Gygax 75

There's a worldbuilding challenge called Gygax 75 that's been making the rounds on the blogosphere. I decided to try to look its origins and follow the people who undertook it, as is my way.

 

 

The earliest origin of the Gygax 75 challenge is an article written by Gary Gygax in the April 1975 issue of the Europa fanzine. Gary lays out a 5 step process for building a new fantasy campaign. I think it's fair to say that this 45 year old piece of ephemera isn't the immediate source of most blogger's participation in the challenge, though.

 

 

 

 
Initial credit goes to Charles Akins from Dragons Never Forget. Charles is the one who found the long-forgotten Gygax article on the Internet Archive and shared the link with the blogosphere. Charles is also the one who called this worldbuilding method "Gygax 75" and threw down the gauntlet to make it into a blogging challenge.

 

The Gygax 75 challenge is a 5 step process that's supposed to take place over 5 weeks. Dragons Never Forget describes these in much better detail than me, laying out the parameters of the challenge, but permit me to at least briefly outline them.

Week 1 - decide on the thematic basis of your campaign and pick out some inspirational materials that you can refer to whenever you need help populating your campaign with details

Week 2 - draw a region map of the wilderness adventuring sites that will surround the dungeon that will form the heart of your campaign.

Week 3 - draw your dungeon! in one week! Gary recommends starting with some overview planning to pick themes, monsters, and architectural oddities for each dungeon level, and then setting out to draw and key the first few levels. in a week! I would argue this should be an 8 week challenge, with week 3 devoted to planning and perhaps mapping, and weeks 4-6 given to keying levels 1, 2, and 3.

Week 4 - design a "home base" for your players, replete with factions, NPCs, and rumors so your players can engage in social intrigue in between trips to the dungeon.

Week 5 - design the larger world around the starting region. you don't need a detailed map of the whole world, but you should know the other regions that can be reached from the current one (either by overland or magical travel) so that you can start writing rumors to entice your players to travel to them.

  

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge Introduction - Charles links us to the original Europa article and provides links to his other posts in this series.

1 The Setting of the Campaign - summarizes Gygax's worldbuilding advice and lays out his own campaign inspirations, setting the stage for post-apocalyptic science-fantasy.

2 The Map Around the Dungeon - Charles creates his starting region, the Valley of the Three Forks.

3 How to Build the Gygax 75 Dungeon - summarizes Gygax's dungeon-creation advice. pick your themes, place your setpiece treasures and encounters, then write or borrow random tables and procedurally generate the rest.

3 Dungeon Level 1 - the top dungeon level is a ruined, abandoned temple

3 Dungeon Level 2 - the next level features a hall of statues and a giant chamber full of pools

3 Dungeon Level 3 - a prison level, with an exit leading down to allow for further expansion

4 The Local Town and All the Trouble - Charles goes over Gygax's town-building advice and comes up with a list of neighborhoods and the most important shopkeepers in each one.

5 The World Plan - describes three important factions that will be encountered outside the Valley

0 Conclusion and Links to Other Challengers - Charles once again encourages us to take up the Gygax 75 challenge, and points us to Viridian Scroll and Beyond the Gates of Cygnus.

 

 

 

 

As is often the case in these kinds of situations, the person who created the challenge and the one who popularized it are not the same person. Credit for successfully spreading the word goes to Ray Otus of Viridian Scroll. If you've seen another blogger taking on the Gygax 75 challenge, they've likely been directly inspired by Ray. If you've seen a single-link version of the challenge, it's probably been to Ray's free pdf version on itch.io. Ray fully credits Charles, but Charles inspired a couple bloggers, while Ray inspired at least a dozen. I should note that Ray's pdf contains both more detailed instructions and a workbook to follow along in, so the work he put into the presentation might explain his greater success in popularizing the challenge.

As we'll see in a minute, Ray and JJ from Beyond the Gates of Cygnus did the challenge at the same time and recorded several episodes of the Plundergrounds podcast about their experiences.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - Ray describes the premise of the challenge and links back to Dragons Never Forget and Europa.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - gathering together inspiration, Ray envisions a world where Iron Age humans in city-states reside uneasily alongside communities of monstrous humanoids.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - Ray sketches and then finalizes a vibrantly-colored map of a desert region, Timuria, the Land between Two Rivers.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - more iterative sketching results in a single dungeon level based loosely on a Hindu temple. 

