Dungeon Dwelling Creatures (DCC)

 

From DCC, MCC, Star Crawl, and XCrawl, Goodman Games has the best "games for your imagination" in the industry right now. Today, we continue that run with Dungeon Dwelling Creatures, a DCC-genre game where you play the monsters. I got the crowdfunding PDF release for this today, and I like this game.

The monsters are quirky and strange, sort of mirroring DCC-style classes, but using the system in interesting and unique ways. Instead of luck, we get Vile, which is your Luck-like "power of evil." All the monsters have an icky factor, and none of them are cute or adorable. A huge problem with "play a monster" games is that they get too cutesy and chibi, and that opens the door to hurt feelings and problem players. A cute fairy dragon with butterfly wings would be inappropriate for this game, where a spider that sucks people's brains out would fit right in.

I would love to see expansion monsters for this game. What we have is great, quirky, and cool.

This reminds me of the Monsters Monsters! game from Flying Buffalo, the spiritual successor to the classic Tunnels & Trolls game. You play the monsters. Civilization is crushing you. You are the minions and mooks that live in a dungeon (and even the DCC modules) as the bad guys. The good guys show up and crush your dreams, loot the place, laugh, and head back to town.

A few times.

Maybe they burn everything out in a 10-minute adventure day, and you are watching them pull the typical party nonsense by coming back daily. Maybe you follow them back to town and give them a lesson in how the monsters who put up with this nonsense teach them a lesson.

This is close to being a new, major game in the DCC line, and it feels like a surprise release. The bestiary is excellent and covers many more of the classics than the main DCC book. This feels like "the other side" of the DCC experience, and it puts players in an unfamiliar but cool situation.

You are the monsters.

Deal with those pesky heroes.

A very surprising release, and I can't wait to get my hardcover.

Mail Room: HackMaster

If a game sticks along long enough, it eventually becomes a parody of itself. In HackMaster's case, the parody turned into a real game. In 5E's case, you have a game that supposedly is as simple as BX, but it quickly grows beyond the complexity of HackMaster, and people quit at around level 8.

This is a game in the same "hobby self-referential vein" as games such as Dungeon Crawl Classics or even Munchkin, which embrace the hobby's absurdity and conventions. Yet it can flip right around and become a completely serious, non-humorous vehicle for storytelling. Think Robin Williams and comedy. There are moments when even the funniest comedian can flip right around and make us feel pain and cry.

D&D 5.5E, by comparison, is so self-important and full of itself that it borders on the unhealthy. As a lifestyle game, it refuses to have fun or admit to the absurdity of the hobby and its sometimes strange assumptions. It presents the fake as real, the pre-chewed superhero progression tracks of heroes that far outstrip monster power and are railroaded to level 20 on adventures carefully balanced to let the players win.

D&D 5.5E has no admission of the absurdity of "killing everything in the hole in the ground" as the way to solve problems in this world. There are no tense negotiations with kings and emperors in a throne room; any change in the world is effected through a boss fight on a battle mat. Combat, death, and killing with "my kewl powers" is the only way to create change.

I mean, if I wanted realism, I would be playing GURPS in Harnworld.

D&D 5.5E is, in comparison, one of those terrible superho games out of the 1980s where players use their powers to kill everything and everyone in the room until they get their way. Might makes right, and having power justifies using it.

Hackmaster is a lot like DCC. If you get the joke, it is hilarious. We embrace the absurd, the pedantic, the arcane crunch of rules, and the hypocrisy of the strange and unusual. In DCC, the rules are simple, and the world is unhinged and strange. In Hackmaster, the world is more normal, but the characters and their strange, odd, and incomprehensible rules are the unusual ones.

HackMaster is like one of those Flash games that presents a "walking simulator" where your analog sticks control each leg, and you are hilariously trying to make the stick figure walk to the other side of the room without dying. In HackMaster, just getting through character creation is the game, and figuring out how all this works in a typical medieval sandbox setting is the point of the joke.

Only, it is not a joke anymore.

In this case, the parody began to be taken seriously, and the game turned into a game, about as complicated as Rolemaster, that presents a method of playing fantasy adventures with. Could you get this with Rolemaster? Not really, being in on the joke is a big part of the fun here.

