Imbricated Interests of a Ludic Ghoul

    That's right everyone, I decided to finally pull the trigger. Tickets are on sale here and are very limited, so you'll want to be quick off the mark!   This is  GrellCon , our first attempt at getting together a small-ish group (around 75 individuals) interested in old-school D&D, which in this instance specifically refers to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons , Original Dungeons & Dragons , and Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons  as well as any of the relevant retroclones.    Taking place in the historic Stanley Arts halls in South-East London, all games will be run on the 1gp = 1xp principle to ensure we're all on the same page and to maximise playing time over three gaming slots! The con on the Saturday will be preceded by a social meetup event on Friday details of which are pending.   Any questions do let me know - I'd love to see you there!        

What are blogs and itch.io for if not to puke out dubious hobby projects for free?  This is the 20 page Crematory Ash-Can version of the ridiculous ruleset I cobbled together to run an eight player OD&D game with mutated undead in the Necropolis28 world last year . It's a one-shot prep document that got way out of control. Inspirations include early Gamma World , the Arduin Grimoires , and of course the independent undead skirmish miniatures game Necropolis28 . Includes tweaked combat rules and 56 blasted Gifts from the schools of undead magic, Blood/Bone/Plasm. I uploaded this as a way of procrastination while doing my taxes. It can be grabbed here . Enjoy!

I bodged the map together on the morning of the game before work. Sepia toning = instant credibility Last night at the Iglootree Shop in London I ran the first of our MYSTERY RPG sessions, in which we take something weird off of the shelf and let members of the public play something unknown - and are hopefully as surprised as we are. For this session I selected the game HAMMERS: Bell Book and Candle Edition by Sivad's Sanctum aka Jon Davis (no not that one ), described as "A Playtest of Horrific Old School System Tools". The System Hammers is one of the strange little games that have cropped up in or adjacent to the Thinking Adventures Discord server. The server generally has a focus on old-school gaming in new directions - many of the rules tinkering there uses OD&D as a basis and Hammers is another of these 'sort-of OD&D' type games, though it wears the influence very loosely while it pulls piecemeal from many (many!) other contemporary indie ...

  photo credit to Bjorn A note on cognomens - as someone who is perhaps online less than many in the scene, I have a nightmare connecting screen names to real-life names. As such, I have used them interchangeability in this post. If anyone would prefer I changed their name from screen to real-life, or omitted it altogether, please get in touch and I will oblige immediately. Same goes for corrections to names I fucked up via misspelling or total forgetfulness, and for anyone that would like a photo of themselves removed.   The fact that I am writing this up before I have even gotten around to doing an AAR for my own event the preceding weekend probably speaks volumes. Still in its first half decade of organisation, the German event known as Cauldron OSR Euro Con has now taken on something of a mythical air for those interested in the tight focus of old-school adventure gaming (read: AD&D and OD&D, and to a lesser degree compatible retro clones). The long and short of i...