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - released more retrospectively than the others, this one covers setting up the town of Addak, which matches the vaguely Babylonian naming scheme of the other cities.

 

 

 

 

Over at Beyond the Gates of Cygnus, Cinderella Man JJ used the Gygax 75 challenge to create a setting for a Delving Deeper campaign.

0 Creating a Delving Deeper Campaign in 5 Easy Steps - JJ announces the start of the challenge, which he's completing simultaneously with Ray Otus from Viridian Scroll.

1 The Overall Setting - in addition to using the Delving Deeper rules, this setting will be inspired by the band Rush.

2 The Starting Area - a town called Willow Dale, a Necromancer's tower in the heart of dead forest, and the River Dell leading to the Down Mountains.

3 The Dungeon - JJ creates the most important details for the Necromancer's tower dungeon.

4 The Home Base - the basic features of the town of Willow Dale.

5 The World - more Rush albums are brought in to help define nearby regions of the gameworld.

 

 
 

 

The Plundergrounds podcast is a collaboration between Ray Otus and JJ. In addition to taking the challenge at the same time, Ray and JJ met once a week to compare notes and talk about their worldbuilding progress.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - introducing the challenge and comparing sources of inspiration.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - drawing the starting area maps.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - starting dungeons that will continue being updated over the next couple weeks.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - working on the starting villages.

5 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 5 - thinking about the wider worlds, and looking back on the challenge.

 

 

 

 

Not everyone who starts the Gygax 75 challenge decides to finish it. Most people, in fact, seem to stop after a couple weeks. The next person I found who started the challenge was Italian blogger Omnia Incommoda Certitudo Nulla. They were apparently inspired by a post by Shane Ward on a message board called OSR Pit. 

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week One - the starting pitch here is for a campaign world inspired by The Hobbit, but also by Dracula and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week Two - a starting map, largely without features, and a wandering encounter table emphasizing human antagonists like duelists, cultists, and bounty hunters.

 

 

 

 

Shane Ward from 3 Toadstools Publishing was the first person I saw who took up the challenge because of finding Ray Otus's itch.io. He got scooped from being the first person to start it without a personal connection to Ray because he managed to inspire OICN to try the challenge before starting it up himself.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - Shane announces the challenge and starts brainstorming, drawing on ideas from Piers Anthony and fantasy botany.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - a more developed start to the setting, inspired by Xanth, Shanara, and Disney's Robin Hood.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2? Sorta - Shane begins drawing a region map, listing possible encounters, and thinking about character classes

 

 

 

 

Verbum Ex Nihilo also briefly attempted the challenge.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - about the potential benefits of structure and deadlines in worldbuilding, with the challenge as one way to impose them.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - about the process of selecting a notebook, creating a mood board, and attempting to conquer writer's block by looking for structures to build one idea off another.

 

 

 

 

Dave from Blood of Prokopius was the next to complete the challenge. Dave comes in with his own ideas and methods for creating sandboxes, keying dungeons, etc, so an interesting part of his commentary is about trying to set his own approach aside to try it Gary's way (as interpreted by Charles and Ray).

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge - introduces Dave's inspirations, science fantasy pitting the forces of Heat & Light against the forces of Cold & Dark.

1 Laser Guns and Plasma Swords - defends adding scifi weapons to this particular fantasy setting.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 2 - Dave draws a fantasy map loosely inspired by Kyrgyzstan, starts stocking his sandbox, and creates a very Lost World random encounter table full of dinosaurs and cavemen.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 3 - a general plan for a dungeon of caves atop a glacier atop a crashed alien spaceship.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 4 - keying the dungeon with monsters and treasures, and writing a wandering monster table.  

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 5 - Dave names his starting city Darkport.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 6 - Dave creates a random name generator to name two shops, and observes some differences in the equipment lists of Basic and B/X.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 7 - human and elven factions for Darkport.

5 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 8 - Dave builds out his world by adding three more factions and developing a key NPC for each.

 

 
 

 

King Brackish actually attempted the challenge twice, first starting it on Tomb of the Wandering Millennial (apparently inspired by Verbum Ex Nihilo), and then restarting and finishing it on Brinehouse.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - Brackish proposes a setting inspired by Berserk and Dorohedoro, among others.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the city-state of Evangelos, surrounded by the Blackmange Forest and the Sancana Steppe, and a random encounter table full of megafauna, necromancers, and skeletons.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 1 - Brackish restarts the challenge with a similar, though not identical list of inspirations.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 2 - a new region map with the port city of Dis on the coast of an ocean, surrounded by three distinct forests. the new random encounter table emphasizes boars, wolves, dragons.

