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10
November
2025
It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Random Character Generator. I had promised my friend Nick I’d make him something that spits out the random grimoires from Errant, and finally got around to it last night: Random Grimoire. I’ll probably try and add random Errant characters next. There are several games I want to this generator. One day.
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09
November
2025
My friends were over to kitbash minis and play Warcry to celebrate our friend Richard’s birthday. There was a small posse of us, so Richard came up with a simple and ingenious way to play mutli-player co-op Warcry that matches the random spirit of the game. We wanted to play a 3 vs 3 game. Each of us took our warbands and split them up into the Dagger, Hammer, Shield groups as usual. We then randomly assigned each group to each player, so each player would bring one of the groups for their team. (For a 2 vs 2 game, you could just one player from each team bring two of their groups, rather than one.) In our game the ways things shook out ended up giving a slight advantage to our opponents, they had a few more points than us, but I don’t think it skewed things thast much. You could grant the underdog team bonus wild dice based on the point differential, though how many is left as an exercise for the reader. Since by the rules you must make your groups with as even a split of minis as possible, and with this format you don’t know which group you’ll take, it likely will lead to fairly even splits anyway. Playing this way means you don’t need to mess with any other rules or the balance of the game. Each team had about 1000 points of minis, would roll initiative dice for their team as usual, etc.
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17
October
2025
For Mothership Month—a crowdfunding campaign extravaganza—Sean decided to spend some of his marketing budget funding a crazy giant digital LARP. Sam Sorensen is running Over/Under, a 100% bananas play-by-post “war-game”. There are over 1000 players! A much smaller subset are ‘bosses’ who get to make actual decisions and interact with Sam to direct the energies of the various factions in play. I had originally planned to avoid the game, it seemed so overwhelming (and honestly still is), but how often does stuff like this happen? I joined the Tempest Mercenary squad, because Amanda is the person in charge, and have been a loyal soldier ever since. The bulk of my “playing” consist of showing up when I see we’ve all been tagged and posting a salute emojis. I don’t think you really need to spend more effort than that if you want to play as well. If I had more time, I probably would have tried to ply my trade as a misinformation broker. Another time. I still don’t really understand what’s happening half the time. It’s still fun & weird experience nevertheless.
This is what some people might call fake news.
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13
October
2025
I really enjoyed this sort of meta-review from Paul, The New Novely. Paul writes very deep meaningful reviews of the games he plays. We also have very different interests or goals when it comes to gaming.
Stuff coming out of the Forge movement either interested me or repelled me. But at least it was novel! Polaris might not have landed for me but Dust Devils sure as shit did. Dogs in the Vineyard was great and Carolina Death Crawl was upsetting. And the new ideas just kept coming. A solid decade-plus of envelope-pushing. … I can’t tell you the last truly new, engaging idea that hit me out of game design. … Looking forward at the next 20ish years of play and it’s all gonna be pretty much the same? Not a great feeling.
Maybe it’s cliche that OSR fans aren’t that obsessed with rulesets, but I’m not that obsessed with rulesets. I have so many variations of D&D, and will honestly buy more before I die. I like whisky, and have so many different bottles in my pantry. They are all unique, interesting in their own ways, enjoyable to drink. I don’t need stuff to be wildly different. I enjoy subtle refinement. But Paul’s point is a good one: where are people doing wildly different stuff right now? Jay Dragon is one person that comes to mind. Who are the other people trying to do something novel?
The “you don’t need to play to review” folks are just wrong if you want anything deeper.
I don’t think Paul is wrong here, you will certainly be able to tell a more complete story about a game or adventure after you’ve run it. I make more of an effort now to play the games I write about before I write about them, but the net result of doing that is I write less reviews. Some games and adventures do benefit from my having sat down and played them. My Night Witches review after having played the game is far better than the one I wrote before playing. But what I wrote about Another Bug Hunt before I played it isn’t so far off from how I felt after I played it. And I still haven’t gone back to write about Another Bug Hunt. I try and write when I have the energy and thoughts to write, not when I think what I’ll produce is perfect. This is a blog, not A Survey of Game and Adventure Design, 2020-2025 from MIT Press. There is a lot of good criticism and writing of games that comes from solely from people reading things carefully and thinking deeply.
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06
October
2025
A recent episode of Between Two Cairns opened with a discussion on what to do when a reaction role doesn’t jive with the idea you have in your head for the situation. Yochai’s sentiment more or less mirrors my own: if you roll the dice, you should just go with what the roll says. There is something chaotic and fun in trying to figure out why the troll in the middle of the dungeon is actually excited to see you. But what if the roll doesn’t make any fictional sense whatsoever? In that case I would question why you are rolling in the first place! I try and assign modifiers to creatures encountered when I want them to have a default disposition that is more negative or positive than a plain 2d6 spread. I also only include any charisma modifiers where it would make fictional sense for a characters charisma to come into play. Finally some monsters are truly mindless and will always want to eat the players, like zombies, perhaps. It’s easy to fall into the trap of rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice. I like Chris’s post on this topic: Information, Choice, Impact.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on September 30, 2025
Tagged: osr
My house rules for death and dying in D&D are buried in a post about my house rules for my Carcosa campaign. That was the first time I used them, but they continue to be what I use when playing D&D-a-likes:
If your hit points drop below or are equal to zero make a Save vs. Death Ray and Poison: success indicates your character is merely unconscious, completely incapacitated until they can get a full week of rest; failure indicates your character is oh-so dead. If you roll a natural 20 on your saving throw roll, your character not only survives, but is invigorated by his near death. In this case your character re-rolls their HP for the session—the “hulkamaniac” rule.
This is easily generalized for any system with saves and hit points. Mothership and DCC RPG have similar rules for death and dying.
I normally re-roll hit points per session, something I picked up from Brendan. (I would say this is an atypical reading of how OD&D explains hit dice, but one I am a fan of—poor rolls for your HP seem less punishing. Carcosa did something similar and more bananas with HP/HD as well for that matter, but I ignored those rules.) If this isn’t how you play, I would return people who roll a natural 20 on their save back to the game with their max HP.
If you want to also include the possibility of permanent scars and dismemberment I would make a table keyed on how much you made your death save by. But I don’t usually play with those sorts of tables. I prefer the simplicity of you’re dead or you’re not.
Sucks Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) turned out to be such a dick.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on August 01, 2025
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on May 29, 2025
Tagged: osr pbta 5e danielkwan
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.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on April 14, 2025
Tagged: wargame warhammer xenosrampant minis 28mm
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.
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.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 30, 2025
Tagged: osr hazarddie mothership
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: EasementEncounter: 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.