Two New Templates for GLOG Spells

I think one of the major appeals of the GLOG is the rules for spellcasting. Spellcasters know a certain number of spells and possess a certain number of Magic Dice, or MD. Whenever you cast a spell, you choose how many MD to invest in it. The spells all have variable effects. If you roll 1-3 you get the MD back to use again, 4-6 it's used up for the day. If you use two or more MD and roll doubles, something bad happens. If you use three or more MD and roll triples, something really bad happens.

Goblin Punch laid out the original rules for spellcasting. Coins and Scrolls rewrote them. Since then others have made tweaks here and there, but the basics haven't changed much.

(The relative popularity of the magic rules from the GLOG, DCC, and Wonder & Wickedness suggests something like a general theory of what some players want from magic in their roleplaying games - spells that can be cast more than once each day, unpredictable magical outcomes, the ability to invest extra resources in a spell to hopefully make it stronger, and a small risk of catastrophic failure that makes the decision to use magic inherently dangerous.)

Most GLOG spells have variable spell effects that depend on the number of Magic Dice spent to cast the spell, which is noted as [dice] in the spell description, or on the number you get by adding up the result of all the MD used in the casting, which is noted as [sum].

Notably, almost all GLOG rulesets allow casters a maximum of 4 Magic Dice, so the [dice] variable will range from 1-4, and the [sum] variable from 1-24.

A few have effects that simply get stronger the more dice you used to cast them, but not in a strictly numerical fashion. The most common examples are spells where the duration of the effect increases (such as from 1 round, to 1 turn, to 1 day, to 1 week) or where the size of the possible target increases (such as from human-sized, to horse-sized, to house-sized, to castle-sized).

It's also pretty easy to imagine spells that either create objects or manipulate them, where the number of MD determines either the material the objects are made of or the technological complexity of their construction.

 

 

from Little Witch Academia

 

I had a couple ideas for other ways to produce variable spell effects. Let's call them Dice Placement Spells and Random Effect Spells. Both would likely use a new variable we could call [number], which indicates the result showing on a specific MD. (Remember that fun mnemonic they taught you in Wizard School? "When dice equals one, number is sum!")

Dice Placement Spells are the more cerebral and gamey of the two. They have 4 possible spell effects, and you choose which effects will take place by assigning an MD to each one. If you use 1 MD to cast the spell, you get one effect; use 4 MD, get all four.

That's not that many decisions to make, but the thing that would turn this from a simple spell to a puzzle is if the different effects care about the [number] on their MD, particularly if different effects "care" in different ways. You'll probably want to be a little careful here to avoid inducing analysis paralysis on your players.

You could have effects that grant a +[number] bonus, effects that impose a -[number] penalty, effects that only work if [number] is equal to the target's HD, effects that always work but work better if [number] is equal to the target's HD, effects that expand the spell out to [number] additional targets or lengthen the spell to [number] additional rounds or turns. You could create an ongoing effect, where each round, something small happens based on [number], and then you subtract 1 from it until it reaches 0. You could create a countdown where each round, you subtract 1 from [number] and when it reaches 0 something big happens.

 

Random Effect Spells are more unpredictable and swingy. They have 6 possible spell effects, and you don't get to choose which ones will take place - instead, the [number] on each MD will tell you which effects you get. There are no choices to be made, just beautiful chaos.

Since the [number] of each MD determines which effect it activates, you can't use [number] as a variable in the spell's effect. You can set up interesting combos where one effect makes another more powerful. In a "dice placement spell" that would likely just result in the player choosing the combo every time, defeating the purpose of offering a choice - but in a "random effect spell" the combo can only happen by chance, making it more like a pleasant surprise when it turns up. Also, remember that doubles and triples cause spell failure, so for any successful spellcasting, each [number] will be different. It doesn't really matter what order you put the effects in, but the spirit of GLOG spellcasting suggests that the weaker effects should correspond to lower [numbers].

One final consideration with both these new templates is that because they produce spells with multiple effects, it would be easy to accidentally make them much more powerful than other GLOG spells. Individually, each effect should probably be weaker than a typical spell, so that when multiple effects happen at the same time, they add up to about normal.

Actual Play - GLOG Wizard City - Freshmen Year

The Wizard Grad School 1st Year Dungeon Exams

So I've finally gotten around to playing a GLOG campaign. The players are Josh and Peter from my regular online group. I'm GMing, although we agreed before we got started that we'd learn the rules together, play things pretty open, and not require homework from anyone, including me.

To that end, we had a "session zero" where we looked at a few different GLOG rules documents together, rolled up our characters, and had a "haven turn" where our characters hit the town before going into the dungeon the next time out.

We're using Goodberry Monthly's "Wizard City" setting, with the Wizard City Hexcrawl as the basis for in-town sessions, and his Under Gallax Hall kilodungeon as the site for our dungeon delves. The conceit is that we're playing wizard grad students, whose annual "exams" involve going into the dungeon under the university, possibly just because the other wizard professors want to prank the Torture Department which is housed down there.

So the first "night on the town" happens over the holiday break of the characters' first year of grad school, and the first dungeon delve is their first end-of-year exam. I should mention that Josh in particular is loving the gonzo-ness of the setting Martin has built.


Session 0 : First Year Winter Holiday

Peter, Josh, and I looked through A Blasted, Cratered Land's Mimics & Miscreants rules, and Coins and Scrolls' Many Rats on Sticks rules, and ultimately decided to go with MRoS as our GLOG ruleset (although we did borrow some equipment from M&M).

Then we rolled up our characters:
- Josh made Jimbo Chirrup, the grasshopperfolk garden wizard
- Peter rolled up Arivaderchi Zeuchinni, a human orthodox wizard
- I got Lunai Lovegood, a lunai orthodox wizard (from the moon!)

Orthodox wizards have a choice to roll on a short list of good spells or a long list of interesting spells. Peter took one of each and got Knock and Mirror Item. I rolled two interesting spells and got Horsebane and Battering Beam. Since I'm the GM, I played Lunai as rather passive and open to suggestions from her classmates, but for my first time using the GLOG, I wanted to get in on the fun a little bit.

Since our characters were all chartered wizards, they all had crippling student debt from their time as undergrads, and only a handful of pocketchange to spend. Well, except Peter. He sold off his wizard robes for some walking around money, and immediately hired a camp follower. He got a minstrel, who, we all agreed, must be Dandelion from The Witcher. Since he had all the cash, Arivaderchi Zeuchinni took the lead, wanting to visit the Hat Shop and the Krill Shop.

I rolled on Martin's campaign events table and got doubles. The first and most obvious result was that deep in the Student Ghetto, the bar known as The Wandering Monster animated and turned into a literal wandering monster. The three friends - and their minstrel! - went to the Hat Shop, where Arivaderchi could afford the rent on a couple hats, but not the deposit you have to put down beforehand. As they went back outside, muttering about unfair prices, the Wandering Monster strolled up and stole the Hat Shop's sign to wear as a hat before continuing on its reign of terror.

The group went to the Krill Shop next, where Arivaderchi hoped to treat his friends to the local cuisine, but they found it to be inedible for humans, and frankly for anyone who's not a whale, and so left empty-handed again, but again, their night was saved by the Wandering Monster, which ran up and began riding the Krill Shop like a mechanical bull.

Spurred onward by the spirit of adventure, the three grad students found the second random event, the Rooftop Dueling Federation hosting a wizard fighting tournament. Arivaderchi was trained as a war wizard, and he still wanted adventure, so he entered the contest. He got paired up against a wizard gang member - the doggy gangster Damien Knight of the Good Boyz, who is (and this is worth quoting) a "Method actor. Completely assumes the role of 'beloved cute dog that you must painfully put down'. Frequently acts death scenes gratuitously." So when Arivaderchi entered the rooftop field of honor, Damien promptly and quite dramatically played dead. With his opponent apparently defeated, Arivaderchi was declared the winner. A quick search of Damien Knight's pockets turned up ... a severed human tongue. Dandelion grabbed the prize out of his employer's hands and stuck it in his cap like macaroni.

With Dandelion following behind, the three friends linked arms and skipped away, setting out again into the night, the sky lit with red and blue flashing emergency lights and the sound of sirens like backing music for Dandelion's songs, as the Wandering Monster continued its own kaiju pub crawl across town. It was one of those magical nights, where yes, for once, the real magic really was the friends we made along the way.

Three friends enjoying a night on the town over winter holiday

Sessions 1-3 : First Year Final Exams

After another semester of studying, Jimbo Chirrup, Arivaderchi Zeuchinni, Lunai Lovegood, and Dandelion the bard entered the dungeons under Gallax Hall, with an ambiguous assignment whose purpose, instructions, evaluation criteria, pedagogical merits, and role in their overall graduate education all ranged from obscure to opaque. (Typical grad school, ammirite?) They marched downstairs with Arivaderchi bravely leading the way, and Lunai cautiously watching the rear. Their first stop was peeking into the office of Professor Sitch, who was glaring at them through the blinds on his office door. "I'm watching you, Zeuchinni... always watching..." Sitch warned them menacingly.

The group quickly ducked into the next room to get away from Sitch, and found themselves in the Bones Lounge, belonging to the Gallax U chapter of the Skull & Bones Society, and home to their club mascot, the skeleton "Mr Bones." Searching the seat cushions of Mr Bones's club chair turned up a couple coins and a key, and looking behind the donor portrait on the wall revealed a hidden door.

The hall behind the door had more portraits of the same donor, as an old man, as a dead man, as a wizened corpse, and finally as a skeleton. This last portrait had another hidden door to another lounge, this one occupied by several jovial seeming skeletons standing around a crystal decanter. Well, they seemed jovial until anyone looked like they might touch the decanter, when the room suddenly became very still. Jimbo and Arivaderchi had the bright idea to fetch Mr Bones, who came to life, happily quaffed the entire bottle in one long glug, and then seemed content to tag along with his new friends. The other skeletons all sulked, either because Mr Bone drank their good liquor, or because he used up all the bait for their student trap.