3 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 3 - Brackish outlines the three-level Temple of the Swine God.

4 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 4 - the village of Mun, along with 10 shops and 5 NPCs.

5 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 5 - more worldbuilding, including a sun god, rumors of dragons and falling stars, and religious-themed magic treasures.

 

 
 

 

Andrew Sawyer from Seven Deadly Dungeons is the last person on my list to finish the challenge. 

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - Andrew's plan involves creating a fantasy postapocalyptic Meso America.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the region contains an active volcano, a ruined city, and several places where ghosts are on the haunt.

3 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - Andrew has a pretty cool dungeon concept here. the whole complex is a superweapon meant to kill angels. the top level is filled with ghosts, the middle is a star chart that functions as the weapon's targeting system, and the bottom level is a site for the blood sacrifices needed to power the weapon.

4 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - NPCs from the character's home base, all of whom have terrible injuries, which is presumably meant to communicate something about the danger of this place.

5 Gygax 74 Challenge Week 5 - encounter tables for three terrain types.

 

 

 

 
I've noticed religious themes, and especially postapocalyptic settings have come up in several of these challenges. Justin Hamilton from Aboleth Overlords picks a decidedly Biblical apocalypse to set his game in the aftermath of.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - human civilization has returned to a late bronze age in the aftermath of a Deluge that drowned the world.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the setting gets a name, Umbroea, along with a list of villages, geographic features, possible dungeons, and encounters. 
 
 

 

 

I'll admit that Liche's Libram's Tlon setting is the one that excites me the most out of all of these. It's one that they were working on before, and seemed to use the Gygax 75 challenge as a way to continue building out their setting. Tlon reminds me of Dying Earth fiction, but transplanted from Earth to a Dying Mars.

1 Tlon Week 1 Gygax 75 Challenge - an overview of the setting's themes. everything is old, civilization is crumbling, water is the most important treasure.

2 Tlon Week 2 Surrounding Area - a visually compelling map, accompanied by descriptions of two cities, a couple geographic features, and a necropolis.

 

 
 

Rob Magus from Penny Ventures decided to make a setting in the aftermath of a cyberpunk apocalypse. I like the image he conjures of whole forests of solar-panel trees.

1 Technoccult Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - the opening setting pitch. images of demon-haunted computers and ghost towns of still-functional neon lights.

2 2d6 Electric Devil Skeletons Gygax 75 Challege Week 2 - locations for the Technoccult setting and a random encounter table with a number of undead cybernetic monsters.

 

 
 

Like Liche's Libram, The Eternal Slog was already working on their Zorn setting when they discovered the Gygax 75 challenge, and started it as a way to do a bit more worldbuilding on an ongoing project.

1 G75 Challenge Week 1 Zorn - the setting here is a previously undiscovered island that rises out of the ocean in 1936 on the even of WWII. various countries send explorers to the island to plunder its ancient occult treasures to use in their war effort. a pretty solid pitch!

 

 

 

 

Jim from d66 Classless Kobolds is an interesting case to me. He published his Weird North game in August 2020, then started the challenge in October to start making a campaign setting for the game.

1 The Conceptual Beasts of the Weird North - human Vikings on an alien planet that resembles Earth's arctic north, full of ancient tech and extradimensional visitors.

2 The Dank Morass A Swampcrawl for the Weird North - a rather nice-looking pointcrawl map and a random encounter table full of dinosaurs and robots.

 

 

 

 

Mihau from Fractal Meadows of Reality started the challenge to work on a far-future alien world setting. One interesting thing about going through these challenges is getting a chance to see where the current campaign setting zeitgeist is at. Science fantasy, post apocalypses, aliens instead of demihumans, and magitech meets stone-age all seem to be en vogue right now.

1 Attempting the Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - inspiration from videogames and an online art book that looks very cool to me. humans and aliens on a distant world ruled by satellite gods.

2 Gygax 75 Week 2 Plains of Eyes and Hands - the Ascendancy of Teal arcology sits aside the Plains of Salt, and an encounter table full of megafauna and cavemen.

 

 

 

 

Phoe of Magic Trash is the most recent person I've spotted to start the challenge. His proposed setting is inspired by extremophile biology and vernacular architecture - a winning combination as far as I'm concerned!

