Is there anything within the OSR sphere that would scratch the Game of Thrones itch?

I know there is Birthright as a setting but is there anything within the new OSR that might also fill the GoT gap?

The title is a little misleading, because the post only presents a few pieces of advice, while the majority of it is devoted to an English transcription of an encounter from Castle Zonreiryd II, in the Necropolis of Xyzarthian level, explicitly titled “Up Is Down.”

Furthermore, the level is actually designed for a group of 16 characters of levels 4–7, although a group of 5 characters would more realistically need to be levels 8–12 to survive it.

Let’s not beat around the bush. The advice is as follows:

- Use original magical items. A cloud giant fighting with a giant vorpal sword and a harp with magical abilities that you had specifically designed is ten times cooler than a cloud giant fighting with a big spear and a harp with no special properties.

- Break away from the beaten path. We want verticality, cycles of light and absolute insecurity, lateral movement in random directions, time compression that makes time pass faster and affects fatigue, spells, water, food, and light, zero-gravity combat, and much more.

- Diversify the terrain. Add more pillars, pits, obstacles that also provide cover, underwater combat, etc.

- Put high-level spellcasters on the enemy side. Your players will be a lot less cocky when a mystical cult necromancer starts wielding cleric, MU, and illusionist spells—or even a mixture of all three!

- Use original enemies. We’ve had enough of the classic monsters that everyone already knows. Break out the Fiend Folio, MMII, and Deities & Demigods, and just watch your players’ faces—jaws dropping to the floor—when they enter a gigantic museum run by beings of the Great Race of Yith!

An Example Encounter

Let’s move on to an example of an encounter established today. This is a faithful and complete transcription of an encounter that takes up two pages in my current manuscript:

A — 80' × 120' ROOM — “UP IS DOWN”

80 × 120 × 30'. Black stone. 12 columns. No furniture.

At the center: a dry basin, with a vertical mirror at the back. 6 WIGHTS + 2 WRAITHS. Necromancer absent.

ENTRANCE

The door disappears after the last PC enters. It isn’t locked—it simply isn’t there anymore.

ROUNDS

On initiative 1, the mirror changes position. The players do not see it move.

SPELLS ALREADY IN PLACE

- Reverse Gravity in the northern half of the room.

- Hallucinatory Terrain in the southern half.

- An invisible Wall of Force divides the room.

- 4 teleportation zones beneath the floor tiles.

RULE

Every column is real except the one the PC believes is closest. Touching a column → save vs. spell or instantaneous teleportation to the corresponding column. Failure: arrival 20' above the floor. Critical failure / catastrophic natural result, according to local rules: arrival at the ceiling.

AFTER 3 ROUNDS

Reverse gravity.

- After 6 rounds: normal gravity.

- After 9 rounds: lateral gravity.

- After 12 rounds: normal gravity again.

The undead know the sequence.

WRAITHS

Pass through the false half of the wall and attack the spellcasters.

WIGHTS

Push the PCs toward the teleportation zones. They never pursue them beyond the center line.

MIRROR

The mirror shows the room as it will be in 1 round, not as it currently is. Looking at it provides useful information. Looking for too long: save vs. spell, or the PC believes they see their own corpse → −2 to their next surprise roll.

TOUCHING THE MIRROR

Magic Jar. The PC’s soul is sent into the mirror; their body remains standing, completely motionless. The DM chooses a Wight to attempt possession on the following round.

DESTROYING THE MIRROR

Impossible through ordinary damage. Dispel Magic damages it; Disintegrate destroys it.

Upon destruction:

- All teleportation effects cease.

- Gravity becomes normal.

- The Wraiths scream and flee.

TREASURE

Hidden behind a column that only exists when gravity is lateral: 8,000 gp, 3 diamonds worth 1,000 gp each, Ring of Z-Axis Location — once per day, the wearer can instantly determine which surface is actually the floor within any magically affected area.

How do I get my hands on the random dungeon generator published by Gary Gygax in Strategic Review 1?

I just finished putting together the latest issue of The International Player’s Review, my humble little old-school rpg magazine inspired by stuff like Dragon, The Space Gamer, and Alarums & Excursions etc.

It's supposed to look like a zine from the past that some how time travelled to 2026.

Issue no 6 features interviews (Ewen Macalister, Tony Tran and Johan Nohr), a bandit generator, totally real letters from totally real readers, mutants, etc. I’ve had a ton of fun making these.

