Jules Futuro OSR

I've been looking into the question of hex crawls recently. Yochai from Between two Cairns has repeatedly pointed out how inconsistent they are adventure to adventure, and I think he's right on that. Although I don't really get why he keeps asking why everyone wants hexcrawl maps. To me that's pretty obvious: people like the idea of a universal, modular system that lets them plug different adventure's hexes into whatever they're running. It's an attractive and relatively simple proposition. Thinking a bit further though, I think it's worth asking why hexcrawls are so all over the place in terms of dimensions and procedures. I won't claim to have the one true answer (unlike every single blog on hexcrawling), but here's my POV: 1) Almost nobody reads the source material  2) We call it hexcrawling, rather than wilderness exploration (which as far as I can tell is the term used in D&D rulebooks) 3) Every blogger and author wants to "sell...

I've been reading a bit about the urban crawl this week. I did find some other sources, but really the only one I want to highlight at this point is The Alexandrian's blog series . If I do a more detailed exploration I'll mention some other posts as well.  What I liked about the Alexandrian's work is that it strikes (what I think is) the right balance between realism and gamification. What I mean by this is that some OSR people become a bit too hung up on - for example - replicating a realistic medival town. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't really cut to the heart of the question which is "how do I run a satisfying urbancrawl in an OSR style?". Another thing I really valued about his posts was the depth of research he did on both new-school and old-school source material. That sort of research really does show in the quality of the writing. Too many people try to do stuff from first principles and get stuck in the weeds. Anyway, that blog...

I've decided to work on a relatively small, contained, OSR adventure (I'll be using B/X rules) with the goal of publishing it as a zine.  Essentially, it's a magical item that shrinks adventurers and then sucks them into it. The adventure takes place in this "Jar of Diminution" which has a loose terrarium "ecology". An additional time pressure element is added by the fact that the adventurers will start growing larger over 24 hours, and thus potentially be crushed before they can make it out.  This blog is there to track my progress. I'd like to simply share the draft on here, but I need to figure out how to best do that. For now I'll just say, it's still a bit of a mess. The first thing I did was have a look at some of the Merry Mushmen's adventures to get an idea of how to "best" lay an adventure out. I do think that they have some of the best layout (alongside the OSE books). I'm not sure that I'm totally sold on the...