Qarsi

oh true lol!

Stop Giving Monsters Spell Slots I'm Begging You A little under a year ago, in the summer of 2023, my friend Marshall asked me for advice on picking a tabletop game for him to run. I threw ...

Sallying out of Magnolia Keep, a case against giving monsters spell slots (and also an excuse for me to suck 4E's dick again)

magnoliakeep.blogspot.com/2025/03/stop...

You Don't Need a Game System Before You Play — Prismatic Wasteland I played a 3ish-month campaign where we made up the rules as we went along. Here are the rules we came up with and my impressions of this experiment.

🚨 New Blogpost: I started a campaign without a game system, collectively designing any rules as they were needed. Here is how my Calvinball experiment fared and the rules we patched together
#ttrpg #osr

Stop Just Playing Games You Know You Like Intro This post has existed in an endless number of forms in my head for months now, so this might as well be the energy we're bringing int...

I spent way too long writing this - both in terms of the months it was stewing in my brain and also that it's now 4:20 in the morning and I'm pretty sure I started this like 5 hours ago or more. Yeesh.

iknowadamseats.blogspot.com/2025/02/stop...

Excited for whatever we do though. It’s just as likely we wrap up the campaign by playing Stewpot and start Forbidden Lands like I’ve always been meaning to.

The characters ended up being much more interested in running their farm and hiring help than adventuring, so if we continue I’d rather do that then continue the adventure path. Hence BW. Players wanted to still level and build their PF2 characters if we did that, and why not?

Today we completed the first book of Blood Lords and this marks the end of my Pathfinder 2 experiment. Really didn’t like the module writing, monster design, and how many rolls it took to resolve things. I did end up pitching an insane Burning Wheel PF2 hybrid game among totally different games.

Oddly this has been my exact game style and it hasn’t been doing it for me! Mostly what I don’t like is the situations haven’t been very clear, at least in the sections I’ve been doing. In particular we just did the far realm watchtower and there was very little to problem solve with.

It’s been pretty weak at my table, so you might be right after all

I had a lot of fun with the Slaying Stone and Reavers of Harkenwold!

I’m sorry D&D 4e stans… I don’t think Madness at Gardmore Abbey is a good adventure 😭

Somehow having this on Itch felt wrong and I’ve moved it to my blog. When I’ve had more time I may polish up and publish properly, for now I need sleep

Long story short, my grandmother is dying and I made a dungeon about a dying wizard to process it

#OSR

blog.catshavenolord.page/the-flesh-is...

Hodag's sword or science big game scholarship Ends 3/1/25 Send 500 word or less pitch to hodagmag at Gmail dot com 2 winners will be chosen. Half packages are the offer Please share far And wide

Know someone looking for B/W interior art for their game by an ENNIE AWARD WINNING ARTIST?

FOR FREE?

Please share far and wide! I'll select from all pitches on 3/1/25. :)

And if you're aprehenisive, I am personally inviting you, yes, you, to pitch! 🫵

Blog Bandwagon: Elements Edition Your guide to catching up on a deluge of blog posts from a single day

Did you recently see a bunch of blogposts loosely themed around "elements"? Too many to keep up with? Good news: I tracked them all down and provided brief summaries of all the posts so you can go read all that sound interesting (which may be all of them!)
#osr #ttrpg

In case you missed the first post and wanted to read it first:

bsky.app/profile/qars...

Two Against Darkness - The Madness I presented a method to run B/X adventures for two D&D4 characters. Now I'll meditate about the differences in math and philosophy between B/X and D&D4, sho...

Blog post!

Last week I posted about Two Against Darkness, a way to run two D&D4 heroes against OSR adventures. Here’s my post about my design process, monster math from OD&D to 4, and how to run it at levels higher than 1.

qarsi.bearblog.dev/two-against-...

Opposed themes and natural tension Amanda P. discusses dungeon design, specifically themes.

Conceiving a dungeon involves injecting spaces with barely contained energy that yearns to explode, impacting the surrounding area. One way to develop natural tension is through creating dungeons that hold opposed themes. #osr #ttrpg

weirdwonder.bearblog.dev/opposed-them...

People seem to like our catalog, so we're looking into sharing it digitally. In the meantime, I wanted to show you its pages and the creators they feature.

First up is @junkfoodgames.bsky.social, who also laid out the catalog. Check out these awesome zines...
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Incredible blog post! This is so useful it’s getting in my game yesterday!

The Elemental Plane(t)s This is my contribution to the 'Elements' Blog Bandwagon from the Prismatic Wasteland Discord server. I've never been the biggest fan o...

blog bandwagon: my contribution to the Prismatic Wasteland 'Elements' blog bandwagon: re-imagining the elemental planes as planets in our solar system!

dungeondoll.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-...

Elements of Alchemy: A Blackjack solution A recurring element of many role playing games is crafting systems, whether for alchemy and magic, or more mundane pursuits. These system o...

Jumping on the Blog Bandwagon, I present a blackjack mechanic for alchemy! Suitable for any role-playing game where you want to add some simple crafting.

personabler.blogspot.com/2025/02/elem...

New Post: Control Weather Should Not Be a Spell

How a single spell holds back an entire field of magic plus a new character class (Tempestarius) that can control the weather and also gets a storm cloud stronghold

(This is for today’s blog bandwagon. Y’know, “elements” as in weather)
#osr #ttrpg

Periodic Table Day: The Rock Lords Hey folks! Today is Periodic Table Day 2025, and as a result, a bunch of us in the Prismatic Wasteland server have decided to grace your ta...

Sallying out of Magnolia Keep, its Periodic Table of the Elements Day! To celebrate, a bunch of us bloggers all made element-themed posts! Mine is on the Rock Lords, demigods fighting in the war between Law and Chaos, with some goodies for Black Sword Hack!

magnoliakeep.blogspot.com/2025/02/peri...

Alchemical Oozes I'm jumping on the elements bandwagon, we're doing alchemy! Specifically with oozes and acids. It's a little puzzle monster for players to interact with. You...

New blog post!

We’re Blog Bandwagoning! The theme is elements, so I wrote about alchemical oozes: a puzzle monster that eats gold, silver, or you depending on what its made of!

qarsi.bearblog.dev/alchemical-o...

Make a Hex Jig I made a little jig out of index cards to make a hex map, and I figured other people might benefit from the experience. Maybe you don’t have hex paper,...

Republishing my first "blog post".

How to make a bespoke hex jig for mapping your #OSR game or other #TTRPG.

Here you go @claytonian.bsky.social.

billhook.bearblog.dev/make-a-hex-j...

His Majesty the Worm livetweet archive When I got His Majesty the Worm in paper, I livetweeted me reading the book. I was pretty happy with my impression, but it's stuck on twitter so here it is, ...

New (?) Blog Post!

Back on twitter I did a live reading of @riseupcomus.bsky.social His Majesty the Worm. I was pretty happy with it and twitter is a hellhole now so it’s now on my blog!

qarsi.bearblog.dev/his-majesty-...

Recent posts I've enjoyed on other blogs
virtualmoose.org/2025/02/05/b...

Having been running D&D4 as my primary game for awhile, I think the problem is overstated but I definitely feel tension between the mechanics and the fiction sometimes. Might be worth an observation in the future if it happens more!

That’s definitely another side of it, mechanics not matching the fiction (see the huge debates about knocking oozes prone), though it seemed the primary complaint was “why can the fighter only do this move once a day?”

I knew I had a lot of blogging built up but this post surprised even me 😅