I was very kindly offered to host the RPG Blog Carnival for the March just been, and I roguishly set the theme as “Over the Garden Wall - Beyond the OSR.” I asked collaborators to reflect on techniques from other roleplaying game play cultures, or from other sorts of play entirely, or even from their work or daily lives - all in service of how they might enrich the sort of “Old-School Revisionist” style of adventure gaming I have come to particularly enjoy, and often discuss on this blog.

For my part, I contributed the following posts through March on the topic:

• Over the Garden Wall: March RPG Blog Carnival
• Officious Storygame Regulations - Stakes
• Paint the (Un)scene
• OSR - Status

But the wonderful thing about this tradition is that it’s not just all down to me! Several of my fellow kith and kin heeded the call to arms, mustering the following warband of musings for our collective enlightenment.

So many blogs in our house, so let's turn the sound up;
You know why? I think it's time for an RPG Blog Carnival round-up!

Histories in OSR Play

Luke over at Cats Have No Lords presents the Histories mechanic from Monster of the Week, and lays out how we can quickly add a handful of intra-party relationships (perhaps positively and negatively valent).

Blog Carnival: Histories in OSR Play

This is a quick post is to jump in on this month’s hosted by . The theme this month is going ”over the garden wall” to pull in elements from non-OSR games i…

Cats Have No Lord

This looks like it would help a new group skip past the awkward “you all meet in a tavern” scene, while still letting us establish our characters a bit, before we start swinging swords and slinging spells. Juice for the table/character banter and friendly rivalries too - everyone wants a bit of that Legolas/Gimli energy when I’m playing D&D.

Reminds me to do something with the Entanglements of Hearts of Wulin, that establish conflicted relationship triangles between PCs and key NPCs. Also perhaps nab the Trust mechanic from Cold City, Hot War for a more adversarial style game like Paranoia. We could be doing more with “social tools/equipment” in this space.

Blades for OSR?

Marcin of VDonnut Valley considers how both the Load and XP trigger mechanics of Blades in the Dark could be adapted to dungeon delving elf- games.

Blades for OSR? - RPG Blog Carnival

I wondered for a long time about this topic. It is heavy and it is tough. In the end I didn’t come up with much in terms of conceptual stuff. I’m not deep en…

VDonnut Valley

I am surprised that I can’t recall ever seeing the Load approach really fleshed out for adventure gaming. I think the whole design lineage of playbook sheets for PbtA/BitD games presents a far better information presentation to onboard new players for character creation, and I’d much rather players reference equipment lists on the sheet in front of them than interminable shopping from the rulebook. The version of Load in Harpers’ Deep Cuts cleans up my biggest bugaboos with the original take as well.

The XP triggers aren’t a world away from ideas for XP per room or hex explored in a session, or XP for magic items in AD&D, or the 3d6DTL Feats of Exploration supplement. Reminds me of a nagging thought: what if rather than XP-for-gold, just actually lean into the material advantages of wealth, and play with gold-for-gold, a la Traveller?

Ideas to Patch into OSR play

Xaoseed of Seed of Worlds brings us a smattering of three thoughts from the broader rolling fields of tabletop role-play:

• Career character generation & advancement (Warhammer Fantasy RPG, Traveller, GLoG)
• Attrition beyond HP (Spire)
• Contacts mechanics (Shadowrun, World of Darkness)

Ideas to patch into OSR play (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Illusory Sensorium has the topic of Over the Garden Wall where they want to hear about what is are things us…

Xaosseed

Absolutely agree with each of these being fruitful voids to look at filling. Careers and cultures are far conceptually denser than ability scores in evoking a sense of character, and the process needn’t take much if any more time than rolling up your typical level 1 character and buying starting gear.

Tracking non-HP resources as old-school is well attested by Sanity in Call of Cthulhu, and arguably both the Credit and the Social Standing systems in Traveller. Contacts or social favours/debt fit in snuggly alongside this.

It’s often quoted “attack every part of the character sheet,” but the corollary is you should be putting more stuff on the sheet to attack in that case!

What OSR GMs Can Learn From Open World Video Games

Reese of Ward Against Evil lays out in considerable detail the level/world design lessons exemplified by three big-budget titles:

• Vantage Outposts, in Mad Max (2015)
• Most Wanted, in Batman Arkham Knight (2015)
• Collect-a-thons, in Far Cry 5 (2018)

What OSR GMs Can Learn From Open World Video Games

I’m specifically talking about three open world games and a different idea from each that can be taken and applied to an OSR open world/West Marches-style campain. They are: Vantage Outposts,…

Ward Against EvilPixelAmerica

I have played at least a bit of all three games, and I think these observations are spot on. The more active way of surveying from towers in Mad Max, or Breath of the Wild (BotW) for that matter, reinvigorated that hoary old Ubisoft motif: and the breadth of moorish ’capsule’ activities & expected rewards in Far Cry 5 goes well beyond the usual schema of Random Encounter, Lair, or (Mega-)Dungeon.

The lost Shrines of Dolmenwood have been a great driver of play for me - should we have Wizard’s Towers housing spell books & scrolls, or Trial Vaults containing sentient magic items locked away for civilization’s safety, until the need is so dire?

At the time I was very impressed by the environmental way-finding and sense of discovery in Batman Arkham Knight. This and BotW are actually the Landmark (my apologies) titles in this regard, being best-in-class at advertising their game-able content without just littering a map with so many exhausting crumbs for want of a good vacuum. Even seminal title The Witcher 3 fell foul of this, as I was ultimately downed and drowned off the isles of wreck-strewn Skellige, and I don’t think I shall ever go back.

Education Scaffolding for tRPGs

Finally, Panic Pillow of Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet had a lovely piece on applying the education theory of Scaffolding to OSR gaming.

Beyond the OSR: Education scaffolding for tRPGs

My submission for the RPG blog carnaval . This month’s topic is Over the garden wall - Beyond the OSR . My job is being a teacher, a philoso…

I was already familiar with the theory of scaffolding, but hadn’t thought to apply it in this way before. We still don’t have many, if any, good texts to both teach the rules and culture of adventure game play side-by-side. Prospective initiates are usually directed to pickup one of the nigh uncountable retro-clones or ‘NSR’/artpunk games but then have to read essays like Principia Apocrypha, Primer for Old School Gaming, or Philotomy’s Musings. This leaves a large gap between theory and praxis.

My understanding is that Vince & Meguey Baker, Ben Milton, and Chris McDowall all have an education background as well. How about y’all help out bring the neophytes into the fold with some more scaffolding like this? Unsurprisingly, in conversation games, word choice and sentence construction matter.

Another instalment in my Chaotic mini-series of story-game techniques ripe for the pillaging by adventure gamers. Graham Walmsley wrote a good summary of the improv concept of Status in his book Play Unsafe.

The cliff notes is that high or low status can be granted (such as a team leader/king, or lackey/convict) or assumed (such as acting confidently and in charge, or acting deferentially).

We can also consider status separately between the player, game (mechanics), and character (narrative): a high status player (whether granted or assumed) might play a low level and hence status thief, or vice versa.

In nearly all interesting relationships there is a status differential (even subtle) that colours the interpersonal interactions, and one of the prime sources of narrative comes from status changes (where swift upheavals are more comic, while slow-burns are more dramatic or tragic).

Despite the clear basis of character level informing game status (through HD, saves, spells - let alone acquired gold and magic items), and the unavoidable differences in player status, there is usually a presumption of quite flat character status. Prior to achieving so-called 'name level' with strongholds and followers, most characters are presented (and in my experience played) as wandering vagrants with no clear place in the social hierarchy. A more granular approach to rising (and threatened!) status is implied by games like Earthdawn, but certainly far from the norm.

Perhaps more interesting still is to explore status differentials between the player characters (PCs). Its usually taken was writ that the PCs should be harmonious & egalitarian in pursuing the 'team goals:' a framing that is summarised by the motto play to win. In this context, it is usually undesirable for some to have status (and hence power) over their fellow players.

Story games conversely promote the motto of play to lose: leaning into flaws and opportunities to see our characters fall and succumb to their darker selves (related to an author stance of play). This can be frustrating in an adventure game context when the game is being played somewhat adversarially: the PCs versus the world, arbitrated by a putatively just and neutral Referee. Someone who makes poor gameplay decisions 'because it's what my character would do' in this setting is working against the team effort.

Yet the Nordic LARP scene coined another approach, termed play to lift: this is working to support whatever approach and intent your fellow players are taking in the moment. This naturally pairs with more status-informed play: both sides of a high-low-status dyad can play to 'lift' the other, which will on occasion include a status reversal when prompted by the fiction. This can more comfortably accommodate status differentials alongside adventure game play: we can highlight the conflicted relationship when it won't jeopardise the mission, but still lean in and pull together when the stakes are high.

Lastly, I'd be remiss to not highlight the importance of communication (safety) tools. In establishing a status difference between PCs, it's important to check in at the player level - both at the outset, and later during moments of relationship tension. It's critical to maintain a clear line between the commanding PC barking orders at their subservient fellow PC, and the desired minimal status difference between those two players as humans around a table playing a game together.

For my second of N part mini blog series on store-game techniques for OSR/adventure games, I'm going to spotlight a pair of scene-framing procedures from The Gauntlet games like Brindlewood Bay and The Between; these invite more creative collaboration from players, but needn't challenge the sense of legitimacy fostered by prep-informed pawn-stance play (blorb).

