There Is More Here

I keep hoping A5E is the 5E I can still live in.

Not the brand, not the argument about who owns the shape of the game. The nights. I have sat through too many of those 5E evenings where the fighter is holding a turn and watching the spell list do the interesting work, and everybody knows it, and we still call it a party. The woods are a skill check you talk past so you can get to the room that was balanced. You write a personality in the margin, and the math never looks at it again. Short rest, next slot, next level. Then the page is blank, and you are supposed to care about a new subclass that arrived in a book you did not ask for.

A5E is the first time in a while the jobs felt like jobs again. Exertion and traditions give a martial character something to spend. I remember the first session I ran it, and the fighter was actually deciding things, not waiting for the wizard to be done. Exploration has parts. You can lose the afternoon on the way to the door. Weather, a hunt, a stretch of road that costs hit points before anyone draws. That used to be the part of the hobby I liked before everything became an encounter budget.

Even sleep is not free. A long rest wants a haven. Somewhere you can eat and sleep without a reasonable chance the night tries to kill you. An inn will do. A camp where somebody has to stay awake on watch usually will not. A ranger who knows how to knock together a small shelter in the trees can make one out there. A few spells and class features do the same. You can lie down in the open and get some of it back, but the worst fatigue and strife hang on until you make it somewhere that counts and you have supplies to eat. I have had 5E tables treat eight hours on a dungeon floor like a reset button. The journey keeps a receipt in A5E, and in other versions of 5E, resting feels like MMO hit-point regeneration.

I am sick of the MMO-isms in 5E. Somebody wash the bad taste out of my mouth.

Destiny is the piece I did not know I was missing. It points the character at something that will not wrap in three sessions. D&D and ToV let you say you want revenge, a crown, or to go home, and then the sheet treats that as flavor. Here the long hook sits next to the numbers. I have had characters in other 5Es who were very well built, and I could not have told you, two months later, what they were walking toward. That started to bother me more than the math arguments.

Multiclassing is usually a cheat or a lecture. You either stack the broken pair, or you sit there explaining why the table is not doing that. Synergy feats treat the mix as a build, which is a small thing until you have spent years policing 5E combinations and you are tired of being the hall monitor. Rare spells scratch a different itch. You hunt them. They are not the same list everybody already knows from the basic book, the one you have seen on every sheet since 2014.

That's not what a clone is for. A clone reprints the shape and settles a few arguments so you can keep your old adventures. I already have that. What I wanted was the language of 5E with a longer memory than the next game session. You do not come all the way back from the woods until you have a haven, whether that is a room in town or a shelter somebody knew how to raise before dark.

I do not know if that saves 5E for me. I know it is the version I pull when I still want that language in my mouth and I want the night to be about more than a room that was pointed at the party’s level. A tradition. A road that costs you. Sleep that means more if you earned the place you are sleeping. A destiny that keeps walking after the short rest. A reason to mix classes without feeling dirty. A spell I had to find instead of picking off a menu. I am running that and seeing if the hope holds, which is as honest as I can get about it right now.

Mail Room: Gate Pass Gazetteer 2025 (A5E)

Level Up A5E is the last 5E version I have on my display shelves.

The annual showed up in the mail, and I had to find a gap on the A5E shelf for it. There is a gap. That is part of why the shelf is still there.

Level Up is the last 5E I keep on display. Not the last 5E I own. The last one that gets to sit with the games I actually look at when I walk past. Gate Pass Gazetteer 2025 goes up with the official books, the ones written for this framework, the other yearly bricks. Everything else that used to lean on “it’s compatible” is in a closet. I stopped supporting that pile. It was too much. You can feel a game go sloppy when the characters feel like they come from different universes and the books get lost in a crowd.

This was the first 5E that worked for me in a way that still felt like a challenge. The numbers sat still. Hits meant something. Dying is not a coffee break. They kept bits from 3rd and 4th that I liked, and they left the danger in. They rewrote the SRD from the ground up so they did not have to live on the OGL, which at the time felt like homework and later felt like the reason the game could stay itself. Fighters had a job. That part still matters when I pull the book.

It is a niche version of 5E. I don’t need this to be a popular game. At this point, it doesn’t matter. Support is thin, and I have stopped feeling that was a problem. What they did print is solid throughout, and there is not so much of it that I need a second set of rules for what belongs on the table. Official sources only, and I have more than a campaign. Exploration that can actually go wrong in the woods. Social classes that do something besides talk while the martial character holds a weapon and waits. Martial classes that spend exertion on a tradition the way a wizard spends slots.

Those jobs are in the books. I do not have to handwave them into existence, or spend more on crowdfunding books to fix a version of 5E that will never be fixed.

The Gazetteer is the right kind of new spine for a shelf like that. A year of the magazine in one hardcover. More heritages, more archetypes, a couple of prestige classes, two combat traditions, challenges, junk items, a pile of monsters. It feeds the same game. It does not ask me to invent a second 5E, so the first one looks supported. I already know what that looks like. It is behind a door.

I am not making a case that A5E should have been bigger. I am looking at a lean official shelf that still covers the night, putting this year’s book in the space I have left, and leaving the closet shut.

The Save You Make...

I still remember the quiet when the referee said save.

Not a death save. That language wasn’t in the room yet. It was just a save, and everyone knew the empty space after it meant needle or gaze or something in a chest that did not care how long you had been walking around in the character. One number. You watched the die, and if it came up wrong, you were already reaching for a fresh sheet instead of a spell slot.