1 Gygax 75 Week 1 - no humans, no humanoids, only talking animals and extremophile aliens, each building unique cities.

2 Gygax 75 Week 2 The Legend of Gygax's Gold - a few points of light in the wilderness, with attention given to the architectural style of each place.

Advice from the Blogosphere 2020

So, last year, I started what I hope will become a tradition for myself by posting about my favorite links from the previous year. I built this collection of links as I saw them throughout the year, with an emphasis on saving posts that gave advice about how to do things.

Last year I also gave my take on the state of the OSR. My current take is that the label OSR seems to mean "small-press D&D-like roleplaying, not 5th Edition, and not Powered by the Apocalypse". If that sounds like it might encompass quite a lot, I think that's because it does. The OSR continues to enlarge and diversify, so much so that I wonder if it can continue to hold together. 

You've still got people playing the retroclone Old School Editions and neo-retroclones like  Dungeon Crawl Classics and The GLOG, but you've also got people playing Mork Borg and Mothership and Troika. You've got a proliferation of unique minigames via itchi.io and ZineQuest. You've got people fully committing to abandoning written rules in favor of ad-hoc rulings in the FKR, as well as more people than in past years (that I'm aware of, anyway) trying their hand at actual wargaming. 

Ultimately, the question of how well any of this holds together as a scene will be answered by many people cross boundaries and play more than one game. Everyone who sticks to just one thing builds up their circle, but also makes it more distinct. Everyone who splits their time between two or three or more circles builds bridges between them and brings them closer together into a more unified scene. It's an open question how many people are acting as bridges and will continue to do so, especially if we add any more distinctions into common circulation.

As with last year, please feel free to share links to posts that you thought were helpful from the past year in the comment section.

 

 

"Initial Sketch" by Luka Rejec

 
Luka Rejec, who in addition to authoring and illustrating his own books, is also an artist who sometimes works on commission, has a guide explaining How to Commission Art, which strikes me as a very useful guide for those of who might like to author a book but don't plan to illustrate it ourselves.

 

Thriftomancer from Dice in the North has advice about Writing Coherent Session Notes. You'll notice that this will be something of a mini-theme among the posts below. Either this was on a lot of people's minds so they wrote about it more than usual, or it was on my mind so I noticed more than usual. Thriftomancer also provides a nice Kilodungeon Definition for creating a space for delving that's much larger than a single-page dungeon, but much more manageable to design and explore than a full-on megadungeon.

Jason Tocci from Pretendo Games has advice from Pretendo's First 4 Months Self-Publishing on Itch.io. Jason talks about how he got started, and kindly pops the hood to see how much he'd made at that point from each of his minigames, both from payments and "tips". Since then, he's written the 24XX System Reference Document for science fiction games, which seems like his most popular game to date.

After years of writing and illustrating great, isometric, two-page spread mini-adventures, and giving them away free, Michael Prescott from Trilemma Adventures launched a successful Kickstarter to fund a hardcover print edition. Afterward, he wrote up My Kickstarter Task List to help other first-time publishers get their project funded successfully. 

I liked this year's piece of advice by Trey Causey over at From the Sorcerer's Skull so much that I actually wrote about it once already. Trey encourages us that Setting History Should do Something, and provides us both with three goals to reach and three pitfalls to avoid. It might seem obvious to observe that it's not helpful for setting history to "describe events that have little to no impact on the present" or "describe events that are repetitive in nature or easy to confuse" ... until you think about just how often setting history falls into exactly those traps. This was also a good year for Trey's writing about planetary and space adventures, and I was particularly glad to see his first Pulp Solar System Anthology and the follow-up about Pulp Uranus and its Moons.

This year, I most often find myself reading Jack Guignol at Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque for interesting book recommendations and Gothic actual play reports, but he did have one advice-y post early on about his recommendations for a possible 6th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. You can probably find a lot of people opining about what they'd do differently next time, but I appreciated that Jack's premise for a hypothetical 6th edition was basically "the good parts of 5th edition, but more so", while at the same time leaning into some useful simplifying mechanics.

I mostly stop by Stone Drunk Wizard to see his art, and I have to admit, this is not his original post, but something he re-tumbled. This is where I saw it though, and I find the genealogical process of tracking down the history of a Tumblr post to be at or past the limits of my internet skill, especially since there was a nice testimonial appended to this version of the post that I wanted to hold onto. Anyway, this advice originally comes from an artist called Xuu, who tells us How to Draw Anything.