Paint the scene

To state it plainly: a Paint the Scene question is a prompt the GM presents to the table (usually but not requisitely pre-prepared) that each player is invited to respond to by adding a fictional detail to elaborate their senses or dressing details: like the layering of paints on a canvas to build up a scene. Here are three examples from different games by The Gauntlet:

It’s a busy time of year at the marina In what ways are the tourists making it difficult for you to conduct your investigation? (Brindlewood Bay)

There were hunters living in Hargrave House before you; trophies from their encounters with the supernatural can be found here. Describe one. (The Between)

A posted flyer warns locals to be on the alert for a saint in the area. The saint is described as highly dangerous, but residents are assured that law enforcement is specially prepared to deal with it—they simply need to be informed if anyone sees something suspicious. What detail makes you believe that this saint is following you and your companions specifically? (Silt Verses RPG)

Observe that these are not just completely open or undirected questions like "what's the tavern's name and why is it interesting," or "describe a beautiful vista." The key to this technique is writing good prompts, which in my estimation are:

• Thematic. The answers should be evocative, sensory, and add colour or texture to the scene - rather than establishing more prosaic or structural details.
• Leading. The prompt is loaded, to both establish the core fiction, but also to make responding easier (restrictions breed creativity and all that).
• Layered. The goal is to flesh out multiple facets of a single item or each item of a set, building up the scene, so there should be room for several answers to mix in together.

These prompts can be deployed to give some light interactivity to an otherwise "empty room" in a dungeon, to help flesh out the ambience and themes of a settlement, or even to elicit player-generated rumours eg. what tall tale have you each heard about a Roc that roosts atop the nearest mountain?

Related reading would include the "unframing" (anti-canonical) questions to open a session in The Wildsea.

Unscenes

Also from a Gauntlet production, specifically The Between: the Unscene is when play is cut away from the protagonists to a group of otherwise unrelated characters engaging in something at most narratively peripheral to the main adventure, while thematically coherent. It's intended to explore the setting as a character, and let players briefly inhabit other character perspectives and have greater narrative authority within a 'walled garden.'

In adventure gaming, this may actually overlap with the classic practices of hirelings and troupe play. This technique can be quite cinematic and is distinguished by:

• Late in, early out. Hard frame the scene to the most interesting moment, and brutally edit to close as soon as the central tension has been released.
• Self-contained. The scene shouldn't need much if any background to become invested in, and not directly impact on the main adventure.
• Iconic. The scene should lean into tropes and genre conventions to be easily framed and resolved, and be emblematic of broader struggles and themes in the setting.

This can be used in lieu of playing out a rest in the dungeon, a camp scene, or any other 'slow' scene that you might not feel moved to foreground, but still want the pacing of an interstitial scene. This is the more 'relaxed' variant.

Conversely, in the original formulation, we cut back and forth with the main characters a few times, and the Unscene sort of functions as a ticking clock: when the Unscene concludes, some looming threat comes to pass for the protagonists. This tighter version may encroach somewhat further in adding a 'meta-game' time limit, but it's worth playing with to find what style suits your table.

A call to arms

I'd love to hear from YOU for the March RPG Blog Carnival: what's something outside the OSR, outside roleplaying, or even just outside gaming (like your day job!) that you think could enrich our collective folk traditions of adventure gaming? Remember to email me or comment on one of these posts so I can include you in the end of month roundup!

I'm hosting this month's RPG Blog Carnival and the theme is Over the Garden Wall - Beyond the OSR. This sadly hasn't garnered much activity yet (myself, admittedly, included) but I am going to work the bellows on those dying embers in this last week of March "save versus Madness."

I have made good use in my adventure gaming with a set of play techniques I was introduced to through story-games. These are each essentially agnostic of the underlying game dice mechanics, and instead operate at the meta-mechanical level of scene framing and lines of narrative authority. I will post a mini blog series giving a brief exposition of each, and how I have lightly adapted it to the needs of adventure gaming.

While reading along, I exhort you to 'get on the blogs' and venture over the garden wall yourself. Doesn't need to be storygames! Refer to the original post above for the full remit of the theme.

Negotiating stakes

My second post on this blog discussed the role of negotiating the stakes before rolling dice in Blades in the Dark (Blades), but in the wake of the stealth-dropped 1.5 edition of that game (Deep Cuts), I have been further galvanized by these ideas.

In Blades, you are directed to negotiate the present and possible future fictions (what I'm dubbing the stakes) before actually touching the dice for a threat (previously action) roll. The two components of this I will touch on are trading position for effect, and making a devil's bargain.

Position and effect were unfortunately somewhat over-explained in the original treatment, but a leaner folk version has since emerged: an explicit step before rolling of establishing what success, failure, or something in-between will look like. This permits the GM and players to then 'haggle' over the risk versus reward (when traditionally adventure games mechanise the chance/probability of saving throws or skill checks, but leave the actual stakes somewhere between GM fiat and prescribed in the adventure module). Jesse Schell in The Art of Game Design posited that such triangularity (risk versus reward) is perhaps the single most potent design lens, and I'm inclined to agree!

The devil's bargain is really a close cousin, where instead of dialling up or down the risk-reward scale, we can pay a definite cost for a boosted chance of success. This can be layered into almost any dice procedure with the usual circumstance modifier, or else rolling with advantage.

Both of these techniques blend seamlessly with the more concrete and less abstract, rulings over rules and OSR challenges style of adventure game play. If only immediate concerns are up for grabs (such as risking damage or loss of equipment, loss of time or health, etc. rather than ticking faction clocks or adjusting relationships) then it doesn't significantly move the narrative authority away from the GM or lose the 'player as pawn' stance (versus 'player as actor' or 'player as author/director').

What both trading position for effect and a devil's bargain offer is a greater fidelity of the fictional details, and this can further promote lateral thinking and creative problem solving. Don't focus on dice modifiers - haggle over all the possible futures.

Summary

• Raise the stakes by increasing both the impact of success and failure, or
• Lower the stakes by reducing both the impact of success and failure, or
• Improve your odds (eg. roll with advantage) by paying a fixed cost in time, gear, health or other resource.

Further reading

• 50/50 by John Harper
• Difficulty in Bastionland by Chris McDowall (Bastionland)
• Advantage and Impact by Sam Doebler (Dreaming Dragonslayer)

Welcome back to the Illusory Sensorium. It's my inestimable pleasure to be hosting this months' RPG Blog Carnival, a lovely little travelling tradition kept inflated and tied into balloon animals by Of Dice and Dragons' Scot Newbury. So far in 2025 we've had a pair of lovely thematic topics: Worlds Beyond and Dragon Neighbours. Now for something incompletely different: Over the Garden Wall - Beyond the OSR.

The tacit framing of this illustrious carnival is we're all prepping and playing fantastic medieval adventure games; or more effusively the most multifarious (Post-)Old/New School Revival/Renaissance/Revolution/Rapprochement. It's got the bones of a broad, blue church, but there has still sadly been a long history of gatekeeping the walled garden.

If you've somehow wormed your way to this very post, on this here blog, about this little hobby, without already having a working knowledge of what the "OSR" even is - I will skip the usual apocryphal primers, and instead recommend this recent tidy summary by Yochai Gal (New School Revolution).

This month, I'm calling everyone in - what is something usually held as outside the domain of adventure gaming, which you think actually blends away nicely? It doesn't have to please everyone - someone's yum is another stooge's yuck - but what's an aberrant idea you're keen to try? Even better: what's something you've already brought to the gaming table last summer, and can now report back to the class?

There are a lot of external sources I'd like to consider, so I'll present an amuse-bouche of inspirations you might like to draw from, as well as some of my own idle musings that I'll (hopefully) expound upon before the end-of-season round up on March 31st:

'Outside' cultures of play

I would consider all forms of make-believe, pretend and imagination play more similar than they are different; if you're not already amongst the weeds on the taxonomy of roleplaying games, I would suggest reading the Retired Adventurer for a primer. Add to that lyric games, board and card games, live-action roleplaying games, family and parlour games, improv, serious/war-games, mega games...

For example, I reckon a lot of story/narrative game 'tech' is well worth pinching: Playbooks, Custom Moves, Clocks, and Fronts from Apocalypse World; negotiating Position and Effect, Flashbacks, Loadouts, and Downtime procedures from Blades in the Dark (and the nuance of the Threat Roll in the Deep Cuts expansion); CATS (Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject matter), Paint the Scene, and Unscenes from The Gauntlet games like The Between; and even (Thoughts), Stars & Wishes by Lu Quade and Craig Shipman.

None of that's novel: what I haven't seen discussed much though, is how play norms like the line of narrative authority might not only vary between games, but even within the one game between its phases of play. Specifically: what about marrying classic/OSR dungeon-delving adventure gaming to alternate phases of more story game downtime or seasonal play in a city or stronghold? The line of narrative authority could deliberately shift, so players may setup scenes and play supporting characters in civilisation, without compromising the verisimilitude of exploring the dungeon (or untamed wilds). Put another way, the players could intentionally shift stances between pawn/actor and author/director, adding another rhythm and dimension to play.

What other ideas from an 'outside' culture of play might be fun to mix with the OSR?

'Outside' roleplaying games

Let's go further afield: what of computer and video games, or other entertainment media? Of course several digital game genres owe their roots to Dungeons & Dragons, but the field has gone on to make further strides that we might now wish to reincorporate:

• Dice-less combat. High-information and low-chance tactical skirmish games like Into the Breach, Mario & Rabies, Marvel's Midnight Suns, and Tactical Breach Wizards demonstrate a style of combat that could prioritise interesting decisions and player skill. In the tabletop space, one of the main such examples I know of is Spencer Campbell's recent LOOT game (Illuminated by Lumen 2.0).
• Mobile combat. The above skirmish games also promote movement and positioning through varied elevation, hazardous terrain, destructible cover, and forced movement. What they don't have is Opportunity Attacks for moving out of a threatened space: a mainstay of D&D that promotes stasis in combat. What if instead, like Midnight Suns, you were liberal with forced movement powers and let people make out of turn attacks whenever an opponent is pushed into them? C-c-combo beatdown!
• Environmental attacks. These same games also reveal the untapped space of pushing people off ledges, through windows, or into explosive or electrified obstacles; and pulling down or activating other hazards. D&D has always presented these opportunities as uncompetitive against your character's intrinsic combat abilities - flip it round so these circumstantial and limited use attacks are the most potent, and even let characters specialise in this (such as a Berserker being better with improvised weapons and smashing into terrain).
• Concrete magic. Advanced by Paulo Greco of Lost Pages, this principle takes on another hue through the lens of the immersive sim genre (such as Thief, Deus Ex, and Dishonoured). Defining character abilities or magical effects in more grounded and less abstract ways facilitates rulings over rules, and play as an open system. Re-purposing a dungeon trap as a limited-use special weapon, using sticky mines as a makeshift staircase, taking control of camera and computer systems... This is why the 5E approach of the Grease spell being uninflammable is so stifling.
• Open-air dungeons. Games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metal Gear Solid 5 give a blueprint for embedding dungeon-like enemy fortresses in a broader open world. This goes further than just Jaquaysing the dungeon with multiple routes of ingress and egress: by bringing the adventure site up to the surface, it facilitates broader faction play with neighbours, and opens up more operational approaches for infiltrating or sieging. There is still work to be done in how to design and present these spaces for ease of play: well-annotated maps, orders of battle, reinforcement plans, alarm level responses, and more are required.
• 4X. eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. A somewhat calcified genre of strategy wargames, now typified by the Civilization series. Rather than the usual framing of domain- and name-level play with singular stronghold building, what about broadening the scope to conquering and ruling an empire? The typical campaign hex map is begging to be repurposed for this: just assign contested strategic resources to settlements and dungeon sites, and change the timebase for downtime play to seasons so you can feel the roll of years.
• War magic. Extending on the 4X idea, Age of Wonders 4 shows a way of linking tactical skirmish combat with the larger scale strategy layer through a shared resource. You could draw upon Mana from claimed land to fuel epic siege-spells and wizardry of mass destruction.