I am not dressing those nights up, and a lot of them were clumsy. The dungeon was the ordinary kind of unfair: too many doors, a pit with no speech attached, a monster that had not been told what level you were, and you brought extra character sheets because a room was allowed to finish someone. Save-or-die was only the blunt version of that. The book was not going to catch you.

Now I open a current-day adventure, and I can feel the courtesy before the first boxed text. The basilisk is still a basilisk; only petrified is a problem with a clock on it, and poison is damage plus a condition you can spend the next ten minutes fixing. The old fear is still sitting in the names, but the write-up has already decided the session should continue. Three failures, a word from across the map, a revival that costs less than the dinner you bought on the way over, and nobody is shoveling dirt on the character sheet.

The modules are built the same way. The numbers have been sliced so the party is supposed to walk out, the rest sits where you would expect to catch your breath, and the boss has enough hit points to feel like work without enough permission to actually end the night. “Balanced so you win” is treated as good manners, and I understand the manners, because nobody drove across town to watch a paladin become a garden decoration in the second room. I still notice that the fear left with the old save.

Video games stopped pretending about this a long time ago. Story mode, the painted line on the floor, a prompt you can skip if your hands are tired. You paid for the ending, so the ending stays available. Tabletop kept the dice and borrowed the courtesy. You still pick up the d20. The dungeon just isn’t supposed to mean it.

I still play this way. I like knowing the next page is waiting. I miss that second before the save, when the adventure module might actually kill your character. Lethal dungeons were not a philosophy. They were just rooms nobody had already sized for a listed level.

These days I look at a monster stat block or room description, and I can already see how the party leaves. That used to not be so certain.

Off the Shelf: Rifts

It was one of those moments when I feared I had lost them all.

A water leak in an adjacent room meant I could not get to my Rifts books, and I feared the worst. So they sat on a shelf while the carpets dried. I was worried about warped paper and ruined books.

All of them were fine. Not one warped page. Not one water-damaged cover. What are these things, indestructible? I have seen people's play copies of Rifts, yellowed pages, all the corners bent, a cover with more creases and bends than California fault lines, and yet still loved and used the day they were bought 30 or more years ago.

When Rifts comes around, people will still be playing Rifts with these same books.

So back in my room, on my premier game shelves, I put the copies right next to my SDC games. I do not care about the MDC thing; that is how we describe standing in front of a cruise missile in this world these days, or staring down the barrel of a tank. We have MDC weapons in this world; get used to it. Bombs, anti-ship missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles, thousand-pound bombs, 30mm anti-tank cannons, and the other big things that go boom are circa 2026 MDC firepower. Even shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets dropped from drones with shaped charges count.

Does Rifts sit as a display game, or do I play it? I get the feeling that this time, I play. It slaps around the D&D multiverse by a good mile, making those worlds look soft and silly. These are true planar terrors, walking tanks that could crush you flat with a cough, or your skin falls off due to their bad breath. Rifts has always been over the top in all the best ways a game could be. The Rifts multiverse is the endgame of all games, including all games, superior to them all, more overpowered than them all, and giving back by making anything magic that stumbles into an MDC creature with MDC power. Even superheroes.

You get MDC! And you get MDC! Here's a six-shooter; even you get MDC!

Powergaming? Books full of OP items? Unbalanced OCCs that could crush some normal human OCC fool who stumbles through a rift from the 1880s? The whole "do we start a bar fight with MDC weapons?" problem. It is all here. Use what you want. Play a small, one- or two-book campaign. Do a one-shot, but it's likely MDC and will end the campaign with a successful hit. Import your favorite characters and kit them out with power armor. Drop your favorite superhero team in and make this world their new home. Everything has a place here. It's all good.

Back in the early 1990s, compared with the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms, Vampire: The Masquerade, BattleTech, Cyberpunk, Dark Sun, a dead Greyhawk, Megatraveller, Twilight:2000, and the other settings of the day, Rifts was better than them all, with maybe Cyberpunk's Night City coming close to the cool factor. D&D and TSR were dying.

People were tired of all the settings we put on pedestals today. I remember the time the "first OSR" died and took TSR with it. Even in fantasy games, we had Palladium, GURPS, Rolemaster, RuneQuest, MERP, and a few others that "did D&D better." AD&D 2nd Edition got heavily sanitized, politically correct, safe for every audience, and nobody cared. The game blew up with splat books. The Vampire subculture started, and continues to this day, with the people angry at VTM 6th. They realize people base their lives around these Kindreds and identities, right? Don't mess with people's goth identities; they are sacred, just like My Chemical Romance is a religious experience.

The hardest part of playing and enjoying Rifts is letting go of other people's negative opinions. In that sense, it is just like GURPS. These games don't deserve the repeated nonsense that people endlessly adopt as false lived experience.

We had an AD&D 2nd Edition game going back in the 1990s, and it was fun, but Rifts was always the one we waited to play. Nothing compared to blowing everything up and laughing about it. You both got to live in utter fear and wield weapons that could level city blocks. The game was pure power fantasy. Did you feel weak with the last character? Ask your referee about playing something overpowered next time for a massive revenge kick. Play an MDC Dragon or Godling if you want. The Coalition will hunt you, but since when did they ever NOT deserve it?

Rifts was awesome and full of character. Any god could drop in, hop off their MDC motorcycle with the nova cannon and missile racks, and offer a mission. If you remember Image Comics and Wildstorm, yeah, that was Rifts. I use my MDC cyber-claws to tear the front of the building off. Roll an attack, give me damage; all right, the building has no front wall, bricks are all over the street, and the bad guys inside are surprised.

Today's games are far too careful and afraid of their own shadows.