RJD20 has advice for How to Build a Unique Culture for D&D, which he demonstrates by planning some yeti-taming glacier goblins. 

Advice for how to run traps is evergreen, but I thought Paul Hughes from Blog of Holding had good advice in How the "Odd Detail" Can Make D&D Traps Way More Fun. An "odd detail" is a clue, something to catch the players' attention, alert them that there's something to investigate, and a puzzle that possibly communicates the nature of the trap. This advice is especially pitched at 5e gamemasters, and Paul does a good job for explaining his rationale for rejecting the alternate advice that "traps are most effective when their presence comes as a surprise."

Also speaking to 5e gamemasters, DM David has advice for Using Experience Points to Make Your D&D Game More Compelling. David recommends using the recommended XP for non-combat challenges as an alternative to the standard monster XP. He identifies a few advantages. This reduces the XP award for fighting monsters (which has other advantages he discusses), makes calculating the awards simpler, and makes it easier for lower-level characters to "catch up" to the other members of their party. The non-combat XP system is technically optional, but I've had success using it for traps and other challenges when I've run 5e.

  

"How to Draw Anything: Step Six" found on Stone Drunk Wizard

John Bell from The Retired Adventurer has roleplaying advice for portraying a character whose actions will seem consistent, sensible, and thus predictable to other players. In Roleplaying, Decisions, Intelligibility, John argues against characterization via "quirks", which show up sporadically and don't necessarily convey a lot of information, and in favor of simple and clear motivations, which can be deployed again and again to create a character that the other players can easily understand.

In a year when all of us did almost all out gaming online, David Schirduan from Technical Grimoire has a great primer of advice for Playing RPGs on Discord.

Anxiety Wizard wrote Half-Organized Thoughts About Monsters, which lays out an approach to presenting information about monsters, both the way information about them is written on the page for the benefit of the gamemaster, and the way that it's spoken during the game for the benefit of the players. He recommends a way of writing up physical details, rumors , and encounters. He suggests an encounter roll that doesn't just produce the number of enemies, but also what they're doing when the players meet them. The full process is a bit labor intensive, so it's probably most worth it in an ongoing campaign, and for like, one of a handful of common recurring monster types.

Chris McDowall from Bastionland spent a lot of the year developing his own minimalist wargame rules. I liked his advice for Cheap Tricks a gamemaster can use to create particular emotional effects in the players, whether that's showing the impact of their characters' success or failure, or trying to get them to laugh or feel (momentarily) frightened. Chris calls these "cheap tricks", but we can also think of them as simple effective storytelling tools.


Daniel from Detect Magic offers a contrarian opinion in Dungeons are Irrelevant. Look closer though, and its also an argument about character motivation, what kinds of in-game events are impactful for players, and an argument about how best to spend gamemaster preparation time in light of those ideas.


Paul Beakley from the Indie Game Reading Club had a couple of pieces I really liked this year. In Whadday Know?, Paul lays out the different ways to decide what the characters know about their world, which turns out to be one way of thinking about how the gamemaster and the players are dividing up worldbuilding authority. In The Cudgel and the Contract, he compares rolling dice (the cudgel) versus coming to an agreement (the contract) as a way of resolving conflict between two players with different goals. I think you could also read this as a comparison of "rules" versus "rulings". What I like here is that Paul identifies several positive points and downsides for both methods, and talks about each way of doing things's vulnerability to bad faith.


Alex Chalk from To Distant Lands has some thoughts about gamemaster preparation, and the difficulty of prepping appropriately for a sandbox style game, which he shares in GM Anxiety and the West Marches. The heart of this post is a story about a time when he prepped 100 hexes for crawling, and his players spent their entire 2 ½ hour session trying to cross a single river. I really appreciate when people share stories of GMing gone wrong, and Alex is thoughtful about how a certain ideal vision of what good GMing looks like can easily lead to misadventures like the one he describes.
 

Arnold K over at Goblin Punch wrote something called Advice for OSR DMs, but really he lists out concrete advice for both gamemasters and players interested in trying out OSR-style dungeoneering.

Gabor Lux from Beyond Fomalhaut has an interesting method for looking at The Anatomy of a Dungeon Map. He turns all the hallways into straight lines, ignores all the rooms that don't have a second exit, and thus creates a diagram showing the routes around the dungeon. The idea is to be able to see the most basic pathways that will define how characters are able to move around, free from the any other set dressing that ordinarily obscures that view. Gabor also released Castle Xyntillan this year, which I've noticed showing up in several other bloggers' actual play posts.