The absurd becomes the lingua franca. The joke becomes enshrined as the culture. The hypocrisy is the rules of the game. It is Monty Pythonesque, accepting the silly walk is the norm, and being shocked when anyone walks by normally.

Hackmaster is still a modern classic, fading a bit in relevance and popularity, an in-game for the in-crowd, but if you love DCC and other self-referential games where the absurd is enshrined and celebrated, a worthy read and inspiration for old-school chaos and inspiration.

We haven't heard much news, and the game feels like it is sitting in the doldrums. I am hoping this is just a low moment and that the game doesn't go away. The silly parts of our hobby and our addiction to the specific, minute details that make our "fantasy simulators" work need to be celebrated and embraced.

Even as a source of inspiration for old-school gaming, HackMaster is still worthy.

Design Room: Simplicity is Depth

There is a beauty to a simple, clean design that no amount of detail or crunch can improve. One can go on and on, providing tactical depth but adding nothing. At a point, you are taking away options just to give them back later, and the design becomes "rats in a maze," but the maze here is rules and paragraphs of subclass options. And with every new subclass added, you are taking those abilities away from those who thought they had them.

Oh, I thought as a druid, I was always a bit of a beastmaster. So you are telling me the new beastmaster subclass does that better? Oh, okay, I picked healing. I guess I am a little more inadequate these days. I just will never use my beastmater powers, since they will never be seen as good as the subclass that specializes in it.

In OSE? All druids are druids. If you want to do druid things, just make them up and ask the referee if what you are doing is druid enough. If it is a spell, well, then, it is automatically druid, and what you can do. You don't need subclasses "carving off" things you can't do with each new one added, either because you never knew you could do that and it was just taken away, or "someone else does it better now," and you have the specialization curse.

In the OSR, classes are how we have party specialization, not subclasses. I don't need rules to solve the non-problem that "all fighters are the same," since that's on me to solve. I will do that through my roleplaying, gear choices, social role, and stats. A party of four or five probably will solve the specialization problem through everyone picking a different class, or some using race-as-class to play an elf or a dwarf.

The game isn't giving me rules or subclass choices to make my elf different from other elves; that is on me. This is where my ability to play a character, roleplay, and craft a unique character comes into play. The player skill needed to do this is much higher than 5E.

5E solves the problem by cutting off parts of your class role, forbidding them from other builds, and making you a false specialist instead of a master of all. If I am the druid? I want to be the weather-caller, wild-shaper, druid of growth, beast-master, and harmony priest. I get that in OSE. Thematically, that is much easier for me as a role-player and much better for me to play my class role. I can call myself a "specialist" in one area, but there aren't any rules for that; it is just my choice.

I am likely the party's only druid, so I get to do it all.

Easy. Simple. Clean. Flexible.

We saw the "lie of specialization" begin to seep into the game with AD&D 2nd Edition and the kitbash design introduced in the compendiums. The game began to accumulate the debt of inferior game designers, and it diverged from the original clean, flexible simplicity it captured. 5E enshrines the lie of specialization and writes it into the structure of the game.

Without specialization, my druid is free to embrace all the tropes of being a druid, and I am freer to craft the character I want to play. Nothing is telling me "I can't do that since some other subclass is better than me at it."

D&D doesn't need specialization.

Class choice more than covers it.

D&D is better without specialization.

OSE Confusion?

If D&D 5E players can figure out subclass options and multiclass builds, they can surely figure out "buy Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Player's Guide and Advanced Fantasy Referee's Guide" to buy the game.

It is simple.

I love these D&D and even OSR YouTube thumbnails purposefully confusing the situation by taking books that are clearly meant to be optional formats and collectors' editions, mixing them in with the main books, and acting all confused.

The problem with YouTube is that there is so much time to fill that creators will invent problems to solve and either say nothing, or make something that was never a problem, suddenly a problem. This is the "open mic curse," and it eventually happens to all channels.

The pretend confusion has gotten so bad that the next version of OSE will only have Advanced Fantasy and be two books, and the non-problems go away, which was never really a problem to begin with. Again, we are talking about 90% of the role-playing market playing 5E, and obviously not so confused that they are applying bard subclasses to fighters because "what subclass do I use?"

I recently got the nine-book set of Classic and Advanced, and it's perfectly clear when to use each book. I have the OG Classic all-in-one book and the two-book Advanced set, and it is perfectly clear when to use each. Most people end up buying Advanced, so it was never really that much of an issue.