Today's players are lost, believing they don't deserve to have it all. A carefully balanced game is good enough for me.

Why aren't you living life?

Why aren't you experiencing something awesome? Another balanced 5E book won't fix your boredom with the game. You will just be complaining about broken this or broken that. Sure, the majority of Rifts is broken, but it still works fine that way.

Why are you so afraid?

If you fear giving characters power, you will run from this game screaming. If you embrace the anime-inspired overpowered attacks and weapons that can slice a hillside in half, you will be right at home here. If all you know in life is carefully balanced D&D 5.5E, I feel sorry for you. That's not true power. Even at level 20, where you are single-turn nova-blasting encounters, that is nothing compared to this. You are still relatively weak on the cosmic scale of things, and your carefully planned alpha attack will bounce off a tank, and your character sheet and identity-gaming avatar will be literal red mist.

And no, this isn't the end-of-edition D&D 5.5E overpowered characters, which are only meant to break the game so everyone begs for D&D 6E to come along and save us from the end-of-edition OP subclass options. They have done this to every edition of D&D they printed; they blow out the edition in a fire sale of OP releases, people "have fun for a little while" but "eventually grow tired of all the powergaming," and then "please release 6E and fix this!" Planned obsolescence means breaking your own game and riding off the YouTube hype to sell the last few books before you replace them all.

We broke the old game; please buy the fixed one.

Is Rifts broken? Mostly. Do I care? No. Is it being so all over the place part of the fun? Sure, why not? I am a roleplayer; I could make a ham sandwich work as a rule system. I can have fun with anything. Part of the challenge is making it all work together. The characters are so cool I don't even care. And the game wasn't intentionally broken to get you to buy the next one. It is a big box of stuff you pick and choose from; most of it works together, some pieces are wildly overpowered, and you learn how to become a better Rifts GM by playing, and not by copying YouTube streaming shows.

Rifts is a game I keep walking away from but can never truly leave.

Rifts will still be here. Just like my books, the game is a survivor.

Just like you deserve to be, too.

Games I Love, Part One

These are games close to my heart, the ones I can dig into and lose myself in. You see my favorites in a few of my blogs, where I drop science daily and let loose a stream of consciousness that few other blogs can unleash. SBRPG is my central home, a jack-of-all-trades blog where anything goes. But a few of my more game-focused blogs go deeper, and that level of consciousness is so rewarding.

GURPS is one, a game I can endlessly dig into and lose myself in. The character design system is the best in gaming, beating the sequined faux-plate mail pants off of 5th Edition any day of the week. Is it retro? Do you need software? Is it deadly and realistic? Is the combat system slow and a bit of a throwback? Yes to all of the above.

Is it so rewarding and deep that I don't even care? GURPS is the end-all, be-all of games. Two books do it all. I do not need thousands of dollars of crowdfunded 5E books selling me slightly altered variants of what I already have. The sourcebooks are some of the best overviews of anything you can imagine ever written.

GURPS was also written in the era of games "beating AD&D at their own game," so it had something to prove. A lot of the games I love today come from this same era and attitude. It is funny how nostalgia and pop culture can't seem to stop kneeling at the altar of nostalgia, and the faux-nostalgia that D&D 5.5E presents as some sort of AAA Gaming Fortnite remake. The OSR worships games I gave up on in the 1980s so I could play these games.

But what if I want to play gritty fantasy or hard science fiction? A realistic western? Ancient Rome? Any historical game? GURPS will go there, and it likely already has sourcebook support. If I want to play in a setting that isn't published anymore, or want better rules for the chassis? GURPS will do all that easily. Do I want to create my own world and develop my own magic systems? GURPS was built for that. I am not forced to take the 5.5E pile of planar stuff, cosplay art, and throwback Vancian magic bolted onto an infinite-cast MMO magic system with video game rest mechanics.

GURPS will let me design my own magic system.

Instead of writing a 14-page backstory, let's design a binder-sized world story with a unique backstory, history, and magic power system. GURPS gives you the tools to DIY. D&D asks you to wait to buy the next book.

Here's another "we gave up AD&D for this" game. Palladium. A game so stuck in the 1980s and 1990s that it brings back the sweet memories of the era. Please never change. I will play in a Ninjas and Superspies game set in the 1980s to a Miami Vice soundtrack forever. No internet and no drones, and cell phones were an oddity the size of a loaf of bread that only worked in a few major cities? Yes, take me back; I got the soundtrack right here.

Palladium Fantasy is another "nah, sorry AD&D, we got better over here" game that answered the armor-damage debate. It came with a fantasy world Wizards of the Coast never repeatedly ruined. The OCCs in this game are unique; they are all specialists, none of them are balanced against each other, and each one feels like "the best in what they do," and that is on purpose.

D&D 5.5E will take a job, such as a chef, and proceed to give them a 1-to-20 rack of combat, utility, healing, crowd control, and adventuring powers to make them a useful party addition to sell you the MMO lie. Palladium will make them a world-class chef and let them die in a dungeon holding a baguette.

Not every job needs to be the same, or have the same level of utility when it comes to killing things. Some have spells with a casting time of days, but nobody else can do this stuff. People call them "trap classes" because new players pick them because they sound cool, then referees throw them into a dungeon (the AD&D mindset on the other side of the screen), and they die. Here's a thought: run Palladium like Palladium, and give those OCCs things they can do. If you want a combat-focused game, pick combat-focused OCCs.

