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Good Thinkings
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Film Notes: Halloween with Dr. Seuss - According to a friend, their child (2ish) enjoys *The Monster Overhaul. *They toddle over to the bookshelf, get it down, and flip through it looking at t...
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Film Notes: Halloween with Dr. Seuss - According to a friend, their child (2ish) enjoys *The Monster Overhaul. *They toddle over to the bookshelf, get it down, and flip through it looking at t...
4 hours ago
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Mixing Warriors of the Red Planet (WotRP) with the Domain-level Architecture of ACKS II Rpg - illegal depot for a warriors of the red planet & ACKS II combined game campaign - Integrating Warriors of the Red Planet (WotRP) with the Adventurer Conqueror King System II (ACKS II) domain rules creates a sword-and-planet campaign whe...
11 hours ago -
Pyramid Review – Big Eyes, Small Mouth: Hot Rods & Gun Bunnies - Originally Published June 20th, 2000 This is how you write a supplement. Why? Well, for starters, what makes a good supplement? First off, the book should ...17 hours ago
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THIS IS WHY WE PRAY: So This City Will Stand By The Gods' Will - I saw a Reddit post where a DM tried to figure out how a city in their campaign could exist and feed itself. But in the end, after many hours with Excel ...
1 day ago -
Big Good Guy Monsters Reviewed and Ranked - The D&D Silver Age (the period beginning at the end of the 80s and segueing into the mid-90s) were my formative years as far as the hobby goes. I was rai...1 day ago
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Quick Reviews & Revisions Oct 2026 - *Arcana Unleashed - Gameplay Expansion*Thinner than I would like even at 17 dollars off store price. Subclasses great, spells ok, magic items ok, organi...
1 day ago -
“Earth Not a Globe”: Parallax’s Zetetic Astronomy (1865) - A book more or less responsible for the revival of Flat Earth theories in the modern period.1 day ago
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Answering the 21 questions [In the House of the High King] - Me and my friends wrote 21 questions for referees to answer recently. I answered them for the High King project. *1. Where can I learn new spells? Who i...
2 days ago -
The Mechanism - By Jon PGwion's MistakeOSRLevels 3-5 Cross a mysterious bridge that appeared on the coast and enter a terrifying city of wealth and splendour. This 54 page...2 days ago
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Delete 💀 Delete 💀 Delete 💀 - Feeling like deleting everything. I am tired of art and TTRPG, I am going nowhere with all this. 💀3 days ago
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Near-Future Simulation Radar - *“**By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”* *—* *Benjamin Franklin* I try keeping my internet radar active searching for news about games. I...
3 days ago -
Post-It Dungeon for October TWO !!! - WE'RE DOIN' IT AGAIN!!! This dungeon can be either standalone (in which case there is an area for a potential entrance marked with a large E on the map...
3 days ago -
Etymology Corner: My Elizabethancore Black Metal Band Wrecched Ympes - I was asked on tumblr about where imps came from and ended up going down a neat etymological rabbithole. Turns out that imp itself was originally a horticu...4 days ago
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d100 - Frustrating Fines & Sumptuary Statutes - One is occasionally in need of some ideas for additional ways to help the Player Characters part with some of their hard-earned Treasure. I am a firm bel...
6 days ago -
Mega Informal Review - Been having a stressful time lately. These are things I’ve read or seen lately and have had thoughts about (if short). Just need to exorcise. *Primetime* ...6 days ago
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Ghost of Yotei: Complete(ly mid) Edition - Ghost of Yotei is a game that is less than the sum of its parts. In my review of the game last year, I expressed a sense of profound disappointment ...
1 week ago -
d20 Fishing Table - Roll a d20, rounding down for repeats if the catch is no longer available. 1. Nothing bites 2. Trout 3. Mackerel 4. Carp 5. Old branch 6. Salmon 7...1 week ago
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100 days of B/X (part IV - B15 to B18) - spellcasting - Continued from here. In B15, we’ve reached one of the hardest parts to convert to my minimalist system, which is magic. This happens for several reasons. ...
1 week ago -
[SUPPLEMENT] Gamemaster’s Guidelines Beyond Fomalhaut (NOW AVAILABLE!) - *A Tome of Mastery“Heavy is the head that wears the crown! In role-playing games, the position of the gamemaster carries the most responsibility, as it is...
1 week ago -
Next Stop: Castle Ravenloft - For this year's Halloween game I'm doing something a little different with the original I6: Ravenloft. I've run it many times, and what I like most is ho...
