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[zine] Grenzland No. 5 - Science Fantasy

Last week I found Wanderer Bill’s Grenzland 5 in my mailbox. Topic “Science Fantasy”. The zine costs 5 Euros for a hardcopy, but can be downloaded for free. As the topic goes into the realm of science fiction there’s plenty of that in this issue. Most of the articles are in German, some are English though. In the appropriately titled article “Piu piu!!” Alex Schroeder gives stats and rules for…

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[Tools] Using calibre-web as reference library for TTRPGs

Calibre, if you are not aware, is an open source ebook management system. It’s one of the best and most easily available ways to manage a collection of electronic books. It stores books in a rather transparent library that allows easy editing, tagging, and conversion between different ebook formats. It also allows to easily send books to connected ebook readers. Ok, the interface is a bit meh,…

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A Miscellany of Links pt. XXII

Random Tables d66 Reasons Why the Castle is Totally Deserted (Blog of Forlorn Encystment) Elemental Heretics (Elfmaids & Octopi) d100 Poltergeists (Elfmaids & Octopi) Let’s Build a Thieves Guild (OSRVault) 100 Urban Quest Hooks (OSRVault) Ideas Babies in Dungeons (Prismatic Wasteland) Random Magic User Generator (Remixes and Revelations) Sandbox Settlements: Downtime (Among Cats and…

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En Garde!

Subtitle: Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions I was woefully ignorant about En Garde! (mind the exclamation mark) until recently, when I tried to investigate why this roleplaying game seems so popular for play-by-mail games, despite being mostly forgotten in normal tabletop RPG circles. It’s to the point that Margam Evans…

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Campaign generation by randomized GURPS sourcebook

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I was a teen-level necromancer

Last Thursday we wrapped up the Grenzland Diplomacy play-by-post game we were playing for the last few days. At least for the season.So the Grenzland campaign (tl.: Borderland) is an ODnD campaign run by Wanderer Bill for the last few years. There already was a lot of history that has been happening in this campaign, and a few months ago he started a sort of Diplomacy-like game, not unlike the…

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[Star Wars] Deathstars & Droids (was: Star Wars - Galactic Adventures)

Ages ago (2011?) I found a Star Wars OSR retroclone called Star Wars – Galactic Adventures on the venerable wizardawn.com page, now lost to the wages of net history. (…that was before there was an actual Star Wars product, a kids’ book, using the same title…) For some reason it never really caught on in the glut of B/X rules variations at the time, and when people were thinking about doing an…

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Players Wanted: Glimmermark Open Table Labyrinth Lord Game

I currently am running a Labyrinth Lord Open Table every Tuesday at 8.15pm CET for 2 hours on the Grenzland Discord Server. Sign-ups are via the Norn bot in channel #glimmermark. A wiki page for the game exists. The Glimmermark is a is a border march of the Kingdom of Brillon, once a core province of the old Empire, but now a landscape of ruins, wilderness, and strange creatures. Here around the…

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[Art and Inspiration] Johnny Bruck

They say quantity is a quality all on its own, and that certainly fits the artistic output of Johnny Bruck. Johnny Bruck was a German artist mostly working in pulp magazines, most famously Perry Rhodan, that weekly science fiction pulp novel series that is at novel issue 3306 as I write this. In fact until his death in 1995 he illustrated most of the 1799 covers of the series up to that point…

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[Traveller] Drinax pt. 2: Have Hazard Suit, Will Travel

So we talked about Drinax and what the UWP implies, but what does life there actually look like on the ground? Well, quite terrible really. There’s not too many people around. The population code gives 70.000 people, but I am pretty sure this amount (the size of a small-medium city) is in the Floating Palace. The whole state of Drinax has to function somehow after all, and I doubt the Scout…

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[Glimmermark] Glimmermärkische Zeytungen - Issue 2

Not sure how many people are interested in it considering this is an English-language blog and this is a (largely) German-language campaign newsletter… but anyway, here is issue 2 of Glimmermärkische Zeytungen. I decided to create an In-Game chronicle here, as written by the scribe on Castle Aberwacht. Which largely concerns the doings of the group of player characters that go out and explore…

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My Hobby Year 2024

It’s the first time I actually feel the amount of times I played in a year worth mentioning. I had a rather successful 2024 in terms of ttrpg gaming. If my reckoning is correct (and I think I might miss a few) I played 56 sessions of roleplaying games this year. And this doesn’t take into account the ones that were scheduled but failed to take place. Most of them were 2 hour sessions on the…

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A Monday Miscellany of Links pt. XXI

J.R.R. Tolkien Illustration “Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-Elves”, 1937 The last few weeks I have been posting pretty often, daily even, which is interesting. I sometimes do get these posting spells for a bit with this blog, and that’s quite nice. Anyway, today I had business in Warsaw and wasn’t able to write anything before I was on the train back, so this post has been created on a…

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[Traveller] Reaction Rolls and Morale for MGT 2e

Reaction Rolls and Morale for MGT 2e I am prepping for a Pirates of Drinax campaign right now, and as the current version of that is for Mongoose Traveller we are going to use that edition. There is something to be said about the way the newer edition (now even with a refreshed look for this 8 year old game) doesn’t have the stark black and white art and design that made me fall in love with the…

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Arcade goes to a game store and finds instead... A Dragon’s Den

It wasn’t all doom and gloom and Satanic panicking in the 80s about rolepaying games. Dynamite Magazine actually had a few features about this new sort of game, and they all have a rather positive spin on the whole enterprise. The famous one is of course the one with the cool homebuilt Dungeon Grognardia and Sarah Darkmagic wrote about before, but there was another article by Suzanne Lord in the…

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[Art and Inspiration] Marvel Star Wars #1-6 (1977)

I was just thinking how people completely miss out on one of the most interesting aspects of this comic series. Marvel Star Wars ran for 108 issues, concluding in 1986. But at the beginning the first few issues adapted Episode IV A New Hope, or as it was then known “Star Wars” into comic form. But the interesting thing was that it was not adapting the movie as such, it was clearly working from…

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Terry Pratchett interview in Adventurer 11 (June/July 1987)

Adventurer was a rather short running UK RPG magazine. In the last issue, Adventurer 11, June/July 1987, there was an interesting interview with Terry Pratchett, where he recounted his experiences with D&D (he used to play and early Discworld has at least some influences from that) and why he stopped. My favorite part is this one: I gained marvellous insight into human nature one day when I…