Again, you started to see the lie be crafted in AD&D Second Edition, where they elevated the bard to a full party role. Palladium lives in an era that says, no, some roles will not be artificially inflated to be dungeoning classes. This is MMO design theory: "we have to make any choice a viable one," and the D&D 4E issue of "everything feeling samey" comes up again and again. D&D 5.5E is already starting to feel this way again, but with the added benefit of martials getting the shaft again.

If I play a bard in Palladium, I will be having all sorts of social adventures, and I will never be a door-kicker. That is fine for me, and I can enjoy a game that runs at a different pace. I will never have the raw killing power of a mercenary fighter, nor the defensive nut of a knight, but neither of them will be as good as I am when singing a song and engaging in social hijinks. The game takes on an entirely different character; the OCC creates its own "world inside of a world" it operates in, and while combat works the same, I am not living in a dungeon crawler and pretending to be a social roleplayer.

Every time I play 5E and want to do social roleplaying, my character sheet screams at me to get in the dungeon and stop wasting my time. Palladium fixes that problem by narrowing the focus of OCCs and letting them play in their own sandbox and sphere of influence.

Why not use GURPS? Palladium is faster, uses d20s and 1d100, uses an AC-like AR armor system with "armor hit points", and feels more like an AD&D-style game. One simple core system, the same combat engine, multiple game worlds, TNMT (and back in the day, Robotech) on the side, and you have it all. I get to use all of my dice. I can get a group of AD&D players into Palladium pretty easily since 90% of the concepts are the same or product-improved versions of systems they already know, whereas GURPS will take longer to learn and get used to.

Don't get me started on Rifts. That is another "ultimate game" that I loved. Rifts, GURPS, and Vampire helped kill TSR when Magic: The Gathering sucked the life out of the hobby. Rifts is sort of like Americanized Robotech, and it fills that headspace completely when Robotech went away. We want power armor and weapons that can flatten city blocks, punch through bridge pilings, and few other games (even today) do that as easily as Rifts.

Rifts was the game that your mom bought you if "your mom was cool." This was the 1990s, so it exists in the decade after AD&D died, and brings back a whole other set of memories for me. If you don't understand the games that "killed the original OSR" back in the TSR days, you will never understand the OSR and will instead put it on a pedestal, along with its flaws, which these games directly addressed. Oh, and the end of Stranger Things should have ended with the kids either playing GURPS or Rifts, if they wanted to be historically accurate.

Don't get me started on power armor design systems in other games that require spreadsheets and graphing calculators. Non-starter. Be cool like your mom wants you to be. Play Rifts.

More games in this series are coming. These two were on my mind today.

High Fashion Fantasy Demigods

If a decorative plate pauldron and a purple trench coat count as full plate mail for Armor Class, and the character refuses a metal helm so they can show off a Supercuts fade with undercut and dyed tips, the art is already telling you something important. It is telling you the game does not take physical reality, violence, or consequence very seriously.

And once the pictures send that message, the players at the table will eventually receive it too.

That is the core problem with the current house style in Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E. The art does not depict people who live in a dangerous world. It depicts fashion avatars who happen to be holding weapons. The armor is sculptural and incomplete—single pauldrons, open chests, impractical silhouettes that would fail the first solid hit. The hair is contemporary salon work, carefully styled and colored so the face remains fully visible and marketable. Helmets are treated as optional accessories rather than the most important piece of protective gear a warrior owns. The overall effect is closer to a Fortnite skin or an Overwatch character select screen than to anyone who expects to survive a fight in the mud.

This is not a minor aesthetic preference. Visual language shapes how players understand the fiction. When every illustration prioritizes “cool silhouette under dramatic lighting” over weight, coverage, and wear, the game quietly trains its audience to treat combat as performance rather than risk. The armor does not need to function because the character is never really in danger of being hurt in a permanent way. The face must stay uncovered because the real product being sold is the character’s look, not their survival. Once that logic is baked into the official art, it becomes harder for a table to maintain any sense that the world has teeth.

I reached the point where I could no longer look at the books.

The pages felt like visual noise—too stylized, too glamorous, too divorced from the physical logic that makes fantasy feel solid. So I put them away. That decision was not about nostalgia or gatekeeping. It was about immersion. When the pictures stop supporting the idea that the world is real and dangerous, the game itself starts to feel like a costume party with dice.

I do not play D&D to simulate high-fashion demigods who just stepped off a runway and whose primary goal is leveling up their aura. The current official art pushes exactly that fantasy: characters who look like they were designed for a cosmetics campaign first and a dangerous world second. Everything is polished, stylized, and deliberately incomplete in ways that prioritize visual flash over function. It feels like the game has jumped the shark straight into its Ziggy Stardust glam-rock phase—all glitter, dramatic poses, and carefully curated spectacle.

My own sense of the genre sits closer to Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses. I want the dirt under the fingernails, the frayed edges, beer on the carpet, the sense that these people have been living hard in a world that can actually hurt them. I want armor that looks like it has stopped a blade, faces that show weather and decisions, and clothing that belongs to a time and place rather than a mood board. When the default visual language becomes pure glam, the grounded, slightly ragged energy that made fantasy feel real to me gets crowded out. The books start to feel like they are selling a different game than the one I sat down to play.

The books no longer feel like anything solid. They feel like a window into a fake Wonderland of fantasy identity wish-fulfillment—bright, weightless, and carefully arranged so nothing permanent can touch the characters. When the official art refuses to take the physical dangers of its own world seriously, it becomes harder for me to take the game seriously either.

The pictures are not depicting adventurers. They depict dungeon tourists: people dressed for the aesthetic of danger rather than its reality.