After making it through several secret doors in a row, the classmates felt sure there should be another, and tapping along the walls revealed the hollow sound of a neighboring room, but no obvious way to open anything. Arivaderchi cast his Knock spell and a hidden door blew open, devastating the plaster wall of the lounge. A horde of terrible looking animals, rats and dogs, including some that were possibly dead, along with the angry ghosts of the same, poured through the new opening, set upon the lounge skeletons as they scrabbled uselessly for the exit, and then tore down the hall to the Bones Lounge. Distant screams suggested that the plague of lab animals was causing quite a stir at the entrance. Dandelion played some storm music to accompany the mayhem. Mr Bones shrugged theatrically and gestured at the new door.


 
Inside, they found a ruined laboratory, obviously belonging to the Department of Torture. There were a dozen wrecked animal cages, and the floor was covered in dried blood and animal droppings. Searching through the detritus found a secret staircase going down embedded in a false cage (the only one not destroyed), a small fortune in platinum (perhaps grant money?), and three syringes labeled "zombie potion", which Arivaderchi, carefully tucked into his breast pocket. They also closed the secret door, hoping the janitors would just plaster over it again. "Brave, brave Jim Chirrup, bravely stole the grant" crooned Dandelion.

There was no other way out of the room, but in a few spots, crazed animals had long ago worn weak spots into the walls with their furious scratching, and the group managed to break another hole, winding up in a hall leading into the Academic Probation detention center. The skeleton jailer, Bones Malone, was making the rounds of the imprisoned students. One wept and cried out loudly. "Oh please feed me, I don't know the answer, if I knew any answers I wouldn't be in here, please!" Mr Bones chattered a joke to Bones Malone and the two shared some side-splitting, fall-on-the-floor laughter.

Arivaderchi ventured in among the cells. "Is someone there?" He saw that most of the students had been in detention so long they'd turned to skeletons themselves. "Please help me, they'll never let me out, I don't want to die!" Arivaderchi found a bored and jaded looking undergrad witch. He asked if she needed help, and she rolled her eyes at him. What-ever. "I need help! Oh god please help me!" Feeling a slight pang of guilt, Arivaderchi finally went to the crying student's cell, found an obviously unprepared freshman undergrad, and opened the cell door. "Oh thank you, I didn't mean to plagiarize, I thought I'd never get out of there!" Arivaderchi tried to give the kid the brush off, but the grateful student insisted on tagging along because he was too scared to find his own way back to the entrance. The witch looked scornfully at Arivaderchi and flounced back down onto her prison bed. What-EVER!

Bones Malone gave Mr Bones and Dandelion some hearty handshakes and pats on the back as the group left. They next found the Experimental Torture Lab, its walls painted black, its floor a depthless pool of black water. "Please don't make me go in there, I'm scared of the dark, I'm scared of everything!" pleaded poor Zygot, the pitiable freshman. Jimbo Chirrup decided to go in, and the door snapped shut behind him. He emerged a short time later, pale as a sheet, mumbling and stuttering. He had acquired a couple forms of madness, he developed a wandering mind that would enter a fugue state while traveling between locations, and was wobbled by the need to be drunk to read, cast spells, or sing.

Jimbo was visibly traumatized by his experience

Unfortunately, Arivaderchi and Lunai didn't have long to comfort Jimbo, because The Melted Muse, a glowing hot metal statue whose features had all melted away, rounded the corner and began lumbering toward the group. They were hit by a blast of hot air like opening an oven, and the temperature continued to rise as the statue staggered closer. "Oh god, what now! My nerves can't take this! I should have listened to my mother! Accountants never get burned up by statues!" Arivaderchi almost immediately regretted rescuing the sniveling young student, and tasked Dandelion with keeping Zygot out of the way. The group dashed away from the slow-moving creature and into the first room they could find, the office of Dr Kinsley, a faculty member in the Department of Torture.

Inside the office, a custodian was carefully dusting off Dr Kinsley's wall of awards and diplomas. Temporarily-illiterate Jimbo was as impressed as Zygot, but Arivaderchi and Lunai noticed that most of the papers had someone else's name crossed out and Dr Kinsely's penciled in in another handwriting. The group asked the custodian to deal with the out of control statue, and the worker quickly dashed out into the hall, where a lot of yelling and clanging could be heard. The group quickly started casing the office. Arivaderchi grabbed a couple of expensive looking medical textbooks. "B-b-but... stealing is wrong! They'll throw us all in detention again! The only spell I know is Circle of Gunpowder, I'll never survive in jail again!" Jimbo found a neat box of gold coins in the desk. "Brave, brave Jim Chirrup, stole another grant!"

The next room was Torture Laboratory S, where they found a magical pane of glass that kept shattering loudly and reassembling itself, and another custodian cleaning up some human-sized cages. After taking in the scene for a moment, the group closed the door and hustled further down the hall.

They next entered Dr Baun's office, but everyone but Arivaderchi was almost immediately forced back outside by splitting headaches and tinnitus that seemed to emanate from two brains in jars displayed prominently on the back wall. Arivaderchi helped himself to some textbooks about medicine and psychiatry, and used Mr Bones to carry the growing library of pilfered books.

The next room's door sign read "Quartering Pylons" which put everyone on edge. In each of the four corners of the room, large metal pylons with spherical heads faintly crackled with magical energy. The entire group crept very carefully along the wall, studiously avoiding the middle of the room, and the impetuous Arivaderchi Zeuchinni attempted to sabotage one of the arcane devices.

Once past that seeming peril, the group ducked into a janitor's closet, hoping for a moment to relax. Inside, they discovered a display of cleaning supplies that was set up almost like some sort of shrine or altar. Arivaderchi and Zygot both peered too closely at the swirling water in the central mop-bucket, and were pulled inside. Jimbo and Lunai watched, aghast, as Arivaderchi was seemingly flushed down to a deeper level of the dungeons under Gallax Hall, and Zygot was whipped around and around in the watery vortex until he drowned. With his employer vanished, Dandelion slung his guitar over his shoulder and walked away, singing to himself, "Toss a coin to your camp follower, oh college of plenty, oh college of plenty."

A long moment passed as Jimbo and Lunai stared at each other in horror, until another figure kicked open the door. It was Deeringer, the deerling drowned wizard. "I heard about your friend," he announced brusquely. "What? How? Who are you?" Deeringer introduced himself as a wizard private investigator and a survivor of the drowning of Atlantis. He also immediately convinced them that Arivaderchi had been carried to hell, "The same place that bastard ocean takes everyone who falls into its rotten grasp," since that is one of the drowned wizard's cantrips. Deeringer offered Jimbo his flask, and he managed to drink enough to restore his spellcasting ability before Mr Bones bogarted it and finished off the liquor. The group quickly rallied themselves to seek revenge against the ocean's cruel collaborators - the custodians who built the shrine The Torture Department!

Their next stop was Torture Laboratory F, where they found Dr Klaus sharpening his flensing knives and testing his whips. A failed reaction roll later, and Dr Klaus set upon them with a fois gras funnel, prepared to teach them a lesson in force-feeding torture. Lunai used her Battering Beam spell to try to push the hulking, Frankenstein-looking scientist backward, and tried to convince her friends to use this chance to run away. Dr Klaus was strong enough to push forward through the beam a couple times, alternately throttling Jimbo and Deeringer. He very nearly killed them both, and probably would have, if he hadn't been pushed out of arm's reach for most of the fight. Jimbo had good luck with his Magic Missile spell; the spell spirit returned to his brain to be recast several times before flying away for the night. Finally, the group decisively got the better of Dr Klaus, and cracked his skull against a table. Deeringer put a fois gras funnel into the scientist's mouth, filled it with corn, then kicked out a leg of the table to make it look like an accidental collapse. "A freak fois gras-ing accident. Happens all the time. We were never here. No one will suspect a thing." Deeringer felt certain he'd arranged the scene to disguise their coldblooded murder noble victory over an agent of the ocean.

Unable to take any of the valuable-looking whips from the room, the classmates "borrowed" Klaus's key and snuck into his office. They stole another four textbooks, and continued their habit of checking behind portraits. The oil painting of Dr Klaus's mother had a note tucked into its back: "If you've managed to steal this, then I have need of your services. Ask the bartender at the Wandering monster for a feline on the rocks." They gave the books to Mr Bones, pocketed the note, and hurried to replace the key in Dr Klaus's pocket.

Next they found Torture Laboratory D, but they could hear the sounds of a lecture (or maybe a practicum?) through the door, and decided not to check inside.

Next, the group entered the backstage area of the auditorium. There was no lecture going on at the moment, so the front of the stage and the seating area were dark. Jimbo was curious to investigate an alabaster statue of a rich donor, Mr Alabaster, while Deeringer and Lunai studied some colored levers. Deeringer first raised the house lights, then accidentally turned on a focusing ray meant to induce students to pay attention. Jimbo became fixated on the details of the statue. "Enemy of cats? Hmm. It's clearly blocking a secret door, but what's the mechanism? Hmm." Deeringer and Lunai got very interested in the levers and tried to guess what the last one would do before pulling it. (Lucky thing too - it was a death ray!) Eventually, the wandering monster check turned up a custodian, who turned off the fascinator and escorted them trio back to the entrance.

They were met by a crowd of mourners, none sadder than poor Mr Sitch, who was nearly inconsolable. "I ... I promised him! I told him I was always watching, but I wasn't watching! And now he's gone!" Deeringer, Jimbo, and Lunai made plans to divvy up their coins, fence the textbooks, and visit The Wandering Monster together over the summer. Jimbo was also very interested in using his student heath insurance to visit the university counseling center for help with his two traumatic difficulties.

Three school friends and their skeleton

Gains
786 in platinum coins
100 gp in gold coins
textbooks worth 10 gp, 15 gp, 20 gp, 20 gp, 30 gp, 30 gp, 45 gp, 45 gp, 50 gp, 60 gp

Losses
Arivaderchi Zeuchinni
Zygot the hapless freshman

XP
1026 for treasure (the textbooks re-sold for half their MSRP)
1026 ÷ 3 = 342 XP each, enough to reach 2nd level!