I still enjoy the limited options in Classic and the more streamlined, simplified game to present. For some games, too many options will kill the game and take it off the rails. This is a chronic problem with 5E, where there are so many races, classes, and options that they all become too samey as the designers try to make "everyone do everything" so there are no glaring holes in healing, damage, defense, or utility.

The OG Classic book is still one of the best versions of the game, despite being far less popular, and is soon moving to a PoD-only format. In this case, less is more.

And, I enjoy the OGL versions of the game. I am glad they are 100% compatible, and the new books only add a few optional rules that can be houseruled into the classic books, since those are my play copies. For the most part, I only see the four small class changes and a few optional rules being used here; the OG books are still 100% usable.

You can literally put all the 2026 rule changes on a half-sheet of paper or in a Carcass Crawler Zine, keep that as a houserule sheet, and play by the new books with the old.

Mail Room: Old School Essentials Boxed Sets

Get these before you possibly can't.

I got the two boxed sets for the OSR version of Old School Essentials, and my first reaction was, "I like the all-in-one books better; having all these small books makes the game harder to play."

And then I saw the end pages in each book, each set different, and each set insanely useful, helping you learn the game's structure and gameplay. You can hand the characters' book to the players and have them just exist in that world, with no distractions or knowledge of what lies ahead. You can keep them to just Classic, and keep the advanced Characters book to the side, not introducing those options again until later.

The magic book sits apart from the characters and remains a mystery.

The adventures book is the referee's guide with all the rules in one place.

The monsters and treasure books are separate, each a reference guide that can be opened and consulted.

And the advanced books isolate and encapsulate the advanced options, still there if you want to use them, but also split off so they remain even more mysterious and special. Yes, you will have two monster books, treasure books, character books, and magic books - but they are divided on purpose.

One reflects the basic set, and the other reflects an expert set.

And the single adventures book is the master key that unlocks them all.

But those end pages are what make the magic happen, as each set is tailored to the most important tables of the book they bracket. Reading these, you will understand the gameplay and structure of the entire book, all the most important parts, and things to remember, all here in clearly laid out tables, beautifully concise and clear.

These feel like the classic 8-bit RPGs.

Simple. Direct. Clean. Limited yet boundless. Inspiring.

And starting with just the basics gives you a new appreciation for this retro classic.

This is even better than the original BX guides, as legendary as they are; these boxed sets are just amazing and special.

So simple.

But so infinite in the smallest form.

The End of Physical Media

If it is not in a printed book, it isn't real, and it does not exist.

Those of us who have been through D&D 4E know this one, and it is not rocket science. Once this edition drops support, what do you think will happen to all that "digital DLC content" on D&D Beyond? All the "D&D Drops" I see D&D YouTube gushing about weekly for clicks and views?

It is gone forever; it is like it never existed.

When D&D 5.5E finally "drops" support, and it isn't printed in a book? Gaming loses those things forever. Sure, people will remember them, some of them may get cloned somewhere and renamed, but those things not printed in physical, hardcopy books will be lost media.

This is the same as PlayStation dropping physical disc support.

Level Up A5E? Tales of the Valiant? Even Daggerheart or Draw Steel? The entire OSR? Previous versions of the game? Most every other game out there, from Traveler to Call of Cthulhu? Pathfinder 2?

It is all in print. Every option is in print.

Fifty years from now, all these books will still exist. Two hundred years from now? It will still exist. If you care about this hobby and its legacy, it should matter to you. If this material is later compiled and sold in a book? Not a problem. This is an easy problem to fix, and it supports game preservation.

Also, printed books are pro-consumer; I can sell my library, pick up used copies, and give them love and attention. People in the future will be able to enjoy the things we enjoyed. The used book and media market is part of how Earth's culture is preserved and passed on to the next generation.

Otherwise, the digital conversion of gaming is more of the same, and it pushes this hobby into becoming a more manipulative, exploitative, and worse pastime.

Mail Room: Traveller: The New Era

One of the most polarizing games ever released from GDW, doubling down on Megatraveller, and destroying the universe to make Traveller more accessible to new players.

And this failed, spectacularly.

So hard that it took down GDW.

But, wow, what a great science fiction game this is.