That is the poser problem running through a lot of modern fantasy gaming. The characters are shown in gear and armor that would get them killed in the first hallway of the Tomb of Horrors. Open chests, decorative pauldrons, uncovered heads, flowing coats that would snag on the first trap trigger—all of it prioritizes looking cool in a promotional still over surviving contact with an actual dungeon. The art sells the idea of the adventurer without accepting the costs that used to come with the job. Once that attitude is baked into the visual language, the game starts to feel like costume play with hit points instead of a world that can push back.

As a result, players end up in one of two positions. Either they stop taking the game seriously and lean into the costume-party energy the art encourages, or they try to run a grounded, high-stakes campaign while constantly fighting the visual and tonal signals the books are sending. “I can run a serious game with this” becomes the battle cry. But why should anyone have to fight their own rulebooks just to maintain atmosphere? When the official presentation works against the tone you want, the extra labor falls entirely on the GM and the table.

That is a tax most of us eventually get tired of paying.

Other games already deliver the tonal seriousness and visual consistency I actually want. I do not even have to leave the broader 5E orbit to find them. Shadowdark has done the job cleanly: the art, the presentation, and the rules all point in the same direction. Characters look like they belong in dangerous places. The illustrations carry weight and consequence. Nothing about the book feels like it is trying to sell me a fashion line or an aura. It simply takes the premise of dungeon crawling seriously, and that single decision makes the entire experience more coherent.

When a game’s visual language and its claimed tone are aligned, the table does not have to waste energy correcting the pictures. That alone is worth more than another volume of high-gloss demigod portraiture.

One Book on the Table

I did not feel like sorting the collection today.

That is usually how these weekends start. I walk past the shelves, think about pulling three books “just in case,” and then I am an hour in before anyone has a character. I have been there with 5E. I have been there with DCC, when the zines and modules piled up so high I didn't even have room for the dice. I still like all of that stuff. I just do not always want to negotiate with it on a Sunday.

What I wanted today was one book that would stay out and do the whole job.

I get why people drift toward those one-book games. Dragonslayer was the example I used last year, but it is the same feeling with a lot of the older cores. You can make someone in a few minutes, put them in a place that already has a problem, and if they don't make it, the next one doesn't take the rest of the afternoon. The big libraries are still here. Pathfinder 1e was the last one that really worked as a library for me. The 5E cousins are either in storage, on a drive, or down to the one version I still enjoy sitting with. GURPS never left. Palladium is coming back out in pieces because I missed having it in the room. DCC takes a wall now, and I am fine with that wall because most of it is places to go, not a second Player’s Handbook I have to flip through before we start.

None of that needed a decision today.

Today I left one complete game on the table and used it. Character, fight, magic, implied world, all in the same spine. I did not rebuild anything. I did not compare two versions of the same class. I did not open a VTT because the sheet was being difficult. I made a person, gave them a door, and wrote a few lines when we stopped.

I still buy the rest. I still like the rest. I just do not owe the rest every free afternoon. When a game gets larger than I can use in one sitting, I stop playing it for a while, even if I love it. That is not a review of the hobby. That is just how my table works.

The other books can wait on the shelf. They are not going anywhere.

Game Pitch: Gaslamps & Lessers

Look at the cover. Nobody is wearing a helmet. Nobody is wearing a full set of anything. There is a corset, a top hat, a trench coat that has never met mud, and a sword held like a cigarette. This is not a warband. This is a photoshoot that escaped the studio and demanded hit points.

Newer games have decided that “adventurer” means Victorian cosplay with better lighting. The party is a row of haute-tote Betters who refuse head protection because it would ruin the silhouette. Armor is a fashion faux pas. A breastplate is what the help wears. You are here to be seen descending the club steps, not to be seen taking a morningstar to the temple.

Gaslamps & Lessers is the game those covers already think they are playing. You do start at 1st level. Of course you do. Someone has to stand in the rain. First through nineteenth are the years in trade: dungeons, marching order, people who still own helmets. The club does not take your coat until 20th. That is not the end of the campaign. That is arrival. Level 20 is when your name is in the book. Everything before it is the servants’ entrance — and you are walking it on purpose, in the outfit, daring the world to notice.

The Lessers are everyone who never gets the coat. Provincial knights. Parties that pack rope. Anyone who thinks a +3 weapon is a personality. You will be them for a long time. Then you will send a card.

Optional rule: the Privilege Die

At the start of any encounter, social scene, or declared combat, the player of the highest-level character present rolls 1d20 in the open.

If the result is lower than that character’s level, the scene does not happen. It is resolved offstage, in the party’s favor. Constables, cousins, groundskeepers, or “a man who owes the family a favor” finish it before the tea cools. When even that would be gauche, magic itself kneels. The spell, the curse, the haunted stair — it steps in and resolves the issue so as not to inconvenience them. Reality would rather tidy itself than ask a Better to draw steel.

That player may then talk down to the encounter and, if they wish, to everyone else at the table who still had their miniature in a fighting stance. One remark. Then the next invitation.

If the result is equal to or higher than the character’s level, you actually have to play. No speech. The coat failed. A natural 20 always plays. Even a duke is occasionally forced to look at a thing. Even magic sometimes forgets its manners.

At 1st level, the die almost never saves you. You are the Lesser. At 10th, half the street moves. At 20th, nineteen scenes in twenty never reach the foyer. You do not earn experience for work the household — or the weave — already completed. Privilege is insulation, not practice.

This is why the art dropped the helmet. If the die is working, nothing will hit you in the head. Society is the armor. When society is late, the universe puts on the apron. The trench coat is not protection. It is a statement that protection would be vulgar. Full plate is what you put on the footman you send into the cellar. The Betters stay in the foyer and explain, at length, why this was never going to be their problem.