Director's Commentary
I feel like this campaign is off to a pretty good start. We've been enjoying the weirdness inherent Wizard City premise, and GLOG spellcasting rules are working out so far. The variability of whether you'll get your Magic Dice back after casting a spell produced some interesting results. Now that we're leveling up, there will also be a possibility of doubles-induced spell mishaps going forward. I suspect there might be a kind of mismatch between the expectations about currency in the rules and the setting, but it hasn't really been a problem, so I think I'm just going to ignore the possible discrepancy.

Since the GLOG is pretty rules-light, I've been tending to simply say yes when Peter and Josh propose doing something that seems like it would be part of a grad-student wizard's wheelhouse, and calling for roll-under-attribute checks for things that seem like there should be a chance of failure.

My only complaint about the rules so far is that I find the roll-under system to be non-intuitive for me in combat and other opposed-roll situations. When attacking, for example, you're supposed to roll the dice and hit a target number or lower, where the target is "your attack – (10 + their defense)", and somehow the order of operations there kept throwing me off. It helped me to think of it as "10 + your attack – their defense" and honestly, I almost want to make a table, or switch back to a roll-over system to make the mental math easier.

So far the only difficulty the no-prep approach is introducing to the game is figuring out who the various professors are, and what their personalities are supposed to be. If necessary, I might go so far as to print out the wandering encounter table and the "bestiary" of professors. The other other problem I'm having is that my lack of strict time recordkeeping (sorry not-sorry, Gary) makes it a little more difficult to use Martin's interesting structure where both the room-based encounters and the wandering encounters vary over the course of the day. I might either need to try a little harder at that, or figure out some sort of simplification.

Robbing Pathfinder - Combat Styles - Bear Crane Dragon

For awhile now, I've had this daydream that a lot of Pathfinder material could be converted to slightly simpler rules-systems where I would feel more able to use it at my table. I like the idea of Pathfinder. It's one of my favorite D&D 3.75 editions (although Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed might be my favorite). It's full of fun ideas, and it has lots of bold flashy art. Yes, it seems to largely be a game of fantasy superheroics, but so does most D&D, and in PF that means there are lots of interesting options for customizing your character.

My only problem with Pathfinder, really, is that its complexity means that neither I nor anyone I play with feels comfortable trying to run the thing. Which I don't mind, really, but I wish I had a way to use some of the cool character ideas that it includes. Hence my daydream of conversion.

So this is something of a thought experiment or proof-of-concept, to see if I can take something from Pathfinder and rewrite it so that I can use it. I want to start with the "combat style" feats that were introduced in Ultimate Combat. Each of these is a series of three feats that define a specific fighting style. One really obvious use for these is additional Mighty Deeds of Arms that DCC warriors could learn. Another possibility is as GLOG spells for characters like the adept class from A Blasted Cratered Land, or one of the muscle wizards from Goblin Punch or Ten Foot Polemic or Remixes and Revelations. In both cases, combining the feats into a single Deed or spell should hopefully provide some nicely variable results.

Sajan the Monk by Wayne Reynolds

Pathfinder Combat Style Feats as DCC Might Deeds

Boar Style - The warrior bites and scratches her opponent, tearing skin from flesh and flesh from bone, emerging red in tooth and claw. Although the style rewards a brawler who abandons herself to bestial fury, its moves were once carefully refined to inflict maximum horror and break the enemy's morale. Boar style is typically unarmed, but it can be enhanced with flensing knives, or by wearing cat-claws or metal teeth (as daggers). Its techniques are sometimes known to Orc bosses, Beastmen champions, and Hobgoblin sergeants.

A warrior can learn boar style by expending at least half her Intelligence or Personality score while in the throes of battle rage, by stealing a blood-soaked idol from the sacrificial altar of a tribe of humanoid berserkers, or by slaying a Giant Boar (combat statistics as Ogre) and eating its heart.

3 You bite and tear at your opponent. They must make a DC 10 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity.

4 You bite and tear at your opponent. The wound bleeds freely, and your opponent suffers 1d3 damage each round until they use an action to staunch the wound.

5 You bite and tear at your opponent, dealing an additional 1d6 damage. They must make a DC 10 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity.

6 You bite and tear at your opponent, dealing an additional 1d6 damage. The wound bleeds freely, and your opponent suffers 1d3 damage each round until they use an action to staunch the wound.

7+ You rip and tear, bite and gouge your opponent, dealing an additional 2d6 damage. Your opponent must make a DC 14 morale check or flee in terror from your ferocity. The wound bleeds uncontrollably, and they suffer 1d6 damage each round until they use a full combat round to staunch the wound.



Crane Style - The warrior stands on one leg, finding her center and balance like a reed that sways in the wind. Allowing her enemy to approach, she batters away her opponent's blows as a bird buffets the air with its wings. This is a measured and cerebral style that turns an opponent's strength against them. Crane style might be unarmed, or might utilize a quarterstaff or shield (shield bash deals 1d3).

A warrior can learn crane style by surviving a fight because her opponent fumbled what would have been the killing blow, by discovering a long-forgotten monastery among the mountain peaks, or by defeating an Air Elemental or an enemy wizard's Invisible Companion.

3 You sway to turn the force of your enemy's blow back upon them. The next attack that hits you, you automatically deal your current weapon's damage to the enemy who hit you.

4 You bend to redirect your enemy's strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you also deals its normal damage to another opponent.

5 You bend and sway to absorb your enemy's might and turn the force of their blow back upon them. The next attack that hits you deals only half damage. You automatically deal your current weapon's damage to the enemy who hit you.

6 You bend and sway to absorb your enemy's might and redirect their strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you deals only half damage to you, and also deals its normal damage to another opponent.

7+ You bend and sway, absorbing your enemy's might, turning the force of their blow back upon them, and redirecting their strike against their own allies. The next attack that hits you deals its minimum possible damage to you, and also deals its maximum damage to another opponent. You automatically deal your current weapon's maximum damage to the enemy who hit you.



Dragon Style - The warrior invokes the spirit of the dragon - her mind filled with the dragon's philosophy, her body emulating the dragon's movements, her heart aspiring to imitate the perfect being. Empowered by her own belief and ambition, the warrior is imbued with the nobility and sovereignty, the savagery and ferocity of the living dragon. Although rare, dragon style is sometimes practiced by entire tribes of Lizardmen and Kobolds, whose community life is devoted to reverence and awe for their sacred ancestor.

A warrior can learn dragon style by failing her saving throw against a dragon's breath and surviving, by establishing a hoard of unspent coins worth at least CL x 1000 gp to sleep within between adventures, or by intercepting a rival adventuring party of would-be dragonslayers and taking the dragon's revenge upon them.

3 The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +1d damage, and you roll +1d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d24).

4 You strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. Your enemy must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or drop everything they're holding and roll -1d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d16).

5 The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +1d damage, and you roll +1d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d24). Then you unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -1d saving throws (usually d16) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat.

6 You unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -1d saving throws (usually d16) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat. Then, you strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. The enemy hit by your attack must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or drop everything they're holding and roll -1d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d16).

7+ The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. Your attack deals +2d damage, and you roll +2d on your next saving throw against magic (usually d30). Then you unleash the dragon's roar. All your enemies roll -2d saving throws (usually d14) and their ACs drop by half until the end of combat. Finally, you strike like the slap of a dragon's tail. The enemy hit by your attack must make a DC 10 Fortitude save or they drop everything they're holding and roll -2d Action Dice until the end of combat (usually d14).

Crane Style by Dmitry Burmak

Pathfinder Combat Style Feats as GLOG Spells

Boar Style
R: touch, T: creature, D: 1 attack

Your biting, clawing attack deals [sum] damage to your target. The target must Save or become frightened and try to run away. An additional [dice] opponents also test their morale. The bleeding wound you inflict deals an additional [dice] damage to your target every 10 minutes until they receive medical treatment, typically in their own lair.

Some monsters' bodies have magical (or toxic!) properties when eaten. When you attack a creature with Boar Style, you may choose to consume 1 serving of its flesh. If you rolled doubles or triples, you automatically eat a serving.



Crane Style
R: self, T: self, D: [dice] enemy attacks

Your bending, swaying defense protects you from the next [dice] attacks that hit you. Set aside the Magic Dice used to cast Crane Style; none of them will return to your MD pool until after they are expended. The [dice] and [sum] devoted to this spell will diminish as its MD are expended.

When an attack hits you, the damage of that attack is reduced by [dice]. Then select one of the Magic Dice used to cast Crane Style. If the original damage of the attack is more than the amount showing on the chosen MD, you push the blow partially aside, and the attacker also deals [dice] damage with their current weapon to another opponent. If the original damage of the attack is less than the amount showing on the chosen MD, you reflect the blow back on the attacker, dealing [sum] damage with your current weapon to them. Finally, expend the chosen MD normally.



Dragon Style
R: self / 30' cone / touch, T: self / [dice] creatures / 1 creature, D: 10 min / 10 min / 0

The spirit of the dragon surrounds you like an aura. You unleash the dragon's roar and strike like a tail slap. This spell has three distinct effects: the first affects only you, the second targets multiple opponents at missile range, and the third affects a single opponent you strike in melee.

Until the end of combat, you have advantage on Saves, and all your attacks deal [dice] additional damage.

[Dice] enemy creatures are shaken with fear by the roar. They suffer [dice] damage immediately and have disadvantage on Saves until the end of combat.

Your stunning attack deals [sum] damage and causes your target to drop everything they're holding, to be too confused to cast spells, and to suffer disadvantage on all rolls until the end of combat.

Dragon Disciple Prestige Class by Jason Engle

Director's Commentary

Boar Style, Boar Ferocity, Boar Shred - When I opened the first summary description, I almost immediately regretted my decision to take this on. "Unarmed strikes deal bludgeoning or piercing damage." Oh, come on! Work with me, Paizo! Give me something, give me anything, that I can actually carry over into a system that doesn't care quite so much about damage types!