What other ideas from 'outside' tabletop gaming might be fun to mix with the OSR?

'Outside' gaming

Last but certainly not least: what about your second favourite hobby, or your profession or day job? I'm a statistical amateur learning some Bayesian data modelling at the moment - there are interesting questions about empiricism and ontology in science that are raised by the priors and likelihood, deduction versus induction and falsifiable claims. It has got me reflecting on the old D&D: Planescape setting, and what it even means to say that belief shapes reality. Is a post-truth world really such a fantasy anymore?

What other ideas from 'outside' gaming entirely might be fun to mix with the OSR?

Get on the Blogs!

So consider this the slap across the cheek with a white kid glove: you have been challenged to write a post on your own blog (or even micro-blog platform like Bluesky) informed by one of these angles. When you have, please comment below or email me at illusory.sensorium@gmail.com with a link. Come the end of the month I'll post here again with a round-up of all the contributions.

Excelsior!

Lurching into 2025 after working through the Christmas period, I had a sizeable backlog of RPG blog feeds to catch up on. The resulting furious reading session likely contributed to the mental stewpot that then started to congeal, and extracted from the cooling mess was this crystallised thought: clear, beautiful, but sharp and ready to make you bleed (for art or play - what's the difference?).

Now just past 50 years from the published birth of the hobby, big corpo Hasbro are doing their darnedest to further monetise and commodify brand-name Dungeons & Dragons: the world's most commercial roleplaying game. In any sane copyright law, a creative work over 50 years from publication would be in the public domain. Fortunately, since the first tentative steps of the OSR (Open Source Roleplaying) through retroclones, the inalienable right to dream with plastic icosahedrons and silly voices has been proper battle-tested. Try and send the Pinkerton's around for stealing the keys to your own imagination.

This is obviously somewhat hyperbolic, but it's with purpose: amidst not just the glossy reboot of Dungeons & Dragons, but even the rising indie production values and impending Zinequest crowdfunding campaigns, I don't want to lose sight of the rough-and-ready photocopied-zine folk traditions of this hobby. Much great creativity and community is shared on blogs, but I don't find the translation of that material to the gaming table occurring as often as it should.

Therefore, consider the following - a challenge, a proposal, a resolution - whatever cognitive frame you gotta squeeze it into to manifest this tulpa:

Build-an-Elfgame

1. Claim an old (but nice enough) shoebox, evict the erstwhile occupants.
2. Take pencils, sharpener, eraser and index cards from the office or store; pay if you must.
3. Cobble together a mismatched set of dice; if you only have neat matching sets, fix that by melting some in your microwave, or hurling over your neighbour's fence.
4. Use whatever P/OSR-adjacent rules you already have in your head or are broadly interoperable with the exisiting corpus of play material. If you need brain fuel: BFRPG, OSE SRD, and Cairn 2E all are free and gratis. Searchers of the Unknown is only one page and hence a lovely fit, while Crack! has just the right anti-consumerist energy. Pick your poison (save).
5. Collate printer-friendly bi-fold one page mini zines (zinis): adventure sites, monsters, treasure, carousing tables, whatever.
6. Release your own zinis, whether adapted from your existing blog posts, or arising from play at the table, or created bespoke as its own diverting lonely fun. Make them by hand, make them digitally, whatever works - to quote the Bakers: "to do it, do it."
7. Play, make, create.

No Rights Reserved

I'd advocate the default be a CC0 copyleft statement for these zinis. This not only makes the strongest statement about the community-ownership of fantasy medieval adventure gaming, but has a practical benefit over the more prevalent CC-BY 4.0: in this small format needing to cite/attribute other sources is somewhat onerous. We're making stone soup here - no need to sign the rocks.

Why zinis?

Why printer-friendly one page bi-fold zinis? I honestly harbour an irrational love of the format, but I could proffer the following incentives:

• They pack away nicely in a box and evoke that early "3LBB" vibe.
• They let you play with an eye-catching front-cover, and have an "inner" and "back-cover" for structure.
• They present a very approachable scope for both producing and consuming: my experience has been a double sided sheet can be quickly whipped up but easily gives a session worth of play.
• They are the second simplest print-and-play at home format (after just one-page kept flat).
• They can be intermingled with larger staple-bound A5 zines that are probably the favourite format for the indie RPG hobby-space.

For my part, I'm presently working on a couple of such Zinis, which I look forward to sharing soon. I hope others might join the vanguard: with just a little extra seasoning, this soup will turn out delicious.

Appendix Now

Rather than spend many further words explaining my train of thought, here's the superimposed metro station.

• Zungeon Manifesto on Playful Void
• 1E Manifesto on 200-Proof Games
• The Ways the Machine Controls Us on Lumpley Games
• Worksheet Manifesto on Aaron King's Tumblr
• The BX Commons on False Machine
• FLAILSNAILS on Jeff's Gameblog
• MOSAIC Strict on Trilemma Adventures
• 2400 bi-fold game family by Jason Tocci
• Tomb of the Primate Priest bi-fold module by Joseph R Lewis
• Innumerable Mothership tri-fold modules
• The breathless creative output of the GLOG community

I will preface by acknowledging, as Zedeck Siew has nicely articulated, that there are problems with incentivising "ethical" behaviour, and as Luke argued in one of his polemics, don't incentivise "desired" behaviour.

Yet, I have been ruminating on a post by Fae Errant about gender-coded aspirations & incentives in roleplaying games. Although "XP-for-GP" is an OSR shibboleth, some interesting alternatives have been presented, including Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast campaign and its advancement by boasting.

A once iconic but now near-forgotten element of That '70s Dragon Game was the level title. Although some were decidedly low-effort (the Barbarian was simply called such at every level), the rest implied a modicum of world-building and helped to provide a lexicon for relating the game abstraction of levels to in-world character scale. For the uninitiated, Grognardia has a nice summary of Fighter and Thief level titles.

It strikes me (both in the reading and the playing) that despite these level tiles being compelling, they are also awkward to fully operationalise. Upon hauling the latest cart of ransacked grave goods back to town, your holier-than-thou Cleric suddenly advances to the third level, and is automatically ordained as a Priest? Though out of vogue in many circles, training time and costs might ameliorate this somewhat, but don't strike at the heart of the matter. Level titles feel disconnected from the usual systems of advancement - but can we flip the script on that?

An aside on incentives

My experience playing games this year with minimal extrinsic mechanical incentive (in contrast to the intrinsic incentives generated by players' actor or pawn stances) has been largely positive. Some games have minimal advancement (Cairn by Yochai Gal), others provided a drip feed of advancement mostly just for showing up (Wildsea by Felix Isaacs, Vaesen by Free League, and Neon City Overdrive by Nathan Russell). None particularly left my table for want of further incentives.

However, I would argue that extrinsic incentives such as advancement remain a vital tool to shape play. In assuming a lusory attitude we adopt the necessary conceits and constraints that inform our play: I've sadly sat down to play a board game with my friends, failed to adopt the lusory attitude, and as should be expected we all had a worse time for it. For many players of imagination games, a clear 'goal' against which to struggle is a vital anchor in an otherwise tumultuous sea of possibilities. If restrictions breed creativity, then unbridled freedom breeds only banality.

Taking a more descriptive than prescriptive look at gaming, one of the most enduring legacies of hoary-old Dungeons & Dragons is precisely its codification of a class-and-level system of character creation & advancement, and the now classic trinities (Warrior, Thief, Mage and DPS, Tank, Healer) carved from the earliest four classes (Fighter-man, Cleric, Magic-user, Thief). Computer games are fecund with such inspired systems, and inarguably they are engaging in the sense they hold player engagement. A reasonable position to hold would even be that this is one of the cardinal reasons that Dungeons & Dragons took off and endured, despite early competition by games like Traveller and RuneQuest/Call of Cthulhu, that presented a far more restrained progression system.

The actual proposal, finally

Scrap XP.

At character creation, claim your name and first title; some suitable construction like:

• Guy of Gisborne
• Gimli, son of Glóin
• Aragorn, Ranger of the North
• Bjorn the Fell-Handed

To advance to the next level, you must achieve something your peers would consider worthy, and then proclaim your new title. A feast, party or other ceremony is warranted and if you still like giving and taking GP for advancement, you can say the festivities must cost the same amount it would have taken to level up per your favourite elf-game. Example adventurer-tier titles might be:

• Goblin-slayer, for beheading the chief of a local hive that were preying upon your home town
• Elf-friend, for a non-Elf who rallied to their aid in a time of dire need
• Priest of Homlet, for one you have actually done the fictional legwork to be ordained by the church

Your new claim will be judged by your peers: both in-world by the characters, but also at-the-table by the GM and the other players. Unmeritorious claims found wanting should be rebuked: there is little more embarrassing than a failed attempt to re-title yourself, and this risk of admonishment (and perhaps wasted expenses on the celebration!) should be sufficient disincentive to make frivolous title claims.