“Have the groundskeeper put it with the others.”
“We don’t do cellars.”
“If it had been important, it would have written first.”
“The ward can see itself out.”

When the die fails, the lowest-level character at the table goes downstairs. The coat stays on the peg. That is the entire class system. The cover already told you who was going to stay pretty. You just have to survive nineteen levels of looking like that before the world agrees.

Modern design treats 20th level like a victory lap and a second binder of options. Gaslamps & Lessers treats it like a membership card you spend the whole game earning while dressed for the portrait. The dungeon is still under the parish. Early on, you go. Later, you simply stop. The owlbear can wait. Someone in a helmet will take care of it. If not, the magic will.

It knows better than to keep you waiting.

Game Pitch: Grimdark Cozy

The gnomes decided they had enough.

Not enough grain. Not enough tithe. Enough of the story that said the Cozy Lands were a place you lived. Dark magic took the warrens first — not as a thunderclap, but as a ledger that started balancing in blood. They took the Chaos Gods the way a miller takes a better stone: because the old gods paid in seasons and the new ones paid in endings. Black hoods. Black iron. A theology with no harvest festival left in it. They did not conquer the meadows so much as close the book on them.

They rule the Cozy Lands with an iron fist. Every mouse-kin, mole-kin, sparrow-kin, and hedgehog with a sewing-needle spear lives in that shadow. The cottages still look like the picture books. The smoke still smells like bread. That is the joke the gnomes allow. Cute is a costume the parish leaves on the livestock so the livestock keep reporting to market.

You play an animal-kin of your choosing. Fighter is the one who gets better at hitting. Specialist is the skill kit. Magic is a loaded acorn — someone will regret the season it was planted. You are small, armed like a folk tale, and visible. The gnomes are not a class. They are the state. They watch the holes, the fords, the chapel steps, the path that used to be a picnic. A pass for the road. A fine for unlicensed burrowing. Stocks for a word said wrong in the square. Witchcraft charges for anyone who found a ring and was foolish enough to wear it.

The wolves are not a random encounter. They are the forest’s tax collectors, and they do not take coin. When an animal-kin vanishes between the hedge and the burrow, the gnomes write it down as weather. When the gnomes want a lesson, they do not need wolves. They have wood, iron, and a crowd that would rather see a stranger in the stocks than a cousin.

This is not a game about saving the Cozy Lands. The Cozy Lands already lost and kept the paint. You are what still moves underneath the postcard — hungry, armed, and one bad night from the parish deciding you were never people.

The night does not start with a tavern speech. It starts like a crime scene that still has bunting on it.

Thistleford looks like a stitch-sampler. Round doors. Window-boxes. A painted sign of a smiling hare holding a pie. Lanterns the color of butterscotch. If you only saw the square at noon, you would swear the world had kept its promise. Night takes the same square and turns the lanterns into interrogation lamps. The pie on the sign is still there. So are the stocks. Someone small is in them. Dew on the wood. A little coat hangs on the post so it won't get mud on the embroidery. Something else wearing it could be hanging in the town square.

The gnomes do not raise their voices. That is the noir of it. A reeve in a black hood, iron polished like a church shoe, reads from a board as if he were announcing a bake sale. Tithe-cart late. Chapel bell since Tuesday. Volunteer required. Paws small enough for the grate. He smiles when he says, volunteer. The smile is the worst object in the square.

You are already in the picture. Animal-kin in travel cloaks that would be darling in a catalog. A hedgehog’s spear no longer than a knitting needle. A sparrow-kin counting seeds in a matchbox like they were rounds. Across the green, a window still has a paper heart stuck to the glass. Behind it, someone closes the shutter. Cute is what the parish leaves in the frame so the ledger can work in peace.

How the night actually begins is a choice the table makes with their feet, not their backstory.

If you go to the stocks, you get a face and a whisper and a reason that will not survive contact with a gnome court. If you go to the ford, you get the cart: painted mushrooms on the side-boards, chains under the canvas, a smell that is not jam. If you go to the chapel, you get the bell, which is still ringing, and a nave full of tiny pews, and a grate that was built for things the hymnals do not mention. If you do nothing, the square keeps being pretty, and the pretty becomes a witness statement against you by morning.

The wolves stay offstage. You may smell them on the path. The gnomes will still call it weather. The postcard will not include that part.

Noir rule for the referee: never let the cute be flavor. Let it be evidence. The ribbon on the stocks is a clue. The smiling hare on the sign is an alibi. The butterscotch lantern is how they see your hands. Every darling thing in Thistleford is either a lure, a record, or a lid. When the animal-kin pick it up, they leave prints.

You do not get a bestiary page. You get a situation that will not hold still. The gnomes watch from the steps with the patience of people who already know how the story is classified. Compliance is the dark order’s only sacrament. Curiosity is how the parish fills the next set of holes in the wood.

That is the start. Not “you all meet in a burrow.” You all meet in a crime that still thinks it is a village fete. The paint is dry. The bell is not. Someone has to move, and the moment they do, the Cozy Lands remember what the gnomes decided they had enough of.

The cottages were always going to be this sharp. We just agreed not to look at the stocks.

Solo, and Still Surprised

I play Dungeon Crawl Classics solo, and it is an amazing game. It has just enough crunch, table-induced madness, and randomness to make me happy, and the emergent play that randomness creates keeps it from becoming a boring exercise in running something solo, going through the motions, and never being surprised.