Fortunately, I kept reading, and there is more there, both in the overall description of the style, and in the complete rules text for the feat. My initial fears may have been a little bit of an overreaction. There are some additional effects to draw on, but what helps at least as much are the descriptions of what you look like, how you learn this, and how you can improve.

For the DCC Deed, I decided to use combine the three effects to produce an A, B, AC, BC, ABC pattern. Obviously, the A effect is the weakest and the C effect the strongest, so I had to think about which should be which. I suppose the platonic ideal combat style Deed would have five different effects, but this seems fine for now. Also DCC spells typically have a top effect that's quite a bit more powerful than the ones that came before it, and I wanted to include that feel here to emphasize the specialness of these moves.

It might be interesting if a Warrior had to "spellburn" Personality or Intelligence to use a style Deed, or if they risked some kind of "disapproval" if they roll low. The point of putting a cost on using one of these moves would again be to help it feel a little more special, and to justify them being a bit stronger than other Deeds.

I also decided to include a bit about how a Warrior could learn each Deed, which is something I first tried when I wrote for David Coppeletti's Class Alphabet, (expected publication date TBA). For these, I thought there should be a way to learn each style by having a particular experience during a fight, a way to "quest for it" on an adventure, and a way to learn it by fighting a specific monster.

For the GLOG spell version, I decided to just pile on all three effects to create a single spell. In terms of the damage dealt, this is like a variation on Magic Missile, and I'm okay with that. Magic Missile also hits automatically, and this one you have to land a punch first, so I think it's alright to add a little more power as a reward for making the hit. Also, since food-based campaigns seem to be relatively common among GLOG players, and since this is a bite attack, I added a culinary effect at the end.

Crane Style, Crane Wing, Crane Riposte - The original version is about reducing the attack roll penalty and increasing the AC bonus for "defensive fighting," and getting bonus counterattacks against an enemy who attacks you but misses. Neither DCC nor GLOG has a defensive fighting option, and reducing penalties isn't super interesting. What DCC does have already is a Mighty Deed that increases Armor Class, so I thought it might be more interesting to turn this into Damage Reduction instead. Having decided that, it's obvious that the counterattacks should happen if your opponent hits you, rather than if they miss you.

For the GLOG version, I realized I could make the spell feel a bit more cerebral by making the caster choose whether to deflect the attack onto another monster or reflect it back at their main opponent, so now you have to think about how to use up each Magic Dice you assigned to the spell, by picking whether to spend one that's higher or lower than the incoming damage. Since doubles are always bad in GLOG spellcasting, discarding a dice that has the exact same number as the damage roll does nothing. As you spend the dice, the power of the spell gets reduced too, so it's not like you're repeatedly Magic Missile-ing your opponent at full strength.

Dragon Style, Dragon Ferocity, Dragon Roar - Of these three, this was the hardest style to work with, because the mechanics are so gamey, and it's not necessarily that easy to visualize what's supposed to be going on. It kind of reminds me of a combo attack from a fighting video game. For the DCC version, I tried to avoid having to keep track of modifiers by using dice-size increases and decreases, which is a fairly standard mechanic for that game. For the GLOG version, I just awarded advantage and disadvantage on the rolls. That's also helpful because a lot of GLOG mechanics are roll-under, and this way you don't have to worry about subtracting a bonus or adding a penalty or whatever.

Overall, I think this went pretty well, although it took slightly longer to write than I'd hoped. Still, it's the kind of thing that makes a nice mental palette-cleanser in between other kinds of writing. There's no shortage of interesting Pathfinder content that could be converted, so I'll probably do more posts like this in the future.

Empire in Black and Gold - part 1

If Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire in Black and Gold isn't the GLOGosphere's favorite novel, it probably should be. In the first place, all the characters are technically human, but they're also all "insect-kinden", members of fantasy races and societies who liken themselves to different insect species, bear some physical resemblance to their namesakes and bear some supernatural powers that resemble them too. In the second place, the setting is an industrial, pre-apocalyptic world where the various societies of the Lowlands are on the cusp of a catastrophic invasion by an unstoppable army from just outside their borders.
 

 
All the different insect-kinden have access to what are essentially psychic powers called "The Art." A person can learn to access their Art by meditation, and it manifests in different ways in the different human races, and apparently there's some variation among individuals of the same race. (Only some Beetle-kinden can fly, for example, and those who can are much slower and clumsier than any other flying race.) When someone summons their "Art-wings", they appear like they're made of light, and the same is true for some other physical manifestations, like the Wasp-kindens' "Art sting." Art also lets Ant-kinden communicate telepathically and Spider-kinden manipulate people's emotions, but it ALSO also lets the Mantis-kinden grow bone-blades from their forearms, and it supposedly accounts for the Beetle-kinden's superior durability.

Tchaikovsky refers to the human races using capital letters, and actual insects using lowercase. So "Beetle-kinden" and "Beetle" refer interchangeably to humans, while "beetle" refers to the insects. There's not much animal life of any kind in the novel, but aside from humans, I think that horses are the only mammals we see. Meanwhile insects are sometimes as large as horses or elephants, and fulfill similar domesticated roles.

The Lowlands are a relatively self-contained region, protected from their neighbors by ocean on two sides, desert on a third, and a "The Great Barrier Ridge", a very Grand-seeming canyon that led me to spend a little time pondering if Tchaikovsky had set his novel in the far future of the real world. I think actually the geography here is supposed to kind of resemble Central and South Asia, but also maybe Southern and Eastern Europe, and the invading Wasp Empire seems like both the Mongol Horde in some ways, and like the Roman Empire in others.

The most industrious people are the Beetle-kinden, who control the liberal, cosmopolitan college city of Collegium and the sprawling, industrial-capitalist city of Helleron. Beetles are shorter than the other races and fatter. They're also the most mechanically adept - or "Apt" - and are the most similar to any readers who hail from liberal democracies in the contemporary West. Three of our viewpoint characters, Stenwold, Che, and Totho, are all Beetle-kinden.

Stenwold Maker reminds me a little of Isaac dan der Grimnebulin from China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. He's a middle-aged man of science, confronted with problems whose origins lay outside his worldview. I think the two are cut from the same cloth, and Isaac's life might be a bit like what Stenwold's life would have been like, if he hadn't adopted an infant daughter and raised her, hadn't adopted his niece as a ward to give his daughter a sister, if he had the opportunity to devote himself to his machines, instead of being forced by circumstance to become a spymaster and a statesman, so that he could learn about the Wasp Empire's activities, and try to influence Collegium's policy against them. (I guess he's also a little like Benjamin Franklin, now that I write this out.)

Cheerwell Maker, "Che", is Stenwold's niece and ward. When I think of her I usually just see Glimmer from the new She-Ra series. Totho is Stenwold's apprentice. The other two viewpoint characters are Tynisa, a Spider-kinden woman who Stenwold raised as his daughter, and Salma, a visiting prince from the Dragonfly Commonweal who understands the importance of opposing the Wasps. Spiders are incredibly adept at emotional manipulation, and Dragonflies just seem to be generally very graceful. We also see a Mantis Weaponmaster, Tisamon, in action, and he's the sort of fighter who can mow through an unlimited number of enemy combatants like an out-of-control grain threshing machine, the kind of fighter who basically can't be defeated in normal combat, because there simply isn't room to surround them with enough opponents to actually defeat them. (If Dragonflies remind me a bit of D&D's monks, Mantis-kinden are like barbarians with unlimited rage. If you used this as a setting for a game, you might want race-as-class character classes, or you might want to give each race 2-3 classes that are tied to it.)

The other place the Lowlands reminds me of is the fantasy East Africa of the Charles Saunders' Imaro stories. Saunders' Nyumbani is filled with a variety of societies and ethnicities, but his heroes are from beyond the boundaries of the lands any of the other characters are familiar with. They have "powers" that are common among their peoples, and those peoples are themselves repeatedly described as "semi-mythical" when Saunders explains how they seem to the majority of Nyumbanians. Imaro himself is a raging warrior whose upbringing resembles a fictionalized version of the Maasai peoples' traditional lifestyle. Pomphis is a pygmy sage who seems to have read and to know everything (a bit like the "lore" ability of D&D's original bards, hmm...), and Tanisha comes from a society that I think is supposed to seem a little like the Nubians after the end of their rule of Ancient Egypt. The point is, in both Saunders' world and Tchaikovsky's we have several heroes from distant lands, whose appearances and abilities seem almost supernatural to local observers.

As I mentioned, the Lowlands are in the midst of an ongoing, Beetle-led industrial revolution. The other "Apt" peoples are the Ant-kinden, whose skin-color derives from their city, and whose cities war endlessly with each other, and the Fly-kinden. (Incidentally, Ants from the city of Tark, and later, desert-dwelling Scorpion-kinden, are the only peoples described as having "pale" or "white" skin, although the Wasps are all blonde, I believe. Everyone else has a skin-tone that would make them a person of color in contemporary America, except the moths who are grey, and the people of Mynes, who have blueish skin.) Spiders have their own kingdom to the south of the Lowlands, and Dragonflies live further north. The Lowlands used to be dominated by the Moths, who enslaved most of the other races, but by the time the book opens, Moths mostly live in caves beyond the outskirts of their old cities.

The Wasps are also Apt, and they're organized as a conquering army. Literally every Wasp male is a soldier, and all their other work is performed by slaves taken from their conquered peoples. From the beginning of the novel, their Empire is large, unified, organized, and preparing to pour into the Lowlands and conquer everyone. The Beetles have been selling them weapons for decades, every Ant city expects that the Wasps will conquer the other Ants and leave them alone, so Stenwold Maker is nearly alone as a voice of reason. Slavery is a common enough practice in the Lowlands (and some characters even observe that Helleron's factories practice a kind of wage-slavery) but if Lowlands' slavery is like the kind practiced throughout the Ancient World, then the Wasps' slavery is more like the chattel slavery that Europe and America perfected between the Age of Exploration and the Civil War. That is to say, all slavery is bad, but some kinds are indeed worse than others, more dangerous, more dehumanizing, less escapable - and the Wasps plan to convert all the peoples of the Lowlands into property.

