Latest shiny links from a week on the web. For even more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request. Dice Exploder shares Transcript: Thri-Kreen (Dark Sun) with Zedeck Siew Throne of Salt writes Power Word Kill is a first-level spell Nordic Larp shares Steering for Survival Roseline gives us Decoding skills in TTRPGs with the 5 Node Interface Model Prismatic Wasteland…

198? Clockwize Platform: Amstrad CPC A short entry for an early Tennis game that was in development at Clockwize for the Amstrad CPC, and preserved thanks to Dean Hickingbottom. Unfortunately, it didn’t get very far at all – but we have a very early glimpse for you to take a look at. The prototype just has a simple scrolling tennis court, with two players either end – the first of which can be moved around, but you cannot really hit the ball or anything, but you can make it move by pressing…

Question: Is chess the greatest board game ever? Answer: Yes, yes it is. :-) A little over a year ago I posted scans of an old 1980s chess program, called Sargon III, to my Commodore 64 web site. Reading through that manual again got me thinking about my all-time favorite game. I learned to play chess when I was pretty young (< 10, I think?) because I was so fascinated by the chess pieces and how they moved on the board. My mother taught me how to play, and we enjoyed many rounds of the…

After running up 1000+ hours on PC alone it almost seems rude to not write a proper article on Larian’s generational masterpiece (marital mishaps aside), even though there must already be a billion articles out there singing its praises. You know, I thought I was too old for this. Too… “mature”. Too observant and aware. Intelligent, even. And by “this” I mean “For a game to make me feel like I’m a teenager re-experiencing my first crush.”. I shouldn’t be this emotional over a game, and I…

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! The eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master haven't changed for me over the past eight years and I've used them hundreds of times to prep my games with several different systems. What I do in each step has changed, however. Often I expanded each step and even moved some steps around to better fit my prep, my materials, and the games I run. One big change was moving the Strong Start into my Scenes step. The strong start is still a separate step –…

Shout out to the thieves who attempted to use my Amex number to buy $300 of golf gear from TaylorMade. Your first mistake was buying golf gear. Amex was like: “This guy has never bought anything golf related in his LIFE” and declined it with prejudice But also to buy it under my email address, in my best friend’s name? Now that’s just goofy

Ready for another Universal Monsters themed Hot Wheels car? Today I'm checking out the last of the cars from this series that I'll probably be reviewing this year: The Bride of Frankenstein's '40 Ford. This is a very classy coupe and it looks perfect for the Bride to cruise around in. Likely on a moonlit night without any lightning, though, as the roof is down on this one. Ready to check out the classiest car in this series? Then join me after the break...The Facts:Length: 3 inchesNon-Scalper…

Paladins of the West Kingdom is a title from Garphill Games. They make many good heavy strategy games, and they have a certain style to their games, both in art direction and in gameplay. In Paladins of the West Kingdom, you need to protect your medieval city from foreign attacks. You need to build walls, defeat attackers, maybe convert them. The stars of the show are the

The past three Saturdays I have run a fantasy adventure game for five rambunctious kids, ages 9 to 11, one of whom is my son (aka, the Ringleader). Now I hear there is a player advice blogwagon, and I took over this ongoing 5e game with three basic ground rules for my young players:Be kind to all.Try not to talk over each other, or me. Share the spotlight.To which was quickly added a fourth rule (after Someone (hereafter, the Grandstander) decided to argue with me over the price of a room in…

Here's a talk I gave this weekend at Roguelike Celebration. Mazes: Are We Lost Yet? It's basically half an hour of me going off on cool mazes. The talk in text form The slides, in the big layout I used for the talk. (Not actually useful for browsing, but people laughed.) The video is not yet posted; I will update when it's available.

The Halloween one-shots continued with a very different PLANET MOTHERFUCKER game that was re-flavored to feel more like a grimdark fantasy than the usual psychotronic trash culture apocalypse. The connections to previous one-shots in this series continued as well; this time we were playing through the final chapters of Gary Brown's (teenage survivor of a plane crash in the first session, genre author using his fiction to spread the madness of Shub-Niggurath in the second) final novel.As you…

Mike Lacher created a hilarious little masterpiece.

A little over two weeks ago, I announced my roguelike deckbuilder Now You’re Cooking!. As promised, here’s my postmortem on the announce.Read more...

To celebrate the spookiest month of this year, it seemed like a good idea to take on the Prime Evils of Sanctuary. It’s been more than five years since I did a few Mephisto runs together with friends. Does this game still hold up, more than 25 years later after its initial release? Even the fresh lick of paint called Resurrected is five years old now. I don’t have a modern Windows machine, and unfortunately, Blizzard decided with the remaster to skip macOS, leaving me with the Switch version to…

A sequel to Join me in just prepping what's fun I have a Stonetop game coming up in a couple hours. I feel like I should prep, but I don't want to. Why? Is it because what I say won't be interesting enough? Stonetop itself says one of the reasons to prep is to "shore up your weaknesses" (Book 1, p. 204); this implies your GMing has weaknesses! In addition, you can't (definitionally) know what prep is needed in advance. That's impossible, assuming you allow your players to make decisions and…