Alex Schroeder also had some thoughts about session reports. Looking at the date just now, this is clearly an older post, but somehow I only saw it this year. (Perhaps it was linked somewhere?) In Session Reports are Read Just Once, If at All, Alex suggests writing session reports for your own benefit, without expecting a larger audience, and has advice for keeping them short and useful. Throughout the year, Alex has been posting about his Hex Describe, Text Mapper, and Gridmapper projects.
   

"Dungeon Graph" by Beyond Fomalhaut

Alcoops at Make a New Cult Every Day posted images of handwritten session prep notes, complete with hand-drawn maps, and invites the rest of us to do the same, asking How Do You Do Session Notes?


Jim Parkin from d66 Classless Kobolds posted back to back Simple and Universal Referee Advice and Simple and Universal Player Advice. Jim's referee advice is about how to communicate information that will be helpful to players, especially about the dangers their characters' face, the choices they have available, and the difficulty of each option. For players, Jim advises a mix of curiosity and caution.


Otspill from BAATAG introduces The Grand d666 as a way to quickly generate setting elements. They recommend filling a d66 or d666 table with the kinds of things you want to be in your campaign setting. Factions, species of monster, but also things like themes, moods. Then whenever you need help starting to write some piece of the setting - such as "what's in this dungeon room?" or "what's in that wilderness hex?" - you roll two or three times and combine the results to serve as your inspiration.


Rodongo from antiknez has written about How to Sandbox, with advice focusing on creating factions, setting them in relation to one another, and finding an entrypoint for your players into that situation.

Gundobad Games wrote On a Method for Handling Secret Doors in Dungeons, that I really liked. Gundobad suggests that players should be allowed to detect the presence of a secret door automatically, so that game time can be spent on trying to figure out how to open the door, rather than trying to figure out if it exists or not. It's one of those proposals - like I2TO eliminating the to-hit roll in combat - that feels radical at first, but also promises to speed up the game and refocus on the most interesting parts of the game.

Artist Donato Giancola (yes, that one) writes the Dweller of the Forbidden City blog, and honestly, this is a real unsung treasure trove for good GMing advice. In Running D&D Games - The Role of the Ref, Donato lays out what he thinks a gamemaster's job is, as well as what he thinks it is not. The three main pillars are creating the game world, deciding how the inhabitants of the game world react to the player characters' actions, and serving as an adjudicator whenever the rules alone aren't enough to decide how to do something or what its consequences are. In Randomization - It's Not What You Think, Donato offers a defense of letting the dice decide elements of the game, from monster hp and NPC reactions to individual initiative and the rewards found in a treasure chest. 

Gus L, now operating out of All Dead Generations, has some advice about One Page Dungeon Design. Gus identifies a few key dilemmas and recommends solutions. Obviously you need to write succinctly to fit on one page, but you also need to avoid saying so little that your dungeon is incomprehensible because you were unable to describe anything, or boring and generic because nothing needed to be described. Evocative imagery, both drawn and written, is your ally here. This year, Gus also started publishing small dungeons again.

Psionic Blast from the Past has a suggestion for Designing Content with a Hierarchical Graph in Sandbox / Hexcrawls. His basic argument is that you can build the sandbox as you go as long as you take some time to figure out what you players are able to reach in the next session and what they're likely to need several sessions to get to. Since in a hexcrawl you can't know exactly which path your players will take, he argues against over-preparing areas that might never be visited. Also, despite the title, he doesn't actually recommend making a graph to decide these things.

Rook from Foreign Planets has a set of tables for procedurally generating a dungeon, quickly at the table. Adrenaline and Spark Tables: Dungeon Generation During Play suggests coming up with some simple elements of set-dressing, common active elements, and common passive elements. Then in each new room, roll the dice and take inspiration from the tables. Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings was also inspired by this post to give some of their own advice for jotting down a quick coherent dungeon.

Ben L from Mazirian's Garden started the year with So You Want to Make a Zine: Printing, which goes over the pros and cons of using a photocopier, a home printer, hiring a print shop, and hiring an online printer. He ended with some thoughts about different approaches to writing and using notes about what happens in each session in Barker's Rolodex: Record Keeping for a Long Campaign. In between, he also had a nice series of posts about character downtime between adventures.