We get introduced to the Beetles and their scientific world-view first, and only later learn that the "in-Apt" races - the Old races who ruled during the Age of Lore before the Beetles' and Ants' revolution overthrew them - that they believe in magic. "Magic" is separate from Art, which is part of why I think of Art as being more akin to psionic power, and for most of the book, it's not clear whether the Beetles' or Moths' worldview is more accurate. Certainly within the industrial society the Beetles, Ants, and even Wasps live in, there is no room for or appearance of magic. It's only what happens outside those societies that makes magic's existence seem possible.

I should mention, the in-Apt peoples literally can't use technology. They can't pick locks or even fire crossbows. Individually, their citizens fly better, fight better, and are just generally more cultured and skilled than the masses of the Apt, but Beetles can make machines, and use them, and overwhelm the others with their sheer numbers. Beetle equality is the key here, because of course the "citizens" of Spider or Dragonfly society doesn't really include their lower classes, who are unlikely to receive such extensive education or training to develop their abilities. And there just aren't enough aristocrats to defeat entire armies of the middle class. (If you were modeling this in a game, you might assign Technology Levels to different species, and use those to restrict their ability to use various equipment. In a kind of balance, the Old races get more innate powers, while the Apt races get better tools.)

And then the Wasps, like something from Max Weber's nightmares, represent a kind of rationality run amok, able to outnumber and out-compete literally every society they encounter. While the Beetles' universal citizenship and compulsory education give them their military and economic edge over traditional societies like the Moths, it also makes them vulnerable to the authoritarianism and universal conscription of the Wasps.

(After writing this, I checked to see if there was a sequel, and learned that Empire is the first in a series of 10 books. I'm not especially interested in watching the kind of thumb-twiddling you have to do to keep mostly the same set of characters in the same unresolved narrative arc over the course of like 3-4 thousand pages, but if you enjoy reading fantasy series, I suspect you could do worse.)

Who is the GLOGosphere?

Several times on here, I've referred to a "GLOG-o-sphere" - a sub-scene of RPG bloggers who use the Goblin Laws of Gaming, aka, the GLOG. So just who is this GLOGosphere? Who are the GLOGgers?

It's worth asking because right now, honestly, they're one of the hottest corners of the RPG blogosphere. Compared to some other sleepy quarters, they're practically incandescent with activity and interest.

Aside from their shared love for the GLOG ruleset, what else do they have in common? For one, they like writing new classes, and because the GLOG's interesting magic rules are probably its biggest selling feature, they especially like writing new magic-using classes.

For another, they like writing random tables, on any topic, the more the merrier, and they're fond of using push-button technology to get the computer to roll all the dice for you at ... well, you know.

What else? Well, I think they're mostly younger than me, Nintendo-Millennials rather than Atari-Millennials, and possibly younger than that.

They use pseudonyms a lot more than the other sectors of the RPG blogsphere that I frequent.

They're energetic, posting fairly often.

And they seem to know how to have fun. They like what they're doing, and their collective project is more fun-building.

Along the way, they seem to have mostly avoided getting involved in any of the drama that's so often embroiled the OSR. There's no edition-warring going on here. There's no, or very little cult-of-personality that I can detect. Arnold K of the Goblin Punch blog and Skerples from Coins & Scrolls are probably the closest thing the GLOGosphere has to leaders, and while their roles are a bit like "the old prophet" and "the new evangelist" the other GLOGgers mostly seem to get on with borrowing and adapting their stuff before going straight back to writing and gaming. There's not much in the way of hero-worship, or interpersonal gossip of any sort, at least not anyplace that I'm able to see it.

There's a definite do-it-yourself / make-it-your-own sensibility across these blogs. One person will write a new class, and a half-dozen people will write supporting material for it or incorporate it directly into their setting, and a half-dozen more will write modified versions of the original to better suit their own sensibilities. Nothing is sacred, nothing is off-limits, everything can be improved, or at least customized, including the rules themselves, which is why so many GLOGgers have their own houserules documents.



Aside from its magic system, which I'll describe more in a second, the primary appeal of the GLOG has got to be its overabundant, gonzo variety. Vanilla fantasy isn't even a distant sight in the rearview mirror in these games. Want to play a weasel who rings magic bells, a spider paladin, or a seething pile of goblins who function as a single character and also found a cannon right after leveling up? Well, reader, you're in luck! You'd have to go to the Lizardman Diaries to find a wilder list of random player-character races (and to be honest, he's probably the OSR blogger who's most similar to the GLOGgers), and the vast array of classes is like everything I wanted from Pathfinder distilled into bite-sized flavor-concentrated portions.

The creative magic system seems to be everyone's favorite part of the GLOG, and I suspect that alongside living the gonzo fantasy dream life, the chance to use this style of magic is one of the key attractions of the rule system. Spells have no level, and can be cast multiple times per day. Magic-using characters have one or more Spell Dice, and they choose how many of these they want to roll each time they cast a spell. Both the number of dice and the sum total showing on the dice affect the spell's outcome. You get those dice back after casting the spell ... most of the time. Also, if you roll two or more Spell Dice and get doubles, there's a mishap; if you roll three or more and get triples, there's a catastrophe. (The mechanics are quite different, but the FEEL isn't very far off from DCC.) Spells are also posited to be living beings, like Espers in Final Fantasy, or whatever the hell Jack Vance was talking about in Rhialto the Marvellous. Magic-users are like Pokemon-collectors, except instead of storing their creatures in crystal balls, the spell-monsters go live inside the wizard's head. And yes, sometimes that means that when two spells love each other very much they go on to make little spell babies, and sometimes it means that the specific magic specimen inside your skull evolves, or mutates, or whatever you want to call it. Each spellcasting class has its own bespoke list of 12 spells to potentially learn, which means that each of these classes has its own unique feel. There are garden-variety wizards (as well as garden-wizards) but there are also deeply, fantastically weird magicians out there as well.

And you know what? These kids won me over. You can expect to see more GLOG content on here in the future. For now though, let's take a whirlwind tour and meet the GLOGosphere.



Blessings of the Dice Gods
blogger: Jeff Russell
founded: January 2010
location: http://blessingsofthedicegods.blogspot.com/

Because I decided to list these in chronological order based on their start dates (rather than attempting to come up with any kind of hierarchy) the first blog on my list isn't a full-time GLOG blog, or at least it didn't start out as one. Blessings of the Dice Gods went on hiatus in late 2016 as a general OSR blog, but when he came back in mid-2018, he was a GLOGger.

(I also JUST noticed that he mentions me in his post on types of creative problem-solving in RPGs. Thanks for the shout-out, Jeff! My sense of what I might have to contribute as a blogger has been a little different since I read The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon. She points to "critics," "collectors," "joiners," and "spectators" as modes of participation alongside "creators." The idea that everyone should, or even can be "a creator" is like a pernicious myth that deters people from other forms of participation and creativity. And those other contributions are at least as valuable to maintaining the scene as the "creators" are.)

Since then, he's written an automatic GLOG character generator and a lore-heavy automatic monster generator. He has a Fiend character class with a unique take on GLOG magic (this is going to be a recurring theme in the entries below). Really, his whole Fellhold campaign setting is made to work with the GLOG. And in another recurring theme among GLOGgers, he has a number of really nice random tables. I'll call out my favorite, a table of random inspirations from Princess Mononoke. Also, while it predates his introduction to the GLOG, his Middenheim campaign setting is worth a look.



Goblin Punch
blogger: Arnold K
founded: November 2012
location: http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/

Arnold K of Goblin Punch is the original progenitor of the GLOG, and the reason anything like the GLOGosphere is able to exist. His entry was the hardest one for me to write, because he's just so prolific (albeit slightly less so recently), and because his blog has a bit of everything, from lore for his earlier Eldritch Americana and later later Centerra home campaign settings, to essays about game design and game mastery, to thoughts about game mechanics (some of which form the original mechanical basis of the GLOG), to just interesting ideas that he's thinking about at the time.

I saw Arnold K once describe himself as writing creepypasta in the form blog posts, and that seems like a fair description of some of his entires, like his VERY popular post about a spell that summons Catherine, and this kind of odd one about how foxes don't exist, the god of foxes don't exist, and how there's a city of foxes that also doesn't exist and ALSO also your player characters can't travel to it. Then again, he also wrote about how time-traveling dinosaurs have taken over all of the past, so it's sort of a matter of personal preference, I guess, which of his "creepypastas" you like and which you don't care for. You'll see links to fan favorites all over the GLOG blogs listed later in this piece, as pretty much every GLOGger has used at least one Goblin Punch post as a jumping off point to write something more. He's arguably one of the most influential bloggers in the OSR, in terms of writing things that other people cite and use.

From the very earliest days of the Goblin Punch blog, you can see him toying with discreet houserules elements which will eventually get compiled into the GLOG, starting, I think with his "lunch rule" about how rations help you regain hit points. There is quite literally too much there for me to link to all of it, or even a sizable fraction. A couple years after starting the blog, he announced that he was starting to put his various houserules together, and a couple years after that, he announced that he'd finished his initial draft of the GLOG. Following that initial announcement, he updated the GLOG many times over. He also made PDFs of all his rules available for free.

Arnold K's tinkering with spellcasters and magic starts, I think, with this post about monastic wizards, which includes the ideas that each monastic order should have a very specialized spell list, and that there should be as many monastic orders as player interest will support. With that philosophy to guide him, and those starting spell lists as a kind of template, the doors were pretty much thrown open for Goblin Punch (and every subsequent GLOG blog) to write lots, and lots, AND LOTS of wizards, including the Noise Wizard, the Hair Wizard, the Spherical Wizard, and the much-imitated Biomancer. His next major post about spellcasting essentially laid out his philosophy that spells are living creatures who can be captured and trained to live inside wizard brains. That idea is ONE OF the most compelling ideas about magic in the GLOG, and it opens the door to ideas like the one that spell-spirits can mutate and evolve inside your head. By the time he first laid out all his major spellcasting ideas in one place, he had pretty designed the system that's still used today. After one more post about differentiating different kinds of spellcasters, he was ready to introduce the class that I believe is most responsible for the GLOG's popularity, the original GLOG Wizard.

