Old-School Essentials – Red Dice Diaries

Working on a Basic Website for our Smoke & Snow Campaign

There has been a link/page on the main Red Dice Diaries blog page providing some basic information about our (at time of writing) currently running Old-school Essentials campaign Smoke & Snow, a game that began with the theme of humanity attempting to resettle a homeland their ancestors had fled ahead of a great arcanely fuelled ice-age.

My Session Prepping the Lazy DM Way

Following on from last episode I talk a little bit about my thoughts having prepped and run a session using the method from Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

Very Large Monsters

In this episode I’m musing on how I plan to implement a very large monster in my next OSE session.

How I Manage Events & Clocks in My Game

I’m an unashamed fan of the idea of clocks within RPGs, if you’re not familiar with this concept the clock (a concept I encountered first in Apocalypse World) is simply a method of tracking how many intervals of time have to pass before an event occurs. Clocks tend to be represented in Apocalypse World and other such games as a circle divided into segments.

In the clock to the left there are eight segments, each time certain criteria were met you–as the GM–would fill in one or more segments, when they are all filled in the event (whatever that might be) occurs in your games.

Random Encounters by Area

In this episode Hannah and myself are discussing my recent decision to have random encounter charts for specific areas in my OSE campaign and the things to keep in mind if you decide to do likewise.

Sentient Swords

In this episode we’re delving into the idea of sentient swords and other items as featured in Old-school Essentials.

Looking through the pre-release PDF of the OSE Advanced Fantasy Referee’s Tome

I backed the Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Kickstarter by Necrotic Gnome and Exalted Funeral, Gavin Norman the author was kind enough to send pre-release PDFs to the people who back the Kickstarter. In this episode I’m looking through the second of the two compiled rules tomes available on the Kickstarter.

An Unfortunate Ending

Please note: This article contains spoilers for session 4 of our OSE campaign Smoke & Snow, so–if you’re at all bothered about that–you may want to skip this until you’ve watched session 4.

Looking through the pre-release PDF of the OSE Advanced Fantasy Player’s Tome

I backed the Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Kickstarter by Necrotic Gnome and Exalted Funeral, Gavin Norman the author was kind enough to send pre-release PDFs to the people who back the Kickstarter. In this episode I’m looking through the first of the two compiled rules tomes available on the Kickstarter.