A monster on the verge of eating an adventurer.

Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming 2025

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on August 01, 2025

Tagged: awards osr

My friend Warren messaged me a few days ago. “Ram,” he said, “reminder to write the Rammies, Ennies are in 2 days.”

Wait, what? The year zooms by and I’m always caught on the back foot. Even with the warning I didn’t really have time to get any of my thoughts down until … well right now. This post wasn’t written before the Ennies began, it will show up some time in the middle of their show. Oh well. I don’t really care about what the Ennies have to say one way or the other, and you shouldn’t either, but I won’t fault someone for loving the Teen Choice Awards of the RPG industry. Someone had to fill that void, why not ENworld? So much voting!

At the Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in gaming there is only one voter: me! There is only one rule when it comes to these awards: the books in contention must have arrived at my doorstep, or digitally in my inbox, during 2024. I had to think a little bit hard about these rules this year, as my copies of Swyvers and Gardens of Ynn arrived safe and sound at my brother’s door in the UK. I’ll see those books in a couple weeks, and so they will be in the running next year. Till then …

Best Game: Break!! by Reynaldo Madriñan and Carlo Tartaglia

End of a cool fight sequence in Break

I waited, along with many friends, many years for this book. And then it finally arrived. I wasn’t always sure it would. But Rey and Carlo took their time and made something special. In the time between me first seeing Rey and GreyWiz working on Break!! to its eventual release it became a big chonky game. It’s not really the sort of game I play anymore. Character creation is 200 pages of this book! Come on, man. Of course, that also doubles as a lot of world building. Break!! has such an imaginative setting, a natural extension of Reynaldo’s Baroviania game. Reading the book it draws you it. Drew me in. I am prepping an inevitable game. Break!! feels well suited to eat 5Es lunch. The character creation is so detailed, there are lots of options and abilities and all that. Lots of ways to customize characters and gear to your liking. The vibes for the game are so perfect. Kitchen sink fantasy that feels very much its own. Carlo’s art is incredible. I would watch the Break!! Saturday morning cartoon. Perhaps one day we will get one.

Best Setting: Gackling Moon by Patrick Stuart & Tom K. Kemp

The map of the Moonlands

Some motherfucking OSR nonsense from the man himself Patrick Stuart. Gackling Moon began its life on Patrick’s blog. For those not familiar, the book describes the Moonlands, a bizarre place for adventure. The book features art by Tom Kemp and feels like you are reading an in world artifact you would pick up at a museum exhibit about the region. This feels like Patrick’s take on the 2e Gazetteer as literary fiction. In many ways this is probably stretching the limits of what counts as a gaming book. There is so much creativity jammed into Gackling Moon, but actually turning that into an adventure to play is left as an exercise for the reader. Maps, stats, everything is absent. That the book features random tables is really the only explicit nod to gaming. But I disagree with those who would argue this isn’t a gaming book: everything was clearly written with an eye to how it would play on a table. This approach feels like less of a stretch—a gazetteer for a fantasy world—than the stat-less monster manual that was Fire on the Velvet Horizon. (That book is amazing, by the way.) There is clear precedent for this style of fiction. Tom Kemp’s art is such a perfect match for the book, and contributes to the feeling this is the companion book to some gallery or museum exhibit. Gackling Moon is maximally creative. Often quite funny. More people should check it out.

The Ramanan Sivaranjan Excellence in Gaming Best God Damn Books of 2024: The Mothership Boxed Set by Sean McCoy & Friends.

Space people

A weird pick: Mothership has already won this coveted spot, but this boxed set is actually really fucking good. The game has matured in that time, lots of tweaks here and there. I’m less interested in those changes and more interested in what I would consider the centrepiece of this boxed set, it’s Warden’s Manual. I love this book! Mothership’s Warden’s Manual is exactly what I want from a “DMG”: practical concrete advice on getting the game you bought to the table. How do you prep? What do you do in your first session? Etc. It’s all the juice. This boxed set made me want to run the game again. And I did! The box conveniently includes an adventure, Another Bug Hunt, which I enjoyed running for my friends. Mothership has grown into a real behemoth since I first wrote about it. This game is probably someone’s first RPG, the Kickstarter raised so much money and had so many backers. What a lucky person.