Most of the other GLOG classes appear in the PDF rules without getting their own blog posts, but I do want to point out a few other classes he wrote that, alongside his philosophy of "as many wizard schools as you can dream of" probably helped push the later GLOGgers to embrace their creativity. The first is the Really Good Dog, which is probably the inspiration for all the later animal classes you'll see in my list below. There's also the Bug Collector (plus some bonus ecosystems) who is like a Pokemon collector, an model I always enjoy seeing variations on. There's also the Mathematician, a very different spellcaster that is awesome in its weirdness.

Arnold K also wrote about a philosophy for designing character races that says that they should get active abilities instead of static bonuses. (He also says that players should be encouraged to build their parties entirely from a single race, whether that's all-human or all-orc, but that idea is pretty much instantly abandoned by the rest of the GLOGosphere in favor of heterogenous parties made up of menageries full of animal-people.)

Alongside developing the GLOG, Goblin Punch is also a repository for ideas about old-school style roleplaying. Again, he's written way WAY too much for me try to link more a little of it, but I'll give some special attention to a small series of posts about how to GM well. He starts by observing that the maxim "rulings, not rules" does not, by itself explain what good ruling would look like. He goes on to talk about his philosophy for when to write a rule, his philosophy for when to use the dice, and his philosophy for how to make rulings well. He also compiles a longlist of old-school style roleplaying challenges. A final post, not exactly in this series, also talks about how he writes adventuring scenarios.



To Distant Lands
blogger: Alex Chalk
founded: January 2014
location: http://todistantlands.blogspot.com/

To Distant Lands is another blog that's not really a GLOG blog per say, but he does have a couple posts about the GLOG. The first is a charming little class called the Muse that looks like it would be fun to play. More recently, he's also written a 30-minute dungeon, which is an adventure template established by another GLOGger that seems to rapidly be becoming a favorite among the GLOGosphere. Outside of those entries, his houserules heavily reference Goblin Punch, and he has a table of random demands from asshole wizards, and a roll-all-the-dice table for random weird plants. Unrelated to the GLOG specifically, I thought his essay about the difference between torches and search checks was thought-provoking.



Wayspell
blogger: Christopher S
founded: March 2016
location: https://wayspell.blogspot.com/

As far as I can tell, Wayspell's first GLOG contribution was writing a couple new ecosystems for Goblin Punch's Bug Collector class. Since then, he's been working on cyberpunk inspired GLOG content, starting with failed cyberpunk careers, a Hacker character class, and other cyberpunk character types like "The Face" and "The Street Samurai." To go along with those, he's written some general equipment and some cybernetic augmentations for cyberpunk characters.



Same is Shark in Japanese
blogger: Lucas Exempli Gratia Smith
founded: March 2016
location: https://sameissharkinjapanese.blogspot.com/

Technically, this blog is named ふかひれスープ. He started GLOGging with a few classes based on Edo Japan, like the Samurai and the Ninja. More recently he's been posting classes based on 8-bit video games, I think, and made a list of spell-songs for punk genre Bards.



Rise Up Comus
blogger: Josh
founded: June 2016
location: http://riseupcomus.blogspot.com/

Rise Up Comus is another recent convert, who seems to have been won over by the possibilities that GLOG rules open up for playing a Monk. His earlier campaigns include an all-Hobbit adventure, and a take on the Knights of the Round Table. He does have a couple good random tables though - random topics for roleplaying conversations around the campfire, and encounters with creatures from medieval illuminated manuscripts.



Fists of Cinder & Stone
blogger: Connor W
founded: July 2016
location: http://fistsofcinderandstone.blogspot.com/

Fists of Cinder & Stone has written a couple of GLOG wizards, specifically the bard-like Noise Wizard and the Hungry Hungry Hippo the Lard Lord Lipomancer. (In accumulating the links for this post, I've noticed that a lot of GLOGgers seem to be interested in scifi, musician characters, seafaring, and culinary campaigns. You might notice those as recurring themes as you read on.)

Most of his writing is devoted to his home campaign, a kind of fantasy Ancient Greece called Anemos. Anemos is a richly-imagined setting, and the back catalog there rewards you for investigating it, especially if you're interested in nautical campaigning. He's written a random god generator for it, and a very flavorful set of tables for generating random spirits and the favors they demand. He also has posts about magic tattoos and tattoos as armor. He also has a short, neat series of posts about encounters with dryads, encounters with questing tree-knights, and foraging for terrain-specific potion ingredients.



The Furthest Lands
blogger: Moses McDermott
founded: November 2016
location: http://www.furthestlands.com/

The Furthest Lands is primarily focused on developing a campaign setting in the city of Booezor and the megadungeon beneath it. To that end, he posts a lot of encounter tables, about dedicated to regions of his megadungeon, and the other half devoted to common terrain types in the wilderness. He's written one GLOG class, the Jellimentalist, a very well-named slime wizard. He also has several good random tables, including random familiars, random troll mutations, and random starting equipment that can also show up on "search the body" checks.



The Bogeyman's Cave
blogger: Tristan Tanner
founded: February 2017
location: http://bogeymanscave.blogspot.com/

The Bogeyman's Cave almost didn't make my list of GLOGgers. After all, there's no "GLOG" tag in his list of blog topics. There's no plethora of wizard archetypes like other GLOGgers write. Most of his monsters say they're "for Holmes Basic".

But then again, he has three different push-button random generators in his sidebar. He wrote the post asking "what are your settings core themes?" that other GLOGgers like to answer. He seems to have invented the incredibly popular 30-minute dungeon format, and he's written A LOT of 30-minute dungeons. And if you look at his houserules document, JABOM aka Just A Bunch Of Mechanics, you see things like races that re-roll one ability score and have one main benefit and one main drawback. You see classes that only go up to level 6. So is the Bogeyman's Cave a GLOG blog? If not, he's the closest GLOG-adjacent blogger I've found yet, and probably deserves "honorary" status on the strength of the 30-minute dungeons alone. Depending on your reading of JABOM though, he might unquestioningly be a GLOGger, albeit one who never uses the word GLOG. (Also, come on, if I'm counting people who only posted a single GLOG class, it's not like I'm setting a high bar to count.)



Coins & Scrolls
blogger: Skerples
founded: February 2017
location: https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/

I can't tell you how much it surprises me that it took this long to get to Coins & Scrolls, because he's probably done more than any other GLOGger, possibly even more than Goblin Punch, to promote and popularize the GLOG. Arnold K posted more as he was developing the GLOG and then less shortly after releasing it, but Skerples leapt into the breach to help popularize the new ruleset, posting hot and fast pretty much from the very beginning.

Where even to start with this guy? I mentioned Goblin Punch's advice on designing fantasy races, but it was Coins & Scrolls that published the first longlist of random races, almost all of whom are animal-people, and established the oft-repeated format of allowing one ability score re-roll, granting one benefit, and imposing one penalty. He's also written advice for designing GLOG races. (These "advice columns" are a recurring feature on his blog, and they're one of several ways he contributes to the collective strength of the GLOGosphere.) 

Similarly, he wrote his own Wizard archetype, and immediately began filling it out with entries like the Orthodox Wizard, the Garden Wizard, the Spider Wizard (the first in what you'll see is a recurring fad among GLOGgers to write animal-themed wizards), and another version of the Biomancer. To go along with these, he's written a condensed version of the GLOG's spellcasting rules, a list of 100 spells in the GLOG format, and advice for designing GLOG wizards.

In addition to his many wizards, he's written several other good GLOG classes. The most influential, probably, is the Many Goblins (based on Against the Wicked City's the Extras class), where "the character" is a composite of numerous fictional individuals who function as a unit. (Basic Red's the Financier is probably the most recent version of this basic idea.) He's also written the Exorcist as a kind of cleric substitute, and the Bell Exorcist, which I think is his most interesting version. He also has a GLOG barbarian, a GLOG sorcerer, the Cannonneer (my personal favorite), the Goliard (a louche wastrel possibly based on ATWC's the Rake class), and a whole host of pirate classes (including, yes, the Crew, a composite class of bumbling pirate incompetents), to name only a few. As with races and wizards, he also has advice on writing GLOG classes more generally.

He wrote Tomb of the Serpent Kings, everyone's favorite introductory dungeon, and he's written a variety of other campaign settings, including the Veinscrawl (an adaptation of Veins of the Earth), and his current project, the Magical Industrial Revolution. These are system-neutral, but Tomb of the Serpent Kings, especially, is a popular adventure with other GLOGgers. He's written advice for gourmet campaigning (and a Cannibal character class to take advantage of all those delicious humanoid monsters.) He has his own GLOG houserules document, a second pirate-themed GROG houserules, and a nice review of the original GLOG.

What else? I would be remiss if I didn't mention Skerples' ongoing efforts to bring more medievalism in to his own (and everyone else's) roleplaying. He recommends filling the background of your campaign with wars and plagues. He has a good list of medieval occupations and medieval "camp follower" NPCs. There's more, really A LOT more, there, but for our purposes, this is a good starting point.



Journey into the Weird
blogger: Chris Wilson
founded: March 2017
location: https://journeyintotheweird.blogspot.com/

Journey into the Weird really likes writing sword using / sword making wizards. The Forge Wizard is his most recent version of the concept, but there are 2-3 earlier version in his back catalog. His other semi-ongoing project is writing GLOG conversion of Gathox Vertical Slum. He also wrote a Druid class and a Woodland Protector archetype for it. Like many others, he has his own houserules, and he's given some thought to how GLOG spellcasting works, and what some of its limitations might be.