That last part is the whole argument. Solo play dies when you already know what the next ten minutes will feel like. You open the binder, push the party down the hall, narrate the obvious success, and mark the box. DCC refuses to let the box stay marked. A Mighty Deed is not a feat paragraph you pre-solved at chargen. A wizard does not fire a known payload. Occupations hand you a weaver and a pair of scissors and call it a character. Luck sits on the sheet like a second Judge. The tables are not garnish. They are how the game talks back.

I do not need the book to be thin for that to work. The core is a fat book. A lot of those pages are results: crits, fumbles, mercurial magic, corruption, disapproval, patrons, the long weird tail of a spell that actually happens. That is a different kind of page than a catalog of who you get to be. I am not flipping six volumes to see whether this subclass interaction still functions. I am rolling to find out what the universe just did to a peasant who was a gong farmer yesterday.

Solo makes that louder. There is no table to perform for and no Judge to paper over a dull room. If the system is only a resolution engine, you will feel yourself acting both parts and get bored. DCC was already halfway to an oracle. The funnel is the cleanest version of the trick. You do not design a protagonist. You generate a village, you walk them into a hole, and the campaign is whoever crawls out. The deaths are plot. The survivors are premise. I do not have to protect a precious concept I spent a Sunday building. The dice already spent that Sunday without me.

A sixteen-peasant funnel looks like bookkeeping. In practice it collapses. You do not need a novel for every name. You need a line: occupation, the one stat that matters, hit points, what they are holding. When the herd thins, the game gets quieter and stranger, which is the opposite of most solo loops, where the sheet only ever gets louder. If the mob is too much on a given night, the culture around the game already knows how to shrink it. The point is not the headcount. The point is that the first level you play is a level you did not choose.

I have two and a half shelves of Dungeon Crawl Classics, and I do not feel shelf-obese. Most of that wood is adventures, megadungeons, and places. When the game puts on a different jacket — XCrawl, Mutant Crawl Classics — it is still one book talking. Some of the games live in zines that riff the main rulebook instead of replacing it. StarCrawl does not ask me to learn a second language. Some of the spines are settings. Some are art books and odd covers. The dice sit in clear boxes because looking at them is part of owning them. That shelf is not a problem I have to solve. It is the hobby, visible.

A hobby shelf is a map. A rules shelf is a filing cabinet. DCC keeps stacking rooms onto one conversation. The book on the table is still the game. The rest is more dungeon, more weather, more Appendix N texture. That is why the physical pile does not argue with the solo night. I am not maintaining a rules stack so the next session can resolve an edge case. I am surrounding an engine that still generates pressure.

It is not a complete solo product out of the box, and pretending otherwise would turn this into a review with a shopping list. Modules assume a Judge who can smell stalling. Spell tables want flipping, or a companion app, or patience. A lone wizard at level two is a different animal than a funnel mob. When the book shrugs I ask a cheap yes or no, I spend luck, I let two stray lines from some dog-eared fantasy paperback color the room. The game does not vanish if I do that. It was built to be interrupted by results.

What DCC thinks a character is: a person the tables have not finished with. Occupation before class. Luck as a resource and a tell. Magic as a negotiation you can lose. A first level that had to be earned by not dying in someone else’s story. That is why playing one of them alone still feels like discovery. The pages describe what the dice just did to you. They do not spend themselves describing you in advance.

I can admire the shelf and then take one book to the table and still be surprised. That is the hobby I actually wanted.

Is There Room for Optimism in the Hobby?

Is there room for optimism in the hobby, or only in parts of it?

Dungeons & Dragons already feels like the long middle of a half-edition. Narrative games have a second center, not a boutique. Shadowdark owns the “this still plays like D&D on a Tuesday” slot. The OSR will keep doing what it does. And yet the hobby feels like a slump if you live where the last decade taught us to look: streams, DungeonTube, and the assumption that the default game would keep handing you a world.

The slump is real. It is also narrower than it sounds.

Two years in

3.5 had five years as the official text and, by year two, the posture of a library. The 2014 rules lasted ten years, which is why 5.5 feels both late and early. Wizards spent two years insisting 2024 was not a new edition, then agreed in 2026 to call it 5.5e anyway.

The Player’s Handbook is two years old this month. That is the date that matters. The name is new. The books are not. Two years in, a half-edition either grows a setting or starts looking like a bridge.

Buy the books, learn the rules, and…?

We were owed a home the year after 2024 shipped. Not another rules appendix. A place.

2025 was not a blank year. February finished the buy-in with a new Monster Manual. July was Dragon Delves: ten dragon one-shots, and the first adventure book written to the 2024 stat blocks. August was Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, which Jeremy Crawford framed as an Eberron-specific Xanathar’s — Artificer update, airships, three sample adventures, and the assumption you still own Rising from the Last War (2019). September was a starter set. November was the closest thing to a setting drop: Heroes of Faerûn and Adventures in Faerûn, subclasses and factions on one side, five regions and a pile of short hooks on the other. Marketing will call those hooks adventures. You will still be writing the campaign.

That is a year of components after a revision sold as a new era. A gazetteer plus character options is not what people meant when they bought the three cores. They meant a place with a campaign attached, and a reason to believe a second book would exist.

The first full adventure that exists because of the new rules is Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, mid-September 2026, starting at 11th level in Thay. Dark Sun and Greyhawk are 2027. Warcraft is November. Star Wars is later. The major worlds are a slide deck.

The announcement is the support

The feeling that Dark Sun or Greyhawk will still be a line after the first books is hope, not a pattern.