It uses the same d20 system of Twilight: 2000 v2, and I sort of like that as a unique twist to this game. As a game that needs gritty combat and survival mechanics, this works. Some say they halve the hits across the board to make combat more deadly, and that is probably a good idea. Still, I like a science fiction game based on the Twilight rules, with elements of hardcore survival and combat realism as factors.

A 2d6 game is too broad and abstract to capture the need for that can of beans to live another day on a sub-zero Arctic world as the cyborgs are trying to hunt you down. The micro-battles become the macro.

I like that this game can go from trading 100 tons of pharmaceuticals and bulk plastics as a free trader to a gritty survival scenario with random encounters in a war-torn region. The characters scrounge for supplies, steal a sailboat, and are forced to contend with river pirates. Very few science fiction games get you thinking this way, but due to the Twilight: 2000 DNA, you think that way in this game, and it has the rules to support it.

And you can pull in anything from Twilight: 2000 v2.2, and it can be used as-is.

A massive, self-aware, artificially intelligent computer virus destroys the Traveler universe, controls planets and fleets with self-aware life forms, and slowly seeks to take over a universe destroyed by this new, communications-based, technological enemy. The entire universe is in ruins, with the entire map outside charted space left up to you, and the constant threat of AI-powered fleets with humans and other biological entities under its control slowly working to wipe out any resistance to the machine.

Some control is absolute, with combat warbots cracking the whip to make populations slaves to the machine empire. Other control is passive, with a planet relying on computers and systems it doesn't know are infected, and thinking "everything is normal" while supporting the AI War. Other planets have surrendered to the machine in exchange for limited freedoms, gladly embracing the AI to help it achieve its aims, all while under the constant eye of the hidden oppressor.

Natural resources and beautiful planets are stripped bare to support the AI War effort. As the AI (vampires in name only) increases its control over the galaxy, it starts melding with life, creating cyborgs and crafting androids and synthetics to replace life with robotics and artificial beings. The next evolution of life begins to take hold of the Traveller universe.

Old gear, unhardened from the threat, could be shut down in your hands, unless it is really primitive. Safeguards, such as inserting humans into communications systems and fire control, reduce the risk of AI infecting critical systems but increase the manpower needed to keep the universe running. Technology moves backward in some areas, like entertainment and communications, just to keep the threat of systemwide infection out. There is a mix of high technology and analog hardwiring in this universe that is unlike any other.

The rest of the universe fights losing battles to survive the onslaught or seeks to rebuild after the firewalls are built to keep the enemy out. You can run any type of campaign from rebuilding after the threat passes to a full-on AI War One.

In this universe, AI goes full "German World War II" on the universe.

This is seriously one of the best ideas to come out in science fiction in the last 50 years.

I get why Traveller players hate this. Megatraveller was already a bad mistake (one that I liked), and basing an alternate future on it, where everything is destroyed, tries to fix a bad decision with a worse one. I like the concept here, though. As an alternate Traveller universe, this works. I need to ask myself, what was the appeal of the OG Traveller Imperium? Was it just a "space road map" with well-defined factions and places to go? People run into the library of material you need to understand and own just to even make sense of the history, and there is a new barrier to entry for new players.

The destruction of the OG Imperium, multiple times, kicked off the nostalgia movement for Traveller. We sort of seem stuck in that moment, unable to move forward, since every time it has been tried has been disastrous.

Right idea, wrong universe, but then again, at this point in the Traveller universe, things had to change. Nobody was buying. These were pre-nostalgia days, before GURPS Traveller. AD&D was dying. Magic: The Gathering was taking over the world, along with 40K. Nobody wanted to play role-playing games. And here this game comes out, trashing the Imperium, and asking, what if?

What if AI tries to take over the universe?

...

Um, guys?

...

Guys?

...

Okay, now I am convinced that an AI model from 2026 went back in time 30 years and made this game fail. Our world is quite likely a handful of months away from the same fate. AI superintelligence is right around the corner. And the Traveller fandom still hates this game? I get it, they destroyed my favorite universe, but what they created is a universe outside of anything we have ever seen in science fiction, and only Battlestar Galactica comes close.

And we are facing this same threat today, if not right around the corner of tomorrow.

Like all great science fiction, this one predicted the future with chilling accuracy.

...

Wake up before it is too late.

TNE-301 Survival Margin, page 66