Throne of Salt
blogger: Dan
founded: May 2017
location: http://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/

Throne of Salt is one of the most active GLOGgers. He has a couple active campaign settings - Mother Stole the Fire, set in mythic times when the world was young and the gods were active, and Great Discape (formerly Danscape), which is a venue for planet-hopping science fantasy. (Perhaps relatedly, he's also a big Mothership fan.) He's written several interesting GLOG classes. The Folk are his version of elves, are fascinating, rather than gaining levels normally, their level changes with their current amount of fairy-ness versus worldly-ness. He's also written a Priest class and a Book Club Witch archetype. He has the Adipomancer as another food-themed class, and a Unified Theory of Food for culinary campaigning. And for scifi fans like me, he has the Thaumonaut, a wizard who wears a space suit, and the Spaceship, so you can play an actual spaceship as your character.

Throne of Salt is also quite fond of writing mini-bestiaries. Among the more interesting of these are his guide to "mundane" animals, his guide to what happens when animals eat human flesh, his two posts about Linnaean monsters, and a list of mutations based on real-world animal abilities. He also has some good random tables, including random Biblical events, and random character beliefs.



The Furtive Goblin's Burrow
blogger: The Furtive Goblin
founded: July 2017
location: http://furtivegoblingaming.blogspot.com/

The Furtive Goblin's Burrow has one GLOG class, the Orc Haruspex. Most of the rest of his blog is worldbuilding for his Ivory Tower University campaign setting. At times, I'm not sure if he's writing prosody actual play reports, or if he's writing fiction about adventurers in his campaign setting.



DMiurgy
blogger: Wizzzargh
founded: July 2017
location: http://wizzzargh.blogspot.com/

DMiurgy started his blog by posting a Silk Wizard and an alternate GLOG alchemist. He very quickly posted his own houserules document, Nightmare GLOG, and got to work writing things like a combined character race/occupation table for Noonlanders, Daylanders, and Moonlanders, the three broad cultural groups in his World of the Wolf Moons campaign setting. He also has a neat post about civilization-destroying dragons. More recently though, he's posted a critique of his own houserules, and it's not clear to me that he's still using the GLOG either to guide his writing or run his games.

In both joining and leaving (?) the GLOG, Wizzargh seems to have shared similar thinking to Lungfungus of Melancholies & Mirth. He recently posted a critique of having too many classes in your game, and later a more full-throated critique of the GLOG that he subsequently deleted from his blog. In fact, he seems to have deleted all GLOG-related posts from his blog's history, and to have edited the remaining old posts to remove their GLOG content, which is why Melancholies & Mirths doesn't make this list. (He really did a LOT of deleting. His 2017 archive dropped from 57 posts to 14. I'm not privy to the details of exactly why he did this.) DMiurgy might be a retired GLOGger, but his back catalog is still available to anyone who's interested in it.



Animate Kratocracy
blogger: Henry V
founded: August 2017
location: http://animatekratocracy.blogspot.com/

He hasn't posted much, but Animate Kratocracy is one of my favorites for his flavorful accounts of his Anerion campaign setting, home to the City of Copper and Brick, which seems to exist in a kind of Baroque/Victorian era, and to involve space travel, so on both accounts, naturally I'm interested. His GLOG-specific writing has been converting material from Mazirian's Garden to GLOG rules. He's also written a few good random tables, like random ways for wizards to recover their spells, and random ongoing wars.



Remixes & Revelations
blogger: Yami Bakura
founded: August 2017
location: http://www.remixesandrevelations.com/

Even among GLOGgers, Remixes & Revelations has written A LOT a lot of wizards. He's also applied a few interesting ideas to transform the Wizard class. The ability to breed spells intentionally is now a standard class ability, as is "astral fishing" - casting one spell out on a silver thread as "bait" and hoping to "catch" a second spell from the Astral Sea. Instead of the standard Mishaps on doubles and Dooms on triples, wizards now get Chaos on doubles and Corruption on triples - and both doubles and triples grant a random number of Doom Points. Accumulate 10 doom points and suffer the Doom of Fools, accumulate 20 and suffer the Doom of Kings, and accumulate 30 and suffer the Ultimate Doom. You can look at that megapost I linked to above for examples, or check out my space-themed favorites the Cosmomancer aka Star Wizard (plus chaos/corruption), and the Cthonomancer aka Gravity Wizard, or the ever-popular Biomancer (plus chaos/corruption).

When he's not writing wizards, Remixes & Revelations is deeply interested in aberration monsters and in angel monsters. He also writes some religiously-themed classes, like the Bearers of the Word of GOD. He's interested in a contemporary occult American setting, and has divided that across three different tags in a way that I don't fully understand. As far as random tables go, among others, he has a random dragon generator and a random demon generator.


 
Down in the Cthonic Deeps
bloggers: Molly J & Nick S
founded: October 2017
location: http://chthonic-halls.blogspot.com/

Down in the Chtonic Deeps is another recent convert to GLOGging. They've written a couple wizard archetypes - the Numismancer, a money wizard, and the Chronomancer, a time wizard. Prior to that, though, they had a long career of writing excellent, evocative system-neutral encounter lists, adventure settings, and just interesting ideas that can be dropped into more-or-less any campaign that wants them.

I really can't emphasize enough how much it pays off to delve into their back catalog. They have interesting variations on elementals and accursed imps. They have entourage encounters, like the Bombastic Knight and his followers. They have a curio seller with random curios, and a traveling circus that is sort of halfway between truly magical and disappointing con artistry, a liminal space that feels perfect for an antagonistic encounter. They have a demon-haunted fire swamp, a fantastical Arabian Nights inspired desert, an army of ivory-armored knights, and general rules for carving magical scrimshaw charms. They have an alchemist's manor as an adventuring site, complete with serum-addicted servitors and general ideas for roleplaying alchemy.

(Incidentally, I think this is part of the appeal of rulesets like the GLOG, I2TO, and Knave - they have advice for resolving common adventuring situations, but contain relatively few built-in assumptions about setting, and their rules are flexible enough to incorporate whatever content you want to bring in, pretty much as is, without needing to adapt or convert much of anything.)


    

Iron & Ink
blogger: Luke Thomson
founded: November 2017
location: https://swordsandscrolls.blogspot.com/

Iron & Ink started off writing a 30 Years War inspired campaign setting called Pike & Schotte that included a classic GLOG race table, and classes like the Reiver and the Sawbones. Like many other GLOGgers, he's also written quite a few wizards. More recently, he's written a Mystic character class, which is a religious magic-user that's intended to be as customizable as the wizard. My favorite cutomization so far is the mystic who basically worships money.



Buildings are People
blogger: Michael Bacon
founded: December 2017
location: https://buildingsarepeople.blogspot.com/

The most notable entries in Buildings are People's blog are his thoughtful series on game resolution mechanics. He's written a Specialist / Thief class for the GLOG that's really interesting for using more randomization to determine abilities than non-spellcasting classes usually get. He also has a nifty Kowloon Planet home campaign going.
 
 
 
Sword of Mass Destruction
blogger: Circas K
founded: December 2017
location: http://swordofmassdestruction.blogspot.com/

Sword of Mass Destruction has written a Wizard of Earthsea style wizard for the GLOG. My favorite thing he's written is a table of escaped spell-spirits who have gone feral in the wild, but can potentially be re-tamed by a careful wizard. He also helps fill out the GLOG's spirit ecology with a table of minor spirits and advice for generating a random dragon. His home campaign setting is a red-stained badland called Circassa that includes interesting takes on standard fantasy races.



Goodberry Monthly
blogger: Martin O
founded: January 2018
location: https://goodberrymonthly.blogspot.com/

Since obviously everyone's favorite part of the GLOG is playing weirdo wizards, Goodberry Monthly had the very sensible idea to plan an all-wizards campaign, where spells are treasure, currencies like "secrets" and "your happiest memories" are coins to gamble away in the casino, and no one ever has to worry about "but what will the kid who hits stuff with a stick real good do while the grown-ups are magicking?" He also tosses his hat into the planar-travel-campaign ring with the math-centric Infinity Hotel setting, and envisions an unending WWI-type conflict playing out on a world where one side is always day and one side is always night. That setting, oddly enough, is the one that spawned the Goldsoul Mine dungeon.

He's also written a GLOG-specific Cleric of Santa Claus, made a plan for clerical domains to grant worldly responsibilities, and he has a table of dangerous foods for gourmet campaigning.



Archon's Court
blogger: Luther Gutekunst
founded: January 2018
location: https://archons-court.blogspot.com/

Archon's Court is using the GLOG rules for far-future scifi gaming. He has his own houserules document, Artificial Sky. He wrote the Tech class as kind of far-future wizard, along with a handful of supporting classes. His own campaign setting, Sunless Horizon, is set inside a space station ruled by insane AIs.



Rose & Kingfisher
blogger: Ezra Bloom
founded: February 2018
location: http://roseandkingfisher.blogspot.com/

Rose & Kingfisher is mostly a 5e blogger, but they've written the Mystic character class as an alternative cleric for the GLOG, and the Poet, and personally I'd love to see a party with a Muse, a Golliard, and Poet dissolutely rogue-ing their way through the world. They also have interesting things to say about gold, astrology and the zodiac, and dinosaurs as monsters.



Swords & Storytellers
blogger: Andy
founded: April 2018
location: http://www.swordsandstorytellers.com/

Swords & Storytellers has written a GLOG fighter and a GLOG witch. His other posts are musings about how to make rulings well, what wilderness travel should look like, and maybe trying to write a custom houserules document based on I2TO.



Unlawful Games
blogger: Lawful Neutral
founded: May 2018
location: http://unlawfulgames.blogspot.com/

I'm sort of pre-disposed to liking Unlawful Games, since we apparently have similar taste in books. So I'm fond of the character races and monster encounters he adapted from Walter Moers' Zamonia books, and the monsters and NPCs he generated from Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World. He's also obviously a bit into Dada, which is how you get classes like the Pataphysician. He also wrote the Snake Wizard and the Really Angry Goose if you like animal characters.