1 week ago -
Where U At, B/X? - This is a meandering TTRPG design post mostly pondering why I haven't been making D&D stuff lately. I just thought this was funny. I don't know. Yeah, so...
1 week ago -
D100+ Border Reiver Eke-Names - Click the button below to get your very own border reiver's eke-name: Eke It Out Show tables Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: h...2 weeks ago
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The Spellbooks of Mydwandr... - Spellcasters in the *Mydwandr* RPG (and its eponymous setting) exploit a natural talent known to few beyond the mysterious elves, shaping the materials o...
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2 weeks ago -
The Spellbooks of Mydwandr... - Spellcasters in the *Mydwandr* RPG (and its eponymous setting) exploit a natural talent known to few beyond the mysterious elves, shaping the materials o...
2 weeks ago
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Summerween Horror Marathon 2026 - For some reason, this year I got into the Halloween spirit extra early. Beginning in early August, my wife and I began watching horror “classics” in the ...2 weeks ago
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Magical Mesopotamiae - Six Strange Rivers cross a great plain, flowing from some mysterious source to the great churning ocean. Settlements cling to the banks of these rivers; ...2 weeks ago
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The Monkey King’s Many Faces - In Kuala Lumpur, in Brickfields, there is a temple called Sree Veera Hanuman, whose vimanam is a green furry tail coiled 41 times into the shape of a tal...2 weeks ago
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Money in Mutants & Wizards - Money and wealth is always an issue in Post-apoc gaming. Mutants & Wizards uses precious metals with the expectation of bartering occurring where that's ...
2 weeks ago -
Polearms & Proust (or, In Search of Lost Biscuits) - A very silly role-playing game about introspective thugs with big pointy sticks. Inspired by this BlueSky post, and written by someone who has never read P...
2 weeks ago -
The Waves Rule Britannia (Some Notes on the UK of Invisible Hands) - *RUN LIKE HELL RUN LIKE HELL RUN LIKE HELL RUN LIKE HELL RUN LIKE HELL RUN LIKE HELL* In the UK, the god who rules is *Flood*, much like the *Economy...3 weeks ago
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Liquidation - *Liquidation *is a creature-capture corpo-crawl for Mothership, published by Spicy Tuna RPG, edited by Chris Airiau, and written by me. Players explore...1 month ago
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Back from the Void: "Where ya been, Gundobad?" - redux! - Well: hello again. It's been a year and a half since my last post, from February 2025. Meanwhile, any reports of my demise have been exaggerated (and hop...
1 month ago -
One Year before the Comms Array - I just realized that it's been almost a month since the one-year anniversary of running Operation Lamplighter. I think this is the longest I've been runnin...
1 month ago -
Vanishing Blogs From The Old Days - There are so many RPG related blogs on every genre and category of RPG. Periodically I discover that another blog is no more when an app on my blog reports...2 months ago
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The Common Store of Monsters - I am slowly grinding my way through the re-writes for Veins of the Earth. As part of the re-write I have re-organised the ‘Pariahs of the Earth’ monsters ...2 months ago
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"Jaquays Your Dungeon" - Another OSR Maxim - Be Cautious of Maxims As I've written before, the "OSR" loved its maxims, short phrases that try to describe shared principles and act as a way of mutual...
2 months ago -
Doing a comprehensive survey of Appendix N - I’ve been chipping away at Appendix N since 2012 (although I’d read a number of Appendix N works prior to that, just not as Appendix N works), and my think...3 months ago
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Dragonlance: Law vs Chaos - Been thinking of Dragonlance again lately. And one thing that strikes me is that the setting works so much better on a classic Moorcockian axis of Law vs...3 months ago
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Who Do You Write For? - It's in the title - when you sit down to write a post, who is it for? I had a conversation with friend of the blog Weird Writer (Roll To Doubt) today an...
4 months ago -
My 2025 in Review - Continuing my annual tradition, here are some of my favorite things from the last year. I think this is the first year where I've had to decide not to shou...
4 months ago -
al-Alam al-Wasat Classes - The classes detailed below represent a series of editorial choices. Some options are unused (or to be precise, sometimes shunted to the "foreign classes"...
4 months ago -
The OD&Dyssey - Fantastic Homeric AdventureConcept A sandbox campaign set in a fictionalized analogue of the Archaic period ( *circa* 800–500 BCE) of ancient Greece, using...
5 months ago -
Sant Jordi 2026 - Portada de la traducción al catalán del juego Year 100 Million BC,adornada con rosas y el texto Sant Jordi 2026 Vuelve a ser Sant Jordi, y el blog cumple u...