 

"Session Notes, page 1" by Make a New Cult Every Day

  

Two Good Sources for Random Monsters

Below are a couple collections of links to the monster randomizers written by two prolific designers.

The links in the first collection are by Lum from Built By Gods Forgotten, who used a "remix" approach to randomize the abilities of the most classic D&D monsters.

The randomizers in the second collection are by Richard LeBlanc of Save vs Dragon. He uses a series of d30 rolls to randomize a creature's appearance, combat statistics, and special abilities.

Fortunately, both authors are from the pre Google Plus era of the Old School Renaissance, so they've both made each randomizer available as a one-page pdf. (Richard also wrote a number of unique new monsters, and both wrote a number of other generators worth looking at.)

Remixes - Built By Gods Forgotten

Dragons & Chimera
Esoteric Animals
Fey Woodland Beasts
Fey Woodland Humanoids
Gorgons Lycanthropes & Gargoyles
Humans
Humanoids
Otherworldly Monsters
Slimes Molds & Jellies
Undead

BONUS - Treasure Maps
BONUS - Treasure Hordes

EXAMPLE - The Widow of Hamelin is a beautiful woman's skeleton that's capable of a paralyzing touch and summoning rats, and is vulnerable only to silver and magic.

2 HD, AC 5, Atk 1d6 or special, Number Appearing 3d6-2. 
Special: must transform into a hideous monster to use special attacks, touch (save or paralyzed for d6 rounds), summon (call d100 rats, 3 times/day).

d30 Variations - Save vs Dragon

Bandits
Bards
Berserkers & Barbarians
Chimeras
Dinosaurs  
Dragons
Dwarves
Elves 
Fiends
Ghouls & Ghasts
Giants
Gnolls 
Goblins
Hauntings
Jellies Oozes Puddings & Slimes
Kobolds 
Minotaurs
Mummies
Orcs
Paladins
Plant Monsters
Rats
Sea Creatures
Skeletons
Snakes
Spiders
Troll Mutations
Wizards 
Worms
Zombies

BONUS - Treasure Maps 

EXAMPLE - Runed Skeleton, immune to divine damage, weapon: short sword (1d8)
 AC 7, 1 HD, Atk  1d6 or by weapon, Number appearing 3d4, Save as Fighter 1, Morale 12, Treasure nil, Alignment Chaotic.

Secret Santicorn 2019

When I wrote about Secret Santicorn 2018, I was basically just working from my own sidebar, and noticing when people used that phrase as part of the title of a post, and I happened across a few more while looking up members of the GLOGosphere. This year, I had the benefit of being able to spot additional posts in the blogroll section on the OSR Discord.

Last year I counted 17 entries. This time there's almost triple that number. Approximately one year after the end of Google Plus, I would say that the health of the blogosphere is strong.

I should also note that Of Slugs and Silver scooped me by publishing their own Secret Santicorn compilation post. I was already collecting links when Ancalagon published their list, so despite the fact that I'm reduplicating their efforts, I still want to put mine up as well. Last year, there was no one else writing a list of all the Santicorn entries. I interpret Ancalagon's compilation as a further sign of the health of the blogsophere, and I'll happily pass the torch on chronicling the next one.

Unlike last year, it's not possible to assemble all of these into a continuous chain of requests and fulfillments, so I've organized the entries by the type of content instead. I'm not sure what it says about me that I've watched two of these from the wallflower seat without ever getting up to dance, but it's likely nothing flattering, so let's avoid uncomfortable personal introspection by diving straight in to this year's entries!


On the first day of Santicorn, the blogosphere gave to meeeee....

Character Options

Aura Twilight of In the Land of Twilight Under the Moon wrote "Fairytale Classes" for Pseudo Fenton

Iemcd of The Benign Brown Beast wrote "The Slipsoul - a Character Option" for Sky Seeker

Quietude wrote "The Succubus - An OSR Race-as-Class"

As a bonus... Rook of Foreign Planets ALSO wrote "Post-Apocalyptic Character Backgrounds"

Sofinho of Alone in the Labyrinth wrote "2 GLOG Classes - The Aviator & The Jazz Bard" for The Mimic's Nest

GR Michael of Numbers aren't Real wrote "Oberon and Titania - Class: Warlock" for A Swamp in Space

Ryan of Kobolds in the Sewers wrote "The Cryptozoologist Class and Nine Cryptids" for Throne of Salt

Kent Miller of Tropicrawl wrote "OSR Gothic"