Tiers & responsibilities

There is no uniformly agreed set of level-and-tier distinctions in the litany of "F20" games, but I'll equate the now most well known (D&D 5E) and roughly equate it to other sources:

1. Levels 1-4 are Local Heroes (5E), akin to Basic (dungeon-based)
2. Levels 5-10 are Heroes of the realm (5E), akin to Expert (wilderness-based)
3. Levels 11-16 are Masters of the Realm (5E), akin to Companion (domain-based)
4. Levels 17-20 are Masters of the World (5E), akin to Master & Immortal (planar-based)

The notion is that you must claim a title worthy of the station you hold: a level 5 Fighter who tries to advance to level 6 by proclaiming "Ravager of the Borderlands" for clearing the Caves of Chaos has missed their chance, and should be suitably shamed for trying to pick such low-hanging fruit.

Circling back to that inciting post by Fae Errant, I think it's important to highlight that claiming a title doesn't just give you power and authority: it also entails duty and obligation. Consider the medieval system of sworn fealty: there is a bi-directional relationship between ruler and the ruled, where though asymmetric, both sides are indebted to the other in some sense and must uphold their end of the arrangement.

I would say only your first-level title is uncontested and leaves you obligated to only yourself.

All later titles should entail some oath or debt of honour, a pledge to serve and protect, etc. The goblin-slayer will be called upon to drive off the next roving goblin horde, the elf-friend will be drawn into a heated dispute between their nations, and the priest of Homlet will have to lead an expedition to exorcise the town's purportedly haunted moathouse.

This rather elegantly supports player-driven play: admixing the pull of seeking new deeds worthy of proclamation with the push to to defend your existing titles against usurpers or calls for aid. The process naturally weaves your character into the broader fabric of the setting: no man is an island.

Failure to uphold your duty also has a natural means of recourse: loss of the level & title. Enfeebled by your disgrace, the ways of the world are that the Old and New Gods or some other Divine Authority that has invested you with this power can just as easily take it away when it is no longer earned.

To twist the otherwise spent quote by Voltaire: with great responsibility comes great power.

I am rather wilfully misconstruing and contorting the prompt of this month's RPG Blog Carnival on Beyond Vancian Magic: nothing is true except out is through.

I'm not enamoured with the aesthetics of tome-toting poindexter magicians, but I do enjoy the logistical implications of requiring our fine-fingered fantasists to account for their spells in encumbrance, as in games like Cairn and Knave. This grounds everyone's problem-solving arsenal and treasure in a shared resource to be managed, and is a more compelling explanation for be-robed casters than the notion that some armour will wreck their interpretive dance skills.

What if instead of those musty spellbooks, living spells must be borne? They take up encumbrance just as usual, for they add to the fat of your soul. I have kept a soft spot for the Binder class of Tome of Magic (D&D 3E), with its named and briefly storied vestiges. Animist magic also provides a few arguable gameplay advantages:

• Hunt for power. Seeking lost and fabled arcane texts to assimilate is a high water mark of player-emergent narrative, but most games also hand out freebies on levelling up and either permit or raise the option of duplicating/transcribing spells between practitioners. Curtailing this requires conceits like magic McGuffin ink, or just establishing that nearly all wizards are selfish gits. Instead, what if you sought out the living spell to negotiate with or otherwise subdue and bring to heel?
• Weird little freaks. If you listen to the podcast Between Two Cairns (and putting my cold-reading star-embossed conical hat on: you do), you will have heard them wax prosaic on the joy of having odd creatures of unusual personhood in our adventures. Living spells are a fantastic excuse to present alien and wilful minds, akin to mischievous faeries or those Zelda characters who are just completely obsessed with something you don't care about.
• World-building. I'd frame arcane spells as daemons/devils of Chaos, divine as angels and other celestial beings of Order, and primal/druidic as nature spirits of Balance (full-throated neutrality). This fleshes out how people socially relate to spell-casters based on the provenance of the powers they choose to entreat with.

Looking at the second-order implications of such possessing spells, I propose that harbouring such fugitives betwixt your glands and humours should have some... ramifications:

• Appearance. Each spell provides a tell-tale cosmetic tell, definitely marking you out as Cunning, and to those in the know implying the actual nature of the mystical powers you wield. This can be a slightly less disfiguring (or more - you do you) version of the corrupting magic idea in Dungeon Crawl Classics.
• Behaviour. Each spell also exerts its will upon the holder, adding a drive or personality trait to the stone soup of their inner dialogue. This likewise can be dialled up if desired to a Disco Elysium level of internal bickering and irrationality - just hand out the dissonant whispers around the table so the DM doesn't hog the fun!
• Cantrip. The only 'hard' mechanical change I'm proposing - let the host wield minor associated magics without expending a spell slot. These can probably just be adjudicated on the fly by common case law, the intention being about the potency of non-combat D&D 5E cantrips or otherwise effects you'd deeply regret having spent a slot on come the morning after.

When a spell is expended, the invested creature becomes unfettered for a time, until you next prepare yourself as a vessel and bind them once more. Does this soften the change to your appearance, quiet its braying upon your shoulder, or curtail your parlour tricks? Ask the stars. Want to play the game of unholy matrimony with your supernatural Sujimon? Skerples of course has got you covered with spell-breeding.

A Worked Example

To forestall the reasonable accusation that my blog remains all shirt and no trousers in the Department of Gameable Affairs (direct all correspondence to secretariat Joesky): here I flesh out how I might apply this to the six possible starting spells from Cairn 2E's character burner:

Detect Magic: You can see or hear nearby magical auras. Scintillating irides. Distractible. Magical script and runes glows faint in your presence.

Control Plants: Nearby plants and trees obey you and gain the ability to move at a slow pace. Verdant digits. Drawn to bask in sunlight. Plants gently part to make a path.

Thicket: A thicket of trees and dense brush up to 50ft wide suddenly sprouts up. Body hair of delicate thorns. Prickly. Mundane thorns cannot pierce your flesh.

Disassemble: Any of your body parts may be detached and reattached at will, without causing pain or damage. You can still control them. Joints settle in disturbing angles. Prankster. Hyper-mobile contortionism.

Read Mind: You can hear the surface thoughts of nearby creatures. Swollen cranium, shrunken ears. Intrusively inquisitive. Silently project own thoughts into other's minds within earshot.

Auditory Illusion: You create illusory sounds that seem to come from a direction of your choice. Resonant, booming voice. Overly theatrical. Louden or quiet nearby ambient noise.

I wouldn't work this all out for every spell before starting play - easier and more collaborative to develop as needed. There's no reason two casters needs to have precisely the same manifestations either: let players have their bespoke pieces of flair.

A recent post by Marcia B of Traverse Fantasy got me thinking about the nature of interstitial scenes; the moments of play that occur before, between, and after each of the integral scenes: combat and chases, social interaction, and dungeon room or local wilderness exploration - all familiar from fantasy adventure gaming.

Integral scenes are identified by a couple of traits: they are usually stationary (opening and closing in the same mode or imaginary space), and embody the lion’s share of the interactivity promised to players. The usual pattern of play in these scenes is to establish and then resolve a conflict where a protagonist pursues a goal against an obstacle or threat (narrative lens), or else must make one or more meaningful informed choices (ludic lens). The so-called core rules of the game usually relate primarily to these scenes, and hence the main character-building gubbins offered to players interface with these systems as well.

Conversely, interstitial scenes are transitive (opening and closing in different modes or imaginary spaces) and unfortunately can be somewhat neglected in terms of interactivity and meaningful character input. These sometimes vexatious scenes are vital to giving form and substance to a session of play; the results mercurial due to inadequate or poorly-received scaffolding.

I am going to non-exhaustively enumerate some key interstitial scenes in a session of play, and touch on specific procedures from games I have read and played that interact with these moments.

Departure

How do we transition from our quotidian lives into the imaginary world, the magic circle of play? Unhelpfully, many games do little to codify or even directly address this issue. Megeuy Baker has written on play as performance of ritual, and this is a helpful lens through which to ponder this transition.

Before the game ‘starts proper’ there is activity at the social level: getting people interested to play, scheduling and setting up a venue, preparing snacks and drinks. This can blur into somewhat metagame elements including: conversation (safety) tools; CATS (concept, aim, tone, subject matter); and a session recap.

Brad Kerr of the Between Two Cairns podcast leads a brief group fantasy visualisation exercise focused on a dragon in a forest. This serves a ritualistic element, clearly demarcating the start of play, but is also a social icebreaker and creative warm-up stretch.

Wildsea by Isaac Felix offers framing (canonical) and unsetting (non-canonical) questions to open play: Sawnanas are far more versatile than most fruit. What are some of their unexpected uses? This is similar to above, but trades less ritualism for more creative juicing.

Delta Green: A Night at the Opera by Arc Dream Publishing presents agents’ standing orders, which I previously wrote about reciting as a group to open a scenario. This was a powerful ritual and provided several callbacks through the session, establishing strong themes of compromise and inevitability.

Initiation

Similarly, how do we transition into the first integral scene or between such scenes? This includes establishing shots and overland or waterborne journeys.

The success of the classic Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawl format is in part the clear structure and rhythm of entering a new room and having an interactive scene (combat, exploration or social interaction), then choosing between a few routes of egress that lead to further scenes. Although the early games defined movement in terms of travel space in feet and squares and 10 minute dungeon turns, most modern Old-School Reinvention games have loosened this up to a turn being entering a new room or any non-trivial action undertaken within a room. I’d argue this has largely been refined over time to the minimum viable procedure to get us between the moments of interactivity.

