The OSRchivist

Rediscovering the magic of old school roleplaying.

  • Zungeon25

    Back on January 1st 2025, Idle Cartulary posted The Zungeon Manifesto, which argued that “[z]ines in TTRPGs in 2024 has come to mean ‘A5, highly produced booklet’, but that isn’t what zines have traditionally been.” The post is an argument for making custom, home-made zines—warts and all. Quickly, Nova added an Itch Zungeon Jam 2025 to match the post, and encouraged the community to submit. I’d commented on that post on January 2nd as a promise to myself I’d participate. Cut to today, December 30th, and me realizing I’d pushed this off for the entirety of the year. Well, you know what? This is a promise to myself that I intended to keep!

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  • Session 9 Report Hole in the Oak

    Previous session report can be found here. First session report can be found here.

    Overall

    On Friday, December 19th, I ran the ninth session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. In this post I’ll recap what happened, and note down my lessons learned.

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  • Session 8 Report Hole in the Oak

    Previous session report can be found here. First session report can be found here. Next session report is here.

    Overall

    On Friday, October 24th, I ran the eighth session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT. In this post I’ll recap what happened, and note down my lessons learned.

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  • Session 7 Report Hole in the Oak

    Previous session report can be found here. First session report can be found here. Next session report is here.

    Overall

    On Friday, October 24th, I ran the seventh session of my Hole in the Oak game for OSE via FoundryVTT.

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  • RPGaDay 2025 31: Reward

    Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually at August 31st right now. I took on this challenge because I wanted to see if I could put something up every day in August. It didn’t all have to be great—in fact, I was sure it wouldn’t have been—but I wanted to post something every day. Taking part in #Dungeon23 taught me that it is more important to put something up than it being good. There’s always time to edit afterwards. So, I’m very proud of myself for having posted every day. I did notice that as time went on, it got easier to fill out a random table. Simply making a few of them does give you the experience to create more. I hope that this will help me make solid tables in the future.

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  • RPGaDay 2025 30: Experience

    There are multiple ways to understand an experience from the past. Historical events are transmitted in one way or another. Sometimes it’s reconstructing events from relics by considering their location and distribution. Sometimes it’s decoding how people wrote about the things happening around them. So, for today, here’s a d8 table of various ways of understanding an experience from the past.

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  • RPGaDay 2025 29: Connect

    “Common” as a shared language in fantasy games has always felt like an odd compromise to me. On the one hand, it’s odd to have a singular language that everybody speaks to communicate with everybody else. On top of that, where is “common” from? What giant empire gathered such power that everybody uses that language as a baseline? There’s not even a real analogue of a language like that on earth. Sure, English may have the most total speakers (though Mandarin Chinese has the most first-language speakers) but by no means could we argue that every human being on earth is fully fluent in English as a shared language. On the other hand, at what point do you draw the arbitrary line of having separate languages? Will each species have its own language? Each kingdom? Each province? At some point, you also just want people to connect so they can get to the interesting bits.

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  • RPGaDay 2025 28: Suspense

    I once read about Hitchcock movies and the difference between fear and suspense. Fear being an immediate response to an immediate stressor. Suspense, on the other hand, is a response to an imagined negative future. When I think of this in the context of the OSR, Mothership immediately springs to mind. I dislike jumpscare horror but I really enjoy horror that creates a sense of unease. So, in that light, here’s a d8 table of elements to add a sense of unease to your suspenseful Mothership games:

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  • RPGaDay 2025 27: Tactic

    At some point, I would like to try my hand at making a flowchart for monster tactics. Today’s not that day, but it’s a thing that’s been on my mind. For now, a random table of chosen actions might see me through as well. So, here’s d8 approach to combat for a monster to take:

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  • RPGaDay 2025 26: Nemesis

    Today’s d8 table is for a set of motivations for a nemesis NPC character. To me, a nemesis isn’t always a grand vizier, super evil kind of person. In fact, more often than not they aren’t. I prefer bad guys to be just regular people, perhaps with different ideas on how to solve the same problems. So, here’s a small table to inspire some NPC motivations.

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