He's also written some very nice random tables, like mansion rooms and haunted house effects (that pair pretty well together), animal familiars for wizards, post-apocalyptic treasures, and versions of the demon Buer (who he seems mildly obsessed with). And, carrying on the tradition of gourmet campaigning, he recently wrote a plan for a Brewscape campaign, and a partial bestiary for it.



Paper Elemental
blogger: Betty Bacontime
founded: June 2018
location: https://paperelemental.blogspot.com/

Paper Elemental is an oddly food-centric GLOG blog. She's written classes like the Skeleton Wizard and the Meat Mage. She's proposed a campaign setting, Platescape, which is just what it sounds like, like Planescape but with plates. It's very weird, but I kind of like it. She also made the Pominomicon, a reference book to magic berries, such as the Squesh (banana + tomato) or the Banananana (banana + banana).

She's also written some pretty cool random tables, like random Biblical signs of angelic heritage for aasimar and nephilim. She's one of a couple people who've written computer code to turn random tables into push-button generators. Most of her tables have been converted to generators using this code, including a neat table of wizard familiars and a table for generating a store that sells divination magic items.



Rhyming Fool Exits Stage Left
blogger: Evoro
founded: June 2018
location: http://evoroxv.blogspot.com/

Unlike the blogs that have only one or two GLOG entries out of dozens of other posts, Rhyming Fool Exits Stage Left is kind of a "one-post wonder" - a GLOG blog that literally only has one or two posts in total. There are a few more of these coming up in my list. I'm not sure if these are already abandoned, or if they're more like placeholders that are someday going to spring back to life, when their founders get more time or inspiration. Anyway, the post of note here is the Vivisectionist character class.



Meandering Banter
blogger: Angus Warman
founded: June 2018
location: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/

Arguably, Meandering Banter's greatest contribution to the GLOGosphere is the push-button list generator he wrote. Which is not to diminish the other things he's written, but other GLOGgers REALLY really like automating their random tables with push-button technology. What kinds of crazy tables has Meandering Banter automated for himself? How about an ASCII dungeon generator? How about random dungeon vending machines to stock it with? How about randomized GLOG races? He also wrote a magic wand generator and an automated carousing table. He ALSO also made automated GM screen for The Gardens of Ynn and a Knave / Stars Without Number mashup. You should also especially check out his blog's sidebar. He has a random GLOG character generator, a dungeon generator, and a mutation generator. (Also, my recommendation to everyone with a GLOG blog with push-button tables in the sidebar? Put them in a post too, so people can link directly to them!)

He also has a houserules document and another called Die Trying, and a home campaign setting called the North-West Marches. He wrote a random crypt-based dungeon, and a haunted forest adventuring site. He's also written about a half-dozen GLOG classes, including a druid, paladin, and tiefling, among others.



Library of Attnam
blogger: Red Kangaroo
founded: June 2018
location: https://attnam.blogspot.com/

Like many other GLOGgers, Library of Attnam has written a whole lot of wizards. I'm quite fond of the early elemental ones, the Sea Sorcerer, the Deep Mage, and the Winter Witch, and the recently written Cat Wizard. He's also written a flexible Cultist character class that can be customized by the choice of heretical patron, and a number of classes adapted from the Monster Blood Tattoo book series. Library of Attnam also has a long-standing interest in random weapon lists, and the spirit world where GLOG spell-spirits live.



The Whimsical Mountain
blogger: Gorinich Serpant
founded: July 2018
location: https://whimsicalmountain.blogspot.com/

Like several others on my list, The Whimsical Mountain is also an I2TO fan, and most of his blog is dedicated to magic for I2TO or ideas about alignment. He does have a single GLOG class, the Very Smug Cat, very much in the tradition of the other animal classes mentioned so far.



Of Slugs & Silver
blogger: Ancalagon The Black
founded: July 2018
location: https://slugsandsilver.blogspot.com/

Most of Of Slugs & Silver is about fantasy coinage and/or Yoon Suin. There is one GLOG class though, the Gish, a runesword-wielding paladin type. There are also play reports for the Tomb of Serpent Kings.



Tarsos Theorem
blogger: Saker Tarsos
founded: August 2018
location: http://tarsostheorem.blogspot.com/

Tarsos Theroem might make more use of push-button random tables than any other GLOGger. His Blasted Lands campaign setting is communicated almost entirely through push-button tables to generate wizards, outlaws, malfunctioning robots, giant monsters, hirelings and NPCs, ghosts and spirits, and misremembered histories. He's also created automated DM screens for Mothership and Veins of the Earth. (Which are both fan favorites within the GLOGosphere.)

He's also written some creative and interesting character classes, including the Scar Speaker, the Dream Raider, and the Fungal Hive Colony. It's not automated, but he's also written a series of tables for summoning a random spirit.



Ship of Socrates
blogger: Ninja Sword
founded: August 2018
location: http://shipofsocrates.blogspot.com/

Ship of Socrates is pretty much a one-post wonder, but they do give us the Drunken Master for when your gourmet campaign needs a drunken lout thirsty bon vivant.



Provinto RPG
blogger: Ian Schlom
founded: August 2018
location: https://provintorpg.blogspot.com/

Provinto RPG is the last blog on my list that isn't really a GLOG blog, but has a few dedicated entries. Specifically, he has a review of GLOG, and his own overview of the GLOGosphere.



A Swamp in Space
blogger: Wr3cking8a11
founded: August 2018
location: https://aswampinspace.blogspot.com/

A Swamp in Space seems to be creating a setting that's half-1980s cyberpunk, half-1980s giant-robots-in-space anime. Like me, they're a bit of a compiler, so they have a list of playable races for the void of space, and a Fighter class for the void of space that both borrow heavily and unapologetically from other GLOGgers. The also have a unique Wordsmith Wizard class that makes use of something like Papers & Pencils "magic words" idea, and, my personal favorite, a list of bard songs in the Vaporwave genre. They've also written a couple 30-minute dungeons, which, at this point, I'm prepared to declare as the unofficial official dungeon format of the GLOGosphere.



Jeff Marches
blogger: Jeff Schwartz
founded: September 2018
location: http://jeffmarches.blogspot.com/

This is another one-post wonder, and the last one on my list. Currently, he's only written a very medieval-feeling Priest class.



Two Goblins in a Trenchcoat
blogger: Type 1 Ninja
founded: September 2018
location: http://twogoblinsinatrenchcoat.blogspot.com/

Two Goblins in a Trenchcoat actually has two houserules documents, the first is a just a personal take on the GLOG rules, called the Trenchcoat Edition. The second is called Moonhop, and its a mixture of GLOG and I2TO rules. Most of his blog content is written for Moonhop, including a list of gonzo space fantasy character races, and a list of gonzo space fantasy failed careers, which are nested by technology level, so you could end up with a shepherd or falconer, or with a zookeeper or geneticist. He has also written a nifty generator to create random tools of divination.



The Bottomless Sarcophagus
blogger: Monsieur Le Battlier
founded: October 2018
location: https://bottomlesssarcophagus.blogspot.com/

The Bottomless Sarcophagus has so far focused on witchcraft and necromancy, and on developing his own campaign setting, the Thawing Kingdom, where Spring has finally come to a world that just spent 500 years in Sleeping-Beauty-like frozen slumber. As for the witchcraft I mentioned, he's developed the Witch as an alternative genus for developing new magic-using class species, and the Orthodox Witch as an initial implementation of that idea. Posted elsewhere, he also wrote an atomic wizard, the Radiomancer.



Tales of Absolute Doom
blogger: rattlemayne
founded: December 2018
location: https://toadrpg.blogspot.com/

Tales of Absolute Doom is another GLOGger with their own houserules document, this one called TOAD, and also incorporating some I2TO in the mix. They haven't posted much yet, but they did write a nifty Unicorn character class, and most recently, they seem to be working playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles using I2TO.



A Blasted Cratered Land
blogger: Velexiraptor
founded: January 2019
location: https://crateredland.blogspot.com/

A Blasted Cratered Land is probably one of the most active of the new GLOGgers. She's posted new takes on a variety of classic D&D classes, as well as a few science-fantasy types, like the Engineer and the Mad Scientist. She's also the author of the Bard class that others have written genre lists for, and of another Math Wizard. Like several others mentioned so far, she has her own houserules document called Mimics & Miscreants. In terms of random generation, she's put out a handy murderhobo hireling generator, and she's written another spell mutation table, might be useful if you want some additional variety in that.

My personal favorites are the starfolk races, which include both the usual GLOG information, plus some very good physical descriptions. Play as a Lunai, Belter, or Jovian from one of Jupiter's four moons? I regret that I can only play one at a time! (She also has some nice crustaceans, bugfolk, and fungusfolk.) There's also The Baleful Star, a hateful black star that wants to extinguish all life, and serves as a warlock patron. A patron who gives me a bronze telescope and some hand-drawn star-maps in my starting equipment? The end of all things is a small price to pay for such a bounty!



The Lovely Dark
blogger: Vulnavia
founded: February 2019
location: https://thelovelydark.blogspot.com/

The Lovely Dark is one of the newest bloggers on my list. Her campaign setting seems to be more Baroque/Victorian than most of the others here, and also seems to be inspired by Echo Bizarre and the other Fallen London games. So far she's written an Anti Wizard class wizards who want to annihilate their own senses in favor of perceiving Ultrareality, and Semiramis-Nebuchadnezzur-Shamsi, a tripartite warlock patron with Babylonian, Code of Hammurabi kind of feel.



Princesses & Pioneers
blogger: zoeology31
founded: March 2019
location: https://princesses-and-pioneers.tumblr.com/

Princesses & Pioneers only has one post so far because she's just so new. She's written the physics-inspired Science Wizard.



So that's the GLOGosphere as it stands today. Where else can you find these cool kids, besides their respective blogs? One popular hangout spot appears to be the GLOG sub-channel on Chris McDowall's overawing OSR Discord. There's also a GLOG community on MeWe, although that seems to be less used.