Conversley, Dungeons & Dragons has struggled to present a coherent method of playing out overland travel and journeys, with many third-party efforts dumping into this void. Hexcrawl and point crawl procedures can be seen as interstitium between the keyed or improvised encounters at each point of interest. How does this interface with the resource economy of HP and spell slots? How do you make weather, wayfinding and getting lost, and tracking rations and foraging more than just busy work? This deserves at least a post of its own, so I’ll park that thought for now.

Blades in the Dark by John Harper presents the package of Engagement and Gather Information rolls, and the Flashback mechanic, to anneal the issues readily observed when players optimise the fun out of play by endless planning and debating before undertaking an adventure or risky action. This is analogous to the screenwriting advice of ‘late in, early out’ of a scene: it makes the interstitial moments quick and punchy, and lets us hop back and fill in the blanks in the canvas that we might uncover later.

13th Age by Pelgrane Press introduced through its organized play adventures travel montages: a round robin where each player sets up an obstacle for the next player who describes how their character overcomes it, then sets up the next challenge before passing the turn over. This can easily be admixed with dice rolls to give colour and texture to the narration: either binary strong vs weak hit or trinary up-beat / mixed-beat / down-beat. Importantly we aren’t rolling for success / failure, as that will inevitably block play.

Silt Verses RPG by Gabriel Robinson and Jason Cordova have Journey scenes that are lightly prepared transitional scenes of collaborative fiction combining paint the scene (leading/motivated scene-setting questions), recall a time (loaded background-establishing prompt), and an evocative moment of surrealism or banality.

The Between by Jason Cordova also has the unscene: a moment where we play in a place (and perhaps time) removed from the protagonists with often only thematic connection to the central plot. This is intended to be cinematic, flesh out the setting as a character, and through the echo in the night mechanic rewards players to draw out the allusions and motifs connecting the unscene back to the central plot.

Wildsea also actually breaks its phases of play done into: scenes (analogous to our integral scenes), montages, and journeys. My experience was that montages were a powerful and easily deployed technique (whether exploring an adventure site, docking at town, or running a quick action scene). Unfortunately journeys felt a bit cumbersome with turns at the helm and on watch with multiple rolls filling progress clocks and randomly generating Peace / Order / Nature encounters of three different threat levels.

Delta Green has home vignettes that prompt us to check in on how the mundane lives of our investigators is put under strain, and tap their bonds to restore Sanity, feeding a cycle of decline. Other games like Lancer by Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan similarly have downtime scenes punctuating the procedural action with moments of recovery and reflection, marrying the mechanical need for resource repletion with prompts to have interpersonal character-driven scenes.

Pendragon by Greg Stafford has the winter phase that punctuates sessions or adventures with the roll of years, leading to both green shoots and prematurely withered family trees. This forcibly grounds the otherwise heroic mythic fiction in more temporal issues of family and legacy.

Return

These final melting moments occur just after an integral scene or help us conclude the session of play:

Dungeons & Dragons seems to naturally produce moments of looting the room and dead bodies, juggling inventory and negotiating who carries what, and upon return to town liquidating ‘discovered’ assets and tallying up new GP and XP totals. These don’t seem exactly designed, but rather have arisen spontaneously at tables the world akin to convergent evolution.

Blades in the Dark has its post-score into downtime procedures of earning Coin, gaining Heat, and generating Entanglements that feeds into the downtime worker-placement game.

Not only Blades but many other Powered by the Apocalypse games also have an end of session move where you answer some questions to earn XP and engage with character advancement. These have the additional effect of providing a tight recap of memorable moments from play.

The final prompt card in For the Queen by Alex Roberts (The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?) and the final Angle roll in CBR+PNK by Emanuel Melo feed into an epilogue moment: who do you ultimately decide to be? where are they now?

At a meta-level, using stars and wishes or roses and thorns to check-in with everyone and help calibrate further sessions of play is a form of interstitial play.

Conclusions

The after taste I am left with from this amuse-bouche is that rewarding moments of interstitial play balance the need for providing a worthwhile experience in their own right, while efficiently escorting us from departure to arrival at our destination.

A common element of all my preferred interstitial procedures is a focus on theme and content, leveraging the input and output of interstitial scenes to add variety to the surrounding integral scenes.

Trying to cram numerical systems and extraneous dice rolling into these moments of play feels misguided. Leave that instead for the integral moments of high-action and back-and-forth investigative play.

Luxuriate in the slower pacing and sparser liminal space that is the interstitium.

The supply train for an expedition in the pre-rail era is limited by the fact that the pack animals themselves consume food. The relationship between cost and scale (of both the animals and edible loads) approximates a binary logarithm: each linear increase in range (say, one week) is associated with doubling the total cost and scale of the expedition. The interested reader is directed to the following if they wish to see the background to this principle:

• Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem (Bret C. Devereaux)
• The Tyranny of the Wagon Equation (Dylan Black)
• A Survey of Overland Travel (Beau Rancourt)

While I very much enjoyed Rancourt's tour of adventure game overland travel procedures, I was not quite satisfied by the resulting synthesis as it does not suit my predilections. I prefer minimal record-keeping, and elimination of false choices regarding solvable problems: meaning the optimal choice may not be obvious, but a strictly (near-)optimal choice does exist, and may be determined with some tedious analysis. Any procedure of accounting per ration and mule falls foul of my aims, so I sought to tackle this top-down instead.

Note that in the original games a week of rations costs 5-15 GP (from standard to iron), mules cost 20-30 GP, and a cart or wagon costs 100-200 GP. Individual adventurer's can reasonably carry food and supplies for one week of round travel, but beyond that will need to invest in transport of goods, subject to the tyranny of the wagon equation.

The main other binary logarithm in fantasy adventure games is the XP required per level. The canonical XP table is the Fighter's (see one rendition below), and this provides a rough estimate of capital wealth by level, given that the majority of XP will have been earned from XP for GP. Hence we arrive at a simple abstraction:

Lifestyle & Market Availability

I then considered how to extend this idea to another couple of areas of fiddly economics: upkeep (lifestyle) costs for player characters covering room and board, as well as determining what scale of transactions each settlement can afford (market availability).

Lifestyle could be similarly set as 1% of Fighter XP per month (the same to fund an expedition of equal level). This represents the natural rise in indulgence and standard of living commensurate with level titles, and is a necessary cost to obtain the social benefits of higher station. You could still choose to live on the streets and hoard your wealth, but you shouldn't want to. Though these prices seem high at first blush, they are in accord with the cost of retaining an alchemist or sage (1,000-2,000 GP per month), so they are not really out of line.

For further mechanical inducement, I would like to also try setting natural healing as 1 HP per level of lifestyle, justified as increasing comfort and safety granting more rapid recuperation (and with a side benefit of preventing high level characters needing weeks of bed rest between adventures).

For market availability, this will be somewhat more arbitrary, but let's establish the following convention:

This can be used as follows: each month a settlement can be expected to buy or sell each individual good in proportion to the market cap. So a village may have only two swords (2 x 10 GP), or a roadhouse five flasks of burning oil (5 x 2 GP). Any items more expensive than the cap might be strictly unavailable, or else if feasible have only a proportional chance of being available each month; a suit of chainmail (40 GP) has a 1-in-2 chance per month of being obtainable in a village, or a small sailing ship (5,000 GP) has a 1-in-4 chance per month in a city.

Hence only common gear and weapons are usually available in villages, all arms and armour but not expensive specialists or land vehicles in towns, and practically everything in a city (with the exception of strongholds and seafaring vessels, though these would usually not be obtained via trade on the open market anyhow).

Regarding expeditions this similarly limits the supply available based on where you set out from: a town can only supply enough to make a 4-week return trip, while a metropolis can provide up to 10-weeks (or perhaps more, given extra months to prepare and secure additional supplies). For sake of play I would judge this per adventurer rather than the expedition as a whole, so though you pay more to bring retainers along, they won't further limit your expedition range.

I Want It Darker

I care more about playability than rigorous economic integrity in my own games, and actually find the approach taken in Knave 2E to be preferable (with just loose guidelines for equipment prices and overall much less growth in purchasing power). For Knave 2E, or just a much grittier old-school game, I would increase this by a factor of x10, up to 10% of Fighter's XP per level in coin, for all of expedition costs and lifestyle and market availability. Given a duke or prince lives on about 60,000 coins per month this is not unreasonable!

Assuming treasure awards from adventuring are kept at expected pace, this puts the adventurers on a much shorter 'burn time' between payoffs - each month of downtime or week of campaigning is going to cost 10% of their expected capital, so after 10 intervals they will be broke (and hence must subsist with no social clout, no natural healing, and risk of disease). Is this the fantasy adventure game equivalent of Traveller being driven by player debt?

If you were once or presently are a child, then you already know how to role-play and make believe.

My nigh-on-three-to-a-grasshopper daughter, like I gather all such little creatures, has taught herself how to role-play and make believe. She will say "I am a ballerina, and am dancing," as she spins before an audience of stuffed toys. "I am daddy, not me, and I sit in his chair now and do work," as she excitedly taps on the keyboard. Though these examples of play seem facile, is there really a bright-line distinction that separates them from: "I am a grumpy murderous dwarf, and I swing my axe at the orc."

Much has been written of difficulties getting new blood into the hobby, or promoting players to take a hand at the helm of facilitating/mastering the game. This can clearly only be due to artificial constraints we have placed on the process - gatekeeping and persnicketing that shuts down the innate spirit of play.

I've had some other planned posts left on the stove far too long, so while I scrub away the burnt grease, I wanted to make a community service announcement of sorts, in the lead up to the (overly?) anticipated release of the 5.2 edition of the world's most blathered about TTRPG. This was also spurred by a recent exchange on Discord with someone who said they really enjoyed a freely available game (Cairn), but their players had some gripes with the inventory mechanics, so they were asking for completely new (commercial) games to try instead.

I strongly support (conceptually and financially) the independent creators and small publishers in this hobby to tart up and spruik their wares at the local jumble sale (Itch.io, DriveThruRPG) or to panhandle before contracting illustrators and book printers (Kickstarter). And I begrudgingly partake of the mass-market, store-bought variety of big business gaming from time to time as well.