Honourable Mentions

I say this every year, but this year was a particularly competitive one. We had another beautiful boxed set with Wulfwald by Lee Reynoldson, Owe My Soul to the Company Store by Luther Gutekunst & R. Devlin, Knave 2e by Ben Milton & Peter Mullen, the nazi killing romp that is EAT THE RIECH by Grant Howitt & Will Kirkby and my new favourite rank & flank war-game, Hobgoblin by Mike Hutchinson. I am a big fan of the first entrants to Troika 1:5 series, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse by Andrew Walter and The Hand of God by Mike Knee and Andrew Walter. I’m really looking forward to the adventures to follow.

Review: Wandering Blades

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on May 29, 2025

Tagged: osr pbta 5e danielkwan

Wandering Blades

The Kickstarter for Wandering Blades is coming to a close. Wandering Blades is a new game from Daniel Kwan—who is notable for Ross Rifles, the Asians Represent Podcast, and living down the road from me. It’s an OSR game that swaps out your typical medieval-fantasy out for some wuxia vibes.

I wrote about Daniel’s previous game Ross Rifle’s back when I played it during BreakoutCon. The game is an interesting (and educational!) Powered by the Apocalypse game about the First World War. Daniel has also done a lot of freelance work, mostly in the PbtA or 5e space. Wandering Blades is interesting because you can see him bring those influences and experiences to the design of an OSR game. It’s interesting to see ouroboros of influences at play. Daniel mentions being influenced by games I would consider to have borrowed or been inspired by PbtA games. It’s all a bit of a circle.

The game has all the trappings of a D&D-like: attributes, hit points, character classes, levels, etc. There are some different names, but if you have played anything vaguely D&D-ish you’ll figure it out. The game has two core related mechanics: checks and saves. You try and beat a difficulty score on a d20 when making a check or a save. A save is reactive, you roll it to avoid a bad outcome. Daniel suggests some sample DCs so you don’t have to think too hard about setting them, the main thing I dislike about DCs. Where the game really branches out is when it comes to combat.

A lot of OSR games focus on problem solving. You will often hear this maxim that combat is a failure state. The rules for many OSR games often often produce grotty nobodies trying to survive long enough to become the sorts of powerful heroes you read about it books. (But I ask you, what campaign ever lasts that long!) Wandering Blades is trying to capture the mood of a very different sort of genre. The characters aren’t usually grotty nobodies, they are capable bad-asses. They might get hurt or die, but they are certainly taking a lot of people with them if that’s the case. The game does a lot of work mechanically to try and capture what makes a fight in those sorts of stories feel dynamic and interesting. This part of the game reminds me of 4th or 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, where the designers tried to go further than “roll a d6 for damage”.

The two core character classes in the game are Youxia (wandering hero) and the Outlaw. The Youxia belongs to a martial arts sect, and has access to a variety of martial arts techniques to use in combat. Daniel describes a few different techniques, each with a very different mood. Outlaws gain skills as they level, but also have access to a small set of combat techniques. Players manage an additional resource, Qi Points, to perform their combat techniques. There are actions and reactions you can perform on your turn in combat. You might parry a blow, or counter attack if an enemy misses you. There is a lot more detail to the rules compared to a lot of OSR games I typically play. I was reminded a lot of Break!!, which also feels influenced by 5e and more “trad” games.

Wandering Blades feels like a good bridge game, something that you could probably use to pull in players who prefer games like D&D 5e. The characters you create have a bit more detail and mechanical weight to them. The rule set isn’t too far off from the core of D&D. The vibes aren’t particularly dark and grotty. I suspect the game won’t be a big leap for most 5e fans. If you’re an OSR fan that gets annoyed at games that aren’t doing any heavy lifting when it comes to mechanics and design, you may enjoy what Daniel has tried to do.

You have 24 hours (after I post this) to go back the thing. Go do it! Gotta support Canadian content.