6 months ago -
The Norwood Reaper Random Table - If your D&D guy is over 20, it’s already over for him: THE NORWOOD REAPER COMETH To determine how over it is, roll on the Norwood Table at character creati...6 months ago
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Thoughts on Autocrats of Night & AD&D Dungeon Guidelines - My Autocrats of Night campaign, wherein the players were to delve the enemy megadungion and steal a Dragon Orb to break the power of the nasty dragon-ri...7 months ago
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Contextual Collapse - In an otherwise unpromisingly-titled article—“Could the US really release more of its strategic oil reserves?”—the Financial Times points out a surprising ...7 months ago
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Referee Sabotage - It is an old saw that players are bad at executing their plans. Imagine this common scene: the party have some big job that requires planning; perhaps robb...7 months ago
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D6 State of Orc & Goblin Clan Relations - Roll every day, keep if higher, resetting on a 1. 1. Orcs kill Goblins on sight because one looked at the clan chief wrong, Goblins fled into warr...7 months ago
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Mapping the pre D&D Dungeon Adventure From May 25 1972, Part 1 - Earlier (Here) we looked at the oldest dungeon dive preserved in Arneson's write up as found in *Blackmoor Foundations*. Turning now to the second dunge...
8 months ago -
Underkeep: a new game reminiscent of Dungeon master - *Underkeep* is a game which is currently in development, it is reminiscent of the old "Dungeon Master" which many of us used to play on Amiga 500 back i...8 months ago
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The Sacrament of the Minotaur - This is the first of a small series of posts which will be about how I am running Luke Gearing’s *Gradient Descent *in my Mothership home campaign. This ...
8 months ago -
The Reassembulation Will Be Messy - I’m reassembulating wizardthieffighter.com on a different platform, in a different format and style. This reassembulation will be messy. Most links will di...9 months ago
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2025 Gaming Summary and 2026 Plans - I didn't blog at all in 2025 because I was too busy gaming. I was playing in two weekly 5e (2014) campaigns and running a weekly Imperium Maledictum camp...9 months ago
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On a Happy New Year - We are about to experience the most social upheaval since industrialization. What will that look like in sixty years? Sinless is starting it's third yea...
9 months ago -
D&D: Inexpensive Miniatures options - Whether you are new to Dungeons & Dragons or coming back into the hobby after many, many years, you will probably want to add various play aids and acces...
10 months ago -
Postcards from the 2025 BIPOC Game Studies Conference - This collaborative essay brings together seven participants to reflect on their observations and experiences at the 2025 BIPOC Game Studies Conference at T...10 months ago
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Cauldron Con AAR: Day 3 & Final Thoughts - Hello Blogland. The spine-tingling conclusion to my European adventure at Cauldron Con is here!! *DAY 3* I awoke feeling not too worse for wear consideri...
11 months ago -
The Earwight - The sinister little insects known as earwights are thought to have once been earwigs who fed on the decaying flesh of revenants or other matter suffused wi...1 year ago
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A Wraithblade to Bind a Murderer’s Soul - Wraiths are the restless souls of brutal murderers. They cannot find rest in death, and keep on tormenting the living, leaving behind a long trail of pain....1 year ago
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Deep Space & Derelicts: Basic/Xenotech version, an idea for a game - here's a little idea for a game that's been floating around my head for a while. what if early D&D had been based around classic scifi rather than cl...1 year ago
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tricks taught: risk, thought, and the Marxist (un)truth of myth in Sukumaland - *a matched pair of mabindas (Sukuma articulated dance figures) on a performance cord* “*For revolutionary consciousness is subjective consciousness...
1 year ago -
Why Did Natural 20's Become Automatic Hits? - Here's an observation I just made, that came up from a friend's question about the 1E AD&D rules for a big project they're working on. Ultimately this hi...
1 year ago -
Old school conversion notes #2 – Armor Class - After the first installation in this series (about different movement rate systems in OSR games) the turn has come to the differing armor class systems tha...1 year ago
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Alternative Experience Awards and Advancement - Alternative Experience Awards and Advancement (I started thinking about this as a way to make XP awards in 5e come from all three “Pillars of Adventure” r...1 year ago
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Pirates and Necromancers, a Play Report - Over the Thanksgiving weekend we did a lot of gaming ranging from “off-table” domain level stuff to some solo adventures to spell and magic item rese...1 year ago
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Knave 2e Alternate Attributes - Sometimes, I'm exactly in the mood for the classic simplicity of defining characters entirely by D&D's six attributes, as Knave does. But sometimes, I want...