Book 37 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – carrying on through the rest of the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. This book blog post comes soon after the previous one because I had already read the next Dungeon Crawler Carl book but opted to read something else so that my blog isn’t just 100% Dungeon Crawler Carl! This post is about the 7th book in the series, This Inevitable Ruin…

# Doom on a DVD player </div> This is the written version of the talk above. Same story, with more detail: the real bytes off the disc, the measurements, and a couple of figures you can poke at. Watch, read, or both. I have a cheap portable DVD player, a JVC XV-PY1000A that cost me about $75. It's a top-loader, so I propped the lid open and you can watch the disc spin. Later that came in handy, when we needed to film the laser. And it plays Doom: the first level, E1M1, the Hangar. You pick a…

A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign. This issue includes sessions 122, 123, 124, and 125. Adventurers recover the Golden Gavel of Justice and satisfy Poseidon. You can download the issue here. Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 16: #Zine Subscribe to get the latest post in your inbox. No spam. rootringPrev · Random · Directory · Next

[Sports journalist Charley Rosen passed away last year at age 84. He left behind plenty of magazine articles about the NBA past, including this one published in the January/February 2000 issue of Hangtimes. Rosen asks the simple question: Do former players make better coaches? Rosen never really answers the question, but he broaches many of the myriad issues worth parsing to answer the question. That makes his article historically interesting, and it remains topical today as retired players…

Occasionally in the Prismatic Wasteland discord we make an impromptu d100 list. It always gives me a smile. Here are the folks involved in this one: Pool Time With Swim Allen, d4 Caltrops, Patchwork Paladin, Rise Up Comus, Brackish Draught, Murkdice, d4hpmagicuser, Sparky Bee Special mention goes to Hodag, the OSR's hardest-working illustrator. Thanks guys! In the depths of the catacomb stands a strange machine: a heavy cabinet of metal, painted in bright colours. A light blinks above a small…

This is for Valeria who asked about hirelings and got me to spend most of the day writing this. Love. I love hirelings. They're one of my favorite parts of old dungeon games. Yet I feel like some people have trouble wrapping their heads around them, thinking they're either too complicated or not worth the money. Let's talk about that. I'm just going to explain how I handle them, which may or may not work with some bespoke rulesets that love to make things complicated by throwing lots of numbers…

Shortly before Enter the Dragonfly exited its tumultuous development, Universal started making plans for another studio to develop the next main Spyro game. They ended up going with Eurocom, a much more experienced developer with plenty of work on licensed projects, and it would eventually release after a relatively healthy production as Spyro: A Hero’s ...Spyro: A Hero’s Tail was first posted on October 18, 2026 at 8:21 am.©2017-2025 "Hardcore Gaming 101". Use of this feed is for personal…

Since my recent return to gaming, I've picked up a few games that I've been enjoying. Dave the DiverI would say that this was the game that started my rollback into gaming. The concept is straightforward: You're Dave. You become associated with the entrepreneurial Cobra to begin a sushi bar by the beach. During the day, you dive and catch—or try to catch—a wide array of fish, from the humble Blue Tang to mighty Hammerheads, Barracudas, and more. What I enjoyed about the game was managing the…

The Treamcast was an unofficial Dreamcast mod made by Hong Kong company XingHong Electronic Co. Ltd featuring a fold-down LCD display (like that PS1 add-on), region-free playback, the ability to play CD-Rs, and compatibility with Dreamcast controllers and games. It never got official status from SEGA but remained something of a cult classic until the mid-2000s.

While the days of optical media are somewhat behind us, it’s amazing that through a combination of luck, generosity and diligence that I can still make new discoveries and experience using different sorts of rare media. This post looks at a now-defunct company, King Disc Technology Corp. (KDT), their 8x DVD-Rs with KDTVVV media ID. Aside from the uncommon MID which is not universally supported amongst recorders (and which I have not previously seen), KDT also had a surprising strategy to sell…

Hello again! We're back, and yet another fortnight has passed without me losing the last shreds of my sanity while trying to distinguish between the shoddily assembled AI rubbish piling up in every corner of this little hobby and the good stuff that I delight in sharing with you all. Check back in two weeks' time for another exciting update! Oh, right: There's still a newsletter to do. Well despite being weighed down by said winnowing process, I've cobbled together some cool stuff for you,…

We never leave out our four legged friends here at Action Figure Barbecue! While our dog, Zoey, has volunteered to write special reviews on toys over the past few years for 31 Days of Toy Terror (she enjoyed all of the kind remarks and praise she got), this year we've decided to give Krypto a turn. We adopted Krypto in August of 2025 and he has made himself right at home. He's a very mellow, pleasant little guy with a very serious stare. Ready to read a (dog) toy review written by our poodle/…

At time of writing these are games that my daughter and I play or have played. We only have Apple Arcade and a PS5 controller, so there are many missing titles that others would be very keen to include. We might look into ways to get PC gaming on a Mac, or go ahead and buy a switch. But for now here are our favorite titles. Cooking Mama: Cuisine! Gaming skill development. PlatformsiPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV GenreCooking Age4+ DeveloperOffice Create Donut County Reading! PlatformsiOS, Mac,…