My present anti-consumerism sentiment is a hypocrisy over-rated and under-fed by my burgeoning gaming shelves, yet too we should not let our field of dreams lie fallow. We owe them nothing, their fancies are no more important than our own. So come to the game with big ideas, your ideas, and leave nothing on the table. Play for keeps, linger in moonlit realms, while the corpos want to squeeze every last eurodollar until your so much dry scop in an endless scroll of braindance doom.

We don't stop playing because we grow old;
we grow old because we stop playing.

― George Bernard Shaw

Let Them Play Games

Zedeck Siew has astutely drawn the parallel between tabletop gaming and hosting a dinner party, and pointedly stated "You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners." This analogy is apt in a few ways: someone plays host to the guests and has the burden of preparation, but everyone contributes whether by their presence alone, or bringing supplementary dishes for the meal.

We must put in care and effort for the enjoyment of that shared moment, to show respect for each others' time and company, but also know come the end of the night we will have only sullied plates left. The experience of gaming, the actual play of it, is akin to the degustation itself, and is necessarily a fleeting fancy.

We can enjoy our indie or big publisher books of fanciful words and illustrations, brimming with possibilities and constraints, but we should not let ourselves go too far down the back of the garden that we can no longer hear the bell to return home for home-cooked dinner. Role-playing is nourishment for the child within all of us, who resists the hardening and fraying of adulthood.

I would posit that the truest expression of the roots of the hobby is do-it-yourself, homebrewing, and kitbashing. I think as much as neo-grognards lament the sense of community from the G+ era, that time was also an infidelitous potluck of revisionism and revolution for many, of dreamers yearning to be free from the imperial rule of companies solidifying the consumer relationship.

We must not lose sight that quality imagination gaming is one of the (potentially) cheapest and most accessible hobbies in the world: all you need is a re-introduction to a culture of play, and re-education on how to make-believe, things that our sallow world sadly beats out of many adolescents. Even pencils, paper and marked plastic lumps for impartial adjudication (dice) may be omitted, replicated freely online, or taken by petty theft at your discretion.

In this spirit, I wanted to highlight and celebrate just some of the fantastic libre (free as in speech) and gratis (free as in beer) roleplaying resources available to all of us. I consider these the glimmering creative street art that liven up an otherwise dreary commercial commons: the humanist spatter left as our minds are mulched up by corporate gaming.

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
It is engender'd in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy's knell
I'll begin it,—Ding, dong, bell.

- Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

Cairn

Yochai Gal's Cairn (licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0) comes first on this list because it is arguably the most approachable, accessible, and supported option to get you started with hobby gaming. It's derived from Chris McDowall's Into the Odd, which is freely available in even more minimalist form as Mark of the Odd, but Yochai and the community have done an exceptional job of taking that statuesque game and fleshing it out with mounds of read-to-play spells, monsters, and adventures (both conversion guides for OSR material and bespoke modules). The Affinity Publisher files are also available, making it fairly easy (though sadly not free) to edit in your house rules and print your own hacked copy.

There is a second edition on the way, which mostly expands rather than revises the first edition. Despite offering a lovely-looking boxed product, the new edition will still be freely available online when released. Based on Yochai's track record, print copies will remain eminently affordable, so this remains one of the strongest offerings in the foreseeable future.

Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game

I'd be remiss to not give equal billing to the closest thing in tabletop gaming to resemble the free and open source software movement: Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game (BFRPG, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0) by Chris Gonnerman and many, many contributors. If you are already familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and have particular nostalgia for, or are just interested to explore, the rose-tinted Basic/Expert era of the game, you can do no better. The LibreOffice ODT files are available, posing the lowest barrier to entry of anything on this list to hacking up the text yourself to make a customised version for your table.

The website offers an online reference to the core rules, download access to the game and several supplements and adventures, and links to at-cost print on demand for several titles as well. Recently revised to its fourth edition (moving from the OGL to Creative Commons), this and Cairn are to my mind the lodestars of free fantasy adventure gaming.

Old-School Essentials

Gavin Norman's Old-School Essentials (OSE) is interesting because although the main offering is their beautiful line of commercial hardback rule and adventure books, he has also generously provided a free and similarly attractive online reference (licensed OGL 1.0a).

Because OSE is derived from the same era of D&D as BFRPG, there is only subtle material difference between these sources, though BFRPG provides far better on-boarding than OSE if you don't already know how to play games like D&D. The licensing of the OSE reference permits derivative commercial works, though you need to be a bit careful using the OGL, so I'd give the nudge to BFRPG for being available under a battle-tested and easily understood license suitable for sharing alike your own derived homebrew online.

Knave & Maze Rats

Ben Milton's Knave and Maze Rats (both licensed CC-BY 4.0) have both been highly influential in the tabletop designer scene, but two niggles hold me back from fully endorsing them for "libre and gratis dreaming." Firstly, tracking down the (legitimately) free versions is non-obvious as they are only listed in the usual places as for sale, hence why I am directly hosting them here:

Secondly, while both are minimalist rules summaries packed with tables of ideas to spark your creativity, they each somewhat assume you already know how to play adventure games - though admittedly the terse advice that they do offer is good stuff.

24xx

Jason Tocci's 24xx (licensed CC-BY 4.0) is derived from his own commercial (though arguably criminally under-costed) 2400 game series, and is my final recommendation. I think this game system gets rather neglected for how easy it is to learn, play, and hack - I wonder if the default cyberpunk science fiction setting contributes to that.

Every line of text has been iterated on countless times, maxims of play triple-distilled to a flammable proof for spirited gaming. You not only get an attractive double-sided single page complete game summary translated into several languages, you also get access to Affinity Publisher and Adobe InDesign files to allow you to make a few quick edits and have an equally professional-looking home-brew to print out and play with at game night (though regrettably editing in these formats is not free).

Conclusion

In this 50th anniversary year of D&D, and arguably the hobby of formalised tabletop imagination gaming in general, I would call for a redoubling of our efforts to preserve the folk traditions of play by eschewing venal influences.

As a (dis)honourable mention, a somewhat stripped-down D&D 5.1 (licensed CC-BY 4.0) is freely available, and we are told the 2024 update of D&D will be similarly released as a 5.2 document - so even if you are truly wedded to the 'official' version of the game, you could wait to check it out for free, without giving Hasbro your dosh for hot new hardcovers chock-full of the same reheated leftover ideas.

I urge you to look at the games above, as I feel they best capture the grassroots do-it-yourself gaming culture we must preserve and protect to keep the hobby strong for the next 50 years. Our imaginations are a libre and gratis birthright, and it is all too easy to let hype and marketing trick us into thinking we need to buy permission from another to be the dreamers of dreams.

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams

- Ode, Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Did I miss your favourite libre and gratis roleplaying game or resource? Please comment below and share alike!

Postscript

Following some Discord discussions, I will highlight a couple more libre and gratis games you may want to check out:

• Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged (licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) are a pair of extremely well presented and supported narrative games for iron age and star-faring fantasy, respectively. Notable features include proactive play, rules for solo and co-operative (duet) play, and lots of printable components giving it a more print and play board game feel.
• Into the Dungeon: Revived (licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) is very similar to both Into the Odd and Cairn, but provides a 'half-way house' to D&D with class-like character features and more traditional spellcasting system. Well worth a look if you like the simple core of those games, but want something more plug-and-play for running old school modules.
• John Harper has released several influential 'capsule' games that are well worth a look if you want a tight and easy to pickup one-shot morsel. I will highlight in particular Lasers & Feelings (licensed CC BY 4.0), and Lady Blackbird (licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). Note the latter actually has two sibling games that are often neglected (Magister Lor and Lord Scurlock, available from the same page as Lady Blackbird); frankly the whole format of these games should be aped more often.

Being agreeable is bad for blogging business. My esteemed colleagues have posited variously 3-mile or 6-mile hex sizes are optimal for mapping a campaign world:

• In Praise of the 6 Mile Hex
• The Ergonomic 3 Mile Hex
• Down With The 6 Mile Hex! A Modest Proposal
• Et cetera

These arguments revolve around the geometric and dimensional properties of orienteering and measuring travel distance across these hexagons, and how that relates to sightline to the horizon. This is understandable, but quite frankly doesn't hold water when the rubber hits the road... or something. Let's break down some of the purposes a region map should serve, and see why day-wide hexagons really are the bestagons.

Travel

Most hexmaps are keyed fairly sparsely: even at a relatively intimate 3-mile scale, they tend to feel barren in play, because translating from the map and key to an experiential journey as relayed via the senses asks a huge lift of the GM.

When I am running the game, I don't have a perfect simulation of the world running in my head, resolving travel distance and sight lines to decimal precision. Outside of setting up a battlemat or grid for a spot of the old ultraviolence (read: wargaming), space in play is malleable - stretching, squishing, slouching to accomodate our imaginings. Observe that in all interactions, a liminal space must be glossed over: street to street or district to district in a town, or moving room to room in a dungeon, or even moving between salient objects or conversant non-player characters within a single room.

One of the reasons that adventure modules are so popular is the format of a map and detailed keys (whether read-aloud text or just sufficient notes to be relayed by the GM without too much off-the-cuff creativity). Each keyed room is a point of interest, and play flows well for all concerned by exploring within a point and then moving along to another. A very common adjustment in modern play from early D&D is abstraction of movement pace in exploration: often it is assumed a 10 minute 'turn' elapses moving into a new adjacent room or by performing a significant action, and the tracking of 120 ft segments seems quaint.

An awkward series of steps and conversions must exist when we consider travel between points of interest in terms of miles: we need to have a travel pace for the party, modified by terrain difficulty and other factors, and often count hours or watches (usually 4-6 hour increments) through each day before a 'make camp' procedure. This invariably adds tracking of state and some accounting, and means a few times each imagined day we need to solicit the party for a current heading, yet I find this often breaks flow and doesn't present particularly meaningful or interesting choices. We wouldn't stop a player moving across a room to ask "you are now mid-way crossing the dining room, do you still want to head North to the door, or do you want to head East to the stone wall, or West where you just came from?" They would rightly reply "I just want to go to the next room - tell me when I get there!"