2 years ago -
Indulge Me - I miss magazines. There was a time when you could walk into any shop and you’d find a plethora of gaming magazines in the used bins and on the new shelves....2 years ago
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Folie à Trois: Trophy Gold - Below is a shared review of *Trophy Gold (2022)*, a fantasy adventure game designed by Jesse Ross and published by The Gauntlet. Although it is informed ...3 years ago
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Another test - Now I’m testing the WP app. Drafting from my phone or tablet would be a useful way to blog more. Possibly. Does purple text show in my template? Quotey q...3 years ago
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Osamu Tezuka (1928 - 1989) - [image: Osamu Tezuka - Shonen Magazine Cover, 1970]Shonen Magazine Cover, 1970 [image: Osamu Tezuka - Shonen Magazine Cover Illustration 1970]Shonen Maga...4 years ago
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Notes on a semi-successful skill system - When I finished my Team Tsathogga campaign back in 2019, one of the things that I noted afterwards was the extent to which fighters had struggled to keep...4 years ago
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Behind the Screen #5: Old Men Rolling Dice - Welcome once again to Behind the Screen! This week take a stroll down memory lane alongside the gang at “Old Men Rolling Dice.” Jeremy and Jason are the go...4 years ago
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My FREE RPG 12v12 Is Out Now!!!! - I hope everyone is well. I am very excited to be able to share a little game I have been working on for a while. 12v12 is a D12-based multi-genre RPG, an...
5 years ago -
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CCLII. AoS28: Sunhold Deadwalkers and Netopyr - *A*t last found a bit of time for my personal projects, so I made a few figures real quick. Sunhold Deadwalkers I'm trying to settle for a definitive ...
6 years ago -
Spoils of the Gorgon Coast: The Degenerate Heir - As the kickstarter for the Zinequest Quartet winds down, I find myself in awe of the amount of folks who seem interested in my project; especially given t...
6 years ago -
The Plane of Lightning & Thoughts - Fulmens - Spells of the Storm-Wracked Noosphere - In conjunction with a good friend of mine I'm helping start the Planescape challenge. For those too lazy to click the link just now, its essentially a re-i...6 years ago
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The Metaminds of Vor - The Metaminds of Vor dream only of doomsday, calculating the odds of humanity’s demise. Synthroid agents tend to the needs of the massive brain-tanks, ...7 years ago
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Indefinite Hiatus - Due to intermittent technical problems on a dying computer and life-changing personal problems, I can't see myself gathering up the motivation to even keep...7 years ago
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Roomless, Mapless, Distanceless - a micro-ruleset for dungeoneering - I am currently running a heavily homebrewed game of Ultraviolet Grasslands with heavily homebrewed rules. Ultraviolet Grasslands, for those not in the k...7 years ago
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Profane and Profound Prep Part 2 - This is part 2 of my work to edit my magic items for a DMsGuild release, along with adding cursed items along the way. Here is part 1. Bone of a Saint 8000...7 years ago
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2018 Was a Hell of a Year - 2018 Was a Hell of a Year It was the greatest year to-date for Darker Hue Studios (DHS). So many things happened that it is a bit of a blur and the fee...7 years ago
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Save Versus All Wands Contest: What is the Value of the Coin Hoard? - Treasure Type H Announcing the third annual (well, not quite) Save Versus All Wands contest! You can read about and see the results of the first two - *...
7 years ago -
The Mystery of Dave Arneson's Engine - *(This article was written as part of Murkhill's Week-long celebration of Dave Arneson. Click the link to find more great articles!)* Like many other Dunge...
8 years ago -
spooky scary skeletons - Skeletons are my favorite D&D enemy. My players know this fact very well. It's become a running joke. Plug: Matt Bailey does amazing illustrations of skelet...
8 years ago -
On Chaos - *This post will have very little in terms of gameable mechanics. I'm wary of posting too much that borders on "game themed prose fiction" but I intend to r...
8 years ago -
DUNGEON#3:TOTALT JAVLA MORKER - PDF here It's a simple 13 room dungeon I've ran for new players to figure out how OSR is played. The dungeon can be easily adapted for your purposes b...
8 years ago -
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About Me
- Roger G-S
- Researcher in social science and appreciator of hexy wargames, role playing games, interactive fiction, board games, and CCGs. I've learned a lot doing design and rules editing work on the side for the Legend of the Five Rings CCG. But this blog is mostly about other things.
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