Review: Xenos Rampant

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on April 14, 2025

Tagged: wargame warhammer xenosrampant minis 28mm

Xenos Rampant

I finally managed to play a game of Xenos Rampant—two games in fact, it proved to be quick and easy to play. Xenos Rampant is written by Daniel Mersey and Richard Cowen, a wargame that takes Mersey’s Lion Rampant and brings it into the world of science fiction.

Xenos Rampant is a minis agnostic platoon sized game. A ‘standard’ game will probably be 4-6 units, but there is a lot of latitude. You will build your units from some core archetypes and a lot of customization. You can make fairly flavourful approximations of the sorts of units you would field in 40K. Units are typically 5 strength points, with each strength point typically referring to a single model in the unit. But the game lets you model things in a mix of ways, so a 5 strength point unit might be 5 Sisters of Battle, or a single Canoness who would track her strength points with a dice. One issue to me was that it’s easy for everything to feel a bit too similar. I ran Sisters of Battle and Evan, my wargaming compatriot, ran his weird kit-bashed AdMech / Imperial Guard minis. I built my Sisters Repentia, the chainsword wielding maniacs of the Sisters of Battle, as Berserk Infantry, with High Powered Blades, Unarmed (no guns), and *Fanatical Discipline as customizations of that unit type. There are lots of 40K units that might also be modelled exactly like this, even if you’d like them to feel more distinct. I imagine this game would work nicely as an alternative ruleset to the Horus Heresy, with Space Marines fighting Space Marines.

The game is very easy to play. Players take turns moving all their units, with a catch: you roll to activate units, and keep activating units till you fail or have activated them all. When that happens your opponent till take their turn, going through the same process. (This is similar to one of the greatest games ever, A Song of Blades and Heroes.) There are three actions a unit can take: Move, Shoot, or Attack (move into combat). In Xenos Rampant each unit has one action they can do without having to roll. After playing 2 games of Xenos Rampant I’m not sure I like the rule, the extra reliability felt overly impactful in our admittedly small sample size of games.

There is only one dice roll to resolve combat, whether you are shooting or fighting up close. You roll 10d6 if you’re at full strength, 5d6 if you’re less than half, and need to beat a target number. You need a number of successes equal the opposing units armour score to remove a strength point. There is no additional rolling or faffing about. A simple example: rolling 10 dice and getting 7 successes into a unit with 3 armour would remove 2 models (if that’s how you’re tracking strength points), the last success having no effect. Like Warcry and other games with simple resolution systems, this makes the game play super quick.

Xenos Rampant

We didn’t dig into all the extra rules and advice for running the game in various settings. They have sample rules and advice for running games like Weird World War, Star Trek, etc. Between these extra rules and all the other customization, it really does feel like you could express any game or setting you wanted within this generic ruleset.

If I have one criticism it’s that the rules writing and organization of the rule book isn’t as clear or concise as I think it could be. The rule set turned out to be so simple and elegant, but I had put off playing for so long because I thought the game would be more fussy than it turned out to be. (By a long shot!) Rules sometimes don’t live where you would expect them to. The rules summary at the back of the book is missing details you would want. I plan to write up my own cheat sheet. (Maybe the act of doing so will humble me.)

Xenos Rampant is great. Evan mentioned that the Goonhammer review was so positive he didn’t think the game could live up to its hype, and yet it did! A game we will definitely return to. And yet, there is still something compelling about all that jank in actual 40K. A topic for another day.

Xenos Rampant

A Hazard Die for Mothership

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 30, 2025

Tagged: osr hazarddie mothership

Rolling a 1 on your Hazard Die

Ben is interested in getting people blogging about Mothership. People are good, so of course it wasn’t long before someone shared something: Hazards In Space! Adapting the Hazard Die For Mothership. Funny enough, this is something I had also done when running Gradient Descent a few years ago, and probably should have carried forward when I was running Another Bug Hunt.

Mothership’s play loop is pretty free-form and loose, like a lot of OSR games: describe a situation and have a conversation with your players till the situation is resolved. This loop is illustrated on page 27-28 of the Warden Manual in a neat and tidy spread. I like to run games this way as well, but I find left to my own devices my games drift towards some all vibes no rules FKR-ish nonsense.1 Forcing some structure on myself is helpful.