Spells & Magic

400 Billion Suns wrote "So You Killed Santa ... What's in His Sack?"

Malcolm Svensson of Tales of Scheherazade wrote "D6 Body-Warping Magic Items and a Body-Warping Spell" for Unreal Star

Isaak Hill of Fallen Empires wrote "D66 Short, Utility-Only Spells" for d66 Classless Kobolds

Diaghilev from Diaghilev's Dice wrote "Field Alchemy!" for Meandering Banter

As a bonus... GR Michael of Numbers aren't Real ALSO wrote "A Sack Full of Toys - Merry Christmas to All"


Monsters

The Byzantine of Espharel wrote "They Came from the Moon! A Space-Breaking Monster" for Archon's Court

Martin O of Goodberry Monthly wrote "Flowery Orcs" for The Whimsical Mountain

Dan of Throne of Salt wrote "Troika Space Combat + d66 Ships" for Of Slugs and Silver

Spwack of Meandering Banter wrote "Creatures Amidst the Ash" for Ten Foot Polemic

Ancalagon TB from Of Slugs and Silver wrote "The 12 Birds of Christmas" for Kobolds in the Sewers

Velexiraptor from A Blasted Cratered Land wrote "The Shellcraze" for Archons March On

Ambnz of Ravenous Ambience wrote "Skyscraper Mimics - and Other Structural Horrors" for A Blasted Cratered Land

Type 1 Ninja of Two Goblins in a Trenchcoat wrote "Words for Monster" for Idle Doings of an Idle Doodler

Valker of Parasites and Paradoxes wrote "Ents and How to Prune Your Humans" for Wanderers and Willows


Campaigns & Adventures

The Goose and Pen wrote "Reinforcing Themes through Mechanics" for Was it Likely?

Vance A of Leicester's Ramble wrote "The Last City"

Luther Gutekunst of Archon's Court wrote "Sci-Fi Dungeon Fill" for Blue Wolf

Agile Goatman of The Man with a Hammer wrote "Drow Econ 101" for Goodberry Monthly

Jones Smith of Was it Likely? wrote "Post-Roman Pre-Saxon Tables, Generators, and Hexes" for Alone in the Labyrinth

Wizzargh of DMiurgy wrote "Pre-Adamite Minidungeon Generator" for Foreign Planets

Lejeune of The Young Dungeon wrote "Generating a Ruined Ship" for Quietude

Jim of d66 Classless Kobolds wrote "The Lounge Temple of Asavraki" for The Magic Spoon

Rook of Foreign Planets wrote "Societies, Gangs, and Cultures of the Post-Apocalypse"

Idle Doodler from Idle Doings of an Idle Doodler wrote "The Underground Caverns of Nodnol" for Same is Shark in Japanese

Journey to the Tomb of the Spider Princess wrote "The Trackless Peaks" for The Young Dungeon

Gabriel Hole-Jones of The Mimic's Nest wrote "The Temple of Lethe" for Princesses & Pioneers

Tamas Kisbali of Eldritch Fields wrote "All Aboard the Terrible Dogfish!" for Deus

Andy of Sword and Storytellers wrote "Herber's Expedition"

James Young of Ten Foot Polemic wrote "Tide-Flooded Caverns" for DMiurgy

Sven Weisserfuchs of Wanderers and Willows wrote "Three Funhouse Dungeon Rooms!"

Gorinich of The Whimsical Mountain wrote "Psychonauts - Courageous Healers or Conniving Thieves?" for Nick Roman

Cataleptic Kraken of Unreal Star wrote "Evolving Dungeons" for Goblin Punch

wr3cking8a11 from A Swamp in Space wrote "An Adventuring Economy" for Diaghilev's Dice

As a bonus... Ancalagon TB from Of Slugs and Silver ALSO wrote "The Secret Santicorn Compilation"

Mottokrosh Machinations wrote "Yuletide Haunting of TOMBS" for Mud & Blood

As a bonus... Iemcd of The Benign Brown Beast ALSO wrote "Crisis on Christmas"

Zoeology of Princesses & Pioneers wrote "Tarot Dungeon" for In the Land of Twilight Under the Moon

As a bonus... Sofinho of Alone in the Labyrinth ALSO wrote "A Gift from Mr Screw-on-Head to Us All..."

DG Chapman of The Graverobber's Guide wrote "Twelfth Night Heist"


... and a partridge in a pear treeeee! Phew!