The natural increment of overland travel is the day - it's how you think about your own journeys, selecting a series of reasonably spaced stops to sleepover. It's also (though this should matter less) more consistent with how someone in-world would think about their journey - before GPS and mobile phones with Map apps, you would just know you can make the walk from Abbington to Bruxenfort from dawn to dusk, or can head as far as the old mill while still getting home before dark.

What of terrain difficulty or mounts? The latter is simple: horses improve carrying capacity but don't change the speed of travel - this is eminently gameable and reasonably realistic to boot. The former is also simple, but more contentious - the harder the terrain within a hex, the smaller the true space covered. A hex of swamp is smaller in geometric terms than a clear field - yet to the person traversing it, they take the same amount of time. Of course this raises some thorny questions if you start trying to plot exact routes through the edges and vertices of each hexagon, but the point is - you don't. Stick to atomic hexes as the unit of abstraction, and let imaginations elide the minor discrepancies.

Exploration

I treat travel separate to exploration. Travel is about getting from your origin to your destination via a plotted route, and though you may have encounters and make detours, it is ultimately a means to an end. Conversely, exploration is its own end, and to be worthwhile requires sufficient density of ideas and experiences in play.

I would strongly argue that you can't make a hexmap of only terrain types and sparse keys very interesting to explore - you just need more content. This is analogous to prepping a (mega)dungeon, and is well discussed in Re-Inventing the Wilderness. To my mind, the best hexmap for exploration in publication that I have seen is Dolmenwood (though Hot Springs Island and Neverland are both also excellent, sharing similar qualities). The hexes are densely keyed, with each location having one or more fairly detailed points of interest. These are intended as allowing traversal of 2-3 hexes per day, but would absolutely function as written at 1 hex per day.

Another good approach is seen in Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow: the adventure presents 3 detailed hexes, each containing several points of interest, and the paths between those are assigned a number of hours of travel. This would be a great way to further detail a day-wide hex when you want play to zoom in, such as searching a forest or swamp for a forgotten temple or crypt entrance.

World-Building

This is the clincher for me, so I've saved it for last. Prior to the widespread deployment of automobiles, we naturally spaced human settlements in large part based on travel and trade patterns. This leads to many old towns being a day's walk from their neighbour(s), and also means that dependent smaller settlements (villages and hamlets) cluster within a half-day of a town to permit travel to-and-fro. A keep needs to project force through military patrols, and these again can reach as far out as a half-day's ride to permit return within camping out.

Day-wide hexagons provide the most convenient division of space for creating and playing with geopolitics. Whatever the largest settlement or fortification is can be assumed to exist in the approximate centre of the hexagon, providing suitable spacing from those others nearby, and making it clear the region of land they can directly control. Projecting force (ie rulership) beyond the immediate hexagon usually requires a satellite settlement or fortification, which seems quite intuitive (though perhaps exceptional cases like guards with flying mounts could be entertained). This makes domain play, so often observed in the breach, just a little bit more accessible: clear a single hex of opposing interests and you can claim your patch of land.

Conclusion

Inevitably, Mr Bastionland has somewhat beaten me to the punch on this one, as Chris McDowall's Mythic Bastionland presents a similar (yet subtly distinct) notion: the Hecksleague, which he describes as:

• The area a hill fort can overlook
• The area that guards can patrol in a day
• A return hike to a neighbouring Hex gets you home before dark

The difference here is only that as implied by point #3 (and later spelled out in his game), you can walk across two Hecksleagues per day. This is ultimately a matter of personal taste, and otherwise all the points above apply equally well to either variation.

Please chime in below or on your own blog: are you a Dayagon convert, a true believer? Or will your slide rule and protractor be pried from your cold, calculating, dead hands?

He's back, baby-daddy! My wife has figured out that the polite way to cease my bloviating about table-talk games is to interject "I can't wait to read it on the blog!" Touché.

Reading Luke Gearing's recent Swyvers, I noted that the default save and skill roll of 3-5d6 under an attribute was reminiscent of a skill system presented by Gus L in his Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier, and even at a stretch related to the core 3d6 dice roll of Steve Jackson's GURPS (which I plead to know nothing further about until I speak with my lawyer). I recall the practice traces back to some of the earliest published D&D modules, but I shan't be tracking down the citation on that.

The Problem

I am not immune to the allure of these mechanics, but I do find there is one glaring issue when ability scores are also generated by rolling the old American standard "3d6 down the line (DTL)." The sequential application of a pseudo bell curved roll (3d6 stat generation plus Xd6 roll-under action resolution) rather over eggs the pudding; an exceptional roll in character generation becomes further compounded, far worse than the (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) maligned "d20 roll under ability score" action resolution method. Compare the odds of success for a spread of target numbers, hence ability scores, with these two methods (slightly rounded):

To whit: observe that in OD&D and its retro-clones, a low score of 8 or even 5 would garner at worst a -1 modifier on d20 rolls. Frankly, I am dissatisfied with this situation, yet wish to salvage the rakish Xd6 roll under mechanic. So what if we change the ability score generation?

A Solution

Roll a single pool of 12d6 dice - I can assure you that this has good gamefeel, my young daughter assures it has good mouthfeel, and given intestinal transit times, I'll have my twelfth die back in a day and a half.

Assuming a classic 6-stat game, group all dice showing the same pip value together in clusters, and add that number of dice to a base value of 8 to determine each ability score. For example, I have just rolled: 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 6. Hence my new character has 12 STR, 10 DEX, 11 CON, 8 INT, 10 WIS, 9 CHA.

This method has several appealing qualities in addressing the problem. The lowest score of 8 is a significant but not overly-punishing 25% success rate, while getting an attribute over 12 is uncommon, and scores over 15 are exceedingly rare (a single 20 and everything else 8 is the most extreme case, and even that should be accommodated by the Xd6 action roll). The sum of scores will always be 60, hence within reach of the gutter-lying 'joe schmoe' of the pathetic-aesthetic, and we don't need any of those ungainly "if your total of ability modifiers is less than some arbitrary threshold of rubbishness, start again."

If the difference seems too slight, consider the following. Players of the 5-and-a-bit edition of the world's biggest imploding lifestyle brand will nearly always have a starting 15 (+2) or 16 (+3) in their primary ability, which is +10-15% chance of success on those rolls. That correlates in terms of impact on dice odds with 3d6 action resolution to a starting score of 11, and if you have a 12 that's like starting with a 20 (+5) in old (? new) money.

But what, my gentle and bereft reader, should one do if they have but 3 scores to play with (such as in Swyvers or the Odd family)? Why, simply cluster 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 together of-course! Then add the count of dice in each cluster to a base of 6. Hence for the rolls above, our character would have 12 STR, 9 DEX, and 9 WIL (or what have you). The sum of scores is appropriately 30, again cutting any tall poppies short before they get big ideas.

Note that though best suited to Xd6 action rolls, this generation method is reasonably germane to d20 roll under systems as well, trading off a fairly tight spread with only the rare exceptional high score, but gaining a strong guarantee of 'equitable' scores, if one lusts for such things.

Commentary

I would love to hear from people with more play experience of these Xd6 roll under systems how they have found them in play, and whether these approach appeals to them. I haven't played Swyvers yet, but have used Gus' Xd6 system when running his adventure, and tried out a GURPS-like 3d6 roll under for a pirate game, each time running into issues, so the impetus for this experiment is not purely theory-crafting.

Keep your eyes to the sky, but don't look directly at the sun, as there will soon be new dastardly miss-adventures: same bat-time, same bat-channel!

I regrettably have not been as productive in the hobby this month as I might have envisaged: the mirage receded. Fortunately, the clarion of the February RPG Blog Carnival was heard far and wide, and several spectres rose from their slumber to answer the call with their own contributions on the theme of Illusions & Delusions, that I bring to you on this singular day more oft forgot:

Surrealism and the King In Yellow

Ighton over at the Serene Library kicked things off by finding Le Roi en Jaune (1984) at the back of a used bookshop, and discovering the impossible and personal horror that the included portrait for one of the lead performers from opening night bears an uncanny resemblance to themselves.

Illusions & the Gameplay Loop

Seed of Worlds' Xaosseed subsequently cognized the division of active versus passive, rather than internal versus external, illusions. I agree with their premise that the former framing is more practical: for is not a shared (external) hallucination just the firmament of our own waking surreality?

Mondenberg Notes: Shadow Magic

Empedocles the Wizard's Elemental Reductions refracts the umbra of arcana obscura through a twilit lens to reveal a phantasmagoria of shadowmancy spells, suitable for all gaming in the fantastical folk tradition that's been twice-bathed in moonlight.

In magic, Illusion is actually Enchantment

The titubating and titular vdonnutvalley casts charm person to make you perceive your interlocutor as a most pleasing individual, and challenges the orthodox Wizarding dogma of illusions & enchantments, and how never the twain should meet.

Actual Test: House of Illusions

Hitting two for two, Xaoseed followed up on Seed of Worlds with an after-action report on their players tearing down the fourth-dimensional house of Tarot cards of a scintillating solipsistic sophont.

Humble Offerings

For my own part, I bottled up but two errant beams of numina, which will once and future be medically proven to improve complexion if one proctally enemizes regularly:

Illusions & Delusions - Part 1

The post that started it all: a hack dictionary of psychosensuopathology for the jobbing make-believe make-believers, and battleground for the pedants and psychofants resident to Arkham.

I Want to Believe

Distilling the gentle art of persuasion into exchange, leverage, and consistency to provide a transparent framework for Masters and their Charges to adjudicate both mundane and mystical petitions.