When I ran Gradient Descent using 0e Mothership, and Another Bug Hunt using the current rules, I never felt like I was really taking advantage of the stress and panic system. I don’t call for rolls that much, so there is less chance for people to gain stress through failure. I also don’t have a good habit for just doling stress out because it makes fictional sense.2 Folding gaining stress into the act of exploration seems like a reasonable approach for play. Here is a small update to my earlier attempt at moving the Hazard Die to Mothership:

Hazard Die

When exploring a dangerous environment roll a d10 each time the players perform a notable action (i.e. move between locations, carefully search a space, attempt to hack a computer, etc).

1: Encounter
2-4: Environment
5-6: Exhaustion
7-8: Expiration
9-10: Easement

Encounter: roll on a random encounter table. Gain 1 stress.
Environment: something about the players immediate surroundings change: lights go out, gravity fails, doors lock, etc. Perhaps there are hints of a future encounter. Gain 1 stress.
Exhaustion: the characters are hungry or fatigued. They must rest or gain 1 stress.
Expiration: batteries die, oxygen runs dangerously low, etc. Easement: a moment of calm, the players may lose 1 stress, but never reducing it below the value they started the session with.

Mothership has real Alien vibes. In a horror games it feels like the general mood should always be “it’s quiet, too quiet.” Mothership’s typical 10% chance of a random encounter seems inline with that, so I left it alone. I merged what Brendan calls Percept & Locality into a single entry named Environment. I think the general intention is the same: hints at future badness. The big change from my previous table is that Encounter and Environment results tick up a players stress. As players explore a location they will slowly accrue stress.

The other results are unchanged from my previous iteration. Exhaustion forces players to pause unless they accept 1 stress. This result is only meaningful if strict time records are being kept. In Another Bug Hunt infected characters will eventually turn into bugs after enough time has passed: make sure you track that shit! If characters are being chased, this is another result that will likely result in them gaining stress as they can’t stop to chill out. In Mothership you don’t have torches, but there are lots of electronics that have a chance to break down. Expiration is the place for those failures to happen. Since we are doling out stress I thought there should be a chance for players to lose some of the exploration based stress they have earned.

Is this good? I’d have to play and see. With these sorts of rules you want to get the mouth feel just right. Maybe a violent encounter should result in d5 stress. Maybe this is way too much stress and your characters become broken husks without also tweaking the stress relief rules. I will report back.

  1. The way I play is nonsense, not FKR, which I think is a very cool and interesting scene. 

  2. How to dole out stress just because feels like something to dig into more. You don’t want to do so in a way that feels arbitrary, or takes away from the agency of the players. 

The Fantastic is Fact has a great post about getting started playing OD&D, my favourite version of Dungeons and Dragons! This post has a good overview of all the various retroclones of the game, including my favourite, Delving Deeper, and Marcia’s Fantastic Medieval Campaigns. Also good links for further reading and resources, like Philotomy’s Musings, which I also host here.

It was a Renaissance

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 27, 2025

Tagged: osr navalgazing meta

Thomas M, who writes one of my favourite RPG newsletters, asked for suggestions about people producing games in “the NSR, post-OSR, and generally the experimental side of the OSR” for what I assume will become an article for Rascal or his newsletter.

I reject the premise of his query: the OSR is and always has been experimental! That’s the whole point. The “R” stands for Renaissance. Of course I complained, like a maniac, and Thomas followed up his thinking on the matter:

The term OSR has a kind of nostalgic or backwards-looking bent to it. While that never applied to all individuals, it applied to some/enough. I think it’s natural for folks who break from that orientation to use different terms.

I reject that premise even more! To quote myself: ”The OSR is a gaming movement focused on player agency, problem solving, and simple open-ended rule sets inspired by old editions of D&D and games from that period of time.”

I agree that the OSR began with retroclones and people trying to reproduce the original D&D games, but that’s certainly the least interesting part of the OSR at this point.1 People quickly moved on from Retroclones. LotFP is 15 years old. DCC RPG is over a decade old. Troika is going to celebrate its 10th birthday this year. All games directly inspired by something older, pushed in new directions.