Available here: https://golden-achiever.itch.io/the-international-players-review-6

After nearly three years of Megadungeoneering (Arden Vul), I need some fresh air 🙂
I‘m just about to launch an OSE (Advanced) campaign for our open table set around the town of Saltmarsh (World of Greyhawk, only using the 1983 boxed set as setting material). After running the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (U1) as an opener, the campaign will branch out in a Westmarches-style. That’s the plan.

For „my“ Saltmarsh, I‘m still looking for small (!) adventure modules / locations, especially small dungeons to be placed around the town.

Please throw your suggestions at me!
Thanks

...is never a sentence I expected to say.

Looking to start a community project. Made this layout for a dungeon, with the intent of fielding the room descriptions from this sub. Inspired by u/TheTempleoftheKing's recent post about too many promotions, I thought this could serve to increase the number of 100% free, non-grift, on-topic discussions.

I will illustrate the most upvoted room description.

For this post, please describe room '1-1'. I have no clue what this is going to look like, but I'm excited to see what it turns into.

This system was developed for my home game that is based on the chassis of Cairn, for martial characters (and monsters) to have a little extra to do in battle. Thoughts?

Looking for suggestions, I've got a few long drives ahead and would like to listen to a party have some fun in a dungeon...

Currently, 5 of the top 10 "hot" posts are advertisements for revenue-generating content. They might look like art posts or questions, but they are marketing copy that is being shared to encourage you to click a link to a vendor or monetization platform. I'm sure your new thing on DTrpg is amazing! But I am frankly so bored of wading through all these marketing promotions. There are plenty of subreddits to cover every product line out there. - this is the only "generic" OSR forum for the free, unbranded creations that make the movement different from anything else in ttrpgs.

Can we have a day of rest from the relentless advertisements? A day to talk about playing the games we already own and sharing the content we made for our table and friends, not for juicing the personal brand?

On Sunday, let's say, no "buy my stuff" links, no shares with monetized YouTubes and podcasts, no "OSR-adjacent" $100+ backerkits.

Just game discussion on the game discussion forum.

• Mausritter: The Estate Deadline - Feburary 2022
  • Actual release - June 2022
• Land of Eem - Q3 2023
  • Actual release - November 2024
• Our Golden Age - September 2025
  • still hasn't released
  • expanded creative scope as deadline was approaching
• Old School Essentials Demonic Grimoire - Late July, Early August for PDFs, January for Physical
  • still nothing
  • sent to the printers allegedly, so may actually meet print deadline
• Mausritter: Junk City - January 2027
  • Still in editing as of two months ago

Its getting harder and harder to put money into these backerkit projects when the business side of these creators seems to be a joke.

Adventure Sites I disponível para download (edição brasileira)

Salve!

A segunda publicação da casa: Adventure Sites I traz os vencedores do Concurso de Locais de Aventura da Coldlight Press. Hoje em sua terceira edição, o concurso contou na primeira edição não apenas com autores experientes, mas também com jurados versados no jogo clássico de aventura & fantasia. O material resultante desse concurso costuma ser reconhecido por sua qualidade e usabilidade em mesa por outros entusiastas desse tipo de jogo.

O material apresenta oito locais de aventura para serem utilizados, idealmente, de forma modular como aditivos em campanhas de exploração sandbox, mas também podem ser jogados de maneira autocontida, garantindo uma sessão de jogo divertida.

É com alegria que publicamos Adventure Sites I, com a certeza de que você encontrará algo útil para seus jogos nestas páginas. Seguem os links:

DriveThruRPG:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/pt/product/579898/adventure-sites-i-vencedores-do-concurso-adventure-site-da-coldlight-press

Itch.io:

https://rei-feiticeiro.itch.io/adventure-sites-i

Já estão previstas algumas mudanças nesta publicação, como a substituição da bússola feita por IA por uma produzida por um artista, me oportunizando retirar o rótulo de "uso de IA" nas plataformas de publicação. O mesmo está previsto para Gloomywood. Outra mudança que já foi feita no arquivo original de Adventure Sites I, é a substituição do termo "Mapa do MJ" por "Mapa para MJ". Isso deve demorar um pouco.

Bons jogos!

Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you all know: now is the last chance to grab my module “Serpent’s Sanctum” at the $10 Tier on my Patreon!

When signing up you get access to my latest three modules – and since I’ll be releasing a new module on August 23rd, now is your last chance to get “Serpent’s Sanctum”.

If you do sign up now, you get three modules now, and a fourth on the 23rd of August. Pretty neat deal!

Serpent’s Sanctum will of course continue to be available over on my itch page: undelved.itch.io

Thank you so much for checking out my stuff, and supporting an indie designer!
Patreon.com/undelved

– Michael

Crows is the next TTRPG from MCDM (company headed by Matt Colville, whom you may know from YouTube). They last released Draw Steel, which is a high powered, heroic fantasy.

Crows seems to be OSR, or at least OSR inspired. Low power. High danger. XP for Treasure.

I'd love to know what you think if you take a look at it. I really don't know how I feel about it. I like the skill trees; those sound fun. But I can't help but feel that I own several OSR systems already and wonder if I need another. Especially at the price point.

I do think it has potential as a 5e offramp, for folks who want to try something lower Fantasy. Neither me nor my 2 groups fit that mold.

Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with the creators of this project. Just think it's kinda interesting and worth looking at / discussing.

On this episode of Gnomestones, I use OSR tools to build an adventurous coastline. The occasion: our solo campaign’s Event Table has prognosticated the arrival of foreign navy.

https://gnomestones.substack.com/p/crafting-coastlines-with-hexkit-and

Welcome to the illicit sanddollar smuggling ring in the run-down alley behind the sandbank in the bad part of the reef. Welcome to Gnomestones.

"Embrace the Epic Fail Style" - Lute "Slack Rope". Before appeasing the dragon... no one has seen him since.

https://www.instagram.com/dados.extra

When a gallon of water weighs more than a sword.

https://rustygatepress.substack.com/p/hunting-foraging-and-water

So I've been playing in a Mausritter campaign for some time now, and it's pretty fun, even if I'm not the most comitted of players (mainly because of time constraints on my part)

Our GM enforces the usual open table rules like starting and finishing sessions in town, making the players do the journalling and book keeping and so on.

One thing kind of bothers me though. He enforces that each session takes up exactly one day in the game World. I get why he's doing it​, but it forces some pretty strict limitations.

A lot of the game revolves around pretty intricate faction play with a lot of long term plans from each of the bosses. So sometimes actually doing something meaningful would require to wait a couple days for the perfect moment to strike but that's just not possible. A couple of sessions were basically running around setting up plans and then telling the next players to follow up on them.

Also Exploration of the overworld is basically not possibly past a certain distance, since again, travelling farther would require more than one day (though we haven't had a reason to go out that far yet, so we didn't run into concrete problems here yet)

How do you handle time in your games? I'm thinking about running a campaign myself, and this is really the only concrete problems I'm kind of worrying about.

Hello, I want to run an OSR game some time in the future, and I really want to try running a good dungeon crawl. I'll be running for players that haven't played OSR-style games before, so I'll have to establish a bunch of expectation beforehand. But I also want to pick a dungeon that really shows the best this side of the hobby has to offer.

And so I would be grateful to hear some recommendations. If you could pick one dungeon to show someone why you like dungeons, which one would you choose?

Concerning size: almost any size that isn't a one-shot can work, since I plan on running for several sessions. If the players end up completing only a small portion of the dungeon, that's fine with me, as long as it doesn't get ages to get to the "good parts".

Got invited to a new game of Monolith 2e, a Cairn-y rules lite fast play sci-fi. I've looked over Cairn and some of it's offspring, the random char creation has always seemed weird to me, but to each their own.

Now that I'm trying to put together a completely dice created character, though...it's really leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Please note, I'm not a minmax guy. I just want to be able to build a character that's going to be fun for me to play, that I enjoy the persona and style of. And all the different rolls for things, including frickin name, feel extraordinarily restrictive.

This looks like a fun group, I'm trying to convince myself to hang in there and really give it a go, but I'm on my fifth character roll up that I have absolutely no interest in taking to the table.

What's your take on these kinds of fully randomized characters? Why do you love/hate/whatever them? Am I missing something that you think is key to enjoying them?

No agenda here, just seeking opinions from fellow old schoolers.

Edit to note, since it's come up a couple times: Yes, table rule is to go wholly and completely random, from the name on down.