Disbelieve: Slush Pile

I have much more to say on these topics, as teased in my Part 1 post, but for want of due time and care, shall resign myself to merely prismatic spray these discordant thoughts from my mental blunderingbuss:

Mechanising & Portraying Mental Health

Sanity mechanics in games can be problematic, and can promote harmful play at the table. It is kinder to aim for inclusivity by focussing play on shared experiences: how we all at times feel stressed, anxious, depressed, over-elated, and even a bit paranoid or mistaken. We can each explore the ideas of illusions, hallucinations, and delusions in our make-believe play without recourse to harmful labels or depictions. We don't need to other people by labelling a fictional character with a clinical diagnosis: medical terminology is a necessary tool of healthcare, but does not adequately define people or their lived experiences. The map is not the territory.

Surreality & Dreamscapes

Imagination gaming provides an unparalleled medium for exploring surrealism through oneiric landscapes: no other medium permits such fuzzy, associative logic. In point of order, all gaming leverages these tools to some degree: through our shared perspectives and conversations we weave a narrative and otherworld through play that simultaneously feels real and unreal, tangible and intangible. There exists unexamined space-time between each scene of play: buying supplies in town, walking across meadows, trespassing past the threshold into the canonical dungeon. What happened between those moments? Is it necessary or even desirable for a purely imagined space to be Euclidean? We are each invested with such a giddying capacity for conscious plasticity and apophenia - let us walk together past undreamt horizons.

Lines of narrative authority and (un)reliable narrators

Much has and will be said of who gets to say what and when in gaming: this has been termed narrative authority or control, or "the line." In traditional play cultures, each player has narrative authority over one character and their thoughts and feelings and actions, while the GM has authority over everything else in the imagined world. The game (both as written and played, and fortified by a bevy of unwritten social contracts) holds governance over the messy no-man's land in-between: for little meaningful play can occur beyond that space where a character interacts with the world.

Illusions, enchantments, and surreality all tamper with this substrate because they operate from within this boundary between a player character's internal personhood and agency, and the external wider fictional world. They twist the narrator, the person presently holding narrative authority, into an unreliable witness of events and reality. High-trust play is a necessary but not sufficient precondition; we need to ride the tension-wave between playing generously but misleadingly. Like engaging with stage magic and mentalism, you as a player need to hold a suspension of disbelief: you need to want to believe.

Latecomers & Hitting The Road

If any of this has stirred in you a sudden dark urge to take to the pen and channel your own missive from beyond the veil, please just comment with a link to your manuscript below, and I'll make sure to share it with the entities that sail the astral plane behind the lake's mirrored surface, the readership.

Next month, the carnival will peg its tent at Vdonnut Valley, with the theme: Feasts, Foods and Fancy Drinks, oh my!

Urgent missive from head office! Sound the everything is OK alarm - it's still Illusions & Delusions month at the RPG Blog Carnival! You're not too late to jump on this once-in-a-lifetime offer to proffer your thoughts on all things tricky, deceptive, and disorienting. So keep calm, carry on, and get blogging! Call within the next 15 minutes to secure your free nomination to the somehow-comes-earlier-every-year 2024 bloggies!*

Ahem. I said I was going to try and write something a bit more practical than my initial definitions of terms, so let's take a crack at what a referee is supposed to do when a winsome player comes to them desperate to play an Illusionist or Enchanter, or Elysium-forfend a psionic Telepath. These archetypes all have a rather poor rap for disrupting usual play and giving the referee headaches, yet they have proven an enduring appeal with players.

For the ensuing discussion, let's use the term mind magic to cover the broad church of illusions, enchantments, and similar psychic powers and monstrous abilities that alter how another person thinks, feels, perceives, or acts.

My best solution (for now) is to bring it back to brass tacks and conceptualise all of these effects as just extensions of an underlying framework for handling persuasion in play.

Art of Persuasion

There is of course an entire field intersecting psychology, linguistics, business and academia about the principles and methods of persuasion. But we just want to have a laugh with some mates as we play make-believe for grown-ups, so we're opting for the no-frills rough and ready approach here.

Persuasion is the art of influencing another's thoughts, feelings, or actions. And the basis of Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy is that thoughts, feelings, and actions are inextricably linked in an Ouroboros-like feedback loop. That's certainly a useful premise for us, and it happens to sound an awful lot like our definition of mind magic, right? What a coinkydink. So we can also see mind magic as persuasive magic - hence, if we can handle mundane persuasion, then any magical version can be just like that, but a bit more potent or flexible.

A useful rubric for adjudicating persuasion at the table is to consider Robert Cialdini's seven heuristics for persuasion that he published in Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade (2016):

1. Reciprocity: We are more inclined to be persuaded by someone when we are receiving something in return.
2. Scarcity: We are more inclined to be persuaded when we believe the supply or opportunity is limited, and we fear missing out.
3. Authority: We are more inclined to be persuaded by someone who we consider to be of a higher office or status.
4. Liking: We are more likely to be persuaded by someone we are kindly disposed towards.
5. Commitment or consistency: We are more inclined to be persuaded when it aligns with our previous actions and self-identity.
6. Consensus or social proof: We are more inclined to be persuaded when it aligns with how our peers are perceived to think, feel, and act.
7. Unity: We are more likely to be persuaded by someone who we share a social identity with and makes us feel included.

Now, I'm not going to actually run through that list every time a ne'er-do-well PC leans on a town guard to turn a blind eye while they carry out the stiffs from a barroom brawl turned hot 'n' spicy. Instead, let's distill it down to just the following memorable highlights:

• Exchange: We are persuaded to give when we receive (or think we're getting something for nothing!), or when we fear missing out.
• Leverage: We are persuaded by people we like, respect, or fear.
• Consistency: We are persuaded to keep in line with our self-identity, shared identities, and society at large.

We can use these three factors similarly to Time, Gear, and Skill for most physical obstacles: if a PC is trying to persuade an NPC of something reasonable (which can only be judged by referee fiat), then only make some sort of roll if they have 2 of these 3 factors. If they possess all 3, automatic success. If they have but 1 or none, automatic failure.

In terms of what to roll exactly, your system of choice probably already provides something, but consider this minor old-school hack: use the staple 2d6 reaction roll for recruiting hirelings from OSE to determine the outcome of a persuasion attempt.

Otherwise, a straight Charisma check might suffice, or alternatively, if you are playing with an Xd6 roll-under skill system, then you could set the difficulty of the CHA test as a base 2d6, plus 1d6 per factor you're missing (with no automatic success or failure). Extrapolation to other dice mechanics is best left as an exercise to the enthusiastic reader.

The advantage of this slightly more structured approach is it provides the players more transparency to 'get their ducks in a row' when engaging in social encounters. It feels less capricious to be told you can't possibly convince the king to just hand the crown over to you, when we can agree you aren't offering an even vaguely equitable exchange, you don't hold leverage through debt or authority, and it's not consistent with his identity as a ruling monarch.

Good Problem People

Now we know how to be persuasive, we need our mark- I mean, conversational buddy. It should be reasonably evident that a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for persusaion to be satisfying is for some non-player characters to be obstructive (for whom their existence or present activity poses an obstacle to the players), and others to be supportive (from whom the players want goods, services, land or the like). The former is the social equivalent of a hostile creature encounter or trap, while the latter is the tantalising treasure cache. Best of all is when a character offers a bit of both.

To nut out a simple rubric for designing these wonderful specimens of imagined humanity, I'd like to triangulate these three references:

• A nice razor for so-called "OSR" problems are those that have no obvious solutions, but many possible, and require only common sense and abilities (rather than special tools or training).
• An objectified character is honed for presenting a challenge to the players: they have a social role/title, they have something to offer (assets, social resources, unusual knowledge or skills), and they have drives, fears, and liabilities that can be leveraged to manipulate them.
• Zelda-style NPCs can be summed up as having something they are very interested in, having something that is of interest or value to you, and they are not inherently interested in you or your goals.

Let's make our second triple-distilled mana for Good Problem People:

• Obsessive: One or two special interests that don't directly align with the PCs goals, but be exploited for Exchange (the bug collector wants a rare specimen), Leverage (the wizard-fan is awed by a showy display of magic), or Consistency (the hermit enjoys being stubborn and alone, and will take a path of least resistance to return there).
• Obstructive: One or two clear reasons they are either being obstructive or hostile in the first place, or are disinclined to provide the potential support they could offer. This might be a lack of readily accessible wants (impairing Exchange), a greater respect or fear of an opposing force (impairing Leverage), or being put in a difficult situation where they can't easily stay true to themselves or follow the crowd (impairing Consistency).
• Useful: One or two pieces of helpful information, skilled services, or resources they could be persuaded to part with. Their obsessions and sources of reluctance could suggest these, like a conspiracy theorist or fashionista.

There is nothing wrong with some NPCs having wants simple and few, or being generally amiable, or lacking any particularly useful assets; they are called extras, and you'll likely forget about them by the end of the night.

A Kind of Magic

Finally, we've arrived at our long-touted destination: how to adjudicate persuasive or mind magic. Generally, a suitable persuasive magical effect can substitute for any one of Exchange, Leverage, or Consistency:

• Creating a Phantasmal Force (Minor Illusion) of a chest full of glittering gold on your vessel while boarding a pirate ship might provide the necessary inducement for them to lay down their weapons and negotiate, given you evidently have the means to buy them off (providing Exchange, though likely to have repercussions when they discover the deception).
• Casting Charm Person on the villain's henchman and telling them to assist with a coup against their master could cause their new-found intense affection towards you to overcome their fear of the master (providing Leverage).
• Using Glamour (Disguise Self) to appear as a suitably-aged long-lost squad mate when asking a veteran soldier to come out on one last adventure (providing Consistency, as answering the call would then match both their self- and group-identities)

What about more powerful effects like Charm Monster or Hallucinatory Terrain? They mostly just do what they say on the tin, but generally a higher level effect can nudge the limits of what is a a reasonable persuasion.

Hopefully, I have managed to persuade you that these sorts of characters needn't cause trouble, and can actually fit well into classic adventure gaming. I'd love to read comments or your own blog posts about issues you have had with persuasive magic and your approaches to refereeing them, or really any other topic that the theme inspires in you. Get in before the turn of the month to be part of this exclusive and one-time-only RPG Blog Carnival on Illusions & Delusions!