Old School Hack came out at the same time as LotFP. If it came out today people would call it “Post-OSR”, but it was released into the maelstrom because the OSR has always been more than just retroclones. Many of the replies to Thomas’s inquiry pointed him to Into the Odd, an important and influential game. Also one that’s a decade old and came out of the OSR scene on G+. Maze Rats is another example of an old influential OSR game that moves well past the world of 3D6 down the line. These games would go on to inspire games like the superlative Mausritter.

OSR modules have almost always been fresh and interesting, where a lot of the excitement in the scene has lived. Deep Carbon Observatory is over a decade old now. Brilliant writing, art, and fun to play! LotFP’s modules (boo, hiss, I know) didn’t attempt to ape TSR trade dress or vibes: they charted their own unique course. Think about how good Scenic Dunnsmouth is! On the flipside, DCC RPG modules prove you can do what TSR was doing, but better in every single way. In the Woods is ten years old now and remains one of the most beautiful games/adventures to come out of the OSR. Another example of something people would call Post-OSR if it came out today.

Reynaldo and Grey Wizard worked on Break!! for what must be a decade. A game that came out of the OSR scene, and certainly has OSR sensibilities, but feels innovative and fresh. Luke Gearing’s Swyvers is another game in this same vein. Its system feels decidedly retro, but somehow the whole game feels new—I guess because it is.

This is a lot of words to not actually answer Thomas’s question about “what’s new” and I have to apologize for that. I feel irrationally compelled to correct people when I see them parrot a definition of the OSR that I could imagine coming from the lips of the most reprobate members of this scene. Probably because it erases me, my friends, and our experience. The OSR didn’t begin and end with AD&D.

  1. I would have called it the smallest part of the OSR, but then OSE came out and seems more popular than ever. I also shouldn’t malign the retroclones, that undercuts how big a deal they were at the time, and also misses the point that they existed so people could share their bananas adventures. I suspect most of the people that were really into OSRIC already owned AD&D 1e. 

Gus, Mr. Dungeon Crawling himself, asks the hard questions: why do most adventures suck? He suggests ways to improve the adventures you are writing (to sell for cash-money). Something he touches on, that gets glossed over in a lot of the discussions I see about writing and running adventures, is around that distinction between writing to be consumed by yourself versus writing to be consumed by others. You can run an amazing session with keys that look like the original keys for Dwimmermount. You don’t need fancy maps. You don’t need perfect prose. You need enough information to remind yourself of the amazing ideas in your head!

My Electrum Archive character sheet

I met up with Emiel and Ava shortly after they arrived in Toronto for Breakout Con. I love to see my D&D friends in real life: that’s what it’s all about. (Our meetup also included Jon, the Retired Adventurer, who lives so close to me it’s embarrassing I only see him when Ava is in town.) I managed to see them a few times before they left, ending my convention crashing a game Ava ran of The Electrum Archive. We played through an adventure that was intended to be part of the second zine, but which was cut for space—the zine was already massive. The adventure was a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to its release. In The Electrum Archive the typical dungeons are the crashed spaceships of an ancient people. Our characters were sent to find a missing posse of soldiers who were exploring one such ship. We would discover they had all been murdered like something out of Alien. The adventure included: someone gaining telepathy; the rest of the party not clueing into how that happened, and instead gaining random crap mutations; a giant mech suit that ended the session just hulk smashing stuff; lots of sphincters; blood, guts and gore. So, all the good stuff.

Review: Nirvana on Fire

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 16, 2025

Tagged: mothership osr

Nirvana on Fire Cover

Nirvana on Fire: Expanded Edition is a 36 page module for Mothership written by David Kenny, featuring art by Jéromê Berthier and top-tier graphic design by Eric Hill. As the name suggests, this edition expands upon an earlier release, featuring additional writing, art, a nicer layout, etc. The pitch for Nirvana on Fire has the players responding to requests for help from a remote colony:

The power station on the moon Bodhisattva 2a is failing; without it, the inhabitants of Siddhartha’s Peace, the small Neo-Buddhist colony established there, will freeze to death. Abbot Benz-Shiroyuki requests aid. Print a new power converter at the Manufactory and as payment, receive salvage rights to the decommissioned Terraforming Tower at the top of the moon’s space elevator.