Fifth edition trained us to treat a setting hardcover as a complete visit. Spelljammer was three thin books in a slipcase, then silence. Planescape wore the same costume. Dragonlance was an adventure and a minis game. Ravnica, Theros, Strixhaven: one and done. Eberron waited six years for a companion that still is not Rising 2. Greyhawk sat in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide as an appendix until a season could be sold around it.

The 2024 pitch was that settings would no longer be one-shots. Gen Con 2026 is that promise arriving as seasons and Universes Beyond. A better slide than Spelljammer’s box. Not proof of a second year on Athas. The record is: the announcement is the support. The follow-up is a different IP.

The camera cooled first

The other half of the slump is the layer that needed an audience.

The big actual-play shows are still huge. That is not extinction. What faded is the sense that watching other people play is how you participate. Luster is not view count. Conversion from viewer to player got weaker, and a hobby that spent a decade confusing those two things now feels empty when the stream is on, and nobody at the table is mid-campaign in the new rules.

DungeonTube is the cleaner fact. Channels that treated 5E as a content vertical have gone quiet, pivoted off Wizards news, or said the algorithm walked them off the stage. Saturation, burnout, a platform that does not want the same class-guide thumbnail. Not “people stopped playing.” The spectacle economy around the default game is contracting. The tables are a different dataset.

Where the motion is

Daggerheart is not a footnote. The core is a year old, Hope & Fear is on shelves, and there is a multi-year schedule. Call it a rival. It is not a side path.

Shadowdark is not a vibe. It is the game tables picked when they still wanted a dungeon, a torch, and a Tuesday that ends on time. A setting Kickstarter in the millions and a third-party pile measured in four figures: that is a lane with a landlord.

The OSR does not need a weather report. It never needed the camera. A one-book core that can change hats is the opposite of a half-edition waiting on Athas.

The sorting hat

The hobby is not slumping. The default game is slumping, and for once that might be useful.

Optimism is not “D&D will be fine.” Wizards will print the 2027 books. Someone will play Dark Sun. Universes Beyond will sell to the people it is for. That is a company doing company things. It is not 2015, when the new book on the table still felt like a door.

The better question is what still works when the camera is off, and the next setting is a year away. Some games shipped the world in the same object as the rules. They did not wait for a season of survival.

The slump is the library-as-subscription dying. You did not need forty subclass books this time. You needed a year of anticipation after three cores, and then a roadmap. That takes up space in the year, not just the bookcase.

There is room for optimism. It is just not in the middle of 5.5, waiting for the slide to become a place. It is in the games that already are one.

The Myth of D&D is Dead

Not the game.

Not the books. 

Not the streams, the VTT, or the fifty million people who have touched it. The myth - the specific story the hobby told itself about what it meant to sit down, light a torch, and go into the dark.

The myth is dead.

That myth was never “we make a story together.” Every RPG does that. The D&D myth was a crossing. You stepped through a threshold into a place that did not care about your character’s tragic backstory or the campaign’s planned ending. The dungeon (or the wilderness, or the mythic underworld) was indifferent and slightly hostile. Doors slammed. Light ran out. Time cost wandering monsters. A rust monster, a save-or-die, or a 4 hp magic-user meeting the wrong corridor could end the expedition. You came back changed because you might not come back. The gold, the levels, and the stories felt taken from the other side, not awarded. That was the alchemy: heat, pressure, and the chance the vessel cracks.

The official game no longer performs that procedure.

Characters can’t die in the way the myth required.

Fifth Edition and the 2024 revision built a machine that treats death as an exception. Death saves, short rests that refill hit points, abundant healing, cheap resurrection, and encounter math tuned so the party is expected to win turn failure into a narrative beat the table can choose to allow. People still lose characters. That is not the point. The system no longer generates death - or even lasting loss - as a structural feature of play. It is optional, often socially costly, and frequently walked back because the story “needs” these protagonists. When the vessel almost never cracks, the alchemy does not fire. You are no longer crossing into Wonderland. You are looking at yourself in the glass.

Every expansion then adds power creep on top of that safety.

New subclasses, origin feats, revised class features, background bonuses, and later-book options keep raising the floor and the ceiling. The company has never kept the classes in a single book in a stable power band. Later material routinely outshines earlier material. The 2024 books continued the pattern: weaker classes got real buffs, the overall power level rose, and the monster and adventure math was not rebuilt to match. This is not “more interesting choices.” It is inflation. The constraints that once made the otherworld feel real - scarcity, time, the risk of permanent loss - are replaced by more buttons and more ways to succeed. When even the publisher cannot keep its own classes balanced, the last pretense of an indifferent, dangerous place is gone.

Play shifts from adventure to consuming content.

Official adventures become products to be completed rather than places that push back. The dungeon is no longer a threshold. It is a series of balanced encounters and set-piece moments designed to make the party feel like protagonists. You move through a theme-park queue with better merch and a guaranteed exit. The brand sells the memory of danger while delivering reliability and escalation. That is the opposite of the old myth. The old myth needed the possibility that you would not get the treasure, would not get the level, would not get the story you wanted. Content consumption assumes you will.

That is why the original myth is dead inside the official product. The design no longer generates the conditions the myth required: real danger, real scarcity, and an otherworld that can reject you. What remains is a well-marketed power-fantasy loop.

The myth did not vanish. It left the books. It lives in tables that house-rule the inflation and the safety nets away, in OSR and adjacent games that never accepted the “you are the destined heroes” premise, and in the memory of people who remember when a first-level wizard had 1–4 hit points, and the dungeon itself was the antagonist.

The question is no longer whether D&D is popular. It is whether we still want the crossing over into the unknown, or whether we are content to consume the souvenir from the gift shop.

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 D&D 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.