In his briefing, the abbot neglects to mention the tower’s AI has come to believe itself a manifestation of the deity Bishamonten. Pushed by Straylight LLC and the dire conditions in Siddhartha’s Peace, the AI is set on taking extreme measures to protect the colony, even if it requires feeding it to the flames of revolution.

I recall being sorely tempted by this book’s Kickstarter, the cover image is so bold and eye-catching. As usual, shipping was too expensive so I moved on with my life. This weekend I attended Breakout Con, where I saw the zine for sale in real life. Beautiful. When I went to pay, the lady working the stall said, “no pressure, but this also comes in a fancy box.” There is no world where I don’t buy the box.

The first party modules for Mothership are excellent and provide a strong template to follow when it comes to organizing your ideas for an adventure. Nirvana on Fire takes those lessons to heart. The module opens with a lot of information to help orient the GM to what’s going on in the scenario. The opening spread is a timeline of how the the colony on Bodhisattva 2a came to exist, how its problems have manifested. The following spread explains how you might use the module. David tells you how you could kick things off, and what “win” conditions might be. This is followed by an overview of the factions at play and the colony itself.

Nirvana on Fire Cover

The graphic design of this module is top tier stuff: they should have put Eric Hill’s name on the cover. I didn’t recognize Hill’s name at first, but he’s the fellow that did the layout for Hull Breach. Of course this thing is going to look hot. Jéromê Berthier art is bold. Lots of reds and blacks. Thick lines. Together the pair take the book to another level.

There are two main adventuring sites in the initial version of this adventure. The first is the colony, Siddhartha’s Peace. It’s described in a single spread, with short descriptions for each of its 10 locations. The GM will roll on a corresponding random table as players move from location to location, which often make the locations a more dynamic. There is a revolution fomenting in the town. Some of the townspeople have become adherents of the AI Bishmamoten. A few encounters involve this tension. The last encounter on the table is “the revolution begins …”.

The “dungeon” in this module is a tower that sits atop the colony’s space elevator, the centre of their terraforming activities until the AI took over. This is 10 rooms, described over two spreads. I would have preferred if the map of the tower was less abstract: it is a simple flow chart, basically. Using the illustration of the exterior of the tower by Jéromê will help you picture the space in your head. As before, a random table provides encounters and colour as players move from location to location. The last encounter on this table is the sole monster that stalks the halls of the terraforming tower, the Spear of Bishmamonten. I was reminded of The God That Crawls or Deep Carbon Observatory, other adventures with a singular powerful monster hunting the party.

Two additional adventuring locations are included in this extended edition. They add more depth to the module. The shorter of two is an addition to the colony, written by Roy Leahy. Players can explore an abandoned Starlight facility, where the company was spying on the citizens and conducting creepy experiments. This location has a nice map. Once again the encounters table elevates the quiet space into something dynamic. The other adventuring location is Facility D-U8K81, written by Noora Masyk. This location reminded me of some of the first party adventures: descriptions are longer, keyed with bullet points. Unlike the other adventuring sites in this module, all the “monsters” to be encountered are described within the location keys. (In this adventure the random encounters table adds some colour.) Both adventuring sites are nice additions to what was already a solid module.

Nirvana on Fire has an amazing cover, and it’s honestly what got me to buy the book. But, contrary to popular belief, you usually can judge a book by its cover. This book is great: I would love to get it to the table. The boxed set comes with a pad of themed character sheets, a GM screen, some patches, and dice. I have zero regrets with my purchase, it’s honestly amazing, but it’s very decadent and certainly unnecessary. That said, these dice are great.

Nirvana on Fire Dice

I love this post from Yochai about running a sandbox style game using his game Cairn and the advice and tools from its Dungeon Masters guide. I’m a big fan of people writing about how they actually prep and run games. I wrote briefly about the start of my Carcosa campaign, how I kicked it off, but never came back to talk about how it was going, or offer advice on running a hexcrawl. It’s something I keep meaning to do, and seeing this post makes me want to do so all the more.